Salamander

by Thomas Wharton

  – Are you well, Signore Flood?

  He nodded. If it were not for Turini and his agile family, they would never have managed to get this far. The morning after they had come aboard he watched the children, a twin boy and girl, scurry up and down the ratlines and along the yards like monkeys, completely at home in their airy world, which to Flood was nothing but a bewildering perplex of ropes and chains. Although they were not deaf-mutes like their mother, Lolo and Miza had learned from her not only their acrobatic skill but also a language of gestures and facial expressions that left them little need to speak. As for their disconcerting resemblance to each other, Flood had soon learned to tell them apart by realizing that he always mistook Miza for her brother.

  Flood squinted upward, expecting to find the uncanny children in their element and instead saw Pica hanging in the shrouds like a bird blown there by a storm. Clutched in one hand was the cracked violin she had brought with her from the Ospedale. Teetering from a renewed attack of dizziness, he watched her raise the violin to her lips and blow across the soundhole, a single shearwater note skimming just above silence, until it was lost to the wind.

  The book tells its own story.

  Examine it closely and you will see the ragged edges of the type, its cracks and bumps and gaps, the letters that lie crookedly or ride higher or lower than the others, the ink’s variations in depth, consistency, and hue, the motes of dust and droplets of sweat sealed within the warp and woof of the paper, the tiny insect bodies caught as the platen came down and now immortalized as unnecessary commas and full stops.

  In these imperfections lies a human tale of typecutters, squinting compositors, proofreaders and black-faced printer’s devils, labouring against time and heartache and disorder, against life, to create that thing not found in nature, yet still subject to its changes.

  The pages stain, fox, dry out. Paper flakes like rusty metal. Threads work loose, headbands and tailbands fray. Front and back boards sag from spines, flyleaves and buckram corner-pieces peel away. Dust mites, cockroaches, and termites dine on paper and binding paste. Rats and mice make snug nests in the middle of thick chapters. And unseen, through the chemical action of time, the words themselves are drained of their living sap. In every library, readers sit in placid quiet while all around them a forest decays.

  THE WELL OF STORIES

  Venice, enclosed in a thick, sluggish fog that had already lasted seven days, was growing all too certain about its existence when the strange vessel appeared on the morning of the eighth day and ushered in a joyous revival of doubt. The first people to see the ship, a few early strollers (and late stragglers) on the Riva degli Schiavoni, were convinced they had at last passed through the unrelenting fog of reality into another age. At anchor in the canal was a dream vessel that would have been at home riding the curlicue waves of a serpent-haunted sea in some far corner of an ancient mariner’s chart. Her towering sterncastle was that of an antiquated Spanish galleon, her crenellated bulwarks from some ancient floating castle that Marco Polo might have sailed in on his voyage home from Cathay.

  The badly painted figurehead was unidentifiable as man, bird, or beast, but the rotund, barnacled hull looked to the watchers on the riva like nothing so much as the jewel-encrusted hide of a dragon, a resemblance aided by the mingled steam and smoke huffing out of her lower portholes. With each exhalation, the ship emitted a wheezing, vaguely musical bellow, like the lowest bass notes from a pipe organ.

  She was a small ship, and someone joked that she must be a dragon of a lesser sort, a stinging bee. Those who came aboard the ship to load provisions brought back even more wondrous stories about the crew.

  It was soon being whispered that the captain was a sorcerer and his daughter a mermaid with power over tempests. This brought about a debate as to whether mermaids might live above the waves, and what they looked like. It was remembered by the oldest men that a mermaid had once been fished out of the canal, in the time of the Doge Venier. Although the lower extremities of the creature were missing, and it was only ascertained that this was indeed a mermaid when the fish-like half washed up on shore nearby. The incontrovertible proof of its sex was such a scandal to Christendom that the bishop had it hidden away, preserved in a barrel of balsamic vinegar in the vault of his palace.

