We can’t sail to Ragusa? Find a Dutch ship there?
Due to the uskoks, the only vessels safely able to sail the Dalmatian coast are galleys owned and armed by the Republic. Which, clearly, would not be safe for us.
Crivano hears the scrape and the stretch of rough twine, and Serena turns to lay the finished parcel on the table before him. The knots that bind the heavy paper are scarcely less artful than the mirror they enclose. I’ve packed it in seaweed, Serena says, to prevent damage from moisture. As I mentioned, I suggest that your friend make a habit of this also. Any good apothecary will stock it. Brandy, dottore?
Crivano nods. Serena withdraws a bluish wide-bellied carafe from a cabinet, along with two simple crystal cups of surpassing clarity and grace. He unstoppers the carafe and fills the glasses, then sits and raises his. To Trieste, then, I suppose, he says.
Trieste, Crivano repeats. Their cups meet with a soft reverberant peal.
Crivano nearly chokes on his first sip: he can taste the volatilized liquor in the air above the glass. From Trieste, he says, clearing his throat, we’ll proceed to Fiume, then to Karlstad, and then through the mountains to the coast of Dalmatia. We must be in Spalato before the Feast of Saint Anthony. Do you foresee any complications? Can your wife and boys travel such distances?
Serena sips, nods, sips again. He doesn’t look at Crivano.
Crivano studies the cup in his hand, rotating it slowly in the sun. Is there any way, he asks, that your boys can be kept clear of the furnaces until our flight commences?
Probably. Why?
We have days of hard travel ahead of us. Some of it on disused thoroughfares. In my experience — I’m speaking now as a physician — young men with fresh burns do not easily suffer prolonged exposure to the elements.
In Serena’s eyes is a flicker of something like anguish. Yes, he says. I see your concern.
He drains his cup and refills it, swilling the liquid inside. It coats the glass’s edges like oil. Mirrors, he says. We’ll be making mirrors, you say?
You’ll make mirrors in the spring, Crivano says, and then whatever you like the rest of the year. Those are our terms.
I don’t know how to silver mirrors. Or to flatten glass.
Yes. We know that.
Serena rolls the base of the carafe back and forth along the desktop. Drunkenness has begun to inhabit his eyes. So, he says, you must have someone else, as well.
That’s correct. We do.
Dottore, Serena says, were you ever able to locate Verzelin the other night?
Crivano looks at Serena, but Serena still won’t meet his gaze: he watches the rolling carafe with a sly half-smile. Crivano takes a sip of brandy before he replies. His pulse thuds patiently in his throat. Oh yes, he says. I found him.
I thought you might have, Serena says. No one on Murano has seen him since. When the men from the Motta mirrorworks came and asked me about him, I told them that you’d gone out looking for him.
The brandy is inching back up Crivano’s throat.
I’m sure they’d already heard as much from the old woman at the Salamander, Serena continues. I also took the liberty of telling them that I met you in the Campo San Stefano later that night, and that you told me you never found him. I had a hunch that I should tell them that. I hope you don’t mind, dottore.
Crivano lets out a long sigh that becomes a nervous laugh, a giggle, at the end. He holds his cup out to Serena wordlessly, and the chime sounds again. They drink in silence for a while.
Say, dottore, Serena says, what do you make of this?
He passes Crivano the carafe. It’s well-made, if uninspired. The glass could be clearer, whiter. Still a better piece than anything he ever saw in the sultan’s palace. He shrugs approval, passes it back.
I made it when I was twelve, Serena says. My first carafe. That’s a glassmaker’s daily bread, carafes. This one wasn’t good enough to qualify me as a journeyman. But I was still young then.
Crivano nods, drains the last of his brandy. He examines his cup again in the light from the window. Tipping it. Holding it close to his face.
Can you see it? Serena asks.
He looks again. There, in the base: a tiny line of bubbles, smaller than an eyelash. The bubbles themselves visible only as a group. This blemish, you mean? Crivano says. This is why it’s not for sale?
Of course. You think I’d sell a piece with such an obvious flaw? Still, the shape of these was pleasing to me. And I needed a pair of cups.
Crivano sets the glass down. Serena fills it again. Crivano’s cheeks are warm, like he’s been near a very hot fire. Which, in fact, he has. You make very beautiful things, maestro, he says.
Serena gives him a strange look as he stoppers the carafe, sets it aside. No, dottore, he says. I do not. I make this.
His hand plucks something from the desktop and tosses it to Crivano; Crivano’s caught it almost before he realizes it’s been thrown. It’s the lump of raw glass Serena took from the cooling pan in the workshop: smooth, oblong, flatter on one side, a pointed lobe opposite, pitted here and there by delicate bubbles. It’s greenish and frosted, but it lets light through. Its shape recalls something; Crivano can’t say what.
Other men in this shop make beautiful things, Serena says. One day, when they are older, perhaps my boys will do so as well. But me? I make this.
He leans forward and takes the raw glass from Crivano’s hand, then sits back in his chair. The blob sits in his right palm like a wet frog, sheltered under the branches of his three scarred tipless fingers.
I make it so it melts evenly, he says. So it can be worked. I make it strong and pliable. I make it clear, when clarity is called for. When mystery is desired, I make it play games with the light. I hope very much that others are able to make it beautiful, dottore. But that is their responsibility. It is not mine.
52
As the traghetto draws near San Cristofero della Pace, disturbing a group of avocets and black-winged stilts in the shallows, Crivano vomits most of Serena’s liquor over the gunwale and begins to feel better. He rinses his mouth from the gondolier’s flask, settles in the shade of the canopy, and rests his head on one of the posts, watching the birds along the bank, the fishermen’s nets drying in the afternoon sun. So heavy, his teeming skull. He imagines it filling like the bottom bulb of an hourglass, every grain a thought, a memory, a secret.
The gondolier moors his craft. Crivano pays him and disembarks onto the fondamenta, clutching his parcel tight against his chest, so intent on keeping it safe that he leaves his walkingstick behind. The gondolier runs after him, catches him when he’s nearly to the Campo Santa Giustina; Crivano thanks him, pays him again.
He has no intention of stopping in the church but somehow winds up there anyway, weaving from sunbeam to mote-dusted sunbeam across the broken floor of the nave, thinking of Lepanto. Captain Bua in his breastplate and helmet: Santa Giustina, we pray that on this, your feast day, you will intercede on our behalf, and secure for us the blessings of God as we fight to defend the chastity of our great Republic from savages. Clutching the Lark’s spray-slick hand as the fleets closed: the last good moment, before the drums and cymbals crashed over the waves to be answered by horns from the Christian galleys, before the line dispersed and the real horror began. The first man he killed: turbaned head blown off and scattered on the water as he jumped from the oven platform. Slipping on the blood-brown deck, ankles tangled in viscera. The Lark clubbing a dead janissary with someone’s severed forearm while keening cannonballs tore the air overhead. The thunderclap when the Christ over the World lit its powder magazine, shattering the Ottoman galleys around it, bits of wood and iron and flesh raining through the smoke. The gulf aflame with burning wrecks, drifting into clusters like petals on a pond, lodestones on quicksilver. Fumbling in the tear-blurred darkness for the Lark’s matriculation certificate as the Turks stormed the decks overhead.