A hopeful gleam appears in Ciotti’s eye — an invitation, perhaps — and Crivano suppresses a wince. He saw Frankish Qurans from time to time in Constantinople: inert, graceless, full of shocking errors. Their shoddiness didn’t scandalize the muftis so much as the very fact of their existence: the idea of God’s final message propagated not by the living breath of the Prophet and his companions, nor by the motions of a calligrapher’s hand, but by the uncanny iteration of soulless machinery. Crivano opts not to explain this to Ciotti. He stretches forward, dumps the sorts back into the Sienese’s cupped palm.
Ciotti looks at them himself, prodding them with his forefinger, like a farmer evaluating a handful of seed. I thought of these last night, he says. Something the Nolan said reminded me. He spoke of the world shown by the mirror, and how it differs from this world. How did he put it, exactly? Do you recall?
Crivano does not. He’s opening his mouth to reply when a soft knock comes at the door. Ciotti rises to pull it open, and the pale boy’s face appears in the gap. A Turk is here to see you, maestro, the boy says.
Very good. Please show Messer bin Silen in.
Sweat beads in Crivano’s armpits when Ciotti pronounces the name, his heartbeat quickens, but his face remains placid, his posture relaxed. He’s wary, but not afraid. Some part of him has expected this.
Ciotti isn’t looking at him anyway. He’s pushed the door shut, and now stands facing it, his nose a palms’-breadth from its knobby wood. The metal sorts are still trapped in his left fist; he shakes them absently. Their soft chime fills the room like the sound of a distant riqq, muffled by palace walls.
The man who originated this way of printing, Ciotti says, was a mirrormaker first. Or so the story goes. Did you know that? This was many years ago. He was a German goldsmith, and he made small mirrors for pilgrims visiting the chapel at Aachen. It was thought by simple folk that these mirrors could catch and contain the invisible blessings that emanated from the relics there. By the standards of Murano they were unimpressive, I’m sure. Made of lead and tin. Similar to my sorts, in fact, in their composition. But they were flat, and therefore whatever images they caught would have been reversed. I like to imagine that this is what gave the German goldsmith the idea for typesetting: tiny backward letters, lined up in rows. The mirror-image of the page-to-be. The reflection never shows the world as it is, as the Nolan told us. But it does show us things about the world. In this way, too, perhaps it is not unlike a book.
A second knock at the door. Ciotti tugs the wrought-iron handle. Messer bin Silen, he says. Thank you for the loan of your expertise. I am Giovanni Battista Ciotti. Welcome to my modest enterprise.
50
Entering the room, Narkis seems stiff and weightless, propelled by a force outside himself, like a straw man at a fair. He’s wearing blue trousers and an embroidered caftan the color of boiled quince. Even in his turban he’s barely taller than the boy who escorts him. His large eyes are focused on a point on the floor about six feet ahead: the signature attitude of an expatriate Turk in an unfriendly city. He speaks softly in his bestial croak. Good day to you, Messer Ciotti, he says. I thank you for your hospitality.
Ciotti maintains his warm smile, but he seems uncomfortable, anxious to take his leave. He keeps glancing toward the shop’s front room to see who might be there, might have seen Narkis come in. Concerned, no doubt, about appearances.
Allow me to introduce Vettor Crivano, he says, who is to be your collaborator on this morning’s errand. Dottore Crivano is from Cyprus, and lived for a number of years among your people. Dottore Crivano, this is Narkis bin Silen, who joins us today from the Turkish fondaco.
Crivano and Narkis exchange stiff bows.
My eminent friends, Ciotti says, I have no wish to detain you today longer than is necessary. My request is simple. A young gentleman of my acquaintance has recruited me to publish — in limited circulation — a Latin rendering of a brief practical work by the Muhammadan alchemist Geber. The work has come into this gentleman’s possession in its original Arab script, and I have retained a scholar from Padua to execute a translation. My concerns, and those of my patron, center on the accuracy of this translation. I gather that our scholar is a very learned man, but also a bit of a poet, and somewhat given to ornament at the expense of clarity. You both have the advantage of knowing the great Geber’s original tongue, and you share an understanding of the practical considerations of a working alchemist. I ask merely that you examine the Latin against the original and evaluate its suitability with these concerns in mind. I can compensate you in coin, or in merchandise. Although, he smiles, I strongly encourage you to take the merchandise.
Ciotti chases the two proofreaders from the shop, sending them off with fistfuls of copper gazettes to a casino on the opposite side of the block, then lays the manuscripts on the thick table. The sun is high enough that it misses the window, but it bounces from the fresh-plastered wall across the alley, giving them plenty of light to work.
Ciotti returns to his office, but leaves his door open. Crivano searches Narkis’s face for a sign of how to proceed, but the look he gets back is so bereft of recognition that he wonders for a moment, against all reason, whether this can be Narkis at all, and not some never-suspected identical twin. The little Macedonian seems to assess him with an equal measure of curiosity and revulsion, as one might inspect a strange songbird found dead beneath a newly glazed palace window.
They seat themselves. With a flicker of his eyes, Narkis indicates that Crivano should take the original document. Crivano settles in his chair and begins to read from it aloud. It’s a brief text; he reads slowly. Narkis moves an inkwell within his reach and stares down at the Latin translation with steady half-lidded eyes.
The text is a treatise on the transmutation of metals, fairly unremarkable in its content had it not been written by the great Abu Musa Jabir Ibn Hayyan, known to the Franks as Geber. As Ciotti no doubt knows, it’s almost certainly a fake — a latter-day imitator or, worse, a translation into Arabic of an original Latin forgery. But this is not the issue Ciotti has asked them to address.
Crivano steals a glance at Narkis from time to time as he reads. Their encounter in the apothecary’s shop was fleeting by design; this is the first close look Crivano has managed since their appointment months ago in Ravenna. Narkis’s face is smooth, unfurrowed, almost a child’s face, fairer than Crivano’s and Ciotti’s both. Even here he retains his stork-like sense of enclosed calm. The hand which travels to and from the inkwell has a black bird emblazoned on its skin, the emblem of his orta, and Crivano considers how different his own fate would have been had Fortune seen him marked thusly, rather than on his chest and his leg, under his clothes.
For half an hour they work through the text. Narkis sometimes interrupts with a question, sometimes makes a notation in his margins. The tension is almost unbearable. Crivano begins to wonder if Narkis is waiting for some signal from him, but can’t imagine what that might be. He becomes sloppy in his recitation, repeating some lines while skipping others, and Narkis gently corrects him.