Salamander

by Thomas Wharton

  Hold back death by dying every day.

  Flood felt himself drained of everything but the cold certainty that the Count’s final riddle would remain unsolved. He glanced at Pica, saw the frightened determination in her eyes, and looked away. Why had he brought her here? The world as it truly was, a broken labyrinth of unfinished stories, would continue to baffle them, lead them astray, and at last turn their hopes to dust, as it had done to everything he had ever worked towards. The pasha alone had seen this truth clearly, that it was better to welcome oblivion than to go on deceiving oneself.

  Flood forced himself to take the next few steps forward. It barely concerned him any longer to wonder how their offering would be received, and he stood as if bereft of will as Selim bent to receive another whispered command.

  – You will remain here, the clerk said. As the pasha’s guest.

  For a moment the old man’s eyes glimmered with something like anticipation, then fluttered back to rest in a dim unseeing.

  – Now I beg you to leave us, the pasha said, waving a hand vaguely in their direction.

  – Open all the windows, he went on, his wattles shaking and his voice tremulously grasping for strength, as if an unexpected fit of purpose had seized hold of him. Around the room, gilded ropes were tugged, heavy tapestries crumpled upward and light crashed into the room.

  – Open them to the winds, he added in a fainter voice, for I feel as if heaven lies close upon the earth and I between the two, breathing through the eye of a needle.

  He smiled to himself, and all at once Flood understood the bizarre hope that the pasha’s unrehearsed flight of eloquence had given him. Such fine last words were too beautiful, too perfect to possibly be one’s actual last words. The moment would pass and the dreary farce would go on, to some doubtless more ignoble conclusion. As he stood with his head bowed, it seemed to him that time had filled to the brim and was trembling, about to spill over into the next moment. The pasha was wrong. There was always something more. Flood’s fit of despondency suddenly left him and he held his breath, seized with the desire to know what was about to happen.

  On his sofa the pasha continued to smile. Selim bent almost double again to await the next command, then lifted his eyes to the pasha’s glassy stare, started, shot a look of terror at the doorwarden, who followed suit with his closest neighbour in the entourage around the throne. In the flurry of somewhat restrained distress that followed, the foreigners were forgotten by everyone except Selim, who glided coolly through the sudden swarm of murmuring courtiers.

  – Wait a moment, then follow me.

  The clerk slipped out of the hall through a curtained recess, and after a few seconds they joined him. Without a word he led them through a sequence of stone passageways that widened and grew brighter as the echoing clamour in the audience chamber faded. To Flood, the sensation was one of an ascent towards freedom, but when Selim finally halted before a narrow door of oak banded with iron, he had the sudden terrible thought that he was about to meet the same fate that had closed around him at the castle. Selim unlocked the door and stood aside.

  – I cannot remain with you a moment longer. Go.

  To Flood’s surprise Pica took the lead, plunging ahead of him into blackness. Flood followed more cautiously, groping for the side walls of the narrow passage and whispering to her. Pica. Where are -? His hands encountered empty air and he stopped, hearing her voice from somewhere below him. There are stairs here. He descended in darkness, the sweat cooling on his neck, his slippered feet gingerly testing for the next stair, until there were no more steps and he felt Pica’s cool hand on his.

  – There’s another door here.

  This time she let him proceed and his fingers found a latch. He opened the unwilling door with a shove and stumbled forward. They were in absolute darkness, on the edge of an unseen open space where a cold, dank wind keened.

  – There’s nothing here, Flood said. We have to go back.

  Pica clutched his arm.

  – Wait. Listen.

  They heard the squeal of a pulley and the clatter of moving chains, and a dim yellow glow appeared below them, growing out of the darkness. As the light neared they could see that they were standing on a narrow wooden platform, on the rim of a cylindrical shaft. The dark clay walls were dotted with innumerable tiny holes, like the nests of wrens. The chains they had heard were moving up and down in the shaft, drawing the light upward from below.

  The light came from a lantern, hanging in a metal cage.

  In the cage stood the Abbé de Saint-Foix, in a turban and caftan powdered with grey dust. When the cage came up level with their platform it jolted to a halt.

  – I call it the well of stories, the Abbé said, brushing dust from his sleeves. I don’t know how far down it goes. When I reach a certain depth candles go out from lack of air. The present ruler’s grandfather unearthed it, but he used the well only to get rid of … inconvenient people.

  He bowed towards Pica.

  – Countess. You have grown.

  Flood inhaled the smell of oiled chains and ancient damp and fought off a rush of vertigo. It was as if the floor of his cell in the castle had dropped away.

  – The Count would approve, he said.

  – Except that here, the Abbé said, time has been banished. The pasha shares my dislike of clocks, and has graciously allowed me to explore the well at my leisure.

  Flood saw then that at the Abbé’s feet lay tools – brushes, a sweeping pan, a hammer and chisel – amid bits of rock and dried clay.

  – You’re a prisoner, Abbé.

  – Only when I work in the well. And only for my own safety. Otherwise I have the freedom of the palace.

  – I find it hard to believe you would submit to this.

  – I have accepted certain constraints on my liberty. As will you, Flood, when you join me here.

