Salamander (19 page)

Flood shivered, took a gulp of wine, and fought back a spasm in his throat. The cabin was cold, damp, ill-lit. Strange lodgings, though the bump of the hull against the pier reminded him all too keenly of the pulse of the castle’s machines.

He glanced at Pica tugging off her soiled stockings and suggested that Darka might be able to find her some girl’s clothes.

Pica frowned and Flood saw a blush steal into her cheeks.

– I like these clothes. They’re loose. My skin is waxy, it needs to breathe. That’s what the doctor said.

– Then there is something we have in common.

She looked at him with a sudden eagerness.

– So you can do this?

She jumped up and placed her hand over the candle on the table. Flood gaped, too startled to act, as a filament of greasy smoke threaded upward from her index finger.

– Don’t! he shouted, crossing the room.

She glanced back at him with a look of mingled surprise and disappointment, and took her hand away slowly from the candle. A faint blue emanation haloed her fingertips.

A sound woke him. A low, tremulous note, like the wind through the hollow of a wave.

He lifted his head and collided with something soft, silk and embroidered. For a moment he breathed in the faint scent of the perfume sachet he had taken from around Irena’s neck, heard her breath in his ear as the bed shuddered beneath them.

He opened his eyes. A cushion had been tied with sail thread to the slats of the bunk above his.

He was on the ship. They were heading out to sea. He lay still, his mind struggling upward out of the pool of time in which he had been submerged.

There it came again. That grave, inhuman whistle.

He rose from the bunk and crossed the room unsteadily, his bare feet feeling their way across the uneven planks. The door of the cabin was unlocked. He hobbled along a short passage to a blank end wall which slid aside at his approach. In the centre of a long, low-ceilinged space stood his printing press, braced with timbers and bolted to the deck with iron bars. Setting it up, Turini had suggested, was the only way to keep the press safe from the tossing and pitching of the ship.

Against the hull sides of the room, fastened by huge iron brackets, stood the type cabinets and stout ink casks with huge brass stopcocks in their bellies. Ludwig hung from his hook in the corner, his glassy eyes fixed on the press.

At the work table sat Djinn, cleaning the long-unused type with a brush, a bottle of solvent at his elbow.

– Did you hear that sound? Flood asked.

The compositor glanced up in surprise and then shook his head.

Flood came into the room and looked around with mingled delight and guilt. While he lay curled up in his bunk the first few days, overcome with seasickness, Djinn had obviously been busy. Everything was spotlessly clean. Everything in place and, he realized with a tremor in his heart, ready for work, if he so wished.
Printing at sea
. He shook his head at the thought, and then the memory came to him of his platform at the castle, shuddering to a halt at the striking of the hour.

He noticed then that as Djinn finished cleaning each piece of type he set it into his composing stick.

– What are you working on? he asked.

– Remembering.

Flood followed the elusive sound through the belly of the ship. Climbing the ladders up through the decks, he rose into the glare of sunlight, the flap of canvas, the smells of tarred rope and freshly stone-scrubbed planks. Dread shot through him when he saw that they were out of sight of land.

On the quarterdeck, Turini was down on one knee, knocking together a pair of boards. With his root-like beard and callused hands, the carpenter reminded Flood of a tree, as if in his features one could see the knotty, living wood that became the smoothly planed chairs and shelves he had been making for their use and comfort since they came aboard.

Darka stood beside him at the helm, as unlike her husband as it appeared possible for someone to be. Like water she flowed rather than moved, her supple body seemingly able to take any shape needed, so that it was she who slipped down into the tight spaces her husband could not reach in his endless hunt for loose planks and leaks. When she saw Flood she slid a leg out and nudged her husband with a toe. Turini hastily stood.

– 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.

T
he 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
.

V
enice, 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.