The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  “The Wheel had turned again. The Tokugawa shogunate claimed a monopoly on the minting of coins—my family lost its chief source of revenue. Firearms were banned—another source of income vanished. Foreign trade was strictly controlled—Sakai became an island cut off from the rest of Japan. But worst of all, for my family, was that Christianity had been outlawed. My father had not been the only Christian to have allied himself with the Toyotomi family, and Tokugawa Ieyasu believed that the Jesuits and the Toyotomis, allied together, were the only force that could defeat him. Both were extirpated.

  “At the time of my father’s birth there were a quarter of a million Christians in Japan and at the time of his death there were none. This did not occur all at once but gradually, beginning with the execution of a few Jesuit missionaries in the Year of Our Lord 1597 and culminating forty years later in a few great battles and massacres. My father perhaps did not really grasp what was happening until it was nearly finished. His brother had gone back to our ancestral land to look after the mines and practice Christianity in secret. My father remained in Sakai for a while trying to make a living in foreign trade. But first this fell under the strict control of the shogun, and from there it was gradually choked off. The Portuguese were banned altogether because they kept bringing over priests disguised as mariners. Sakai and Kyoto were closed to foreign trade altogether. Only Nagasaki was left open, and only to the Dutch, who—being heretics—did not care about saving Japanese souls from eternal fire, and only wanted our money.

  “So my father had become a masterless Samurai, or ronin—one of a large host of Christian ronin brought into being by the policies I have described. He moved round to the opposite coast of Honshu—the coast that faces towards Korea and China—and worked as a smuggler. He smuggled silk, pepper, and other goods to Japan, and smuggled fugitive Christians out to Manila.

  “Now, formerly my family had had no contacts with Manila whatsoever, because we were exporters of silver. If the commerce of Asia is like a fire, then silver is like the air blown into it to make it blaze up, and Manila is the bellows. For it is to Manila that the Spanish galleon sails every year, full of silver from the mines of New Spain. My family’s mines could not compete against this, and so in generations past we had been more apt to trade with Macao, and other ports on the coast of China—a vast country that is eternally ravenous for silver.

  “But in that time Japan refused to accept ships from Macao, even at Nagasaki, because Portuguese priests, who longed for martyrdom, used Macao as their point of departure. My father’s contacts in Macao dried up, or moved to Manila. By that time he was no longer in the silver business anyway. So he began to trade between Manila and a certain smuggler’s harbor in northern Honshu, near Niigata. His fame spread as far as Rome, and soon Jesuits began to arrive in Manila from Goa in the west and Acapulco in the east, and to request him by name. He would take them up to Niigata, where they would be met by Japanese Christians who would take them up into the mountains to preach the Word of the Lord and serve holy communion in secret. But at the same time my father would bring aboard other Japanese Christians who had fled from this persecution. He would convey them down to Manila where there was, and is, a large community of such persons.

  “So it went for a time. But in the Year of Our Lord 1635 the shogun decreed that thenceforward no Japanese could leave the Home Islands on pain of death, and that all Japanese currently abroad must return home within three years or face the same penalty. Two years after that, the Christian ronin staged a great rebellion on Kyushu and fought the forces of the shogun for half a year, but they were wiped out. Not much later the remaining Christians were obliterated at the Massacre of Hara. My father survived by virtue of several miraculous interventions by various Saints, which I will not enumerate since I know that you are a heretic who does not believe in such things, and made one last voyage to Manila where he took a young Japanese wife.

  “I was born in Manila three years after Japan closed itself off from the world. When I was a boy I would beg my father to take me up on his boat so that I could see where we came from, but by then he was an old man and the boat was a worm-eaten wreck. He contented himself with painting pictures of the landmarks that he had used to navigate from Manila to his smuggler’s cove on Honshu. My efforts here—One Hundred and Seven Views of the Passage to Niigata—are a miserable pastiche of the art that he made.