  Others asserted that the girl was not the sorcerer’s daughter but in fact a machine that played the violin, and which he stole from the castle of a Hungarian prince in the hope of making a fortune by exhibiting her (or it) in all the great cities.

  There was a family of circus performers on board who slept hanging by their feet from the yards like bats. And a clockwork soldier that could walk and talk and breathe fire. And a three-hundred-year-old Chinaman with six fingers on each hand, who had prevented his own decay by lacquering his body, as it was well-known they did in that strange upside-down country.

  The ship, it was clear, was some kind of impossible machine. At the helm stood a console with keys and stops that the helmsman played like a church organ to raise and lower the sails. The hold was filled with devilish engines of smoke and fire groaning and hissing away for the purpose of some diabolical alchemy.

  Rumour soon fastened onto a few scraps of truth, and it became known that the master of the archaic vessel was a printer who travelled the world selling his damp books, printed in the ink of the squid on pale green seaweed paper and bound in cured sharkskin. As the story spread it was aged like cheese to give it greater piquancy, allowing its tellers to refer to the long-lost Bee, as if the tale of Flood the nautical printer was one they had first heard at their grandmother’s feet.

  The news that uncertainty had returned at last to Venice brought everyone out, and soon the deserted streets were packed with the usual crowds, with buyers and sellers, with the gazers and the gazed at.

  In the afternoon, as they made their way along the riva to the Piazza San Marco, Flood and Pica could not help but overhear the stories about them. To Flood it seemed as if his earlier imaginings about pursuing his trade at sea had run on ahead into the future and fulfilled themselves, while he himself lagged behind.

  As they passed the grey façade of the Ospedale, Pica tugged her hat lower and hurried by without looking up. In the swarming, noisy piazza they sat at a table under a busy colonnade, where they awaited a reply to the letter, and the spoon, they had sent Kirshner the metallurgist that morning.

  Out of nowhere a waiter materialized and took their order. He asked them if they had seen the ship.

  – What ship? Pica asked.

  – The floating bookshop, the waiter said. The Bee.

  In the crowded streets, Flood had not only heard rumours about himself but about the metallurgist as well. He was reputed to be of fabulous age, every morning extending his already unnatural lifespan through the drinking of strange fruit juices and the ritual stretching and bending of his limbs. The much-feared Council of Ten had been investigating Kirshner for some time, it appeared. Responsible for the moral health of the city, the Council regularly employed spies, thieves, and arsonists to safeguard and maintain that health. If you learned that you had made it onto their Index of undesirables, one certain truth loomed: someday they would come for you, spirit you away to their prison from which few returned, the Leads.

  It could be days or months, Pica had informed him earlier, having heard all about the Council of Ten while growing up at the Ospedale. Or even years. But they would come for you.

  Flood listened anxiously to these tales of dread, and wished he were back aboard the ship. This briny Venetian murk, like a room that moved with him, blocked out any glimpse of sky, any suggestion of distance, but it did have an alarming tendency not to behave like proper walls, to drift and thin out, allowing apparitions through, like the one who appeared suddenly at their table, a tall figure costumed as the Jew: wide-brimmed black hat, huge hook nose tied on with string, devilish two-pronged beard.

  With the threat of the Council hanging over him, why had the metallurgist, o
r his agent, chosen to disguise himself as his own grotesque double? Flood was about to confirm that this was in fact the person he was supposed to meet here on the stroke of three, as the letter had stipulated, when the costumed man leaned towards him and breathed, in even poorer Italian than his own,

  – How much for a night with your girl-boy?

  Flood was already turning away when Pica, much to his surprise, spat at the masker a gondolier’s insult, Coglione! The man stepped back and stared, his eyes darting from Flood to Pica and back again.

  – Do you know the metallurgist? Flood said.

  The man’s tongue began to flick in and out like a snake’s, a gesture that was difficult to interpret in a face hidden behind artifice. Just then a hand tapped Flood on the shoulder and a voice whispered a single word. Kirshner. He turned to see a boy, a year or two older than Pica, he guessed, in a cloak and tricorn.

