Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

He’s attacking a cured Milanese sausage when Tristão bursts in, a wary and determined cast on his comely face, as if he half-expects the room to be filled with cloaked assassins. Not atypically, his mien is that of a man in the midst of a great and nebulous adventure. Vettor! he says. Here you are! You are here.

Crivano’s knife saws through the mold-dusted sausage casing; he speaks through a mouth only partly empty. I am indeed, he says. Where in God’s name have you been? I don’t know any of these Uranici. How do you expect—

Come with me, Tristão says. We must be swift. The Nolan is soon to speak.

A moment, please. I’m eating.

Come! Tristão says, grabbing Crivano’s sleeve with one hand, beckoning with the other. Come come come come come!

Crivano folds the thin sausage slices into a scrap of bread and follows Tristão into the corridor. They turn not toward the great hall, but deeper into the house. As he walks, Tristão fishes a folded sheet of paper from his doublet, flattens it, and hands it to Crivano. Here, he says. Look.

Penciled off-center on the yellow sheet is an oblong shape, pinched at one end like a deformed pear, or a long-stemmed fig. Crivano stares the drawing, rotates it, but can make nothing of it.

This, Tristão says, will work. Don’t you think so?

Crivano looks at Tristão, flummoxed. Tristão looks back. He seems intent on resuming a discussion Crivano doesn’t recall having had in the first place. Don’t I think what will work? Crivano says.

Tristão flicks the paper with a long middle finger. This , he says.

What is it supposed to be? A uterus?

Tristão stops, gives Crivano an icy glare, and plucks the drawing from his hand. He slaps it flat against the wall, produces a pencil from his robe, licks the tip, and scrapes it across the paper, darkening the lines on either side of the shape’s broad end, as if to thicken the womb’s endometrium. Your man on Murano, he says. Your mirrormaker. He will do this for me. With — I don’t remember how to say it.

Silvering, Crivano says. You want to make an alembic.

Yes! An alembic. What else would it be?

A mirrored alembic. An alembic lined with silvering.

No, Tristão says. Not lined. Coated. On the outside. A clear glass alembic. To trap the light within. Do you see? Do you not believe that this method will work?

Tristão has never discussed alchemical practice openly with Crivano before. If the wrong person — Mocenigo, or a pious servant — were to overhear, they likely would find themselves facing the Inquisition. Tristão could be tortured and expelled. Crivano gapes in disbelief, but Tristão’s face shows no concern: impatient, but otherwise calm.

I–I don’t know, Crivano says. I have not had access to a laboratory in some months. And I have never considered—

He looks past Tristão to the drawing, still held against the wall, and squints at it. Is light produced during the Great Work? he says. I’ve never heard such a thing.

I don’t know if light is produced, Tristão says, exasperated. I think perhaps that no one knows this. I could find nothing conclusive in the literature. For that reason, if no other, this approach must be attempted. If the sun never set, Vettor, would we know that there are stars? No. We would not.

Crivano is at a loss. He looks at Tristão, then back at the drawing, then down at the bread and sausage wadded in his hand. He lifts them, takes a small sheepish bite.

Tristão’s nostrils flare; he stuffs the pencil and the drawing back into his doublet. When he speaks again he takes the tone of a beleaguered schoolmaster, his voice soft and sharp. How do we judge the progress of the Great Work? he says.

Crivano shrugs, chews, swallows. By the colors it takes, of course.

Yes. We speak of blackening, of whitening, of the tail of the peacock, of the final redness that yields the elixir that we seek. They agree on little else, but all sources agree on this. The colors are important. Perhaps they are more important than we know.

I don’t see what you’re getting at, my friend.

Perhaps, Tristão says, the colors are not merely qualities, but products. Perhaps the key to a successful operation is to feed not the alchemist’s vision with their display, but the chemical engine itself. To hold the color, undevoured by the human eye. And what holds color, as liquid is held by clay, or hard wood, or metal, or glass?

A mirror.

Only that. Nothing else. Scholars of optics and of perspective describe the mirror as a device to assist our vision, but it is not. Or it is so only accidentally. The mirror is an invisible object. It is a machine for unseeing. And I believe it is the hidden heart of the processes to which we devote our efforts.

Crivano knits his brow, puts a thumb across his lips. Interesting, he says. A fresh approach to the problem, without question. And yet I must confess, Tristão, that I can think of nothing in the alchemical literature to ratify your claim.

Tristão elevates his eyebrows mildly. No? he says. Permit me to refer you to the foundational text of our art, the Tabula Smaragdina of Hermes the Thrice-Great.

Crivano stifles a laugh. The Emerald Tablet ? he says, louder than he means to. He looks both ways down the corridor, steps closer, whispers. You can’t be serious, he says. To what passage do you refer?

Its very name, Vettor. The word emerald . The Greeks of antiquity used the same word to name any polished green stone, as did the Romans after them. Emeralds, jaspers, certain granites. In Pliny we read of the Emperor Nero, weak of sight, who viewed the deeds of his gladiators with the aid of an emerald. Our historians always identify this object as a lens, but I believe it to have been a curved jasper mirror. Furthermore, I believe it likely that the original text of the Emerald Tablet was etched upon a mirror of similar design, no doubt mislaid in the chaos of passing centuries. Mirroring is, after all, what it prescribes —as above, so below —and mirroring is its intended function.

Tristão has advanced this case with waning fervor: not as though beset by doubt, but rather as though unable to maintain his interest in prosecuting a line of reasoning he regards as self-evident. Crivano gapes in disbelief. Every educated man — from Suez to Stockholm, from Lisbon to Lahore — has at least a passing knowledge of the Emerald Tablet , even if only as an ungodly thing to be eschewed and condemned. Any scholar concerned with the pursuit of secret knowledge knows its thirteen enigmatic sentences by memory. Yet in a lifetime of study — in two lifetimes, Ottoman and Frankish — Crivano has never encountered the notion that Tristão so blithely puts forth, nor any notion that might be its parent, or its sibling. For the first time he finds himself considering the possibility that his handsome friend may not be merely eccentric, or imprudent, but genuinely mad. He wonders whether Narkis knows this, wonders again why Narkis directed him to make Tristão’s acquaintance in the first place.

Tristão seems lost in thought; Crivano clears his throat softly to reclaim his attention. So, Crivano says, that’s what you wanted to show me?

No, Tristão says. This.

He steps forward, opening a door to another storeroom, this one filled with dusty crates and casks. A lamp burns on a table in the room’s center, illuminating a small beechwood strongbox. Tristão pulls a key from around his neck, unlocks it, and opens the lid.

It’s full of coins: silver ducats and gold sequins. Well over a thousand, to judge by its dimensions. Tristão closes it, locks it, hands the key to Crivano. For the glassmaker, he says. Give it to him, please, and bring my mirror to me.