  “My life has been uneventful by comparison. I grew up in Manila. The only people I ever saw were Japanese Catholics, and a few Spanish priests. Jesuit fathers taught me to read and write. Christian ronin taught me the martial arts. In time I took holy orders and was sent to Goa. I lived there for a few years, and developed some familiarity with the language of Malabar. Then I was dispatched to Rome, where I saw Saint Peter’s and kissed the Holy Father’s ring. I had hoped that the Pope would send me to Nippon to achieve martyrdom, but he said nothing to me. I was crushed, and in my self-indulgence I went through a time of doubting my faith. Finally I volunteered to travel to China to work as a missionary and perhaps be granted martyrdom there. I boarded a ship bound for Alexandria—but along the way we were captured by a galley of the Barbary corsairs. I killed a fairly large number of them, but then a member of my own ship’s crew, seeking to curry favor with the Turks who were soon to be his masters, hit me from behind with a belaying-pin, and ended my struggle. The Turks took us back to Algiers and gave the one who had betrayed me slow death on the hook. Me they offered work on a corsair-galley, as a Janissary. I refused, and was made to pull an oar instead.”

  A paper door slid open, and from the darkness on the far side of it emerged a pair of ebony breasts and a tummy, followed in short order by their owner: Kottakkal, the Pirate Queen of Malabar. Behind her came Dappa, who was also naked from the waist up, but who had belted on his Persian scimitar. This accounted for the dim muttering sounds that had been audible through the paper wall for the last quarter of an hour: Dappa had been translating this story for the Queen.

  She was a big woman, about as tall as an average European man, with broad hips that gave her exceptional stability when standing barefoot on the rolling deck of a pirate-ship, and were equally convenient to child-bearing—she had produced five daughters and two sons. She had a marvelous round belly covered in an expanse of smooth purplish-black skin. Jack always had the vague, dizzying sense that he was falling into it, and he suspected that other men felt the same. Her breasts showed the aftermath of many babies, but her face was quite beautiful: round and smooth except for a sword-scar under one cheekbone, with complicated lips that always had a knowing grin, or even a sneer, and eyelashes as black and thick as paint-brushes. Her head always seemed to be resting on a steel platter, or rather a whole stack of them, for whenever the Queen ventured out she wore—in addition to diverse gold bangles and rings—a stack of flat watered-steel collars that went over her head, and piled up into a sort of hard glittering neck-ruff.

  Now the Queen spoke and Dappa translated her words into Sabir: “When we captured the gold-ship with Father Gabriel, Dappa, and Moseh—for Jackshaftoe and the others lacked the courage of those three, and had already lost their nerve, and jumped off into the water like panicked rats—”

  Jack bowed low and muttered, “A pleasure to see you as always, Your Majesty.” but the Queen ignored him and continued:

  “At any rate, my men were about to put them to death, for they assumed that this would please me. But then Father Gabriel recognized us as Malabari, and spoke to me in a way that pleased me even more, and so I suffered them all to live.”

  “What did he say?” asked Enoch Root.

  “He said, ‘It is your prerogative to cut my head off, but then I cannot tell you the story of how the Vagabond named Quicksilver achieved his long-planned revenge against a Frankish Duke in Cairo, and stole this hoard of Mexican gold.’ So I commanded him to tell me that tale before he was put to death. And this he did; but what he was really telling me was that he and his companions were worth mor
e to me alive, as slaves, than as headless corpses bobbing in the Gulf of Cambaye.”

  “Your Majesty chose wisely,” said Enoch Root.

  “Often I have doubted it,” said the Pirate Queen. “Dappa is a linguist, which (he informs me) means a man with an excellent tongue, and he has found more than one way of putting his tongue to work pleasing me. Gabriel Goto makes a good, if peculiar, garden. Moseh seemed like a useless mouth. Many times my advisors urged me to break the group up and sell them at a loss. Indeed I was on the brink of doing so several times in the early going, for there is an excellent slave-market in Goa and another in Malacca. But when Jackshaftoe secured his jagir from the Great Mogul, everything changed, and the construction of the ship began. Lately even my most skeptical captains have been vying with each other for the honor of supplying the ship’s masts.”

  “I was wondering where you were going to obtain masts.”

