Salamander (22 page)

Djinn suggested trying a different ink. He was thinking of a formula he had glimpsed in an occult treatise on geometry in the Count’s library. The author, Johannes Trithemius, suggested that this forbidden ink, which was reputed to be of the same chemical composition as a fallen angel’s blood, might be efficacious in the summoning of mournful, tormented spirits.

Flood, his Latin grown rusty, attempted to translate for Pica’s benefit.
To make supernatural ink, gather oak-galls, and grind minutely …

–
Aquam mutabilem?

– We could try vinegar, Djinn said.

– Good. Now,
put in as much – vitalo?
What is that? Vitality? Life? –
as is sufficient to your judgement and permit it to stand for some days …

Alexandria was white, a city of salt on the edge of the sea.

On the first day, Flood, Djinn, and Pica left the
Bee
only for short forays into the narrow alleyways around the harbour, dazed into near-imbecility by the heat. Flood’s right leg had remained stiff and sore since the attack, and now the pain flared up again, so that he limped along. Before they left the ship, Pica had looked through the seventh volume of the encyclopedia, in search of something that would help them orient themselves in this unfamiliar world. All she could come up with was the entry on language, which speculated that the tower of Babel might have been in Egypt.

Alexandria had been cobbled together from the ruins of its ancient lives, so that one might see the stumps of Roman columns framing a doorway, or bits of ancient mosaic tile stuck into the plaster of a wall. To ascend these crumbling colonnades, where cloaked and veiled figures drifted past or lurked in curtained recesses, was to imagine that they had come to a cemetery where the dead had not quite settled down to rest. The impression of their own swiftness in relation to these spectres continued until they reached the souk, where the sun finally pummelled them into submission and they took refuge under an awning’s thin moon of shade.

As they rested, panting like dogs, Djinn found his vision
splitting in two like the halves of a lemon, so that it seemed everything was happening to him in two places at once. Like a man carrying a mirror on his shoulder, he moved through two worlds unfolding from one. In the lifeless dust he caught the delicious scent of rain. A curving pathway of sand shimmered for a moment with the tree-shaded green of a canal. Above him a pagoda rose, a horned and scaly dragon perched among the slender minarets. Out of the buzz and murmur of tongues he had carried in his head since childhood, two words came together, spoken in a voice so clear that he started as if it had been whispered in his ear.

Xian Shu
.

– My name, he said.

– What’s that? Flood said, looking up.

– I know my name.

The sun slid from its zenith and the marketplace began to fill with people. The three of them rose from their shelter and set out again, keeping the twin spires of the palace before them above the flat rooftops. By now Djinn was caught in a maze of reflections so persistent that every doorway of beaded curtains, every yawning camel, every pair of eyes flashing from the covert of a yashmak, had its counterpart in his memory. This was both a leafy city in China and salt-crusted Alexandria, and thus somewhere other than both, and Djinn sensed in this joining and splintering of worlds that his history was more than a single sad tale, or even a chain of such stories told one after another.

Flood spoke, and the vision folded in upon itself again, the jade towers of China melting away like ice spires in the heat.

– Here it is.

They were at the gates of the palace.

– Do you have an appointment? the doorwarden asked. You have to have an appointment.

– How do we get one?

– You have to see the
vekil
of appointments.

– Then we’d like to see him.

– Do you have an appointment?

Unable to puncture this hermetically sealed logic, they retreated.

– Don’t worry, Djinn said as they turned away. He will let us in tomorrow.

– How do you know that? Flood asked.

– I remember.

On the morning of the second day, in the crowded souk, Flood lost her. He and Djinn turned this way and that, jumped to look over heads, called her name into the chorus of a hundred voices crying their wares.

On the edge of the marketplace they were caught up in a hurrying mob. From the gossip around them Djinn was able to glean that there was to be an unexpected public execution. The condemned man, a supplier of coffee to the Mamluk garrison, had been caught dealing with the despised Turkish janissaries. This was not an execution, in other words, so much as a message from the powerful Egyptian troops to the Ottoman pasha, and it was clear the people in the streets were eager to see it delivered. Flood and Djinn shouldered through to the front of the crowd just as the curved blade flashed down. After a long still moment the spectators stirred, the talking and jostling beginning anew as the crowd transformed from a single body into people heading every which way back to their lives.

He caught sight of her then, not far from him, staring at the
headless body slumped on the stone, the blood darkening in the sand.

He took hold of her wrist and led her out of the square.

The next day the three of them set out again for the palace.

– Do we have an appointment? Djinn asked the doorwarden.

– With who?

– The
vekil
of appointments.

– How the devil should I know? the doorwarden growled. Ask him.

