Chapter Text
Messina, Sicily — October, 1347
The gulls were the first to know.
Andreu noticed it before he noticed anything else, because Andreu was the kind of man who noticed birds. Not in a poetic way — he was not a poetic man, his wife reminded him often, and at length, and sometimes with crockery — but in the practical way of someone who had grown up gutting fish on a dock. Gulls meant work. Gulls meant a ship was coming in, or a catch was being cleaned, or a fool tourist from the mainland had dropped his lunch. Gulls were, in their screaming and shitting and squabbling way, the reliable music of the Messina harbor.
Tonight, there were no gulls.
There was a moon, the wrong color, hung too low over the water like a lamp someone had forgotten to trim. There was the smell of the sea, which was correct. There was the distant clatter of the night watch on the seawall, which was also correct. But the gulls had taken themselves elsewhere — to Calabria, perhaps, or to whichever underworld gulls retired to when they were finished — and their absence sat on the harbor like a held breath.
Andreu crossed himself, because that was what one did, and then he spat into the water, because that was also what one did, and the two gestures more or less canceled each other out in the eyes of God. He was thirty-four years old, missing two teeth and one finger, and he had a wife named Caterina and four children of various sizes, two of whom were probably his. He was not, by his own estimation, a man marked for any particular destiny. He had come down to the dock tonight because Old Vito had sent word that twelve Genoese galleys were limping in from the Black Sea and there was coin to be made by any man with a strong back and a weak sense of curiosity.
Andreu had both. He was qualified.
He shouldered his hook and walked out along the pier.
The galleys came in slowly.
That was the first wrong thing, after the gulls. Genoese ships did not come in slowly. Genoese ships came in the way a drunk husband comes home — loud, sideways, full of opinions — and the sailors aboard them shouted and sang and insulted the harbor pilots in three languages at once. It was tradition. It was practically liturgy.
These ships came in like funeral barges.
No singing. No shouting. No insults, in Genoese or otherwise. The oars stroked the water in a rhythm that was almost right and not quite, the way a man might walk if he had forgotten which leg was which and was working it out as he went. Andreu watched the lead galley slide up against the pier with a soft, almost apologetic bump, and he waited for someone aboard to throw a line.
No one threw a line.
"Madonna," muttered Old Vito beside him, which was an excellent summary of the situation.
A boy was eventually dispatched up the side of the galley with a rope, and the boy came back down very quickly, and the boy was sick into the harbor for a long and thorough interval, and after that the boy went home and was not seen at the docks again for the rest of his natural life. Which, as it turned out, was not long.
The stevedores went aboard anyway. There was a coin to be made. There was always coin to be made, even when the gulls were gone and the ships sighed up to the pier like dying horses and the boy who had climbed up first was now somewhere in an alley reconsidering his career. Andreu went aboard with the others because the others went, and because Caterina had been particularly eloquent that morning on the subject of the rent.
The deck was empty.
Not empty in the sense of unoccupied. Empty in the sense of vacated — the way a room is empty after someone has left it in a hurry, with a chair tipped over and a cup still rolling. There were ropes coiled half-coiled. There was a bucket on its side, with something in it that Andreu chose not to identify by lamplight. There was a small wooden flute lying on the planks, and Andreu, who had a sentimental streak about such things, picked it up and put it in his belt to take home to his youngest.
(He would never play it. None of them would. The flute, when found later in the ruin of his house, would be discovered to have a single human tooth lodged in its mouthpiece, and the magistrate who found it would burn it without writing it down.)
The crew was belowdecks.
There were perhaps thirty of them, and at first Andreu thought they were all dead, which would have been bad but explicable. The sea was a hungry thing and crews died, and it was the practical sorrow of port towns to clean up after her appetite.
But they were not all dead.
Some of them were singing.
It was not a song Andreu knew. It was not in any language he could put a name to, though he had heard Sicilian and Genoese and Catalan and a smattering of Arabic and the curses of at least two kinds of Greek, and he considered himself reasonably well-traveled in the matter of how human beings made noise. This was something else. The men who were singing it lay on their pallets with their eyes open and their mouths barely moving, and what came out was a sound like a hymn being sung underwater, by something that had only recently learned what a hymn was and was very pleased with itself about it.
