Salamander
Page 19
Flood continued to work with the gooseflesh type and the weeping ink. Long after Djinn had gone off to bed he would be sorting and resorting the type and printing trial sheets, finally collapsing at dawn and sleeping through the day before awakening in the afternoon to start all over again. By lantern-light he sat scribbling notes and figures at his work table, oblivious to the dozens of bats nestled in the crannies of the room and sometimes in his hair.
Pica brought him his meals, aware that he had grown forgetful and even more solitary than usual since she had gone into the well. She would look with suspicion at the pieces of gooseflesh type laid out on his work table. When he wasn’t looking she would read the lines of words he had arranged in formes, and realized that he was taking as his texts passages from the books on his shelf. Geometry. Typography. Calculus. Without knowing quite why, she left one of her own books, Gulliver’s Travels, in the press room where he would see it.
At last they caught a favourable wind that sent the Bee ploughing northwest into warmer waters. One evening Amphitrite, up on the masthead, sighted the spouts of whales. When they drew nearer to the great beasts they caught the foul reek of their spray.
Later that same day gulls appeared and wheeled around the ship, uttering raucous cries of welcome. Amphitrite sounded every hour and at last touched ground at twelve fathoms, the lead bringing up sand and iridescent bits of shell.
They anchored off a shore of white sand that stretched away on either hand in an unbroken line to the horizon. One hundred paces inland, searching for fresh water, they struggled up a ridge of soft sand and found themselves on a shore again.
On this island that was nothing more than a narrow strip of beach they met with a marooned Scotsman.
He called himself Mister Zero because he had forgotten his real name. Following him down the beach they came to the stilt hut he had built from the timbers of the ship that had broken here, spilling him out into the waves, where luckily he had been snagged like a fly on this spider’s thread of land. His diet consisted of whatever polyped and crustaceous life the sea left stranded on the coasts of his lean continent.
Mister Zero invited them to share his lunch of boiled crab and seawrack, and related the story, as well as he could draw it out of his waterlogged memory, of how he had ended up the sole citizen of Exilium, as he had named the island. At times, depending on the winds and currents, his island would be submerged, slowly sinking under the waves from both ends. On those occasions he was forced to run back and forth until he was certain where the high ground would be this time.
– It’s rather bracing, he said. Being monarch of a mound, while the waves lap at your ankles. But we are safe for now, I assure you. High tide isn’t for another three days.
The vessel he was aboard as supercargo had set out from the East India Company station at Canton with a fleet of four others, their goal the newly discovered continent in the South Seas that Dutch explorers, with outrageous presumption, had named New Holland. Lured by tales of ruby mountains and deserts of gold dust, they ventured beyond the southern edge of their maps.
– We discovered it, Mister Zero said. And there were deserts all right.
As a consolation they found the sport very much to their liking. On the day they first landed Zero shot three eagles.
– Is it true, Pica asked, about the giant rabbit that lives there, the one that keeps its young in a pocket?
– Quite true, Zero said. Gan-gurroo the natives call these remarkable creatures. I shot a tidy number of them myself and often heard the babies mewing in their dead mother’s pouch.
– And the animal that’s part duck, Djinn asked, and part beaver?
– Never saw a hair of one of those. They might already all be shot.
On the return voyage to Canton, his ship was separated from the rest of the fleet by a violent hurricane off the Admiralty Islands. Dismasted, leaking in a dozen places, the ship drifted for days without fresh water or provisions, until the desperate cook caught and cooked up some sort of foul-smelling jellyfish which gave everyone fever and hallucinations. Half the crew leaped overboard. The captain hanged himself while up in the crosstrees trying to summon rainclouds.