In the outer reception hall they met the indifference of court protocol, a cold so palpable that Flood almost wished the clerk he had snagged by the sleeve would wave them off and thus waft some of his studied iciness their way. The clerk, a thick sheaf of documents stuffed under his arm, listened without expression as Flood described the Abbé, then informed them he had never seen nor heard of such a person, and continued on his way.

Back outside in the public court, they sat by a fountain under a sycamore and debated whether to return to the ship or find lodgings in the city. They were no longer in a hurry, content for the moment to be out of the furnace of the streets. As they lingered near the fountain, reluctant to leave its cool spray, the clerk Flood had spoken to earlier came hurrying by, now without his bundle of documents. He gave Djinn the briefest of sideways glances as he passed and kept on, but at the gate of the court he stopped, turned, and came back.

– No one will help you, he said in French, if you keep doing foolish things.

– Such as? Flood asked.

– Asking for Safwa Effendi.

The clerk’s name was Selim. He told them he spoke French because it was required at the present pasha’s court to know the language of that refined nation, Alexandria’s favoured trading partner. He asked their names and inquired after their business, but was careful, Flood noted, not to ask too much. He told them that the Abbé’s knowledge of obscure arts and sciences made him a closely guarded resource.

– Like the porcelain-makers of Germany, he said, imprisoned by greedy kings to keep the process secret.

If they wished to see Safwa Effendi, they had to gain entrance to the inner palace, and in order to accomplish that, they would have to be invited by the pasha.

– The cool of the evening is almost here, the clerk said. We may walk together in the streets now without attracting notice.

Djinn fetched the Turinis from the ship, and they all ate dinner at the clerk’s house, a loft above the
khan
of an Armenian wool merchant, where doves crowded the ledges of the latticed windows. Lolo and Miza, having spent so much of their life on board the ship, were terrified of the city’s unyielding solidity and clung to Pica the entire evening.

Selim lived with his three unmarried older sisters, who welcomed the visitors with nods and bows, but soon retired to a far corner of the room and sat together, stealing curious glances at Pica. They sat apart during the meal as well, and from the bits of family history Selim dropped here and there, Flood learned that all three sisters were widows of the pasha’s numerous military excursions, and that their brother’s greatest concern was to find each of them a husband.

– I could die in peace tomorrow, he said, eyeing Djinn and then Flood, if I found a soul brave enough to take all three.

The pasha, Selim informed them, had one all-consuming passion: his own death, for which he was determined to be better prepared than any man had been before. As a result, he was an insatiable collector of things that would assist his meditations on the inevitable. Lugubrious poetry, dismal music, the bones of suicides, and courtesans dead of the plague. By now the pasha was said to have an unrivalled collection of such morbid treasures, and so something that would tempt him would have to be very unusual indeed.

The next morning Pica found her father in the press room, unshaven and dressed in the clothes he had on the day before, having stayed up all night wrestling with the challenge of creating something very unusual. He had expected Djinn’s help, but for the first time since Flood had known him, the compositor seemed uninterested in printing, and took to strolling alone through the streets. He would be gone most of the day and then return to the ship in the evening, bringing sugary treats, toys, or unusual shells for the twins. Lolo and Miza now rushed to greet him, tugging at his sleeves and chanting his name. Selim had been telling them stories from
The Thousand and One Nights
, and they were convinced that the compositor might, if pestered enough, live up to his name and perform the kind of djinnistical feats performed in these tales, like growing to the height of Diocletian’s pillar, or drinking up the Mareotic Lake in one mighty gulp.

One evening when Pica and the twins were visiting the clerk, Djinn showed up with a sheaf of long yellow leaves tucked in his belt and a dazed, far-off look in his eyes. Selim pushed and patted the compositor down into a chair and brewed him some of his frightful black coffee. Once he had been rescued from the children, Djinn shrugged off his stupor
and related how, while nosing around in the souk, he had caught the scent of something that would not let him go and had traced it, delving further and further into the windings of the streets, along narrower and narrower passageways, having picked out of the cloud of aromas a scent that seemed to him to come not from the here and now but from the hazy borderlands of his own past.

– I thought I was fooling myself, he said, but it was maddening. Like a face you can’t quite remember.

He ended up in the arcade of a public bath, at a tiny stall that sold baskets woven of a slender yellow sedge. The aged merchant spoke a tongue of which Djinn could only understand a few words, but he patiently showed the compositor how they used the roots of the plant for firewood and building material, and the long blades of the leaves for baskets, rope, and paper.

The sedge was papyrus.

When Djinn’s reservoir of words ran dry, the old man brought out some leaves of papyrus, a reed pen, and a clay ink bottle. Djinn sniffed the ink and knew at once it was the recipe for which he and Flood had been seeking. This was the fallen-angel ink, its faint scent that of a time of absolute joy now dead and gone, darkened by the sulphurous odour of mingled blood and pitch. With halting words and hand signs, he asked what the ink was made from, and the old man drew