THE GLASSBLOWER

  THE GLASSBLOWER DIPTYCH I

  VICTORIA GODDARD

  Copyright © 2024 by Victoria Goddard

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Author’s Note

  1

  Scheherezade entered the hostelry without much anticipation. It was raining: she’d crossed the city hoping not so much for a warm welcome, but at least warmth. She’d found, over the past year or so of travelling, that the warmth accorded to an unaccompanied woman traveller varied quite considerably.

  The room was dim and smokey. The new-style glass lamps were in the process of being lit, by a thin, faded-looking woman in a dull blue apron. She looked around with a sharp turn when Scheherezade opened the door, and paused in apparent astonishment. Scheherezade nodded uncertainly. “I was told this was a safe house for travellers,” she said, using the words she’d been given by a tinker before she’d embarked on the ship.

  “It was,” replied the thin woman. Her voice was sharp as her movements, monotonous as her colouring. “Is still, sometimes. There have been troubles.”

  “I am sorry to hear that.” The language was taking some time getting used to. There were a few words of Arabic, even Persian mixed in, which disconcerted her. This city was nothing like her home, neither the desert nor the gardens. It was built on water, dripped with water, was sodden with water. If the Babylon of Scheherezade’s past was a city of air, the island city of Venice was a city of water.

  “Come in,” the woman said with a toss of her head, her grey headscarf swaying. “But I warn you, be careful. The old master is dead, may he rest in peace, and the new master has different ideas. Be sure you keep yourself to yourself. We don’t want any … shenanigans.”

  Scheherezade tried hard not to be offended. A solitary woman, coming in to a hostelry of a rainy evening, dressed in a dark cloak … There were many views people took, few of them admirable. She did not need to be beautiful to know that.

  “Thank you, good mistress. I merely want to sit by the fire and warm up. I can pay.”

  “Where is your coin from?”

  “I have silver coin of seven realms, and gold of three, and stories of a thousand.”

  The thin woman stopped again, hand on the last lamp. She didn’t turn. Then she blew out the spill she was holding, with another abrupt motion. “I’ve heard tales of a woman who told stories.”

  “I’m sure I’m not the only one, good mistress.”

  “The new master will be coming soon. He doesn’t hold with travellers from beyond. Best say you’re from somewhere closer to home. Sit. I’ll bring you something warm.”

  Scheherezade sat on the bench placed beside the fireplace. With the lanterns lit the room was quite pleasant, cleaner than she’d expected from the stench in the canals outside. She could hear people’s voices echoing indistinctly along the water, and shivered again. Since leaving her desert she’d never felt quite warm; her paths had taken her to cold forests and empty plains.

  She had seen many great wonders—and wondered greatly what she should do, where she should go, what there was to do when whole new worlds opened before her, and all she could truly see was the face of her husband when he had opened his eyes at the last and seen that she was killing him, and not understood.

  After a few moments she took off her cloak and tried to wring out her headscarf without getting water all down her back. She’d arrived in Venice that morning on board a ship trading up the Adriatic Sea from Constantinople. She’d joined the vessel as a half-stowaway; the captain occasionally smuggled items, and people, from a certain small town on the Illyrian coast. The tinker had been very helpful with what she needed to know to cross from the little town, which was quite close to a gap between the worlds.

  She had been travelling on the other side, along a lonely road between Faërie and somewhere else, and lost the path in a misty forest. Stumbling out to this side of the forest, the first person she’d met had addressed her in a barbaric dialect of Persian.

  Thus she’d found she’d stumbled back to her own world, just about a year of her life since she’d left for the unknown regions behind the sun, and some centuries of its own time. She might have been more grieved by the changes had she not already lost everyone and everything she held dear.

  The thin woman came back with a small tray containing a steaming bowl of hot spiced wine and some bread rolls. Scheherezade murmured her thanks. Three months in that little Illyrian town, part of the Venetian empire, had given her the basics of the language. The Illyrian villagers had been a hybrid population, part native Slav, part Venetian colonists, part Persian and Ottoman settlers, with a handful of families who’d come through what they called the Gap in the Woods.

  The other side of the Gap was a land where satyrs and centaurs roamed and nymphs and other small divinities were to be found, and which was oddly fractured by magic, so they said; long ago there had been more commerce between the worlds. Scheherezade had not been wandering in Arcadia, as the place was called, and was a little disappointed not have been able to experience the truths of those stories.

  She ate hungrily, and eventually sat back to feel her cloak—still damp, alas—and tried to warm herself at the fire, which was down to sullen embers. She tried to focus her thoughts on what to do. She could not—would not—stay here, in this damp and unwelcoming city, so grimy and so gloomy. Perhaps in the summer it was magical, the water and the palaces and the people, but this time of year, this time of her life … no.

  No.

  She had no idea what else to do. She had a small store of coins, and was reasonably confident in her ability to earn her way by her stories.