For his part, Zero became convinced the crew was trying to kill him. Locking himself in his cabin, he stood in front of his travelling mirror and in agony pulled from his ear a tiny dagger of yellow wax. He was going mad, he knew, and considered that his misfortunes – the fatal idea of expanding his Turkey and Levant Company around the Cape of Good Hope to these antipodal waters, with the subsequent loss of everything – had at last turned his wits. This is what comes, he told himself, of trusting these newfangled nautical chronometers, as I warned Captain Tristram — damn that unlucky name — on many occasions. That night, unpiloted and driven before the winds, the ship struck a shoal in the sea and foundered.
– Everyone was swept overboard and lost, Mister Zero told them, myself included.
– Only you survived? Flood asked.
– I said everyone was lost, myself included. By which I meant to imply that rather than clinging to a cask and washing up on this shore, I believe that I became a citizen of the land of the dead.
– And what about us?
– I doubt my powers of fancy bold enough to dream up such an apparition as your ship and crew. No, I am sure you are living sojourners through this terraqueous netherworld, and that however it has come about, you have happened here fortuitously for my sake. The postal ships don’t stop in this vicinity, and it so happens I have a letter that I would like to have delivered to someone residing in the country of the living.
– Which we’ve been hoping to find, Snow hinted.
– Head due north from here – once you find your way around the island – and you should eventually bang up against China. The British traders at Canton will help you if you use my name as an introduction. The letter is for my son. He was nearing his fourth birthday when I left home for what I could not contemplate would be the last time.
Zero tugged a folded scrap of paper out of his boot. Gently he pried apart its folds.
– His name is Robert. The letter is addressed to the office of the Expanded Turkey and Levant Trading Company in Canton, since I no longer remember where it was that I lived. When I lived.
Djinn asked to see the letter and turned it over in his hand. The late-afternoon light slanted across the paper, transforming its surface into hillocks and hollows, a desert, the thin letters crossing it like a caravan and its long shadows. As in Alexandria, he heard his first name called from a great distance. Xian Shu …
– This is extremely fine paper, he said. Where did you get it?
Zero’s eyes brightened.
– A connoisseur, I see. Yes, this is of rare manufacture, isn’t it? Finest Tortoise, the Chinese call it. They alone know the secret of its making. The likes of us, foreign dogs all, are not even supposed to set eyes on the stuff, but on a trip to Canton I was able, with a great deal of trouble, to get my as yet living hands on a few sheets. That was seventeen years ago. The sheaf looked like it might be good for twice a dozen pages at most, but the paper is so incredibly fine that with careful economy I’ve made it last until today. This is my last scrap of Finest Tortoise, hoarded for this very opportunity.
Before allowing them to leave, Zero took a stick of burnt wood and drew up a map on the wind-whitened door of his hut. If his memory served, this was an accurate chart of what they might encounter on their course for China.
He warned them to keep well away from the terrible island of Durge, where the people live perpetually buried up to their necks in black volcanic soil, with hot ashes raining down on their heads night and day. At dusk, he told them, yellow-eyed jackals come down from the mountain in hungry packs, and then the inhabitants of Durge, contorting their faces with desperate animation, begin a ceaseless prattle to which the jackals will patiently listen as though spellbound by every word. Some have memorized their chatter and numbly repeat the same litany nig
ht after endless night, while others, the more adventurous or forgetful, come up with a new stream of babble on each occasion.
– But woe to those whose tongues tire out, Zero said, or who find themselves at a loss for words, for the jackals are quick to gather about the silent and eat their heads.
And they should watch out for the treacherous rocks that lay hidden near Oronymy, a chain of steep mountains rising like a wall out of the sea. This was the home of the Glose, a race of sleepers who dwelt high up on the sheer precipices in hollows worn out of the rock by their own bodies as they squirmed and writhed in their dreams. The Glose rarely awakened, but when they did, and became aware of their precarious situation, they lost their nerve, and their balance, and toppled headlong into the sea.
