by Martin Seay
This Spalato development is no good. He’ll need to find Obizzo soon, give him the news, but first he’ll have to settle on the best way to tell the story. He can’t imagine how he’ll keep Obizzo contained once they’re on the mainland. He knows very little about the man. Four years ago Obizzo was sentenced to the galleys for assisting his elder brother’s flight from Murano; he’s been hiding ever since. His brother now runs a prosperous glassworks in Amsterdam, a city for which Obizzo expects to be bound soon himself. In this belief, of course, he is mistaken. Crivano knows these things, and also that Obizzo is willing to murder. He and Obizzo know that about one another now.
He leaves the Mercerie, continuing down a wide straight thoroughfare toward the Grand Canal, where the crowds move more quickly. He’s eager to return to the White Eagle, where he hopes to have time enough to open his new books—to place the wooden grille over the coded message, to see what Narkis has planned for him—before he has to depart for Murano. But then, on the Riva del Ferro, he stops.
The bridge again. With most of the boats now loaded and unloaded and sailing for the Terrafirma, it’s unobstructed, clearly visible from the quay. Colors reflected from the surrounding façades turn its white limestone surfaces slightly golden, like the seared flesh of a scallop, and snakes of light play along the underside of its grand arch. Crivano imagines what might have been built instead—the mock-Roman temples that Ciotti described—and smiles. The new bridge is breathtaking in its practicality, so well-matched to the hidden rhythms and textures of the Rialto that it almost vanishes.
In the city that can build this, he thinks, great deeds are surely possible.
51
Despite, or because of, their obvious drunkenness, the two gondoliers Anzolo has found are resolute and quick: they slide a beechwood oar through the iron rings of Tristão’s strongbox and lift it aboard their batela as if it’s a stag they’ve poached. Then they seat Crivano on a bench with the box between his boots and row hard toward the Cannaregio Canal, trading verses of a strange barcarolle about a doomed lady who weaves an enchanted web. Soon they’ve passed beneath the Bridge of Spires—another new construction, another single span—and through the muddy encrusted layers of the city’s newer neighborhoods to meet the open waters of the lagoon. The bow swings north, then east. Crivano breathes through his sudarium and crouches over the strongbox, his stomach clenching each time the keel tilts on an errant wave.
A flat crack comes across the water, and a white cloud rises from a sandolo off the bow: a pair of hunters shooting diving ducks. A second plume appears in the farther distance, at the marshy edge of San Cristofero della Pace, and the sound of the shot arrives a heartbeat later. Off starboard a crew of shouting laborers is clustered around a barge, now stranded by low tide; they’re driving piles in the muck, turning shallow water into solid earth, extending the city outward.
The batela angles north again, aimed at the mouth of the Glassmakers’ Canal, a smudge of furnace smoke on the vacant sky. Crivano can make out a green shadow at the island’s edge: the stand of holly-oaks where he crushed Verzelin’s throat. He wonders in passing whether the mirrormaker’s absence has been widely noted or commented upon, but this speculation fails to hold his interest, and he turns his eyes toward the city again. The boatmen’s oars slash the water, the pale willows of the nearby islands slide across the unearthly obelisk of San Francesco della Vigna, and Crivano feels a rush of astonishment, a sudden recollection of what it was like to see the city for the first time. Two days ago on the Molo it eluded him: clear in his mind but lifeless, a picture of itself. He’s able to reach it now only by way of a memory from years later: he was traveling the King’s Highway in the caravan of an adventurous young vizier, and they made a detour to al-Bitrā, the ruined capital of the Nabataeans, south of the Dead Sea. As he walked among the empty temples, rosy monoliths carved into the canyon walls, he could think of nothing but the moment when he and the Lark first glimpsed the Basilica’s domes: built on nothing solid, every constituent substance estranged from its origin. The impossible city of their ancestors, precipitated from the mist.
