Salamander (15 page)

He was taken down into the clockworks, to a stone chamber with a huge toothed gear for a roof. Pungent steam rose from a grate in the floor.

There was a straw pallet against one wall and above it a narrow embrasure that let in a weak, nacreous light. He could hear water trickling somewhere. Once every hour the gear overhead creaked to life and with a dull clunk ratcheted around one tooth, splattering oily water into the cell.

The Count came to inspect the new arrangements, sliding open the door’s spyhole to have a look at his prisoner.

– You can’t do this, Flood said when he saw the old man’s eyes fastened on him. I am not one of your subjects.

– If you were to consult the most recent surveyor’s maps, the Count said, you would find that this castle does not exist. And now, neither do you.

Flood sank onto the straw pallet.

– At least let me have my press. I can still work on your book.

– I’ve changed my mind concerning that, I’m afraid. Books need readers, and when I am dead, there will be no one here to do any reading.

– Where is the Countess?

– Oh, I’ve brought her to see you, the Count said, stepping away from the spyhole. Since the two of you will never meet again, I thought it only fair that you should have the chance to say your goodbyes.

There was a rustle of silk and Irena’s face appeared. She gazed into the cell, expressionless.

– Countess, Flood whispered, unable to move.

– She was not for you, the Count’s voice said.

His long thin fingers spidered up to Irena’s temples, sank
in like talons. With a click her face came away in his hands. All that remained were her eyes, two naked orbs in a hive of twitching, buzzing machinery.

The panel slid shut.

He howled. Pounded the door, scraped at the walls until his fingers bled. Wept himself into exhausted sleep.

After a murky expanse of time he heard a sound overhead and a basket on a rope came down through the gear housing with his meal: a heel of loaf, a stone bottle of water, half of a stale meat pie. He left everything where it was and did the same when the basket came down the next day. The day after that, the basket failed to appear. When it finally descended again three days later he snatched at its contents greedily and from then on ate every last crumb.

He set himself to ignore the sound of the gear before it drove him mad, until he realized that the mental effort needed would lead even more quickly to the same result.

He tormented himself with questions he could not answer. What did the Count mean by showing him that clockwork parody of her? Was she dead? Or had that
thing
been her all along? No. Another of his riddles. An insidious joke. She had to be alive. She was the only thing in this prison that was.

Horror-struck at the abyss beckoning his sanity, he set himself a daily regimen of imaginary printing. Unencumbered by the limitations of real paper and ink, the dumb recalcitrance
of inanimate objects, he was free at last to dream a book unlike any other. In his head the calculations based on the golden section flew together in angelic concord. It all made sense now. The book would climb into being on the infinite spiral of the Fibonacci sequence. The frame, the container of the words, was the key.

The various stages of producing each sheet were parcelled out by the ratcheting of the gear. To make the work expand to fill the vague gulf of time before him, he went about it more slowly than he would have with a real press, setting and printing only one single sixteen-page forme every hour. As night fell and the cell sank into darkness, he would peel an invisible sheet from the type, blow on its intangible surface, hold it before his unseeing eyes to check the quality of his nonexistent impression.

In time his phantom presswork failed to distract him from his situation and he sank into a torpor out of which he would jolt awake in the dark, having sat heedlessly on his pallet through an entire day. He eventually decided that he was neglecting to imagine the text that was to fill his spectral pages. To his inner vision the impression was always clean, unblemished, his best work, but the matter remained utterly obscure, veiled from him as if he had lost the ability to read. He had always relied on his customers to supply him with the text that he would print and bind, but now, he realized with dismay, he would have to become author as well as printer.