  “Come with me, O Bringer of Armaments,” said Queen Kottakkal, and whirled around and stalked out through Gabriel Goto’s paper house. She moved so decisively that the wind of her passage peeled dry palm-leaves from stacks of finished artwork. The men hastened to catch up with her, creating a wind of their own, and gloomy drawings of Hazards to Navigation rose into the air and careered back and forth, spinning and sailing lazily on the heavy air. Among these Jack noticed some letters brushed in what he took to be the Japanese script—these were on rice-paper and had a weather-beaten and well-traveled look about them.

  “What news from your brush-buddies in Nippon and Manila?”

  Gabriel Goto’s face did not betray any particular reaction, but he turned his head suddenly toward Jack. “Normally I do not look to you to voice any interest in the internal broils of Nippon and the exiled Christian ronin of Manila,” he announced starkly.

  “But now that I am a king of sorts I must broaden my interests—so indulge me.”

  “The shogun continues to hoard silver for internal use—which amounts to saying that he has been making the Dutch at Nagasaki accept gold coins for the goods that they unload from their ships. But recently the shogun devalued gold to the point that the Dutch are forced to take their compensation in the form of vast quantities of copper coins instead.” He stopped and inspected Jack’s face for signs of incomprehension or boredom. They were following the others across a courtyard where Hindoo statuary lurked in cascades of ripe flowers, and fountains fed melodious brooks.

  “Don’t be such a tease!”

  “All such matters are now firmly controlled by a family called Mitsui—they have founded what you would call a banking house.”

  “I ween you’ve been in touch with your uncle’s people—the miners.”

  “How did you know this?”

  “Why, it’s obvious that the devaluation of gold had great import for anyone running a copper mine in Nippon.”

  Gabriel Goto, seemingly shocked at having been found out, said nothing. They had entered into the Queen’s apartments and were pursuing her down a gallery. She was deep in conversation with Enoch Root, but Jack got the impression that during the pauses, when Dappa was translating, Enoch was cocking an ear towards them.

  Gabriel went on: “Since your inexplicable and new-found interest in Nipponese currency fluctuations is so marked, then, Jack, I shall warn you that it is all very complicated. The shogun has actually made several devaluations, trying to draw more metal from the ground and increase the supply of money, which in his view will bring about a corresponding increase in the amount of goods produced. Or so it seems from a miner’s perspective—which, after all, is the only perspective available to me.”

  They were ascending a stone staircase, working against a current of cooler salt air. “Tell me of more complications,” Jack said.

  “You probably imagine my people still working the same land that we were bequeathed many centuries ago. But we lost that land as part of the evolutions I spoke of, and my surviving relatives fled generally northwards, to be closer to the smuggling ports, and farther from Edo. Edo has a million people now.”

  “It is impossible for a city to be that large.”

  “It is the largest city in Creation, and no place for Christians.”

  They had gained the top of the stairs now, and were crowding into a chamber that opened onto a balcony. From the rail of this balcony—the highest part of the palace—they could look down the vine-and flower-covered cliff below and out across the inlet where most of the Queen’s pirate-fleet rode at anchor. The ships seemed to float in mid-air, such was the transparency of the water, and underneath them schools of bright fish maneuvered through coral formations.

  “Behold!” said the Queen, sweeping out one bangle-covered arm. Actually she said something in Malabari, but obviously it meant “Behold” and Dappa did not bother with a translation.

  A peculiar sort of cargo-handling operation was under way down below: two pairs of small boats, each pair lashed together abeam of each other with logs spanning the gap between them. One of these makeshift catamarans was following several lengths behind the other, and the distance between them was bridged by a colossal tree-trunk, spoke-shaved smooth, and painted barn-red.

  Jack heard Dappa speaking in English to Enoch Root: “Normally I would not be so presumptuous as to proffer advice to you on any subject, least of all manners and protocol—but I urge you, sir, not to ask the Queen where she obtained that mast.”

  “I accept your counsel with gratitude,” said Enoch Root.