  The boy held up a tarnished spoon.

  – I saw them first, the costumed man protested halfheartedly as the boy led Flood and Pica out of the piazza. Couldn’t we share?

  – Foreigners, the boy muttered. He tugged down the brim of his hat and increased his pace.

  As he hurried to keep up, Flood asked the boy why everyone in the streets seemed to be so restless.

  – It’s the wind of doubt. Rolls in once every few months. Stirs everyone up.

  – I think we brought it with us, Pica said.

  – There will be a celebration tonight. The forse. The carnival of uncertainty.

  They passed a man lighting lanterns despite the fact that it was mid-afternoon, and further on an old woman in rags squatting over a grate and whistling as she loudly emptied her bladder. They were followed for a while by a shabby figure in sackcloth, shouting and crying after them about the eighth level of hell being nearly full. Eventually, after a few more turns and windings, his blood-curling shrieks faded away.

  After stumbling in the gloom over two prostrate bodies reeking of drink, they came at last to a narrow bridge barred by a heavy chain. A uniformed man sitting in a sentry box leaned out slowly to look them over, glimpsed the boy, and unhooked the chain to let them through. They crossed an empty, echoing campiello and descended a short flight of uneven stone steps into the narrowest passageway they had seen yet, where the sky was finally shut out by the rain-gutters of the leaning walls.

  The boy took them through an arch and under a long sottoportico until he halted at last before an unmarked door set in a wall of featureless lead-coloured stone. Fastened to the doorframe was a small metal tube with a tiny window in its side, in which Flood glimpsed a rolled-up scrap of parchment. The boy unlocked the door and opened it, releasing a grey cat that slid like quicksilver into the shadows.

  – You’ve got a message, Pica said. In your letter-box.

  The boy’s solemn face broke into a grin.

  – Thank you for letting me know.

  When they were inside he shut the door and led Flood and Pica along a dim passage. At the end of it they climbed warily down another uneven flight of steps, to a subterranean canal that smelled sharply of mould and damp. The light of a file of torches flung dancing water shadows onto the vault of stone over their heads. Flood stopped and gazed around him, his breath suddenly coming in short gasps. Pica touched his sleeve.

  – I’ll be fine.

  They went along the edge of the canal to a landing where a small boat was tied. The boy climbed into the rear of the boat and they followed, sitting in front on the narrow wooden slats. The boy poled them along a tunnel lit by ventilation shafts in the arched roof just above their heads. From time to time Pica glanced over her shoulder at him, and whenever his eyes met hers, a suppressed smile would tug at the edges of his mouth.

  When they emerged from the tunnel they were in a sunlit garden alive with insect hum and the twitter of sparrows. The world was a green well in which pollen swirled like falling snow. The boy helped them climb from the boat and led them along a curving path bordered by a dark box hedge, at the end of which knelt a white-haired old man, digging with a spade in a bed of tomato plants. Various articles of furniture stood around him on the grass: a type cabinet, a table displaying a disordered array of files and other metalworking tools, a lacquered folding tray on which sat the remains of a meal. The old man raised his head at their approach.

  – I’ve brought them, Grandfather.

  – Thank you, Nathan.

  The boy turned to go, and as he passed Pica he grinned once more. The old man struggled to his feet and greeted them with a bow. Pica curtsied, a remnant of her Ospedale upbringing that Flood had not seen before.

  – This is my workroom, Kirshner said, slapping at his dusty breeches, as well as my kitchen garden. Light is important for both. But forgive me.

  He patted the empty bench beside him.

  They approached and sat, waiting for him to speak again. Kirshner had not yet looked directly at them, and this close Flood could see that the metallurgist’s face was pitted with tiny scars, the pupils of his eyes clouded. Something had shattered into atomies in front of him, Flood guessed. A hazard of his profession.

  Kirshner felt in the basket at his feet and plucked out two tomatoes.

  – Hungry?

  Flood declined.

