Free Salamander by Thomas Wharton

Zecchino’s
Antiquities
, concerning the founding of Venice.
    – There were two wealthy Roman families in Aquilea, he told Irena, who each had one child born to them on the same day, a boy and a girl. The children were wondrously beautiful, but the local sibyl warned that should they ever meet, they would instantly fall so deeply and irrevocably in love with one another that they would expire on the spot, their mortal bodies too frail to withstand such unearthly and absolute desire.
    He paused, seeing Irena frown as she handled the unwieldy ribbon of paper.
    – Go on, she said. I’m listening.
    – The two families had a city constructed on the sandy islets in the lagoon. A city designed as an elaborate maze of walls, streets, and canals, something like this castle, if you will. The idea was to prevent the boy and girl from ever meeting. By the time they reached the age of sixteen, however, they had both heard rumours of each other’s existence, and understood that the city was in fact their prison. So the boy and the girl escaped into the streets to find one another.
    – The looping design, Flood went on, reflects their endless pursuit. The boy’s story is printed on one side, the girl’s on the other. But when the ends are joined, both follow the same single-sided story, so to speak, unaware that only if one of them stops moving will they be able to meet.
    He waited for some comment from her, and when she handed the scroll back without speaking, he said,
    – You don’t think the Count will care for this?
    She glanced up with a look of confusion, as if she had woken suddenly from a dream and still expected to see its landscape around her.
    – It’s very clever. I think you should show this to my father.
    He did so that afternoon, despite his misgivings.
    – Have you ever been to Venice? the Count asked, handing back the scroll.
    – No.
    – If you had, you likely wouldn’t have chosen a romance for your text. The Queen of the Adriatic is toothless, senile, and smells bad. Still, this is a clever contrivance and I am not displeased. Persevere, Mr. Flood.

    Instead of persevering he stepped out for a breath of air and a leg-stretch on one of the parapets. He walked up and down, rubbing his hands together, glared at by gargoyles with long icicle noses, their gaping jaws dribbling water into an abyss of cornices, spires, slate roofs, and flying buttresses. He stood gazing out at the outside world that for days now he had virtually forgotten. How long had he been here? Today made it … eleven days. Only eleven days.
    The river was frozen over but for a narrow scar of black water. The pines on the mountains were cloaked with snow, the ribbed white roof of the sky streaked with smoke rising from the village. From the forested hillsides came the sound of trees being cut, the axes striking the wood in an irregular tattoo that somehow soothed him. If not for that vaguely pleasing sound, the world would have seemed locked away in crystal.Had anything ever changed in this valley? For all he could see or hear that revealed otherwise, it could be the year 1000. Or the year 1400, Gutenberg’s invention of movable type still half a century away.
    What would he be if he had lived then? A scribe, a monk, if he was fortunate. But more likely he would be down there in the forest with the timber-cutters, one of those who had likely never held so strange an object as a book in their callused, dumbfounded hands.
    About the time this castle was built, according to the Count, the Mainz goldsmith had begun his cataclysmic innovations. And now, three hundred years later, the world was just beginning to drown in books. Like the magic wine cask in the old story, the press, once set flowing, could not be stopped by human power. Everyone, rich and poor, inquisitive or merely bored, was clamouring for things to read, and here he was, in this spellbound corner of the world, busily adding his own trickle of inked paper to the biblical