Matteo could feel the pressure rising, as though one of his sensible organs (in addition to much of his fortune and more of his honor) lay within the rapidly heating vessel. A seam creaked loudly and the young trader flinched, recalling a weaker model that had blown open, spraying Gaspare and an assistant with scalding water. He wished he had calmed his nerves with a cup of caofa, the elixir that brought fixity of purpose and clarity of mind, and which held the balance of his fortune in pawn.

Another joint groaned, but Senator Domenico remained impassive. His secretary, who seemed to know more, looked as though he wanted to step back. The sides of the great kettle had visibly distended, a tin boy popping his cheeks. Matteo glanced worriedly at Gaspare, but the engineer seemed to be counting, as though trying to determine the proper interval in a recipe. Finally he stepped forward and upended a bucket of water over the kettle. A cloud of steam immediately enveloped him.

"As the vessel cools, the steam within will now condense," Matteo announced. Gaspare got down on his knees and, holding a pair of long tongs, laboriously turned a valve under the kettle. A deep gurgling rose from beneath the wooden floorboards.

". . . And the water is drawn up from the level below." Matteo strove to keep his voice confident and assured. The kettle, which had dimpled inward, bunged back to convexity with a faint gong.

Gaspare, who was still crouched at the base of the kettle, now spoke. "In a more efficient model, the water used to cool the vessel–now warmed–would be poured into a second vessel, which would then be heated in its turn. In this manner the coals would do continuous work, and the flow of water proceed uninterrupted."

The senator spoke. "And your vessel is now filled with. . . ?"

"Let me show you." Gaspare stood, brushing dirt from his knees. A brass spigot emerged from the lower half of the vessel, and he carefully turned it, then stepped back as brown water spurted into his bucket. The stench that rose from it was unmistakable: the vile bilge, compounded of offal and decomposing vegetable matter, that eddied at low tide in the canals and seeped into the foundations of buildings. "It’s only about a quarter full," Gaspare admitted. "The engine’s capacity is limited by the tank’s size and, especially, its strength. A large, double-vessel engine, of strong bronze–"

"Yes; I comprehend your point." The senator walked slowly around the apparatus, his expression betraying no sign of censure or approval. "And this is your invention?"

"The principle is ancient," said Gaspare cheerfully. "Hero of Alexandria showed how water displaced by steam could be made to do work. More recent studies by the Neapolitan della Porta suggested that with superior metallurgy–"

"I see. What do you think, Enrico?" he asked.

The secretary, an unsmiling man with a partially grown out tonsure that gave him the look of an expelled monk, pursed his lips. "I count ten briquettes of coal expended," he said in a nasal voice. "A considerable expense for the raising of eight gallons of water."

Matteo was about to protest the obvious injustice–the coals were not yet consumed, and another vessel could be heated–but the senator waved him off.

"It is perhaps not the most economical means of pumping," he said. "Yet the work could be done at any hour, and while haulage requires strong men, the boiler could be tended by a cripple. More to the point, there is perhaps value in a system that can drain a basement without the need to admit workmen below."

Matteo did not follow that, but the secretary nodded. Ser Domenico gathered his cloak and looked around him. "This warehouse belongs to your family?"

"It does, sir."

Domenico smiled faintly. "Its empty space stands ready to receive shipments of that bean you think to sell to Christendom, the one the Turks use to brew that bitter liquid–what do they call it?"

"They call it ‘Arabian wine,’ ser," Matteo replied. "Our warehouse stands ready to receive shipments of anything my father and brothers bring into port."

"Very good. Still, it hardly seems secure enough for investigations of potential benefit to our Republic. Until you dismantle your present model, I will post a guard around it."

Matteo inclined his head politely.

"You promise better performance with a sturdier engine? Very well. Have young Treviso come see me tomorrow."

"As you wish, ser." Matteo bowed, uncertain how to greet this. He was disappointed that the senator would discuss funding with Gaspare, who was a wretched negotiator. Still, for a trading family to win subsidy for a venture gave Matteo a thrill of triumph such as Gaspare–whose father had always been employed by the state–would never understand.

With brief but ceremonious leave-taking (and a sour look from his secretary) the senator departed, and the two young men looked at each other. Matteo was too well schooled to show his feelings even in the aftermath of a transaction, but Gaspare pushed his hair back, smudging his face, and grinned. "Have you any of your wondrous elixir?" he asked. "I believe this calls for a drink."

They repaired to the workbench, where Matteo produced a leather bag from his belt. "Roasted this morning," he said as he unlaced its neck, releasing the intoxicating aroma. Matteo ground the beans in a mortar while Gaspare flushed out the vessel and poured in fresh water, then carefully took out the tiny sieve–gold leaf hammered to paper thinness and riddled with needle-sized holes–that represented his own contribution to the art of brewing caofa. He doubted his countrymen would ever drink it as the Turks did, with suspended grounds settling into a sludge at the bottom of their cup.

Spooning the black powder into the sieve, Matteo called out, "Ready?" He carefully fit the sieve into the throat of a flask, and turned to Gaspare, who was bent over the vessel like a chymist before his alembic. "It’s ready," he murmured. Matteo positioned the flask just beneath the spigot, and Gaspare turned the tap.

The jet of steam caught them both by surprise. Gaspare, who should have closed the valve instantly, continued to twist for a second longer, then froze. Matteo felt the flask buck in his hand as though trying to kick free. Instinctively he resisted the force pushing it away from the spigot, and immediately got himself a blast in the face.

Both men were cursing and spitting as the cloud dissipated. Matteo blinked, tasting grit on his lips, and looked down to see his doublet spattered with grounds.

"Sorry," Gaspare muttered. "I forgot that there was still water in the boiler."

Neither man cared to say aloud that they had narrowly missed a nasty accident. Matteo knew that beneath his nervous relief a blister of shame was rising. And on top of that, they had ruined a pot of caofa.

The flask was still dangling in his hand. Matteo lifted it, felt it slosh a bit, then pulled out the sieve and peered in. The residue at the bottom looked black as ink.

Grimacing, he poured it into one of the cups they had set out. Gaspare stared at the opaque liquid, leaned forward, and sniffed. Then he raised the cup to his lips and sipped.

"Say," he said in surprise, "this isn’t bad."

The morning shadows had retreated from the Canale di San Salvatore by the time Matteo and Gaspare emerged, and sunlight shone upon the bobbing trash and green-tinged spume of its waters. Gaspare climbed into one of the gondoli lining the quay and directed it to the Arsenal, while Matteo turned and began to make his way toward the Rialto. Holding together the edges of his cape to cover his stained doublet, he moved swiftly through the narrow calle, threading between the servants on errands, the lunching workers, the loitering poor, and the jostling, swaggering bravi, Italian and foreign, who filled the piazzi and campielli of La serenissima, city of St. Mark, the holy and Most Serene Republic of Venice.

One of the bocche di leone, its mouth gaping like the spout of a disused fountain, stood at the edge of a small square, ready to swallow proffered notes. Matteo watched a red-haired sailor approach and peer into it. As a child he had listened in awe to stories of how citizens would wake one morning to see bodies dangling by a foot from the gibbet between the two columns of the Piazzetta: enemies of the state, denounced by informers or anonymous letters and executed by the Council of Ten. Nothing so public had taken place in Matteo’s memory, but it was reassuring to see that the leoni still held the power to impress foreigners, especially in these beleaguered days of the Republic’s slow decay.

He found Selim at a café near the Ponte di Rialto, almost within sight of the bridge. There was nothing on the table in front of him, for of course he could not have wine or ale; and Matteo realized in a flash what the old man would like.

"My friend," he said, and the two men engaged in an elaborate greeting that partook, if imperfectly, of the etiquettes of both their nations. In courtesy and deference Matteo spoke Arabic, though his trader’s Turkish was better. If the wizened Cairene was pained by the sound of his native tongue in Matteo’s mouth, he did not show it.

"Boy!" Matteo called. "Bring a pitcher of hot water, near boiling." And as he brought forth the sack of beans Matteo saw comprehension light the man’s face. He called for a mortar and pestle, which had to be procured from a better establishment down the street, then ground the caofa with animation, enjoying the bemused glances of passersby.

"Someday," he said in a clear voice (in Italian), "All Venice will sip kahveh as they sit along the Grand Canal."

Selim laughed quietly. "You will convert first your countrymen, then Europe? I shall never want for a cup again."

"You will not today, in any event." Matteo was inspecting his grounds as the steaming pitcher arrived, and both men leaned forward as he tipped the powder in. The aroma began to spread through the air at once, and they sighed.

"Venice remains Europe’s crossroads for the spice trade," said Matteo, speaking more in bravado than truth, "and when its great cities begin to drink kahveh, they shall flavor it with spices brought by Venetians." In a confidential tone he added, "My sister will only drink it when I put in honey."

Selim grunted. "But Venice is the most Levantine port in Christendom," he noted. "Some of your customs will encounter resistance elsewhere." And as if led on by that reflection, he pointed at the Ponte di Rialto. "Is that one of the bridges where your city conducts its battagliole?"

"Oh, no," replied Matteo, shocked. "The Rialto is public territory, the heart of the Republic. The pugni who engage in bridge battles would never bring such disorder here; the traditional ponti di guerre all lie far from the city center." He reflected that Selim, whose culture embraced practices of breathtaking barbarism, might think the same of Venice’s battagliole sui ponti, which aroused such fascination and misunderstanding.

Selim nodded equably. "Some of your customs will encounter resistance," he repeated. "You have traveled farther in the lands of the Faithful than in your own, but you will see what I mean when you visit Barcelona and Lisbon. I am sorry; have I said something wrong?"

Water splashes against stone at every homeward turning, a seemingly friendly sound whose familiarity disguises its jeers. What type of knowledge can be apprehended not by learning, but only through exposure to time and the world’s elements, like a weathering rock?

Vendors shouted the names of their wares, much of which the Benvenetos had, lately or in Matteo’s youth, imported from throughout the Mediterranean. He had been twenty-one on his first voyage–older than Alessandro and Tullio had been, but trading ships take months to complete a journey, and the family was shrewd enough not to send him on a trip that would teach him little. Marina was three months pregnant and Matteo was in danger of becoming a father before he had left his home. With a cargo of fine Venetian textiles and refined sugar, the Volpe d’Oro sailed into the Adriatic, bound east for the trading-posts of the Levant.

For the first days Matteo was seasick almost continually, to the amusement of the crew and his own burning shame. The ceaselessness of the Volpe’s pitch and plunge wore at him: unable to find even an hour’s respite to recover his energies, Matteo could keep nothing down, found it impossible to maintain his balance, and felt the ship’s unnatural motions–irreconcilable with any human cycle–begin to ravage him. By the time the Levanter rose, blowing steadily out of the Holy Land like a djinn repelling Crusaders, Matteo had sunk into a stupor.

He never knew whether the captain decided to make for Alexandria rather than Beirut out of concern that his passenger might die. Their goods could doubtless be sold there, but it was in the eastern ports that the Venetians hoped to obtain the spices, silks, dyes, and drugs that could most profitably be sold in the landlocked markets of Austria. Matteo was carried insensibly ashore, and awoke days later in a strange bed. By the time he had recovered enough to sit up, the Volpe d’Oro had departed.

Too weak to travel, Matteo wrote to his family explaining that a fever had laid him up while the ship had continued on. It was one of the hazards of the business. The cargo had been consigned by the Benvenetos’ business associates, and the decisions regarding what wares to take on and carry east–for which Matteo had been trained and entrusted–had been made for him.

A month later he descended the inn’s narrow stairs and emerged shakily into the streets of Alexandria. Sunlight blazed downward like a hammered spike, and the flashing white of the natives’ robes hurt his eyes. Matteo felt his sinuses parch and his lips crack in the desiccated air, and he wondered whether the women veiled their faces to preserve their breath’s moisture.

So he drank, to keep from splitting like parchment. No wine, of course: rather fruit juice and goat’s milk, cloudy infusions of dates and raisins called nabidh, and a black substance, hotter than any nabidh, which Ibrahim called kahveh. The scalding liquid burnt Matteo’s lips and offered no relief from the day’s heat; but afterward he felt a strange rush to his head, like a spray of water sluicing grime from a window.

"Is this the effect of kahveh?" he asked.

Ibrahim laughed. "Markaha!" he cried. It meant, Matteo learned later, the peculiar ecstasy of kahveh.

Matteo could only walk about for an hour or two before exhaustion overtook him. Sitting for most of his day, he resolved to learn the local Arabic. It did not take him long to realize that kahveh (which Ibrahim served during the lessons) concentrated his mental powers; and when he learned to drink it hot he discovered that the freshest brew possessed surprising subtleties of flavor. He visited marketplace stalls where he could watch the kahveh seller prepare a fresh pot. "I grind them up, so," the man said, pointing to a spice mill. "Ah, you would like to see?" Smiling, he poured a dozen beans into Matteo’s palm.

Matteo studied them closely. They were a glossy brown, dry to the touch. He raised them to his face and caught a faint whiff of the familiar aroma.

"They blacken when roasted," the Musselman said, "but you will never see them green. The beans are boiled before they leave Yemen. So if you were hoping to grow your own plants–" He cackled gleefully.

"I am a merchant, not a farmer," Matteo replied with distaste. In fact the possibility of cultivating the crop had never occurred to him. It should have, however: the Dutch would certainly have thought of it. He would have to think better–think differently–if he was going to find a way out of the box that was slowly enclosing his city.

In September a sirocco blew out of Africa, and a Venetian galleass made ready to run for the Adriatic. Matteo was as fit for a sea voyage as he would ever be, and he joined the traders returning home with their goods and their profits.

The Tarida, wind in her sails, cut swiftly through the waves, and Matteo fought the nausea rising within him. Like a defender hoping to conserve his stores until reinforcement, he gave ground slowly, walking the decks to escape the bad air below, lying down only when exhausted in the hopes of promoting sound sleep. The Tarida entered the Adriatic before he finally collapsed.

The captain, reluctant to return a dead merchant to his family, called over a Candian sailor with reputed skills as a herbalist, who prepared infusions of dictamus and shook his head. When he learned the contents of Matteo’s sacks below, however, he brought beans up and brewed kahveh on the deck, administering sips every hour. Matteo lost weight steadily, but never fell senseless; he was conscious and despairing when the ship entered the lagoon.

Matteo had been gone for ten months. He returned, broken and defeated, to find that his intended maiden journey had returned (with moderate success); the Dutch had effectively cut off the flow of spices from the Moluccas; and Marina had died in June of childbed fever, four days after giving birth to a stillborn son.

***

The streets below the Piazza San Marco were quiet; a gentleman in grey trailing behind him was the only other soul in sight as he turned toward the campanile of St. Mark’s, still tinted with sunlight on its upper reaches. When he stepped through the nondescript building’s west entrance a guard obliged him to produce the letter attesting that Messer Matteo Benveneto was granted entry to the Archivio dei Documenti. He was escorted to the third floor, where Scipio himself answered the guard’s knock.

"Ser Benveneto," he said, his voice no more unwelcome or suspicious than usual. "You are here late." He opened the door far enough to admit him.

"I wished to return these volumes," Matteo replied. "It was most gracious of the senator to permit me to take them away."

"It is not the library’s policy to permit works to be removed from the building," Scipio observed, taking the volumes from Matteo and inspecting them closely. "Senator Domenico’s request on your behalf was quite exceptional." Matteo had hoped to find him gone at this hour, but the librarian seemed to live in these rooms.

The library had lost some of the wonder it had held for Matteo upon his first admission, but he still felt a tremor of excitement as he looked from one book-lined wall to the next. Most of the volumes were relatively dull–reports by diplomats and informers, dating back decades, describing in detail the battlements and garrisons of various cities–but their very numbers seemed to compel interest, as though they had been compressed, like charcoal, into a form ready to ignite. "Do you have writings on qahwa?" he asked politely

"Qahwa?" the librarian asked, frowning. "The shrub Arabs use to make medicine?"

"The drink made from a bean, yes."

Scipio scowled and turned to open a large ledger on his desk. "You will have to return tomorrow," he said over his shoulder.

Matteo had hoped he would be invited to stay while the librarian went off to find the volumes, but he merely nodded and thanked the man again. It was growing dark as he descended the stairs; even the broad lanes were filling with shadow. Matteo walked unaccosted, conscious that this was not his part of town. By the time he reached Franchescina’s street it was twilight, smells of cooking wafted through open windows, and the only other pedestrians were swathed in the grey that cats adopt at night.

"I expected you earlier," she said upon admitting him. "I hope you ate."

He had not, and the thought that a cold chicken breast might await him had cheered his long walk. He kissed her, to show how little he cared about food, and asked how her day had been.

"Trying," she replied with a sigh. "People come to see me, they don’t know what they want, so become impatient that I cannot at once give it to them."

"Give them something finer than what they think they want." Matteo strode into the dining room and spilled a handful of beans onto the table. "From a shipment that arrived three days ago. They are much superior to the last ones."