The men who were not singing were dead, mostly, or in the slow process of becoming so. The lamps caught the shapes of them — the swollen places at the throat and under the arm, black and shining, the size of small apples. Some had burst. The deck was sticky with what had come out, and the smell was something Andreu would later try to describe to a priest and fail.
"Madonna," said Old Vito again, with the weary persistence of a man whose vocabulary was being asked to do work it had not trained for.
"We should leave," said Andreu, who had at this point in his life made very few correct decisions but was about to make one.
"We should," said Old Vito.
Neither of them left.
This is the part Andreu would, in the small remaining country of his life, return to in dreams.
There was a crate.
It was at the back of the hold, behind the singing men, behind the dying men, behind a stack of spice barrels that had been arranged around it with what — looking back — Andreu would recognize as the deliberate care of men trying very hard to hide something they had been told not to look at.
It was made of cedar.
It was the size, more or less, of a child's coffin, though Andreu did not think of this comparison at the time, because at the time he was thinking about coin. The crate had ecclesiastical seals on it, three of them, in red wax. Two of the seals were broken. The third was intact and bore a mark Andreu did not recognize: a hand, or what was meant to be a hand, with too many fingers.
He counted them, because counting was something to do.
There were seven.
"What is this?" said Old Vito, who had crossed the hold to stand beside him without Andreu noticing, which was strange, because Old Vito creaked when he walked. Old Vito had not creaked. Old Vito had arrived.
"Cargo," said Andreu, which was true and not helpful.
They got the crate up onto the deck with two other men, who did not speak the whole time and afterward went home and were not seen again for some weeks, by which point the question of where they had gone was no longer the most pressing one in Messina. They set the crate down by the gangplank. The wood of the deck creaked under it more than it should have, given the size.
The harbormaster, who had finally arrived with a lamp and an expression, looked at the crate, and looked at the broken seals, and looked at Andreu, and made the calculation that men in his position have always made, which is that whatever was in the crate was now Someone Else's Problem and the sooner it left his dock the better.
"Open it on the pier," he said. "I want to see what they brought in before I sign for any of it."
"On the pier, signore?"
"On the pier."
So they carried it onto the pier, and they set it down under the wrong-colored moon, and Andreu took his hook and wedged it under the lid.
The lid came off with a sigh.
It was not a creak. It was not a crack. It was a sigh, the soft exhalation of something that had been holding its breath for a long time and was now, finally, permitted to let it out. The men around the crate took a step back without discussing it. The harbormaster crossed himself. Old Vito muttered something in a Calabrian dialect that Andreu had never heard him use, even when drunk, even when his daughter married the cobbler.
Inside the crate was straw, and inside the straw was a face.
A mask. It was a mask. Andreu told himself this firmly and several times.
It was made of porcelain, white as a moon that had been washed and put away in a cupboard. It was the face of a young man, or a young woman, or possibly both at once — Andreu could not later say — with high cheekbones and a small, gentle mouth curved in an expression of the most patient, the most loving amusement. The eyes were closed. The eyelashes were painted in fine, fine black lines, the work of a craftsman with too much time and not enough fear of God.
It had not a single crack on it. Not one. After what, by Andreu's reckoning, must have been weeks at sea in a wooden box belowdecks among men who had been dying in interesting ways, it lay on the straw as if a nun had just set it down for a moment to go and fetch a cloth.
It was, Andreu thought distantly, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
He should not have thought this. Andreu was not a man given to admiring objects. Andreu admired good wine and his wife's thighs and the way light came off the harbor at certain hours of certain mornings, and beyond that his aesthetic vocabulary was thin. He had no business finding a porcelain face beautiful. And yet.
Hello, little one.
Andreu blinked.
