The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  “That could not hurt a sparrow,” Jack said. “I prefer the original type with the rotating knives.”

  “All well and good for striking prey off tree-limbs in the Philippine jungle,” Enoch said, “but it gets uncomfortable, carrying such weapons about in one’s pocket.”

  “Where art thou and thy yo-yos bound?”

  “It is rumored that the purple savages of Arnhem Land also make throwing-weapons that return to the thrower,” Enoch said, “but without a string, or any other such physickal connexion.”

  “Impossible!”

  “As I said—‘Any sufficiently advanced tech—’ ”

  “I heard you the first time. So it’s off to Arnhem Land. And then?”

  Enoch paused to check the progress of the boat-loading, and seeing that he still had a minute or two, related the following: “You know that our entire Enterprise hinges on our being able to corrupt certain Spanish officials and sea-captains, which is not inherently difficult. But we have had to spend countless hours wining and dining them, and listening to their interminable yarns and sea-fables. Most of these are tedious and unremarkable. But I heard one that interested me. It was told me by one Alfonso, who was first mate aboard a galleon that left Manila for Acapulco some years ago. As usual they attempted to sail north to a higher latitude where they could get in front of the trade wind to California. Instead they were met by a tempest that drove them to the south for many days. The next time they were able to make solar observations, they discovered that they had actually crossed the Line and were several degrees south. Now the storm had washed away all of the earth that they had packed around their hearth in the galley, making it impossible for them to light a cook-fire without setting the whole galleon ablaze. So they dropped anchor near an island (for they’d come in sight of a whole chain of ’em, populated by people who looked like Africans) and gathered sand and fresh water. The water they used to replenish their drinking-jars. The sand they packed around their hearth. Then they continued their journey. When they arrived at Acapulco, the better part of a year later, they discovered nuggets of gold under the hearth—evidently that sand was auriferous and the heat of the fire had melted the gold and separated it from the sand. Needless to say, the Viceroy in Mexico City—”

  “The same?”

  Enoch nodded. “The very same from whom you stole the gold before Bonanza. He was informed of this prodigy, and did not delay in sending out a squadron, under an admiral named de Obregon, to sail along that line of latitude until they found those islands.”

  “Would those be the Solomon Islands?”

  “As you know, Jack, it has long been supposed that Solomon—the builder of the Temple in Jerusalem, the first Alchemist, and the subject of Isaac Newton’s obsessions for lo these many years, departed from the Land of Israel before he died, and journeyed far to the east, and founded a kingdom among certain islands. It is a part of this legend that this kingdom was fabulously wealthy.”

  “Funny how no one ever makes up legends concerning wretchedly poor kingdoms—”

  “It matters not whether this legend is true, only that some people believe it,” Enoch said patiently. He had begun to do tricks with the yo-yo now, making it fly around his hand like a comet whipping around the sun.

  “Such as this Newton fellow? The one who reckoned the orbits of the planets?”

  “Newton is convinced that Solomon’s temple was a geometrickal model of the solar system—the fire on the central altar representing the sun, et cetera.”

  “So he would fain know about it, if the Islands of Solomon were discovered…”

  “Indeed.”

  “…and no doubt he has already perused the chronicles of that expedition that was sent out by our friend in Bonanza.”

  Enoch shook his head. “There are no such chronicles.”

  “The expedition was shipwrecked?”

  “Shipwrecked, killed by disease…the vectors of disaster were so plentiful that the accounts cannot be reconciled. Only one ship made it to Manila, half of her crew dead and the rest dying of some previously unheard-of pestilence. The only one who survived was one Elizabeth de Obregon, the wife of the Admiral who had commanded the squadron.”

  “And what does she have to say for herself?”

  “She has said nothing. In a society where women cannot own property, Jack, secrets are to them what gold and silver are to men.”

  “Why did the Viceroy not then send out another squadron?”

  “Perhaps he did.”

  “You have grown coy, Enoch, and time grows short.”