He had expected her to require persuading of the beans’ significance, but Franchescina exclaimed as though he had poured out jewels. "They’re lovely!" she cried, stepping forward to pick up several. "I’ll get the mortar." She went into the kitchen, where he heard her telling Paola to boil water. Smiling, she returned with the set he had given her for grinding spices and sat down across from him. She poured the beans into the bowl, letting them click, then bore the pestle down with a crunch. Matteo watched bemusedly as she applied herself, as though grinding caofa beans before one’s lover was a skill known to every courtesan.

"Do you remember how to make it?" he asked. She flashed him that knowing smile that urged him not to be foolish. Of course, she had watched him prepare the caofa he had served her once and had memorized the steps of its preparation, which she recognized as better suited to her. Deftly she reduced the fragments to powder; perhaps she wished to demonstrate her wrist action. A rich aroma spread through the room.

"It is too bad," he said casually, "that the beans have all been roasted, preventing any buyer from growing his own." Franchescina had no reaction to this. He had seen her slip a half dozen beans into her sleeve, and was glad to see she was not contemplating betrayal.

Paola brought out the water, and Matteo produced his golden sieve, at which Franchescina’s eyes opened wide. "Not a present, alas," he said as he passed it over. The servant stared as Franchescina tipped in the caofa and poured the steaming water. "Do you recognize this, Paola?" he asked. "It is caofa, an eastern drink sometimes used as a medicine. But it is beneficial to the healthy as much as the ailing, and delicious besides." The old woman was doubtless as great a gossip as her mistress.

Solids sublime only slowly, heated fluids faster. Sliding between the silk sheets Matteo had bought her, Franchescina snuggled against him, her belly radiating warmth as though from fires within. Matteo could feel her drying upon him, the vapors escaping from beneath the sheet he had pulled up to perfume the air around his face. Would the essence of caofa now running through her veins tincture her perspiration and other liquids? It was an interesting question, too subtle for Gaspare with his hydraulics and pressures to answer.

As though thinking along parallel lines, Franchescina whispered: "Do the scholars at the university study caofa’s effect on the humors?"

"How should I know? I just trade for goods."

"You said you were going there soon, to consult their library."

"That was–" That was to investigate the design of steam engines, which Matteo was now enjoined from discussing. When had he let that slip? "That was another matter."

"I thought you wanted to study rising fluids."

Matteo wondered what the hell he had said. Franchescina knew no more about humors or sublimation than he did; she merely possessed the facility to chat with seeming knowledge about anything. He decided to speak less hereafter of his plans for caofa, and not at all about steam.

"My fluids are rising already," he said. "Come here."

***

Matteo sat reading in his father’s study, and later, when he could venture out, in the libraries of his father’s friends. He did not know how many doors had been opened by pity; it was not a question he was yet strong enough to face. What he did know was that traders bought cheap and sold dear, preferably goods that they alone controlled. And that with Venetians’ profits slashed nearly to nothing, what the Benvenetos needed was something wondrous to corner.

Even as he paged through folios of unreliable Ottoman histories, Matteo knew that it was qahwa, which had soothed his nausea and preserved his life, that was to be his miracle import. The references he found were all in the tales of travelers, as though word of caofa had repeatedly washed to shore but never lodged on land. Belli spoke of "cave," while an Augsburg botanist who had visited Jerusalem mentioned the drinking of "kahveh" and a Dutch volume called Linschooten’s Travels included a reference to "chaoua." Had none of these men bothered to taste it?

Matteo served it to his family, his father’s colleagues, his mother’s friends. He adulterated its essence with milk, with honey, with wine (a poor idea), with brandy (better). He sprinkled fine grounds upon pastry. He exhausted his supply and sent to Alexandria for more, at considerable expense. Eventually he persuaded some few dozen acquaintances that caofa was a pleasing curiosity.

"Do you hope to sell caofa to the Venetians?" asked his father, amused. "Should our fellow citizens develop a taste for it, they will surely procure their own."

"I hope to sell caofa to Europe," Matteo replied. "All Venice should harbor such hopes. Do we control tobacco, pepper, saffron? Do we sell anything others cannot?" Do we wish to become great again? he wanted to ask, but dared not.

It was at a masque that a young man Matteo’s own age approached and asked whether he had seen any "steaming engines" during his months in Alexandria. Surprised, Matteo described a brass serpent that would flap wings when the kettle within it boiled. The man nodded, yes that was the principle, and showed disappointment when Matteo said that he had seen nothing larger. There were reports, Gaspare Treviso explained, of tiny carriages that would roll forward when a brazier in their vitals was kindled and similar playthings. Nowhere, however, had anyone built a machine that harnessed the expansive force of steam to perform real work.

"The ancients designed such engines, but any that were built are now lost. Have the sultan’s engineers constructed their like, or learned of others who have? I fear the Turks’ wealth and long reach."

Matteo welcomed the Turks’ wealth and long reach: they gathered in the goods that Venetians could sell to Europe. He listened, politely but without sympathy, as the young man spoke of engines that piped water to foundries or drained mines more efficiently than hand-worked pumps or bucket winches. He gravely agreed that Turkish builders were formidable, and showed him his caofa mill, whose gears were machined to clockwork precision yet could withstand the resistance of caofa beans being crushed. Gaspare studied the mechanism and agreed gloomily that Venetian craftsmen could only produce such workmanship at prohibitive expense.

Several days later Matteo received a letter from the Arsenal, where Treviso worked alongside his father in the bronze foundry. The engineer inquired whether Matteo would be willing to come examine something "interesting" in two days’ time. Mystified, Matteo wrote back agreeing to accompany him.

Gaspare arrived dressed nearly as well as Matteo, and seemed somber in a manner he had not seemed before. The engineer conducted him not to the Arsenal (where the trader had expected to be shown some improved milling device) but instead to an anonymous building within sight of St. Mark’s, where two guards challenged them as soon as they approached. It was only after much scrutiny, especially of the letter Gaspare produced, that they were at length admitted.

"What was that you gave them?" he whispered after the guards shut the door behind them.

"A letter of passage," Gaspare replied softly as a new pair of guards approached. "I have another for Ser Scipio upstairs." As they were escorted up the stairs, he added: "Don’t say anything."

And so Matteo was admitted to the library that had no name, which occupied the third floor (and perhaps more) of the blandly titled Archivio dei Documenti, itself inaccessible without sanction from an authority greater than the city’s large bureaucracy contained. The letters, documents, and manuscripts came (Gaspare told him) from every corner of the Mohammedan world, including lands like Spain and Sicily, which the Infidels had once conquered and might yet again.

Matteo spent two afternoons reading through Arabian treatises and copying out what they had to say about steam-driven engines. He had no reason to help young Treviso, but the entree the bumptious young builder enjoyed to this secret trove must mean something, and access through ports was what all traders craved. The letter that Matteo had been given to show Scipio he retained (although his notes had to stay in the library, where they gave signs of being handled in his absence), and the name of Senator Domenico was on it. Matteo was willing enough to do a favor for a man with such friends.

Gaspare invited him to dinner and thanked him for the report, which had evidently become part of the library’s holdings. "Most of what you found was ancient knowledge," he admitted. "That fellow Hero lived as long ago as Our Lord."

"I am sorry I could not find you anything," Matteo replied courteously.

"If the Turks have been building steam devices, I want to know of it," said Gaspare, who paused to study the hinge of a mussel he had just opened. "But if they turn out to know nothing, all the better.

"Hero’s book was called Pneumatica," he added after swallowing, "and I have asked that the University at Padua be requested to send its copy. I don’t suppose you read Greek?"

"Not even the Greek of today," Matteo admitted. "If you deal with officials in Athens, you speak Turkish."

Gaspare suddenly grinned. "I bet you do not even read Latin," he said. "Of course not: it is the language of science, not trade." He stood and brought over two leather-bound volumes. "Nice to see a proper-looking book, eh? Take a look at them."

Matteo, who had been wondering what gift of Gaspare’s had so impressed the Republic’s leaders that he was given the power to summon books from one city to another, took the folios in hand. They were De Medicina Aegyptorum and De Plantis Aegypti Liber, by one Alpinus. Opening the cover, he found a note, written in a strong Italian hand, disclosing that the author was actually Prospero Alpini, a Venetian physician and botanist who had traveled to Egypt in 1580. Was that what librarians did, inform on authors?

"Here, turn to the marked page," said Gaspare, leaning across the table to flip the top volume open. Matteo found himself looking at an illustration of a small tree.

"This is a caofa shrub?" he guessed.

"Oh, you’ve never seen one? I assumed they were cultivated locally. Yes, each book contains a discussion of ‘caova,’ as he calls it. They are part of the University Library at Padua; I briefly have their loan." And Gaspare explained how his investigations came to enjoy such support. The tale involved a drawing seen during his schooldays and long remembered, of a device that spun and flung jets of steam; and a tale about an ill-soldered pot that had been used in a nobleman’s kitchen to boil water: the lid had become fixed fast, and–when a scullion bent over it to wonder why no steam was escaping–blew up with enough force to maim.

This led young Gaspare to wonder whether steam could serve in place of gunpowder. Although the gun he built was unwieldy and temperamental, it did propel a bullet through a wall. When Gaspare expressed concern that the engineers of the Sublime Porte might turn their fearsome ingenuity to exploiting this power, he was quietly granted permission to consult an archive on such matters.

Matteo was impressed with Gaspare’s ability to win government support for his project. It didn’t sound as if this included financial assistance, but Matteo knew he could complete that next step. "You plainly possess the knowledge to do great things," he said. "But will you profit from this asset, or shall the Senate and burocrazie relieve you of your treasure, as a trader would fleece a foolish seller?"

Later that night, after hours of talk and brandy, Matteo drew up a partnership agreement, formalizing their conjoined efforts to develop engines and other devices powered by steam and to profit thereby. Gaspare, who received wages for his work in defense of the Republic, had not thought how he might protect his own interests, which seemed to him one with his city’s. He read over the agreement, which Matteo had set down in the standard wording, and frowned indecisively.

"Of course you should not sign it until you have discussed matters with your lawyer," Matteo told him. Abruptly he pulled over the agreement and signed it himself. "There," he said. "Now I am bound by this; until you sign, you are not." And he returned the sheet and sat back.

He knew without thinking that Gaspare would now honor the contract, and stood to raise his goblet. "Like steam, may we expand and be felt!" The two men drank ceremoniously and hurled their cups to the floor. Then, to drive the fumes from their heads, they brewed and drank a pot of caofa.

The Argo came through the lagoon with its sails snapping, as if to advertise its disdain of rowers. Though one of a dozen ships to reach the city that morning, it was recognized by a harbormaster’s boy, and Matteo got word as he was finishing breakfast. He was at the quay before the inspectors and tariff assessors were through, and stood waiting to greet the captain as soon as he stepped off.

"Welcome back, Captain," he said, leaning out to extend the old man a hand. "A happy voyage, I hope."

"Happy for those who stand at its conclusion with their hands open," he muttered, a bit ungraciously. He grasped Matteo’s wrist and pulled himself up onto the pier, then squinted at him. "Messer Benveneto. Your family will have no reason to curse, if I remember rightly."

"Thanks, Captain," said Matteo with a bow. "The ship’s manifest. . . ?"

"Is in the hands of the purser." They were walking toward the harbormaster’s office, where the captain would have to go through various formalities before he could have breakfast. He looked up the quay, as if expecting more traders come to ask after their goods.

Then, as if recalling something odd, he added: "You got several sacks of beans."

There were more important shipments expected than this, but Matteo was inordinately pleased by the news. He wished the captain good morning and sent one of his boys to alert the warehouse that a ship was in. He returned to the office and was checking receipts when Gaspare appeared.

"We have a site," he said briskly as he came through the door. Matteo stared at him. "A building," Gaspare explained when he noticed the expression. "Where they want us to build a steam-driven engine. We’re to inspect it this morning."

"Gaspare, I have a ship just in. I’m going to be busy all day."

The engineer blinked, as if startled at not being understood. "They want us there this morning; other times are no good. They seemed reluctant even to tell me where the building is."

Matteo tried to control his exasperation. "Gaspare, that’s nonsense. They want us to make measurements, they let us visit the site. Where are we building, in a contessa’s boudoir?"

"I don’t know," Gaspare said seriously. "They eventually gave me a map, but it lacks some important information, which they would only tell me. Are new inventions kept in secret locations?"

Matteo looked at him bemusedly. It had occurred to him that he could spare the next two hours, before the goods were unloaded and had to be watched. Certainly Gaspare could take a man and carry out the measurements himself, but a shrewder head should also be present.

Sitting across from Gaspare in the gondola a few minutes later, he studied their scribbled route, which was indeed incomprehensible if one did not know its point of origin, and difficult to reconcile with the city’s layout if one did. We’re not being told overmuch, he thought.

Three men stood silently at the dock where they debarked. They took Gaspare’s map and led the young men through a narrow street that saw little traffic, into an alley separating the back fences of unfamiliar buildings, and finally through the servants’ entrance of an anonymous brick pile that Matteo doubted he would recognize from the street.

Inside stood Senator Domenico’s secretary, who led them down the corridor into a windowless room, which he indicated was the space they should measure. "You want us to install the engine here?" Gaspare asked. He stamped the tiled floor, inquired about its load bearing capacity, then explained that he would have to drill a hole through the floor to drop the plumb line through. The secretary muttered a word to one of the guards, who returned a moment later with a wooden toolbox.

"So when was this house built?" asked Gaspare amiably as he chiseled into a tile and then applied the drill. No one answered, and when he finally drove the bit through the wood and into the void below, he sang out the floor’s thickness, which Matteo wrote down. Men watched silently as he took out a lead bob on a string and lowered it through the hole, ear held close as he listened for the click.

Matteo looked idly about the room, which had water-stained walls and lamps too dim to read by. He had concluded it wasn’t a private home, and decided now that it was some government building, where petty bureaucrats would come in to study their engine and measure its achievement. Perhaps new devices, not yet ready for production, were tested or stored here. Matteo thought suddenly of the university, and scribbled 8-10 beans/sack? in his notebook. One of the men saw him writing when Gaspare had not called out a number and frowned.

"Got it," Gaspare said, and pulled up his string, laid it along the floor, and counted its length in tiles, which he reported to Matteo. With a practiced motion Matteo placed the toe of his boot against a tile to establish its length, which he multiplied by Gaspare’s figure and wrote down. It was a tradesman’s trick, the kind shopkeepers use to take quick measure, but the secretary seemed to dislike him already, so Matteo didn’t care.

"Time to go downstairs," Gaspare announced. He lowered the bob back down the hole to its previous extent, weighted the string with a loose tile, then stood brushing his hands. The guards glanced at each other, but the secretary led them silently from the room. They descended a steep stair into darkness, whose chill breath wafted the taste of standing water, wood rot, and something organic that didn’t get the chance to blow away.

"Watch your step," Matteo called back to Gaspare, a warning that the secretary had not offered him. The final stair was a different height than the rest, which was hard to anticipate in the near darkness. Save for the candle the secretary carried, the basement was black as a crypt, and the wavering light barely reached the packed earth floor.

The secretary stopped and turned. "Here," he said, holding out his candle. Matteo could see a plastered wall and some rough stones underfoot, but the ceiling was invisible, save the tiny hole Gaspare had drilled. "Is this the basement’s lowest point?" Gaspare asked as he examined the floor. "That’s the place to drain." Matteo was studying the high-water marks on the wall, the most recent of which appeared to be a few inches up.

With their measurements completed the secretary plainly wanted them gone, but the two men lingered, looking about for things they should note. Gaspare scuffed at the floor, remarking that it could be raked to present its lowest point where the pipe opened, while Matteo inquired about the basement’s square footage. Eventually they were herded back up the stairs, where Matteo banged his head against a low beam and Gaspare laughed. "It would have hurt more if the wood hadn’t been rotten," he retorted.

Outside they were taken away by a different route than they had come, and conducted through numerous turns before being deposited in a covered gondola. "I don’t think they want us back," Matteo observed. "Do they expect us to build the engine elsewhere?"

Allowed at last to disembark, the engine-makers grinned at each other and made ironical gestures: something to talk about when there is time. Matteo had a cargo to protect from being nibbled away, while Gaspare had to hasten back to the Arsenal and other deadlines. "Are we still for Padua?" Gaspare asked.

"On Thursday we are for Padua," Matteo assured him; and repeated it to Franchescina that night. "Why ever are you going there?" she asked.

"Beans," he said, and laughed. Worldly as she was, and somewhat mercenary, she had never heard that mainland term for money.

"Does Ser Treviso travel for beans?" she asked mockingly.

"Gaspare travels to learn how to build a better engine," he replied. "Do you know what he calls his present model? A succhiatore."

