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

by Neal Stephenson

  The inspector made it clear to everyone within earshot that he was not happy with any part of the arrangement, but he did his part and departed without creating any obstructions or demanding any baksheesh above and beyond what he was getting anyway: a purse of pieces of eight, handed to him by Nasr al-Ghuráb after the “inspection” was complete.

  This inspector turned out to be a hospitable soul, who importuned Moseh to come in and share an evening meal—making the reasonable assumption that the galleot would remain tied up to his pier all night. And indeed this would have been easiest. But a French sloop-of-war had been dispatched from Alexandria and was halfway to them now, her triangular sail apricot-colored in the late afternoon sun, and no one liked the looks of that. Furthermore, according to this Jew, a fine high-road called the Canopic Way joined Alexandria to Abu Qir, and riders on good horses could easily make the trip in a couple of hours. Having no particular desire to be trapped between the French sloop and a hypothetical squadron of French night-riders, Nasr al-Ghuráb ordered the galleot to put to sea about an hour before sunset. Under other conditions this would have been most unwise. But the current of the Nile would tend to push them away from the land, and according to the weather-glass that van Hoek had improvised from a glass tube and a flask of quicksilver, the skies would be clear for at least another day. So they abandoned themselves to the waves, and spent an uneasy night throwing the sounding-lead over the side and hauling it in again, over and over and over, lest they run aground in the Nile’s shifting sands.

  When the sun rose upon one tired and irritable Cabal, they found themselves in the center of a vast half-moon-shaped bay, contained between the headland of Abu Qir to the southwest, and a huge sand-spit to the northeast, some twenty miles farther along the coast from Abu Qir. This bay had no distinct shore, but rather smeared away into mud-flats that extended for many miles inland before they became worthy of supporting trees, crops, and buildings. It soon became plain that the galleot had been drifting in a lazy orbit, a vast whorl of current driven by the Nile. For according to the raïs, the sand-spit to the northeast had been constructed, one grain of silt at a time, by the Rosetta Mouth, which was bedded in it somewhere. And when the sun bubbled up from the horizon and shone as a red disk through the haze of floury dust sighing down from the Sahara, it silhouetted a skyline of mosque-domes and minarets, deep among those mud-flats, which was the city of Rosetta itself.

  The morning’s peace was then broken by wailing and sobbing from the head of the galleot. Jack went forward to find Vrej Esphahnian kneeling on the heavy timber that had once supported the ram. The Armenian was now doing some ramming of his own, repeatedly butting his forehead against the timber and clawing at his scalp until blood showed. He did not appear to hear anything Jack said to him. So Jack lingered until he was certain that Vrej did not intend to hurl himself into the bay, and then returned to the quarterdeck, where tactics were being discussed.

  As soon as it had grown light enough to see, they had turned the galley northwards and begun rowing out of this bay. Rosetta (or Rashid, as al-Ghuráb called it) had been close enough that they’d heard the city’s muezzins wailing at the break of dawn. But the raïs explained that to reach the city they would have to go several miles north to the tip of the bar, and find their way in at the river-mouth, then work upriver for an hour or two.

  It was not long before the French sloop came into view; she had sailed out into deeper waters for the night and was now patrolling off the Rosetta Mouth. Fortunately a wind came up from the southwest, and by raising some canvas the galleot was able to run before it, overshooting the river-mouth and making excellent speed towards the east—as if she intended to go in at the Damietta Mouth, a hundred miles away, or to break loose altogether and make a run for some other port. The sloop’s skipper had no choice but to bite down hard on that bait, and to chase them downwind. When she had drawn abeam of the galleot, and begun to converge toward them, al-Ghuráb struck the canvas, wheeled about, and set the oar-slaves to work rowing upwind. The sloop came about in response. But lacking oars, she could only work upwind by tacking, and so she had no hope of keeping pace with the galleot. The gap between the two vessels was about half a mile to begin with, and grew steadily as they rowed towards the snarl of interlocking and ingrown sand-bars that guarded the Nile’s Rosetta Mouth.

