The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  “Why doesn’t the charcoal just burn?”

  “No air can get into the sealed crucibles,” Enoch snapped. “Instead it fuses with the iron to make steel.”

  “We’ve come all this way to watch a bunch of wogs make steel!?”

  “Not just any steel.” Enoch stroked his beard. “The diffusion must be very slow. Mark how carefully they tend the fire—they must keep it at a red heat for days. You have no idea how difficult that is—that boy with the poker must know as much of fire as Vroom knows of ships.”

  The alchemist continued gazing at the furnace until Jack feared they would remain in that very spot for as many days as the firing might take. But finally Enoch Root turned away from it. “There are secrets about the construction of that forge that have never been published in the Theatrum Chemicum,” he said. “More than likely they are forgotten secrets, or else these people would have built more of them.”

  They moved on to a pile of crucibles that had been removed from the furnace and allowed to cool. A boy picked these up one at a time, tossing them from hand to hand because they were still too hot to hold, and dashed them against a flat stone to shatter the clay crucible. What remained among those smoking pot-shards was a hemisphere of spongy gray metal. “The egg!” exclaimed Enoch.

  A smith picked up each egg with a pair of tongs, set it on an anvil, and struck it once with a hammer, then examined it carefully. Eggs that dented were tossed away on a discard-heap. Some were so hard that the hammer left no mark on them—these were put into a hod that was eventually carried across the compound to another pit where an entirely different sort of clay was being mixed up, according to some arcane recipe, by the stomping feet of Hindoo boys, while a village elder walked around the edge peering into it and occasionally tossing handfuls of mysterious powders into the mix. The eggs of metal were coated in thick jackets of this clay and then set aside to dry. The first clay had been red when wet and yellow when fired, but this stuff was grey, as if the clay itself were metalliferous.

  Once the gray clay had dried around the eggs, these were carried to a different furnace to be heated—but only to a dull red heat. The difference become obvious to Jack only when the sun went down, and he could stand between the two furnaces and compare the glow of one with that of the other. Again, the firing continued for a long time. Again, the eggs that emerged were cooled slowly, over a period of days. Again they were subjected to the test on the anvil—but with different results. For something about this second firing caused the steel egg to become more resilient. Still, most of them were not soft enough to be forged after a single firing in the gray clay, and had to be put through it again and again. But out of every batch, a few responded in just the right way to the hammer, and these were set aside. But not for long, because Persians and Armenians bought them up almost before they had hit the ground.

  Enoch went over and picked one of them up. “This is called wootz,” he said. “It’s a Persian word. Persians have been coming here for thousands of years to buy it.”

  “Why don’t the Persians make their own? They seem to have the run of the place—they must know how it’s done by now.”

  “They have been trying, and failing, to make wootz since before the time of Darius. They can make a similar product—your sons and I made a detour to one of their forges—but they cannot seem to manage this.”

  Enoch held the egg of wootz up so that fire-light grazed its surface and highlighted its terrain. Jack’s first thought was that it looked just like the moon, for the color and shape were the same, and the rugged surface was pocked with diverse craters where, he supposed, bubbles had formed. On a closer look, these craters were few and far between. Most of the egg’s surface was covered with a net-work of fine cross-hatched ridges, as if some coarsely woven screen—a mesh of wires—had been mixed into the stuff, and was trying to break free of the surface. And yet Jack had seen the crucibles prepared with his own eyes and knew that naught had gone into them save black sand, fragments of charcoal, and magic leaves. He pressed a fingertip against a prominent lattice of ridges; they were as hard as stone, sharp as a sword-edge.

  “Those reticules grow inside the crucible, as plants do from seeds. And they are not only at the surface, but pervade the whole egg, and are all involved with one another—they hold the steel together and give it a strength nothing else can match.”

  “If this wootz is so extraordinary, why’ve I never heard of it?”