Lying back on his pillow, Matteo imagined the fragrance of caofa ascending through the caverns of his sinuses, each wisp slipping through keyholes and causing thick doors to swing open. Sex drains the loins as wine feeds the blood, but caofa opens the mind to the vibrancy of the world beyond, where a man strides free in the brightening tones of dawn, remembered even as reason and the body compose themselves for sleep.

Padua had been Venice’s for two hundred years, but the city was freely given, and did not comport itself like a possession. It was dark before the travelers arrived, after a day spent crossing the lagoon and being rowed upriver, and Matteo directed his servant to find a good inn. "And not one with students in it," warned Gaspare, who had been here before.

Matteo slept in a strange bed, as traders do, and breakfasted with Gaspare before they separated, bound for different parts of town. He asked directions for the Department of Botany, and walked along a surprisingly uncrowded road following the river (it could not be mistaken for a canal). In the distance, waving faintly like an unexpected memory, was a row of palm trees.

"It was as a physician that I accompanied the Consul," the director explained with a deprecating gesture, as though this admission came somehow at his expense. "The fact that I held the Chair in Botany was of no concern to the Venetian government, which was worried only about its consulate being poisoned by foreign doctors. The university was happy to authorize funding for the collection of samples, although–" he laughed and gestured at the botanical garden around them– "I ended by exceeding my budget several times over."

"I can well imagine," said Matteo. The image of a Venetian trading vessel entering the lagoon, its deck a swaying oasis of potted palms, shrubs, and citrus trees, seemed a very allegory of collector’s extravagance. Perhaps Alpini was allowed to return some on the consular galley, though Matteo doubted it.

"Your letter spoke of an interesting project," Alpini said. "You look to be a man of business, not a scholar. Pray tell me what your own travels to Egypt have produced, that you believe I could be of some help to you."

Matteo took out his leather bag. "Do you recognize these?" he asked, pouring a handful of green beans into Alpini’s hand.

The director studied them closely. "I suppose they are Egyptian? They look like . . . heavens, they look like the berries of the caova tree." He shook his head, smiling. "I saw one in Cairo, but it rarely flowered. The caova really only flourishes in southern Arabia, in the highlands. That’s where these seeds must have originated, to reach this nice size. The natives roast them and make a hot drink of it."

"Indeed." The two men had settled on a bench beside the path, where Alpini was turning over the beans in his palm. "Do you think you could grow them?"

"These seeds? I never succeeded in Egypt." He prodded a particularly large one with his finger. "I wouldn’t mind trying again, though."

"I have twelve sacks of them," Matteo said. "Perhaps one was hurried through the scalding process." He opened his wallet and pulled out a dozen tiny twists of paper, which rattled slightly. "All we need are a few beans–even one–that were not heated enough."

"In the wrong climate or soil, the tree will not flower," Alpini warned. "But if there is still life in these seeds, I shall bring it forth." He shook the packets lightly, as though anxious to open them. "Did you travel extensively in Egypt? I could not: the Consul remained in Cairo, and me perforce with him." They were walking toward the garden gates and the botanical building beyond, where Alpini wanted to show the beans to his students. "Do you get there often?"

The Palazzo Communale stood on Padua’s main square, built at the Republic’s expense so that "Venetian and Paduan men of good will might meet and converse together to increase their mutual love and trust." Many of the afternoon’s occupants appeared to be students, neither Venetian nor Paduan (the famous university attracted scholars from throughout Europe) nor, to Matteo’s jaded eye, men of good will, either.

This did not matter, for students were as ready to relish pleasures as more sensible men–and probably faster to speak of them afterward. The hired serving-maid smiled at everyone as she ground the beans in a pestle, to coarse comments but also looks of interest. The carafe was a fine one, and the emptiness of the cups, arranged invitingly along the long table, carried an unmistakable air of expectation.

Matteo walked among the onlookers nodding and bowing, like a burgher at the marriage of his daughter. "From Arabia, yes," he told inquirers. "They call it caofa, the word actually means ‘wine.’ Because it intoxicates without stupefying, the Mohammedans’ proscription against alcohol cannot touch it. Yes, Egyptians and Turks drink it black and hot, but in a moment Paolina will set out cream, honey, vanilla, and other additives, so that Christian tongues may taste it in a more becoming mode."

Men were leaning forward as Paolina poured the rich dark powder into the sieve. One by one the students sniffed, recoiled with a startled expression, then took a second, deeper breath. By the time the kettle was boiling she had attracted a considerable audience, who watched the thin stream patter over the grounds like an alchemist’s disciples. Enough men were waiting that Paolina poured the cups only a quarter full, as though this were an especially select vintage. Matteo watched as they grabbed the cups and tasted, then looked at each other uncertainly as they smacked their lips or rubbed the grains against their tongues. One glanced at him, and Matteo said, "Remember your first sip of wine?"

By the time the second carafe was being served, the first drinkers were looking at each other with a dawning surmise, and the buzz of conversation grew a bit louder, the gestures more animated. Encouragements were shouted at Paolina to grind faster, and laughter broke out in small groups. A young man added cream to his cup and was roundly jeered by his fellows.

Matteo was arranging that a tray of caofa be taken to a group of older men sitting at the far side of the room when Gaspare grabbed his elbow. "I’ve got it!" the builder whispered.

"Got what? Have you had a cup yet? They’re going fast."

"I’ve got the answer! Look at this." Gaspare was trying to show him something; he was flipping through the pages of a huge book. "It’s called De Re Metallica; one of the professors told me about it. I’ve been in the library all day."

"Gaspare, can this wait? I’ve got responsibilities right now."

Gaspare looked around bemusedly. "You’re hosting this? What a waste of good caofa!" He opened the folio. "In brief, it’s a book about mining and smelting, which little concerns us at the Arsenal. But look at this." Gaspare pointed to a large woodcut illustration. "It is a machine for draining water from a mine–‘siphones aquam spiritu tractam’; that is, a suction-pump. Can you see what produces the suction? It’s a pestone!"

"A rod attached to a cylinder?" Matteo was sure that the text explained this, and felt a stab of annoyance at having to guess when Gaspare had not.

"There is a seal within the cylinder, which the rod pushes up and down. A down stroke expels the air beneath the cylinder, so that the up stroke will then produce suction. And that draws up the water!"

"Excellent." Matteo stood and waved to an older man who had just come in, a Paduan trader he knew. They were sitting in armchairs discussing river traffic when Paolina appeared with two cups, which she served as though filling an order. "Do you know this, Benito?" Matteo asked casually, then watched his colleague sniff uncertainly and sip. Another trader stopped by, and soon Matteo was invited to a dockside tavern where merchants gathered at a back table at the close of day. By seven he was sitting at Grimaldi’s dinner table, being regarded curiously by the trader’s family.

"Could a potion consumed solely by Turks and other heathen truly be welcomed in Christian lands?" asked daughter Maria.

Matteo inclined his head politely. "Spices and fine fabrics cannot be produced in Europe, so we import them. There is nothing un-Christian about eating pepper or wearing silk."

"How much is consumed to make a cup?" asked Grimaldi’s Giorgio.

"Perhaps a half cup of beans to brew a carafe," Matteo admitted.

"So you do not get hundreds of servings per pound," Grimaldi observed. "Caofa is not a precious substance, but rather a commodity, like wine or grain."

"I can see why the physicians made a medicine of it, to dispense by the spoonful," Signora Grimaldi remarked.

"Wine and grain can be very profitable," Matteo pointed out. "And caofa costs much more than either. Would you leave this market for the Dutch to pick up?"

"It is possible," Giorgio said diplomatically, "that the felicities of caofa will be appreciated most readily in the metropolises of Venice or Amsterdam, with their sophisticated and well-traveled populaces. Might it not encounter resistance in smaller cities or towns?"

Matteo wanted to reply that cinnamon and nutmeg were consumed in every household that could afford them, but Maria spoke up first. "Is it true that in Venice the carnival lasts for six months of the year?"

"Why, it may be six months from October to Lent," replied Matteo as though in surprise, "but the Arsenal builds ships, and merchants hire them, throughout the year." He wondered if every convent-taught mainland girl held such beliefs.

"But you allow brawling on the bridges during Feast Days," she said.

"The battagliole? But that is sport!"

"But it is true that people are sometimes killed?" asked Giorgio, sounding more intrigued than scandalized.

"They use their fists; that is why they are called pugni." Matteo sought to change his tone to worldly amusement. "The birds at your market day cockfights die; our pugni don’t."

"Two cups of that stuff and I still feel as alert as if it were lunch time!" Grimaldi exclaimed, slapping a palm against the table. "There will be a market for it, never fear." His family nodded and smiled, and Matteo felt like a general who heard word that the first village beyond the frontier has been taken.

The men spent the rest of the evening discussing the northern trade, then Grimaldi rose with a yawn (Matteo knew how long the effects of the caofa would last) and declared that good merchants rose early. Returning from the garden fifteen minutes later, Matteo encountered Giorgio in a darkened corridor; without a word they turned and repaired to the kitchen, where Matteo ground enough caofa to send them both buzzing like hives. The evening ended with the two young men sitting on the tiled floor, brains crackling, as they plotted the invasion of the Hapsburg lands with merchant vessels led by caofa-sharpened traders and manned by the beans themselves.

"The steam enters a cylinder and pushes the pestone upward," Gaspare was saying. The shoreline was flowing past them faster than yesterday, when they had been sailing upriver. "The operator continues admitting steam until the pestone is at the top of the cylinder. This pressure batters against its inner surface, despite being made up of very little air and water. Like little men pushing hard. Do you understand?"

"How is this an improvement on our present design?" Matteo asked.

"The steam, of course. In the Succhiatore, all the power to be generated by several minutes’ heating is expended at once, which means it must first be concentrated in one place. Here, the steam only exerts enough pressure to push the pestone upward–there’s no resistance except the pestone’s own weight, so we don’t need that tremendous pressure. Don’t you see?"

"It works in many little gasps, rather than a single great one?"

"Well put! It does not have to drink the sea in a single sip." Excitement seemed to have lent Gaspare a poetical turn of mind.

"We need it to work reliably," Matteo reminded him. That was the sole beauty of the homely Succhiatore: it was too simple to allow technical complications. Enough now to demonstrate that such engines worked; they could improve the design later.

"It’s the caofa vendor!" cried a hearty voice behind him. Matteo turned to see a merchant whose face he remembered from the day before.

"Did I charge you for that cup?" he asked mildly.

"You’ll charge me for the next one!" Behind his bluff grin, the man eyed Matteo appraisingly. "Have you calculated your unit costs yet?"

"That depends on whether we import by galley," Matteo replied. Renting a state-owned galley was expensive, but it greatly reduced insurance rates on the cargo.

"In Sumatra, pepper is as cheap as flour," the merchant observed. Gaspare, bored by this unpromising turn of subject, drifted off toward the bow, but Matteo took the man’s meaning.

"Caofa reaches Egypt inexpensive enough that shopkeepers can drink it," he said. "Venetian demand may drive the price up, but the increased cultivation this will encourage will bring it back down. When that happens–it may take three or four years–we will see an explosion of caofa-drinking in Europe."

As soon as the boat bumped against the deck Matteo and Gaspare vaulted over the railing. It was Saturday afternoon, and workers were being hastened to complete their work before the Sabbath. Matteo bade his friend goodbye and went to the office, where he hoped to learn that an expected ship had come in. Instead he found a note from his uncle, summoning him home on family business.

Puzzled and apprehensive, he walked rapidly to Palazzo Benveneto, wondering whether an unfavorable report of his Paduan adventure had reached his father’s ears. On the staircase he met Uncle Bartolomeo. "How was your voyage?" he asked. "Did your stomach tolerate the packet?"

"Scarcely a voyage, and it went well. And rivers run quite smoothly." Matteo hoped no one else would think to ask.

His uncle smiled affectionately, younger son to younger son. "Your ventures are already coming to the attention of important people."

Matteo felt a thrill of alarm. "My caofa party?"

"No, not that." Bartolomeo chuckled. "The plumbing system you want to install with young Treviso. You boys hope to become building contractors?"

Matteo paused before the door of his father’s office and composed himself, then knocked. It was Alessandro’s voice that called him to come in, and when he opened the door Matteo saw the two men sitting at the desk, which was spread with papers. "Ah, Matteo," said his father. "I gather your trip went well."

"He successfully disposed of his merchandise," said Alessandro dryly.

"Thank you, ser, it did," Matteo replied, ignoring his brother. "I believe that if we brought a shipment of caofa into Venice, we could sell it."

Ser Benveneto looked thoughtful, but before he could say anything, Alessandro spoke up: "Easier at least to give away beans than sell steam."

Matteo began to reply, but Ser Benveneto raised a forestalling hand. "And there is that second matter," he said. He picked up a folded sheet, which bore at its upper edge a broken Senate seal. "The secretary for Senator Domenico has written, setting out the terms by which you and your friend shall undertake to build a pump powered by the pressure of steam." He glanced over the paper at his son. "They are not generous, but I suppose it represents entree into a new market."

"A new market for what?" Alessandro asked. "Are we to supply boilers for the leaky basements of government buildings?"

"We are selling the design," Matteo, sensing that Alessandro wished to provoke him, replied calmly. "Or rather, we are not selling the design; after we demonstrate its success with the model we are being paid to build, I will apply for a letter patent."

Alessandro looked puzzled–good eldest son, he could only imagine trading in things–and Ser Benveneto rustled the paper. "You will have to take care if you wish to retain control of this project," he remarked. "Without physical possession, your bargaining strength is much compromised."

"What do you mean?" Matteo asked. He understood that his father, as head of the family, would have received and read any correspondence, but wished that he could now see the letter.

"The Senate evidently considers this design valuable to the state," said Ser Benveneto, with an admonitory nod at Alessandro, "and wishes it built within the security of the Arsenal."

"What? May I see that?" Matteo reached for the letter anxiously. His father handed it over, then murmured something to Alessandro, who got up and left.

Matteo read and reread the letter in bewilderment. The sipho would be built on the site that Messers Benveneto and Treviso had been shown; and it would be developed and assembled in a special workshop at the Arsenal. On a second reading Matteo caught a reference to ingenium, and realized that two pumps, the second a product of the builders’ further improvisation, were to be produced.

Gaspare must have spoken of an unproved model after all, and the senator had decided to let them try to build it. Matteo read once more through the letter, at last understanding its various clauses. "This cannot be," he said at last.

"No?" asked his father, amused.

"We are not arsenalotti," he declared. "We will design the second model in our own workshop, and deliver it when complete. Do they think we are petitioning to join their work rolls?" The sum specified was moreover too small for a Succhiatore plus an ingenium, but that was a matter of bargaining.

Matteo realized how exhilarated he should be that the senate was showing interest in a model that Gaspare had merely described confidently. He looked at the second sheet, which proved to be a special licentio permitting him to enter the Arsenal. Glumly he put it down.

His father smiled. "If your pump proves successful, there will be recognition from the Republic, whether financial or not. You told me once that your caofa project was more for the glory of Venice than the wealth of our family." (Matteo winced; had he ever made such an unmercantile remark?) "Might your steam pump prove valuable to Venice?"

"It possesses some worth," Matteo said. "How much depends on how far the design might be improved."

"Well then," said his father, nodding, "it is good that the Republic wishes you to improve it."

This was not to the point, but Matteo had realized by now what his father was thinking. Three sons were more than the family business needed, and his father had suggested before that Matteo’s gift for language and numbers might stand in good stead for government service. He did not appreciate that the Benvenetos needed a son who knew better than to follow the business practices of their father, who was reluctant to abandon the successful strategies of decades.

"If they wished, I would improve the Republic," said Matteo, and saw by his father’s expression that he had gone too far; but it was true, Venice was ossifying like the deposits that encrust hulls and chains, hardening like an old man’s joints. Matteo knew the malady and realized moreover the avenues to cure, for Venice should be more like steam and expand to press against every surface it touched; indeed in its ability to force its way into openings and run the shortest routes Venice should be like money, flowing instantly where value could be found and drying up where it had withered. And where money finds opportunity and nourishes it, the fruits will quicken the wits of others, even those whom they reach from far away: for Venice lives by water and wind, which carry the essence of its wealth: Matteo could not say it aloud, but yes, Venice should be like caofa.

The Sun hung just above the lagoon’s wavering reflection, which fragmented and reformed in the vagrant breeze that accompanied sunrise. Workers were already rowing down the Rio dei Gesuidi, but Matteo recognized them as porters, artisans, and vendors. The arsenalotti all lived to the south and west, in the small closed neighborhoods that had housed the shipyard’s workers for centuries.

A church bell was ringing, evidently to speed the tardy. The swart Venetian faces–there were, Matteo realized, no foreigners present–looked relaxed, unhurried. Matteo would have walked a bit faster, but did not care to draw attention to himself. Not since Alexandria had he seen a crowd where everyone was dressed alike.

He was stopped at the gate, as he had expected, but when he showed his licentio the guards frowned, grew more unfriendly rather than less, and pulled Matteo out of line and sat him in a small room. He was still there forty minutes later when Gaspare came in.

