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something beautiful could now
grow.

    He took a breath and blew. The glass miraculously arched
from his lips into a long, delicate balloon. Corradino always
held the breath out of his lungs until he had made sure
that the bubble, or parison, he had created was perfect in
all dimensions. His fellows joked that he was such a perfectionist that, were the parison not perfect, Manin would
never take another breath in, and expire on the spot. In
truth, Corradino knew that the slightest winds of his breath
at the crucial heat meant the difference between perfection
and imperfection, between the divine and the merely beautiful.
    He watched the glass changing, chameleon-like, through
all shades of red, rose, orange, amber, yellow and finally
white as it began to grow cool. Corradino knew he must
work fast. He thrust the parison into the Porno to reheat
it briefly, then began to manipulate it with his hands.
    Not for him the protective wads of cotton or paper that others used to save their skin from shriveling and blistering
with the heat. He had long since sacrificed his fingertips
to his art. They had burned, scarred and eventually healed
smooth with no prints. Corradino recalled the tales of
Marco Polo who had said that the ancient T'ang dynasty
of China used fingerprints as a means of identification,
and the practice had endured in the Orient ever since.

    My identity has become one with the glass. Somewhere in Venice,
or far overseas, my own skin lies embedded in the hard silica of
a goblet or candlestick.
    Corradino knew that his glass was the best because he
held her in his hands, touching her skin with his, feeling
her breathe. He took up his tagianti shears and began to
pull a delicate filigree of curlicues from the main cylinder,
until a forest of crystalline branches sprang from the tube.
Corradino swiftly broke the blowpipe free, and transferring
the piece to a solid iron rod - the pontello - he began to
work with the open end. Finally running out of time as
the unforgiving glass hardened, he took it to the mother
structure and wound the new arm round the main trunk,
in a decorative spiral. There was no rough spot - no pontello mark - to remain, like an umbilicus, to betray the
origins of the limb.
    He stood holding the arm while the final hardening
took place, admiring his work, then finally stood back and
wiped his brow. Although shirtless, as the maestri always worked, he still felt the burning of the furnace fires on his
skin from dawn till dusk. He wondered, looking at the
diligent workers around him, whether this profession were
a good preparation for hellfires. What was it that Dante
wrote?

    `... tall flames flowed fierce,
    Heating them so white hot as ever burned
    Iron in the forge of any artificers.'
    Corradino knew the work of the Florentine well. His
father had allowed all the family to bring one possession
- one most precious thing - with them from the Palazzo
Manin on the night they escaped. His father had brought
a precious vellum copy of Dante's Divina Commedia from
his library.
    That was my father's choice. It's the only book I own. It's the
only thing that remains of my father.
    Corradino banished the thought of him and turned back
to the punishing flames.
    No wonder that, back in 1291, the Grand Council of
Venice had decreed that all glass-making should take place
on the island of Murano, because of the constant threat of
fire to the city. A blaze begun by the furnaces had more
than once threatened to engulf Venice. It had been a wise
idea to move the centre of production, for just a few years
back the English city of London had been all but destroyed
by fire. Not, mind you, that it had been started by anything as artistic as a glass foundry. The latest rumour among the
merchants on the Rialto had spoken of the blaze beginning in a pie-shop. Corradino snorted.

    'Tis an English trait - always thinking of the stomach.
    The London fire had meant good