  “Because Franks name it something else.” Enoch glanced up, attracted by a distant ringing sound: a smith was smiting something. But it was not just some dull clod of iron. This was not a horseshoe or poker in the making. It rang with a noble piercing sound that put Jack in mind of Jeronimo wielding his rapier in the Khan el-Khalili.

  The forge was about five minutes’ walk away, and when they arrived they joined a whole crowd of Ottoman Turks and other travelers who had convened to watch this Hindoo sword-smith at work. He was using tongs to grip a scimitar-blade by its tang, and was turning it this way and that on an anvil, occasionally striking it a blow with a hammer. The metal was glowing a very dull red.

  “It isn’t hot enough to forge,” Jack muttered. “It needs to be a bright cherry red at least.”

  “As soon as it is heated a bright cherry red, the lattice-work dissolves, like sugar in coffee, and the metal becomes brittle and worthless—as the Franks discovered during the Crusades, when we captured fragments of such weapons around Damascus and brought them back to Christendom and tried to find out their secrets in our own forges. Nothing whatsoever was learned, except the depth of our own ignorance—but ever since, we have called this stuff Damascus steel.”

  “Damascus steel comes from here!?” Jack said, jostling closer to the anvil.

  “Yes—the reticules you saw in the egg of wootz, when patiently hammered out, at low temperature, produce the swirling, liquid patterns that we know as—”

  “Watered steel!” Jack exclaimed. He was close enough, now, to see gorgeous ripples and vortices in the red-hot blade. Without thinking, he reached for the hilt of his Janissary-sword and began drawing it out for comparison. But Enoch’s hand clapped down on his forearm to restrain him. In the same moment the forge was filled with a storm of whisking, scraping, ringing, and keening noises. Jack looked up into a dense glinting constellation of drawn blades: serpentine watered steel daggers, watered steel scimitars, watered steel talwars, Khyber swords, and the squat fist-knives known as kitars. Inlaid passages from the Koran gleamed gold on some blades, as did Hindoo goddesses on others.

  Jack cleared his throat and let go of his sword.

  “This gentleman with the hammer and the tongs is extremely well-thought-of among connoisseurs of edged weapons the world round,” Enoch said. “They would be ever so unhappy if something happened to him.”

  “ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, your point is well taken,” Jack said, after they had, by dint of Enoch’s diplomacy, extracted themselves from the forge with all of their body parts present and in good working order. “If we want valuable cargo for the ship’s maiden voyage, there is no need to go to Batavia and load up with spices.”

  “Ingots of wootz will fetch an excellent price at any of the Persian Gulf or Red Sea ports,” Enoch said learnedly. “You could trade them for silk or pearls, then sail for any European port—”

  “Where we would all be tortured to death ’pon arrival. It is an excellent plan, Enoch.”

  “On the contrary, you might survive in London or Amsterdam.”

  “I had in mind going the opposite direction.”

  “It is true that in Manila or Macao you might find a market for wootz,” Enoch said, after a moment’s consideration. “But you would make out much better in the Mahometan countries.”

  “Let us strike out south and west towards the Malabar coast tomorrow.”

  “Will that not take us through Maratha territory?”

  “No, they live in citadels up on mountain-tops. I know the way, Enoch. We will pass
through a couple of independent kingdoms that pay tribute to the Great Mogul. I have an understanding with them. From there we can pass into Malabar.”

  “Wasn’t it Malabaris who stole your gold, and enslaved half of your companions?”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “What is the other way?”

  “Surendranath, Monsieur Arlanc, Vrej Esphahnian, and Moseh de la Cruz—our most cosmopolitan and sophisticated members—prefer to think of Malabar as a large, extremely queer, remote, hostile, and heavily armed goldsmith’s shop in which we have made an involuntary deposit.”

  “We call such enterprises banks now.”

  “Forgive me, I haven’t been in England for nigh on twenty years.”

  “Pray continue, Jack.”

  “They have our gold. We can never get it back. But it does them very little good, sitting there. Kottakkal, the Queen of the Malabar Pirates, can only spend so much of it fixing up her palace and refurbishing her ships. Beyond that, she must put that gold to work if she’s to derive any benefit of having stolen it from us.”

