Free Salamander by Thomas Wharton Page A

deluge that was surely coming.
    Someday books would even spill into this valley, and the people down there would scoop them up out of curiosity and drink, and learn the taste of knowledge, which always left one thirsty for more. And then that pleasantly distant sound of axes would grow much louder, as freshly sharpened blades started biting into the roots of this castle.
    He heard a sound near him and peered around the corner of the parapet to see the Abbé de Saint-Foix, wrapped in a thick cloak, pacing and reading a letter. When Flood approached he glanced up as if emerging from a deep cavern.
    – You’re only in your shirtsleeves, Mr. Flood. Aren’t you afraid to catch a chill?
    – I thought winters in Quebec were a lot worse than this.
    – They are. Why do you think I left?
    For the first time, they shared a smile.
    – I see that the Countess Irena takes quite an interest in your craft. If only I was staying on here. The three of us might have worked together on your impossible project. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, Book without end, Amen.
    – It sounds like you’re planning to leave soon.
    – I must. In any event I have found life inside this giant clock a little confining. I will be returning home, to Quebec, at least for a while. This letter informs me that my brother, Michel, has gone to his eternal reward.
    – I am sorry.
    – You needn’t be, the Abbé said, meticulously folding the letter and tucking it into his cassock. He was brother to me only by accident of birth. Life under his rule, after our parents died, was rather like life here at the castle. Come to think of it, Mr. Flood, I have a story about my childhood that may be of use to you in your labours for the Count.
    THE ABBÉ’S NARRATIVE
    During Sunday Mass, wedged with his squirming brother and sisters between the sombre bastions of his parents, Ezequiel listened to the priest expound upon the eternity of bliss enjoyed by the righteous in heaven, or, more often, the eternity of torment awaiting sinners in hell. He would attempt to form a picture of it –
what would an eternity of bliss be like?
— since he never seriously contemplated the possibility that God would send him elsewhere, and in any case the priest already supplied avivid description of the other place. He had much to say about what activities would be occupying the hours of the damned in hell, but he never went into similar detail about what the blessed would be doing with all the time at their disposal, other than singing the same hymns they sang here in church, only even more interminably.
    What did it mean to say that for those in heaven, bliss would never end? How could that be? A thing only made you feel good because there was a time when you didn’t have that thing, and so when you did, you could remember how much less enjoyable life had been not having it. Eternal bliss meant you were happy always and at every moment, without ever passing through a time when you were not happy. Every moment of that timeless time you would be aware that, yes, you were in heaven and this was bliss. Always. An unpassing passage of time, it seemed to him then, that might be like the long, dark winters of this land, like the fields of snow that stretched out endlessly beyond the walls of Quebec, perched on its rocky height above the silent white river.
    His mind, like his delicate stomach the day his brother forced him to eat a scrap of the leathery cured meat favoured by
les coureurs de bois
, instinctively rejected the idea. That was no escape. It was mindless, the dream of slaves. He realized quite early how life in the colony was ruled by the clock. Each spring, when the ice broke up and he waited with everyone else for the arrival of the first ships from France, it occurred to him that time was their creator. Quebec did not believe in its own existence until those white sails were sighted on thehorizon. Then the people around him, the pale ghosts of winter, would