Finally, now, the clansmen of Nyazi were able to bring the horses out of the stable-yard and hitch them to the gold-wagons, though various dragoons, musketeers, and Janissaries continued to harass them from all around; and now the thieves of Cairo were beginning to make their presence known, too. Flocks of them began to coalesce in doorways and corners, hidden by the greedy shadows of late afternoon, and made occasional sorties into the light in the hope of fetching some gold. In spite of this, within a quarter of an hour they were able to drive away from the stables—a cyclone of flame now—with four of the original six gold-carts.
Jack and Gabriel Goto were riding on the last of these, supposedly to act as a rear-guard. But both of them had another errand in mind as well. When they came abreast of the side-street where the barricade had been exploded, they reined in the cart-horse, jumped off, and ran up to recover Yevgeny.
Because of the smoldering debris that half-choked the street, they could not see the place where he had fallen until they were almost upon it. But then they found nothing except a wide smear of gore. Yevgeny’s blood had outlined the paving-stones in narrow red lines as it trickled between them, seeking the gutter. But Yevgeny himself was nowhere to be seen. The only other traces of him that remained were his left hand, which had been shot off, and a few rude characters drawn in blood on the pavement. An uneven line of bloody footsteps meandered up the street toward the stables, and disappeared into dust and smoke.
“Can you read it?” Jack asked Gabriel.
“It says, ‘Go the long way round,’ ” Gabriel answered.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Specifically? I do not know. Generally? It suggests that he will go some other way.”
“Spoken like a Jesuit.”
“He has gone that way,” said Gabriel, pointing toward the caravanserai, “and we must go this.” Pointing back towards the gold-carts.
“We are needed there anyway,” Jack said, breaking into a run. For their cart had already come under attack from a mixed mob of thieves, Vagabonds, Janissaries, and French soldiers. The appearance of Jack and Gabriel on their flank, bloody sabers held high, got rid of most of them. But looters better armed and more determined were close behind them, and so Jack and Gabriel and a few of Nyazi’s men rattled the half-mile down to the canal hotly pursued, though at a prudent distance, by a sort of wolf-pack.
At the foot of the street where it gave way to the canal, Mr. Foot, Vrej, Surendranath, and van Hoek were waiting—looking as if they had been through some adventures of their own this afternoon. They had thrown a heavy platform across the gap between the quay and the river-boat, and the other three gold-carts had already rumbled across it, spilling many of their contents on the deck.
Parked to one side of the street was a humble-looking hay-wain, harnessed to a camel. As the last cart, carrying Jack and Gabriel, jounced past it, a whip cracked and this vehicle bolted out into the middle of the street. By this point nothing could have prevented the gold-cart from reaching the platform, so Jack vaulted off of it, and turned round to face the hay-wain, anticipating some sort of attack. But by the time he had recovered his balance, the hay-wain had stopped in the middle of the street, directly in the path of the pursuing horde. The driver (Nyazi!) and another man (Moseh!) jumped off and chocked its wheels there, and at the same time the pile of hay on the cart’s back seemed to come alive; most of the load showered into the street. Revealed were a long tubular black object (a cannon!) and, clambering to his feet next to it, a black man (Dappa!).
Now in a way this was not surprising, for it was all a part of the plan—they’d spent all of yesterday buying the damned piece. In another way it was, for it was supposed to have been set up at dockside, loaded, aimed, and ready to be fired. Instead of which it had just gotten here—in the nick of time, Jack thought, if it had been loaded. But Dappa, rather than jamming a torch against its touch-hole, now began to rummage through a clanking assortment of implements strewn about his feet, while from time to time casting a glance up the length of the street to (at first) count, and (presently) estimate the number of heavily armed, screaming men sprinting their way.
“I have not done this before,” he announced, fishing out, and inspecting, a long, rusty pick, “but have had it all explained to me, by men who have.”
“Men who have lost sea-battles and been taken as galley-slaves,” Jack added.