"Sorry about that," his colleague said. "Your papers were unfamiliar to the portoneri, who have sent them to their superiors. We’re going to have to wait a while. Care for some breakfast?"

Gaspare led Matteo back out the gate and onto the now nearly empty Campo dell’Arsenale. "Are visitors to the Arsenal so unusual?" he asked. "Those guards acted as though I was likely a spy."

"We get visitors all the time. The Arsenal has become a tourist stop for prominent foreigners, from whom the guards expect tips. But you’re Venetian, you’re a trader, and you came carrying a pass from the senate, which nobody had ever seen before. These guys aren’t paid to make decisions, and arsenalotti do only what they’re paid to do."

Matteo saw a familiar structure near the edge of the square, one of the squat metal boxes that dotted the city, this one bearing a sign, Denontie Secrete per L’Inquisitorie all’Arsenale, above the slit where the denunciations would go. He raised his eyebrows. "To the Arsenal Inquisitors, not the Council of Ten?"

Gaspare spread his hands in mock modesty. "The security of La serenissima’s shipyard demands unique precautions."

They sat at a table on a tiny square in San Martino and ordered bread and cheese. Housewives were hanging their washing twenty feet away, looking disapprovingly at Matteo’s fine garb. Children’s voices bounced like balls off nearby walls, and Matteo could hear women’s voices from the kitchen, but the only man he saw was the one who served them.

"An arsenalotti parish, eh?" he asked.

Gaspare laughed. "San Martino? You should go out to San Pietro di Castello. Everyone looks alike!"

Matteo had no desire to be the peacock in a flock of pigeons. "When we get through the gates," he began, "we shall have to show the papers to the Patroni, for they specify that a special site be made available for the construction of our ingenium."

"Our what?" asked Gaspare with a frown.

"Latin for ingegno," Matteo told him. "I didn’t know, either."

"Ah." The younger man grinned. "They want us to build an engine with our ingenuity!"

Matteo sighed. "And they want us to keep it here, did you get that? Not in our own workshop."

"Well, fine. We can use the Arsenal’s material rather than our own."

"Let’s walk," said Matteo, who did not wish to talk business in this warren of Arsenal families. Faces–similar beyond their suspicious expressions–were peeking out at them from narrow doorways. Matteo directed their steps back toward the Campo. "Is there some campiello where your family has lived for generations?" Matteo asked.

"My family?" Gaspare stopped and stared at him. "My grandfather was almost born in the Ghetto, because some official wanted to treat conversos as Jews. Papa was only allowed to move here after he married. I am the first generation to be accepted as not Jewish."

"Your family were conversos?"

"Spain insisted," Treviso said heavily. "And when she later found such conversions unpersuasive, conversos and Jews both fled. Do you know no history except your own city’s?"

"Well, certainly not Spain’s," Matteo admitted. "So . . . tell me. Do Jewish dietary laws proscribe the drinking of caofa?"

Treviso laughed. "Ask an inhabitant of that other gated community. Not all communita del cancello are alike."

The Arsenal had only one entrance, so they had to follow the wall (Matteo looked up at four of the thirteen guard towers as they passed) around to present themselves at the gate. Two guards scowled at them, but the licentio had been found in good order, and after signing a large book Gaspare waved him in. Blinking as he stepped out of the arch’s shadows, Matteo felt a breeze sharp with sawdust and resin, heard hammering echo off walls, and saw before him as on a broad canvas an enclosed world, womanless and under construction, the outspread hive of the Officina delle Meraviglie, the Factory of Marvels.

"Where are they?" Matteo asked, standing on tiptoe.

"The ships? Why, they are everywhere." Gaspare pointed across the road to an open bale of what looked like twists of old rope. "That oakum will go to make caulking, which imbues every vessel. If you mean the hulls, they are launched in the Arsenale Nove and towed this way, past the dock where they are outfitted and rigged. When a ship emerges through the wall, it is complete." He shielded his eyes with a hand and scanned the rooftops to the north. "I don’t see a mast, which means that one hasn’t been launched this morning."

A wagon clattered past and the two men stepped back. "Keep close," Gaspare said as he led around a pyramid of squat kegs. "A stranger wandering loose would attract notice fast."

Matteo felt as though he were in another country, one that resembled his own in numerous but unimportant ways. Food stalls lined the thoroughfare, and arsenalotti, their attire suggesting the occupying army of a foreign prince, were eating and talking in small groups while others pushed past with barrows or carts. Workshop smells hung in the air, and a shift of wind–the huge enclosure seemed to possess its own weather–brought a whiff of the lagoon.

"We need to find Ser Cavallo," Gaspare was saying. He walked ahead of Matteo to a corner where several workmen stood around an upright cask. Matteo stood at a proper distance awaiting introduction, but Gaspare spoke rapidly to the men in the linguaggio arsenalesco, and they listened stolidly without paying Matteo the slightest attention. Each man held a cup, and the cask, he noticed, emitted a distinct odor of wine.

"They don’t know where he is," Gaspare reported when he returned to Matteo. "Let’s just go to the shop." He sounded irritated.

"That was a big barrel," Matteo observed.

"The bevanda ordinaria? It is supplied to all workers here, a tradition that goes back centuries." A note of pride entered Gaspare’s voice.

"Free wine for the arsenalotti? I suppose the state worried about the quality of the wells on this part of the island."

"They drink a lot of it," Gaspare added gloomily.

He led Matteo to a large empty space at the back of a storehouse. "The windows admit plenty of light," he said as he swung open the doors and gestured for Matteo to enter. "And they are set well above eye level." Matteo walked across the packed earth through shafts of angled sunlight, looking at the plastered walls and the high ceiling. "There’s a well twenty feet away, so water supply isn’t a problem. And the cellars–" he stamped the ground– "don’t extend back here."

Gaspare meant that they could build a large boiler without worrying about the floorboards. "A chimney?" Matteo asked, looking up.

"We will run a pipe through the ceiling," Gaspare told him. Matteo had meanwhile noticed a ladder built into one of the walls, which ascended to the high windows. He began to climb, ostensibly to examine the roof timbers, but actually to get a look outside.

The row of panes ran just below the eaves, and Matteo peered out upon a landscape of sheds and larger buildings, some with their own courtyards, overlooking gardens of equipage and soaking ponds separated by hedges of stacked timber. Smoke rose from a distant foundry, and a line of workers stood up suddenly bearing a beam on their shoulders. It was like one of the walled estates outside Alexandria, or the cave containing chamber after chamber of treasures in the Arabic fairy tale.

Beyond a long shed he could see the outline of a galley, and next to it another still trellised with scaffold. The Rio, invisible behind them, wound through the Arsenal like an immense gut, swelling at intervals into basins where unfinished ships floated. The surrounding docks were covered, their high roofs large as churches’, and Matteo could not tell which of the smaller buildings housed shops for oarmakers and gunners, which contained storerooms or employed the caulkers or shipwrights. From a distant corner rose a column of dense smoke, the foundries of the ironsmiths.

Voices rose from below, and Matteo climbed back down to find Gaspare in conversation with a red-faced man wearing a leather apron. "This is Ser Antonio Cavallo," Gaspare said, rather informally considering the occasion. "He is one of the principal proti of the Arsenal."

Matteo greeted him with formal courtesy. "We thank you for providing this space for our labors," he said. He remembered that foremen ranked high in the hierarchy of Arsenal officials, for all the man’s rude attire.

"The Patroni all’Arsenale have directed that a secure workshop be made available for Ser Traviso’s labors," the foreman said solemnly. He seemed quite conscious of the irregularity involved.

"I have already seen the vigilance of the Arsenal security," said Matteo. It was intended as a kind of compliment, but the foreman frowned.

"We are the Arsenal, the Arx Senatus," he warned. "Our guardianship is a sacred trust, which the Fortress of the Senate shall ever hold true."

"You think the word’s origin is Latin?" asked Matteo in surprise. "I had assumed it derived from Dar as-Sina’a, Arabic for ‘House of Construction.’ "

The foreman looked as though he had been struck. Gaspare, who had been smiling uneasily, now spoke up. "Ser Cavallo will order the workshop prepared if we find the space satisfactory," he said.

Matteo looked up and down the room a final time. "It is admirable," he declared. "You have our gratitude; we shall accomplish great things here."

The three men made an awkward leave-taking, Matteo and the foreman bowing stiffly as Gaspare made tiny movements toward the door, as though to suggest that the young men now leave. They stepped out amid further assurances of high regard, watched as Ser Cavallo shut and locked the door, then headed down the narrow avenue, ducking as two boys swung a beam round to fit it through a hatch.

"You have to be careful what you say here," Gaspare called after him as they splashed through a flooded expanse. "This is a different world."

"Officials and traders understand each other," Matteo assured him. "We rub together all the time." But the foreman had not spoken like the customs or tax inspectors Matteo regularly dealt with. He had the manners of a craftsman, and Matteo realized with a start that he might have begun as one.

"There is Alvise," said Gaspare as an elderly man turned the corner and approached the door. The aged laborer squinted at the lock (of good German design) and then at Matteo, and Gaspare stepped forward to hail him in the arsenalotti dialect. "He is charged with safeguarding the warehouses of the Campagna, and now this shop in particular," he reported upon returning. "I have assured him you are intimate with the project, but he regards you doubtfully withal."

"A suspicious people," Matteo acknowledged, remembering the old man’s expression.

"Suspicious and combative," Gaspare corrected. "The old doges didn’t employ them as their personal guard because the arsenalotti like to take orders." He chuckled at the thought, then added: "Did you know they staged a battaglia for Henri III, though it wasn’t the season? The French king knew of the custom, and wanted to see it done well."

"And how did he enjoy the spectacle?" Matteo asked.

"He declared it very impressive, but called a halt after a few hours. He said, ‘Se è da scherzo, è troppo; se è da vero, è poco.’ "

Matteo laughed. "Not as cruel as a true battle? I thought they used sticks back then!"

"They did indeed, but I suspect that soldiers take greater care to brain their opponents. But too cruel for a game! Keep you that in mind, my friend: even our games aren’t games."

They emerged into a small square where the warehouses of the Campagna gave way to the basins of the New Arsenal. Virtually everyone Matteo had seen was dressed in dun arsenalotti attire, with only a patch of grey or other hue visible in the crowds, but ahead he now saw a brightly colored party of obvious foreigners, pointing and gaping as a galley was towed out of one of the covered dry docks.

"Those tourists look like Frenchmen," Matteo exclaimed.

"Very possibly," Gaspare replied easily. "Care to stroll forward and overhear their jabber?"

"No, it’s, they could just as easily be Spanish! Doesn’t anyone care who comes in to study your secrets?"

"The state cares intently," Gaspare said. "You may be sure that these outsiders are being watched this minute. Are not spies most revealing when they think themselves overlooked?"

Matteo ventured to the edge of the water, hoping to glimpse the timbers that were said to lie seasoning at the bottom. Assemblage began in the Arsenale Novissimo where the hulls were launched, which then attached themselves to dry dock and acquired beams and decks during the long months of labor. In the basin of the Arsenale Nove they were equipped with masts, rudder, and artillery, then were towed through the narrows of the Arsenale Vecchio, paradoxically moving backward in the shipyard’s history while proceeding in their own, to be handed arms and provisions as they passed toward the gate. Matteo lifted his eyes to the matrix of seeming disorder, workers and visitors seething beyond the buildings lining the basins, and wondered at the venerable sow, ill-nurtured and slack with inanition, who yet could produce robust litters on demand.

Clear ground was visible beyond, the great basin and open yards of the Darsena Novissima. Like Venice, the Arsenal was most developed in its oldest reaches, a garden grown to thickets. Wider walkways led into the northeast corner, where a row of galleys had been drawn up onto the bank like enormous sardines. The sheds and buildings lacked the additions in various styles that characterized the older crowded neighborhoods.

"We are in the very provinces," Matteo declared. "Shall it take another century until this region is built up?"

"That depends upon the Turk. Do you hope for another Lepanto?"

"The heavenly saints forbid!" War disrupts commerce, even with Alexandria. "You may grow vegetables here with my blessing." Yet this uncongested back lot formed the headwaters of the Marvel, upstream of everything. Beyond these gates and shores, the Doge yearly married the Sea; what ceremony other than War would prompt conception here?

They rounded the Newest basin and turned south, past the shops of the mastmakers and the iron foundries. "And where do the Trevisos work?" Matteo asked.

Gaspare grimaced. "The bronzeri do not yet enjoy a workshop of our own. Because our output is precious but small, we are only granted use of the forges of the fabbri, after hours. –Of course, we spend most of our time in design and calculation," he added defensively. "In time the Arsenal will recognize our contribution, and build us a facility consonant with our merit."

At the far end of the Tana lay the other foundry, the gunmakers’. "Our boiler will be made there," Gaspare said. Matteo could smell hot iron in the waves of heat that radiated through an open doorway.

"When?" asked Matteo, trying to peer through the doorway.

"Don’t ask him now," Gaspare warned, and Matteo turned to see Ser Cavallo standing thirty feet away. The street angled away from the Tana into the multi-storied crowding of the old Arsenal, which the foreman was regarding with a severe expression. The way was too narrow to pass without acknowledgement, and the three men bowed stiffly as masters and their apprentices pushed past.

"You have toured the yard?" Ser Cavallo asked, unsmiling.

"Like a gaping Dalmatian," Matteo said cheerfully. "The wealth of provision is amazing."

"Provision is had with mere gold," the foreman replied, rather ungraciously. "The Arsenal is its workers, its true wealth their skills."

"Indeed," Matteo agreed as a carter stumbled before them, nearly upsetting the load of wood he was hauling. "Their every move seems . . . steeped in tradition."

Cavallo looked at him closely. "They’re set in their ways," he said evenly. "Those ways have saved the Republic, time and again. You smart young men remember that."

"Well, we hope to benefit the Republic ourselves," said Matteo easily, neither intimidating nor deferential. "If you used caofa as your bevanda ordinaria, your workers’ spirits would be quickened rather than intoxicated." And when the foreman stared he added, "Have you ever tried it? When we are set up, I shall brew you a cup myself."

"The arsenalotti are really set in their ways, you know," Gaspare remarked as they headed for the gate.

"And those ‘ways’ include–what did you tell me? Arrogance, inefficiency, constant theft–you didn’t mention the drunkenness."

"These have been problems for decades," his friend answered. "Centuries, actually."

Matteo waited until the gatekeeper let them pass before tipping him, lest it look like a bribe. "One could still call it that," Gaspare remarked as they came down the steps onto the Campo. "We will be dealing with the same people every day."

"Really?" Matteo replied blandly. "Oh, dear."

Spring swelled and ripened, a time of preparation. The trade fair was important but not to the Benvenetos, for only foreigners from the nearby cities of the Veneto came, and they to sell, not buy.

One or two asked for caofa, to Matteo’s delight; he served with a free hand at the family table, then set up a stall at the Rialto. When merchants inquired about a steady supply, he spread his hands. "To furnish your own household, do as I do: put out word with the Arsenal bowmen that you will pay for sacks they bring back. Larger and more reliable shipments must wait upon the wakening of our traders."

The ships of the spring muda would return in June, and there was much ground to propose before then. Matteo painstakingly wrote up a business plan, as realistic as he knew investors would demand. He was tempted to show it to Uncle Bartolomeo, for support, but steeled himself instead and brought it to his father.

"You propose an old-fashioned galley company, with twenty-four shares?" Ser Benveneto looked across the top of the sheet, amused. "My son, traders do not form galley companies any more. They do not pay well enough."

"Spices do not pay well. But no one imports caofa, and we know we can find buyers."

"Do we, in the quantities you seek? And are you seriously proposing to send an actual galley?"

"A galeass, perhaps." Matteo smiled, acknowledging the implausibility. "But now that Venetians may own foreign-built ships, we need not lease from the English and the Dutch."

"But why need we lease vessels at all?" his father asked. "If shipping has ceased to be profitable for us, should we bankrupt ourselves persisting in it?"

"If we do not ply the sea, we are not Venetians," Matteo said stubbornly.

"Neither Rome nor Spain suspects that," his father answered dryly. "We have trimmed our sails to catch advantage too readily to be anything but Venetians."

Which was a fact that Matteo knew as well as anybody. It had been a century since Venice’s nobility had abandoned commerce, taken their immense wealth and invested it in the rich farmlands of the Veneto. The trade that had created Venice’s empire and sustained it for half a millennium had been abandoned to Greeks, Jews, and smaller families as the patriciate collected its rents. The English and the Dutch, sailing out of the forested north where timber and iron were cheap, ravaged the Venetian spice trade, fought off the pirates who turned instead to the Serenissima’s vessels, and ate away at the profits of the ancient Levantine routes. Venice now collected more in anchorage tax from foreign vessels than from its own, and no one seemed to mind.

"Nor should they," Franchescina declared as she handed Matteo his wine. "Money is like water, it seeks out the easiest paths. So we lease Dutch mules rather than raise our own? So what?"