  “It is not that I am coy, but that you are lazy in your thinking. If such expeditions had been sent out, and found nothing, what would the results be?”

  “Nothing.”

  “If an expedition had succeeded, what result then?”

  “Some chronicle, kept secret in a Spanish vault in Mexico or Seville, and a great deal of gold…” Here Jack faltered.

  “What did you expect to find in the hold of the Viceroy’s brig?”

  “Silver.”

  “What found you instead?”

  “Gold.”

  “But the mines of Mexico produce only silver.”

  “It is true…we never solved the mystery of the origin of that gold.”

  “Do you have any idea, Jack, how many alchemists are numbered among the ruling classes of Christendom?”

  “I’ve heard rumors.”

  “If a rumor got out among those people—kings, dukes, and princes—that the Island of Solomon had been discovered, and gold taken from there—not just any gold, mind you, but gold that came from the furnaces of King Solomon himself, and was very close to being the pure stuff of the Philosopher’s Stone and the Philosophick Mercury—I should think that it would excite a certain amount of interest. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “If rumor got out, why, yes—”

  “It always gets out,” Enoch explained flatly. “Does this help to explain why so many great men are so very angry with you?”

  “I never thought it wanted explanation. But now that you mention it…”

  “Good. And I hope it also explains why I must go and see these Solomon Islands myself. If the legends are true, then Newton will want to know all about it. Even if they are nothing more than legends, those islands might be a good place for a man to go, if he wanted to get away from the world for a few years, or a few centuries…in any event, that is where I am bound.”

  The yo-yo came up sharply into Enoch’s palm and stopped.

  THE SEA-VOYAGE FROM JAPAN to Manila had in common with all other sea-voyages that it was all about latitudes. Van Hoek, Dappa, and several others aboard knew how to find their latitude by observing the sun’s position in the sky. The sun came out at least once a day and so they always had a good idea of which parallel they were at. But there was no way to reckon longitude. Accordingly, van Hoek’s charts and records of Hazards to Navigation tended to be organized by latitude. Along certain parallels they had nothing to worry about, because in this part of the world (according to the documents) no reefs or islands existed there. But along certain other parallels, hazards had been discovered, and so whenever Minerva was found to be in such latitudes the mood of the ship changed, sail was reduced, lookouts added, soundings taken. They might have been a hundred miles due east or due west of the Hazard in question; not having any idea of their longitude, there was simply no telling. Since the voyage from Japan to Manila was a north-to-south one, their degree of latitude, and their degree of anxiety, were changing every moment.

  Other than reefs and islands, the chief hazards were typhoons, and the kingdom of Corsairs who had wrested Formosa from the Dutch some years previously, and through whose waters they had to sail in order to reach Luzon. On this voyage both of those hazards struck on the same day: Corsairs sighted them and fell into an intercept course, but before they could close with Minerva, the weather began to alter in ways that suggested an approaching typhoon. The Corsairs broke off the purs
uit and turned their energies to survival. By this point Minerva had ridden out several such storms, and her officers and crew knew how it was done; van Hoek could make educated guesses as to how the direction of the wind would change over the course of the next two days, and how its strength would vary according to their distance from its center. By setting some storm-sails and managing the tiller personally, he was able to arrange it so that they were not driven against the isle of Formosa. Instead the typhoon flung them out to the south and east, into the Philippine Sea, which was deep water with no obstructions. Later, when the weather cleared and they could shoot the sun again, they sought out a particular latitude (19° 45’ N) and followed that parallel west for two hundred miles until they had passed through the Balintang Channel, which separated some groups of small islands north of Luzon. Turning to the south then, they made way with great care until the hills and headlands of Ilocos—the northwestern corner of Luzon—came into view.

  At that moment the character of the voyage changed. Three hundred miles separated them from the point of Mariveles at the entrance to Manila Bay, and it would all be coastal sailing, which meant contending with weak and fickle winds, and taking frequent soundings, and dropping anchor at night lest they run aground on some unseeable hazard in the dark. Some days they made no progress whatever, owing to contrary winds—by day, they traded with locals for fresh fruit and meat brought out in long dual-outrigger boats, and by night they patrolled Minerva’s decks with loaded blunderbusses, waiting for those same locals to steal out in the same boats and creep over the gunwales with knives in their teeth.

