Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

He’s made nearly a full circuit of the Piazza before he notices that it’s grown larger. The old pilgrims’ hostel has been demolished — replaced by a new Procuracy, maybe half-finished, in a fussy classical style — and the square’s trapezium broadened. This space holds the fair’s most elaborate installations: here the glassmakers’ tables display leaping dolphins, reared dragons, winding serpents, a glass armada under full sail. Crivano draws closer to admire a miniature castle with scarlet banners, edged by a bosk of frothy trees and a moat bubbling with citrine wine.

But this all pales beside the mirrormakers’ showcase. They’ve linked their booths with a wooden passageway of columns and rafters, like a pergola bereft of vines, and hung the inner surfaces with an assortment of flat glasses. Beneath a canvas banner at the entrance — VIRTUTUM SYDERA MICANT — five strapping guildsmen beckon to passersby, doffing their caps and singing in rough harmony. Their tune is borrowed from an old frottola, one the Lark used to perform, though Crivano can’t recall its true words.

A simple art, ladies! If everyone knew it ,

then every globe-blowing jackass would do it .

Demonstrate here? Do you take us for fools?

Come visit Murano! We’ll show you our tools!

As Crivano elbows his way across their threshold, his halfsize image slides into view around him — to his right, to his left, overhead — while others, smaller still, appear alongside those, ricocheted from the mirrors opposite. Every glass surface he passes shows a procession of windowed chambers, endlessly iterated, with Crivano the living void at its center. He reaches for his sudarium, hurries to the other side.

The costumed crowds, the shiny heaps of luxuries: it all might have been pleasant had Crivano arrived well-rested, but in his current state it’s unsettling, a parade of morbid compulsions, and suddenly he’s sorry he came. Near the clock tower he buys a pastry — a fritter studded with almonds, dusted with fine white sugar — and he eats it as he strolls along the basilica’s façade, assaying the gold and the marble, the cool serpentine and carnal porphyry, the encrustation of ancient spoils. Over the northernmost vault a mosaic depicts the theft of the corpse of Mark the Evangelist from infidel Alexandria; this image triggers a quick flood of memories: his first meeting with Narkis, nearly thirteen years ago, roused from sleep in his quarters in the Divan Meydanı. I have come to you, Tarjuman effendi, on behalf of the haseki sultan. She has made an interesting suggestion . A week later, waiting by the obelisk in the old Roman hippodrome. Strange men hidden in the shadows, their breath clouding the moonlit air. Run, messer! The devils are at my heels! Plucking the bundle from Polidoro’s trembling fingers — miserable Polidoro, the thief, the slave, the dupe — as the guards’ shouts rang out.

Then, later that night, the embassy in Galata, holding his breath while the bailo unwrapped it: a packet of human skin, neatly folded, its tanned surface fuzzed with short red hair. The old bailo green-gilled, unsteady, choosing his words with caution. Rest assured, messer, that you will be duly rewarded for recovering the remains of this great hero of Christendom . Well, they were somebody’s remains, anyway. Within the month he’d sailed through the Golden Horn aboard a Lucchese galley, bound for Ravenna, his University of Bologna matriculation certificate safe inside his doublet. Wearing, for the first time in his life, the black robes of a citizen of the Republic. Another metamorphosis accomplished.

Crivano had planned to return to the White Eagle through the Mercerie — he wants to have a look at the new bridge over the Grand Canal — but the crowds will be worse that way, and he’s grown impatient with crowds. He passes under the old Procuracy and follows the long Street of the Blacksmiths, where he’ll be able to hire a gondola. Walking quickly against the flow of traffic, he lowers his head and sweeps his stick to fend off the provincial whores gathered along every route, two or three deep. By the time he reaches Magazine Street the mobs have thinned, and he moves with little effort.

In the Campo San Luca he allows himself to be distracted by a band of wandering performers as they improvise a satire about a mountebank alchemist. It’s clear soon enough that these are not ordinary clowns: no urchins ply the audience on their behalf, the actor playing the charlatan shows some real knowledge of Latin and alchemy, and their jokes — sharp gibes at Philip of Spain and the Holy See among them — gild the edges of a substantive argument, one that might cause them trouble if aired in the Piazza.

Every lesser metal , the sham alchemist lectures, aspires toward gold, just as every acorn would fain become an oak .

Speak to the point! a player masked as a clever Jew demands. I would follow to the tree you speak of, dottore, but you cut a crooked path through the bush!

The alchemist feigns irritation. These circumlocutions protect secret knowledge, my simple friend , he explains, just as the finest berries are hid by leaf and thorn .

For all this fellow’s shrubby words , the masked Jew shouts, I’d think an alchemist naught but a learned squirrel!

Crivano laughs at this exchange, winces at a sharp lampoon of Bolognese rhetoric that finds its mark, and applauds as the performance ends and the alchemist is chased away, running toward Campo San Paternian, counterfeit nuggets dribbling from his robe. Crivano is about to follow, to discover who these educated pranksters really are, when a gasp runs through the square behind him, and a woman shrieks.

In the campo near the mouth of Oven Street a dark form has appeared. Like nearly everyone else, the figure is disguised, but its costume is hardly festive: it wears a wide-brimmed black hat, a long black robe of waxed linen, and the dull bronze mask of a plaguedoctor, beaked like the head of a monstrous tropical bird. Townsfolk scatter and cross themselves as it moves through the square; a few curse it, but none stands in its way. The few unhidden faces in the crowd are convulsed with anguish, an inventory of recalled suffering inscribed in their expressions.

Seventeen years have passed since plague last came to the city. Although he was in Constantinople at the time, Crivano knows the last one was very bad: a quarter of the population dead, including what remained of his own family, those lucky few who escaped Cyprus ahead of the sultan’s troops. The memory of pestilence still lies across every street and every campo here like an unseen scar. At carnival time, when order is suspended, this fellow’s costume might simply be in horrific taste; during the Sensa it’s unthinkable. Or perhaps this is yet another theatrical provocation. Crivano scans the crowd, alert for the arrival of more players, but nothing moves: everyone else in the campo is frozen in place, shrunken into themselves like sea anemones at low tide.

When he turns forward again, the plaguedoctor is almost upon him. Crivano sidesteps to clear the figure’s path, but the figure tracks him, closing the distance with slow steady paces like a terror in a dream. Wisps of burning asafetida rise from its vented beak; a slim ash wand dangles from its gloved right hand. Its robe is splashed with dark fluids, dried in the creases: what might be bile, what might be blood.

A few feet from him the figure stops abruptly, silent and statue-still. Crivano stares hard at the beaked mask’s eyeholes, but they’re unscry-able, capped by blown-glass hemispheres. His worn nerves tighten like a springline in a gale.

He’s about to issue a challenge when, with a liquid motion swifter than a blink, the figure lays its wand alongside his neck. The tip rests against Crivano’s bare skin just above his ruff, as if to measure his pulse. He springs back, swats the wand away with his own stick, then slides his fingers down its shaft and swings it hard with both hands, axing the heavy silver knob downward at the figure’s clavicle.