Salamander (28 page)

While Turini worked, the winds rose and brought storms over the island of weeds. At night, while the elements raged, they huddled under the scant shelter that was left in the half-dismantled ship and felt the ground beneath them shudder with the rolling of a deep current. In the morning the weed
bed would show gaps here and there, ponds and creeks that had not existed the night before. The daily strolls that had relieved the tedium were forbidden now.

Turini worked on the ship at a feverish pace. The unknown creature that had graced their bows was knocked away and replaced with the figurehead from a Dutch flute, a rubicund mermaid with flowing scarlet tresses. The mermaid was too long to sit well in her housing under the bowsprit and so she suffered a curtailment under Turini’s adze. Pica and the twins pitched in to give her a new coat of paint, which they had to finish from a longboat, as the island was by now shredding away under the force of the waves.

The only potent liquor they had left in stores was the weeping ink. With a bottle of it they christened the new
Bee
.

That night, under a swollen moon, the ship drifted clear of the weeds and in the morning they found themselves once again on a barren ocean.

The island where they anchored next for food and water turned out to be the habitation of innumerable tiny bats, the size of sparrows, with wings as thin as gossamer. As soon as the sun had set they would begin to take flight from the caves in immense silent black swarms. The crew of the
Bee
watched them rising until they merged with the deepening night. At sunrise they would be seen returning in a great cloud.

Flood continued to work with the gooseflesh type and the weeping ink. Long after Djinn had gone off to bed he would be sorting and resorting the type and printing trial sheets, finally collapsing at dawn and sleeping through the day before
awakening in the afternoon to start all over again. By lantern-light he sat scribbling notes and figures at his work table, oblivious to the dozens of bats nestled in the crannies of the room and sometimes in his hair.

Pica brought him his meals, aware that he had grown forgetful and even more solitary than usual since she had gone into the well. She would look with suspicion at the pieces of gooseflesh type laid out on his work table. When he wasn’t looking she would read the lines of words he had arranged in formes, and realized that he was taking as his texts passages from the books on his shelf. Geometry. Typography. Calculus. Without knowing quite why, she left one of her own books,
Gulliver’s Travels
, in the press room where he would see it.

At last they caught a favourable wind that sent the
Bee
ploughing northwest into warmer waters. One evening Amphitrite, up on the masthead, sighted the spouts of whales. When they drew nearer to the great beasts they caught the foul reek of their spray.

Later that same day gulls appeared and wheeled around the ship, uttering raucous cries of welcome. Amphitrite sounded every hour and at last touched ground at twelve fathoms, the lead bringing up sand and iridescent bits of shell.

They anchored off a shore of white sand that stretched away on either hand in an unbroken line to the horizon. One hundred paces inland, searching for fresh water, they struggled up a ridge of soft sand and found themselves on a shore again.

On this island that was nothing more than a narrow strip of beach they met with a marooned Scotsman.

He called himself Mister Zero because he had forgotten his real name. Following him down the beach they came to the stilt hut he had built from the timbers of the ship that had
broken here, spilling him out into the waves, where luckily he had been snagged like a fly on this spider’s thread of land. His diet consisted of whatever polyped and crustaceous life the sea left stranded on the coasts of his lean continent.

Mister Zero invited them to share his lunch of boiled crab and seawrack, and related the story, as well as he could draw it out of his waterlogged memory, of how he had ended up the sole citizen of Exilium, as he had named the island. At times, depending on the winds and currents, his island would be submerged, slowly sinking under the waves from both ends. On those occasions he was forced to run back and forth until he was certain where the high ground would be this time.

– It’s rather bracing, he said. Being monarch of a mound, while the waves lap at your ankles. But we are safe for now, I assure you. High tide isn’t for another three days.

The vessel he was aboard as supercargo had set out from the East India Company station at Canton with a fleet of four others, their goal the newly discovered continent in the South Seas that Dutch explorers, with outrageous presumption, had named New Holland. Lured by tales of ruby mountains and deserts of gold dust, they ventured beyond the southern edge of their maps.

– We discovered it, Mister Zero said. And there were deserts all right.

As a consolation they found the sport very much to their liking. On the day they first landed Zero shot three eagles.

– Is it true, Pica asked, about the giant rabbit that lives there, the one that keeps its young in a pocket?

– Quite true, Zero said.
Gan-gurroo
the natives call these remarkable creatures. I shot a tidy number of them myself and often heard the babies mewing in their dead mother’s pouch.

– And the animal that’s part duck, Djinn asked, and part beaver?

– Never saw a hair of one of those. They might already all be shot.

On the return voyage to Canton, his ship was separated from the rest of the fleet by a violent hurricane off the Admiralty Islands. Dismasted, leaking in a dozen places, the ship drifted for days without fresh water or provisions, until the desperate cook caught and cooked up some sort of foul-smelling jellyfish which gave everyone fever and hallucinations. Half the crew leaped overboard. The captain hanged himself while up in the crosstrees trying to summon rainclouds.

