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 whic