The voice had not come from the crate. The voice had come from inside his own ear, which was a different and worse thing, but it had used the cadence his mother used to use when she put him to bed as a child. His mother had been dead for nineteen years. His mother had spoken in the soft up-and-down lilt of a village near Catania, where she had been born, and where she had sung him a particular lullaby about a fisherman and the sea and a girl who waited, and the voice in his ear was using exactly that lilt now, the same up-and-down, the same patient warmth, the same — the same —
You look tired, little one. You've been working so hard.
"I have," whispered Andreu, who had not meant to whisper anything.
Pick me up.
He picked it up.
He did not feel himself bend. He did not feel himself reach. He felt only that his hands, which had been at his sides, were now cradling the porcelain face the way one cradles a newborn — carefully, beneath the back of the head — and the mask was warm. It should have been cold. Porcelain at the bottom of a crate, on an October night, on a pier in Messina, should have been cold as a knife. It was warm. It was the warmth of skin.
The painted eyelashes did not move. The painted mouth did not move. But Andreu felt, with absolute and serene certainty, that he was being smiled at.
There. That's better. Isn't that better.
"Yes," said Andreu, and he was startled to find that he was crying. He had not cried since his mother's funeral. He had not cried when his second daughter died of fever. He had not cried when the Saracen pirate had taken his finger off with a curved knife in the alley behind the chandler's, and that had been by any reasonable accounting an occasion. But he was crying now, slow and warm down his unshaven cheeks, and he could not have said why except that something — someone — was being very kind to him for the first time in a long time.
The harbormaster was saying something. Old Vito was saying something. They were quite far away. They were on the other side of a soft, white curtain that had drawn itself across the world.
Take me home, little one.
"I can't," whispered Andreu. "It's not mine. The harbormaster —"
Take me home.
"Yes," said Andreu.
He tucked the mask under his arm, beneath his jerkin, and he walked off the pier. No one stopped him. The harbormaster was, at that exact moment, looking at the open crate and being violently sick, and Old Vito was staring at the moon, and the other stevedores were watching the singing men come up out of the hold of the galley, walking on legs that did not quite remember being legs, and so it was that the most important cargo Messina would ever receive walked off the pier under the arm of a man whose name no one would bother to write down.
Behind him, the first stevedore — a young man named Tomasso, who had a sister in Palermo and had been saving for a donkey — coughed once, politely, into his sleeve.
He looked at his sleeve.
He had not been eating anything red.
He looked up at the moon, which was still the wrong color, and he opened his mouth to say something, and what came out instead was more of the red, in a quantity that surprised him very much, and that was the last surprise of Tomasso's life.
The harbor began, very quietly, to die.
Andreu walked.
The streets of Messina at this hour were a confusion of cats and shadow and the small domestic sounds of a city that had not yet learned it was finished. A baby cried somewhere. A man laughed somewhere else. A woman, in a window above a tavern, was singing to herself as she combed her hair — a real song this time, in proper Sicilian, about a soldier and a cherry tree. Andreu heard all of these sounds at a great distance, as if through wool.
The mask, against his ribs, was warm.
Tell me about your wife, little one.
He told it. He had not meant to. He had meant to walk home in dignified silence, like a man who had stolen something from his employer and was reasonable about it, but the voice in his ear was so kind, and so patient, and so interested, that he found himself telling it everything — about Caterina's laugh, which was loud and embarrassing in public and which he loved, and about her hands, which were rough from washing other people's linen, and about how she had cried when their second daughter died and he had not known what to do with his own hands and so had simply stood in the doorway like a fool for an hour until she had finally looked up and said, Andreu, you idiot, come here, and he had gone there, and she had cried into his shirt, and that had been — that had been —
That had been love, little one. Yes. I see. I understand.
"Do you?" whispered Andreu, on a street he had walked a thousand times and which now seemed unfamiliar, as if it had been very slightly rearranged while he wasn't looking.
Oh, yes. I understand love very well. I've been studying it for a long time.
His house was at the end of the lane, with the blue shutter that Caterina had insisted on, against his judgment, because she had once seen a blue shutter in Taormina and decided that they too were the sort of people who had blue shutters. The shutter was, in the moonlight, very nearly the color of the sea.
Andreu stopped at the door.
