“I swear by my country—the country of free men,” said Dappa, “which at the moment has only sixteen or so citizens, and no territory. But it is the only country I have and so by it do I swear.”
Jeronimo stepped forward, piously wringing his hands, and began to mumble some words in Latin; but then his demon took over and he shouted, “Fuck! I do not even believe in God! I swear by all of you Vagabonds, Niggers, Heretics, Kikes, and Camel-Jockeys, for you are the only friends I have ever had.”
THE DUC D’ARCACHON had disembarked from his gilded river-barge, and was riding towards the Khan el-Khalili on a white horse, accompanied by several aides, a Turkish official or two, and a mixed company of rented Janissaries and crack French dragoons. Behind them rumbled several empty wagons of very heavy construction, such as were used to carry blocks of dressed stone through the streets. This much was known to the Cabal half an hour in advance—word had been brought by the messenger-boys who moved through the streets of Cairo like scirocco winds.
Every master jeweler in the city had been hired by the Duc d’Arcachon—or, failing that, had been bribed not to do any work for the Cabal—and were now converging on a certain gate of the Khan el-Khalili to await the Duke. This was common knowledge to every Jew in the city, including Moseh.
A flat-bottomed, shallow-draft river-boat waited at the terminus of a canal that wandered through the city and eventually communicated with the Nile. It was only half a mile from the caravanserai, down a certain street, and the people who dwelled along that street had carried their chairs and hookahs indoors and rounded up their chickens and were keeping their doors bolted and windows shuttered today, because of certain rumors that had begun to circulate the night before.
It was mid-afternoon before the clatter and rumble of the Investor’s entourage penetrated the still courtyard where Jack stood in the lambent glow of the stretched canvas above. He took a deep whiff of air into his nostrils. It smelt of hay, dust, and camel-dung. He ought to be scared, or at least excited. Instead he felt peace. For this alley was the womb at the center of the Mother of the World, the place where it had all started. The Messe of Linz and the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig and the Damplatz of Amsterdam were its young impetuous grandchildren. Like the eye of a hurricane, the alley was dead calm; but around it, he knew, revolved the global maelstrom of liquid silver. Here, there were no Dukes and no Vagabonds; every man was the same, as in the moment before he was born.
The challenges and salutations were barely audible through the stable’s haystacks; Jack could not even make out the language. Then he heard horseshoes pocking over the stone floor, coming closer.
Jack rested his hand on the pommel of his sword and recited a poem he’d been taught long ago, standing in the bend of a creek in Bohemia:
Watered steel-blade, the world perfection calls,
Drunk with the viper poison foes appals.
Cuts lively, burns the blood whene’er it falls;
And picks up gems from pave of marble halls.
“That is he!?” said a voice in French. Jack realized his eyes were closed, and opened them to see a man on a white, pink-eyed cheval de parade. His wig was perfect, an Admiral’s hat was perched atop it, and four little black patches were glued to his white face. He was staring in some alarm at Jack, and Jack almost reached for one of the pistols in his waist-sash, fearing he had already been recognized. But another chevalier, riding knee to knee with the Duke to his left side, leaned askew in his saddle and answered, “Yes, your grace, that is the Agha of the Janissaries.” Jack recognized this rider as Pierre de Jonzac.
“He must be a Balkan,” remarked the Duke, apparently because of Jack’s European coloration.
A third French chevalier rode on the Duke’s right. He cleared his throat significantly as Monsieur Arlanc emerged from the stables and fell in beside Jack, on his left hand. Evidently this was to warn the Duke that they were now in the presence of a man who could understand French. Moseh now emerged and stood on Jack’s right to even the count, three facing three.
The Frenchmen—wishing to command the field—rode forward all the way to the center of the alley. Likewise Jack strolled forward until he was drawing uncomfortably close to the Duke. Finally the Duke reined in his white horse and held up one hand in a signal for everyone to halt. De Jonzac and the other chevalier stopped immediately, their horses’ noses even with the Duke’s saddle. But Jack took another step forward, and then another, until de Jonzac reached down and drew a pistol halfway from a saddle-holster, and the other aide spurred his horse forward to cut Jack off.