– On my way here, he told them, I penetrated to the interior of Oronymy, and came to a silent city. I spent some time there, wandering from street to street, house to house, but finding nary a soul who was not utterly plunged in fathomless slumber. Each night I would sit in a different drawing room, a snoring dog curled at my feet, smoking my pipe and listening to a symphony of breathing. From time to time I would tuck the blankets back around a child that had cried out in its dreams. At last, however, the sadness of this city overcame me and I left.
If forced to it by bad weather or some other mishap, he went on, they could safely lay to at a nearby island of fussy cannibals who dined only on each other, finding the meat of strangers vastly inferior to the local variety.
– Although the island may be deserted by now, he mused.
In an emergency, they could do worse than to anchor off Alluvion, a great, ring-shaped reef composed entirely of refuse, filth, and human dung. The inhabitants of an industrious, over-populated nation not many leagues to the east began hauling their voluminous mountains of waste by ship to Alluvion many decades before, as the only way to avoid being buried in it. Zero was not certain who the original constructors of the reef were, but Alluvion was home at the present time to highly intelligent monkeys and seagulls who lived together as one nation.
Amphitrite Snow asked him if he had visited Shekinar.
– I believe I’ve heard of it, Zero told her. The pirate utopia, where all men live in peace and harmony?
– Yes.
He gave her a gentle smile and went on to the next point of interest on his chart.
Back aboard the Bee, Pica watched Djinn and her father hurry back down into the press room. She followed them and found them examining the fibres of the letter paper through the pocket microscope. As she entered the room they looked up.
– We’re going to China, aren’t we, she said.
The world’s most expensive paper, Finest Tortoise, was said to be fashioned of a blending of crushed hummingbird-egg shells, dragonfly wings, and the inner lining of wasp nests. Its exact composition and delicate method of preparation remained a secret passed down through the generations from the earliest, legendary masters of the craft. The price for a ream was breathtaking, but Flood had made up his mind he must acquire at least a few sheets of it. Unfortunately, Finest Tortoise was not for sale, he was told by the English stationer in Canton.
– How about the next best thing?
– That would be what they call Breath-That-Folds, but I haven’t any of that either.
The Bee had arrived in the Portuguese colony of Macao a week before. It had taken that long for them to clear customs and be allowed to sail up the mouth of the Pearl River to Canton. Now the ship lay at anchor in a floating city of frigates, ferries, junks, government vessels, barbers’ boats, and the sampans of actors and fortune tellers from Hanan Island. As soon as they had permission to set foot on Chinese soil, Flood and Djinn sought out the stationer’s shop in Thirteen Factory Street.
At the moment there was no paper of any kind for sale in the foreign enclave.
– Why the ban?
– The Chinese governor’s decree, the stationer told them. He loves to play this chess game with the white traders. If Westerners want China’s miraculous porcelain, they have to earn it by behaving as befits their status.
– Which is?
– According to the latest imperial edict, slightly above dogs with the mange. The traders don’t like crawling on their bellies, and every so often they kick against the rules and the governor goes off like a firecracker and tells us we can no longer buy or sell things invented by his people. Last month it was gunpowder. The month before, compasses. If you wait long enough, the ban on paper will be lifted and get put on something else. Ice cream. Parasols. Ploughs. Nobody knows what’s next. Nobody has a clue. We live in a murky ambiguity lit by occasional flashes of utter incomprehension.
The stationer told Flood and Djinn that the only Finest Tortoise within a hundred miles of Canton was to be found at the palace of a great mandarin in a neighbouring province. In his employ were the only artisans who knew the secret of making the precious writing material.
The mandarin’s library contained great treasures, it was rumoured. An encyclopedia in eleven thousand volumes. A book made of jade that could predict the future. The world’s lengthiest erotic novel, banned by imperial decree for its power to turn readers, men and women both, into shamelessly rutting beasts. It was said to have been written by the god of tumescence during the brief rests he took from his unending sexual exercise, and printed during the Xia dynasty on Finest Tortoise.
The title of this monumental sutra of the flesh was Dragon Vein Stretching a Thousand Miles.
