She found her father at the far end of the press room, holding a sheet of paper under the moonlight sieved by the grille of the overhead hatch. He did not move as she came near, and in the cold silver light his skin had taken on the automaton’s rigid pallor.
– The paper was the key, he said, as if to himself. It’s beginning.
– What is?
– The alam.
He stirred at the sound of her approach and turned stiffly, blinking at her as if unable to quite remember who she was.
He lived in the press room now, catching brief snatches of sleep in a hammock. He worked with Ludwig alone and seemed to prefer it that way, no longer bothering to ask if Pica wished to help. Once in a long while he would appear on deck, unshaven and dazed, and stare out at the city, hazy and steaming in the endless drizzle, or at the crowded waterway with its changing warp and weft of sails. He would dunk his head in the water-butt, come up dripping, and then suddenly disappear down the hatchway without a word, like a ghost departing at cockcrow.
On the rare occasions he joined the rest of them at supper he fidgeted like a little boy and laughed giddily at his own feeble jokes. Whenever he showed up at the table, Pica would find an excuse to leave early and go up on deck to sit alone until she heard his press start up again.
When the English fleet was at last ready to get under way, Pica learned from Turini that the birthday of the twins had just passed. She threw off her dampened spirits, determined to give Lolo and Miza something she had never had.
– It will be a farewell party, too, she said. For Djinn. With Ludwig as the guest of honour.
The Bee was decked from bow to stern with paper garlands and the shrouds and stays hung with multicoloured lanterns. Flood brought out the fireworks he and Djinn had purchased weeks before and Darka hung them all over the ship. While Darka and Snow prepared a feast in the galley, the twins and Pica, in her boy’s clothes, tried out Djinn’s kite on the quay. The wind rose with such sudden ferocity that Lolo was nearly carried off into the sky. They were reeling him and the kite in for another try when Turini called them back to the ship. In the channel hundreds of vessels of every shape and size could be seen heading shoreward like a great invasion fleet. Soon the Bee was surrounded by a crowd of boats bumping into one another, snagging each other’s yards and rigging in their haste to find anchorage.
The sea began to heave. The masts swayed and the lanterns in the rigging swung wildly, some snapping free. They felt the tug of the ship straining against its anchor chains.
In an ominous twilight they sat down to the birthday feast, then hurried back out on deck. A wall of black cloud had risen out of the southeast and soon brought a slashing rainstorm down upon the harbour. The gale that followed drove the waters before it, sending wave after wave breaking over the decks.
While Turini and Darka rushed to lash down the sails and make fast the rigging, a white ship appeared out of the veils of rain at the entrance to the harbour, rising and dropping out of sight again. The guns of the Cloud Island fort fired the one-volley alarm for a ship in distress, then as an afterthought the two-volley alarm for pirates. A mountainous swell rose in the river, and when it subsided, after disgorging great numbers of fish onto the dockside streets, the white ship had vanished.
By dawn the next morning the wind had dropped to a fresh breeze and the sky was clear. Aboard the Bee they were confronted with a mess of shredded sails, snapped and snarled rigging, and wet, limp, washed-out paper garlands. The rockets that Flood had been assured by the stationer would burst in the shapes of fantastic birds were soaked and useless. All but one, as they discovered, which Lolo had taken the night before and hidden under his pillow. Despite the fact that it was daylight, they gave in to his inarticulate entreaties and fired it for him. It flew upward in a wobbly spiral, sputtering smoke but failing to burst, then plummeted and vanished into the water with a hiss.
Turini and Darka spent the morning making repairs in preparation for a hasty departure. A few minutes into the forenoon watch, as they were about to weigh anchor, a closed carriage rattled up on the stone quay, bumping over the ropes of dried seaweed that still lay strewn everywhere. An indistinct voice hailed the ship, and Snow leaned over the quarterdeck rail to see an elegantly dressed young man tumble from the carriage, followed by an empty brandy bottle that wobbled chummily over to a bollard, against which it stopped with a hollow thunk. The young man crawled over to the bottle with an exaggerated mockery of feline stealth, lunged, and caught it in his hands. He scrambled to his feet and held aloft his prize, which immediately slipped out of his grasp and shattered on the stones.
The mishap was applauded by the other occupants of the carriage, three rouged and powdered women peeking over the fringes of scallopshell fans. The young man bowed extravagantly to them, spun teetering on his heel, and waved up at the crew of the Bee.
– Pardon me, mariners, he shouted, but I was told there was an absolute smasher of a party going on here. Are we too late for it?
– You’re English, I think, Flood said.
– So do I, sir, although I confess I am no longer certain. They say this climate kills men of my nation and I’m still here. Dear Papa thought it would be so improving to send me out to the antipodes for a few years to learn commerce from the Chinamen. Do me a world of good, he insisted. Do him good, the old bugger, after I strolled into the orangery one afternoon and found him at it like donkeys with the gardener.
At that moment Pica came up beside Snow. The young man’s eyes went wide and he staggered back theatrically, placing a hand on his breast.
– God’s wattles, he said, if you aren’t the spitting image of Madame Beaufort. I last saw her on the day I left London, to ask her would I have a safe voyage. And I swear, if you couldn’t pass for her daughter, my little lass, then I am an orangutan.