  – Why would I do that?

  – Like me, you won’t be able to resist. These pigeonholes around us contain parchment scrolls and codices that have been embedded in wet clay for an untold number of centuries. Someone, we know not who, or when, intended them to be drowned and lost forever. Ironic, don’t you think, seeing how the world believes the ancient library was consumed in fire? Just think of the fame that would come to the man who printed the lost library of Alexandria.

  – I have been locked away long enough. No book is worth that again.

  – A price must always be paid for knowledge. Of whatever kind. You know that.

  – You knew that the Count had imprisoned me, and you did nothing.

  – You were in that cell for twelve years, but only for some of that time were you the Count’s prisoner. By the time I found out what had happened to you, you had become your own jailer. It seemed wiser, certainly kinder, to leave you be. And then the pasha offered me this opportunity.

  – To do what?

  – The pasha, true as ever to his ruling passion, is looking for what is known here as sihr. Books of magic. So far I’ve managed to extricate fragments of histories, legends, records of famines or droughts. The pasha and I have reason to believe there is more to be found here. From the earliest days of the Ottoman conquest, as you may know, the rulers of Alexandria have been known for an all-consuming preoccupation with their own mortality.

  THE LEGEND OF SESHAT

  From their Egyptian subjects, it was said, the Ottomans had caught the disease of haunting their own tombs in advance. An Ottoman warrior was supposed to sneer at death, which came when it came, as Allah willed it. The important thing was to be doing something worthy of paradise when death arrived.

  The Turkish overlords, looking about them in this conquered land where the dead seemed to outnumber the living, had forgotten this truth. Long after the ancient library had been gutted, its contents burned and the ashes scattered, they continued to search for a fabled scroll that was said to hold the secret of immortality.

  They knew there had been books housed in the ancient library that had b
een filed away in the labyrinthine catacombs in a time already remote from the knowledge of the librarians of antiquity. According to Zenodotus, one of the first chroniclers of the fate of the library, fires often started when weary scribes knocked over oil lamps, and over time many of the precious books were damaged or lost. The depredations of conquerors also took their toll. Then came the rumour that the Christian monks, whose power and influence in the city had been growing, intended to destroy the library, the fount of pagan knowledge, once and for all. One of the old librarians, whose name has not come down to us, wished that somehow he could keep the books in his care safely tucked away in their nests and holes, while at the same time freeing them from their vulnerable immobility, so that they would escape any catastrophe which might befall the library itself. One day he noticed the ink stains on the hands of the many scribes who toiled at copying the books, and a wild idea came into his head.

  The librarian called together all his assistants, all the scribes, copyists, and book-menders. Employing tattoo artists equipped with the quills of porcupine fish and ink made of acacia oil, the librarian ordered the text of one book to be inscribed on the flesh of each man. Only those parts of the body that would not be hidden by clothing were left unmarked. The dictating and inscribing took many days. Only a small amount could be copied at a time, as the pain was terrible and caused the men to twitch and writhe, marring the tattoo artist’s delicate work.

  The history that follows I am sure you know. The library was burned not once but several times as one empire after another plucked the jewel of Alexandria for itself. The remaining papyrus scrolls and parchment codices were utterly consumed by fire, decay, and time. The scholars and librarians were stoned to death or driven into exile. The secret of the tattooed men might have been safe but for the unlucky moment when one of them, driven by the thirst of curiosity, stood naked in front of a brass mirror and began to read, laboriously translating aloud the sinuous, backwards script that coiled around his body.

  He found it to be a verse epic celebrating the numerous episodes of intimate congress between gods and mortals. Yet there were, to his dismay, sections of the book, on the small of his back, his shoulder blades, and elsewhere, which no amount of agonizing contortion allowed him to glimpse. Desperate to fill in the missing verses, he visited a brothel and requested a woman who could read. He did not know that the enemy, from long experience of the places where valuable secrets are revealed, had stocked every house of pleasure in the city with spies.

  Under torture the tattooed man surrendered the details of the librarian’s plan. A list of all the book-men was swiftly drawn up. One by one they were hunted down and killed, the skin then stripped from their bodies and burned to ashes.

  Legend has it, however, that a woman, an Abyssinian slave, who was chosen only out of necessity because the librarian ran out of time and men’s bodies, was the last to be inscribed. This woman alone of the tattooed fraternity managed to escape with her life and her secret. She took the name Seshat, goddess of archives, sister of Thoth, or as the Greeks called him, Hermes Trismegistus.

  Seshat wandered for years through the empire of the conquering faith, carrying the last of the librarian’s books concealed from her enemies, and over time she gathered around her a small group of readers to whom she revealed the secret.

  The book she bore upon her flesh was rumoured to be a treatise by Hermes himself on the lost art of never dying. No one knows if that is true, but the legend tells us that when Seshat grew older, she had the markings copied onto one of her younger followers, with instructions to do likewise. And when Seshat died, her body, as she requested, was wrapped in the traditional manner, in ribbons of muslin sprinkled with hyssop.

  Since it is the binding which usually announces, before anything else, the presence of a book, Seshat and her followers must be the exception to this rule. For only if their bindings are removed may one discover that beneath them a book lies concealed.

