A footman from a nearby palace ducks into the apothecary’s shop, and Crivano follows him inside, then browses heaped bouquets and bundled roots as the apothecary fills the footman’s order for vervain. As the servant departs Crivano steps to the counter, leaving his stoppered jar behind, nestled amid the herbs. Good day to you, maestro, he says. Have you any biennial henbane of quality?
Before the words have left his mouth Crivano feels a slight contraction of the air, a dimming of the light, and he knows that Narkis has entered the shop behind him, though he dares not turn to look.
The apothecary is a compact and fastidious Slovene wearing thick spectacles of Flemish glass; he speaks with urgency as he unlocks one of his many strongboxes. This very power, what I give you, he says. Must not use in tight-closed room. Must not open jar, even. You feel sleepy? You see strange sights, like dreaming? You must cover up, you must open window, you must go outside. Very very very caution. Yes?
Of course, maestro, of course, Crivano says.
The apothecary draws a wide glass cylinder from his box, lifts its tight-fitting lid — he and Crivano both grimace at the cloying stench — and reaches under the counter for an empty container. Oh, I brought my own jar, maestro, Crivano says, then tenses in feigned surprise, patting his belt and his purse, looking up and down the counter.
A voice from behind him: Forgive me, dottore, but is this what you seek?
In thirteen years, this is the first time Crivano has heard his own native language issue from Narkis’s tongue. Narkis pronounces the words roughly, with effort, and the sound is eerie and grotesque, like hearing an animal speak.
Crivano turns — allowing himself only the briefest glance at the hairless face, the white turban — and plucks the empty jar from Narkis’s fingers. Yes, he snaps. It is. My thanks to you.
The apothecary shakes a pile of leaves onto his scale, scrapes a few back into the cylinder to reach the proper weight, and quotes Crivano an astronomical price, which he pays without protest. The leaves fall into the jar; the cork is replaced and hammered tight. Very great power, the apothecary says, waggling a finger. Not for play.
With no second glance at Narkis, Crivano quits the shop and hastens toward the White Eagle again, eager to put distance between them. He reckons his report will be read within the hour — the wooden grilles decode more swiftly than they encode — but he can’t begin to guess how long Narkis will take to formulate a response. In the meantime, the thousand surrogate eyes of the Council of Ten watch from every balcony and every window. Somewhere in the lagoon, Verzelin’s gassy corpse strains surfaceward against its decaying fetters.
As he walks, Crivano is attentive to faces, alert for any he recognizes. He’s fairly certain that sbirri followed him during his first days in the city — an understandable precaution, given what the authorities know of him — but he doesn’t think he’s being shadowed any longer. No doubt informants still track his movements, but they won’t have noticed anything suspicious today. Crivano is a physician; physicians frequent apothecaries. Nothing unusual in that.
He’s nearly back to his locanda when a figure catches his eye: a rustic girl of perhaps twenty years, leaning against the cracked stucco of a joiner’s shop. She bends forward to study her black-soled foot, her right leg folded at the knee; a boot sags empty on the pavement below. The girl’s hands are stained brown to their wrists from some recent labor: tanning, dyeing, packing fabrics. Her drooping headscarf reveals cropped russet hair, shaved and partly grown back, as if she’s lately been treated for ringworm, or run afoul of the Inquisitor. She prods the filthy ball of her foot with brown thumbs, heedless of passersby, appearing and disappearing as they cross before her.
Something about her is familiar, though Crivano doesn’t think he’s seen her before. He watches for a moment, then draws closer and watches for a moment more. Well-muscled arms extend from her sleeveless blouse, sun-cooked nearly to match the stains. The angles of her face are boyish and hard. The small toes of her bare foot curl inward, the large one tips back, and Crivano discerns the irregular ellipse of a verruca in the pad beneath it. Does that give you pain? he asks.
For a long moment she doesn’t look up. It feels strange to walk, she says.
There’s physic for it. You should seek it out before you ask a barber to cut.
Her eyes are angry, but the anger doesn’t seem to be for him. And what does a girl pay for that? she asks.
Crivano gives her a warm smile, and opens his palms.
She stares at him. Then her face sags, and she looks back to her foot. The hour grows late, dottore, she says. You name a price for your physic, and I’ll name a price for my cunt. And then perhaps we’ll make a bargain.
Crivano’s mouth drops open. He closes it, and grinds his teeth. The girl brings her fingers to her lips, spits on them, and wipes them across the wart. It clarifies against the damp whorls of her calloused skin.
So, wench, Crivano says, his voice ugly in his own ears, does the entire city take to whoring for the Sensa? Or do all you slatterns come here from abroad? Good christ, every brothel from here to Munich must be shuttered.
I guess someone can answer that for you, dottore, she says. But not I. Ask a Bavarian pimp if you meet one. Will you lend an arm?
She’s looking up again. For an instant he’s inclined to strike her, to break her lean mannish jaw with the knob of his stick. But he gives her his arm, and she pulls her boot on. Thanks, she says. And a good day to you.
He stands by the wall to watch her limp away, her kerchiefed head bobbing among the crowds bound for the Mercerie. He half-expects to see her stop — to pitch a lewd proposition to a pack of merchants or pilgrims or sailors, to detour with one or several of them to a sidestreet or sottoportego or darkened doorway, to offer up her lean flesh for their abuse — but the girl moves ahead steadily until she’s gone from sight.
And then, at the White Eagle, on his way upstairs to his room and his books, he remembers a long-ago morning out riding with his brothers south of Nicosia on the Larnaca Road. Their party came upon a procession of Cypriot girls with an ass-drawn cart, bringing baled henna to market. The girls were all bent double under their heavy packs, even the youngest; all stared fiercely at the pitted surface of the old Roman road. Maffeo spat at them as they passed, and Dolfin stood in his saddle to display his cock. Those girls are probably all dead now, Crivano figures: killed during the invasion by the troops of Lala Mustafa. Or they’re in harems, or they’re rearing Turkish bastards, or they’re living now just as they were living then. The distant cedars of the Troödos formed a green shadow in the west that morning; he recalls watching them with unblinking attention after he turned his head away.
The girls’ strong arms were dyed brown to the elbows, their legs dyed brown to the knees. Every nail on every finger was a ghostly pink oval, edged by a sepia ring, and that, Crivano thinks, must be why the insolent slut seemed so familiar.
28
The late morning arrives harsh and white: a veil of smoke traps light in the thick air above the tiled rooftops, and the Grand Canal is a listless river of quicksilver. The sun presses gently on Crivano’s black robes, warming him from the core, and he feels himself grow weightless, on the verge of being borne aloft, like a Chinese sky-lantern. The thousandth year of the Hijra is only months away, and it’s suddenly easy to imagine the Prophet stirring in his tomb. This is a day to herald the end of the world.