The Water Mirror (2 page)

The guardsman on the bridge looked down into the gondola with a grin, then
waved to Merle and gave the lion his spurs. With a snort the beast leaped forward. Merle
could hear all too clearly the scraping of its stone claws on the pavement. Junipa held
her ears. The bridge quivered and trembled under the paws of the great cat, and the
sound seemed to careen back and forth between the high facades like a bouncing ball.
Even the still water was set in motion. The gondola rocked gently.

The gondolier waited until the soldier had disappeared into the tangle of
narrow streets, then spat into the water and murmured, “The Ancient Traitor take
you!” Merle looked around at him, but the man looked past her down the canal, his
face expressionless. Slowly he guided the gondola forward.

“Do you know how far it is now?” Junipa inquired of Merle.

Before she could answer, the gondolier replied, “We're there
now. There ahead, just around the corner.” Then he realized that “there
ahead” was not information the blind girl could use. So he quickly added,
“Only a few minutes, then we'll be on the Canal of the Expelled.”

Narrowness and darkness—those were the two qualities that
impressed themselves on Merle most strongly.

The Canal of the Expelled was flanked by tall houses, one as dark as the
next. Almost all were abandoned. The window openings gaped empty and black in the gray
fronts, many panes were broken, and the wooden shutters hung aslant on their hinges like
wings on the ribs of dead birds. From one broken door came the snarling of fighting
tomcats, nothing unusual in a city of umpteen thousand stray cats. Pigeons cooed on the
window ledges, and the narrow, railingless walks on both sides of the water were covered
with moss and pigeon droppings.

The only two inhabited houses stood out clearly from the rows of decaying
buildings. They were exactly opposite one another and glared across the canal like two
chess players, with furrowed faces and knitted brows. About three hundred feet separated
them from the mouth of the canal and from its shadowy dead end. Each of the houses had a
balcony, that of the one on the left of stone, that of the one on the right wrought of
intertwining metal grillwork. The balustrades high over the water were almost
touching.

The canal measured about three paces wide. The water, though still a
brilliant green, looked darker and deeper here. The spaces between the old houses were
so narrow that hardly any daylight reached the water's surface. A few
bird feathers rocked languidly on the waves caused by the
gondola.

Merle had a vague notion of what lay ahead of her. They had explained it
to her at the orphanage, repeatedly mentioning how grateful she should feel that she was
being sent here to apprentice. She would be spending the next few years on this canal,
in this tunnel of greenish gray twilight.

The gondola neared the inhabited houses. Merle listened intently, but she
could hear nothing except a distant murmur of indistinguishable voices. When she looked
over at Junipa, she saw that every muscle in the blind girl's body was tensed; she
had closed her eyes; her lips formed silent words—perhaps those she was picking
out of the whisperings with her trained ears, like the movements of a carpet weaver, who
with his sharp needle purposefully picks out a single thread from among thousands of
others. Junipa was indeed an extraordinary girl.

The building on the left housed the weaving establishment of the famed
Umberto. It was said to be wicked to wear garments that he and his apprentices made; his
reputation was too bad, his quarrel with the Church too well known. But those women who
allowed themselves to secretly order bodices and dresses from him swore behind their
hands as to their magical effect. “Umberto's clothes make one
slender,” they said in the salons and streets of Venice.
Really
slender. For whoever wore them not only
looked
slimmer—she was in fact so, as if the magical threads of the master weaver drew
off the fat of all those who were enveloped by them. The priests in Venice's
churches had more than once thundered against the unholy dealings of the master weaver,
so loudly and hatefully that the trade guild had finally expelled Umberto from its
ranks.

But Umberto wasn't the only one who had come to feel the wrath of
the guilds. It was the same with the master of the house opposite. There was also a
workshop housed in that one, and it too devoted itself in its way to the service of
beauty. However, no clothing was woven there, and its master, the honorable Arcimboldo,
would doubtless have protested loudly at any open suggestion of a connection between him
and his archenemy, Umberto.

ARCIMBOLDO'S GLASS FOR THE GODS
was written in golden
letters over the door, and right beside it was a sign:
MAGIC MIRRORS FOR GOOD AND
WICKED STEPMOTHERS, FOR BEAUTIFUL AND UGLY WITCHES, AND EVERY SORT OF HONEST
PURPOSE
.

“We're there,” Merle said to Junipa, as her eye traveled
over the words a second time. “Arcimboldo's magic mirror
workshop.”

“How does it look?” Junipa asked.

Merle hesitated. It wasn't easy to describe her first impression.
The house was dark, certainly, like the whole canal and its surroundings, but next to
the door stood a
tub of colorful flowers, a friendly spot in the
gray twilight. Only at the second look did she realize that the flowers were made of
glass.

“Better than the orphanage,” she said somewhat
uncertainly.

The steps leading up to the walk from the water surface were slippery. The
gondolier helped them both climb out. He had already been paid when he picked the girls
up. He wished them both luck before he slowly glided away in his gondola.

They stood there a little lost, each with a half-full bundle in her hand,
just under the sign offering magic mirrors for wicked stepmothers. Merle wasn't
sure whether she should consider this a good or a bad introduction to her
apprenticeship. Probably the truth lay somewhere in between.

Behind a window of the weaver's workshop on the other bank, a face
whisked past, then a second. Curious apprentices, Merle guessed, who were looking over
the new arrivals.
Enemy
apprentices, if you believed the
rumors.