  These maneuvers took up half the day, which gave Vrej Esphahnian time to calm down. When he seemed capable of speech again, Jack brought him a cup and a wineskin, and sat with him in the bow—now the least foul-smelling part of the ship, as they were working into the wind.

  “Forgive my weakness,” said Vrej in a hoarse voice. “When I saw Rosetta, I could think only of the tales my father told me, of how he passed through that place with his boat-load of coffee. He had nursed that boat through countless narrow seas and straits, canals and river-courses, and when he passed through customs at Rosetta and sailed down to the river’s mouth, suddenly the vast Mediterranean opened up before him: to some, an emblem of terror and harbinger of wild storms, but to him a vista of freedom of opportunity. From there he sailed direct to Marseille and—”

  “Yes, I know, introduced coffee to France,” said Jack, who knew the rest of the tale at least as well as Vrej himself. “Now excuse me for tacking upwind, as it were, against the general direction of your narration. But according to your brother’s version of this story, your father acquired that boat-load of coffee in Mocha.”

  Vrej, taken aback: “Yes—Mocha is where coffee from Ethiopia, silver from Spain, and spices from India all come together.”

  “I have seen maps,” said Jack impressively, “maps of the whole world, in a library in Hanover. And I seem to recollect that Mocha lies on the Red Sea.”

  “Yes—as Nyazi can tell you, it lies in Arabia Felix, across the Red Sea from Ethiopia.”

  “And furthermore I am under the impression that the Red Sea empties into the ocean that extends to Hindoostan.”

  Vrej said nothing.

  “If it is true that Cairo is the end of the line—that no vessel can go farther east than that—then how did your father manage to get his ship from Mocha, on the Red Sea, to here?”

  Vrej was now sitting with his eyes tightly shut, cursing under his breath.

  “There must be a way through!” Jack said, then stood up to shout the news to the others. As he did, he noticed, in the corner of his eye, a movement of Vrej’s hand. It was subtle. Yet any man in the world would notice it, and many would step away in response, or even reach across toward his sword-hilt, because Vrej was unmistakably reaching towards the handle of the dagger that was bound in his waist-sash. His hand moved no more than a finger’s breadth before he mastered the impulse and moved it back. But Jack noticed it, and faltered, and looked into the eyes of Vrej Esphahnian, red and swollen from weeping. He saw sadness there (of course), but he did not see murderous passions; only a kind of surrender. “That’s the spirit, Vrej!” he said, giving him a hearty shoulder-slap, and then Jack stepped away and called the Cabal to council.

  THAT NIGHT THE PEACE of the Street of the Wigmakers in the souk of Rosetta was wrecked by the sound of a pistol-butt being hammered against an old wooden door. The head of an angry man was thrust out between shutters above, and became much less angry when he saw that two of the three visitors were Turks (or at least dressed that way), and one of those a Janissary. Pieces of eight jangled in a purse improved his mood even more. Door-bolts were removed, the visitors admitted.

  The dwelling was clean and well-tended, but it smelt as if the floor-sweepings of every barbershop in the Ottoman Empire had been stuffed into its back room and left to ripen. Tea was brewed and tobacco proffered. After some half an hour of preliminaries, the visitors made a business proposal. Once the owner got over his astonishment, he accepted it. A boy was sent off to the Street of the Barbers at a dead run. While they waited, the wigmaker lit some lamps and displayed his wares. The finished products were big wigs mounted on wooden block-heads, dest
ined for export to Europe; but they looked almost as strange to the European visitors as they did to any Arab, for during the years that they had spent pulling oars, fashions had been changing: wigs were now tall and narrow, no longer flat and broad.

  Deeper in the shop were the raw materials, and here choices had to be made. Even the finest Barbary horse-hair was too coarse for tonight’s project. At the other end, hanks of fine, lustrous human hair from China were available—but these were the wrong color and it would take too long to dye them.

  A bleary-eyed Turkish barber came in and began heating water and stropping razors. The customers settled on some sandy brown goat hair, intermediate in price.

