Salamander (32 page)

The automaton returned on a rainy morning. Under her umbrella, her hat pulled low to hide her face, Pica was waiting as she had been every day since Djinn set out, near the gatehouse in the wall.

In a downpour too loud for conversation, she took Ludwig by the arm, alarmed at Djinn’s lightness –
they’d almost starved him with this crazy scheme –
and returned to the ship.

The compositor was not inside. The clockwork mechanisms that had taken his place were unfamiliar. Flood spun the tiny wheels of brass and prodded delicate copper cylinders, while Pica peered into the hollow limbs. In one leg they found a note in the compositor’s hand explaining, with a rare joke that revealed to them the seriousness of his decision, that he would be staying behind in China rather than returning in porcelain.

At the bottom of the page Djinn had scribbled an afterthought.

I
was wrong about the future. Or it was wrong about me
.

Inside the other leg of the automaton they found a sealed bamboo tube, and inside it a roll of paper that gave off a faint scent of something vaguely familiar for which Flood could not find a name. Amphitrite Snow sniffed the paper.

–
Kong hu
. Black tea. It’s the only thing we had to drink aboard the
Gold Coast
, once the rum was gone.

The paper was extremely light and thin, yet durable, without being any more translucent than a standard rag stock.

Pica remembered her first sight of the compositor and the automaton together, at the castle. Djinn had been printing a trial page on the press before he took it apart, to make certain it would work when they put it back together in her father’s cell. She had watched the two of them in a kind of trance, these beings of unearthly beauty, working together in silence.

It was only now, when they understood that Djinn would not be returning, and she and her father reassembled Ludwig and polished him up, that Pica realized how much she already missed whoever it was that the two of them, man and machine, had made.

That evening, when she brought her father his customary late supper, Pica was surprised to see that all the lamps were out. Ludwig was not at the ready alongside the press where she expected to find him, but hanging from his hook, swaying slightly with the rocking of the ship. The air smelled of steam and hot metal, reminding her of the laundry at the Ospedale.

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.

T
he 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
.

I
t 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.

When he rested briefly from his labours he would ask his daughter if she wished to look through the sheets just printed.
Pica always declined, although she would watch him at his work, and once she asked how he would know when he was finished. He held up the apple she had just brought him for lunch.

– 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.