The Mirror Thief(164)

This continues across what seems like many hours, although Crivano recalls hearing no bells. Only when they’re both clumsy, fumbling, all but asleep, does he let her touch him. She settles an arm around his waist; her hand makes a few perfunctory strokes. He rises to clean himself.

Sometime during the night her snores wake him; he’s uncertain of the hour. Dark. The lamp on the table has burned itself out; the fresher one in the corner still flickers. He slides from bed, refills the new lamp’s reservoir, shapes its wick with a needle until he’s built a steady flame. Then he unlocks his box of physic.

He places his square marble slab on the tabletop, along with a pair of small tin spatulas and a sealed jar of beeswax, and turns to inspect his herbs. Birchbark. Fig-leaf resin. Celandine. The biennial henbane he bought from the apothecary, moments before he met this girl for the first time. Why did he purchase so much of it? Enough to kill everyone in the White Eagle, and many more besides. Might not the sale raise suspicion?

He puts that concern aside, makes his selections, measures them onto the slab. Then he gathers beeswax on a spatula, softens it over the lamp-flame, smears it across the scattered herbs, stirring and scraping them into an ointment. Once he’s gathered it in a vial, he returns to his box, fishes out a long slim razor, and rouses the girl.

She recoils when she sees the blade. He claps a hand over her mouth before she can scream, pinching her nose, pressing her skull downward until the bed-ropes groan. Then he begins to whisper in her ear, and he keeps whispering until her struggles cease, until she understands and accedes to what he’s about to do.

He releases her, then takes hold of her thigh and rolls her quickly over on her stomach. He straddles her, rests his buttocks against her own, bends her back leg. As if she’s a horse he’s shoeing. He tilts the pad of her foot toward the lamp until the wart is clearly visible. Then he begins to cut.

He draws no blood, or very little. As the shaved-away callus litters the sheets, he sweeps it to the floor with the back of his hand. When the area of the verruca is cleared, he applies the poultice, then dresses it with a snug bandage. Clean this every night, he says. Put ointment on it every morning. Don’t walk unless you must. If you do these things, within a month it will cease to trouble you.

He stands, freeing her. She he rolls onto her side, then cocks her leg, prods the bandage. Looks at him. Dottore, she says.

She says nothing else. After a moment, she rolls onto her belly and draws in her limbs, rising sphinx-like on her knees and elbows, swaying sleepily in the lamp’s flame. Crivano watches her for some time. A sound escapes his throat: a wet exhalation, like a small beast dying or being born. Then he climbs across the mattress and commences to use her in the manner of the Greeks, in the same manner the janissaries would sometimes use him, in same the manner he’d sometimes put the Lark to use during the long slow dream of their boyhood, those unspoiled days when nothing was different and nothing would ever change.





54


When he wakes, sunlight is pressing through the curtains, and the girl still sleeps beside him.

When he wakes again, the sunlight has shifted, grown softer, and the girl is gone. He tries with some success to sink back into slumber, but recollections of the night before—along with concerns about what the girl may have stolen, and the desire to void his bladder—finally rouse him.

Stool and urine in the chamberpot already. Enough water in the pitcher to clean himself. The stack of coins that he left for her is gone, of course, but his own purse still jingles when he lifts it. The ample sheaf of papers in his trunk’s false bottom—letters of advice from a bank in Genoa, an account Narkis established for him—has led him to be somewhat careless with his funds; he turns out the purse on the tabletop to take stock of its contents. Gold sequins, silver ducats, silver soldi, copper gazettes. A few lire and grossi. One scarred and flattened giustina, MEMOR ERO TUI IVSTINA VIRGO visible on its reverse. Coins from other lands: a papal scudi, an English half-groat, a quart d’ecu bearing the device of Henri IV. One blue-green piece he can’t identify. He opens the curtains, winces, holds it to the light. A ducat. A coin of necessity, struck during a siege by a local treasurer from whatever metal could be spared. One side is illegible, worn smooth; the other bears a winged lion, and the year the coin was minted: 1570.

Crivano’s arm spasms and goes numb as if struck on the ulnar nerve; the ducat clatters to the floor, rolls to a corner. Crivano, trembling, stoops to retrieve it. He sits naked at the table, reading the coin’s relief with his fingertips as his eyes grow wet. Thinking of his father. I demand that you end this fatuous sulk at once. I have made my decision. Maffeo and Dolfin will stay here with me. What you say is true: if we defeat the Turks, my estate will pass to them. But we will not defeat the Turks. Don’t you see? The sultan’s victory may come this year, or next year, or ten years from now. But it will come. There is no one who does not know this. To Maffeo and Dolfin, I bequeath my lands and my properties, which are worth nothing, which are in fact a curse that dooms them. To you I give my name, my seat on the Great Council. I am sending you and the Lark to Padua not because you have no legacy in Cyprus, but because the only legacy for you here is death. Crivano wipes his cheeks, dries his face on his peg-hung shirt, dresses himself. Wishing for an instant that he still had Trist?o’s mirror: wanting to read the history in his face, history he’s labored greatly to conceal, to forget. History no other living soul could recognize.