Matteo smiled affectionately. The dish on the table, of the finest Venetian glass, held nineteen caofa beans (Matteo had counted them at a glance): all that he had given her. The arrangement was attractive; one’s eye was drawn to the dark beans, dusky and irregular against the glazed symmetry of the dish. He was pleased to see that their number had not diminished over time.

"Do the merchants tell you this?" he asked.

"Rogue!" She raised an embroidered cushion and made as if to throw it at him. "Their wives tell me, or rather each other. They talk money while pretending not to, the hens."

Matteo wished Franchescina would speak more about her clients, whom she entertained with card games and presumably a bit of fortune-telling. He knew perfectly well that Venetian trade was increasingly being conducted on foreign vessels; he could quote the prevailing shipping rates. The Benvenetos sent German wool and furs to the Levant and brought back what items they could still sell profitably, and Matteo’s entry-books cared little what flag the cheapest ships flew. His business plan (he had not dared show it to Franchescina, though he knew she could read perfectly well) was not a denial of reality, for all that it proposed a company of the galley. Could people not see it for what it was?

Ideas crowded Matteo’s thoughts, but Gaspare elbowed them aside. "You are neglecting the great work," he complained. "We have two commissions now, and I cannot execute both of them alone."

Matteo wanted to send a servant to help Gaspare install the Succhiatore, but his friend seemed affronted by the suggestion. Matteo could not see the offense: he was involved also with a venture to send Murano glassware to the Besançon fair, but did not plan to help load the crates. Nevertheless, he agreed to accompany Gaspare back to the government building, and donned for the occasion his oldest and shabbiest attire.

"For this engine we want reliability, not efficiency or power," the engineer was saying. "A nice, steady suction that will require little maintenance and take years to wear out. For that we will accept a lesser efficiency, since the waste heat will moreover serve to warm the building’s damp bones."

"I doubt that his Excellency’s secretary will credit us with that," Matteo replied. But he began considering ways to express the benefit in twin entries against coal expended.

They stepped once more from the closed gondola to the unmarked entrance and into the building where stray glances brought frowns. Matteo wrapped himself in a black cloak as they prepared to descend the stairs, and a faint splash in the darkness below fired the sudden hope that it was merely another silent escort and not a rat.

"Are you ready?" he called up at the inch-wide hole. With a long scrape, the lead pipe began to descended toward Matteo’s outstretched hand. Fitting the wire cage over the opening was manageable even in the dimness the guard wanted, but when Matteo began to guide the assembly onto flat ground he had to call irritably for more light. As he wriggled his fingers in the mud he heard a faint groan through the nearest wall, and wondered with fleeting sympathy what workmen were laboring in the next chamber.

"Cospetto del diavolo! You look terrible," Gaspare exclaimed when he saw Matteo. He glanced at his own dusty knees as if abashed at not having undergone more.

Matteo shrugged, neither disputing nor pressing the point. Chagrin is a negotiating advantage best used later. "Let’s move the engine," he said.

The boiler rested on a wooden trestle, which had been carried in earlier by workmen ("specially blinded by the occasion," Gaspare joked) along with lengths of pipe and a toolbox. The two contractors made a show of puffing and straining as they pushed it across the floor, but the wooden-faced guards who stood by the door did not move to assist them. "Have you been making witticisms in their hearing?" Matteo hissed as they drove their shoulders against its dumb unyielding bulk. Gaspare said nothing, but Matteo noticed that he took upon himself most of the next hour’s work in attaching the valves and couplings.

"Good enough for this engine," said Gaspare at last, sitting back on his heels. "Our next will require welded joints. It will generate greater pressures than the Succhiatore, and run more efficiently. Ideally the boiler should be bronze."

"Ha," replied Matteo, who knew something of the subject.

"Will you be at the Arsenal tomorrow?" Gaspare asked as the curtained gondola took them away.

"No, and neither will you." Matteo could be irritated by Gaspare’s inability to keep disparate thoughts in his head. "They will want you to start the engine, and then instruct someone in how to run it. That will require only one person, so they will only send for one. I will be inside a different fortress."

It was a fortress so distant that it had to be approached by water. This failed to bother Matteo when he was being bundled into closed cabins by the Signoria, but setting out for a strange land was very different, even if the land lay within the city.

The Ghetto Nuovo was bounded by water, that access might be controlled through its two bridges. The buildings–they resembled neither palazzi nor tenements–were taller than any others in the sestieri, as though the prospering Jews, forbidden to surpass their borders, had instead expanded upward. Matteo could see them, women and children mostly, out on their balconies, from which (he remembered) they were said to gaze at and blaspheme Christian processions. Thus the sporadic attempts to compel them to seal up windows that looked upon the Can-naregio promenade. The effect, he reflected as he approached the near bridge, would render the Ghetto yet more alien in appearance, like the windowless exteriors of Alexandrian estates, unreadable behind their high walls and orchards.

But the crowd in the Campo had no more yellow hats than Matteo could see any day at the Rialto, and the bustle of commerce felt much like that of the nearby stalls. He moved through the crush of workers and artisans until he reached the appointed portico, where a young Jew stood waiting. Silently he conducted Matteo into a narrow stairwell, up four stories (not only the partitions but the staircase itself was made of wood, as though the building could not bear more weight) to the apartments of Iacob Zacuto, who conducted them into his office.

"I have brought you some caofa," said Matteo, presenting him with a small paper bag. The trader took it curiously, as though aware that protocol did not involve an exchange of gifts, but he spoke without evidence of disquiet.

"So this is what you propose to import," he remarked. "I have spoken to colleagues who have tasted it, both here and in Mecca." He handed the bag to the young man, who took it away. "And you think that the peoples of Christendom will take to caofa like the Turks and the Levantines?"

"I know they will," Matteo replied. Zacuto indicated a chair, and he sat. "We can sell caofa even at the prices I have paid for it. When we can secure it for less, profits will result."

Zacuto made a noncommittal gesture. "You will spend some years awaiting that." He sat behind his desk and looked hard at Matteo. "And what do you want with us? Surely you are not approaching us as potential business partners."

"No, Ser Zacuto," said Matteo, meeting his gaze. "We both know that the Cattaveri would object to such arrangements. You have capital, which is part of what we need, but your value to this enterprise lies elsewhere, as does what we can offer you."

"Yes?" The Jew sat back, prepared to hear the pitch.

"We have created curiosity about and demand for caofa throughout the Veneto," Matteo began, "but it required effort: I had to ply the bellows before my spark took fire. Caofa is becoming known in Europe as travelers report of it, but it is only available in the port cities, and there only occasionally, as a medicine or expensive curiosity. It will not become popular until it is imported in quantity, and its praises sung by residents."

Zacuto did not nod or otherwise acknowledge these points, but remained unmoving–a bargainer’s trick, but one that Matteo found slightly unnerving here, dealing with someone who was at once so familiar and so alien.

"Venetians go everywhere, but the Jews of Venice come from everywhere. Your Three Nations–which are in reality five or more, since the Marranos hail from Portugal as well as Spain, and many Venetian Jews have lived elsewhere in Italy–have ties with every Jewish community in Europe. If the merchants of the Ghetto took part in the caofa trade, the bean would have entree into every city with a synagogue."

"You would present Europe a Turkish drink as though it were a Jewish one?" asked Zacuto. His tone was too dry to convey irony.

"Christians do not care from whom they buy, so long as it is good." Matteo said this lightly, but with emphasis. "There are no Christian spices or silks." A wave of unease spread through him, and he concentrated with an effort.

"It was not the consumers I was thinking of." Zacuto paused, then seemed to set this thought aside. "You are interested, then, not in our money, like the poor to whom we must lend at a loss, but in our likeness as non-goi. As in a comedy, where the well-born lovers must pass notes through their servants. –Here now, is there something wrong with you?"

"Your low ceilings are rather oppressive," said Matteo weakly. They seemed in fact to be pressing down upon him. "It is a bit like being below deck. . . ." He rose, then grabbed the arm of his chair.

"We must get you outside," said Zacuto, coming quickly around the desk. He took Matteo by the elbow and conducted him into another room, where a narrow door opened onto a balcony. The noise without was great but the open space an immediate relief, and Matteo stepped onto the platform unconcerned that it gave slightly beneath his weight.

"Thank you," he gasped, steadying himself against the railing. The hand was gone from his sleeve, and fresh air blew through the campo at this height. Zacuto, evidently assured that this Christian would not be sick in his rooms, now stood beside him.

"We do not live in palazzi," he said blandly. "The bounds of the Ghetto were not enlarged when the Marranos were admitted."

A voice within was calling, and Zacuto turned to reply briefly. An elderly servant came out bearing a tray with steaming cups, which Matteo immediately saw were caofa. More surprisingly, the servant was Christian. Matteo took a cup, looked closely at the man (who did not meet his eye), then sniffed and sipped at the brew, which was stronger than he had learned Venetians prefer.

"I do not believe that Spain and Portugal would welcome a drink so suggestive of the Turk," said Zacuto, "while the English and Nether lands, whose climates might recommend it, have sent few Jews to Venice."

"Then we shall storm those shores by other means," he said. Zacuto was looking down at the crowded campo, and Matteo followed his gaze, wondering how much ground he had lost by being stricken. Only one or two upturned faces were gazing at them, though they must have made an odd pair. It was only then that Matteo realized, with a deep start, that from this angle no one could see that he wore no yellow hat, so he must seem another Jew.

"Has the caofa cooled your blood?" Zacuto asked suddenly.

"My blood?" Matteo was little concerned with the mechanisms of the drink’s beneficence, though he had rather assumed that it exerted some calming effect upon the choler.

"It is supposed that caofa offers relief to the sanguinary temperament," Zacuto replied. "Perhaps the engine that forces blood through the veins is driven by heat."

"That blood moves through the veins is news to me," Matteo replied politely. If the Jews, whose physicians were at least as good as the Christians,’ had claims to make concerning the therapeusis of caofa, he was prepared to hear them.

"It was discovered not long ago, by one of your own countrymen. There are valves within the veins, permitting movement in one direction only."

"Valves?" Matteo stared at the Jew.

"Suggesting that blood flows in a stream. They were discovered by Paolo Sarpi."

At this Matteo blinked and only just refrained from exclaiming, "Fra Sarpi?" Instead he affected a milder surprise, and remarked, "If the savior of Venice has distinguished himself in anatomical studies as well, he is a prodigy indeed."

"He only saved it from the Curia," replied Zacuto with a short laugh. "Will your caofa save us from Spain?"

Matteo pondered the question, to which he had given no very satisfactory answer, as he walked back through Cannaregio. He had wanted to reply Yes! despite the risk of appearing foolish, but his assurance would have sounded muddled and weak to the hard-headed trader. The Republic’s patricians cling now to land, while its merchants are content if their money travels for them: how to explain the miracle of the caofa bean, that carries the land within it, yet releases an immaterial essence that quickens the spirit and brightens the eye? Yes, the spread of this substance into Europe would halt the advance of Spain, like throwing open shutters to let sunlight strike mildew.

Talk at the dinner table concerned the Besançon Fair, now underway in Piacenza although news would not reach Venice for a week or more. Matteo wasn’t sure that anyone else present understood the proceedings, though his kinsmen never spoke of them with the boorish incredulity of older traders mocking the spectacle of financiers attending a fair with no goods, no coin, just thousands of pieces of paper being matched together and torn up. The Benvenetos at least understood how bills of exchange could be cleared, like the wake from passing gondolas meeting wave to trough and vanishing.

What mattered, of course, was where the Genoese banchieri di conto would set the exchange rate for liquidating bills. The rise or fall of the conto would reverberate through Venice and Christendom, although in ways Matteo wasn’t sure he could predict, or himself understand.

"And where are you bound?" asked his father, turning at last to his youngest son.

"Tomorrow I go to the Signoria," Matteo replied, careful to keep from his voice any tone that his brothers could call self-important, "to see Senator Domenico’s secretary." He did not add that he was also going to the secret library, to request the new book by Della Porta.

"Seeking a letter patent for a new steam kettle?" Tullio drawled.

"Seeking more money, now that I have justification," Matteo replied. "Is that not a good thing?"

"So you are not going to the Arsenal, to pound nails?" Alessandro inquired.

"He looks as though he already has," said Tullio suddenly. "See his hands!"

And the table erupted in laughter as Matteo looked dumbly at his caofa-powdered fingertips, black as soot though more aromatic. His mother passed down her lace handkerchief, though Matteo pulled out his own and began rubbing before it reached him. Bartolomeo made a mild remark about traders not minding getting their hands dirty, but the mirth washed over it.

"Will the Fair mean a carnival?" asked little Felicia, saving him.

"Not that kind of fair, dear," said her father. Though it once was, thought resentful Matteo. Nobody thought to ask him about that, and he sat silently, willing the warmth to drain from his face.

"Our own carnival will start soon enough," Ser Benveneto assured her. The actual carnival season would not begin until the feast of San Stefano, but a festive–that is, a non-working–atmosphere would begin to gather in the streets even before battagliola season broke out, which was invariably sooner than permitted. Perhaps Ser Benveneto imagined that his granddaughter would enjoy seeing artisans push each other off bridges. (Her father certainly did.)

Battagliole soon, but first the muda. What price his agents paid for the arriving caofa, and the price at which he would sell it, would determine whether the next muda sailed with Matteo a patron or a shopper.

When he went upstairs two hours later he found a copy of Il Gentiluomo, which his father had given him when he was fifteen, propped on his bed. A passage was marked with a ribbon, and he did not even have to pick it up to guess that it was the one where Muzio explained that a gentleman must do nothing with his own hands, but have everything carried out by his agents. Matteo knocked it with his own hands to the floor, then called angrily for his cloak. On the way out he picked up the book and returned it to the library.

"Did you sniff your fingers? Perhaps that’s not the sign of a gentiluomo."

"You tell me; you have entertained a greater variety of them."

"With me they do whether it is proper or not!"

The richest caofa–brewed with unscanting profligacy–bore a savor so strong it touched the corporeal, with the piercing seethe that was only produced by flesh. Damp loam rose to the face, alive with the quality of being alive. Can such complexity speak only to the tongue, an array of sensations like an artist’s paint box? The wet grounds later held nothing: all was expended in that single release.

Which meant there was nothing next day. Senator Domenico’s secretary was sour, as was the librarian. Clouds of papers swarmed to vex him, turbid with numbers that promised knowledge but tendered none. And in the afternoon word ran through the Rialto that the new conto was surprisingly high, sending waves of alarm that accomplished nothing save to interfere with actual work.

Matteo visited their Arsenal workshop the next week and found Gaspare in high spirits. "Here, sign this," the engineer said, picking up a sheet and thrusting it at him. Matteo studied it in perplexity. "It’s a loan agreement for bronze, so we can build our valves."

"You melted down a ship-owner’s cannon?" asked Matteo disbelievingly.

"Had to be recast anyway, the muzzle was cracked. He won’t need it until the next muda, by which time our ingegno will have proved its worth and the senate reimbursed us the cost of the bronze, which I will use to buy more for the trader."

"And if not, I am responsible for the charges." But Matteo was already looking for the ink.

"But that’s what traders do, underwrite bills. Especially for ventures that carry no risk!" And Gaspare laughed, ground a pinch of sawdust between thumb and forefinger, and sprinkled it over the fresh signature.

A galeass beat the muda to port, bearing incomplete but promising news of the spring convoy. The letters it carried for Casa Benveneto were sufficient to keep Matteo busy for days, and when word came one morning of sails on the horizon, he groaned instead of setting out for the waterfront.

It was another day before the bills reached them, and after supper when Ser Benveneto found and showed Matteo the entries for nineteen sacks of caofa. The price paid was only somewhat higher than Matteo had hoped, but the exhilarating size of the shipment was faintly alarming: five times what he had previously disposed of, most of which he had given away.

I will sell fully half, he mentally indited. And that half not sold shall be seed, to grow the next year’s customers.

Fresh caofa next morning at the Rialto, so that Matteo’s fellow traders, even the Germans at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, might know what the muda had brought. The flavor lost its finest subtleties within minutes, so Matteo had the serving boy grind and then brew one small pot at a time, which would be finished before it could stale and left interested customers waiting while the next was prepared. He counted the numbers of customers, and, after the second day, the number who showed up more than once.

The discomfited Germans, required to stay at the Fondaco, sell all their wares there, and use the proceeds only to buy Venetian goods, came over curiously, assured Matteo that caofa would never rival beer, then each bought a cup (when their companions weren’t there) and sipped with the assessing expression of a rentier pinching the pigs. Eventually they banded together and bought half a sack, which Matteo measured with a fine pewter scoop, like a Dutchman pouring out cloves.

Caofa became modestly fashionable, something for the worldly to be seen enjoying. Merchants bought small paper bags made for sweetmeats, and their wives asked Matteo about flavorings. An entire sack disappeared in these tiny increments, then much of another in larger bites destined for the mainland.