  At any rate, ten days of this sort of travel brought them, late one afternoon, to the point of Mariveles, where several rocks projected from the surf like daggers. The garrison on the nearby island of Corregidor caught sight of Minerva around sunset and lit some fires to prevent her from running aground. By triangulating against these they were able to bring the ship gingerly around the south side of the island and drop anchor in the bay there. The next morning the Spanish ensign in command of the garrison came out on a longboat for an hour’s visit; they knew him thoroughly, as Minerva had passed this way a dozen or so times on her triangular voyages among Manila, Macao, and Queena-Kootah. He gave them the latest jokes and gossip from Manila and they gave him some packets of spices and a few trinkets they’d picked up in Japan.

  They weighed anchor and sailed across Manila Bay. The Spanish castle on the point of Cavite came into view first, and later they could make out, beyond it, the bell-towers and fortifications of Manila, and a thicket of masts and spars, shot through with furling silk banners, around the outlet of the Pasig River. It was the expectation of most aboard that they would make direct for there. But as they weathered the point of Cavite and entered into calmer water in the lee of the castle, van Hoek ordered most of the sails taken in. A banca—a sort of longboat hewn from the trunk of a single colossal tree—came toward them, and as it drew closer, Jack was able to recognize Moseh and Surendranath, who had stayed behind to settle some business affairs, and Jimmy and Danny, who had been acting as their bodyguards. One by one these men clambered up the pilot’s ladder and joined their brethren on the upperdeck. Moseh and Surendranath went back into van Hoek’s wardroom to confer with the captain and the other chief men of the enterprise. Jack could have participated in this meeting but declined to because he could tell from the look on Moseh’s face that it had all gone more or less well, and that their next voyage would be eastbound.

  This was the innermost harbor of Manila Bay: a hammock-shaped anchorage slung between two points of land several miles apart, each of which had been built up into a fortress by the Spaniards, or rather by their Tagalian minions, during the century and a half that they had held sway over these islands. The closer of the two forts, just off their starboard, was Cavite: a conventional square, four-bastioned castle thrust out into the water on a slender neck of land, so that the bay served as its moat. A ditch had been dug across that neck so that the landward approach could be controlled by a drawbridge. This ditch was situated at some distance from the castle proper, and the intervening space had been covered with buildings: a crowd of cane houses with more substantial wood-frame dwellings rising out of it from place to place, and three stone churches that had been erected, or were being erected, by various Popish religious orders.

  The opposite end of the harbor was the city of Manila proper. The Spaniards had taken a small peninsula framed on one side by the Bay and on two others by rivers: the Pasig, and a welter of pissant tributaries that joined the Pasig just short of where it emptied into the Bay. They had enclosed this peninsula in a modern sort of slope-sided wall, a couple of miles in circuit, and erected noble bulwarks and demilunes at its corners, rendering it impregnable to land assault by Dutch, Chinese, or native legions. The outlet of the Pasig was dominated by a considerable fortress whose guns commanded the river, the Bay, and certain troublesome ethnic barangays across the river.

  From this point of view—or any point of view, for that matter—it did not look like a fabled citadel of inconceivable wealth. If the Spaniards had built Manila anywhere else, her church-spires and watch-towers would have reached into the clouds. As it was, even the noblest buildings hugged the ground and had a stoop-shouldered look about them, because they had learned the hard way that anything more than two storeys high, and built of stone, would be brought down by an earthquake while the mortar was scarcely dry. So as Jack stood there on Minerva’s deck he perceived Manila as something very dark, low, and heavy, and overlaid with smoke and humidity, softened only a little by the high coconut palms that lined her shore.