Dappa brushed hay from the butt of the cannon and shoved the pick into the touch-hole.
“Help load the boat!” Jack screamed at Moseh and Nyazi. To Dappa he suggested, “For Christ’s sake, don’t worry about clearing the bloody touch-hole!”
Dappa returned, “If you’d be so good as to get the tampion out of my way?”
Jack scurried around to the muzzle-side of the wagon, turned his back to the on-rushing horde—which was not a thing that came naturally to him—reached up, and yanked out a round wooden bung that had been stuffed into the gun’s muzzle. It was shot out of his hand by a pistol-ball.
Dappa had an arrow through his sleeve, though not, apparently, through his arm. He was regarding a long-handled scoop. “As you are in such a hurry today,” he announced, “we shall dispense with the customary procedure of swabbing out the barrel.” As he spoke he shoved the scoop into some crunchy-sounding receptacle, which was hidden from Jack’s view by the side of the wagon, and raised it up heaped with coarse black powder. Balancing this in one hand he produced a copper-bladed spatula in the other, and leveled the powder-charge; then, moving with utmost deliberation so as not to spill any, he turned the scoop end-for-end and introduced it to the cannon’s muzzle, then, slowly at first, but quicker as he went along, hand-over-handed it until the entirety of its long handle had been swallowed by the barrel. He then gave it a half rotation to disgorge its load, and began gingerly to extract it.
Jack had until now been caught between a desire to make sure that Dappa didn’t do it wrong, and a natural concern for what was approaching. To describe the foremost of the attackers as irregulars would have been to give far too high an estimate of their discipline, motives, armaments, and appearance; they were thieves, avaricious bystanders, micro-ethnic-groups, and a few Janissaries who had broken ranks when they had caught sight of gold bars. Most of these had faltered when they had caught sight of the cannon. But awareness had now propagated up the street that it was still in the process of being loaded. Meanwhile the French platoons had re-formed and begun marching in good order down the hill, reaming the street clear in a manner very like what the gun-swab would have done to the barrel of the cannon, had Dappa not elected to omit that step. The emboldened rabble swarming out from their places of concealment mingled together with the not-so-emboldened ones being rammed down the street by this piston of French troops and all joined together into—
“An avalanche, or so ’tis claimed by certain Alpine galériens I have rowed with, may be triggered by the sound of cannon-fire.” Dappa had torn off his shirt, wadded it up, and stuffed it down the barrel, and was now feeding in double handfuls of shot. He followed that with his turban, and finally took up his long rammer. “I wonder if we may halt an avalanche thus.” His long dreadlocks, freed from the imprisonment of the head-wrap, fell about his face as he bent forward to get the pad of the rammer into the muzzle.
“Don’t bother taking the rammer out—at this range ’twill serve as a javelin,” was Jack’s last advice to Dappa, as he turned his back and began to stalk up the hill towards the Mobb. For there were one or two fleet-footed scimitar-swingers, far ahead of the pack, who might arrive soon enough to interfere with the final steps of the rite.
“Where did that horn of priming-powder get to?” Dappa wondered.
Jack feinted left long enough to convince the hashishin on the right that he had a clear path to Dappa; then Jack lashed out with a foot and tripped him as he ran by. Moseh emerged from nearer to the quay. He had located another boarding axe, his tongue was coming out, he had an eye on the man who’d just p
lanted his face in the street, and he was followed by Nyazi and Gabriel Goto, who had been watching all of these developments with interest and decided to leave off ship-loading work.
A scimitar slashed downward from the left; Jack angled it off the back of his blade. A tapping sound from behind suggested that Dappa had found his priming-powder and was getting it into the touch-hole.
“Has anyone got a light?” Dappa said.
Jack butt-stroked his opponent across the jaw with the guard of his sword and yanked a discharged pistol out of the fellow’s waist-band, then turned round and underhanded it across five or six yards of empty space to Dappa. Which might have got him killed, as it entailed turning his back on his opponent; but the latter knew what was good for him, and prudently flung himself down.