– So what do you write on in the meantime? Djinn asked the stationer.
– Wood. Unless it’s lacquered. That’s banned too at the moment.
Flood glanced around the shop, noticing for the first time the number of solitary, unescorted Chinese women rifling distractedly through the boxes of pens and sealing wax. He leaned towards the stationer and said in a low voice,
– You’re absolutely sure there’s no paper? Not even in, let us say, unofficial transactions?
– Absolutely certain of it, sir. And even if there were, the price would be triple what I just quoted you.
– Good Lord.
– Indeed. Commerce out here is like the climate. It has done in many an iron constitution.
– This is a stationer’s shop and you can’t sell me paper?
– I can sell you fireworks. And kites. For now.
Flood turned to go and discovered that Djinn was no longer beside him. The compositor had wandered away into the shop and was now looking up at the kites that hung on strings from the ceiling. Amid the brightly coloured swallows and dragons and goldfish was a huge box kite of black silk and bamboo, unadorned and slowly turning at the end of its string.
A tiny inscription in red ran along one edge. The stationer translated it for Djinn:
The tiger opens the casket of dreams.
– I will take that one, Djinn said.
That evening Djinn brought back to the ship a cartouche of bamboo rockets and the silk box kite, but as it was raining, the show he had hoped to put on for the twins had to be postponed.
For days they waited with the fleet of homeward-bound English merchantmen, delayed by port officials and their elaborate ceremonies, and by the lateness of the monsoon winds that were to drive them across the Indian Ocean and around Africa. Pica, Snow, and Darka, confined below decks most of the time by the stricture against foreign women in Canton, shared a cabin to keep one another company. When she rose in the yellow light of dawn, Pica expected Snow to have slipped away in the night, vanished into the teeming city of ships in search of another berth, a vessel ready to sail for London. But every morning the young woman was still there, sitting up in bed, smoking a pipe and lost in thought. Pica cautiously hinted at this one day, and Snow laughed.
– Haven’t you learned any patience, little girl?
In the meantime, Flood found the post office of the East India Company and delivered Mister Zero’s letter. The clerk looked it over, stroking his quill pen against his cheek.
Flood glanced in dismay at the map of the southern hemisphere tacked to the wall, covered in pencilled circles and arrows and forested with pins. He described, as well as he could with having spent most of it below decks, the journey they had made from Exilium to Canton. The clerk turned to a tall oak filing cabinet behind his desk, pulled open a drawer, then another. His fingers snapped the sheets briskly forward, then back.
– We keep records of all our castaways, he said, slamming the second drawer shut and trying a third. There are currently over a hundred solitaries in the general area of which you speak. A few double numbers here and there, and one sextet. Not a happy island, from all reports. Let me see now. Let me see.
Since they were not going anywhere soon, Flood decided there was time to journey into the interior in search of Finest Tortoise. The only problem was that the Emperor had once again rescinded the Edict of Toleration and hustled the Jesuits out by their clerical collars. General hostility toward fan kwae lo, the foreign devils, was being encouraged, and in light of these political developments, the celestial empire was off limits to any but the foolhardy.
On their first trip to the stationer’s shop, Flood and Djinn had brought along Ludwig the automaton to help them carry the reams of paper they had expected to purchase. Flood quickly noticed that a man made of porcelain caused not the least astonishment in the streets. The next time he went to the stationer’s to inquire about the feasibility of travelling inland he learned the reason for this surprising lack of interest in what would be a marvel in any European city.
This was China, the stationer reminded Flood. They invented the stuff. And they were fascinated by the clockwork gadgets of the west. They called them sing-song, and a European who wanted decent treatment from a local dignitary had better have some to hand out as gifts. The Chinese had applied Europe’s ingenuity to their own way of life, and as a result porcelain automatons were as common as spades in some districts. Government officials used them as long-distance messengers. They never got distracted, for one thing, and they could never be bribed or recruited as spies.