Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

The walkingstick bites only air; Crivano stumbles to keep his feet. As he’s rising again, the wand flicks his wrist, and his stick falls to the pavement. Crivano’s hands are up instantly, guarding his face. He’s calm, almost relieved to be in proper combat again. Flattening his gaze to hide his intentions. Figuring distances: the stick on the pavement, the stiletto in his boot. Kill the bastard, dottore! hisses a voice from the crowd. The plaguedoctor faces him, open-armed, motionless.

Crivano moves. He lunges, feigns a jab, rolls the stick behind him with the ball of his foot. Then he steps back, gets his toe under the rolling knob, and pops it into his hand. It’s a beautiful move — he’s very pleased with it — and when he lifts the stick to try another strike, the plaguedoctor is gone.

Its black shape is already halfway to the Street of the Casters, in no evident hurry, making easy strides. So quick it seemed weightless. Its turn like the pivot of a bird-rattle on the wind. Still in his attack stance, his walkingstick aloft and at the ready, Crivano looks, he realizes, somewhat ridiculous. He straightens up, adjusts his garments, plants his ferrule on the stones with a decisive click.

The campo is emptying. People avoid his eyes, embarrassed for him, or for themselves, he can’t be sure which. A water-vendor appears at his side with a ladle; Crivano gratefully drinks. That whoreson was smart to run off when he did, dottore, the man says without conviction. You’d have thrashed him.

Do you know who that was? Crivano asks between gulps.

The water-vendor shrugs, eager to move along. Someone with no goddamned decency, I suppose, he says. Probably from the mainland.

Crivano hands back the scoop. I’m a stranger to your city, my friend, he says. Tell me, the costume that blackguard was wearing. Is it commonly seen here?

Not lately, dottore, the water-vendor says, and crosses himself. Not lately.

A shaft of orange sunlight splits the room like a blade, and a noise that Crivano takes at first for hoofbeats resolves into a steady pounding at the door. He springs naked from bed and has his hand on the bolt before he remembers the regimental emblems that mark his skin. Yes, he calls. I’ll be with you in a moment.

The knocking stops. He unhooks his shirt from its peg, shrugs into it, and surveys the room as he pulls on his hose. Before lying down — just for a moment, to rest his eyes — he’d been working at the table; the report to Narkis is still there, along with the polished wooden grille which encoded it. Crivano hides the grille under the paper, then opens the door.

Anzolo, the proprietor of the White Eagle, waits in the hallway, studying the framed woodcut on the opposite wall. He turns with a ready expression, as if mildly surprised, as if Crivano has emerged quite by chance. Ah, he says. Good day, dottore.

What is it, Anzolo?

I’m sorry to disturb you, dottore. Dottore Tristão de Nis is downstairs, and he wishes to speak with you. He says that you are expecting him.

Anzolo is a very good innkeeper — he has an imperturbable ease any courtier would admire — but now a shade of doubt haunts his manner, an uncertainty regarding protocol. Doubts of this sort follow Tristão as birds follow cattle.

Yes, Crivano says. I’ll be a short while. Please give Dottore de Nis my apologies for the delay, and see to his comfort. We’ll take supper in the parlor.

When Anzolo is gone, Crivano bolts the door again and takes a moment to collect his thoughts. He’d been enmeshed in vivid dreams, and they slip from him now in an indistinct rush: fragments in the midst of fragments, like the mirrored passage in the Piazza. His mother and young sister on the Redeemer’s white steps, milk-eyed and smiling, dead of the plague. His father and older brothers, bloodied and proud at the Famagusta Gate, offering him a robe fashioned from his own skin. Crivano wonders what these dreams augur for the success of his mission, and why they fail to disturb him.

He retrieves the wooden grille from the table and tips back the lid of his massive walnut trunk. Jostling items aside — spare shirts and hose, heavy boots and rainwear, his rapier and the new snaplock pistol he purchased in Ravenna — he uncovers his books. Beneath these is a spring-loaded panel that conceals a shallow compartment, and Crivano opens this to put the grille inside. Then he replaces his belongings and closes the trunk. The brass key scrapes between the wards; the lock clicks.

As he’s draping the key from his neck by its leather thong, he remembers the plaguedoctor. He lowers his wrist into the sunbeam to inspect the skin where the ash wand struck it, but he finds no rawness there, no bruise. The inevitable notion arises— was that too a dream? — but Crivano swiftly stifles it. He flexes his fingers, noting the smooth glide of tendons under skin, and returns to his task.

On the floor beside the trunk is his box of physic; from it, he withdraws a square of white linen, and a narrow ceramic jar stoppered by a wide cork. The jar is half-full of dried ragwort root; Crivano shakes this onto the linen, ties it into a bundle, and puts the bundle back in the box. Then he rolls his report to Narkis into a narrow tube, drops the tube into the jar, and stoppers it again.

The bells of San Aponal are ringing the hour, a few long breaths out of phase with the bells of San Silvestro farther south: Crivano counts twenty-three. He combs his hair, slicks the prongs of his beard, and dons his boots and doublet and black robe. A corner of curtain is trapped in the double window in the eastern wall; Crivano opens the sash for an instant to let the curtain fall plumb, and the ray of sunlight vanishes. Then he takes up his jar and Serena’s sealed letter, lifts his stick from its corner, and walks downstairs.

The White Eagle is quieter this evening than he’d anticipated. Most locande in the Rialto are double- or triple-booked for the duration of the Sensa, but Anzolo has been cautious not to let occupancy exceed what his eight servants can manage. The inn is expensive, especially for a room to oneself, but worth it. Narkis suggested the place. Crivano wonders how he learned of it, since the law forbids him from ever spending a night here.

Nearly all the tables in the parlor are occupied. Crivano recognizes most of the lodgers from previous meals: two fat merchants from Frankfurt struggling to parse the mumblings of a one-eyed galley captain, Bohemian pilgrims studying a map of Jerusalem with madness simmering in their eyes, a pair of shabby young nobles from Savoy pointedly ignoring a second pair of shabby young nobles from Milan.

In the middle of the room sits Tristão. He’s absorbed in an octavo that he holds in his left palm; his right hand makes an automatic circuit — flipping a page, plucking a nut from a dish, bringing wine to his lips, flipping another page — as if it’s a separate creature, a helpful imp. Crivano approaches, hesitates, clears his throat.

Tristão blinks and shakes his head, his eyes unfocused, as if the book won’t relinquish its hold on him. Then he looks up with a broad smile and a sigh of pleasure. Doctor Crivanus, he says, rising for an embrace. You demonstrate great kindness by your willingness to see me.

They speak Latin, as is their custom. Tristão’s speech is by turns stilted and poetic and urbane, a Latin learned from books, far removed from the bland efficiency of Crivano’s university argot. Of the three languages they share, it’s the one in which Tristão is most comfortable. In this room it also affords a measure of privacy.

May I ask how fares Senator Contarini? Tristão says, sinking into his chair. Does insomnia still prolong his nights?