The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

  The intensity of the cannonade waxed, if such a thing were possible, and reached a climax as the gold-plated galley drew up alongside a stone pier that projected into the harbor not awfully far away. Then, all of a sudden, the noise stopped.

  “What in Christ’s name—” he began, but the rest of his utterance was drowned out by a sound that—compared to hundreds of cannons firing at once—made up in shrillness what it lacked in volume. Listening to it in amazement, he began to detect certain resemblances between it and musick. Rhythm was there, albeit of an overly complicated and rambunctious nature, and melody, too, though it was not cast in any civilized mode, but had the wild keening intonations of Irish tunes—and then some. Harmony, sweetness of tone, and other qualities normally associated with musick, were absent. For these Turks or Moors or whatever they were had no interest in flutes, viols, theorbos, nor anything else that made a pleasing sound. Their orchestra consisted of drums, cymbals, and a hideous swarm of giant war-oboes hammered out of brass and fitted with screeching, buzzing reeds, the result sounding like nothing so much as an armed assault on a belfry infested with starlings.

  “I owe an ’umble apology to every Scotsman I’ve ever met,” he shouted, “for it isn’t true, after all, that their music is the most despicable in the world.” His companion cocked an ear in his direction but heard little, and understood less.

  Now, essentially all of the city was protected within that wall, which shamed any in Christendom. But on this side of it there were various breakwaters, piers, gun-emplacements, and traces of mucky beach, and everything that was capable of bearing a man’s weight, or a horse’s, was doing so—covered by ranks of men in divers magnificent and outlandish uniforms. In other words, all the makings of a parade were laid out here. And indeed, after a lot of bellowing back and forth and playing of hellish musicks and firing of yet more guns, various important Turks (he was growingly certain that these were Turks) began to ride or march through a large gate let into the mighty Wall, disappearing into the city. First went an impossibly magnificent and fearsome warrior on a black charger, flanked by a couple of kettledrum-pounding “musicians.” The beat of their drums filled him with an unaccountable craving to reach out and grope for an oar.

  “That, Jack, is the Agha of the Janissaries,” said the circumcised one.

  This handle of “Jack” struck him as familiar and, in any case, serviceable. So Jack he was.

  Behind the kettledrums rode a graybeard, almost as magnificent to look at as the Agha of the Janissaries, but not so heavily be-weaponed. “The First Secretary,” said Jack’s companion. Next, following on foot, a couple of dozen more or less resplendent officers (“the aghabashis”) and then a whole crowd of fellows with magnificent turbans adorned with first-rate ostrich plumes—“the bolukbashis,” it was explained.

  Now it had become plain enough that this fellow standing next to Jack was the sort who never tired of showing off his great knowledge, and of trying to edify lowlives such as Jack. Jack was about to say that he neither wanted nor needed edification, but something stopped him. It might’ve been the vague, inescapable sense that he knew this fellow, and had for quite a while—which, if true, might mean that the other was only trying to make conversation. And it might’ve been that Jack didn’t know quite where to begin, language-wise. He knew somehow that the bolukbashis were equivalent to captains, and that the aghabashis were one rank above the bolukbashis, and that the Agha of the Janissaries was a General. But he was not sure why he should know the meanings of such heathen words. So Jack shut up, long enough for various echelons of odabashis (lieutenants) and vekilhardjis (sergeants-major) to form up and concatenate themselves onto the end of the parade. Then diverse hocas such as the salt-hoca, customs-hoca, and weights-and-measures-hoca, all following the hoca-in-chief, then the sixteen cavuses in their long emerald robes with crimson cummerbunds, their white leather caps, their fantastickal upturned moustaches, and their red hobnailed boots tromping fearsomely over the stones of the quay. Then the kadis, muftis, and imams had to do their bit. Finally a troop of gorgeous Janissaries marched off the deck of the golden galley, followed by a solitary man swathed in many yards of chalk-white fabric that had been gathered by means of diverse massive golden jeweled brooches into a coherent garment, though it probably would’ve fallen off of him if he hadn’t been riding on a white war-horse with pink eyes, bridled and saddled with as much in the way of silver and gems as it could carry without tripping over the finery.