No other possibility presented itself than that of beginning with Irena. He had already filled a book with her name.
This
book would contain everything else about her that he could remember, their first meeting and all that followed. He filled column after imaginary column with the timbre and nuances
of her voice, with every word they had spoken to one another, with the changing colour of her eyes, the coolness of her hair streaming across his naked chest, her body, volcanic, supple, entwining with his, the scent and taste of her skin, until, remembering his last sight of her, on the far side of the gallery the morning of what was to have been their fourth night together, he was so overcome with despair that he left his work and curled up in a ball on his pallet, seeing and hearing nothing and hoping only for death.

To survive he would have to begin elsewhere. He recalled a passage he had found in one of the Count’s books, a commentary on the tenth-century
System
of Al-Kindi, who postulated the causal influence of everything upon everything else. The entire cosmos, from the tiniest atomies to the vast silent spaces beyond the moon, formed a web of connectedness within the mind of God. From this astounding proposition the Arab philosopher conjectured that a complete knowledge of one single thing,
any
single thing, be it a chair, a feather, a raindrop, the merest trifle, will lead at last, through the web of relations, to an understanding of everything else. A radiant knowledge of All. The tiniest pebble under one’s feet a mirror in which the entire Creation was invisibly reflected.

Casting about for an object to be the seed of a universe, he plucked a straw from his pallet and described to himself its length, shape, coloration, and texture. From there began a meticulous survey of the pallet from which he had taken the straw, followed by an inventory of every square inch of his roughly trapezoidal cell, each stone of the walls and every crack and crevice in the mortar between each stone, the mouse droppings he found each morning on the bare floor, the comings and goings of the rats and the many-legged vermin that nested in his
pallet and that ate the mouse droppings, the tiny scraps of dry and scaling skin that would fall from him like snow whenever he scratched his burning limbs, the tremulous webs of light reflected from the water that ran beneath his cell, the reef of dirty ice that slowly formed on the embrasure when winter came and just as slowly thinned and wasted away the next spring.

His senses, their sphere of action limited, did not grow dull but rather began to sharpen on what little was available to them. In time the soft patter of a centipede’s legs resounded for him like the tread of a column of marching men. He could watch the stones of the walls settle a little farther each day into one another as they sank slowly towards the river. Lying awake at night he smelled the blood moving under the surface of his skin, felt the tug of the rising moon in the glands of his neck and groin. One day, instead of printing, he sat on the floor and watched a spider build a web in the crook of his arm.

Everything was woven into his work.

He moved, inch by inch, through the halls of the castle and into the world.

From time to time he heard the panel in the door slide open. He would not look to see who was observing him. He kept on with his printing. Let them wait. They would get their book when it was damned well ready.

Chewing his heel of loaf he bit into a rolled cylinder of paper. A note from Djinn. The backward message, once he had deciphered it, told him that the Count had gone with his men to a hunting
salash
in the mountains and that if they acted quickly Flood could be freed and spirited out of the castle that
night. The printer sliced his finger on the edge of the paper and sent back a message scribbled in blood, asking Djinn to wait, if he would be so kind, until his work was finished.

One spring the river rose through the grate in the floor. He climbed from his bed one morning into ankle-deep icy water.

The flood subsided after a few hours, but not before collapsing a section of the wall opposite the door. Behind the fallen stones stood a gnarled trunk of bare wet rock. The unhewn roots of the castle. When he put his ear to the crevices at dusk he could hear the squeak and flutter of bats waking.

A pair of night herons nested for a season in a corner of the cell. Their luminous eyes followed his movements back and forth across the tiny space. After a while he ignored them, certain that they were mechanical toys belonging to the Count.

Time became spherical. Past events gathered around him like words in a book he could read as he pleased, in any order.

One day he stepped back from the press, wiped his brow, hung up his leather apron, and peered out the window of the shop. It was a cold winter morning in Lady Chapel Court. Snow was falling softly, silently, and the stones of the court had vanished under a covering of white. He wiped at the frost on the warped pane and saw a small figure in a red cloak. Meg, making snowballs. She looked up, saw him in the window, waved and shouted, although he could not hear the words.
Come out, Nicholas
.