The gondoliers moor their boat in a vacant berth next to another batela, this one riding quite low, filled to the gunwales with split alder. The fragrant fresh-cut wood is a garish orange in the sun. As the boatmen lash their lines to a palina and ready an oar to lift the strongbox, Crivano springs to the quay and enters a door bearing the device of the siren—a stained-glass chimera with shapely bare breasts and the claws of a raptor—hung in a frame of dark wood. The shop’s shelves are crowded with the output of the attached factory: great crystal pitchers in the shapes of sailing ships, wide shallow goblets for red wine, carafes so thin and so clear as to be visible only by their filigree, interspersed with urns and plates and dishes of calcedonio glass in odd and startling hues. The shop-girl behind the counter listens meekly to a plump woman in an elegant saffron zimarra; as Crivano enters, they both turn and curtsy. The older woman’s eyes flash when she notes his black physician’s robes; her mouth tightens. Serena’s wife. She knows who he is, why he’s here. Good day, Crivano says. I’m looking for Maestro Serena.
As he speaks, the thin goblets along the walls shiver with the sound of his voice; their high chime gilds its roughness, rings into the stillness that follows. The woman’s reply is a low murmur to which the glass does not react. Yes, dottore, she says. You will find four men here who answer to that name.
Crivano smiles. This is good: the woman knows who he’s looking for, but she’s clever enough not to give that fact away. She’ll be no trouble in the escape: an asset, even. Narkis has nothing to fear. My business is with Boetio Serena, Crivano says. I have payment for him, and I would like to collect an item that he has crafted for me.
Mona Serena turns to the girl. Show the dottore to the workroom, she says.
The girl leads him through a side door, down a hallway, and then asks him to wait. She tugs open a thick portal banded with iron—heat billows through the gap, along with the smell of scorched air—and vanishes to the other side. In a moment she returns with young Alexandro in tow, the boy whom Crivano met at the Salamander. Ash dusts Alexandro’s face and hair, paints the edge of his jaw where sweat has smeared it. He wipes his hands on a linen rag with the air of a man eager to get back to his business. Dottore Crivano, he says with a bow. Your visit honors us.
Crivano returns the greeting. Young maestro, he says, I need to have a word with your father.
He’s mixing the batch now, but he’ll be done soon. I can show you to our parlor if you’d like to wait there. Or may I address your concern?
The look on the boy’s face makes it evident that his question is no question: his purview extends to all that occurs here. Crivano assesses his cool eyes and easy bearing—so like the Lark’s—and realizes that this is why Serena chose to join Crivano’s conspiracy, to remove his family from Murano. The glassmaker, he recalls, has two elder brothers; those brothers have many sons of their own. Alexandro practices his family trade not only as if he’s studied it diligently, which no doubt he has, but as if he has an inborn genius for it. Yet he will not run this shop in his lifetime.
On the pavement outside, Crivano says, are two gondoliers. You will find them in song, I imagine, asway with drink, and bearing between them a strongbox heavy with coin. This is payment for a piece your shop has made. Collect it from them with my thanks—but do not trouble yourself to fetch the item I’ve purchased. I’ll wait for your father. I have an unrelated matter to discuss with him.
As you wish, dottore. I’ll show you to the parlor.
Is there a chance, Crivano says, that I might linger in your workroom instead? I’m curious to witness the exercise of your craft. Or would my presence compromise confidential procedures?
Alexandro considers this, then smiles. It would, he says, if you are able to scry the insides of our skulls, to see the secrets hidden there. Otherwise there is no danger. I’ll grant you access, but keep well clear
of the furnaces and the hot glass. Unless you’re prepared to spend your physic on yourself, dottore.
A nervous grin: for an instant, the boy seems his true age. But this passes, and he leads Crivano through the heavy door.
Crivano wonders whether he shouldn’t have waited in the parlor after all: the air stings his eyes and nose, all but cancels the aroma of his sudarium. The space before him swarms with frenzied scrambling men, silhouetted by the hard coppery light cast by two furnaces that blaze at the workroom’s far end like the infernal tombs of arch-heretics. Alexandro aims him toward a stack of crates in the corner, directs him to take a seat. My father will be with you shortly, he says.
