The Mirror Thief(65)
Seventeen years have passed since plague last came to the city. Although he was in Constantinople at the time, Crivano knows the last one was very bad: a quarter of the population dead, including what remained of his own family, those lucky few who escaped Cyprus ahead of the sultan’s troops. The memory of pestilence still lies across every street and every campo here like an unseen scar. At carnival time, when order is suspended, this fellow’s costume might simply be in horrific taste; during the Sensa it’s unthinkable. Or perhaps this is yet another theatrical provocation. Crivano scans the crowd, alert for the arrival of more players, but nothing moves: everyone else in the campo is frozen in place, shrunken into themselves like sea anemones at low tide.
When he turns forward again, the plaguedoctor is almost upon him. Crivano sidesteps to clear the figure’s path, but the figure tracks him, closing the distance with slow steady paces like a terror in a dream. Wisps of burning asafetida rise from its vented beak; a slim ash wand dangles from its gloved right hand. Its robe is splashed with dark fluids, dried in the creases: what might be bile, what might be blood.
A few feet from him the figure stops abruptly, silent and statue-still. Crivano stares hard at the beaked mask’s eyeholes, but they’re unscry-able, capped by blown-glass hemispheres. His worn nerves tighten like a springline in a gale.
He’s about to issue a challenge when, with a liquid motion swifter than a blink, the figure lays its wand alongside his neck. The tip rests against Crivano’s bare skin just above his ruff, as if to measure his pulse. He springs back, swats the wand away with his own stick, then slides his fingers down its shaft and swings it hard with both hands, axing the heavy silver knob downward at the figure’s clavicle.
The walkingstick bites only air; Crivano stumbles to keep his feet. As he’s rising again, the wand flicks his wrist, and his stick falls to the pavement. Crivano’s hands are up instantly, guarding his face. He’s calm, almost relieved to be in proper combat again. Flattening his gaze to hide his intentions. Figuring distances: the stick on the pavement, the stiletto in his boot. Kill the bastard, dottore! hisses a voice from the crowd. The plaguedoctor faces him, open-armed, motionless.
Crivano moves. He lunges, feigns a jab, rolls the stick behind him with the ball of his foot. Then he steps back, gets his toe under the rolling knob, and pops it into his hand. It’s a beautiful move—he’s very pleased with it—and when he lifts the stick to try another strike, the plaguedoctor is gone.
Its black shape is already halfway to the Street of the Casters, in no evident hurry, making easy strides. So quick it seemed weightless. Its turn like the pivot of a bird-rattle on the wind. Still in his attack stance, his walkingstick aloft and at the ready, Crivano looks, he realizes, somewhat ridiculous. He straightens up, adjusts his garments, plants his ferrule on the stones with a decisive click.
The campo is emptying. People avoid his eyes, embarrassed for him, or for themselves, he can’t be sure which. A water-vendor appears at his side with a ladle; Crivano gratefully drinks. That whoreson was smart to run off when he did, dottore, the man says without conviction. You’d have thrashed him.
Do you know who that was? Crivano asks between gulps.
The water-vendor shrugs, eager to move along. Someone with no goddamned decency, I suppose, he says. Probably from the mainland.
Crivano hands back the scoop. I’m a stranger to your city, my friend, he says. Tell me, the costume that blackguard was wearing. Is it commonly seen here?
Not lately, dottore, the water-vendor says, and crosses himself. Not lately.
27
A shaft of orange sunlight splits the room like a blade, and a noise that Crivano takes at first for hoofbeats resolves into a steady pounding at the door. He springs naked from bed and has his hand on the bolt before he remembers the regimental emblems that mark his skin. Yes, he calls. I’ll be with you in a moment.
The knocking stops. He unhooks his shirt from its peg, shrugs into it, and surveys the room as he pulls on his hose. Before lying down—just for a moment, to rest his eyes—he’d been working at the table; the report to Narkis is still there, along with the polished wooden grille which encoded it. Crivano hides the grille under the paper, then opens the door.
Anzolo, the proprietor of the White Eagle, waits in the hallway, studying the framed woodcut on the opposite wall. He turns with a ready expression, as if mildly surprised, as if Crivano has emerged quite by chance. Ah, he says. Good day, dottore.
What is it, Anzolo?
I’m sorry to disturb you, dottore. Dottore Trist?o de Nis is downstairs, and he wishes to speak with you. He says that you are expecting him.
Anzolo is a very good innkeeper—he has an imperturbable ease any courtier would admire—but now a shade of doubt haunts his manner, an uncertainty regarding protocol. Doubts of this sort follow Trist?o as birds follow cattle.
Yes, Crivano says. I’ll be a short while. Please give Dottore de Nis my apologies for the delay, and see to his comfort. We’ll take supper in the parlor.
When Anzolo is gone, Crivano bolts the door again and takes a moment to collect his thoughts. He’d been enmeshed in vivid dreams, and they slip from him now in an indistinct rush: fragments in the midst of fragments, like the mirrored passage in the Piazza. His mother and young sister on the Redeemer’s white steps, milk-eyed and smiling, dead of the plague. His father and older brothers, bloodied and proud at the Famagusta Gate, offering him a robe fashioned from his own skin. Crivano wonders what these dreams augur for the success of his mission, and why they fail to disturb him.