Salamander

by Thomas Wharton

  – 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

  By nightfall they had passed through the gate of the moon, seated in a houseboat of plaited reeds, the guests of three people with whom they had hardly spoken a word: the ancient basket merchant, a woman who appeared to be even older, and a young woman, veiled and silent. Flood and Pica sat together in the stern, watching Djinn converse haltingly with the old man in a tongue that he seemed to be remembering as they spoke. The boat floated through a forest of towering rushes, water lilies drifting past in the darkness like luminous planets.

  They arrived at dawn in a tiny village among the reeds where one of the last of the papyrus craftsmen lived. Greeted as one long lost by the villagers, Djinn was taken to his reed hut and permitted to watch while he worked.

  The craftsman split the green leaves with a bone needle into long, narrow strips and held them up for Djinn’s inspection. The quality of the papyrus, Djinn learned, was best when made from the inner pith. This was used to make the hieratic paper, reserved exclusively from ancient times for sacred texts. From there, the various grades deteriorated until one reached the outer husks, which were used for emporitica, paper for wrapping fish and other perishable merchandise.

  The thin strips of papyrus were spread out on a wet stone table. As the craftsman wove them together, his assistant, a little boy, spread watery mud on each layer. The woven plaits were then pressed beneath heavy wooden boards, left to dry in the sun, and finally stitched together into a long roll.

  Djinn held a freshly dried sheet of papyrus to his nose and inhaled, and something older than his own past was breathed to him. The slightly briny reek of the fibres hinted of a time so distant he grew dizzy at the thought. This paper comes from a place where we all began, he thought. Not quite land, not quite sea.

  The three people they had travelled with erected a sheepskin tent on the edge of the village and made a fire with thin sticks of wood and cakes of dried dung. When they had eaten their evening meal, the young woman rose, slipped silently into the tent, and returned a few moments later. Her face was still veiled but the rest of her body was draped only in a sheet of the thinnest muslin. She approached the fire, and when she let fall her sheer covering, they coul
d see that her umber skin was tattooed from neck to ankles with tiny blue-black interweaving symbols. The basket merchant beckoned to Djinn and made a sign to him that he should also disrobe. Djinn glanced at Flood and Pica, then slipped out of his shirt and breeches and stood clutching the bundle of his clothes. The merchant untied a small leather pouch and set out on the sand before him an array of knives and bone needles.

  At his bidding, Djinn lay down on his side near the fire. With a finger, the old woman began to trace the flowing script on the tattooed woman’s flesh, and as she did so she spoke to the old man, who sat cross-legged beside Djinn with his tattooing instruments and pouch of ink.

  As each word was passed to him, he made an incision into Djinn’s flesh.

  The true weeping ink, the basket merchant called it.

  Djinn was not able to read the ancient script, but as if the ink had seeped through his skin and added its own dark tincture to his blood, he would spend hours in a lethargic trance, only to wake suddenly, leave the ship, and prowl through the marketplace, on the trail of a certain herb, gum, or oil that would be added to the mixture brewing in the iron pot he had placed on the type-founding furnace.

  Both Flood and Pica noticed that the compositor had grown even more quiet and withdrawn since his tattooing, and assumed that the ink was indeed to blame. Hoping to draw him out, Pica began preparing the ingredients he gathered and mixing them in the quantities he prescribed.

  The resulting fluid was so volatile they had difficulty pouring it into the storage vat. The ink leapt as if alive, splattering and slithering away along the seams of the planks, where it quickly vanished, as if absorbed into the frame of the ship itself.

  Finally, Flood managed to confine a few ounces in a stoppered glass bottle, and by careful siphoning was able to coat a forme of gooseflesh type. A sheet from the roll of papyrus the paper-maker had given them was prepared and set in place, and while Pica and Djinn watched from a safe distance, Flood slid the carriage under the press, heaved on the bar, and released it.

  He undipped the damp sheet from the tympan and peeled it away. The paper was as blank as it had been when it went in. The ink had not held, they thought at first, until Pica noticed a tiny speck near the bottom of the page. At first they thought it was an eyelash or something that had fallen on the sheet just before printing.

  – It’s a comma, Flood said, closing one eye and peering closely at the speck. A Griffo, or a Jenson, I think.

  He brought out a small cylindrical microscope of tooled copper, peered through the aperture at the paper, and let out a soft hmph of surprise. Djinn had a look, and then it was Pica’s turn. She squinted into the eyepiece and was startled to see that the comma, which to her unaided eyes had looked smooth and sharp-edged, had become a spiny sea creature, scaly and ten-drilled. The paper itself had been transformed into a bumpy plain of rises and hollows. This was what happened, she understood at last, when inked metal letters were pressed into paper. They crushed it and bled hair-thin capillaries of ink into its fibres.

  Then she saw something else. The comma was breathing, its sea-horse shape expanding and contracting with a slow pulse.

  – Did you see? she asked her father breathlessly.

  – Yes. And look at the type.

  Flood drew their attention back to the forme. They gathered around the press to see that the blank plate of metal within the chase was now shimmering, restless, liquid, as it had been in Kirshner’s garden.

  She opened her father’s pocketwatch, examined the face by the light from the overhead hatch, and shut the lid. Dangling the watch by its chain, she quickly lowered it into the glimmering pool of metal.

