Salamander (21 page)

Kirshner nodded.

– Good. You’re observant. I left one letter out.

He pulled open a drawer in the cabinet, plucked out a single sort and dropped it into the tiny square hole in the forme. When he had tightened all the quoins around the edge of the iron frame he held one hand just above the surface of the type, his fingers trembling.

– Like you, Mr. Flood, for years I never suspected the existence of such a society. At least not until I began to work on this, for you. What would once have taken me mere days when I was young and blessed with eyesight has taken a very long time.

He pushed the chase across the table and Flood saw, in place of the expected lines of type, a dull, solid plate of metal.

– I’ve always found it intriguing, Kirshner said, that an alphabet is both the most durable and the most ephemeral of the world’s elements. In the language of my people the alphabet consists of twenty-two letters. Twenty-two rivers, twenty-two bridges.

He smiled at Pica and gestured to the chase.

– Now, if you will, breathe lightly on the forme.

She leaned over the chase and blew softly across its surface. All at once letters began to rise in relief from the metal, until the entire forme had reappeared. Pica laughed.

– Gooseflesh type, she said.

– In my daybook this batch was noted down as
Kirshner galliard roman thirty-seven
, but I like your suggestion much better. Gooseflesh type it shall be.

Flood was unable to tear his eyes from the backwards letters that lay before him, untouched by ink and seeming to blaze in the sunlight so that he could not read them.

The metallurgist’s hand brushed lightly over the raised type and the letters rose and sank, bobbing in a pool of mercury. Forme after forme appeared and disappeared, as if within the depths of the metal pages were being turned.

– Is it just random, Flood asked, or is there some order … ?

– You could ask the same thing of the universe, Kirshner said. Whatever else infinity may be, it is generous.

Flood watched, spellbound, and thought of the book he had printed for Irena.
Desire
. Her name hidden within it like these letters rising from the metal.

– The pieces are more fragile when they’re unassembled, Kirshner said. As they watched, the type solidified again into an ordinary, unmoving block of text.

– Handle them carefully. They are somewhat volatile, as I have discovered.

He held his hands out and Flood saw, burned into his fingertips, slender Hebrew characters.

– The sefirot. Essential ingredients of the alloy, and which I should have taken more care and time to understand. But they did teach me much. We think of the world as
filled
. With things, phenomena, a vast drawing room stuffed with objects,
solid and imperishable. When read by the light of the sefirot, however, this world reveals itself to be impermanent, illusory, mostly empty space, until the mind begins to furnish it.

With the quoin key, Kirshner unlocked the chase and slid out the slender wedges of metal furniture.

– If such is the nature of the world, then imaginary books are not absurd dreams but intimations of reality.

He lifted the lid of the typecase and with methodical care began returning the sorts to their compartments. A dragonfly whirred past and vanished into a bed of hollyhocks. When Kirshner had finished he closed the lid of the case and slid it across the table to Flood.

– You want me to have this?

– My work is done. It’s up to someone else to find out what can be made of it.

They followed Kirshner through his garden as he finished gathering vegetables for supper. He told them that over the centuries the society had attracted enemies as relentless as they were powerful. If they took the gooseflesh type with them they would have to be on their guard.

– I’ve been told the Council of Ten is watching you, Flood said.

– They are indeed. And now they will be watching you, too, I’m afraid. I recommend you remain here until the carnival begins. You will more likely go unnoticed in a crowd.

They stayed the evening with the old man, who insisted they dine with him and his grandson. They ate and drank at a table outside until the light declined, then the boy lit torches around the garden. The flames bent and twisted in the night wind. From beyond the walls they heard the rising noise of laughter and merrymaking.

As Flood and Pica were taking their leave of Kirshner they heard a flap of great wings. A pelican glided down over their heads, skimmed the surface of the canal, and rose again, vanishing into the lilac dusk. The first stars began to appear and the boy took them back through the tunnel to the door of the house.

– I will escort you to San Marco, he said, slipping on a cloak.

– I can find it, Pica said, already walking away.

– I think he likes you, Flood whispered when he had caught up to her.

– I really can find the way, she said. I have it in my head now. You’ll see.

Flood steered for the streets where the crowds were thickest, Pica close at his side and the case of gooseflesh type clutched tightly under his arm. He was not sure just what he had been given, but the familiar heft of the case, the muffled rattle of the sorts, reassured him.

Grotesque and comical faces swam up at them and vanished. The familiar harlequins, beaked plague doctors and zanies were in abundance, but every so often masks swept past that left them only with a vague sense of recognition and unease, as if they had encountered these faces before in dreams.