  (Oh, how hard that first night had been, through the other side of the oasis from her world to another, when she nerved herself to enter a strange caravanserai, with only the desperate knowledge that she had used every art available to her to keep her husband focused on her for those thousand nights and one night he had not killed any other wife. But yet … each night in a new place, as a stranger, continued just as hard. Would there never be peace?

  But yet, she had not asked for, nor been offered, peace. She had despaired of the end of all her stories, and been granted worlds more.

  She had not listened well enough to her own tales. Be careful what you wish for was riddled through them all.)

  She would keep travelling, she supposed. Keep learning stories. Keep telling tales, high and low, short and long, in her own language and in any other tongue she might learn. She was already become a character in a story, that storytelling queen who had told her stories for a thousand nights and one night. Would it be so terrible to spend her life turning slowly into the sharp-eyed crone in the corner of the room?

  By the time she lifted her head from the buns, which were not very nice once the sauce of hunger had thinned, a few other patrons had entered the room. Three men, two together and a third who’d seated himself apart, and two or three women—she could not quite see around the two men with them—whose clothing suggested they were of higher rank than one might expect to find in such a mean hostelry as this. They were clearly (surely?) not related, not with the way they were touching each other, though all but one was dark of hair and eye and feature, if not so dark in any respect as Scheherezade herself.

  She patted her hair self-consciously, her braid wet down her back. She had hung her cloak on the hook beside the chimney, but the fire was so unthrifty it barely cast more than smoke into the air. The party called for wine and food, and started a noisy laughing argument whose laughter was raucous and harsh to her ears.

  She told herself it was not because she was jealous of their camaraderie. She had had a close companion and friend only in her sister, and no one since. Her sister was dead, for telling the truth, and Scheherezade’s hands were bloody with the bloodless death she had granted her husband when he had given her that truth in his turn, and shown her that not all her stories could save a man from himself if he did not so choose.

  Scheherezade swallowed the sour wine and turned her gaze to the other man, the one who sat by himself. She was careful not to be too bold in her attention. He was thin, neatly but plainly dressed, holding himself as if he also were a bit cold. His clothing was rumpled and bore marks here on there on it, soot and burns from what she could see at this distance. His hair was dark but his skin fairer than the other men, his features rather narrow but attractively disposed, drawing her appreciation as for a sculpture more than anything.

  His hands commanded her attention, being beautifully shaped and somehow eloquent in how they rested on the table, one curled around the stem of his goblet. They had a few burns on them, too, and smudges of dirt or ash, and she could see the silvery line of a scar across one wrist catching the light from the lamp on a table near him.

  He seemed to feel her gaze, for he moved his hands suddenly and rubbed the scar with the fingers of the opposite hand. She looked down, flicking her glance back up a moment later to see that he was looking at her with reciprocal albeit much more subdued curiosity.

  Movement across the room caught her eye. The thin woman from before was standing at the door to the kitchen door, staring at the scarred young man with a hungry, almost desolate expression. He did not seem to notice, for he had returned his gaze to his drink, which he was now sipping slowly. Scheherezade had the strong impression he was waiting for something.

  Not someone? she asked herself, running through possible stories for a clue to this one. Perhaps … there was a half-veiled eagerness to his bearing, though his face was melancholic. But he was not looking at the door, he was looking at his goblet, the party over by the window, at the kitchen door where the thin woman had disappeared again.

  The outside door swung open. The scarred young man tensed. She looked too, perforce: it was a great bear of a man, with a small boy running behind him. The big man bellowed out a handful of incomprehensible words to the room and flung himself down in the great chair on the other side of the fireplace from where Scheherezade sat. The little boy ran off through through the kitchen door. Both Scheherezade and the melancholic young man held themselves still. She relaxed when the little boy returned with a bottle of wine; he did not.

  She decided the raucous party was getting too large and belligerent for her tastes. She felt the thick wool of her cloak, but it was still not dry. She sighed and shifted in her seat. Not that she had anywhere to go, this time of day, and she did not, quite, think that it would be safer to wander the nighttime streets of Venice than to stay in this hostelry.

  The melancholic young man drank his wine slowly and picked at his buns with little enthusiasm. Scheherezade watched him as closely as she dared, drawn by his tension and his abstraction. He seemed to her as if he were both waiting and listening to something she couldn’t hear. It intrigued her. He made no effort to speak to her or anyone else.

  When the thin woman next passed by Scheherezade very quietly asked for her tariff. The woman nodded brusquely, eyes on the big man, who was sprawled in his chair, red-faced from the wine he was quaffing, and grinning over at the loud party.

  “Your husband?” Scheherezade asked, trying to put this story together.

  “Nothing like the real one,” the thin woman replied, her voice sharp and acidic. “I shouldn’t have—but never mind that.” Her glance strayed across to the quiet man.

  “Who is that?”

  “Who? Oh, him!” Her tone was dismissive, but her intense gaze belied it. “He’s a glassblower, I hear tell. Foreign, they say.”

  “Foreign? Like … me?”

