Salamander Read Free Page A

outstretched hands shakily patting the air before him. In the distance three infantrymen have upended a gunpowder cask and are already playing cards.
    The world will not stop.
    The Count tosses his sabre to the earth. Tomorrow perhaps, or the next day, the Prince’s army will breach the walls and take its vengeance for the deaths of comrades, family, ancestors. He will not be among them. He will honour his son’s dying request and return home. He will mourn his wife. See his infant daughter. And devote himself at last to his long-abandoned dream.
    The next morning he resigns his commission. Prince Eugene tearfully embraces his old comrade-in-arms.
    My dear Konstantin, what will you do?
    Puzzles
, the Count says, placing his sword in the Prince’s hands.
I will do puzzles
.

    After his son’s death Count Ostrov retired to his ancestral castle, on a precipitous island of rock in the River Vah. This ancient stronghold had been built by his ancestors on the crumbling remains of a Roman fort in the same year that Constantinople fell to Mehmed the Conqueror and Gutenberg printed his first Bible.
    As a boy growing up in this castle, the Count had loved puzzles.
    Cryptograms, mathematical oddities, those new criss-cross word games known in his native land of Slovakia as
krizovka
, riddles and philosophical conundrums, optical illusions, and sleight-of-hand tricks: all beguiled him and, so the Count came to believe, each of these puzzles was related to the others by some hidden affinity, some universal pattern that he had not yet uncovered. Their solutions hinted at a vague shape, like the scattered place names on a mariner’s chart that trace the edge of an unmapped continent. The philosophers of the age were asking why or how God, perfect Being, had created an imperfect world, a world which at the same time the new science was comparing to an intricate machine of uncertain purpose. Perhaps the answer to such questions could be found in these seemingly innocent diversions of the intellect. Was not the mind itself, the Count conjectured, a composite engine of messy animal imperfection and clockwork order?
    Yet if there were a single solution to the infinite puzzlement of the world, the young Count Ostrov had been forcedto abandon the search for it. In the tradition of his forefathers he had taken up the sabre and spent his life on horseback battling the encroaching Turks. At the time the thought did not occur to him that he might make some other choice. One of his ancestors, after all, was legendary for having decreed that when he died, his skin should be fashioned into a drum to call his descendants to arms. Another still led his men into battle after an exploding shell had blinded him.
    Now the Count indulged himself in puzzles as he had never been able to in his youth.
    He had
trompe l’oeil
doors and windows painted on walls. Filled rooms with unusual clocks and other marvellous trinkets and curiosities: refracting crystals and magic lanterns, miniature cranes and water wheels, ingenious traps for mice and other vermin. The few dinner guests who stopped at the castle over the years were required to solve riddles before they were allowed to eat.
    We are little airy Creatures
All of different Voice and Features;
One of us in Glass is set,
One of us you’ll find in Jet.
Another you may see in Tin,
And the fourth a Box within.
If the fifth you should pursue
It can never fly from you
.
    He hired servants who were what he called human riddles. Massive-jawed giants, dwarves, beings of indeterminate age or sex, boneless contortionists, and people with misshapen or extra limbs. Many of the menial tasks in and around the castle were,however, performed by ingenious mechanisms installed in the castle by inventors from all over Europe. Count Ostrov dreamed of a castle in which there would be no living servants at all, but despite many attempts he had not yet succeeded in having a machine fashioned that could prepare roasted larks just