As did Jack; and (as he saw now, turning his head to look up the hill) as did nearly everyone else. A small number of utterly unhinged maniacs kept running toward them. Jack got to his feet, making sure he was well out of the way of the cannon’s muzzle, and backed up to the wagon. Nyazi, Moseh, and Gabriel Goto closed ranks around him.
There followed a bit of a standoff. Crazed hashishin aside, no one in the street could move as long as Dappa had them under his gun. But as soon as Dappa fired it, he’d be defenseless, and they’d be swarmed under. Pot-shots whistled their way from a few doorways up the street; Dappa squatted down, but held his ground at the cannon’s breech.
It bought them the time they needed, anyway. “All aboard!” called van Hoek—a bit late, as the boat had already cast off lines, and the gap between it and the quay was beginning to widen. “Now!” called Dappa. Jack, Nyazi, Gabriel Goto, and Moseh all turned and ran for it. Dappa stayed behind. The French regulars leapt to their feet and made for him double-time. Dappa cocked the pistol, held its pan above the small powder-filled depression that surrounded the orifice of the cannon’s touch-hole, and pulled the trigger. Sparks showered and, like stars going behind clouds, were swallowed in a plume of smoke. A spurt of flame two fathoms long shot from the cannon’s muzzle, driving the ram-rod, some pounds of buckshot, and half of Dappa’s clothing up the length of the street. The riot that came his way a moment later suggested that none of it had been very effective. But by the time the Mobb engulfed the cannon, Dappa was sprinting down the quay. He jumped for it, caromed off the gunwale, and fell into the Nile; but scarcely had time to get wet before oars had been thrust into the water for him to grab onto. They pulled him aboard. Everyone went flat on the decks as the French soldiers discharged their muskets, once, in their general direction. Then they passed out of sight and out of range.
“What went awry?” van Hoek asked.
“Our escape-route was blocked by a company of French musketeers,” Jack said.
“Fancy that,” van Hoek muttered.
“Jeronimo and both of our Turks are dead.”
“The raïs?”
“You heard me—he is dead, and now you are our Captain,” Jack said.
“Yevgeny?”
“He dragged himself away to die. I suspect he did not want to be a burden on the rest of us,” Jack said.
“That is hard news,” van Hoek said, gripping his bandaged hand and squeezing it.
“It is noteworthy that both of the Turks were killed,” said Vrej Esphahnian, who had overheard most of this. “More than likely one of them betrayed us; the Pasha in Algiers probably planned the whole thing, from the beginning, as a way to screw the Investor out of his share.”
“The raïs seemed very surprised when he was shot by a Janissary,” Jack allowed.
“It must have been part of the Turks’ plan,” said Vrej. “They would want to slay the traitor first of all, so that he would not tell the tale.”
Upstream, a Turkish war-galley had been dispatched from Giza to pursue them. But it had feeble hope of catching them, for the Nile was not a wide river even at this time of the year, and such width as it had was choked by a jam of slow-moving grain barges.
Night fell as they were approaching the great fork of the Nile. They took the Rosetta branch to throw off their landward pursuers, then cut east across the Delta, following small canals, and got across to the Damietta Fork by poling the boat over an expanse of flooded fields several miles wide. By the time the sun rose the following morning, they had struck their masts, and anything else that projected more than six feet above the waterline, and were surrounded by tall reeds in the marshy expanses to the east.
At the end of that day they made rendezvous with a small caravan of Nyazi’s people, and there a share of the gold was loaded onto their camels. Nyazi and the Nubian both said their farewells to the Cabal at this point and struck out for the south, Nyazi visibly excited at the thought of a reunion with his forty wives, and the Nubian trusting to fortune to get him back to the country from which he had been abducted.
Eastwards on the boat continued Jack, Mr. Foot, Dappa, Monsieur Arlanc, Padraig Tallow, Vrej Esphahnian, Surendranath, and Gabriel Goto, with van Hoek as their captain and Moseh as their designated Prophet. It was a role in which he seemed uncomfortable until one day, after many wanderings and lesser adventures, they came to a place where the reeds parted into something that could only be the Red Sea.
