Salamander

by Thomas Wharton

  She moved forward and something brushed cobweb-like against her skin. As she lifted a hand to sweep it aside, everything in front of her, the press, the ink barrels, the long room and the layered and gelatinous light itself, bent and elongated slightly, like an image painted on taut, transparent fabric. That faint spidery sensation, she understood, was the impress of the light itself on her skin.

  She squeezed her hand into a fist, and when she opened it a knot of light sat pulsing in her palm.

  Ludwig lay motionless in the pool of ink that was fused to him now, and solid as black glass. She knelt and tugged the automaton’s head around. His eternal smile of youth had been split by a hairline crack running from forehead to chin.

  She left him and climbed the hatchway. A dark figure hung, silhouetted against sunlight, at the top. Her father, still and silent, one foot raised over vacancy, about to descend the stairs to the press room to find out where she had gone.

  When she reached him she examined his shadowed face, the line of muscle in his jaw revealing teeth clenched hard. His eyes looking into hers, not seeing, the dilation of the pupils arrested as he was turning away from the light. The fear there, for her. Or of her. Fear of what he would find when he reached the press room.

  For the first time she touched his hand, felt the ridges of the veins, the callused knuckles. Cold and lifeless as stone. She saw the fraying threads of his shirt cuff, the tiny dots of ink on the sleeve.

  Finally she stepped past him and climbed onto the quarterdeck. The ship lay at the beginning of a larboard heel, Snow and Turini frozen at the helm, Darka and the twins stopped where they had been racing along the gangway, frozen into positions impossible even for them. Puffballs of black smoke hung in the air. She pushed at one just above her head and her hand sank into it, leaving a hand-shaped hollow.

  She could look at the sun without flinching, its face a dark burnished gold, its light hanging visible in the air like strands of honey.

  The silence.

  She was alone. Everyone else suspended while she remained here. Waiting for her to bring them back to life.

  She looked at the frozen sky and all at once she remembered something that happened to her at the Ospedale in Venice. She had been sitting in the garret, reading one of Francesca’s forbidden novels. Bored with its tale of fearless knights and virtuous ladies, she had taken the Maestro’s violin down from the wall and was lying on her back, her head hanging over the foot of the bed so that she was looking upside down out one of the open window casements. She plucked the one remaining string of the violin, wondering if the sound would summon the Maestro’s shade again. Out the window, she remembered, was a lake of blue sky. The ceaseless burble of the city had dwindled to an immense distance. She felt the thrum of the plucked string pass from the instrument’s belly to her cheek, listened as the note faded in the still air. The sound like time itself, each moment a wire, taut with possibility and then plucked and already fading into the past. As the notes died away she suddenly felt lighter than air, about to rise off the bed and float away through the window. She was free.

  In the well the world was like that empty blue vault, like a string pulled taut, not yet plucked.

  She had to be careful. Without time, she sensed, the world was defenceless against suggestion. The skin of the moment was fragile. She alone could choose. Like reading a book, she told herself. I make the next thing happen.

  She leaned out between two bulwarks. The surface of the ocean gleamed like a shell of translucent green glass. Just beneath the surface she saw the black egg of an incubus, its shell already cracking open along red volcanic seams, inches from the Bee’s hull.

  She squinted through the intervening forest of smoke to the white hull of the warship, lit with the motionless stars of its own gunfire. Terrified, she saw herself walking across the water’s surface, climbing aboard the Acheron, disabling their guns. Taking the Commander hostage. Making him re-enter time with a sword through his guts. She rejected her next idea as soon as it formed in her mind, tempting her with its awful simplicity: striking a match in their powder magazine and leaving it hang there, about to fall, an icicle of fire.

  Her gaze moved past the Acheron to the sea. A storm to the northeast stood like a vast grey ship, anchored to the sea by a white cable of lightning. She thought of the great round globe, the cities, towns, and villages and all the people in them, the farms and vineyards and forests and deserts, the creatures down in the abysses of the sea and on the plains and high in the air. Everyone and everything still as a painting now. Drops of rain suspended inches above the earth. Trees bowed by invisible shoulders of wind. Deer caught in mid-leap. Newborns halted in their first tiny wails. Condemned men reprieved for now from a drop through the final door of the gallows.

  The earth itself not turning, she thought in wonder, turning away from the rail. She felt the blood within her slowing, the seeping away of time from her flesh and bones. She sensed deep within that if she were to stay here, she would never sicken, never grow old. She would stay a girl forever.

  Someone was missing. Djinn.

  She slid down the companion ladder and ducked through the hatch to the great cabin.

  In the gloom she groped for Amphitrite’s chart table, and as her sight returned she found it, her fingers touching the painted plaster globe of the world that sat there.

  She found Djinn crouched under the chart table, his hands over his ears, his mouth open in a silent scream. Like a terrified little boy. She knelt and kissed him softly on the forehead.

