Halfway along the Street of the Coopers a blue-flowered bunch of pennyroyal in an apothecary’s window distracts him, and he misses the turn onto Swordsmen’s Street. Not till he smells the fishmarket ahead does he realize his error, by which time he’s disinclined to turn back. He can see bright air over the canal, a wall of light where the buildings fall away, and he continues toward it. Suspending his purpose for a moment. Luxuriating in the ravel of possibilities, the sensation of being neither lost nor certain.
The Babylonians speak of Hathor as Ishtar. The Hebrews call her Astarte. The Greeks also know her as Io, beloved of Zeus, guarded by a giant with one hundred eyes who is, of course, slain by Hermes. Crivano steps over puddled seawater and piles of offal, moving among the fishmongers’ stalls to see what the ocean has divulged. Much is familiar from his visits to the Bal?k Pazar? during his years at court, but much is also new, or forgotten. Gangly spidercrabs. Coral-hued langoustines. Frogmouthed monkfish. Razor clams in neat rows, like the spines of books. A tangle of octopodes, their purple arms pocked with white suckers. Mullet and seabream stiffening in the warm air, their eyes gone foggy, like inferior glass. Behind the booths the water is a weave of pulsing lozenges, borrowing blue from the sky, orange from the palaces along the Grand Canal. A bragozzo moored at the white limestone quay is emptying its hold, spilling out sardines in a slick mirrored torrent.
Crivano passes by the moneychangers and bankers at their benches under the colonnades, then proceeds south through the Rialto, pausing to examine red chicory from Treviso, wheels of cheese from Asiago, sheaves of asparagus from Bassano del Grappa. He finds bright-skinned lemons and bitter oranges from the Terrafirma, including the fragrant teardrop fruit from Bergamo, but the handful of sweet citrus available is absurdly expensive, and he asks a vendor why this is so. Uskoks, the man says with a shrug.
The pungent hemp and pitch in the Ropemakers’ Square are pleasing to his nose, but Crivano has no interest in this merchandise. He turns down the narrow Street of the Insurers, passes through a sottoportego into the Campo San Giacometto, and emerges near the Proclamation Column, surprised to find himself in the spot where twenty years ago he and the Lark heard the news that Nicosia, city of their birth, had fallen. They’d been crossing the square to the Pisani bank to redeem more of his father’s letters of advice: two doe-eyed street wanderers, eager to be corrupted. Those boys seem entirely strange to him now: anxious, smooth-cheeked, full of foolish notions. They stood open-mouthed, their hearts striking the anvils of their ribs, as they struggled to parse the dialect of the comandador atop the porphyry column. In the general uproar they made their way south to the Molo and stood weeping and howling with rage under the arcades of the Doge’s Palace as the clerk copied their names—Gabriel Glissenti, Vettor Crivano—into the register of the Gold and Black Eagle of Corfu. Ravenous as only the young and privileged can be for their own annihilation. It was a clear day in September; they’d been planning a visit to a bookshop. That much, at least, has not changed.
The Rialto too seems much the same. Crivano crosses the pavement to read the notices posted around the hunchbacked statue at the column’s base. When trading with Dalmatia, captains of state-auctioned galleys must henceforth make port at Spalato. The Serene Republic encourages the Hapsburgs and the Sultan to resolve without warfare their ongoing dispute in Croatia. Uskok pirates have intercepted three merchant vessels of late, murdering the crews and eating the hearts of their captains, as is their custom.
Not till Crivano turns to check the clock on the fa?ade of San Giacometto does he glimpse the new stone bridge. Its stepped incline rises from the Street of the Goldsmiths and arcs across the Grand Canal in a single broad span, fed from the Treasury and the Riva del Vin by a pair of steeper staircases. A moment ago Crivano had forgotten it; now he hurries toward it as if expecting it to dissolve into air.