Some part of him, some old animal part that had nothing to do with reason or coin or the rent, was telling him — quite urgently, in fact, in the tone his grandmother had used when she warned him about wells — not to take the mask inside. To put it down on the doorstep. To leave it there. To turn around and walk back to the harbor and confess to the harbormaster and accept whatever punishment was due to a man who had walked off with cargo that wasn't his.
He stood at the door for what may have been a long time.
Andreu.
The mask had never used his name before.
The mask should not have known his name. He had not told it. He had told it about Caterina, and about his daughters, and about the finger he had lost to the Saracen, but he had not told it his own name. He was certain of this. He was, in the small remaining clear country of his mind, absolutely certain.
Andreu, little one. Open the door.
He opened the door.
Caterina was asleep at the table.
She did this often. She fell asleep waiting up for him on the nights he worked the docks, with her cheek on her folded arms and her dark hair coming loose from its pin, and he had a small ritual of brushing the hair back from her face and carrying her to bed without waking her, which he was very proud of and which she pretended not to know about. The fire was low. The children were asleep upstairs in the loft, all four of them, in the tangled sleeping-puppy heap they made every night despite having been told repeatedly to sleep in their own places.
The house smelled of bread and onions and the small good smell of his family.
Andreu stood in the doorway with the mask under his arm and he thought: I will put it in the cellar. I will put it in the cellar and tomorrow I will take it back to the harbor and I will say I found it on the street and I will give it up.
Of course, little one. Put me in the cellar. That's a very good idea.
The voice was so warm. So agreeable. So understanding.
He went to the cellar door.
He opened it.
He went down the three stone steps into the cool dark, where Caterina kept her onions in their braids and her jars of oil and the small wheel of cheese they were saving for the saint's day. He set the mask down on the wooden shelf, between the onions and the cheese, and he stepped back.
The painted eyes were closed. The painted mouth smiled, patient and loving, in the dark.
Goodnight, little one.
"Goodnight," whispered Andreu.
He climbed the stone steps.
He closed the cellar door.
He went to the table and he brushed his wife's dark hair back from her face, and she made the soft small sound she always made, and he carried her up the ladder to the loft as he had done a thousand times, and he laid her down beside the heap of their children, and he stood for a moment looking at all of them in the dim red light of the banked fire.
He smiled.
He did not know that he was smiling. He had not, in fact, smiled in some time. Caterina had remarked on it just last week, in the tone she reserved for remarking on things, and he had told her that men of his age and station did not smile without good cause, and she had thrown a wooden spoon at him.
He was smiling now.
He climbed down from the loft. He banked the fire. He went to his own pallet by the hearth — they slept down here in the warm months, up in the loft in the cold, and the seasons had not yet fully turned — and he lay down on his back, fully clothed, with his hands folded on his chest like a man laid out for his own funeral.
He stared at the ceiling.
In the cellar, below him, between the onions and the cheese, the porcelain face smiled in the dark.
Sleep, little one. Sleep well. I'll be here in the morning.
Andreu slept.
In the harbor, the first stevedore was already cold. The second was on his knees in an alley, coughing politely into his hands and trying to understand what was wrong with them. The harbormaster had locked himself in his office with a bottle of something Sicilian and was attempting, with diminishing success, to write a letter to his superior in Palermo. Old Vito had walked home and gone to bed and would, in the morning, find that he could not get out of it again, and would lie there for three days asking his daughter in a small clear voice for water that she would bring and that he would not be able to swallow.
The galleys at the pier creaked against their moorings. The wrong-colored moon set. The gulls did not come back.
In Andreu's cellar, the porcelain mask lay between the onions and the cheese, and it did not move, because it did not need to.
It had four days.
It had, perhaps, a great deal longer than that. It was very patient. It had been patient for a long time, in the dark of the crate, in the dark of the hold, in the dark of whatever older and colder dark it had been in before that — and four days, in the cellar of a stevedore named Andreu, with a wife and four children and a blue shutter, was nothing. Four days was a held breath. Four days was an aperitif.
It listened, with great love, to the sound of the family breathing above it.
It smiled.
It had come a long way.
It was so glad to be home.