The Glass Kiln

The crier came to the Rialto on the eighth day of November, in the year of Our Lord 1291, a little after the bells for terce, and climbed onto the stone by the money-changers' tables, and unrolled his parchment, and read it out in a voice that carried across the whole wet market.

Mara heard it with a basket of beech billets on her back and a loaf of bread under one arm, standing between a fishwife and a man selling eels out of a barrel. The crier read it twice, so that no one could say afterward they had not heard it.

The Great Council of the Commune of Venice, for the safety of the city against fire, had decreed that every furnace for the making of glass within the city should be put out and pulled down, and that the glassmakers should take their art to the island of Murano, across the lagoon, and work there and nowhere else. Small lamps for beads, set far from houses, might be allowed. The great furnaces might not. It was done in the name of the Doge, Pietro Gradenigo, and the councils, and it was to be done before the feast of the Nativity.

There was a noise from the crowd like a wave going up a beach. Half the people round Mara were glad. Everyone in Venice could remember a fire: whole streets of wooden houses gone in a night, the sky orange over the roofs, buckets passed hand to hand from the canals. The glass furnaces burned day and night, every day of the year, and threw sparks out of their chimneys like fountains. "About time," said the fishwife, with satisfaction. "My cousin lost a roof in San Barnaba to one of those chimneys."

Mara said nothing. Mara lived in San Barnaba, under the roof of one of those chimneys, and had for three years.

The walk home took Mara over the wooden bridge at the Rialto, with its two halves that could be raised to let a tall ship through, and down the long curve of the canal on the Dorsoduro side, through alleys so narrow two people could not pass without turning, and out at last onto the little paved square beside the Rio di San Barnaba, where the Brazzan furnace stood with its door open and its chimney breathing a thin blue haze into the November sky.

It was a long, low building of brick with a tiled roof blackened by forty years of smoke, and inside it was always summer. The furnace itself stood in the middle of the floor like a great beehive of fired clay, taller than a man, with a row of round mouths, the glory holes, glowing orange-white around its belly. The heat came out of those mouths like a hand pressed flat against the face. Above the main chamber, built into the beehive's top, was the cooler chamber where finished pieces were set to cool slowly through the night, so they would not crack. Around the furnace stood the benches, the marvers of smooth stone, the water buckets, the racks of blowpipes, and the stacked wood, beech and alder, that went into the furnace's firebox all day long.

Master Lunardo Brazzan was at the bench nearest the door, with a blowpipe across his knees, turning it slowly, and on the end of it hung a gather of glass no bigger than a pear. He was sixty-one, broad and bald and slow-moving, with forearms like a boatman's and a face burned to the color of a brick. His eyes were the color of weak tea and had been going cloudy at the edges for two winters. Forty years of looking into the glory holes did that to a glassmaker. He did not like anyone to mention it.

"You heard," he said, without looking up.

"Everyone heard, Master."

"Before the Nativity." He turned the pipe. "Forty years at this furnace. My father before me, thirty more. And now some patrician who never lifted a pipe in his life says we must carry it all across the water in boats, like tinkers." He looked up then, and his cloudy eyes found Mara's face. "Well. Come here. Shut the door. I want to show you something before we lose the light."

Mara shut the door, and put down the basket, and came to the bench.

Master Brazzan took the pipe to the second glory hole, the small one at the furnace's left side, where he kept a pot that nobody else was allowed to touch, and dipped the gather in, and turned it, and drew it out again. The glass that came out on the pipe was not the green of ordinary glass, the pale sea-green of the cups and phials and lamps the furnace made by the hundred. It glowed a dull red-gold in the heat, like all glass did. And then, as Master Brazzan turned it and blew into the pipe and it swelled and cooled, the color came up through it, as if someone were pouring ink into water.

Blue. Not the blue of the sky, or of the lagoon in summer, or of the cheap beads the women sold on the bridges. A blue so deep it was almost dark, like the sky over the lagoon an hour after sunset, when the first star is out and the water has gone still. And yet when Master Brazzan turned it toward the window, the light went straight through it, and threw a pool of blue on the floor at their feet that trembled like water.

"The azzurro di notte," said Master Brazzan. "The night blue. There is no other furnace in Venice can make it. Not in Murano, not in Genoa, not in Damascus. It is in my book, and in my head, and nowhere else." He set the pipe on the rack, the little blue bubble on the end of it, cooling. "One day it will be in yours."

"The furnace?" Master Brazzan looked at the great clay beehive as if it were an old horse that would have to be put down. "They will pull it down. You cannot carry a furnace in a boat. We will build another on Murano, or rent one, and the pots will come with us, and the tools, and the pipes, and the book." He was quiet a moment. "Fire is not a thing that likes to move house. The first month in a new furnace, nothing comes out right. The draw is wrong, the clay is new, the wood is from a different forest. You will see."

"Will the night blue come out right?"

"The night blue," said Master Brazzan, "will come out right if I have to sleep beside the pot."

He reached under the bench, where an iron-bound chest stood against the wall with a great lock on it, and took a key from the cord round his neck, and opened it. Inside, wrapped in a square of oiled linen, lay a small book bound in brown calf, no bigger than a man's hand, its pages soft and thick with use.

He opened it and showed Mara a page. It was covered in writing that was not writing: little marks and hooks and circles and crosses, with numbers among them, written in the master's square brown hand. Mara had learned to read letters from the priest at San Barnaba, which was why the master had chosen Mara from among the boys and girls who came asking for an apprenticeship three years ago. Over three years Mara had learned the master's marks, too, one by one, from the tally sheets and the orders for wood and ash he sent to the merchants: this circle for ash, that cross for sand, the hook for the blue stone. The master's threes always had a long curling tail at the bottom, as if they were trying to become something else. Nane, the younger apprentice, said they looked like eights that had given up halfway.

The master turned the page away before Mara could read it, and wrapped the book again, and put it back in the chest, and locked it, and put the key back round his neck.

"It never leaves the chest," he said. "It never leaves the house. When I die it comes to you, and you will keep it the same way. That is the oath of this furnace." He looked at Mara with his cloudy eyes. "And now Venice wants us to put it in a boat."

Outside, the bells of San Barnaba rang for nones, and across the city, at forty other furnaces, other masters were hearing the news, and looking at their fires, and thinking the same thing.