  The silence had been working on her, she realized, filling her with the deepest loneliness she has ever known. She was glad her father would not be far away when she climbed back out.

  Before leaving she looked at the books lined up on the shelf behind the chart table. Turini’s books of navigation and weather lore. Her own books were down in the press room, in a glass-fronted cabinet that Turini had made for her, to protect them from damp and rot. Gulliver’s Travels. Robinson Crusoe. The Thousand and One Nights. The seventh volume of the Libraria Technicum.

  To keep them all safe, she could just stay here and read. Forever.

  She was free here to take hold of the hem of things, pull the world around her like a cloak, search through its dark folds and creases for what she has lost. The earth her clockwork toy, spinning as she wished, all mysteries and sorrows burned away in the cold flames of her desire.

  She touched the globe, sent it revolving slowly, wobbling slightly from the tap of her finger. Rivers, mountain ranges, names of places she had never been drifted past. Cathay. London. New France.

  The empty expanse of the Pacific rolled past. Where, she wondered, was Amphitrite’s fabled island of Shekinar? If she stayed here long enough, she could find it, or make it exist.

  Her heart began to pound and a wave of cold panic crawled over her skin. She had to leave now, while she still could.

  With a slap she sent the globe spinning.

  Back in the press room she took another deep breath and plunged headfirst into the metal. When she climbed out she saw the hands of the pocketwatch moving, and heard the metallic stutter of Ludwig the automaton. The clock of the world was ticking again.

  Sometimes you wish to escape to another part of the book.

  You stop reading and riffle the pages, catching sight of the story as it races ahead, not above the world but through it, through forests and complications, the chaos of intentions and cities.

  As you near the last few pages you are hurtling through the book at increasing speed, until all is a blur of restlessness, and then suddenly your thumb loses its grip and you sail out of the story and back into yourself. The book is once again a fragile vessel of cloth and paper. You have gone everywhere and nowhere.

  THE PAPER-THIN GARDEN

  There had been a battle at sea. They were all agreed about that. But no one could quite remember how long ago it had happened, or how it had ended, other than with their escape.

  Pica h
ad joined the others on deck, where they stood about like recently awakened sleepers. The battered Bee was listing slightly to starboard. The air hung heavy and still, but despite the heat the masts were furred with rime.

  That evening and for days afterward, while they made repairs to the damaged timbers and shifted the ballast in the hold, they kept stumbling across objects no one remembered seeing before: an arrow stuck high in the mizzen-mast, drifts of snow in shaded corners of the upper decks, a snakeskin glove without its fellow. This collective memory loss, Snow decided, was an early sign of scurvy, and they had better hope to find fresh rations soon.

  One morning they found themselves in a region of great ice islands, through which they crept like wayfarers in a frozen city of giants. During a blizzard they anchored in the lee of a rocky islet, the home of a colony of seals that could not be seen through the flying snow, but whose bellows and honks went on incessantly throughout the storm. In the morning the air was clear and the wind knife-sharp. Amphitrite Snow went alone to the far side of the islet in a longboat, taking with her the ship’s one working gun, Turini’s ancient musket. They heard five shots, a long silence between each. Soon afterward Snow returned, with three of the beasts in the bottom of the boat. When Turini hauled her up she heaved one of the seals over the gunwale onto the deck. It lay there, a huge, bloody bag of fur.

  Snow crouched, rolled the animal over, and with her knife sliced along the pale underside from gullet to rump. Pica watched the knife tug and twist, the guts spilling forth, collapsing into a coiled grey mound, striped with ropy gouts of blood. The liver followed, lying like a smoking island in a lake of blood, then the lungs and the heart.

  – Best to eat it raw, Snow said, holding up the liver. Helps against scurvy.

  She bit into the dark slab of flesh, and through a gory mouthful, insisted that everyone else take a bite.

  One by one the others tried a bit of the raw liver, and then, disgusted, Turini lit a fire in the galley and roasted what remained. Everyone ate, cramming the steaming strips of flesh into their huffing mouths.

  After the meal Snow lifted up the skin, showed it to Darka and mimed the action of putting on a coat.

  – If she needs more skins, Snow said to Turini, I can get more.

  The coats the contortionists made for everyone kept them warm and comfortable while they ploughed onward through the bitter cold. The largest of the ice islands stood off their port quarter for three days, until they began to wonder if there were any end to it. On the fourth day, Snow roused everyone with the discovery that the Bee and the ice island had drifted much closer to one another in the night. What from a distance had appeared to be solid and unmoving was as subject to the heaving and tossing of the sea as they were. The wall of the island rose ponderously before them on the swell of the waves and sank again with a roar that shook the Bee’s timbers. In its shadow the shriek of the wind dropped to a muted moan, punctuated by the rumbling and creaking of the ice.