Greeks and resident Turks began to buy, though the Jews seemed not much interested, and an attempt to make a beachhead in the Arsenal was repulsed. "Don’t worry about attracting the artisans," his father said. If they disposed of nine sacks at these prices, the profits would be genuine.

"Selling it by the bag, like a shopkeeper?" asked Franchescina. "Your brothers must be making comments."

"Probably, but not to me." Matteo in fact recognized that the expense of keeping a servant there four hours a day should properly be added to the costs. "I would rather sell tiny bags to a hundred cittadini than full sacks to three. Eventually the hundred will want sacks."

And indeed a taste for the bean seemed to be spreading through the city’s traders, foreigners, and scholars. One day Gaspare showed him a short treatise, De Flatus Caofae, which discussed the nature of farts engendered by caofa. "What does it say?" Matteo demanded, flipping through the pages of Latin.

"Well, too much caofa," said Gaspare helpfully. "You know. Always seemed a small price to pay."

The heat of summer seemed an unpropitious season for consuming hot caofa, but Matteo reminded colleagues that those in the Turkish lands drank it in the blazing heat of day and derived much benefit thereby. The serving boy all but dared customers to drink the steaming beverage down and feel its effects, to which he would then loudly draw attention. For his part Matteo did not scruple to point out how good caofa tasted on damp winter mornings, by which time supplies might be less plentiful than now.

The long sweltering afternoons might prompt industrious citizens to hot refreshment, but unoccupied youths, idle and bored, lounged at the ends of bridges, drinking wine (which heats the senses and lulls judgment) and calling taunts to like idlers on the opposite side. A volley of abuse would answer this, leading to exchanges of contemptuous display that would rapidly escalate until one side launched itself across the bridge. The shouts and flying fists would quickly draw a crowd, hundreds or even thousands pouring in from neighboring campi to line each side of the canal and scream support. The summer feast days were increasingly given to these "spontaneous" outbursts–which seemed to relieve only a portion of the excitement that had built up over the previous weeks–and battagliola season approached through a cloud of increasing pressure.

Matteo was sitting peaceably in his office when the summons came. His father appeared in the doorway, a paper in his hand and an expression on his face that Matteo had never seen before. "It is from the Avogadori di Comun," he said. "You are accused of bringing discord to the Republic."

"What?" Matteo read through the summons disbelievingly. He was charged, in formal government prose, with employing the resources of Casa Benveneto to disrupt civil order and jeopardize the public safety. The last phrase made Matteo’s head swim; everything alleged was absurd, but allegations concerning the public welfare could conceivably attract the attention of the Council of Ten.

"We are supposed to appear in eight days," his father said grimly. The pronoun was a kindness, or perhaps an assurance of solidarity, for the document named Matteo Benveneto alone. Matteo had never seen his own name on an official paper, and his gaze fixed upon it with paralyzed horror.

"This is . . . untrue," he said at last, sounding fatuous to his own ears.

His father made an angry sound. "It is the pharmacists," he said. "They have brought a complaint."

"For what?" Matteo asked. But he immediately guessed at something.

"You sell as an everyday drink something that they prescribe as a costly medicine, and tell the city’s merchants that you can obtain it more cheaply still? How do you think they will respond?"

"But that is their misfortune," Matteo protested, indignant. "What does the Republic care if I manage to undercut these frauds?"

"They will claim that caofa is too potent to be sold as a frivolous quaff," Ser Benveneto predicted. "That you will poison unsuspecting Venetians with this toxic brew." Matteo tried to protest that nations of Turks drank it daily, but his father interrupted. "Don’t argue it with me. That is the attack they will make, unless you have done something else to leave yourself vulnerable."

In fact it was something worse. A discreet inquiry (probably involving a bribe, although Matteo was not involved) brought word that the Avogadori were investigating charges that Matteo had encouraged rioting during the feast day scaramuccie by selling a Turkish drink that inflamed the spirits and counteracted wine’s natural tendency to slow responses. The skirmishes’ reliance upon fists rather than sticks and knives would be undermined, resulting in "widespread injury and even loss of life," as the papers evidently had it.

Matteo’s wrath– "Those louts don’t buy caofa! And weapons are no more common in bridge fights near the Rialto than in those a mile away!"–swept a cloak over darker feelings, which themselves thrashed above a still pool he could not glimpse, filled with something black and bitter. Walking along the Rio del Palazzo one drizzly afternoon, Matteo felt the writhings of helpless rage as something dying, a serpent poisoned by the toxins of fear.

"Are you going to speak at all?" Gaspare asked him, less annoyed than bemused. "I do believe you are suffering from melancholia."

Matteo laughed. "Is that a word arsenalotti use?"

"Don’t be a snot. I have read a book or two, you know–some on unlikely subjects, since it’s hard to know what’s in a book until you read it."

Matteo did not want to discuss Gaspare’s familiarity with the varieties of human temperament. He said: "I am distracted because I must speak this afternoon with a lawyer, and unhappy because no one is now willing to deal in caofa. These emotions are the consequence of outward causes, and that is all."

The lawyer, at least, was prepared to stick to outward causes. "You should get statements," he said after reading through the complaint while Matteo sat waiting. "From your servants who prepared the drink, that they served it almost exclusively to merchants, and never to idle young men. From fellow traders, that they purchased it at prices too high for the popolani. From those colleagues you approached as investors, that you planned to import this substance at a cost that young artisans would find expensive, and that you acknowledged it would take years to bring the price down.

"Assure your colleagues that they may say whatever they wish, and do not be dismayed by their statements’ self-serving natures." He smiled faintly. "The Avogadori are used to witnesses falling over themselves to make clear their own lack of involvement."

"Will these suffice?" Matteo asked in a voice that betrayed him by quavering.

"They form the foundation of your rampart. Each answer you give is a stone, to be piled up methodically."

It was an incongruous image to hear in this handsome office, across a walnut desk wider than his father’s. The lawyer, silver-haired and richly attired, seemed less concerned about this business than Matteo, which might or might not be reassuring.

"I will set forth everything clearly," Matteo promised.

The counselor shook his head emphatically. "Restrict your answers to the points at hand," he said. "Content yourself with protesting your innocence, and do not attack the interests behind the complaint. As far as the Avogadori know, you have no idea who laid these baseless charges."

Matteo had intended a vigorous denunciation of these powers. He nodded, however, and asked meekly, "What of the Shirri? Their patrols must know that bridge fighting has been no worse this year."

"That is not for you to demonstrate. Let the Avogadori wonder what the arrest records show. They will adjourn, request further reports from various quarters, and the inquiry will in time grind to a halt."

Matteo didn’t like the sound of this. "But I require vindication," he insisted. "No trader will join my venture while everyone is waiting to see if I am arrested."

The counselor shrugged, then offered a sympathetic smile, Matteo’s last. "Many of your potential partners have had their own dealings with the law over the years, and know enough not to expect a formal exoneration. You will have to rely upon your own powers of argument, which have after all gotten you this far."

"Alas," said Matteo, looking about the chamber as though reflecting on where this far now was.

"Traders do not make the worst witnesses," the lawyer added unexpectedly. "You know enough to be pleasing, and how to explain matters without condescension. Let the Avogadori feel the force of your desire to persuade, and they will soon decide that this case ought not to have come before them."

He dressed himself the next morning as though to meet a foreign delegation, the accomplished young trader of good family. His brothers were nowhere to be seen, as befit their doubts concerning his status: beloved son riding into his first battle or scapegrace facing judgment. Ser Benveneto stood waiting at the door, with a fatherly hug and a few words of advice. "Look them in the face, not insolently but as a fellow Venetian. Your family–its generations of service to the Republic–stand behind you, visible to them: but you should not allude to it. Rely on your dignity and upon the justice of your enterprise, but do not be concerned whether they approve it–and above all don’t offer them caofa."

He rode to the Palazzo Ducale in an open gondola, a young trader of repute keeping an appointment with officials. His morning cup, swathed in milk and honey, warmed his stomach without assailing it. Wine at lunch, assuming they didn’t clap him in chains.

Matteo stated his business to the clerk at the top of the Scala dei Censori, who turned a page in the great ledger before him, read carefully, then directed him without expression down a series of corridors. Matteo was careful to attend his instructions, but two guards nevertheless fell in beside him as he turned to go, an escort to create the appearance that he was being brought in under duress. As a piece of Venetian ceremony, it was less venal than many, and Matteo gave them a single sour look.

The Avogaria lay beyond a pair of heavy oak doors, opposite a penitential bench to which Matteo was brusquely directed. It was ninety minutes later that the great doors swung open and a secretary poked out his head to call Matteo’s name. Matteo had tucked away his book as soon as he heard the knob turn, and rose smoothly at the sound. What little he had absorbed about domestic economy vanished at once, but the exercise had calmed him. He took a deep breath, prayed: San Menas, patron of traveling merchants, be with me now, and stepped forward.

The doorway led onto a different corridor, narrower and differently tiled. Four doors down, and he was gestured into the one on the right. The tableau was just as predicted: three officials sitting at a table at the far end, with a secretary or two sitting to the side. No chair for himself. It was not quite a trial, those being conducted in the Quarantia Criminale, but if things did not go well here there would soon be one.

"Matteo Michaelangelo Benveneto, Venetian, of Casa Benveneto?" asked the man in the center, a balding patrician in his forties. Matteo bowed. The man read from a sheet he held before him. "You are accused of attempting to disrupt civil order and jeopardize the public safety of our Serene Republic by importing a potent substance, made from the bean of the . . ." (he hesitated and scowled) "kaffa?–plant, which, taken in the large draughts that you have urged upon buyers, and especially in the simple apprentices and workmen . . ." The charge ran on along the lines Matteo expected, sparing him at least (he had worried about this) some unprepared-for surprise. He listened carefully, and when the official finished and raised his eyes inquiringly, Matteo realized he had to speak.

"I have been apprised of these charges, Your Eminences, and with respect I declare them false, and my family and myself innocent of these imputations." He looked to the official on the left (having decided that the presiding official was a mediocrity with a sinecure), wondering whether this was appropriate, and received a tiny nod.

"The charges," the patrician began, untying the ribbon that held the fat folder the official on his right slid before him. Matteo watched with horrified fascination as the cover was lifted to disclose a pile of documents, each a different size and color. The Avogadore paused like a German merchant before a plate of fresh seafood, wondering where to begin. One of the items, Matteo recognized with disgust, was De Flatus Caofae.

"What is this?" The prosecutor frowned as he looked down at a folded sheet sitting at the top. He picked it up and turned it over, showing the seal. The official on his left started slightly.

Everyone watched as the patrician unfolded the letter and read it. His face darkened. "It appears," he said, "that the Holy Office has taken an interest in the case of Ser Benveneto. Why was I not shown this?"

All three avogadori turned to one of the secretaries, who mimed bewildered incomprehension. "I did not receive the letter," he protested. "I would have informed your excellencies of its arrival. Perhaps it was Lippomano?"

Matteo heard all this through a haze of stunned incomprehension. Word that his "case" had attracted the attention of the Venetian Inquisition had stopped all thought, like a cork blocking the duct that conveys the substance of reflection. The idea of the Holy Office was frozen before him, like an image lingering on the surface of a pool after the figure who cast it has gone.

The officials were conversing in low voices, their secretaries hovering behind them to lean, pointing, over the folder. Perhaps I will faint, thought Matteo in a flash of lunatic clarity. People must topple over as they stand here all the time. Is it taken as a sign of guilt?

Someone cleared his throat. "It appears, Ser Benveneto," the official on the left was saying, "that the Holy Office has taken an interest in your case." A part of Matteo’s consciousness registered the lawyers’ tendency to repeat each other’s phrases. "This raises a question of jurisdiction, which must be settled before we proceed." He seemed to be saying that Matteo could not remain standing here during this period.

The official in the center, deep in discussion with a secretary over the folder, looked up at this. "You may go," he said, with evident reluctance. "But be prepared for a further summons, and do not leave Venice in the meanwhile." Someone murmured something, and he laughed.

Numbly Matteo bowed and left the room. Someone was sitting on the bench, who looked up anxiously as Matteo pushed open the doors, but he did not take notice. Corridors and stairways opened before him, which his mind traced in reverse without conscious intervention. It was only as he stood in the courtyard, with the Porta della Carta before him and Venice beyond, that he roused himself and balked, obscurely but decisively, at walking through the public entrance like an uncumbered man. Lesser exits dotted the Palace like mouseholes, and Matteo forswore the Gate of Paper– why was it called that?–to slip instead, a tradesman not a gentiluomo, through a victualer’s door and back into the Piazza.

He was just south of the Bridge when someone caught up with him. "Ser Benveneto?" in an unsmiling voice.

Matteo started–what had he been expecting, a gang of Inquisitors? some physician come to punch his nose?–but it was one of the escorts to the unnamed government building, who never smiled. "Good afternoon," he said, civil but not welcoming.

"You must come with me," the guard said, peremptory as always.

It was the stuff of low comedy: a cracked joint in the Succiatore, official outrage, the wrong contractor dragged in and ordered to fix it. "You can’t make repairs? Then grab a bucket and start bailing!" Matteo began to explain, and realized that a second guard, this one bigger, had materialized on his other side and had taken his arm. "Excuse me," he said sharply, pulling away, "but–"

The blow sent him reeling, into the other’s arms. Matteo, shocked, was pinned before he could draw breath, and tried to regain his footing only to have his boots kicked out from under him. Men were scrambling from a nearby gondola, running up. A glimpse of shocked onlookers as they closed round him.

"Hey!" It was his only outburst. A cloak was thrown over him, entangling as it obscured. His sense of direction warned where he was being pushed, and he flailed madly. Hands grasped him, four, six, then hoisted. He was flying through the air, and down.

Darkness swathed but did not comfort, a region of indeterminate nature. It was confusion, like a season of prolonged storms, that disrupted communication but did not block signals of distress from distant provinces. He lay in a condition of disarray but stillness, ignorant of everything yet aware of the magnitude of his defeat, though its dimensions, in this realm beyond time, were not measurable. Assessment came with intervals like day and night, unavailable to a mode of being that took form around an irregular distant drip, the texture of wet stone against his cheek.

Once he heard the sliding of a grate, and dimness filled some portion of his chamber. He sat up, trying to turn his neck to see the rectangle of light, but it whispered shut before he could get his bearings. The second of illumination had revealed the fixity of his enclosure, which he could still sense even in the darkness. After sitting upright for several minutes, he reached out to find the nearest wall. It was some time before he embarked to trace its circumference, and when he did he discovered he could not determine the size of his cell, for in the darkness he could not retain the number of sideways steps he took from one corner to the next. A narrow bench occupied the center of the floor, and he stretched out upon it.

Time loses significance in the enormity of failure, fading into the lightless eternity of a drowned ship sinking through the depths. If he made an effort Matteo could recall intervals when the door had swung open and a tray had been pushed in or his slop bucket taken away. He no longer turned when the spy slot slithered open and darkness bloomed briefly into grey. Lying in the unchanging stillness, he arranged his few facts in patterns, fusing them finally into hard diamonds of surmise that he let slip from his fingers into blackness.

They came when he was deep in reverie, something–it was deeply felt, but impossible to articulate consciously–about Marina when they were children, before he fell in love with her. Its substance had gathered to a density too great to disperse at once, and Matteo sat up disoriented, not dazzled (he had learned to glance away when the door swung open) but unmoored. "Come on," was all they said, and hoisted him under the arms.

"How long have I?" Matteo asked, lucidly he thought, but got no answer. He was being walked down the corridor, whose high windows, too high to see through, admitted the wan half-light of dusk or not quite dawn. Matteo tried to focus his thoughts but could not; they were hurrying him too briskly, pausing only to pull open doors. It was when he thought of how he could collect himself while waiting on the bench that he realized this respite would be denied him.

They showed him in at once, although the seconds between knocking and admittance allowed Matteo to straighten his clothes and push back his hair. His beard was raspy as the side of a file, not yet long enough to curl. They want you to be disoriented, he thought, and tried to close a fist around that.

The sight that greeted him as the doors swung open was certainly sufficient to chill. An ecclesiastical official, hatted and grim, sat glaring at the center of the table, which was wider and finer than the last. Neither a priest nor bishop, both familiar enough from weekly Mass, nor even similar in attire to the Archbishop, whom Matteo knew, if only from a distance, from civic ceremonies. Of course he was an Inquisitor, possibly no more than monsignor by one ordering of rank, but the wielder of terrible powers. Matteo realized that his life would quite possibly end in this room.

"The prisoner shall come forward," someone said. No recitation of his name for purposes of formal identification; he was in the realm now of confident certainties. Matteo got a quiet prod in the back, and took three steps forward. No hints from the table on proper protocol today, but he hesitated only a second, before giving a formal bow.