Behind the Duke and his men, it was possible to hear a considerable number of French soldiers and Janissaries infiltrating the caravanserai, and before long Jack began to see musket-barrels gleaming in windows of the uppermost storeys. Likewise, men of Nyazi’s clan had taken up positions on both sides of the alley to Jack’s rear, and the burning punks of their matchlocks glowed in dark archways like demons’ eyes. Jack stopped where he was: perhaps eight feet from the glabrous muzzle of the Duke’s horse. But he chose a place where his sight-line to the Duke’s face was blocked by the aide who had ridden forward. The Duke said something sotto voce and this man backed his mount out of the way, returning to his former position guarding the Duke’s right flank.
“I comprehend your plan,” said the Duke, dispensing with formalities altogether—which was probably meant to be some kind of insult. “It is essentially suicidal.”
Jack pretended not to understand until Monsieur Arlanc had translated this into Sabir.
“We had to make it seem that way,” answered Jack, “or you would have been afraid to show up.”
The Duke smiled as if at some very dry dinner-table witticism. “Very well—it is like a dance, or a duel, beginning with formal steps: I try to frighten you, you try to impress me. We proceed now. Show me L’Emmerdeur!”
“He is very near by,” said Jack. “First we must settle larger matters—the gold.”
“I am a man of honor, not a slave, and so to me, the gold is nothing. But if you are so concerned about it, tell me what you propose.”
“First, send your jewelers away—there are no jewels, and no silver. Only gold.”
“It is done.”
“This caravanserai is vast, as you have seen, and full of hay at the moment. The gold bars have been buried in the haystacks. We know where they are. You do not. As soon as you have given us the documents declaring us free men, and set us on the road, or the river, with our share of the money in our pockets—in the form of pieces of eight—we will tell you where to find the gold.”
“That cannot be your entire plan,” said the Duke. “There is not so much hay here that we cannot simply arrest you, and then search it all at our leisure.”
“While we were going through the stables, hiding the gold, we spilled quite a bit of lamp-oil on the floor, and buried a few powder-kegs in haystacks for good measure,” Jack said.
Pierre de Jonzac shouted a command to a junior officer back in the stables.
“You threaten to burn the caravanserai, then,” said the Duke, as if everything Jack said had to be translated into childish language.
“The gold will melt and run into the drains. You will recover some of it, but you will lose more than you would by simply paying us our share and setting us free.”
An officer came out on foot and whispered something to de Jonzac, who relayed it to the Duke.
“Very well,” said the Duke.
“I beg your pardon?”
“My men have found the puddles of lamp-oil, your story seems to be correct, your proposal is accepted,” said the Duke. He turned and nodded to his other aide, who opened up his saddle-bags and began to take out a series of identical-looking documents, formally sealed and beribboned in the style of the Ottoman bureaucracy.
Jack turned and beckoned toward the doorway where Nasr al-Ghuráb had been lurking. The raïs came out, laid down his arms, and approached the Duke’s aide, who
allowed him to inspect one of the documents. “It is a cancellation of a slave-deed,” he said. “It is inscribed with the name of Jeronimo, and it declares him to be a free man.”
“Read the others,” Jack said.
“Now for the important matter, mentioned earlier,” said the Duke, “which is the only reason I made the journey from Alexandria.”
“Dappa,” read al-Ghuráb from another scroll. “Nyazi.”
A cart rattled out from behind the French lines, causing Jack to flinch; but it carried only a lock-box. “Your pieces of eight,” the Duke explained, amused by Jack’s nervousness.
“Yevgeny—and here is Gabriel Goto’s,” the raïs continued.
“Assuming that the wretch you displayed in Alexandria really was L’Emmerdeur, how much do you want for him?” the Duke inquired.
“As we are all free men now, or so it appears, we will likewise do the honorable thing, and let you have him for free—or not at all,” said Jack.