  It was obvious that the mast had just been brought in by one of the Queen’s fleet: a frigate of European design. She was the largest ship in the harbor, but much smaller than the one being built on the beach in Dalicot, and so the mast dwarfed her—it was longer than the frigate’s deck, and must have projected forward and aft before it had been unlashed and let down onto those boats.

  The boat-crews were paddling toward the shore as gamely as they could, though half the men were laboring with bails; gouts of water flew from the boats in all directions and slapped the surface of the harbor, only to rush back in over the gunwales during the next swell. Jack wondered whether he was about to witness a disaster, until he heard men in the boats, and on the shore, laughing.

  Then he turned his attention back to Gabriel Goto. “But if your family are reduced to Vagabonds, how comes it they know so much of currency devaluations—and how do they write you letters on fair-looking rice-paper?”

  “The short answer is that they remain bound to the same ancient Wheel, which has not ceased to turn.”

  “The shogun wants metal to come from the ground—and in order to make it so, the House of Mitsui needs your cousins and nephews.”

  “That is not the only thing on the shogun’s mind. In the far north, the Russians are on the move. Mostly it has been adventurers and fur-traders, ranging from outposts in Kamchatka, the Kurils, and the isles of the Aleuts. But there is a new Tsar in Russia named Peter, a man with a formidable reputation, who has even traveled to Holland to learn the art of shipbuilding—”

  “I know all about this Peter,” said Jack. “Jan Vroom worked by his side, and Peter wanted him to come to Russia and build ships there. But Vroom saw the prospect of more profit, and warmer climes, in the offer of van Hoek.”

  “In any event,” said Gabriel Goto, “Peter’s fame has reached the court of the shogun. Obviously Russia will one day threaten Nippon from the north. When that day arrives, Nippon will be defenseless against Peter’s Dutch-style ships and al-jebr-trained gunners, unless we are well established in northern Honshu and on the vast island to the north—a wilderness full of blue-eyed savages, called Ezo, or Hokkaido.”

  “So your family may be doubly useful to the shogun. You can mine copper, and you have an interest in moving northwards.”

  Gabriel Goto said nothing, which Jack took to mean yes.

  “Tell me—has the shogun’s concern about this military threat led him to relax his ban on firearms?”

  “He imports books of rangaku, wh
ich means ‘Dutch learning,’ so as to keep abreast of developments in fortifications and artillery. But the ban on guns will never be lifted,” said Gabriel Goto firmly. “The sword is the symbol of nobility—it is what marks a man as a Samurai.”

  “How many Samurai are there in Japan?”

  Gabriel Goto shrugged. “Their proportion to the entire population is somewhere between one in ten, and one in twenty.”

  “And there are a million souls in Edo alone?”

  “That is what I am told.”

  “So, between fifty and a hundred thousand Samurai in that one city—each of whom must possess a sword?”

  “Two—the long and the short. Many have more than one set, of course.”

  “Of course. And is watered steel as desirable there as it is everywhere else?”

  “We may be isolated, but we are not ignorant.”

  “And where do the sword-smiths of Nippon get this kind of steel?”

  Gabriel Goto inhaled sharply, as if Jack had strayed into the middle of his garden and left muddy foot-prints in the white gravel. “This is a great secret, the subject of legends,” he said. “You know that most Japanese are Buddhists.”

  “Of course,” said Jack, who hadn’t known.

  “Buddhism came from Hindoostan. And so did some of our other traditions that are very ancient—such as tea…”

  “And steel,” Jack said, “which for centuries has been imported, by the finest swordsmiths of Nippon, from India, in the form of small egg-shaped ingots with a distinctive cross-hatch pattern.”

  For once Gabriel Goto was openly dumbfounded. “How did you come to know this!?”

  Down below, the narrow end of the giant mast had plowed into the beach. One pair of boats was being abandoned by drenched rowers. The other group was thrashing the water, trying to wheel the trunk around so it could be rolled up onto dry land. At a glance it seemed not to be moving at all. But move it did, as slowly as the minute-hand of a clock—as steadily as that mysterious Wheel that Gabriel Goto was always speaking of.