  “The new Pasha—straight from Constantinople!”

  “I’ll be damned—is that why they were firing all those guns?”

  “It is traditional to greet a new Pasha with a salute of fifteen hundred guns.”

  “Traditional where?”

  “Here.”

  “And here is—?”

  “Forgive me, I forget you have not been right in the head. The city that rises up on yonder mountain is the Invincible Bastion of Islam—the Place of Everlasting Vigil and Combat against the Infidel—the Whip of Christendom, Terror of the Seas, Bridle of Italy and Spain, Scourge of the Islands: who holds the sea under her laws and makes all nations her righteous and lawful prey.”

  “Bit of a mouthful, isn’t it?”

  “The English name is Algiers.”

  “Well, in Christendom I have seen entire wars prosecuted with less expenditure of gunpowder than Algiers uses to say hello to a Pasha—so perhaps your words are not mere bravado. What language are we speaking, by the way?”

  “It is called variously Franco, or Sabir, which in Spanish means ‘to know.’ Some of it comes from Provençe, Spain, and Italy, some from Arabic and Turkish. Your Sabir has much French in it, Jack, mine has more Spanish.”

  “Surely you’re no Spaniard—!”

  The man bowed, albeit without doffing his skullcap, and his forelocks tumbled from his shoulders and dangled in space. “Moseh de la Cruz, at your service.”

  “ ‘Moses of the Cross?’ What the hell kind of name is that?”

  Moseh did not appear to find it especially funny. “It is a long story—even by your standards, Jack. Suffice it to say that the Iberian Peninsula is a complicated place to be Jewish.”

  “How’d you end up here?” Jack began to ask; but he was interrupted by a large Turk, armed with a bull’s penis, who was waving at Jack and Moseh, commanding them to get out of the surf and return to work—the siesta was finis and it was time for trabajo now that the Pasha had ridden through the Beb and entered into the cité.

  The trabajo consisted of scraping the barnacles from the hull of the adjacent galley, which had been beached and rolled over to expose its keel. Jack, Moseh, and a few dozen other slaves (for there was no getting round the fact that they were slaves) got to work with various rude iron tools while the Turk prowled up and down the length of the hull brandishing that ox-pizzle. High above them, behind the wall, they could hear a sort of rolling fusillade wandering around the city as the parade continued; the thump of the kettledrums, and the outcry of the siege-oboes and assault-bassoons was, mercifully, deflected heavenwards by the city walls.

  “It is true, I think—you are cured.”

  “Never mind what your Alchemists and Chirurgeons will tell you—there is no cure for the French Pox. I’m having a brief interval of sanity, nothing more.”

  “On the contrary—it is claimed, by certain Arab and Jewish doctors of great distinction, that the aforesaid Pox may be purged from the body, completely and permanently, if the patient is suffered to run an extremely high fever for several consecutive days.”

  “I don’t feel good, mind you, but I don’t feel feverish.”

  “But a few weeks ago, you and several others came down with violent cases of la suette anglaise.”

  “Never heard of any such disease—and I’m English, mind you.”

  Moseh de la Cruz shrugged, as best a man could when hacking at a cluster of barnacles with a pitted and rusted iron hoe. “It is a well-known disease, hereabouts—whole
neighborhoods were laid low with it in the spring.”

  “Perhaps they’d made the mistake of listening to too much musick—?”

  Moseh shrugged again. “It is a real enough disease—perhaps not as fearsome as some of the others, such as Rising of the Lights, or Ring-Booger, or the Laughing Kidney, or Letters-from-Venice…”

  “Avast!”

