Crivano stifles a laugh. The Emerald Tablet? he says, louder than he means to. He looks both ways down the corridor, steps closer, whispers. You can’t be serious, he says. To what passage do you refer?
Its very name, Vettor. The word emerald. The Greeks of antiquity used the same word to name any polished green stone, as did the Romans after them. Emeralds, jaspers, certain granites. In Pliny we read of the Emperor Nero, weak of sight, who viewed the deeds of his gladiators with the aid of an emerald. Our historians always identify this object as a lens, but I believe it to have been a curved jasper mirror. Furthermore, I believe it likely that the original text of the Emerald Tablet was etched upon a mirror of similar design, no doubt mislaid in the chaos of passing centuries. Mirroring is, after all, what it prescribes—as above, so below—and mirroring is its intended function.
Trist?o has advanced this case with waning fervor: not as though beset by doubt, but rather as though unable to maintain his interest in prosecuting a line of reasoning he regards as self-evident. Crivano gapes in disbelief. Every educated man—from Suez to Stockholm, from Lisbon to Lahore—has at least a passing knowledge of the Emerald Tablet, even if only as an ungodly thing to be eschewed and condemned. Any scholar concerned with the pursuit of secret knowledge knows its thirteen enigmatic sentences by memory. Yet in a lifetime of study—in two lifetimes, Ottoman and Frankish—Crivano has never encountered the notion that Trist?o so blithely puts forth, nor any notion that might be its parent, or its sibling. For the first time he finds himself considering the possibility that his handsome friend may not be merely eccentric, or imprudent, but genuinely mad. He wonders whether Narkis knows this, wonders again why Narkis directed him to make Trist?o’s acquaintance in the first place.
Trist?o seems lost in thought; Crivano clears his throat softly to reclaim his attention. So, Crivano says, that’s what you wanted to show me?
No, Trist?o says. This.
He steps forward, opening a door to another storeroom, this one filled with dusty crates and casks. A lamp burns on a table in the room’s center, illuminating a small beechwood strongbox. Trist?o pulls a key from around his neck, unlocks it, and opens the lid.
It’s full of coins: silver ducats and gold sequins. Well over a thousand, to judge by its dimensions. Trist?o closes it, locks it, hands the key to Crivano. For the glassmaker, he says. Give it to him, please, and bring my mirror to me.
Crivano sets his half-eaten bread and sausage on the table, takes the key, and drapes it around his own neck. Then he takes hold of the box’s handles and tries to lift it. It won’t budge.
Tonight, Trist?o says, when you depart, you will have the assistance of Hugo and the footman. About my project they know nothing of import, and they can be trusted to be silent. I am very grateful to you for this errand, Vettor.
He bends, blows out the lamp.
Crivano gulps the last of his food as they hurry down the corridor. The lute and the theorbo are playing again; the candles in the great hall are being snuffed, and the Uranici are congregating in the dayroom. Come quickly, Trist?o says. There is a fellow here tonight to whom I have pledged to introduce you.
Most of the guests have gathered around the two musicians; they clap and shout encouragement as the players embark upon a fantasia that grows increasingly complex and harmonically improbable. The lutenist plays as if he has surplus fingers. Crivano can see the long neck of the theorbo nod with the rhythm, but the musicians themselves are hidden by the crowd.
Trist?o walks to the chamber’s opposite end, toward the row of breeze-sieving windows that opens onto the Grand Canal. Two men converse there; Crivano notes with displeasure that one is Lord Mocenigo. As they draw near, the noble’s vaguely cretinous face clarifies in the dim light, its expression aggrieved and conspiratorial. You now tell me, Crivano overhears him say, that you met no one in all of Frankfurt who successfully learned the Nolan’s so-called art of memory?
The other man, a tall and burly Sienese, seems unfazed by Mocenigo’s question, but he smiles with relief and gratitude when Trist?o and Crivano approach. Dottore de Nis! he says. As always, your arrival makes the rest of us seem even uglier than we are.
Mocenigo emits an irritated puff, stalks away. Messer Ciotti, Trist?o says, allow me to present Dottore Vettor Crivano, who has come recently from Bologna. Dottore Crivano, this is Messer Giovanni Battista Ciotti, who may be known to you already as the proprietor of Minerva, our city’s finest bookshop.