  This was just the sort of weather that culminated in a bracing thunder-shower—a fact Minerva’s crew knew well, for Manila had been their home port for most of the three years since the ship had made her maiden voyage out of Malabar, and at any rate half the crew had grown up along the shores of this bay. They also knew that this bay offered no protection from north winds, and that a big ship like Minerva would be cast away if she were caught between Cavite and Manila when the wind shifted round that way; she would run a-ground in the shallows and fall prey to Tagalians who would come out in their tree-trunk boats and Chinese sangley s who would come out in their sampans to salvage her. So instead of being boisterous, as one might reasonably expect of sailors who’d just made a perilous and improbable voyage to Japan and back, they were solemn as monks on Sunday, and angrily shushed anyone who raised his voice. Malabaris had suspended themselves in the ratlines like spiders in webs and were hanging there motionless with eyes half closed and mouths half open, waiting for meaningful stirrings in the air.

  The sky and air were all white, and of a uniform brightness, so that it was impossible to get even a general notion of where the sun might be. According to the hour-glasses they used to keep track of watches, it must be an hour or so before sunset. The whole bay was as still and hushed as Minerva’s upperdeck; the only noise, therefore, came from the vast shipyard that spread along the shore below the sullen arsenal of Cavite. There five hundred Filipino slaves were at work under the whips and guns of helmeted Spaniards, constructing the largest ship Jack had ever seen. Which, considering the places he had been, meant that it was very likely the largest ship the world had seen since Noah’s Ark had run a-ground on a mountain-top and been broken up for firewood.

  Piled on the shore in pyramids were the stripped boles of giant trees that these Filipinos, or others in the same predicament, had cut down in the bat-infested jungles that crowded in along the shores of Laguna de Bay (a great lake just inland of Manila) and floated in rafts down the Pasig. Some of the workers were cutting these into beams and planks. But the great ship was close to being finished and so the demand for huge timbers was not what it had been months ago when the keel and frames had stood out like stiff fingers against the sky. Most of the laborers were concerned with finer matters now: making cables (indeed, Manila made the finest cordage in the world), caulking joints between hull-
planks, and doing finish carpentry on the cabins where the most ambitious merchants of the South Seas would dwell for most of the next year, or drown within weeks, depending on how it went.

  “Dad, either my eyes play tricks, or else you’ve finally traded in that Mahometan spadroon for proper armaments,” said Daniel Shaftoe, eyeing the katana and wakizashi of Gabriel Goto, thrust into Jack’s belt.

  “I’ve been trying to grow accustomed to ’em,” Jack allowed, “but it’s all for naught. One-handed is how I learned to fight, and it’s all I’ll ever know. I wear these to honor Goto-san, but when next I venture into some place where I might need to do some defensing, it’s the Janissary-sword I’ll be wearing.”

  “Aw, it ain’t that hard, Dad,” said Jimmy, coming up to shoulder past his brother. “By the time we reach Acapulco we’ll have you swingin’ that katana like a Samurai.” Jimmy patted the hilt of a Japanese sword, and now Jack noticed that Danny was armed in the same manner.

  “Been broadening your horizons?”

  “Manila is better than the ’varsity,” Danny proclaimed, “as long as you remain a step ahead o’ that pesky Spanish Inquisition…”

  “From the fact that Moseh is still alive, and has all his fingernails, I’m guessing you succeeded there.”

  “We fulfilled our obligations,” Jimmy said hotly. “We took lodgings on the edge of the barangay of the Japanese Christians—”

  “—an orderly place—” Danny offered

  “Perhaps a bit too orderly,” Jimmy said. “But we were hard up against the wicker walls of the sangley neighborhood, which is a perpetual riot, and so whenever the Inquisitors came after us we withdrew into that place for a while, and kept a sharp eye on one another’s backs until such time as Moseh could settle the matter.”

  “I did not appreciate that Moseh had any such influence with the Sons of Torquemada,” Jack said.

  “Moseh has let it be known, to a few of the Spaniards, what we are planning,” said Danny. “Suddenly those Spaniards are our friends.”