Then, without looking up, Narkis makes a swift gesture with his right hand and touches his fingers to his lips. This is işaret, the language of deaf-mutes, known by all who have served in the sultan’s silent inner court. Crivano never managed to learn it well; much of what he once knew he’s forgotten. But he understands well enough now. Speak, Narkis says. Tell me.
Take any portion of the stone with its mixture, Crivano reads, and grind it with copperas and sal ammoniac and water until it becomes black. The glassmaker and the mirrormaker are both committed, and are ready to depart upon a few hours’ notice. We await your instructions. Then subject it to very slight heat until it takes on the odor of a man’s ejaculate.
Crivano keeps his voice flat, his inflection uniform. His stomach tightens as he makes his report, though he knows no one within earshot but Narkis can understand his Arabic words; they hear only his ongoing recitation.
Narkis’s hands speak again: What of the dead man?
He’s in the lagoon. No one will find him. I have heard of no disturbance related to his vanishing. When it has that smell, remove it and wash it gently with pure water, then roast it with low heat until you perceive a visible vapor.
Narkis nods. Then he speaks aloud, also in Arabic. The glassmaker’s refusal to leave Murano without his wife and sons is very bad, he says. The risk is unreasonable. Can he be dissuaded? Can you convince him that they will be delivered to him in time?
This was the principal demand in Serena’s hidden message, the chief feature of Crivano’s encoded report. He’d hoped that it wouldn’t present any great difficulty — once Narkis has arranged an escape for three men, what trouble is the addition of two boys and a woman? — but evidently his hope was misplaced. The glassmaker is no fool, Crivano says. We have to do what he asks. Don’t worry about the family. I’ll find a way to include them without compromising our project. In this fashion the water will be driven off, and the weight of the stone will be reduced, yet without the loss of its essence.
I have found a ship, Narkis says. It departs from Spalato in three weeks’ time.
It’s now Crivano’s turn to be vexed. From Spalato? he says. Why not from here? Remove it and submerge it again in water, and make a powder of it under water, and roast it again as before. Its blackness now diminishes.
Too dangerous, Narkis says with his hands. The journey must begin by road.
He’s worried about the uskoks, Crivano realizes. Take off the dry stone when the water has been absorbed, he says. This is certain to create difficulties. The craftsmen still believe they’re being taken to Amsterdam, not Constantinople. The mirrormaker in particular is very desperate, and will not be easy to control. I fear he’ll try to escape to the Netherlands on his own if he reaches the mainland. Grind it in pure water and roast it again. It becomes green, and the blackness vanishes.
Persuade him to cooperate, Narkis’s hands say. Then his voice. I will take my payment today in coin, he says. You will take yours in books. I will hide the information you need inside the Latin Kitab-al-Manazir on our host’s front table. The second book in the stack. You and the craftsmen must be prepared to embark at Cannaregio for the mainland in three days.
Narkis looks up from the manuscript to meet Crivano’s eyes. He holds them for a moment, then looks down, and does not speak again.
Within the hour the text is finished. The two of them browse the books in the front room in silence as Ciotti fetches Narkis’s payment from his strongbox: a small stack of soldi. Crivano presents Ciotti with his selections — a new translation of Galen, one of the Nolan’s works, the Kitab-al-Manazir—and by the time Ciotti has deducted them from his inventory, Narkis has gone.
The midmorning light casts strange shadows down the Mercerie as the textiles billow in the late-spring breeze. Underfoot are traces of last night’s revels: spilled wine, soiled ribbon, fragments of eggshell. Looking south toward the Piazza, Crivano thinks he can make out Narkis’s turban, slipping in and out of sight like a moon among clouds, but he can’t be sure. A couple of laborers from a coal ship pass by, laughing boisterously, their eyes clamshell-white in their blackened faces. A group of bravi loiters at the corner of a sidestreet, watching the workmen, watching Crivano too. One of the ruffians, probably late of the wars in France, has a face so mutilated it hardly can be called a face: a slash of a mouth and one glaring eye emerge from a welter of scars. Crivano shudders, walks the other way.
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.