For his part, Zero became convinced the crew was trying to kill him. Locking himself in his cabin, he stood in front of his travelling mirror and in agony pulled from his ear a tiny dagger of yellow wax. He was going mad, he knew, and considered that his misfortunes – the fatal idea of expanding his Turkey and Levant Company around the Cape of Good Hope to these antipodal waters, with the subsequent loss of everything – had at last turned his wits.
This is what comes
, he told himself,
of trusting these newfangled nautical chronometers, as I warned Captain Tristram — damn that unlucky name — on many occasions
. That night, unpiloted and driven before the winds, the ship struck a shoal in the sea and foundered.

– Everyone was swept overboard and lost, Mister Zero told them, myself included.

– Only you survived? Flood asked.

– I said everyone was lost, myself included. By which I meant to imply that rather than clinging to a cask and washing up on this shore, I believe that I became a citizen of the land of the dead.

– And what about us?

– I doubt my powers of fancy bold enough to dream up such an apparition as your ship and crew. No, I am sure you are living sojourners through this terraqueous netherworld, and that however it has come about, you have happened here fortuitously for my sake. The postal ships don’t stop in this vicinity, and it so happens I have a letter that I would like to have delivered to someone residing in the country of the living.

– Which we’ve been hoping to find, Snow hinted.

– Head due north from here – once you find your way around the island – and you should eventually bang up against China. The British traders at Canton will help you if you use my name as an introduction. The letter is for my son. He was nearing his fourth birthday when I left home for what I could not contemplate would be the last time.

Zero tugged a folded scrap of paper out of his boot. Gently he pried apart its folds.

– His name is Robert. The letter is addressed to the office of the Expanded Turkey and Levant Trading Company in Canton, since I no longer remember where it was that I lived. When I lived.

Djinn asked to see the letter and turned it over in his hand. The late-afternoon light slanted across the paper, transforming its surface into hillocks and hollows, a desert, the thin letters crossing it like a caravan and its long shadows. As in Alexandria, he heard his first name called from a great distance.
Xian Shu …

– This is extremely fine paper, he said. Where did you get it?

Zero’s eyes brightened.

– A connoisseur, I see. Yes, this is of rare manufacture, isn’t it? Finest Tortoise, the Chinese call it. They alone know the secret of its making. The likes of us, foreign dogs all, are not
even supposed to set eyes on the stuff, but on a trip to Canton I was able, with a great deal of trouble, to get my as yet living hands on a few sheets. That was seventeen years ago. The sheaf looked like it might be good for twice a dozen pages at most, but the paper is so incredibly fine that with careful economy I’ve made it last until today. This is my last scrap of Finest Tortoise, hoarded for this very opportunity.

Before allowing them to leave, Zero took a stick of burnt wood and drew up a map on the wind-whitened door of his hut. If his memory served, this was an accurate chart of what they might encounter on their course for China.

He warned them to keep well away from the terrible island of Durge, where the people live perpetually buried up to their necks in black volcanic soil, with hot ashes raining down on their heads night and day. At dusk, he told them, yellow-eyed jackals come down from the mountain in hungry packs, and then the inhabitants of Durge, contorting their faces with desperate animation, begin a ceaseless prattle to which the jackals will patiently listen as though spellbound by every word. Some have memorized their chatter and numbly repeat the same litany night after endless night, while others, the more adventurous or forgetful, come up with a new stream of babble on each occasion.

– But woe to those whose tongues tire out, Zero said, or who find themselves at a loss for words, for the jackals are quick to gather about the silent and eat their heads.

And they should watch out for the treacherous rocks that lay hidden near Oronymy, a chain of steep mountains rising like a wall out of the sea. This was the home of the Glose, a race of sleepers who dwelt high up on the sheer precipices in hollows worn out of the rock by their own bodies as they
squirmed and writhed in their dreams. The Glose rarely awakened, but when they did, and became aware of their precarious situation, they lost their nerve, and their balance, and toppled headlong into the sea.

– On my way here, he told them, I penetrated to the interior of Oronymy, and came to a silent city. I spent some time there, wandering from street to street, house to house, but finding nary a soul who was not utterly plunged in fathomless slumber. Each night I would sit in a different drawing room, a snoring dog curled at my feet, smoking my pipe and listening to a symphony of breathing. From time to time I would tuck the blankets back around a child that had cried out in its dreams. At last, however, the sadness of this city overcame me and I left.

If forced to it by bad weather or some other mishap, he went on, they could safely lay to at a nearby island of fussy cannibals who dined only on each other, finding the meat of strangers vastly inferior to the local variety.

– Although the island may be deserted by now, he mused.

In an emergency, they could do worse than to anchor off Alluvion, a great, ring-shaped reef composed entirely of refuse, filth, and human dung. The inhabitants of an industrious, over-populated nation not many leagues to the east began hauling their voluminous mountains of waste by ship to Alluvion many decades before, as the only way to avoid being buried in it. Zero was not certain who the original constructors of the reef were, but Alluvion was home at the present time to highly intelligent monkeys and seagulls who lived together as one nation.

Amphitrite Snow asked him if he had visited Shekinar.

– I believe I’ve heard of it, Zero told her. The pirate utopia, where all men live in peace and harmony?

– Yes.

He gave her a gentle smile and went on to the next point of interest on his chart.

Back aboard the
Bee
, Pica watched Djinn and her father hurry back down into the press room. She followed them and found them examining the fibres of the letter paper through the pocket microscope. As she entered the room they looked up.

– We’re going to China, aren’t we, she said.