Serena himself works nearby, ladling water into a tub of white batter as a laborer stirs it. Behind them another workman shapes paste from a second tub into small white cakes, sets these cakes to dry on a rack near the smaller furnace. Now Serena laughs; he musses the stirrer’s filthy hair and crosses the factory floor, past rag-draped wooden trays where fused lumps of frit are cooling, to meet the sweat-drenched drudge who breaks the snowy frit with an iron maul. Serena stops him for a moment, bends to pick up a shard, studies it, drops it again. Then he moves to the larger furnace, checking the work of the man who loads the broken frit into crucibles, the man who stirs and skims the molten glass, the man who pours the melt into steaming pans of clean water. Here again Serena stoops, fishes a blob of cool glass from a pan, and holds it to the light that pours through the furnace’s glory-holes.
Crivano makes a quick count of the laborers and arrives at ten: young men, a few boys, mixing the batch, working the glass and the frit, feeding the furnaces, splitting wood. And these are only preparatory gestures: no one has yet begun to work the glass into finished shapes. This task, he guesses, will fall to Serena’s older brothers and their favored sons; in Constantinople it will be Obizzo’s charge. But who will keep the furnaces burning steadily, and how will he know what temperature is right? Who will choose the wood to fire them, the stones to build them, the clay to seal them? The man who skims the crucibles in the long furnace is using a metal scoop with a long handle; Crivano has never seen the likes of it for sale in any tinsmith’s shop. Will such tools have to be made? Who will know how to make them? Has the haseki sultan any notion of what will be required for production to begin?
Serena’s insistence on bringing his family looks less and less like selfishness or sentiment, more and more like the wise recognition of necessity. No doubt the glassmaker has already considered how he’ll find his materials once he’s relocated to Amsterdam—but he isn’t going to Amsterdam. Has Narkis considered this? If Serena isn’t able to begin work quickly he’ll grow frustrated, restive, tempted to a second betrayal, one that the Spanish and Genoese spies in Galata will be eager to assist. And Obizzo! Obizzo will become a rampaging beast.
Narkis needs to address this: these issues of tools, facilities, raw materials. Spiriting the craftsmen out of the Republic’s hands will be wasted if their skills can’t be put to use. What preparations are being made for Serena’s and Obizzo’s arrival? Does Narkis know anything about making glass, really? What should Crivano tell him?
He begins a clumsy impromptu survey of the crates and sacks he sits among. Some of the containers are open, half-full; most contain a glittering powder with the texture of coarse flour. Crivano takes this for crushed quartz: extraordinarily pure, more uniform even than the whitest beach-sands of Egypt. Sacks of magnesia alba, too, and various salts, none in great quantity. More white powder, even finer than the quartz. Some sort of flux, probably. He wets a fingertip in his mouth—the dry air drinking the moisture from the whorls of skin—and dredges it through the powder to taste it. Cool and sharp and bitter. Slick on his tongue. He tastes it again.
I’ll have my niece fetch you a sweet, dottore, if you’re hungry.
Serena strolls up beside him, wiping his forehead with a cotton cloth. He still holds the lump of raw glass in his left hand, kneading it like a worry-stone. Crivano rises and returns Serena’s bow. I was just examining your materials, maestro, he says. This is potash, I suppose?
Soda ash, Serena says. From the Levant. The guild buys it through a syndicate with the soapmakers and the majolica makers, who also use it. I’m told it’s made from the ash of a plant that drinks saltwater like the freshest rain, that can uproot itself and move about on the wind to spread its seed, although whether this is true I cannot say.
It’s true enough: Crivano remembers seeing wagons laden with the dry round shrubs along the Syrian coast, and more blowing free along the roadsides. In Tripoli he saw laborers burning it, packing it for shipment to the West—al-qaly, it was called. What of the crushed quartz? he asks. Where does that come from?
The riverbeds of the Ticino and the Adige. The magnesia is from Piedmont. There are other sources, of course, but these—
Alexandro’s angry voice cuts through the shop: he’s just returned from leading Crivano’s gondoliers to the storeroom, and now stops to berate the man who rakes the contents of the smaller furnace. The workman had become inattentive, probably watching Serena with Crivano; now he blanches, refocuses his attention.