"You stand accused of material abetment in the ungodly practice of divinazione," said an official to the Inquisitor’s side. Matteo had expected His Eminence to do the speaking, and wondered that someone clearly from the Signoria was present at a Tribunal. "The gravity of this offence has brought your case to the attention of the Holy Office," the man continued, sounding angry. Matteo looked from one man to the other, trying to figure out what was happening here. He desperately wanted a cup of caofa.

"I beg your pardon, ser?" he said inanely. The actual wording of the charge was only now taking form in his mind. "Divination?" He could not have been more bewildered if they had accused him of being the sultan in disguise.

The Inquisitor spoke for the first time. "Do you recognize these?" he asked heavily. His palm opened, disclosing a handful of dark seeds.

"They are beans, Your Eminence." There was no question what they were, even from this distance. "They look like caofa beans."

"Indeed. And did you give these beans to the woman known as Franchescina Castellano?"

Matteo stared.

"Come, speak up," said the official from the Signoria sharply.

"Ser, I . . ." Matteo concentrated his wits with an effort. Always admit what they know anyway. "That woman I know, Your Eminence. I deal in caofa beans, and have brought them to her apartment, to prepare the drink with which I hope to make my family’s fortune."

"Did you make her a gift of these beans?"

"I . . . no. I do not recall ever leaving her with more beans than we used to make the infusion." An awful suspicion was dawning. "She may have kept some back from our grinding."

There was a chuckle from the side of the room. The official shot an angry glance in that direction, but the Inquisitor appeared not to notice. He said, "So you did not give the beans to Signorina Castellano for their efficacy in the practice of buttar fave?"

"Of. . . ?" Matteo frowned at the unfamiliar syllables. After a second he sorted them into two words, and his expression blossomed in astonishment. "You mean bean-casting?"

The official began to speak sharply, but the Inquisitor raised his hand. "That is correct. Do you deny that you aided this woman, your lover, in seeking greater power in divination through the potency of these foreign beans?"

"But that’s–" Matteo shook his head in distraction. "They’re just a commodity! The Turks and Jews of the Levant import them by the sackful, and all they do is grind them up!" He stared at the man wild-eyed, as though lunacy had seized them both.

A third official, who had been writing busily, now spoke without looking up. "So you attest that the beans were brought into the woman Castellano’s house solely for consumption, and that you did not suggest or encourage their use for unholy purposes."

"I, yes." Matteo blinked. The question, laid out on the trellis of syntax, now seemed almost sane.

The men behind the table were conversing in low voices. "Take him away," someone said, which Matteo heard but did not apply to himself until a guard plucked his sleeve. He allowed himself to be led out the door, past a group of young lawyers who had stood listening. As the guards maneuvered past them Matteo abruptly addressed one. "How long since my arrest?"

The young man frowned at him, then pursed his lips. "Six days," he said.

He was jerked forward, then marched quickly to his cell and pushed in. He fell asleep almost at once, then woke, hours or a day later, and felt the uncertain boundaries of his confines to be more distinct. Most immediately, he knew now where he was: back in the Palazzo Ducale, in the dank cells known as the pozzi. His trip on the floor of the gondola had been a return one, and he wondered why the agents of the Council of Ten (as they surely were) had not simply waited outside the Avogadori’s door.

Confident now that he was being fed daily, Matteo began to count his meals. He established that he slept once between them, which he could now assay at a night’s worth. Something like structure took form, a bulwark against the enveloping darkness.

Other assemblages were less easy, and he lay on his back for hours, trying to fit them together. Franchescina had used the pilfered beans to tell fortunes, and must by now have joined the ranks of women convicted of some form of stregonaria, like those he had seen (childhood memories were more vivid here than recent ones) standing in the pillory wearing placards that read: Per la santa Inquisitione per herbarie e strigarie e buttar fave. Had she boasted to her clients that her beans were of the caofa plant, so that whoever denounced her could guess at Matteo’s connection and include him as well? Or had Franchescina, under examination, freely spilled his name to the Tribunal?

One piece didn’t fit: what Matteo had faced had not been a Tribunal, which would have been filled with clerics, but something else. What then, and why? He turned the piece over in the darkness, looking for an edge he could match.

On the twenty-ninth day he thought he heard a faint noise drifting under his door through some open window, then realized it was now the battagliola season, and the surf-whisper perhaps the roar of thousands. Curly-bearded, he touched his cheek and thought, I look like a galley slave. And might soon be one, if Franchescina’s perfidy combined with the pharmacists’ charges into something sufficiently malign.

When reassemblage failed, the darkness reclaimed him. Too stealthy to show its leading edge, despair crept up next to him, coating without whelming, like oil, then wholly subsuming once it no longer mattered. Matteo thought of his mother and sister, their misery; the gentlemen Benveneto, their disappointment; the disgrace that burned inextinguishable, tainting his name in others’ mouths like the rankest dregs. Failure most shameful, a bankrupt’s or coward’s, seared him as he lay unseen, a twist of pain in the ruins of his once brilliant ambition.

It was the sixty-third day when they came for him. "Get up," called the turnkey as the door swung open, the middle silhouette in the dim but stinging light. The two guards pushed past him and led Matteo away without a word.

They had proceeded down two corridors and were climbing a staircase–the demand upon unaccustomed muscles may have woken something–when Matteo realized that he was being taken perhaps to judgment or even summary execution, but that there was also the possibility that he was about to get the chance to explain himself, for which he had raged through long darkened hours. An interlocutor who would ask what he had been doing, since he was not going to confess to the allegations collected. The self-evident truth of his words, their justice and reason, would sweep away the compacted illogic of the charges against him, which must contradict each other and established fact at numerous bleeding points.

The tiny room into which he was thrust was scarcely larger than his cell, though better lit. Matteo sank onto the narrow bench and looked at the second door (through which faint murmurs could be heard) with relief: torture chambers don’t have waiting rooms.

The functionary who opened the door, however, looked at Matteo so blackly that he flinched. The fact that it was not a guard come to let him in was even more alarming. Where was he, that prisoners no longer needed guards?

The chamber beyond was large, although the high ceiling and darkened windows (Matteo had not realized it was night) lay beyond the few lamps’ illumination. The five robed men sat not behind a table but in raised chairs against the far wall, the center one framed by a red panel. Clerks and lawyers occupied the tables, against the wall opposite the windows. Matteo approached slowly, glancing about in bewilderment.

"What are you looking for?" one of them asked. His voice carried clearly enough to echo faintly behind Matteo.

"Your pardon, Your Eminence," he said in a croak. How long since he had last spoken? "I had expected to see an Inquisitor present."

"This is a court of the Consiglio dei Deici, not the Inquisition!" another judge snapped. "You have already caused us trouble by involving the Holy Office in this."

"I beg your pardon," Matteo whispered. He tried to fix on this, but his thoughts spun helplessly, like gears failing to engage. The Council of Ten! Neither of the previous interviews had been formal trials, and perhaps this was not, either; but with the Ten you did not always get one.

It would be damning to say nothing further, so he added, "The last time I was taken from my cell I was questioned by an Inquisitor. I have not been apprised of the nature of the proceedings against me, and must apologize for my ignorance."

One of the judges stirred. "It is not culpable under law for a citizen innocently to complicate an investigation by suffering the attentions of third parties," he observed. "That this has inconvenienced this inquiry cannot be one of the counts against Ser Benveneto."

"We have enough already," another judge snapped. He pointed at Matteo. "You! What have you been doing poking about with secret books? And why have you shown such interests in the writings of the Neapolitan Giovanni Battista della Porta?"

"Della Porta?" For a second Matteo felt, insanely, as though he were being examined by tutors. "He wrote Pneumatica, a study of the power of steam."

"It is interesting that you went looking for it in the Archivio dei Documenti, where you had a commission to search for writings about steam from the Turkish lands."

Matteo blinked. "With respect, Your Eminence, I had permission from the office of Senator Domenico to look for books about steam power. Certainly we were interested in works by Arab philosophers, but if there were new studies published by Christians, I read them as well."

"Yet you also took the opportunity to look for writings about caofa, did you not?"

"Let us not turn to the matter of caofa just yet," the presiding judge suggested. Matteo was looking from one man to the other in astonishment.

"Very well," said the finger pointer. "This Neapolitan is also the author of another treatise, De Furtivis Litterarum Notis, in five books. You were looking at that volume as well. Why the interest in an author who writes about codes and cryptography?"

Matteo stared. "But that was more than forty years ago! Della Porta wrote that book as a very young man."

"That scarcely matters," said the fourth judge, on the far right. Two of the others nodded at this. "The prisoner has shown a pattern of gaining entry to restricted sites and then looking about too closely. I am more interested in why he was poking about in the casa basement."

The judge who had demurred earlier now raised a hand. "We should take care not to utter secrets in front of the prisoner. It is still possible he could be acquitted and released."

"That hardly seems likely," the presiding judge replied. He leaned forward slightly to address his colleague on the right. "Do you wish to ask about the basement installation? That little Jew from the Arsenal told us nothing, even under the cordello."

"I suggest we try the cordello now."

"To what purpose?" the third judge asked. "The wretched converso spilled everything he could, and we learned nothing that was not evident from their papers. Everything heard to date suggests two young men who don’t know when not to exhibit curiosity. Unless this prisoner’s answers give evidence of dissembling, the cordello would be an unwarranted recourse."

Matteo followed the exchange, but a spreading chill seemed to have frozen his faculties, soul, humours, and all. Like ice in a conduit, the words he was hearing had blocked the flow of thought, which hung immobilized before his mind’s eye.

"Very well," said the presiding judge. "Let us turn then to matters that are better documented. Prisoner: Tell us of your dealings with the Jews of the Ghetto. And know that at the first sign of prevarication, you shall be hanging from the cordello."

Matteo drew breath slowly. Even an ice sculpture may move if ordered so by the Ten. "Your Eminences," he began. "If you have seized the papers of myself and my associate Gaspare Treviso, then you surely know of my efforts to find investors for a plan to import caofa beans from Egypt, which we hope to sell throughout Europe, thus enriching my family and benefiting our Republic. Such investment has been hard to secure: prosperous merchants now entrust their capital with Genoese and Florentine houses, which guarantee safe returns; while the noble families of Venice have placed their wealth in their mainland estates."

He paused; had he just offended his judges? The ice had numbed; he could not care. "The Jews are hungry for opportunity, and they have more money than the Greeks. I would approach them as investors if the Cattaveri permitted it. Instead, I proposed to a Jewish merchant that the Jewish communities in European ports be used to promote my caofa. My family knows well the laws regulating our profession; there is nothing wrong with this."

The judges all looked at each other. "And what did the Jew Zacuto say to this?" one asked.

"He was guarded," Matteo replied. He was trying to remember what he might have written down. The ice was breaking up, things said a moment ago were bobbing into view. "Wait–did you think that Gaspare had something to do with this? No, he is merely–"

"Silence!" the presiding judge snapped, distracted. A lawyer had come up with a paper, which he took and studied. There was a silence as it was passed along from one judge to the next.

"According to Zacuto, you showed nervousness and extreme agitation," one of them said after a moment. "He said that you seemed plainly aware that your actions were irregular."

"You . . . you have been interrogating my prospective partners?" Matteo asked in astonishment. A blow to the back of his head sent him pitching forward to his knees.

"You are not here to pose questions," one of the judges exclaimed angrily as Matteo shook his head and rose slowly. He knew enough not to turn to see who had struck him. "If there is another outburst like that, I shall call in a guard. They are much rougher than my clerks."

"I beg your pardon, Your Eminence," Matteo said. The court was regarding him sternly, five family portraits in a forbidding gallery. Matteo distantly registered the thought as he studied each face in turn.

One of them leaned forward. "And what does that expression of yours portend?" he asked. His tone was not particularly dangerous.

"Your Eminence, I scarcely know how to answer." Matteo spread his hands. "If you have called in and questioned the merchants I have spoken to, I am ruined beyond possible redemption. I could walk out of this building tomorrow, and every member of my profession would treat me like a leper. I–" He looked up to the ceiling, dim with its indistinct design, then back down at them. "Ask whatever you wish," he said simply. "I have nothing to hide."

"How gracious of you," one of them remarked. Matteo straightened his back and looked ahead. What did his expression portend? He had no idea; he was no longer wholly inhabiting his body.

The judge on the far right glanced again at the paper and set it down. "You approached a Jew of the Ghetto, who knew enough to agree to nothing. You passed no money to him, and he undertook no steps to develop the secret network you proposed." He looked at the presiding judge. "What about the Arsenal?"

"He was certainly not secretive." The last judge now spoke up. "He offended every official he spoke to, and their workshop was searched nightly." He shrugged. "They built a machine that would pump water if you kept a fire burning."

"The ingegno," somebody said. "The engineer said that Benveneto hoped to circumvent the terms of his government contract."

"How?" asked the demurrer. "They finished the device, or almost did, and left a mass of innocuous notes. Offending arsenalotti isn’t evidence for conspiracy."

"The contracts said nothing about bronze, but the notes were full of it," said the fifth judge. "Bronze means cannon, which they wanted to divert for other purposes."

"What do you say to that?" the presiding judge asked.

"A bronze valve weighs less than a brick," Matteo replied. "The ingegno Gaspare wanted to build required three."

Some judges were glaring, others looked unreadable. "What has steam to do with caofa, anyway?" asked one testily. "Prisoner, answer that."

"Caofa and steam power? Why, they could both make Venice great," Matteo said simply. "Only savants know about steam, but all the Turkish empire drinks caofa. Perhaps it will make the Dutch great." With all in wreckage about him, he should marshal his forces to preserve what was worth saving. And what was that? Nothing.

The presiding judge stirred. "There are some questions still unanswered," he said.

"I object," said the judge who had demurred earlier. "We have found no evidence of criminal activity. To proceed as you suggest would be an abuse–"

"If the Avogadori find no evidence of a crime, they need not prosecute. Our commission is broader, and we are unencumbered by the constraints you seem to enjoy."

"I–"

"You don’t think he should hear this? Oh, very well." The presiding judge lifted his chin to look past Matteo’s shoulder. "Get him out of here."

They never came for him. For four days he expected it hourly, soon guessing that the interrogators routinely held back, that anticipation and terror might pull the prisoner taut as a viola string. Far beyond the reach of either, Matteo experienced not remorse, nor defiance or the delusive bravado that crumbled quickly. His friend had been questioned under torment, as had others. What right had he to hope for less?

Gaspare; his father; the Venetian traders he had grown up yearning to emulate: they seemed to regard him in the darkness, all betrayed. He lost count of his meals (a true merchant never loses count) and slid into an aching dies non juridicus, like an open sore that neither festers unto death nor scabs.

At one point he suffered a fever, and blazed like a coal that will consume itself by morning. He imagined the interrogators finding him thus, and later recalled the encounter so vividly (he could see their indignant expressions upon feeling the fever radiate from his skin, as though this were a particularly unworthy trick) that he wondered if it had happened. No rope burns on his wrist, however; no unsocketed joints from having hung from the ground while . . . he could not think farther. While what was done to Gaspare happened, but hadn’t, to him.

He was awake when he heard two pairs of boots approaching, though he could not say what he had been thinking a second earlier. The footsteps moved faster than those of turnkey leading prisoner, and stopped outside his cell. Matteo sat up, gathering what wits remained, as he heard a key scrape noisily in the lock. He had learned to avert his face as the door swung open, and shielded his eyes with a hand before looking back.

"Matteo Benveneto," someone said. Matteo was not used to being addressed by name. "Leave the door ajar and stand back," the voice added in a lower tone. A man in lawyer’s robes stepped forward as the door swung to and the brightness dimmed. Matteo stood with an effort.

"My name is Ludovico Contarini," the lawyer said. "I work for the Avogadori di Comun." At one time, he and Matteo would have been about the same age. "Do you remember me?"

"No." Matteo was trying to think, and added, "I did not think my case was before the Avogadori."

"It is not, but it began with us, and we try not to let go of anything. Sit down," he added. Matteo sat, as far from the light as he could. The lawyer sat as well, surprising him even more by straddling the bench so that his back was to the door.

"The Avogadoria summoned you to a hearing, but the Council of Ten intervened, as it often does. The counselors were unhappy, among other things, because the Holy Office had come upon your name in the course of a routine case of divination. They felt, and in this we concur, that the ecclesiastical authorities cannot be allowed to intercede frivolously in the Republic’s court system. Memories of the Interdict are too recent.

"Do you understand this?"

Matteo frowned. "No," he said.

"I thought not." Contarini reached into his robes. "Lean forward," he said in a softer tone.

Matteo tilted his head, puzzled, and a soft object was placed in his hands. "Drink," the lawyer said. The skin was small, and Matteo ran his fingers over its slithery shape in bewilderment. Speaking loudly, the lawyer pulled the cork and pushed it toward Matteo’s mouth. Matteo raised it and drank. The wine stung the roof of his mouth, and his eyes filled with tears. He almost sputtered, then swallowed and drank again. Almost immediately the skin was empty, and was being removed from his hands.