“Here is that of van Hoek,” said the raïs, “and here, a discharge for me.”
Another tolerant smile from the Duke. “I cannot recommend strongly enough that you give him to me. Without L’Emmerdeur there is no transaction.”
“Vrej Esphahnian—Padraig Tallow—Mr. Foot—”
“And despite your brave words,” the Duke continued, “the fact remains that you are surrounded by my dragoons, musketeers, and Janissaries. The gold is mine, as surely as if it were locked up in my vault in Paris.”
“This one has a blank space where the name should go,” said Nasr al-Ghuráb, holding up the last document.
“That is only because we were not given this one’s name,” explained Pierre de Jonzac, pointing at Jack.
“Your vault in Paris,” Jack said, echoing the Duke’s words. He now spoke directly to the Duke, in the best French he could muster. “I amguessing that would be somewhere underneath the suite of bedchambers in the west wing, there, where you have that god-awful green marble statue of King Looie all tarted up as Neptune.”
A Silence, now, almost as long as the one Jack had experienced, once, in the grand ballroom of the Hôtel Arcachon. But all things considered, the Duke recovered quickly—which meant either that he’d known all along, or that he was more adaptable than he looked. De Jonzac and the other aide were dumbfounded. The Duke moved his horse a couple of steps nearer, the better to peer down at Jack’s face. Jack stepped forward, close enough to feel the breath from the horse’s nostrils, and pulled the turban from his head.
“This need not alter the terms of the transaction, Jack,” said the Duke. “Your comrades can all be free and rich, with a single word from you.”
Jack stood there and considered it—genuinely—for a minute or two, as horses snorted and punks smoldered in the dark vaults of the caravanserai all around him. One small gesture of Christlike self-abnegation and he could give his comrades the wealth and freedom they deserved. At any earlier part of his life he would have scoffed at the idea. Now, it strangely tempted him.
For a few moments, anyway.
“Alas, you are a day too late,” he said at last, “for last night my comrades swore any number of mickle oaths to me, and I intend to hold them to account. ’Twere bad form, otherwise.”
And then in a single motion he drew out his Janissary-sword and plunged it all the way to the hilt into the neck of the Duke’s horse, aiming for the heart. When he hit it, the immense muscle clenched like a fist around the wide head of the blade, then went limp as the watered steel cleaved it in twain.
The blade came out driven on a jet of blood as thick as his wrist. The horse reared up, the Duke’s jeweled spurs flailing in the air. Jack stepped to one side, drawing a pistol from his waistband with his free hand, and fired a ball through the head of the aide who had brought the documents. The Duke just avoided falling off his horse, but managed to hold on as it bolted forward a couple of paces and then fell over sideways, pinning one of the Duke’s legs and (as Jack could hear) breaking it.
Jack looked up to see Pierre de Jonzac aiming a pistol at him from no more than two yards away. Moseh had meanwhile stuck his tongue out, and gone into motion. A flying hatchet lodged in de Jonzac’s shoulder, causing him to drop the weapon. A moment later his horse collapsed, shot through the head, and de Jonzac was thrown to the ground practically at Jack’s feet. Jack snatched the fallen pistol; aimed it at the head of de Jonzac; then moved the barrel slightly to one side and fired into the ground.
“My men think you are dead now, and won’t waste balls on you,” Jack said. “In fact I have let you live, but for one purpose only: so that you can make your way back to Paris and tell them the following: that the deed you are about to witness was done for a woman, whose name I will not say, for she knows who she is; and that it was done by ‘Half-Cocked’ Jack Shaftoe, L’Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak: Quicksilver!”
As he said these words he was stepping over to the Duc d’Arcachon, who had dragged himself out from under his horse and was lying there, hatless and wigless, propped up on one elbow, with the jagged ends of his leg-bones poking out through the bloody tissues of his silk stockings.
“Here I am supposed to give you a full account and explanation of your sins, and why you deserve this,” Jack announced, “but there is no time. Suffice it to say that I am thinking of a mother and daughter you once abducted, and disgraced, and sold into slavery.”