  She waited, holding her breath. After something more than a minute she lifted the watch out, checked the time, and smiled to herself. Again she leaned over the chase of gooseflesh type, studied it for a few moments, then pursed her lips and let drop a gob of spittle.

  There was a cough from the doorway and she turned to see her father watching her.

  – I wanted to see what would happen, she said.

  – And what did?

  – Time slows down in there.

  – And the spit?

  – I don’t know. I felt like doing that.

  He smiled.

  – Keep the watch. You can use it.

  Once the ink was ready, Djinn began to set a text. He mingled gooseflesh and ordinary type in formes that he printed onto the papyrus and then stitched into a growing scroll. When Flood asked him where he was getting the story, the compositor explained that it was drawn from his own life.

  With the help of the ink and Kirshner’s type, Djinn had managed to go back further than ever, through his youth and into his vanished childhood, to the first sounds he had ever uttered, while he was still in his mother’s womb. He had recaptured it all, he told Flood.

  – The taste of milk from my mother’s breast. The first sight of my father, dancing a tiny jade horse before me. The cool silk cocoon my mother carried me in.

  He knew now that his father was Chinese and his mother Ethiopian. They had met in Alexandria, had a child, and had travelled during Djinn’s early childhood. His father was a silk merchant, he believed. One terrible day he had been separated from them, and then, much later, from his memory of them.

  – How did you lose them? Flood asked.

  Djinn would say nothing more.

  – I don’t like to tell the story forwards.

  – But you’re printing it.

  He was not. Instead, he was printing the melancholy story of his life yet to come.

  – When you look far enough into the past, Djinn said, the future overtakes you. Since I’m of a melancholy humour at present, it had to be the result of both sorrow past and sorrow to come.

  – I’m no philosopher, Flood said, but it seems to me that a cause can’t come after an effect.

  Djinn shrugged.

  – It’s comforting to know you won’t be taken by surprise.

  – So what is the story you’re working on, then?

  – There’s a woman. It’s difficult to explain –

  Pica, polishing the timbers of the press, stopped to listen.

  – This is news, Flood said. Who is she?

  – I haven’t met her yet.

  Turini, passing through the press room on his never-ending campaign against leaks, offered his own advice.

  – The best cure for melancholy is a good bleeding. Get the black bile out. That’s what Darka does for me.

  In this way the problem of vitalo was solved. Darka cut open a vein in the compositor’s forearm. Blood of an alarmingly black colour spurted out of him and joined the rest of the ingredients simmering in the pot.

  To test the ink’s affinity for paper, they printed, with a combination of gooseflesh type and ordinary ten-point Bembo, a copy of Djinn’s Book of Tears, which they bound in scroll form. When Flood added his device to the last leaf he realized that this was the first time he had done so in twelve years. After the countless hours he had spent in the cell printing off sheaves of intangible paper, this slender roll of papyrus, someone else’s book, was all he had to show the world.

  Djinn gave Pica the scroll to read first. She scanned the first few pages, a hazy description of a green, meandering river, and then suddenly drew her head back, her eyes filling with tears.

  – It’s like peeling an onion. Is that really what you want?

  – It will have to do, Djinn said.

  Selim took the Book of Tears with him to the palace. They prepared themselves for another long wait, but the clerk returned to the ship the very next day with the news that the Reader of Souls, the court censor, had approved the book and that they had been granted an audience with the pasha. Or rather, Flood and Pica had been granted that tremendous honour. As the slave of a European, Djinn could not be brought in the pasha’s presence.

  Flood protested that Djinn was the book’s creator, but the compositor did not seem to care.

  – Just go
. It doesn’t matter.

  Now, as if by magic, the forbidden inner regions of the palace were opened to them. Led by a solemn doorwarden shouldering a gold mace, Flood and Pica passed through the flock of whispering clerks in the outer reception hall and across a parade ground open to the sky, where a group of janissaries stood around in idle conversation, grooming their horses. At the gate of the inner seraglio the guards ordered them to remove their buckled shoes and put on green felt slippers. Here, where absolute silence reigned, they were led through a succession of anterooms and connecting corridors to the Hall of the Divan, an oblong vault of dull stone hung with black brocades, weakly illuminated through a deep skylight in the roof. At the door, Selim appeared and leaned towards Flood, speaking in a whisper.

  – Remember to bow. Often.

  As they proceeded down the length of the hall, led by the doorwarden, courtiers in robes of dark red and brown drifted like dispersing mourners out of their path.

  The plump ruler of Alexandria lay on his side on a cushioned cedar sofa, already half-mummified in wet cloths soaked with some bitter-smelling embrocation. At the doorwarden’s whispered announcement, he raised a many-ringed finger to signal that the printer should approach.

  Flood stepped forward, and Pica shrank back behind him.

  – And the boy, the doorwarden said.

  Pica came out from behind Flood. The pasha studied her for a long time, then whispered to Selim, who bowed so low to reach his master’s ear that Flood wondered if he would manage to right himself again.

  – We have seen your book, the pasha breathed in French. We thank you for it.

  Flood caught sight of Selim’s frantic grimace, remembered that he was supposed to bow, and did so, emptied of fear and desire. In the old man’s half-throttled wisp of a voice he had heard the weary effort to remain interested in the world, in anything, no matter how trivial, as if life might be clung to by the thread of mere curiosity. But beyond all of this ceremony, the end was still coming. The end that could best be delayed by making each day so very like one’s last that to survive it seemed a miraculous reprieve.