Salamander (29 page)

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.

– Zero, Zero, he mused softly. Where did you say this encounter took place?

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.

– What happens when they wind down, or stray off the road?

Everyone knew the messengers were on important imperial business, so passersby always paused to crank them up again or set them back on course. Heaven and earth had to run efficiently.

Back on board the ship Flood took his straight-edge rule and measured Djinn’s height.

– You speak Chinese, don’t you?

– Which Chinese?

– How many languages do they have here?

– Several, I believe.

– As long as you know one of them.

When the compositor understood what Flood wanted of him, he made no complaint.

– I will meet my fate here, he said.

It turned out that Djinn was slightly shorter and slenderer than Ludwig. Turini carefully dismantled the automaton, removed his cogs and gears, and fitted his porcelain shell around Djinn like a suit of armour. Ludwig’s painted metal eyeballs were replaced with transparent disks of glass to allow the compositor to see where he was going. A latch and hinge were fitted to the mouthpiece to allow him to eat and drink, and another similar trapdoor cut in the posterior for the subsequent necessities. As a final touch, Darka concealed Ludwig’s military paint behind Chinese garments, and placed a straw hat like that worn by the locals on his head to hide the automaton’s European features.

They escorted him through the streets to the high whitewashed wall that enclosed the district of the traders, and saw him off at a gatehouse with a humpbacked roof of red tiles. All
that Pica could glimpse before the doors shut was a low hedge glistening darkly in the rain.

THE ADVENTURE OF DJINN

After several days of solitary travel he came at dusk to the bank of a wide river, where a ferryman sat waiting in his boat. The fading light, the lonely slap of water against the side of the ferry, the dim red lantern of the ferry boat all produced in Djinn a feeling that his melancholy destiny was near, and he brightened at the thought. As he hurried down the steep, stony bank, the ferryman appeared, a naked sword in his hand.

– An upside-down night, the bearded, red-eyed ferryman growled, his teeth bared in a terrible grimace. A moonlit day.

Djinn hesitated at the sight of this apparition. Fearing to betray himself he remained silent. The ferryman repeated his salutation and then leaned closer, sniffing.

– Ah. Only a wind-up messenger. I can’t see anything in this gloom.

As the boat slipped out into the stream, the ferryman took a longer look at his passenger by the light of the stern lantern.

– You’re not really an automaton, are you? he asked, his frightful red eyes narrowing.

Djinn did not speak.

– A foreigner?

– Of course not, Djinn blurted in his best attempt at Cantonese. – You see, I’m actually from –

– Another foreigner, the ferryman muttered, shaking his head. Tell me, why do you people persist in coming here?
You will find only what you would find anywhere else. Pain and sorrow.

The ferryman seemed to want to continue, and so Djinn said nothing, knowing silence to be the surest prompter of speech.

– Three years ago, he said, my beautiful young wife drowned in this river. Here at this very crossing.

Djinn slowly sat, abandoning all pretense of machinehood.

– Years ago, the ferryman went on, I was a wealthy and respected salt merchant. I had been married since my youth to a kind and hard-working woman. When death took her suddenly from me, I mourned for a long time, certain that I would spend my remaining years in solitude, comforted only by memories of my dear helpmeet. If only heaven had seen fit to allow my old age this lonely but dignified retirement from the world.

He ceased for a moment, and all around them in the humid night Djinn heard the croaking of multitudes of frogs.

– As heaven willed it, the ferryman went on, one day I saw a face. A face that stopped me dead in the street. I stumbled home, forgetting my business. I made inquiries. The young woman was from a distant province, and her noble but impoverished family had come to my prosperous town in search of better fortune.

Her name was Pool of Jade. At night her perfect white face hovered before him, driving away sleep. By day he tended his business in a state he had all but forgotten: the giddy drunkenness of infatuation. In a kind of fever he went again and again to her house, wooed her, lavished gifts on her family, and was at last accepted.

On fire, he married hastily, against the advice of his older brother, a monk, who tactfully reminded him of the wide river
of years between his betrothed and himself, and cautioned him to maintain a stern lordship over her at all times. The salt merchant demanded of his cloistered brother what he could possibly know about love, and devoted himself entirely to his wife’s happiness.

– I see now that I fussed over her far too much, made myself an obsequious and tiresome fool in her eyes. No doubt she soon wearied of such timid attentions from a man whose hair was already grey.

After her death he found letters full of indecent hints and suggestions she could only have exchanged with some shameless libertine of the town. It was clear to him then that she had found what she really longed for, a youthful lover.

– Who he was, I have not yet discovered. Not yet.

He knew only that at night she would slip out with her devoted maid to meet this scoundrel at the river, where he waited with a boat to take them to their trysting place. There was no ferry at this crossing then. People in these parts had always called this the Ford of Amorous Longing and he had never known why.

– I know now, to my sorrow, the ferryman said. Why was I not aware of her absences, you may well ask. It seems she had bought from some apothecary a vial of sleeping potion, a few drops of which in my evening tea would topple me like a stone into unhearing, dreamless slumber until the dawn.

Toiling each day at his shop, mollifying customers and government inspectors, browbeating his labourers, he was too busy to be suspicious of this unusual drowsiness and only assumed that age was at last laying its heavy hand upon his shoulder.

– One spring night, as my wife and her maid slipped out to their clandestine rendezvous, a thunderstorm rose up and hid
the moon. My wife, not seeing her lover’s lantern in the rain and darkness, fell into the river and was swept away. I assume her brave paramour heard her screams for help and fled, rather than risk his own precious life to save her.