  “Nothing like. From across the mountains, they say. Florence or somewhere. Jewish probably, and pretending not to be. Don’t talk to him. He’s trouble.”

  “There seems to be a lot of trouble here.”

  “The malaria is rising,” she said enigmatically. “He’s an artist, that glassblower. The master doesn’t like artists.”

  A thin whining voice called for wine, and the woman bustled off, leaving Scheherezade to ponder her words. So the melancholic young man was a glassblower. That must be the cause of the scars, from dealing with molten glass, and the burns on his clothes, too. He was watching the little boy now, who was back-chatting pertly with the raucous party. Scheherezade didn’t understand his words, he spoke far too fast and with a lisp moreover, but she guessed they were rather ruder than one would like a young child to know, in an ideal world.

  Neither this nor any of the ones she had seen had been an ideal world, not for all the wistful longing in the eyes of those exiled to the Illyrian town on the other side of the Gap in the Woods from Arcadia.

  There was a fuss—spilled wine?—over at the loud table, and one of the women swept up the little boy onto her lap. The other, or one of the others—Scheherezade could still not see the whole group clearly—laughed and lilted out something in a voice so much more musical than anything else to come from that direction that Scheherezade was taken aback. She tried not to be obvious in peering more closely, squinting against the smoke. The boy was leaning against the woman’s breast, his expression pouting and sly. She was fondling him happily.

  Scheherezade leaned back. She felt sick. She wished she’d been guided to a different safe house. That she had somewhere else to go. But she did not.

  A stray draught brushed across her lower back. She shivered, drawing her cloak down from the hook where it was still not yet dry, and in her turn to free it from a snag on an iron protuberance in the side of the chimney she saw the two new men who had entered the room quietly. They stood too casually near the door, one half turned outside, the other glaring at the room.

  The raucous party were ignoring everything but the boy, who was now holding a wine-cup, enormous in his hands, and giggling as he teased the men with giving it back. The laughing woman was fiddling with his curls, the little neckcloth he wore in imitation of the men’s dress, touching. The two men were leaning over the table, reaching for the wine-cup, ignoring even the other woman, who was pushing back and trying to hold one of them back by the arm. The little boy was still giggling and lisping out incomprehensible phrases. Everyone else seemed to find the situation hilarious.

  Not everyone. The glassblower was still, watching them with such focus that she was quite sure he was seeing nothing else in the room.

  She looked around again under the guise of swinging on her cloak. The master chuckled indulgently at something one of the party called out, and tossed his head at the thin woman. She was standing once more at the kitchen doorway, wringing a cloth in her hands. Scheherezade saw that, her hands stilling on her collar without fastening the catch. Then she saw that as the master resettled himself into his chair, he gave a small nod to the strangers.

  The one on the inside stepped casually forward, into her clear line of sight. He made a motion with one hand that she didn’t at first recognize, except that she’d seen people ready to murder, seen men without conscience ready to kill without passion. She knew exactly that professional calm of the man without a heart or a care. So had her husband looked when he wedded and bedded and buried a wife each day for the year before she had steeled her nerve to offer herself to him.

  She couldn’t see this man’s weapon but she didn’t care. She still held her cloak and without any further thought she jumped forward out of the inglenook and tackled the killer with it.

  They crashed sideways into the table in front of the glassblower, scattering his goblet and all the wine within it across the floor in a terrible ringing smash. As the killer cursed vehemently she saw the knife in his hand, a wicked-looking thing with a soot-blackened blade.

  She rolled sideways over his hand, using her elbow to knock his face back against the flagstones. Something snapped beneath her, but she felt no pain. As he writhed she fell off his arm, half under the glassblower’s feet, and as she rolled to her hands and knees she saw the second man hesitating between attacking and running, and at a sudden trill of obscene laughter turn to run.

  She pushed herself up. The whole thing had taken much less time than she’d realized: no one had had much time to react. The master was half-upright from his chair, the raucous party had barely turned to see what the noise was, and the glassblower was blinking in dazzled astonishment.

  Scheherezade caught her breath on a small flare of pity that this melancholic young man’s innocence should be broken. Her storyteller’s mind enquired next why the new master of this hostelry should be engaging ruffians to attack him—if he had been the target—but curiosity and confusion and a pained sense she’d bruised her hip was overwhelmed by the expression on the thin woman’s face

  The woman looked absolutely horrified, sick with fear. She’d dropped the rag from one hand, and her face was sallow. Her eyes stared wide, negating the horror she was witnessing.

  She wasn’t looking at the mess, or the still-cursing ruffian on the ground, at Scheherezade, at the glassblower, at her husband, or at anything else. She was staring at the raucous party.

  The glassblower stood up indecisively, blocking Scheherezade’s own view of the party. She was shifting to see when another motion from the door caught her eye, and she turned to see that a trio of elaborately tabarded men with drawn swords had just flung themselves into the room. One shouted and ran off outside again. The other two spread out and cried, “Halt! Halt in the name of the Doge!”

 

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