  The Janissary’s head and face were now shaved clean by the barber, and the fine fuzz on the upper cheeks burned away, dramatically but painlessly, using spirits of wine soaked into wads of Turcoman cotton. The barber was paid off and sent home. The wigmaker then went to work, painting the naked skin with pine gum one tiny patch at a time and stabbing tufts of goat hair into the goo. After two hours, the Janissary smelled overpoweringly of goats and pine-trees, and looked like he hadn’t had a shave or haircut in years. And when he was stripped to the waist, revealing a back ridged with whip-scars, anyone would have identified him not as a Janissary but as a wretched oar-slave.

  PIERRE DE JONZAC RETURNED to the bank of the Nile an hour after dawn, just as he had promised or threatened to, and he brought with him his entire squadron of dragoons. Yesterday they’d galloped headlong to the very edge of the quay and pulled up just short of charging across the gangplanks, all panting and sweaty and dust-caked from having galloped up and down the Canopic Way for a night and a day trying to follow the maneuvers of the galleot.

  Using Monsieur Arlanc as interpreter, Nasr al-Ghuráb complimented de Jonzac on the splendid appearance of his self and his troops this morning—for it was obvious that the menials at the French Consulate had been up all night grooming, scrubbing, starching, and polishing. The raïs went on to apologize for the contrastingly dismal state of his ship and crew. Some of them were “enjoying the shade of the vines,” which was a poetic way of saying they were in the bazaar (which had a leafy roof of grapevines) buying provisions. Others were “sipping mocha in the Pasha’s house.” De Jonzac looked on this (as he was meant to) as a crashingly unsubtle way of claiming that members of the Cabal were inside the stone fort built by the Turks to control the river, showering baksheesh upon officialdom. The fort was nearby enough to literally overshadow them, and scores of resplendent Janissaries were peering down from its battlements, casting a cold professional eye on the French dragoons. The point being that Rosetta was very different from Alexandria; here the French might have a consulate, and some troops, but (as the saying went) that and a few reales would buy them a cup of Mocha.

  This point was entirely sound, but al-Ghuráb had spoken only lies so far. The real reason that only a few Cabal members were visible on the galleot’s quarterdeck was that four of them (Dappa, Jeronimo, Nyazi, and Vrej) had been riding south, post-haste, all through the night, hoping to cover the hundred and fifty miles to Cairo in two days. And another of them was chained to an oar.

  “It was uncommonly humane of you to set free a third of your oar-slaves last night,” de Jonzac commented, “but since my master owns part interest in them, we have made arrangements, among our numerous and highly placed Turkish friends in yonder Fort, to have them all rounded up and sent back to Alexandria.”

  “I hope that your Navy will be able to find benches for them to sit on,” shouted van Hoek.

  De Jonzac’s face grew red and stormy-looking, but he ignored the cruel words of the Dutchman and continued: “Some of them were eager to talk to us, even before we put thumbscrews on them. So we know that you have been hiding certain metallurgical information from us.”

  The night before—needing some ready cash to pay wigmakers and horse-traders—they’d broken open a crate, and pulled out a gold bar, in full view of certain oar-slaves who’d later been set free. This had been done in the hope and expectation that they’d later divulge it to de Jonzac.

  The raïs shrugged. “What of it?”

  De Jonzac said, “I’ve sent a message to Alexandria informing my master that certain numbers mentioned in the Plan must now be multiplied by thirteen.”

  “Alas! If only the calculation were that simple, your master could relax in the splendor of his Alexandrian villa while you went to Cairo to balance the books. In fact it is much more complicated than that. Our friend in Bonanza turns out to have diversified his portfolio far beyond the usual metal goods. The hoard will require a tedious appraisal before we can reckon its value.”

  “That is a routine matter—you forget my master is well acquainted with the workings of the Corsair trade,” de Jonzac sniffed. “He has trusted appraisers who can be dispatched hither—”

  “Dispatch them instead to Cairo,” said the raïs, “for that is where our trusted appraisers dwell. And send for your master, too. For there is one treasure here whose value only he can weigh.”

  De Jonzac smiled thinly. “My master is a man of acumen—I assure you he leaves appraisals to experts, save, sometimes, when it comes to Barbary stallions.”

