The Mirror Thief(82)
If he erred at all, signore, Crivano says, it was no doubt from generosity. You, I gather, are one of my noble hosts, although I confess I know not which.
I’m Andrea Morosini. That’s my brother Nicolò there, in debate with Lord Mocenigo. Come, I’ll introduce you.
Milord, the steward says, forgive my intrusion, but the dottore has not yet taken his supper. If you’ll permit me, I’ll take him to the pantry now, and return him to you in a moment.
Yes. Of course. Go with Hugo, dottore. He’ll see you fed. Our Nolan friend is about to begin his lecture, but with any luck I can delay him. Oh, dottore?
Andrea takes Crivano’s elbow as he’s moving away. He’s somewhat shorter than Crivano. Athletic, poised like an acrobat, but soft. He leans in close and speaks.
You did a brave thing at Constantinople, he says. No one can dispute that. My brother and I are proud to have you in our house.
Before Crivano can consider what might have prompted this commendation, the steward is leading him through the huge room, past the long banquet table, now almost bare. The dark terrazzo floor is flecked by stone chips of mossy gray and blackbird-beak orange; its polished surface—like that of an underground pool—returns Crivano’s blurred image. As he walks, slow fireflies swarm before his drowned phantom self: the reflection of the candles on the brass chandeliers overhead.
To his right, through the door of a dayroom, he glimpses the musicians: a sturdy black-beaded man with a lute and a Servite friar wrestling with a massive theorbo. They’ve paused in their playing for a good-humored squabble. No, the one with the lute says, plucking a repeated note. Down, he says. Tune down.
Crivano has passed the dayroom by the time he hears the Servite’s response. Down? the friar says, twanging a bass string. You’re deaf. Listen to that buzz!
The voice is familiar. Why? Crivano pauses, turns back, and meets the eye of a second friar just outside the dayroom door. This one is dressed in a tunic and scapular of matching bole: the habit of no order Crivano can name. Sharp-featured. Splenetic. A patchy chestnut beard, and the frail physique of a sickly boy. He’s been conversing in Latin with a Hungarian baron while a bookish German youth looks on. Noting Crivano’s gaze, the friar’s eyes flash, his weak jaw snaps shut, and he counters with an insolent glower of his own.
Hunger has turned Crivano’s temper foul; he’s about to square his shoulders and call the man out when the steward takes hold of his elbow. Here, dottore, he says. This way. Before our hired girls depart with all the food.
Crivano permits himself to be led, and as they resume their course, realization dawns. The lean and quarrelsome friar, he thinks: that pompous little ass must be the Nolan.
The hirelings have removed the banquet to a storeroom off a nearby corridor; the steward dismisses them with handclaps and a few brusque words in Friulian. Let me set a place for you, dottore.
That’s hardly necessary, Crivano says, unsheathing the knife on his belt. You may leave me. I’ll only be a moment.
He sets in immediately on the hindquarters of a jointed hare, then moves on to a flaky piece of mullet in a black-pepper glaze. Consumed, these somehow leave him more famished, and he steps up and broadens his assault: a wedge of pigeon pie, a salad of rocket and purslane, a bowl of noodles with cinnamon and shaved cheese, the ruined donjon of a sugar castle, the thigh of a roast peacock. Across the room, a rawboned Moorish girl who’s stayed behind to dump bones into a stockpot eyes his progress nervously. After a moment she wipes her greasy hands on her apron and tiptoes away, leaving Crivano alone.
He presses on. The skin of his belly grows tight, so he limits himself to single bites as he moves from dish to dish, searching the cluttered table for whatever taste will collapse the void gnawing in his gut. Walnuts. Boiled squid. A soft yellow cheese. Poached quince. A purple candied rose. Fish jelly. A white-stalked herb he can’t even identify. He recalls the siege of Tunis: the door-to-door hunt through the medina for escaped Spaniards. Numbing, desperate, faintly ridiculous. What within himself wants so badly to be fed?
He’s attacking a cured Milanese sausage when Trist?o bursts in, a wary and determined cast on his comely face, as if he half-expects the room to be filled with cloaked assassins. Not atypically, his mien is that of a man in the midst of a great and nebulous adventure. Vettor! he says. Here you are! You are here.
Crivano’s knife saws through the mold-dusted sausage casing; he speaks through a mouth only partly empty. I am indeed, he says. Where in God’s name have you been? I don’t know any of these Uranici. How do you expect—
Come with me, Trist?o says. We must be swift. The Nolan is soon to speak.
A moment, please. I’m eating.
Come! Trist?o says, grabbing Crivano’s sleeve with one hand, beckoning with the other. Come come come come come!
Crivano folds the thin sausage slices into a scrap of bread and follows Trist?o into the corridor. They turn not toward the great hall, but deeper into the house. As he walks, Trist?o fishes a folded sheet of paper from his doublet, flattens it, and hands it to Crivano. Here, he says. Look.
Penciled off-center on the yellow sheet is an oblong shape, pinched at one end like a deformed pear, or a long-stemmed fig. Crivano stares the drawing, rotates it, but can make nothing of it.
This, Trist?o says, will work. Don’t you think so?
Crivano looks at Trist?o, flummoxed. Trist?o looks back. He seems intent on resuming a discussion Crivano doesn’t recall having had in the first place. Don’t I think what will work? Crivano says.