Serena grins. We calcine the batch in the small furnace for five hours, he says. It must be raked all the time, so it will heat uniformly, and fuse into frit without melting. If it melts it becomes worthless. It can even destroy the furnace. Every man you see here, dottore, has the capacity to ruin us all at any moment. This is why you often find glassmakers with black eyes, bloody knuckles, absent teeth.
I fear I have become a spectacle in this room.
Serena’s damaged right hand makes a dismissive gesture, but his expression is not so cavalier. Don’t worry yourself, dottore, he says. All the same, perhaps you’ll indulge me in a respite from the heat. Let us retire to my counting room, where I’ll show you what your friend has purchased.
He leads Crivano to a side door bearing an impressive German lock, which opens with a heavy key. The room beyond is small, neat, lit from beside the desk by a window of modest size; Crivano is seated and leaning toward it for a breath of fresh air before he realizes that it’s glazed. Uniform and colorless, the panes appear in the fog of his breath, then vanish again as he moves away.
On the floor behind the desk Serena casts open more bolts, these on a massive strongbox that looks as if the entire building must have been fashioned around it. After a moment he rises, lifts the lid, and reaches inside.
When he turns, the sun blazes out of his broad chest. Crivano lifts his hands to shield his eyes, then lowers them when the brightness fades, only to meet his own wincing face suspended between Serena’s rag-bundled fingers.
Serena sets the mirror on the table. Crivano leans to inspect it, blocking the sight of himself with an open palm. Verzelin’s glass is even larger and clearer than he remembered it, and Serena’s artfully affixed frame hides little of its surface. The frame is crafted from three braided strands of chalcedony glass, perfectly symmetrical, with seven wire threads wound around them. The glass strands, cream-white and identical on their surfaces, flare like opals when caught by the sunlight, disclosing veiled interior colors: fiery red, near-black indigo, the variegated blue-green of a peacock’s tail. The frame must be shaped around a hidden armature of some kind, because it also supports a series of medallions, each about the size of a gold sequin, that float along its outer edge. Crivano notes the designs struck on them—a naked archer, two fighting dogs, a man mounted on a lion, a woman being beaten—and he knows without counting that there are thirty-six. Serena is right to want this out of his shop.
Will this satisfy your friend’s expectations, dottore?
Yes, Crivano says. I’m certain that it will.
Turning again, Serena closes the strongbox lid and begins assembling items on it: twine, thick paper, raw cotton, slats of wood, dry gray-green leaves. I am not a pious man, dottore, he says. As you have probably gathered. But now that this is done, I’m going to make a very sincere conf
ession, and I’m going to give Saint Donatus a few of your friend’s coins. With this item under my roof I have slept not well at all.
I hope for my sake, maestro, that you will keep your confession brief, vague, and tightly focused on the topic at hand.
Serena turns with a wink and a grin. And not mention my impending travels, you mean? he says. No, dottore, I’ll confess those sins after I’ve committed them. I’m sure Amsterdam contains priests of some variety.
Crivano’s expression must betray fear; Serena laughs as he whisks the mirror away and turns back to the strongbox. It’s safe to speak in this room, dottore. No one will hear us over the workshop’s racket. Now, tell me of your plans.
Crivano frowns at Serena’s broad back. Well, he says, you might consider spending what coins you don’t give to Saint Donatus on jewels for your esteemed wife. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds. Anything lighter than gold. Something that will travel.
She and my sons are guaranteed passage?
Of course.
When?
In three days, you and your family are to travel into the city and lodge for the night at a locanda called Cerberus. You’ll find it on the Fondamenta de Cannaregio. I will come for you, and together we’ll make a night-crossing to a trabacolo anchored in the lagoon. The trabacolo will take us to Trieste.
Trieste? Why Trieste?
We’re going overland. To Spalato. We’ll board a Dutch ship there.
I’m not sure I understand, dottore. As long as we’re going overland, why not go to Trent? Why not go the right direction?
For the first time, Crivano detects a trace of anxiety in Serena’s voice, and tension in his posture. Murano is a comfortable cage for him; he’s probably never set foot on the mainland, may only have crossed the lagoon to the city a few dozen times in his life. He is not Obizzo. He has a great deal to lose.