  “Has she been putting it to work, then?”

  “She owns twenty-five percent of our ship.”

  Enoch laughed—an uncommon event. He did more than his share of winking, smirking, chuckling, and deadpan commentary, but laughing out loud was a rare thing with him. “I am trying to imagine how I will explain to the Electress of Hanover, and heiress to the Throne of England, that she is now in partnership with Kottakkal, the Queen of the Malabar Pirates.”

  “Imagine how you’re going to explain it to Kottakkal, please,” Jack suggested, “because that will happen sooner.”

  *Meaning that seen in cross-section, her hull had a V shape instead of being flat-bottomed.

  Malabar

  LATE 1696 AND EARLY 1697

  THEY WERE TRAVELING NOW AS Hindoostani gentlemen: Enoch and Jack each had a light two-wheeled carriage drawn by a pair of trotting bullocks. Each carriage could have accommodated two passengers, provided they were very close friends, but by the time Jack and Enoch had packed themselves in with their diverse weapons, bundles, wine bottles, et cetera, there was only room for one. And that was fine with Jimmy and Danny Shaftoe, who acted as if they’d never seen anything quite this bizarre in all their travels, and could not choose between being amused and disgusted. That was before they discovered that their own horses could barely keep up with these trotting bullocks over the course of a long night’s march. Their escort—eight musketeers and eight archers, siphoned off from the endless Siege that Sword of Divine Fire had supposedly been prosecuting against the Marathas—had to jog the whole way.

  By day the pace, combined with the sun, would have slain them all in a few hours. So they woke up around sunset, lay about camp for a few hours as the heat of the day seeped away into the earth and sky, then got underway a couple of hours before midnight and hurried down roads and paths until dawn. Jack had made the trip several times, and had learned how to break it up into stages, each of which ended in a mango-or coconut-grove near the walls of a town. They would smooth out some ground and make camp as the sun rose, and a few runners—adolescent boys of his jagir, well compensated for their exertions—would be dispatched to loiter outside the town’s gates until they were opened. These would go in and bargain for victuals while the others slept in the shade of the trees. The goods would then be delivered after sundown as the party readied themselves for the next stage.

  This was traveling of a wholly serious and businesslike nature, and demanded certain adjustments of Jimmy and Danny, who in their journey across Eurasia with Enoch Root had wantonly indulged in side-trips and digressions. There was no time to do anything except cover ground, or make preparations to cover ground. There was no time even to talk.

  Once they had escaped from Jack’s blighted jagir the landscape was pleasant enough, but uniform and monotonous: ditched and irrigated fields alternating with groves of food-bearing trees, and occasional stretches of jungle covering hills, vales, and other areas that were not suited to agriculture. Sometimes they had to pass through such parts; the jungle seemed to rush out of the night to envelop them, and they moved forward with extreme care, expecting stranglers to abseil from overhead limbs, or large man-eating felines to explode from the brush. They had to ford several rivers, which in this part of the world meant wading through crocodiles. At one of these fords, Danny noticed a pair of largish reptilian nostrils closing in on a boy who was straggling behind the main group, and discharged his pistol in that general direction. It probably had no effect on the crocodile, but it scared the boy into catching up. At another ford, an immense crocodile carried away one of their donkeys.

  The next day—or rather, the next evening—they woke up to find themselves in a black country of black men. It had been a long night’s march and their bodies wanted to sleep but their minds did not. When they lay their heads down they could hear the earth thumping beneath them, like a gentle heartbeat, for this black earth was far richer in saltpeter than any in Jack’s jagir, and the ground outside the walls of this town was pocked with holes where people labored with their thudding timbers all day long.

  If the earth was full of thumps the air was just as full of strange cries, for every peasant working in the fields hollered “Popo!” every minute or so. Jack ended up sitting in the shade of a tree with Jimmy and Danny and Enoch, eating mangoes that literally fell into their laps, occasionally jumping up to sweep back plagues of ants, and watching these black Hindoos live their lives. A cool westerly breeze blew over them smelling of salt water, for they had almost crossed Hindoostan from east to west, and were nearing the Arabian Sea.

