Salamander Read online

  – No.

  – Then there’s the matter of obtaining copyright, I suppose.

  The Count snorted.

  – Copyright. That is most amusing. To whet your curiosity, let me say that the text of this book has never been attributed definitively to any known author. And in fact, I’ve never even set eyes on a manuscript. Intrigued?

  – And mystified.

  – Glad to hear it. I surmised from your work that you would be one to accept a challenge.

  Flood bowed his head.

  – Your generous offer has –

  – Yes, yes, the Count said, scratching at his wig and stirring up a cloud of powder. I have an idea, a chimera, you might say, that I hope you will be able to help me with. The finished work will be my property, of course, although you will be allowed to imprint the colophon with your device. You will find I am not parsimonious with credit where it is due.

  – Thank you, Excellency.

  The Count returned to his breakfast. Irena lifted a porcelain sauce boat shaped like a Spanish galleon and poised it over Flood’s cup.

  – Chocolate?

  – Please.

  She poured him a full cup of the thick steaming liquid, and it occurred to him he had never had a cup of melted chocolate in his life. He took a trial sip. It was good. Very good. He took another, longer gulp, savouring, then looked up, met the Abbé’s amused gaze, and set his cup down with a clunk.

  – Nothing quite like it, the Abbé said. Hearing a voice as smooth as the dark ambrosia he had just tasted, Flood realized these were the first words he had heard the man speak.

  – Did you know, the Abbé went on, that to the Aztecs chocolate was a sacred drink? They used to offer it to their most distinguished victims, the ones considered worthy of having their hearts torn from their chests to feed the gods.

  Flood let out a nervous, barking laugh and quickly bit into a crescent-shaped pastry. I will not make another sound at this table …

  – Here we don’t show our guests such courtesies, Abbé, Irena said. They usually leave with their hearts intact.

  – I confess I find that hard to believe, Countess.

  Flood glanced back and forth at the two of them, aware of a world unknown to him, where wit and flattery flew like shuttlecocks. The Abbé set his knife and fork down in the middle of his plate and sat back, stroking his immaculately shaven chin. Apparently he hadn’t been so unexpectedly awakened, and Flood wondered whether he was a guest or a permanent resident. The slightest of smiles hovered at the edges of his full-lipped mouth, the kind of careful almost-smile Flood had seen time and again on men of a certain distinction who desired the services of a skilled and discreet printer. I’m here but I’m not really here.

  – My daughter is in charge of the books, the Count said without looking up. She will explain to you how we have arranged everything.

  – I will, Father, Irena said.

  The Count’s head shot up again.

  – Assistants, he said through a mouthful of sausage. I expect, Mr. Flood, you’ll require assistants for the project I have in mind.

  – I most often work alone, Flood said. But I would certainly welcome any –

  – I have just the fellows for the job, the Count said, stabbing his fork in Flood’s direction. Wait until you see them.

  Glancing into the passageway down which his bed had disappeared, Flood saw a horse being led by a groom. He looked at Irena, whose line of sight also must have included the apparition, but she was busy pouring her father another cup of coffee.

  – I see, the Count said, that the brewing machine has finally stopped cranking out that godless Mahometan gruel.

  – I made the coffee, Father, Irena said. We tried all morning to repair the faulty valve, but it needs a new –

  The Count’s wrinkled hand paddled the air.

  – We will have a look at it later.

  – If I may say so, Excellency, Flood ventured, I am more concerned about where I am to work. I would imagine I could be most productive if a room were set aside –

  – Set aside? the count growled, sitting back in his chair and dabbing at his lips with a white silk napkin. A room set aside, the fellow says. Young man, have you any inkling – Has no one, my daughter or some other member of my household, explained to you the workings of this castle?

  – I arrived quite late last night, and as yet no one has explained anything to me. In any case, a printing press must be bolted down to prevent jarring and shaking.

  – Of course, the Count said, blinking. He tilted his head back and gulped down his coffee. Of course. I will have my head carpenter discuss the matter with you later today. I am sure we will be able to arrive at some kind of suitable compromise. In the meantime, my daughter will provide you with a basic plan of the castle, and the latest timetable, to help you navigate.

  – I’ll see to those now, Father, Irena said, rising and nodding to the Abbé and Flood in turn. She glided noiselessly away, her long gown concealing her feet so that she seemed to slide across the floor like one of the castle’s mechanisms. There was something in her carriage, Flood noticed for the first time. An odd stiffness.… He followed her with his eyes until a deep, sonorous bong, more a felt vibration than a sound, jolted him back to his former circumspection. He glanced quickly at the Abbé, who was regarding him now with a slightly more corporeal smile. As the reverberations of the sound died away, one of the pier glasses slid upward and a wall, panelled and wainscotted, began to slide outward into the room. At the same moment, another pier glass on the other side of the room also opened and a second wall began sliding towards the first.

  A movement from the Abbé drew Flood’s attention back to the table.

  – I will take my leave as well, Excellency, the Abbé said, rising and brushing at his black cassock.

  – Off to work with you then, my handsome friend, the Count said over his shoulder. You cannot disappoint those fair readers who are no doubt panting in their corsets waiting for your next offering.

  The Abbé bowed slightly and then turned to Flood.

  – I hope we will have more opportunity for conversation. Our nations may be rattling spears at one another, but that is no reason for us to do likewise.

  – Of course not.

  The Abbé nodded, bowed again to the Count, turned smartly on his heel, and walked between the moving walls, which came together behind him with a soft click.

  – Time, the Count said, checking the gold watch that hung on a heavy chain around his neck. Give us time, Mr. Flood. You will come to appreciate what at the moment seems only utter chaos.

  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.