  From his cassock the Abbé drew out Djinn’s Book of Tears.

  – Alexandria is not the first place I have served as an interpreter of ancient texts. Since we parted at the castle I have travelled the globe. Jerusalem, the Orient, Brazil, New Spain.

  The Abbé unrolled the scroll to the innermost leaf.

  – Do you know that the ancient Mexicans worshipped a god whose image very much resembles the symbol you put on your books? Xolotol, the god of transformations. In their mythology he was a hideous, giant amphibian that could leave the water, change shape and become a dog, a woman of fire, the future. I’ve taken him as an emblem, you see, of my search. He’s slipped away from me and I’ve caught sight of him again, many times. I had begun to think I was wasting my time here, since I had found little trace of him thus far. Then you arrived with your marvellous scroll.

  – What do you want from me, Abbé?

  The Abbé shook his head.

  – You should ask instead what I can give you, and your daughter. I have the means to find out what goes on outside the palace. I know, for instance, that you brought something from Venice, something that helped you make this. And I know about the disease that plagues your daughter’s skin. Why go roaming about the world, endangering your work and her health, when everything you need is right here?

  – So you would take the place of the Count. I didn’t want to think you capable of that, Abbé.

  – It would be for your own good, Flood. The superstitious populace already looks upon the inventions of Europe as tools of Satan. Imagine their response should they find out what you could bring into the world. Books that say to all boundaries, all truths, There is something more.

  – Is that what you think I’m doing?

  The Abbé slowly rolled up the scroll, his gaze fixed on Flood.

  – You don’t see it, do you? he said. The possibility that this … this trial effort hints at.

  – I’m sure you’re planning to enlighten me.

  The Abbé smiled.

  – That remains to be seen.

  He toed a chunk of dried clay to the edge of his cage, nudged it over into the well, where it dropped into silence.

  – My time here is growing short, he said. There are underground sluices running from the river that could drown this well again in a matter of minutes. I expect that is what will happen if the anti-European faction wins out at court.

  – It probably has, Flood said. The pasha is dead.

  The Abbé blinked.

  – Dead?

  – Just now, in the Hall of the Divan.

  The Abbé gazed upward into the darkness, and a cold laugh burst from him.

  – Just now. And so time wins again.

  Pica stepped in front of Flood.

  – You were on the ship, she said. When I was born.

  The Abbé stared at Pica open-mouthed and then, recovering himself, bowed slightly towards her.

  – You have an astounding memory, mademoiselle.

  – You were there. The man in black.

  – Ah. Yes. The midwife. I knew she was not to be trusted, but yours was a difficult birth, and something had to be done to preserve, if possible, both mother and daughter. In other words, you should be thankful I was there, Countess, since it was my task to make sure you were both safely … delivered.

  – Then it’s true, Pica said.

  – What story did they tell you at the Ospedale, about your mother? That she was dead, no doubt. Forgive my bluntness, but did it ever occur to you that they might be telling the truth? Or that they were, but in another sense. Perhaps, child, they were hoping to spare you further pain and loss.

  Pica stared at him, her eyes searching his. The Abbé turned to Flood.

  – Surely you’ve prepared the girl for the possibility that her mother does not want to be found. Especially by the daughter she cannot acknowledge as hers.

  – I don’t believe you, Pica said.

  – As you please. But believe me when I say I do not know where the Countess is. I cannot even
tell you whether she is living or dead.

  He gestured to the darkness around them.

  – This is the world, mademoiselle. Few questions find answers. Few stories end the way we might wish. Ask your father.

  The chains jerked and squealed and the Abbé’s cage began to ascend ponderously into the upper darkness.

  – I am called to my accounting, he said, tucking the scroll into his sleeve. But I would advise you to stay where you are. There is, after all, nowhere else to go.

  Selim found them wandering the corridors and led them safely through the palace.

  – As you see, I don’t exist, he whispered to them as they slipped across the parade ground where the janissaries preened with their horses. At least not here.

  They took a devious route to his house to collect Djinn.

  The clerk insisted they stay with him until the excitement over the pasha’s death quieted down. There was no need, he went on, for them to leave at all, really. There was certainly plenty of work for a printer in Alexandria.

  – We can’t stay, Flood said. Someone will come for us sooner or later.

  – At least you, Selim said, embracing Djinn with tears in his eyes. You belong here. That much I know.

  Djinn smiled.

  – I wish I did.

  When they returned to the Bee, a huge warship, crowded with sails, was just gliding into the Port of the Infidels. She had clearly been on a long and eventful journey: the hull, pockmarked by cannonfire, was bleached to a driftwood paleness by salt and long exposure to the elements.

  The Bee was standing away from the mole as the white ship passed them, so near that the hull towered overhead like a great chalk cliff. The figurehead, a mad-eyed harpy, grinned down for a moment and then turned its shoulder to them. The Bee lurched through the warship’s wake, caught a favourable breeze, and began to make way.

  By late afternoon, as Alexandria dwindled to a white mirage on the horizon, Flood looked for Pica and found her at last in the last place he expected, the galley, slicing up a cuttlefish Djinn had bought in the souk before they left.