The book invents another book.
Now and then you glimpse it, this other book that desires you as reader. It is there before the book is opened, there after it is closed. Letters of ink on white paper may fleetingly seem the shadows cast by its radiance, passing through the net of the world.
Sages have spoken of the Four Noble Books: the Material Book, the Fluid Book, the Fiery Book, the Invisible Book. And in their merging is said to be found the Unread Book within all others. Heard in the creak of the binding, felt in the fibres of the paper, beheld entire for an instant on the edge of a turning page.
There are those who say that the printing press, like a mirror that produces only false copies, is the enemy of the Unread Book. It is wise to remember, however, that even the most commonplace volume partakes of the substance of the Material Book. Out of that subtle affinity much has been dreamed. I have heard of holy fools who read with their legs stretched naked in the dust. They read from the sole of the foot upward, from the crown of the scalp downward. A book, they say, consists of nails, teeth, skin, tendon, marrow; of heart and lungs, liver, spleen, and kidneys, stomach and intestines; of the fire of the breath and the wind of the bowels; of sweat, spittle, tears, mucus, urine, bile, lymph, oil of the joints, and fluids of generation.
They burrow into the book held warm and living in their hands, peel its leaves back like layers of flesh, come at last to blankness, a page of bone.
THE CABINET OF WONDERS
It was inevitable that he would lose count, and so he did, somewhere past the twelve thousandth sheet. Still his pace did not slacken. Kirshner’s type continued to bring forth forme after forme, rising unbidden from the metal, and he continued to print, to cut into small folio pages, pausing only long enough to notice that the stack of paper which he had expected would soon overflow his work table did not seem to grow measurably once it had reached the thickness of a Bible, or one of Samuel Richardson’s novels. It occurred to him that this could only be possible if each sheet he cut from the roll of Finest Tortoise was thinner than the one before it. He wondered what he would find when he reached the innermost curl of the roll, if he ever did.
– If the book was shaped like this, he said, would you ask that question?
She went away puzzling over that, and then realized that the solution, if there was one, did not matter as much as the fact that her father was answering her now in riddles.
He had begun to inhabit another world, a waning moon. His gaze went through things. On the rare occasions he spoke, his words came from a lunar distance. He was indifferent to food, and as usual barely slept, but now without apparently needing to sleep.
On the day he had set her the riddle of the book’s shape she returned later with coffee, and saw that the apple, shiny and unblemished a few hours before, now resembled one of the shrunken heads she had seen in the window of a curio shop in Canton.
After that revelation she found excuses to linger in the press room and silently observe. Candles burned down to stubs here twice as fast as they did anywhere else on the ship. The timbers of the press had begun to crack and warp. Cobwebs hung everywhere and an odour of ancient decay like that of the Abbé’s subterranean library clung to the room, even after she opened all the gunports and scrubbed the planks. When she watched Ludwig at the press she saw that the automaton’s movements had increased in speed to the point where, after a long run of printing, his fingertips were hot to the touch. A mosaic of hair-thin cracks had begun to appear all over his faded enamel.
For the first few days out of Canton, the Bee had kept along with the East India Company fleet, but soon she outpaced the huge, lumbering trading vessels with their laden holds. The white spray flew from the ship’s bows as day after day the Bee sliced through the waves, her taut sails straining.
Once through the Strait of Sunda they rode the monsoons northwest to Ceylon, laying over to caulk the leaking seams of the hull at the port of Trincomalee. Pica, Darka, and the twins sat under a sailcloth awning on deck, twining strands of tarred rope to make oakum, which Snow and Turini hammered into the loosened joints and cracks between the planks. Eventually even Flood was driven out of the sweltering tomb below decks, and took a hand in the repairs. At the end of the day they all lay prostrate on the deck, drinking the milk of coconuts.
– It’s too bad, Pica said, we can’t sew the ship up like a book.
The next day, to her surprise, her father led them on an excursion through the town. Soon leaving behind the tidy lanes of houses around the harbour, they entered the borderland of the half-castes, a narrow zone of unroofed light between the angled black shadows of the European streets and the hushed, towering forest. On a road curving up a bare hill, a thin snake of blood slid through the dust at their feet. At the crest of the hill they found the source, a ramshackle tannery. The reek of blood and the moans of animals about to meet the knife propelled them forward, but Flood lingered, his eye caught by a display of undyed skins on racks by the entrance.
Pica’s comment the evening before reminded him he had yet to consider how he was going to bind his stack of pages.
While the others waited, he fingered the pale yellow skins, tugged at them, gathered an impression of resilience and supple pliability. The Sinhalese tanner, his own skin dyed a deep blue, knew a few words in English, French, and Dutch, and by trading these scraps of language back and forth Flood learned that these were the skins of rare monkeys from the interior hills. If he wanted to know more, the tanner told him, he would have to consult the alam.
– The what?
– Alam, the tanner repeated. He sighed, beckoned Flood though a beaded archway and up a curving staircase. On the roof, under a parasol, an old naked man sat cross-legged on a carpet of palm leaves.