They were hurrying along an unlit arcade, hoping to elude any pursuers, when two cowled figures and a man dressed as Don Quixote stumbled drunkenly out of the shadows into their path. All three carried thick wooden staves. The lanky knight stepped forward and in a slurred voice demanded that they all go for a drink, even the lad. Flood refused and asked to be left in peace, as he was on urgent business. He was not sure what sign
indicated it to him, but in the next instant he knew that the three men were as sober as he was.

– We can guess your urgent business, Don Quixote said. You were in the Jewish quarter. You brought something out with you. Alchemist’s gold, perhaps, to ferret out of the city.

– We have nothing you would want.

Don Quixote scratched his chin.

– Are you absolutely sure of that, friend? After all, this is the night of
forse
. I think my friends and I will have to see for ourselves.

Flood leaned down to whisper in Pica’s ear.

– Run. Warn Djinn.

– But –

– Do it.

As she darted away, Flood turned back the way they had come and was instantly seized from behind. Over his shoulder he caught a glimpse of Pica bolting down the arcade, then their staves cracked against his skull, his shoulders, drove into his stomach. Pain dazzling as lightning illuminated the borders of a realm he had not imagined, the dark ranges of agony When it had subsided he was lying with his face pressed against the cold stones, tasting his own blood.

– What are they?

– Lead slugs. Trash.

He heard the case crack as it hit the ground, the scuff of footsteps receding.

Slowly, with laboured breathing, he climbed to his knees. The case lay open and overturned nearby, its lid split down the middle. His attackers had kicked the slugs in every direction before fleeing.
Pie
, he thought absurdly, his father’s word for a mess of spilled type.

On hands and knees he began to gather the sorts that were scattered over the stones, dropping them with trembling fingers back into the case without concern for the proper order. A few stray pieces lay at the canal’s edge. Just beyond his reach the moon slithered on black water. He watched its silent dance for a moment, spellbound.

It was likely that some of the type was lost forever, lying now in the murk and mire at the bottom of the canal. Perhaps he could bring Pica here in daylight to search for the missing pieces.

Pica
.

He heard the sound of footsteps and climbed unsteadily to his feet. He lurched into a staggering run and as his legs gave way a sturdy pair of arms caught him.

– I’m ready now, he said. Lock me up and don’t let me out this time.

They brought him back to the ship, where he lay, delirious, in his bunk, while Turini set sail and took them out to sea.

Three days later he awoke with a throbbing head and a terrible thirst, to find that they were bound for Alexandria.

When he was well enough, he had Pica bring him the gooseflesh type. Under his direction, he had her set a forme. As she had done at the metallurgist’s garden, she tried breathing on it, then shaking it, and brushing the letters with ink. She and Djinn heated the chase, immersed it in brine, and set it out in the sun. Nothing produced the slightest tremor in the metal. The slugs, some with letters and others blank, remained as they were, dull and inert.

– We’ll keep rearranging the letters, Flood said, like the pieces of a puzzle, until something happens.

She remembered how she had first glimpsed him through the spyhole in his cell at the Castle Ostrov, oblivious to everything else around him as he printed an invisible book.

She had been searching the
Bee
up and down ever since they first came on board, with no idea what she was hoping to find. Now she spent all her spare time prowling the decks, learning every passageway, every sliding panel and trapdoor, every secret recess where someone or something might have been hidden away.

A letter. A map. Some sort of clue. The more she learned of the ship’s devious intricacies, the greater was her sense that there was something hidden just beyond her knowledge. Sometimes when she was climbing through one of the sliding panels she had the feeling that her mother had just disappeared behind another panel or through a hidden door, that she was actually somewhere on the ship and that they were both looking for each other but never quite meeting.

She spent most of her time with the Turinis, aware of the way the four of them existed as a kind of single being. They had soon overcome their fear of her, although the carpenter still insisted on addressing her as Countess. From him and Darka she learned to steer, keep the sails trim, and judge the wind. With the encouragement of the children she began to feel at home high up in the rigging. She sensed, running through the daily shipboard routines, the invisible web that bound the parents together, the parents to the twins, and the twins to each other. Lolo and Miza
often woke her early in the morning, crawling into her bed and asking for the stories she had learned as a child. She would rise with the family, eat with them, share their talk and laughter, their squabbles and reconciliations. Often she would spend an entire day among them without once seeing her father. In the evening, she would bring him a meal and he would grope for his cup of tea with his eyes on the forme of type before him.

Then night would come, broken up into its long, tedious watches. The children would finally fall asleep, and she would take her turn alone at the helm, keeping the lanterns lit and the sails braced. And then she would hear, amid the other moans, murmurs and stirrings of the dreaming ship, the dull clink of the sorts.