The Duke pondered this for a moment, looking bewildered, and then said: “Which ones?”
Then Jack brought the bright blade of the Janissary-sword down like a thunderbolt, and the head of Louis-François de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, bounced and spun in the dirt of Khan el-Khalili in the center of the Mother of the World, and the dust of the Sahara began to cloud the lenses of his eyes.
NOW JACK GOT THE IDEA that it was raining, because of the spurts of dust erupting from the ground all around him. Frenchmen, Janissaries, or both were firing at him from above—feeling free to do so now that Jack had apparently slain all three of the Frenchmen in the alley. Monsieur Arlanc and Nasr al-Ghuráb had made themselves scarce. Jack ran into the stables, which had become the scene of a strange sort of indoor battle. Nyazi’s men, and the Cabal, were outnumbered. But they’d had plenty of time to ready positions among the haystacks and watering-troughs of the stable, and to string trip-wires between pillars. They could have held the French and Turks off all day, if not for the fact that the stables had been set on fire—possibly on purpose, but more likely by the muzzle-flash of a weapon. Jack vaulted into a trough, drenching himself and his clothes, and then scurried back through an apparently random hail of musket-balls to where Yevgeny, Padraig, Jeronimo, Gabriel Goto, the Nubian eunuch, and several of Nyazi’s clan were frantically rifling haystacks for gold bars and piling them into heavy wagons. These were drawn by nervous horses with grain-sacks over their heads to keep them from seeing the flames—a cheap subterfuge that was already wearing thin. At a glance Jack estimated that somewhat more than half of the gold had been recovered.
Moseh, Vrej, and Surendranath, with their merchants’ aptitude for figures, knew where every last bar was hid, and were making sure that none went missing. That was a job best done by calm men. As men were more intelligent than horses, one could not keep them calm by putting sacks over their heads; some kind of real security had to be provided, from fire, smoke, Janissaries, dragoons, and—what else had the Duke mentioned?
“Have you seen any French musketeers?” Jack inquired, when he had located Nyazi. As long as they remained in the stables, Nyazi was their general.
It was easier to talk now than it had been a few minutes ago. Smoke had rendered muskets useless, and flames the possession of gunpowder extremely dangerous. The thuds of musket-fire had died away and were being supplanted by the ring of blade against blade, and the shouting of men trying to shift their burdens of fear to their foes.
“What is a musketeer?”
“The Duke claimed he had some,” Jack sa
id, which did not answer Nyazi’s question. But there was no time to explain the distinction between dragoons and musketeers now.
A horn had begun to blow from the back of the stables, giving the signal that the gold wagons were ready to depart. Nyazi began to holler orders to his clansmen, who were distributed around the smoke in some way that was clear only to him, and they began falling back toward the wagons. This was their attempt at an orderly retreat under fire, which as Jack knew was no easy thing to manage even with regular troops under good conditions. In fact it was almost as chaotic as the advance of the Janissaries, who had overrun at least part of Nyazi’s defensive line and were now stumbling forward, gasping and gagging, tripping over rakes and slamming into pillars, charging toward the sound of the trumpet call—not so much because the enemy and the gold were there, as because one could not blow a bugle without drawing breath, and so it proved that air was to be had ahead.
Jack got as far as a place where the smoke was diluted by a current of fresh air, then was nearly spitted by a bayonet-thrust coming in from his left rear, aimed at his kidney. Jack spun almost entirely around to the right, so the tip of the blade snagged in the muscle of his back but was deflected, cutting and tearing the flesh but not piercing his organs. At the same time he was delivering a backhanded cut to the head of the bayonet’s owner. So the fight was over before Jack knew it had started. But it led immediately to a real sword-fight with a Frenchman—an officer who had a small-sword, and knew how to use it. Jack, fighting with a heavier and slower weapon, knew he would have to end this on the first or second exchange of blows, or else his opponent could simply stand off at a distance and poke holes through him until he bled to death.
The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World Page 149