– Father-in-law, the tanner said.
Flood crouched in front of the old man, who was mumbling softly to himself, his head sunk forward, his long, root-like beard covering his naked body.
– Are you … the alam?
The old man’s muttering ceased and he slowly raised his head. A pair of depthless brown eyes blinked and focused on Flood.
– Alam…. Yes. She whispered it, my name, like a secret, in the garden of the English consul. Her lips on my ear. The Jacaranda petals were about to fall.
The old man’s head drooped again.
THE TALE OF THE TANNER’S FATHER-IN-LAW
He was the chief huntsman of the white overlords. She was the governor’s neice. He circled her noiselessly, as if she were a wild animal. One evening after the hunt he was invited among the pavilions, to tell the quaint old stories. She was there, reclined on dark silk laid on the cool, wet grass, a little brown monkey playing about her white arms. Her eyes were upon him as he told of Prince Rama and loyal Hanuman. How they built a bridge of stones across the sea to Lanka, to rescue lovely Sita from the ten-headed Ravana and his demons.
He told of Hanuman’s monkey army, dying in their thousands on the bloody field of battle, and how their grieving commander, to save them, fetched an entire mountain from the far Himalayas. A mountain on which grew a herb that cured all sickness and restored life to the dead.
Does that mean, she asked him, that my little friend here, being one of their descendants, is immortal?
They all laughed at that. He answered before he could relax the bowstring of his anger.
You should ask the people of the forest, he said. They were here before any of us.
They watched him more carefully after that day, but in her eyes he saw that only she had guessed the truth. The secret he had kept from his new masters, the name a seed wrapped in betel leaves.
She came to him, and he told her his hidden name. They fled together to the forest of his people. He found their way by the trees that held the ancient tattoos. Eyes and arrows. In the forest she gave birth to their child, but there was not enough life in her for both of them.
After she died he killed the monkey, the beloved pet she had not been able to leave behind. He roasted it, chewed its flesh and fed it to the child. A delicacy among his people. Then he took his bow and hunted its brothers. Old rhymes, nonsense for children, drew them down from the branches.
– I shot them and skinned them, the old man said, and with our child in my arms I came down out of the forest. The Portuguese and the Dutch and the English marvelled at the beautiful skins and bought them, and sent me back into the forest to find more.
The old man fell silent, seemed not to hear Flood’s further questions. Behind them the tanner coughed pointedly.
That evening Flood brought several of the undyed skins back to the Bee. He stretched one of them on a board, in preparation for making parchment endpapers. Then he found Darka and had her bring him the sealskin left over from the making of the coats.
From Trincomalee they stood southwest for Madagascar, hoping to pass quickly through the equatorial zone, where the weather refused to obey the almanacs. Day after day they were driven before the wind and drenched with rain. When the storms at last ceased the Bee was becalmed under a yellow haze. The sea turned bile green, hardly seeming to stir. In the sultry heat their wet clothing refused to dry. When they took it down from the shrouds in the morning it would still be damp, giving them rashes, and chills when night came.
At noon, not even the merest horsetail swish of breeze stirred the air. They went about their daily chores in a surly silence, avoiding one another’s eyes, their conversation at supper pared down to the mere necessities of table etiquette. Finally Darka stitched some odd scraps of canvas together, and Turini hung the resulting patchwork bag from two spars over the side. Now they had a makeshift bathtub that was theoretically proof from sharks, and in which everyone except Flood spent the hottest hours of the day.
They sighted the coast of Madagascar, anchored to take on fresh water, and continued south. The nights grew colder, and with the
relentless damp everyone, with the exception of Flood, succumbed to fever. The twins were struck the worst blow. They lay in their hammocks shivering and crying out now and again from the depths of nightmares that they appeared to be sharing. At a suggestion from Snow, Turini heated chain shot in the furnace and hung the linked cannonballs in their sleeping compartment, where for hours they radiated a dull flatiron warmth.
A southeast gale blew them into Cape Town, where they lay to for a fortnight while the twins recovered. The weather seemed to come in waves here at the land’s end: a day of heat and unearthly stillness giving way to wind and icy rain.
It was in Cape Town that Flood, who had so far escaped the fever, finally succumbed to the rigours of the voyage. Despite his bad leg, he insisted on climbing with Pica up the side of Table Mountain for a view of the land beyond the colony. To the north all of Africa seemed to stretch away before them, sand flats and tawny hills giving way to faint smoke-blue ranges.
As they were descending, the sky swiftly darkened and they looked up to see a milky cloud pouring over the long flat rim of the mountain. Wet flakes of snow drifted around them as they scrambled down the path. Flood stumbled several times and Pica had to help him down the rocky slope.
As they reached the road back to town the sun splintered the clouds and birds rose everywhere from the steaming grass. Rounding a curve, they glimpsed a group of what looked like children in ragged sheepskins flitting across the road and disappearing into the bramble hedge on the other side. The last of the children paused at the edge of the impenetrable green wall, glancing over her shoulder as they passed. Pica saw that she was a young woman. Under the brim of her goatskin hat her buttery skin gleamed.
Salamander Page 22