"Prisoners are often too famished to comprehend what I must tell them. A mouthful goes far in your condition, though any more and you would fall over."

"Thank you," Matteo whispered. Then he added, slightly louder: "The Holy Office was mistaken in its allegations."

"About you? True enough, and you will be delighted to hear that they seem inclined to take no further action. I shouldn’t tell you, but since it hardly matters now I will add that the Avogadori’s report found no evidence that a mug of your caofa infusion will madden a workman."

Wit flickered, a spark from a cold ember. "Then I can go?" Matteo asked.

Contarini looked at him closely. "No. Agents of the Council of Ten had been following your movements for some time, and they found lots of disruptive activity. Did you really tell an official of the Arsenal that they should make caofa their bevanda ordinaria?"

Matteo was feeling the wine spread through his system. His head seemed clearer, though his chest tingled. "They consider that treason?"

"I’m not going to judge their proceedings, which remain almost wholly secret. It is only because we are able to send one avogadore to sit upon their courts that we know anything at all. Ser Giustinian, for whom I work, was among the four councilors who heard your case. He wrote a memorandum of your testimony, which we have already burned, lest one of their agents find it." He paused. "Are you listening?"

Matteo held himself still. "You are saying that I have been condemned."

"I am saying that sentence will be passed upon you this evening, when they meet. This afternoon, of course, they are all at Mass." His tone was faintly mocking. "The bridges are jammed right now, but the council will meet at nine. With the return of reports from abroad, they are now ready to settle your case."

"From abroad? I do not understand."

The lawyer sighed. "All your letters to foreign destinations have been opened and read. But since some were intercepted only once aboard, the reports on their contents must travel back by return voyage. Why do you think they have kept you here so long?"

"Our business correspondence?" Matteo shook his head in wonder. "Those letters were to our agents, buyers in Alexandria and the Levant! If I am to be judged by their contents, I shall be freed."

"Ser Benveneto, please do not think that. The Council of Ten does not have to prove your complicity before deciding to get rid of you. They deal with threats to the Republic’s internal security, and one need not conspire with our enemies to disturb the social order. The council read your letters to learn whether you had fellow conspirators, not to determine what to do with you. They have doubtless already made that decision."

Matteo pondered, holding up the lawyer’s words in the strange clarity of his present thoughts. The situation seemed no different from what had obtained before he arrived. "So why are you telling me this?" he asked.

"Because you have the opportunity to make a statement." Contarini turned and lifted something: a writing tray, with inkpot inlaid and a pen lying across it. "It has been six weeks since your appearance before the council, and Ser Giustinian maintained strongly that you should have the chance to add to your testimony."

"Add what?" Matteo asked. Then he caught an undercurrent of the lawyer’s words. "Why was I never interrogated? That is how you supplement prisoners’ testimony, is it not?"

Contarini was adjusting the tray on his lap. "The council is far from foolish. They realize their increasing unpopularity, and your case–the merchant who poured caofa–is well known. Ser Giustinian at length persuaded them that unless they were confident of finding something, they should not subject you to torment."

As they did my partner. What did Gaspare say, when he must have known what they wanted? Matteo could not enter that thought, it lay beyond seas he would ever cross.

"A statement could hardly hurt you," the lawyer said. "The last report reached port yesterday, and the Ten are annoyed that it contains nothing. An expression of cooperation from you might salve their anger."

A statement could hardly help me. It certainly could not help his family or Gaspare. Though perhaps he was to think otherwise: doomed regardless, should he not take the opportunity to castigate his folly, absolve his associates, praise Venice? The temptation was tremendous: Matteo could feel the logic of its urgency, the needed supplement to the inadequate truths of his testimony. Provided freely despite, because, it had not been extracted by force.

"I . . ." You what? I condemn myself. As you should. Nothing true would do anything else.

"Yes?"

"I," and could say no more. From that word, nothing could follow.

"Gaspare," he said, "did nothing wrong. Neither did anyone in my family. I urged them to let me import caofa, and they assented."

"Good," the lawyer said. He was writing. "And you?"

"Me?"

"What of your own actions?" The pen had paused.

"I brought this down upon them." Gesturing, simply, about him.

"Yes, but how?"

Matteo grimaced, fretful. "I told them all that. Jews, the Arsenal, our little booth." Shame settled over him like soot. "Everything I said before was true."

"Nothing more?"

What did the man want? "Everything," Matteo repeated. He sat silently as the lawyer finished writing.

"Very well," Contarini said at last. "This will be entered in evidence." He stood and turned toward the door. "They will probably send for you, and you will be taken across the Ponte dei Sospiri to the Palazzo. If this happens, you may have one more chance to say something before sentencing."

"I beg your pardon?" Matteo’s attention snagged on this. "We are in the Palazzo."

"Here? No, this is the New Prison." Contarini looked at him oddly. "The cells of the pozzi are . . . only for short stays."

Matteo could not explain why this disclosure so disoriented him. Wretched as he was, his deracination was exacerbated to vertigo by this awareness, and when the guards came for him hours later ("Don’t bring your bag," with a laugh), he staggered in the corridor and had to be pulled upright. His journey across the Bridge of Sighs, its windows glinting in the torchlight of night-time Venice, produced a pang of such piercing misery that he halted in mid-passage, as though the wavering reflections on the canal and the shouts of protracted battagliole were signals of urgent import. A jab sent him stumbling forward, down the last dozen steps of the descending arch and into the Palazzo Ducale, returned at last.

The haggard man sitting on a far bench in the busy waiting room looked at him in astonishment, and it was only as he saw the expression change that Matteo recognized Gaspare. He was dressed like a worker, and bruise-colored bags sagged beneath each eye. The young man rose and was immediately forced back into his seat by the guards on either side.

"Matteo!" His gaze ran up and down, and Matteo realized what his beard, his filthy clothes, and hair must look like. He took a step forward and was restrained. There were another half dozen people in the room, including Contarini, who was looking at him. Matteo was tugged backward, but resisted for a second.

"You have been imprisoned this whole time?" Gaspare called. Matteo gestured: As you can see. He began to ask something, but was firmly pulled away; the two men were not to speak. He sat fifteen feet away against the opposite wall, exchanging mute looks with his friend until the double door opened and a guard stepped out.

"The prisoner Benveneto." He was hauled to his feet, but walked across the parquet floor unassisted. Into the inner chamber, whose dimness could no longer affect him, who had spent months in darkness.

There were more than five judges sitting this time; perhaps all Ten, although Matteo did not think he could count without using a finger.

"Matteo Benveneto," said one without preamble. "You have engaged in activities disruptive to the civil order of Venice, sought to make secret treaties with foreigners, and derided the wisdom of the city’s traders and nobles to all who would listen.

"Had we found any evidence that you intended harm to the Republic–" He paused and looked hard at Matteo– "our response would have been immediate and terrible.

"Instead, we sentence you to ten years’ exile from Venice and its possessions." He lifted a sheet of paper he had been holding in his lap, and a clerk hastened to take it.

"Have you anything to say?"

Matteo was too stunned to answer. He had expected merely to be hanged.

"No," he said at last. And then: "All I have said has been true."

The judge quirked his lips. "The same for me," he said. "Take him away."

No one stopped him from walking unsteadily to Gaspare. "What did they do to you?" he asked.

"They confiscated the ingegno," the engineer said urgently. "Seized the workshop and our papers."

Matteo could think of no reply save "I am sorry." He looked into his friend’s eyes. "But how are you?" he persisted.

"You must go now," said Contarini, coming up. He held a paper in his hand. "It is not good for your friend to be seen speaking to you."

Matteo looked stricken, but it was Gaspare who spoke. "That does not matter," he said firmly. He looked coldly at Contarini, who shook his head and walked over to the guards.

"Your family will fall liable for our costs," Gaspare said. "I tried to speak to them, but my father forbade any contact."

Matteo’s heart contracted. "Do you still have your position?" he asked.

"I now work in the iron foundry," Gaspare replied with a shrug. "The dignities of the bronzeri are denied me."

"The Iron Age came after the Bronze," said Contarini briskly, returning with two guards in attendance. "Bid your friend farewell, Benveneto. You have a voyage ahead of you."

The two young men looked at each other. "What a mess," said Gaspare. "Weren’t we going to win ricchezza e fama?"

"For our familes and for Venice, I believe." Matteo smiled, aching. "And some would spill over on us."

The guards’ grip tightened on his arms. He took a step back, but turned to Contarini. "Between the Ages of Bronze and Iron came the Age of Heroes, remember?" The taunt was like a compress over pain.

"Heroics?" said the engineer, startled.

"Yes!" Matteo called as they led him away. "How do you like that idea?"

Gaspare smiled sadly. "Se è da scherzo, è troppo; se è da vero, è poco," he said.

Night had fallen, but Venice partied on, exultantly and combatively. The battagliole season would soon give way to Carnival, which was already showing its symptoms, a dinner guest who arrives earlier each year.

The lawyer conducted them down a series of corridors–public ones, the kind with windows along one wall. Matteo caught glimpses every seventh step: enormous shadows dancing on the sides of buildings; the Ponte della Paglia writhing with men, as though pugni were stilling battling for it. Shouts on the water, still dark with boats.

"The popolani seem to be rioting," Matteo observed. He added bitterly: "Despite my being in prison."

"I’m glad they don’t know about the caofa shipment," Contarini muttered.

"Shipment? Which one?"

"Did I not tell you? The autumn galleys have returned, including the one from Alexandria bearing the reader’s report on your letters. That ship also contains a large load of caofa beans."

"My caofa!" Matteo stopped dead. "What will my family do?"

"Well, they won’t try to sell it, that’s for sure." The lawyer favored Matteo with a grim smile. "I doubt your father even needs to be told."

A guard prodded him, and he resumed his pace. They descended a staircase, where an official coming up stared at them. Bearded and dirty, Matteo realized he still looked like a prisoner. And of course, he still was one.

"We are putting you on a ship tonight," Contarini was saying. "Your father has paid for passage, and I believe there is a purse awaiting you. You will not starve."

"Tonight?"

"Did you hope to bid your family farewell? You’re still not thinking." They were on the ground floor, where he pointed them toward an exit. "You’re headed upriver, if that’s what you’re worried about. No intolerable sea voyage."

Did they know everything about him? Everything that could be overheard, anyway. How many anonymous pages had been scribbled by informants, preserved in the city’s archives, ready for kindling should the council want a fire? Fatti, compressed in imperishable millions, useful only to damn.

They emerged into one of the courtyards, too crowded and garish with lights for Matteo to tell which one. "Mother of Jesus," Contarini swore. "This can’t be happening in the Broglio."

Matteo laughed. "Listen to yourself," he said, but was drowned out by the cries of the revelers. Many were actually wearing carnival masks, illegal this early in the season. One carried a papier-mâché uccello beneath the front of his tunic, which he would abruptly display to scandalized shrieks.

"Let’s get out of here," said Contarini. "Not through the Arco." Matteo looked toward the crowded entryway, where revelers were still pouring in. He could understand how the lawyer might not wish to get caught in the narrow Arco Foscari with a stream of boisterous popolani.

The crowds on the Molo San Marco were just as bad, but the open space was less alarming. The four men stood beneath the colonnade, looking out upon the teeming wharf and the waters beyond.

"It may be late before we put you on your ship," Contarini observed. He sighed. "I would enjoy a cup of caofa right now."

Matteo didn’t think he heard him right. "Do you drink caofa?" he asked wonderingly.

"Not very often." The lawyer looked at him reproachfully. "You sold it near the Rialto, not the Piazetta."

And will next sell it where? The Hapsburg lands, of riverine trade, beer, and noisome snow, lay before him; what could it matter if he introduced caofa to such trolls? Exile, the condition of Jews and imprudent scholars, was a dish he would learn to keep down, employing his skills with tongues and accounts as a cobbler does his last.

One of the guards stirred. "Ser," he said. "There is a customs launch moving on the water."

"What?" But Matteo, understanding faster and looking with a practiced eye, saw it first. Beyond the heads of the crowd, perhaps sixty feet out in the broad Canale di San Marco, a pair of lamps disclosed the low form of a boat. Figures were crawling over bales, unnoticed though not stealthily. A gondola touched the launch, and more men debarked.

"It is the Nicolotti!" Contarini cried. "They are hijacking confiscated cargo!"

People on the edge of the quay had begun to notice, and were cheering. Did the Nicolotti win today, or were they trying to salvage their honor after a Castellani victory? It was the only question to ponder, and Matteo could not bring himself to ponder much. Let the Shirri find a boat and go after them.

"They’ll throw the shit in the canal," the other guard predicted. It seemed likely enough. Customs agents only took on seized goods, contraband or irregular wares, whose disposition was sufficiently problematic that–

"My beans!" Matteo screamed. He was down the steps and running before either guard could grab him. He nearly crashed into a big-bellied artisan wearing an admiral’s hat, and before he could recover his balance a swarm of shouting youths had enveloped them. Matteo pushed frantically, expecting a hand on his collar at any second, and found himself squirming deeper into the crowd.

The revelers were close-packed but directionless, and Matteo was able to press between them. He saw an open space ahead and squeezed into it, to find an apprentice on hands and knees vomiting onto the cobblestones. A Pantaleone mask, already stepped on, lay beside him. Matteo bent and snatched it up.

He kept the smell of the canal ahead of him as he tugged the dirty mask over his face. Did it cover his beard? The eye holes finally slid into place, and Matteo could see the launch coming closer to the wharf. Hooded Nicolotti were gleefully tearing open the bales and hurling their contents toward the shore. The first handfuls fell short and rained into the canal, but within a minute the brawniest of them, posing like a new doge throwing coins into the multitude, managed to reach the edge of the crowd. The celebrants whooped and snatched at the largess, which they examined and then flung at each other. One landed at Matteo’s feet, and he picked it up.

It was a caofa bean, of course, but green as a pea. Matteo stared. His agent had managed to procure unroasted beans–still scalded so they couldn’t be grown (although it would be worthwhile to try), but likely to remain fresh longer. Caofa that might taste as he remembered it from Alexandria.

Matteo closed his eyes, feeling his heart scalded. More beans pelted the crowd, which was booing lustily.

He did not hear the other craft approach until the increasingly excited pitch of the roar at last penetrated his misery. Faces were turned east, arms pointing. Matteo leaned over the edge of the water, although the occasional nearby splash warned of the pressure exerted by the crowd behind him, and saw the barge approaching.

The arsenalotti who manned it made no attempt to disguise their identities, and their narrow flatboat was recognizably the design used to move lumber through the Arsenal basins. But what Matteo saw was the splendid structure that rose from the deck, like the cabin of the doge’s galley. Its underside lit by a blazing fire, massive as a gigantic bell and beautifully trimmed with brass fittings, the ingegno called forth cries of admiration.

Pipes protruded at right angles like flagpoles, and one of the arsenalotti reached to seize a valve, then snatched back his hand with a roar. As he danced about swearing and the crowd howled with laughter, a second man wrapped up his hand elaborately and turned the valve. Steam erupted in a white plume, and the crowd burst into cheers.

"Be careful!" Matteo cried inanely. "It’s not a toy!"

But a toy was exactly what it was. The arsenalotti capered for the crowd, bowing and waving at their trophy–what impulse had moved them to bring it out? disdain for poor Gaspare? pride in Arsenal workmanship?–while the fire crackled merrily, as though heating soup. Their sweaty faces beamed in the reflected light, looking at the thousands lining the quay.

When they caught sight of the Nicolotti launch, they bellowed with outrage. Imprecations were hurled, and returned. The launch was slowly being turned about, while the barge made straight for it.

"No!" cried Matteo. The barge struck the smaller vessel amidships, and instantly men were leaping from one ship to the other. The crowd was swelling as word spread and people came running out of the Piazetta.

The explosion produced little light, just a tremendous thunderclap and darkness as the flames vanished into steam and debris. The shockwave struck Matteo an instant later, wet and hot. The expanding ball of steam was immediately diffuse enough to admit light, and dancing flames appeared on both boats. Men were screaming, falling into the water.

The quality of noise from the crowd had altered, but could grow no louder. Most of the ingegno was lying near the port side of the barge, which was listing markedly. With a groan it slid into the water and disappeared in a last gout of steam.

Both ships were bobbing empty, although there seemed to be some movement in the water. Splotches of flame dotted the bales like spilled grease, and began spreading to join each other. Within seconds the entire mound was ablaze, a pyre spilling black smoke. Matteo made a sound, but no one heard him.

Then the wind shifted, and they caught it. Roasting caofa, more fragrant than the drink itself, the finest smell in the world. Waves of it came off the boat, expanding to spread across the waterfront and Piazetta. Matteo was weeping, eyes streaming with hot air and cinders, even as the essence rose into his nostrils.

Borne on the lagoon breeze, the cloud spread across Venice. Carousers paused and sniffed with wonder; some recognized it and cheered. Enticing as it disappeared, the aroma expanded to fill every space open to it, an insubstantial dream of fragrant, marvelous caofa.