  “How about English geldings?” the raïs asked, and nodded to Yevgeny and Gabriel Goto.

  Down on the oar-deck, Jack began to rattle his chains and to scream in English: “You bloody bastards! Sell me out to the Frog, will you? Motherless wog scum! May God’s curse be on your heads!”

  Calmly ignoring this and further curses, Yevgeny came up behind Jack, pinioned his elbows together behind his back, and lifted him up off the bench so that de Jonzac could get a good look at him. Gabriel Goto then grabbed Jack’s drawers and yanked them down so they hung around the knees.

  De Jonzac observed a long moment of silence as a frisson ran through his dragoons.

  “Perhaps it is Ali Zaybak—perhaps some other English wretch who stood too close to a fire,” the raïs said drily. “Can you recognize Jack Shaftoe?”

  “No,” de Jonzac admitted.

  “Having recognized him, could you place a value on his head?”

  “Only my master could do that.”

  “Then we will see you, and your master, in Cairo, in three days,” said Nasr al-Ghuráb.

  “That is not enough time!”

  “We have been slaves for years,” said Moseh, who had been standing quietly, arms folded, the whole time, “and we say that three more days is too long.”

  LATER THAT DAY they set off upriver, mostly under sail-power. The main channel was a few fathoms deep and perhaps a quarter-mile wide—which meant that they were never more than an eighth of a mile from French dragoons. For de Jonzac had sent out two pairs of riders to shadow them, one pair on each riverbank.

  As soon as the galleot got clear of Rosetta—which was a sprawl of mostly humble dwellings with no wall to mark its boundary—Jack was dragged away from his bench and draped about in diverse neck-collars, manacles, and leg-irons, then taken back to the concealment of the quarterdeck where Yevgeny devoted a quarter of an hour to smiting an anvil, rattling chains, and producing other noises meant to convince anyone listening that Jack was being securely fettered. Meanwhile Jack—never one to stint on dramaturgy—screamed and cursed as if Yevgeny were bending red-hot irons directly around his wrists. In fact, the reason for his cries of agony was that he was ripping handfuls of goat-hair from his scalp and head. The skin was left covered with a scaly crust of hardened pine-gum. Various scrubbings with turpentine and lamp-oil got that off, taking several layers of skin and leaving him raw from the collarbones upwards. He wrapped his burning head in a turban, got dressed, belted on his sword, and strolled out into view looking every inch a Janissary; then paused, turned around, and shouted some abuse in Sabir at an imaginary chained wretch behind him.

  He dared not look directly at his audience during this performance, but van Hoek was spying on the dragoons through an oar-lock, and reported that th
ey’d witnessed most of it. They did not have much leisure for spying, though. The river was at its highest now, filling its channel and frequently spilling out into surrounding countryside, and so the galleot did not have to work her way around shallows as she would have in other seasons. Yet the current was gentle and she could easily make seven miles an hour upstream. Jack had been expecting a desert, and he could tell one was out there somewhere from the way everything collected a film of yellow dust. But Egypt, seen from here, was as moist and fertile as Holland. And as crowded. Even in the most remote stretches they were never out of sight of several dwellings. They passed villages a few times an hour, and large towns several times a day. For as far as they could see to both sides of the river, the flat countryside was covered with golden fields of corn and rice, and veined with wandering lines of darker green: the countless water-courses of the Delta, lined, and frequently choked, with reeds and rushes as high as a man’s head. Palm trees grew in picket-lines along waterways, and towns were belted with orchards of figs, citrus, and cassia.

  All of it was scenery to the Cabal, and an obstacle course to the French riders. They fell behind the galleot when they had to swing wide around river-bends and flooded fields, then caught up when they found a way to cut across one of the river’s vast meanders. Fortunately for them they had left Rosetta trailing strings of fresh horses; and Egypt, like most of the Turks’ empire, was a settled and orderly country. Traveling along her high-roads was not as easy as in England, but it was easier than in France, and so they were able to keep pace during the day. This gave Moseh, Jack, and the others confidence that the four who’d gone ahead—Nyazi’s group—had reached Cairo without difficulty.