  “In any event, you came down with it, Jack, and had such a fever that all the other tutsaklars in the banyolar were roasting kebabs over your brow for a fortnight. Finally one morning you were pronounced dead, and carried out of the banyolar and thrown into a wain. Our owner sent me round to the Treasury to notify the hoca el-pencik so that your title deed could be marked as ‘deceased,’ which is a necessary step in filing an insurance claim. But the hoca el-pencik knew that a new Pasha was on his way, and wanted to make sure that all the records were in order, lest some irregularity be discovered during an audit, which would cause him to fall under the bastinado at the very least.”

  “May I infer, from this, that insurance fraud is a common failing of slave-owners?”

  “Some of them are completely unethical,” Moseh confided. “So I was ordered to lead the hoca el-pencik back to the banyolar and show him your body—but not before I was made to wait for hours and hours in his courtyard, as midday came and went, and the hoca el-pencik took a siesta under the lime-tree there. Finally we went to the banyolar—but in the meantime your wagon had been moved to the burial-ground of the Janissaries.”

  “Why!? I’m no more a Janissary than you are.”

  “Sssh! So I had gathered, Jack, from several years of being chained up next to you, and hearing your autobiographical ravings: stories that, at first, were simply too grotesque to believe—then, entertaining after a fashion—then, after the hundredth or thousandth repetition—”

  “Stay. No doubt you have tedious and insufferable qualities of your own, Moseh de la Cruz, but you have me at a disadvantage, as I cannot remember them. What I want to know is, why did they think I was a Janissary?”

  “The first clew was that you carried a Janissary-sword when you were captured.”

  “Proceeds of routine military corpse-looting, nothing more.”

  “The second: you fought with such valor that your want of skill was quite overlooked.”

  “I was trying to get myself killed, or else would’ve shown less of the former, and more of the latter.”

  “Third: the unnatural state of your penis was interpreted as a mark of strict chastity—”

  “Correct, perforce!”

  “—and assumed to’ve been self-administered.”

  “Haw! That’s not how it happened at all—”

  “Stay,” Moseh said, shielding his face behind both hands.

  “I forgot, you’ve heard.”

  “Fourth: the Arabic numeral seven branded on the back of your hand.”

  “I’ll have you know that’s a letter V, for Vagabond.”

  “But sideways it could be taken for a seven.”

  “How does that make me a Janissary?”

  “When a new recruit takes the oath and becomes yeni yoldash, which is the lowliest rank, his barrack number is tattooed onto the back of his hand, so it can be known which seffara he belongs to, and which bash yoldash is responsible for him.”

  “All right—so ’twas assumed I’d come up from barracks number seven in some Ottoman garrison-town somewhere.”

  “Just so. And yet you were clearly out of your mind, and not good for much besides pulling on an oar, so it was decided you’d remain tutsaklar until you died, or regained your senses. If the former, you’d receive a Janissary funeral.”

  “What about the latter?”

  “That remains to be seen. As it was, we thought it was the former. So we went to the high ground outside the city-walls, to the burial-ground of the ocak—”

  “Come again?”

  “Ocak: a Turkish order of Janissaries, modeled after the Knights of Rhodes. They rule over Algiers, and are a law and society unto themselves here.”

  “Is that man coming over to hit us with the bull’s penis a part of this ocak?”

  “No. He works for the corsair-captain who owns the galley. The corsairs are yet another completely different society unto themselves.”

  After the Turk had finished giving Jack and Moseh several bracing strokes of the bull’s penis, and had wandered away to go beat up on some other barnacle-scrapers, Jack invited Moseh to continue the story.

  “The hoca el-pencik and several of his aides and I went to that place. And a bleak place it was, Jack, with its countless tombs, mostly shaped like half-eggshells, meant to evoke a village of yurts on the Transoxianan Steppe—the ancestral homeland for which Turks are forever homesick—though, if it bears the slightest resemblance to that burying-ground, I cannot imagine why. At any rate, we roamed up and down among these stone yurts for an hour, searching for your corpse, and were about to give up, for the sun was going down, when we heard a muffled, echoing voice repeating some strange incantation, or prophecy, in an outlandish tongue. Now the hoca el-pencik was on edge to begin with, as this interminable stroll through the graveyard had put him in mind of daimons and ifrits and other horrors. When he heard this voice, coming (as we soon realized) from a great mausoleum where a murdered agha had been entombed, he was about to bolt for the city gates. So were his aides. But as they had with them one who was not only a slave, but a Jew to boot, they sent me into that tomb to see what would happen.”