Arcimboldo and Umberto had never liked each other, that was no secret, and
even their simultaneous expulsion from the trade guilds had changed nothing. Each one
blamed the other. “What? Throw me out and not that crazy mirror maker?”
Umberto was said to have asked loudly. The weaver asserted, on the other hand, that
Arcimboldo had cried at his own expulsion, “I'll go,
but you'd do well to bring charges against that thread picker, too.” Which
of these accusations matched the truth, no one knew with utter certainty. It was clear
only that they had both been expelled from the guilds because of forbidden trafficking
with magic.

A magician,
Merle thought excitedly, though she
had been thinking of scarcely anything else for days.
Arcimboldo is a
real magician!

With a grating sound, the door of the mirror workshop was opened, and an
odd-looking woman appeared on the pavement. Her long hair was piled up into a knot. She
wore leather trousers, which emphasized her slender legs. Over these fluttered a white
blouse, shot through with silver threads—Merle might have expected such a fine
item in the weaver's workshop on the opposite bank of the canal, but not in the
house of Arcimboldo.

But the most unusual thing was the mask behind which the woman hid a part
of her face. The last Carnival of Venice—at one time famous the world
over—had taken place over four decades ago. That had been 1854, three years after
the Pharaoh Amenophis had been awakened to a new life in the stepped pyramid of
Amun-Ka-Re. Today, in time of war, distress, and siege, there was no occasion to dress
up.

And yet the woman was wearing a mask, formed of paper, enameled, and
artfully decorated, doubtless the
work of a Venetian artist. It
covered the lower half of her face right up to her nostrils. Its surface was snow white
and shone like porcelain. The mask maker had painted a small, finely curved mouth with
dark red lips on it.

“Eft,” the woman said, and then, with a barely noticeable
lisp, “that's my name.”

“Merle. And this is Junipa. We're the new
apprentices.”

“Of course, who else?” Only Eft's eyes betrayed that she
was smiling. Merle wondered whether the woman's face could have been disfigured by
illness.

Eft ushered the girls in. Beyond the door was a broad entrance hall, as in
most of the houses of the city. It was only sparely furnished, the walls plastered and
without hangings—precautions against the high waters that struck Venice some
winters. The domestic life of the Venetians took place on the second and third floors,
the ground floors being left bare and uncomfortable.

“It's late,” said Eft, as if her eye had happened to
fall on a clock. But Merle couldn't discover one anywhere. “Arcimboldo and
the older students are in the workshop at this hour and may not be disturbed.
You'll get to meet them in the morning. I'll show you to your
room.”

Merle couldn't repress a smile. She had hoped that she and Junipa
would share a room. She saw that the blind girl was also happy to hear Eft's
words.

The masked woman led them up the steps of a curving flight of stairs.
“I'm the housekeeper for the workshop.
I'll be
cooking for you and washing your things. Perhaps in the first few months you'll be
giving me a hand with it; the master often requests that of newcomers—especially
as you are the only girls in the house.”

The only girls? That all the other apprentices could be boys hadn't
occurred to Merle at all until now. She was all the more relieved that she was beginning
her apprenticeship with Junipa.

The blind girl wasn't very talkative, and Merle guessed that she
hadn't had a very easy time of it in the orphanage. Merle had only too often
experienced how awful children can be, especially to those they consider weaker.
Certainly Junipa's blindness would frequently have been a reason for mean
tricks.

The girls followed Eft down a long hallway. The walls were hung with
countless mirrors. Most were aimed toward each other: mirrors in mirrors in mirrors.
Merle doubted that any of these were Arcimboldo's famous magic mirrors, for she
could discover nothing unusual about them.

After Eft had explained all the rules about eating times, going out, and
behavior in the house, Merle asked, “Who buys Arcimboldo's magic mirrors,
anyhow?”

“You're curious,” stated Eft, leaving it open as to
whether this displeased her.

“Rich people?” Junipa queried, absently running her hand over
her smooth hair.

“Perhaps,” Eft replied. “Who
knows?” With that she let the subject drop, and the girls probed no further. They
would have time enough to find out everything important about the workshop and its
customers.
Good and wicked stepmothers,
Merle repeated to
herself. Beautiful and ugly witches. That sounded exciting.

The room that Eft showed them to was not large. It smelled musty, but
since it was on the fourth floor of the building, it was pleasingly bright. In Venice
you saw daylight only above the third floor, to say nothing of the sunshine, if you were
lucky. However, the window of this room looked out over a sea of orange tiles. At night
they would be able to see the starry heavens, and all day they would be able to see the
sun—provided their work left them time for it.

The room was at the back of the house. Far below the window, Merle could
make out a small courtyard with a round well in the center. All the houses opposite
appeared to be empty. At the beginning of the war with the Pharaoh's kingdom, many
Venetians had left the city and fled to the mainland—a disastrous mistake, as it
later turned out.

Eft left the girls, telling them she would bring them something to eat in
an hour. And then after that they should go to bed, so that they would be rested for
their first workday.

Junipa felt along the bedposts and gently let herself
down on the mattress. Carefully she stroked the bedcover with both hands.

“Look at the blankets! So fluffy!”

Merle sat down beside her. “They must have been expensive,”
she said dreamily. In the orphanage the blankets had been thin and scratchy, and there
were all kinds of bugs that bit your skin while you were asleep.

“It looks as though we've been lucky,” Junipa said.

“We still haven't met Arcimboldo.”

Junipa raised an eyebrow. “Anyone who takes a blind girl from an
orphanage to teach her something can't be a bad man.”

Merle remained skeptical. “Arcimboldo is known for that—taking
orphans as pupils. Anyway, what parents would send their child to apprentice in a place
that calls itself the Canal of the Expelled?”