Salamander (6 page)

From somewhere unseen a clavier struck a trio of spindly opening chords, and then a lute, a horn, and a high, plaintive voice joined in. Flood, who had never cared for music, found the noise vaguely irritating. Another distraction within a distraction, like everything else in this castle.

– Now to the heart of the matter, the Count said, rubbing his hands together. One of the possible origins for the name of my people, Mr. Flood, is the word
slovo;
that is, the word
word
. Thus we Slovaks, one might say, are the People of the Word. But what irony that our national literature scarcely exists. The republic of letters has no ambassador from our country. Tell me, can you name an imperishable classic by a Slovak author?

– Well, I –

– Exactly. The Abbé asked me the other day to recommend a good Slovak novel, and I had to tell him there were none. Not just
no good
Slovak novels. No novels whatsoever. Almost everything we read, everything we say, everything we think, comes to us in someone else’s language.

He sat back, fingering his white silk napkin. The ceiling above his head opened and with a groan of gears another wall began ponderously to descend. The Count sprang forward
again so suddenly that Flood jerked backward before he could stop himself.

– Did we Slovaks utter the first word? No. Will we utter the last word? Not likely. Those glorious absolutes are reserved for the youngest and the oldest of nations. Consult any history book and where do you find us? We are a footnote people, briefly mentioned in vast tracts about others. All too often I glimpse our name in an index, I flip to the page and am informed that
such and such an event also affected the Slovaks and the What-have-yous
. Well, we are going to do something about that, you and I. When we are finished it will be possible to say that the Slovaks are truly the People of the Word.

The descending wall came to rest and immediately folded in the middle to form a corner. The immense hall Flood’s bed had rolled into earlier had vanished, and they were now in a small rectangular room, into which bookshelves began to rise from the floor. The Count smoothed out his silk napkin on the tabletop. He folded it in half, then in half again, his eyes not for a moment leaving the printer’s.

After several folds he held up a thick, compact white bundle.

– I want you, Mr. Flood, to create for me an infinite book.

– Infinite?

–
Nekonečný. Unendlich. Sans fin
. A book without end. Or beginning, for that matter.

The Count’s wrist flicked and the folded napkin snapped open like a sail catching the wind.

– The way you go about it is up to you. My one stipulation is that you bring every ounce of your native wit, imagination, and cleverness to this undertaking. No pasteboard trickery, no
feeble jokes. I have shelves of that kind of thing already. No, this is to be a book that truly reflects what I have accomplished here. A book that poses a riddle without answering it.

– I can’t think how one could –

– Don’t try to solve the problem right now. Infinity can’t be pounced upon. It is like a walled town that must be observed from concealment, reconnoitred, mined carefully from beneath. You’re a young man. You’re still on friendly terms with time. For the moment, let’s just get you settled in. You can work on other things to begin with, like your book of mirrors.

The Count pushed his empty plate away and leaned back in his chair, nodding his head in time to the music. After a while he turned back to Flood.

– This one is called Tancovala.
On she danced
. Crystalline, aren’t they? From Vienna, but they do know the old songs of my land. Which proves that something worthwhile may arise now and again from the Royal Capital of Mud.

Flood opened his mouth to speak but said nothing. The Count’s hawklike eyes fastened on his face.

– Long ago I thought I was creating this castle of riddles in order to outwit a handful of government lackeys and thus protect my purse. But lately I understand more clearly what I have really been doing.

He clicked open his pocketwatch, frowned at what it told him, and tucked it away again.

– This is not a castle, this is a system. The priests and the madmen make systems out of dreams. The writers, like our handsome Abbé there, make systems out of words. I have made this system, my system, out of stone and wood and metal and glass. And why? To what purpose? Push your chair back.

– Pardon me?

– Push your chair back, I say. Quickly now.

Flood did as he asked, and at the same moment the musicians abruptly ceased playing. At Flood’s feet a narrow gap opened in the floor, a slot stretching across the floor of the room and bisecting it into two hemispheres. With a whirr of unseen machinery, a huge metal bar, an arrow, a room-length, Brobdingnagian clock hand rose out of the slot, sending Flood scrambling from his chair. When the barbed point had risen to his eye level, something subterranean and metallic went
clank
and the gigantic ictus stopped, wavering slightly.

– The planets, the Count began, leaning sideways to sight along the arrow’s diagonal while glancing again at his watch. The planets, the starry firmament, the unfathomable abysses of darkness and time through which we plummet without knowing how or why, the entire universe, I have come to realize, is a vast, unbounded book of riddles. A book written in the elusive and unutterable language of God.

The Count snapped shut his watch.

– What I want is nothing more or less than my own personal edition.

As Flood discovered, there were areas of the castle where one function appeared to predominate over others. The head carpenter, a curly-headed young Savoyard named Turini, directed him to his proposed workplace, a gallery circling the rim of a central cavity. The immense hole, as the carpenter explained, was originally excavated to allow the Count’s engineers easier access to the main clockworks far below. As the complexity of
the castle’s design increased, this great cylindrical shaft had become a central rerouting point for bookcases and other furniture. As Flood watched, leaning over the balustrade, the cases far below him swivelled ponderously, changed direction, dropped or rose to other levels on their way through the castle. At times they passed over and through the gallery where he stood, as he learned when the carpenter pushed him abruptly to one side to avoid being run down by a glass-fronted map cabinet approaching from behind.