  “Those field workers are Cherumans—a caste so low that they can pollute a Nayar from a distance of sixty-four feet,” Jack explained, “whereupon the Nayar is obligated to kill them, and then purify himself with endless and pompous rites. So to save themselves from being killed, and the Nayars from being inconvenienced, they cry out Popo! all the time, to warn all comers that they are present.”

  “You’re full o’shite as ever, Dad,” said Jimmy with equal measures of contempt and affection.

  A different cry sounded from around the road-bend: “Kukuya! Kukuya!” As soon as they heard it, the Cherumans picked up their hoes and moved away from the road, depopulating a sixty-four-foot-wide strip to either side of it. Presently a small party of travelers came into view: a black-skinned woman, naked from the waist up except for her gold jewelry, riding a white horse, and a few servants on foot.

  “If that be a Nayar, then let’s go to where the Nayars live,” Danny said.

  “What the hell d’you suppose we’ve been doing for the last week?”

  “There’s more like her where we’re going?”

  “Yes—they run the place. They are a warrior caste. It’s just like going to St. James’s and gawking at the Persons of Quality: lovely ladies, and men with swords—who don’t hesitate to use ’em.”

  After the sun had gone down, Jack sent his escort back to re-join the luxurious Siege. They lay about in that camp for the rest of the night dozing. At daybreak they were startled awake by a shouting match between a Cheruman, standing before a slab of rock sixty-four feet from the city limits, and a Banyan standing on the parapet of the wall. The Cheruman upended a sack of money onto the slab: cowrie-shells, Persian bitter almonds, and a few black coppers. Then he withdrew. A minute later the Banyan came out, deposited a bundle of goods, plucked off a few shells, almonds, and coppers, and went back into the town. The Cheruman returned and collected the bundle and whatever change the Banyan had left behind.

  “Seems a wee bit cumbersome,” Danny observed, watching incredulously.

  “On the contrary, I deem it eminently practical,” said Enoch Root. “If I belonged to a small warrior elite, my greatest fear would be a peasant uprising—ambushes along the roads, and so on. If I had the right to kill any peasant who came within a bow-shot of me…”

  “You could relax a
n’ enjoy the good life,” Jimmy said.

  After provisioning themselves in the town they turned south and followed the coast deeper into Malabar. From time to time they would pass a criminal who had been impaled on a javelin and left to die by the road-side, which only confirmed the impression that they were in a well-ordered place now, and had not taken any undue risks in sending their escort home. The heat of the sun in this far southern place was murderous, but the farther they went the closer the came to the Laccadive Sea with its cool onshore breezes, and in many stretches the road was lined with Palmyra palms whose enormous leaves cast volumes of shade on the way below.

  They knew they were close to the court of Queen Kottakkal when frail racks began to line the road, all a-drape with those same palm leaves, which had been put there to dry and whiten. The Queen’s scribes used them as paper. A lot of shouting could be heard up ahead.

  “What’re they hollerin’ about?” Danny wondered.

  “Maybe one of their ships just came back loaded to the gunwales with booty,” Jack said, “or maybe a crocodile is loose in the town square.”

  The road opened up into the main street of a fair-sized port town consisting mostly of woven reed dwellings. There were occasional timber houses along the street, and these became more numerous and larger as they drew closer to the waterfront: the bank of a significant river that ran slowly and quietly through a deep-looking channel that broadened, a quarter of a mile downstream, to form an inlet of the Laccadive Sea. The town had doubtless stood here for æons but gave the impression of having just been set up in the midst of an ancient forest, as giant trees—teaks, mangoes, mahua, mahogany, coconut-palm, axle-wood, and one or two cathedral-sized banyan trees—stood between houses, and spread and merged overhead to create a second roof high above the palm frond thatchings that topped the buildings.