  – Too bad. These are the best vegetables in the city. How about you, young lady?

  – Please, signore.

  – Catch.

  He tossed Pica a tomato.

  – Thank you.

  – You have your mother’s voice, my child.

  Pica lowered her eyes and blushed.

  The old man sighed.

  – I wish I could tell you where she is. But I am afraid the last contact I had with the House of Ostrov was when I filled your father’s order for type. Twelve years ago now. Though I’ve thought of you, Mr. Flood, many times since then. And strangely enough, not long ago I had a visit from someone who might be able to help you in your search. The Abbé de Saint-Foix. He told me that you had left the Count’s employ, and so he had taken charge of your project. He was eager to learn if you had commissioned anything from me in that regard.

  – Did he tell you where he was going?

  – He did, in rather loud hints. He wanted me to know that he had been invited to Alexandria by the Ottoman governor. Some prestigious post at court, although he wouldn’t say exactly what it was. For my part, I gave away even less by way of help or advice. Not even a spoon.

  – The spoon, Flood said. I didn’t understand why you sent it.

  The old man smiled.

  – Neither did I, then.

  THE METALLURGIST’S TALE

  He was born not far from the Castle Ostrov, on the other side of the mountains, in a little Polish village. His father Avram was also a metalsmith. He made candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and brooches, and often experimented with alloys, on more than one occasion almost blowing himself up in the process. He travelled often to Krakow to find out what was in fashion and to hunt for new commissions. Each time he returned he would sit Samuel on his knee and tell him about what he had seen on the way there and on the way back. On every trip he invariably encountered something odd or amusing to relate. Avram was a bear of a man, tall and long-bearded, and Samuel would gaze up at his father as he told his stories, in a kind of worshipful fear of those glittering black eyes, that great grinning mouth. Only many years later did he suspect that most of what he had accepted as truth was nothing but the purest invention.

  Finally, when Samuel was old enough, he was allowed to accompany his father on the great journey to Krakow. When they got to the city, he was silent and sullen, and when his father wanted to know what was the matter, he asked why they hadn’t met that peasant. What peasant? his father asked. The one you said you saw the last time, carrying a saddle on his back.

  The boy had been certain he would see everything his father had seen, as if the sights along the road existed as a fixed and eternal tableau for their eyes. He thought it deceitful of the w
orld not to remain as his father had described it, but he would be fooled no longer. He would believe only in what he had seen for himself.

  When Samuel began his apprenticeship, Avram Kirshner would often hold up a soup spoon or a knife that they had just made, and instruct his son to remember how strange and miraculous it was that everything in the universe is really a word, a thought thinking itself in God’s mind.

  He spent as much time scouring obscure old kabbalistic tomes as he did making brooches and candlesticks. And he was not alone. Half the men in the village came to the house in the evenings to discuss these phantom visions of dead mystics. Avram and his sad-eyed colleagues would sit up all night drinking tea and arguing about the hidden meanings in mystical texts, about the en-sof, about the shattering of the vessels of light and the Angel Metatron, whose little finger spans the distance from the earth to Saturn. They talked as if the infinite was as real, as close and solid and undeniably there as a table, a chair, a floor you could stomp your foot against.

  When he was old enough to leave home, Kirshner moved to Venice, a place where men trafficked in what could be seen, touched, tasted, bought, and sold. As a parting gift from his father he asked for one tarnished spoon.

  While the old man was telling his story, the wind rose and a cloud passed across the sun. A drop of rain touched the back of Pica’s hand. She stirred, looked up at the changing sky, anxious to be gone now that she knew the old man could not help them. When the sun emerged again its light seemed to be rising out of the earth.

  – Perhaps, Mr. Flood, the spoon does taste the broth, Kirshner said. Tell me, the imaginary book your letter mentioned, did you have a name for it?

  – The alam, Flood said. I called it the alam.

  – Alam. That is good. I like that. There have been many other names for it, of course. Zohar. The paper-thin garden. Il’bal.

  – Other names. How could there be?