There Moseh stood in the bow of the boat, lit up by the rising sun, and spoke a few momentous words in half-remembered Hebrew—prompting Jack to say, “Before you part the waters, there, please keep in mind that we’re on a boat, and have nothing to gain from being left high and dry.”
Van Hoek ordered the masts stepped and the sails raised, and they set a course for Mocha and the Orient, free men all.
Book 5
The Juncto
Eliza to Leibniz
LATE SEPTEMBER 1690
Doctor,
I have been a few days in Juvisy, a town on the left bank of the Seine, south of Paris, where Monsieur Rossignol has a château. This is a natural stopping-place for one who has come up from the south. I have been in Lyon for almost a month tending to some business, and am just now returning to Île-de-France. Juvisy is a sort of fork in the road; thence one may follow the river into Paris, or else strike cross-country westwards toward Versailles. Monsieur Rossignol placed his stables and staff at my disposal so that my little household, and our brief train of horses and carriages, could refresh themselves while they waited for me to make up my mind. Jean-Jacques is at Versailles, and I have not seen him since I departed for Lyon, and so my heart told me to go that way; but there is much to be done in Paris, and so my head bid me go thither. I am going to Paris.
When I woke up this morning, the estate was strangely quiet. I drew a blanket over my shoulders and went to the windows, where I beheld a grotesque scene: during the night the garden had become matted with unsightly lumps of damp straw. The gardeners, sensing an unseasonable drop in temperature yester evening, had been out late into the night packing straw around the smaller and more delicate plants, like nurses tucking their babies in under duvets. All was now dusted with silver. Taller plants, such as the roses, had frozen through. The little pools around the fountains were glazed, and the statues had picked up a frosty patina that gave keen definition to their rippling muscles and flowing garments. The place was quiet as a graveyard, for the workmen, having toiled half the night to erect ramparts of straw against the invading cold, were all sleeping late.
It was quite beautiful, especially when the sun came up over the hills beyond the Seine and suffused all of that frost with a cool peach-colored light. But of course for such cold to strike France in September is monstrous—it is like a comet or a two-headed baby. Spring was late in coming this year. France’s hopes for an adequate harvest depended on a long, warm autumn. As much as I admired the beauty of those frosted roses, I knew that grain, apples, vines, and vegetables all over France must have suffered the same fate. I sent word to my staff to prepare for an early departure, then tarried in M. Rossignol’s bedchamber only long enough to bid him a memorable farewell. Now—as you will have discerned from
my wretched penmanship—we are in the carriage, rattling up the Left Bank into Paris.
During my earlier life here, I’d have been beside myself, for this early frost would have sent the commodities markets into violent motion, and it would have been of the highest importance for me to get instructions to Amsterdam. As matters stand, my responsibilities are more profound, but less immediate. Money surges and courses through this realm in the most inscrutable ways. I suppose one could construct some sort of strained analogy—Paris is the heart, and Lyons the lungs, or something—but in any event, the system does not work, and money does not flow, unless people make it work, and I have become one of those people. At first I worked mostly for the Compagnie du Nord, which imports Baltic timber to Dunkerque. Through this I came to know more than I should care to about how le Roi finances the war. Lately I have also become embroiled in some scheme of M. le duc d’Arcachon whose details remain vague. It was the latter that took me down to Lyon; for I traveled down there in August in the company of the Duke himself. He installed me in a pied-à-terre that he maintains in that city, then journeyed onwards to Marseille where he planned to embark on his jacht for points south.
We are coming up on the University already, we move too fast, the streets are empty as if the whole city mourns for the lost harvest. All is frozen except for we who move quickly so as not to freeze. Soon we shall cross the river and reach the hôtel particulier of Arcachon, and I have not got to the main points of my letter yet. Quickly then:
The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World Page 151
