第44章 The High Water

The flood came to Venice on the last Friday of November, and it came the way the city's great floods have always come — slowly, then all at once. The sirens sounded at four in the morning, the low wail of the city's warning that carried across the water like a lament, and by six the canals had climbed the stone steps of every quay and were lapping at the doorways of the houses that had stood for five hundred years and never once learned to lock their lower floors. Marco was in the workshop when the water found the factory. He had been there all night, working on a commission of his own — a small bowl for a wedding, nothing royal, nothing the palace would ever see, just glass, the way he had learned to love it, quiet and steady and unhurried. He heard the sirens. He heard the water. And he did what the factory's founder had done, generation after generation, when the lagoon decided to visit: he began to move the glass. The furnaces were the first concern, but the furnaces were high and safe, and the fires would not be drowned. The finished vases were the second concern — the eleven completed months stood in the gallery on their pedestals, waiting for the unveiling, and Marco moved them one by one, carefully, steadily, up the stone stairs to the upper floor, where the water could not reach. He worked without panic, the way you work when you know the work is all you have. Tommaso arrived at seven, wading through the water in his boots, and together they moved the crates of the unfinished work, the tools, the records, the journals that held the kingdom's memory. Sofia called from Berlin, her voice thin with distance, and Marco told her the truth: the factory is safe. The glass is safe. We are safe. Then the water found the hidden workshop. It came through the floor, the way it always had, seeping up between the stones of the old foundation, finding the seams that five hundred years of tides had worn smooth. The hidden workshop was below the gallery, below the waterline of the lagoon, and it was the room where the kingdom had been born — where Emilio had sealed his letters, where Isabella had found the pomegranate vase, where the thirteenth breath had been blown. The pomegranate vase stood on its pedestal in the center of the room, glowing in the dim light, its seven lobes catching what remained of the glow, its core burning with the ruby that had survived fire and water and time. Marco did not think. He went down the stairs into the rising water, the cold taking his legs, his waist, his chest, and he lifted the pomegranate vase from its pedestal with both hands and carried it up through the flooding room, up the stairs, into the light of the upper floor, where Tommaso took it from him and set it on the highest shelf, and Marco stood in the doorway with the water dripping from his clothes and his breath coming hard, and he looked at the vase that had survived two centuries and one more flood, and he began, very quietly, to laugh. Isabella heard the news in Berlin at nine o'clock, from the night porter at her hotel, who had seen the reports from Venice on the morning television. She was on the train by ten, and the train was slow, and the hours were long, and she spent them with her phone pressed to her ear, listening to Marco's voice describe the water — the height of it, the speed of it, the way it had come for the hidden workshop first, as if the lagoon knew exactly where the kingdom kept its heart. He did not tell her about the pomegranate vase until the end, and when he did, his voice was casual, the way it always was when he had done something that mattered: the vase is fine. I moved it. Everything is fine. The train reached Venice at dawn. The water was already receding, leaving the city gleaming and strange, the stones dark with wet, the canal steps emerging from the lagoon like the shoulders of drowned statues. Isabella walked the last kilometer from the station, through streets that were empty and wet and beautiful in the way Venice is always beautiful, even when the water has been inside the houses, and she found the factory standing, and the furnaces breathing, and the gallery full of the eleven completed months, each one dry on its pedestal, each one whole. She found Marco in the upper workshop, asleep on a pile of packing blankets, with the pomegranate vase on the shelf above him and his hand resting on the edge of the shelf, as if even in sleep he was keeping it safe. His clothes were still damp. His face was smudged with ash and exhaustion. And Isabella stood in the doorway and looked at him, at the man who had carried the kingdom's heart through the flood while she was in another country, and she felt the crack in her chest — the crack that had been widening all autumn, the crack that had first opened on the bridge, reading the name Otto Brandt — close over, finally, not with a scar but with a seam. She knelt beside him. She did not wake him. She laid her hand over his, on the edge of the shelf, over the shadow of the pomegranate vase, and she said, very quietly, the thing she had been traveling between cities for months to say: "I'm home." The bells of the city were ringing — not the palace bells, the city bells, the old ones, the ones that had been ringing for a thousand years through flood and fire and silence, calling the people to the high ground, calling them home. Marco opened his eyes. He looked at her. And he said, in the voice of a man who had been waiting a long time to say it, "You were always home. You just kept leaving." The water had receded. The kingdom was safe. But on the table by the door, where Tommaso had left it with the rest of the morning's post, there was a letter with the palace seal — and the letter said that the unveiling would be brought forward to the first of December, and that the palace was sending its own barge to Venice to collect the twenty-four months, and that the Director of the Royal Glassworks, Friedrich von Altdorf, would be coming in person to oversee the journey. And on the envelope, in a hand that Isabella did not recognize, someone had written: Ask him about the twelve that came before.