  At the helm Snow frantically attempted to claw them away from disaster. Underneath the waves the hull groaned, scraping against something for a long terrible time. As they finally began to shear away from the overhanging wall, a shower of crystal needles glittered down around them. The twins shrieked, leaping to catch the ice diamonds in their hands and on their tongues. Snow hissed at them to be quiet, then looked up and shouted a warning. There was a crack like thunder as far above them a vast plate of ice broke free from the white cliff.

  Turini and Darka grabbed the twins and shielded them with their bodies. Djinn and Snow dived to the deck. Pica crouched with Flood in the lee of the forward companionway.

  An obelisk of ice hit the stern rail of the Bee and shattered it into flying splinters. A white mass the size of a house plunged just to the stern. A cataract of freezing brine roared over the deck.

  In another moment they had emerged from a cloud of churning mist and into the waning light of day. Pica, clutching Flood’s hand, raised her head to see jagged stalactites sticking upright in the planks of the quarterdeck. Snow and Djinn were picking themselves up and brushing ice chips from their hair.

  After they left the sea of ice they were dogged by a lingering drowsiness. Days passed during which the watch was neglected, the sails and rigging untended, the ship’s course left to the random nudgings of wind and waves. They slept undisturbed through a gale that spun them around and tore the sails to shreds. When they gathered for meals in the galley they would try to reconstruct an objective history of the last few hours, with everyone contributing minutes of lucid certainty here and there. Often this collective remembering was frustrated by the way they had begun mixing up their sleeping and waking lives. Each morning the twins reported their odd dreams, about how the ship had gone very fast through forests and cities, and eventually someone else would admit that they had had similar dreams of terrifying speed. The only one who never had any nocturnal visions to report was Pica. At breakfast she sensed that they were waiting for her to contribute her dreams, and when she did not there would be an awkward silence.

  Despite the disappearance of the Acheron, Amphitrite Snow remained vigilant when on her watch, but during her off-hours took to sleepwalking in earnest, sometimes in the middle of the day. One morning Flood found Ludwig missing from the press room and followed inky prints of bare feet to Snow’s cabin, where he found her snoring peacefully with the automaton in her arms.

  The only one who seemed not at all baffled by their circumstances was Djinn.

  – I knew something like this would happen, he said. It was to be expected. We’re utterly lost.

  The stars had changed.

  They drifted on the swell of the sea for days without breath of wind or sight of land. The water in the butts dropped to an alarming level and the provisions they had taken on in Alexandria were nearly gone.

  One morning Pica awoke to the sound of rain and went out on deck to find the Bee resting in the middle of a plain of lush green grass. Snow was already at the rail, lowering a lead line.

  – It must be the calenture, she said. Sea fever. I’ve seen it happen. You think the sea is a lovely meadow, so you climb overboard to go for a pleasant stroll and you drown.

  – It looks real to me, Pica said.

  There was only one way to find out. Snow had Turini lower her in a longboat, which sat solidly in the grass and did not bob as she had expected. She trailed a hand over the side and came up with a fistful of stalks. Finally she climbed out of the boat and walked all the way around it.

  It was a bed of seaweed, she finally admitted. The surface had a spongy give and she could hear a watery squelch at every step. It was grown so thick that other vegetable life had been able to thrive upon it.

  By this time the rain had drawn off, the Turinis were up and soon joined Amphitrite for a stroll. Turini brought out poles and sailcloth and erected a pavilion to keep the sun off. By the time Flood awoke he found everyone out on the grass, having a picnic. He climbed down to find Djinn brewing tea on the stove he used to recast type. The children had gathered leaves, tubers, and iridescent snails to make a salad. Turini and Darka were giggling and cooing over each other like young lovers.

  Pica sat apart, propped against an empty ink cask, immersed in one of her beloved novels. Flood left her alone, reminded of how Irena had looked the day he watched her reading among the silent shelves.

  They spent all day and most of the evening away from the ship, lolling about in the cool grass. Djinn and Turini went on a trek and returned at sunset with the news that they had found the rotting remains of other vessels. The seaweed island was a graveyard of ship carcasses, the oldest a galley that appeared to be of Roman vintage.

  Days went by while they waited to see if the weeds would let them go. Not even Djinn could offer any guess as to their fate. Turini took advantage of the enforced idleness to patch up the ship, although it soon became clear that the carpenter had grander plans in mind. His intent had been to refit their ship with salvageable materi
al from the scattered wrecks, but to accomplish this such extensive dismantling was necessary that the Bee was stripped down to little more than a skeleton. When Flood wondered out loud, over supper, whether such drastic measures were really needed, Snow came to the carpenter’s defence by citing the one great law of the ocean, the one that even the whales understood: Sooner or later you’re going to run into someone you know. It would be a good idea, she mused, to change appearances and confuse the perceptions of the Commander as much as possible. If he was still out there hoping to swat a bee, they would transmogrify into some other creature.

  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.