Down the middle of the gallery’s long sweeping curve ran a sunken rail along which a metallic angel of death glided (counter-clockwise, Flood noted) with lance raised on high. Under Flood’s direction, Turini pried loose the life-sized memento mori and replaced it with Flood’s press and work table, mounted on a small platform attached to the sunken rail in the floor. The undercarriage glided along smoothly enough that vibrations would not be a problem, except on the stroke of the hour, when everything jarred to a halt. Turini ran a callused hand through his hair and suggested that when Flood heard the clockworks beneath him tensing to strike, he would have to cease work for the next few moments. An annoyance, certainly, but not an insurmountable obstacle.

– That’s what His Excellency told me, the carpenter said, when I first came to work for him. No obstacle is insurmountable. So I’ve set my sights on Darka, the contortionist. She’s deaf and dumb, it’s true, but what a beauty.

Flood was allowed to keep his stacks of paper and casks of ink in one place, a cabinet he could reach by climbing down a ladder into the central shaft. In order to reach what he needed he soon found he had to plan his path carefully through the moving labyrinth of bookshelves.

Turini helped Flood assemble the press, a device he had never seen before, and praised its ingenious construction.

– Before there was a machine to make books, he mused, how did men get smart enough to invent one?

By early evening the uncrating, assembling, and arranging was complete, and Flood wiped his grimy hands on a cloth and stepped back to appraise, for what had to be the thousandth time, the ungainly instrument of his livelihood.

We are both out of place here
. As if aware of its incongruous presence in such surroundings the ancient workhorse seemed to hunker down before him, a faithful beast of burden awaiting the next load it was to bear.

Not for the first time he marvelled at what an odd composite creature a printing press was. With its legs and its stout frame and its various handles and protrusions, it resembled at one and the same time a bed, a pulpit, and an arcane instrument of torture. The weathered wooden timbers had been scored, cracked, water-damaged under leaky roofs, set on fire (once on purpose, by an author given to drink who’d found a typographical error in his book), realigned and repaired again and again. It had been taken apart, hauled to new lodgings, and reassembled countless times before this latest epic remove. Its wood and metal parts had been scrubbed and polished every single day of its existence, and replaced only after all attempts at repair had failed. The longest-surviving timbers, from the time of his great-grandfather the Huguenot exile, had been worn to the rounded smoothness of driftwood. The inscription burned into the underside of the frame,
N LaFlotte 1663
, had almost disappeared.

In their games of pretend he and Meg had called the press the
chimera
. It was his word, gleaned from the books of fabulous stories he read to her at bedtime. As always she took everything
he said as an article of faith. She truly believed the press was some kind of monster, and was afraid to go into the print shop. He remembered her sudden tears when he pretended he had been turned to stone by an evil spell. She had lost him.

The press had waited for him like this, he remembered, the day she died. She was eight years old. He was eleven, a child watching another child die. Before he began his apprenticeship in the print shop they had been constant companions. While his father worked late hours, he was the one who cooked her supper, put her to bed, and read to her from the Greek myths, La Fontaine’s Fables,
The Thousand and One Nights
. They invented an imaginary kingdom in which everyday things blossomed with wonder. The rooms of the house were transformed into ogres’ lairs and the mossy caves of sorcerers. Their father was the king, but his printing press stymied them for a long time. It seemed their father was both its master and its victim, and so the press could not quite be any one thing.

He and his father sat by her bedside day and night while the smallpox slowly consumed her, burning her to ash before their eyes. They washed the bleeding sores that covered her arms and legs, and finally her face. When she woke screaming from the fever nightmares he soothed her with her favourite stories. His efforts to comfort her at last became empty when she went blind.

He remembered most of all the smell of her dying. In the end she became a thing to him, the source of the graveyard stench that turned her sickroom into an antechamber of hell. He hated her for what she had become, what she had done to both of them.

On the last day she drifted in and out of delirium, shivering, babbling nonsense, and then thrashing awake, moaning
that she was on fire.
Papa, please make it stop
. He ran through the shop to fetch cool water from the pump in the court, and each time he passed the press he was aware of its silent waiting presence, mutely abiding all.

They sat at her bedside through the night until her tortured breathing finally ebbed away. Still he remained kneeling beside her, exhausted, his heart worn as thin as paper. After some time he heard the creak of the press screw from the shop. He hadn’t noticed when his father had left the bedroom, but he was gone, already back at work finishing his latest commission. After listening for a while to the sounds from the shop, he finally left Meg and went to join his father at the press.

The work went on. Every day since then, and here, too, in this castle that was like something he and Meg might have dreamed. Flood took a deep breath and tied on his apron.

There was a noise behind him and, thinking it was one of the bookcases, he stepped nimbly aside.

– I’m sorry if I startled you, the Countess said. Sometimes I forget what this place can do to newcomers,

He was glad to see her again, the only sane soul, it seemed, in this madhouse. He hoped she would linger and talk for a while, but she merely asked him if he was satisfied with the arrangements. He told her that he was, and then wondered why he had, since he most definitely was not. She said she would inform her father that all was well, and turned to leave.

– Once I’ve finished a book, Flood said quickly, stepping down from the press platform, all I will have to do is deposit it on one of the passing shelves.

Irena frowned.

– I’m afraid no one is allowed to add or remove anything from these bookcases, she said, without my father’s approval.

– I had thought from what the Count said that you were in charge of the library

– That is how it works in theory, she said with a smile. In fact, my father inspects everything that gets done here, even down to how many mice the cats are catching. Nothing escapes his notice for long.