  “And what did happen?”

  “I found you, Jack, standing upright in that ghastly, but delightfully cool space, pounding on the lid of the agha’s sarcophagus and repeating certain English words. I knew not what they meant, but they went something like this: ‘Be a good fellow there, sirrah, and bring me a pint of your best bitter!’ ”

  “I must have been out of my head,” Jack muttered, “for the light lagers of Pilsen are much better suited to this climate.”

  “You were still daft, but there was a certain spark about you that I had not seen in a year or two—certainly not since we were traded to Algiers. I suspected that the heat of your fever, compounded with the broiling radiance of the midday sun, under which you’d lain for many hours, had driven the French Pox out of your body. And indeed you have been a little more lucid every day since.”

  “What did the hoca el-pencik think of this?”

  “When you walked out, you were naked, and sunburnt as red as a boiled crab, and there was speculation that you might be some species of ifrit. I have to tell you that the Turks have superstitions about everything, and most especially about Jews—they believe we have occult powers, and of late the Cabbalists have done much to foster such phant’sies. In any event, matters were soon enough sorted out. Our owner received one hundred strokes, with a cane the size of my thumb, on the soles of his feet, and vinegar was poured over the resulting wounds.”

  “Eeyeh, give me the bull’s penis any day!”

  “It’s expected he may be able to stand up again in a month or two. In the meanwhile, as we wait out the equinoctial storms, we are careening and refitting our galley, as is obvious enough.”

  DURING THIS NARRATION Jack had been looking sidelong at the other galley-slaves, and had found them to be an uncommonly diverse and multi-cultural lot: there were black Africans, Europeans, Jews, Indians, Asiatics, and many others he could not clearly sort out. But he did not see anyone he recognized from the complement of God’s Wounds.

  “What of Yevgeny, and Mr. Foot? To speak poetically: have insurance claims been paid on them?”

  “They are on the larboard oar. Yevgeny pulls with the strength of two men, and Mr. Foot pulls not at all—which makes them more or less inseparable, in the context of a well-managed galley.”

  “So they live!”

  “Live, and thrive—we’ll see them later.”

  “Why aren’t they here, scraping barnacles like the rest of us?” Jack demanded peevishly.

&nb
sp; “In Algiers, during the winter months, when galleys dare not venture out on the sea, oar-slaves are permitted—nay, encouraged—to pursue trades. Our owner receives a share of the earnings. Those who have no skills scrape barnacles.”

  Jack found this news not altogether pleasing, and assaulted a barnacle-cluster with such violence that he nearly stove in the boat’s hull. This quickly drew a reprimand—and not from the Turkish whip-hand, but from a short, stocky, red-headed galley-slave on Jack’s other side. “I don’t care if you’re crazy—or pretend to be—you keep that hull seaworthy, lest we all go down!” he barked, in an English that was half Dutch. Jack was a head taller than this Hollander, and considered making something of it—but he didn’t imagine that their overseer would look kindly on a fracas, when mere talking was a flogging offense. Besides, there was a rather larger chap standing behind the carrot-top, who was eyeing Jack with the same expression: skeptical bordering on disgusted. This latter appeared to be a Chinaman, but he was not of the frail, cringing sort. Both he and the Hollander looked troublingly familiar.

  “Put some slack into your haul-yards, there, shorty—you ain’t the owner, nor the captain—as long as she stays afloat, what’s a little dent or scratch to us?”

  The Dutchman shook his head incredulously and went back to work on a single barnacle, which he was dissecting off a hull-clinker as carefully as a chirurgeon removing a stone from a Grand Duke’s bladder.