The Confusion

by Neal Stephenson

  "In fact we are not lost at all, but taking the most direct route to our destination," Dappa said. "But my story is a simple one—not like yours, Jack—and there will be more than enough time to relate it. All right then: every slave-port along the African coast must have a linguist—which signifies a man skilled in many tongues—or else how could the black slavers, who bring the stock out from the interior, make deals with the ships' captains who drop anchor off-shore? For those slavers come from many different nations, all speaking different languages, and likewise the captains may be English, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Arab, or what-have-you. It all depends on the outcomes of various European wars, of which we Africans never know anything until the castle at the river-head suddenly begins to fly a different flag."

  "Enough on that subject—I've fought in some of those wars."

  "Jack, I am from a town on the river that is called, by white men, the Niger. This is an easy place to live—food grows on trees. I could rhapsodize about it but I will refrain. Suffice it to say 'twas a Garden of Eden. Save for the Institution of Slavery, which had always been with us. For as many generations as our priests and elders can remember, Arabs would occasionally come up the great river in boats and trade us cloth, gold, and other goods for slaves—"

  "But where'd the slaves come from, Dappa?"

  "The question is apt. Prior to my time they mostly came from farther up the river, marching in columns, joined together by wooden yokes. And some persons of my town were made slaves because they could not pay their debts, or as punishment for crimes."

  "So you have bailiffs? Judges?"

  "In my town the priests were very powerful, and did many of the things that bailiffs and judges do in your country."

  "When you say priests I don't imagine you mean men in funny hats, prating in Latin—"

  Dappa laughed. "When Arabs or Catholics came to convert us, we would hear them out and then invite them to get back into their boats and go home. No, we followed a traditional religion in my town, whose details I'll spare you, save one: we had a famous oracle, which means—"

  "I know, I've heard about 'em in plays."

  "Very well—then the only thing I need to tell you is that pilgrims would come to our town from many miles away to ask questions of the Aro priests who were the oracles in my town. Now: at about the same time that some Portuguese began coming up the river to convert us, others began coming to trade with us for slaves—which was unremarkable, being no different from what the Arabs had been doing forever. But gradually—too gradually for anyone to really see a difference in his lifetime—the prices that were offered for slaves rose higher, and the visits of the buyers came more frequently. Dutch and English and other sorts of white men came wanting ever more slaves. My town grew wealthy from this trade—the temples of the Aro priests shone with gold and silver, the slave-trains from upriver grew longer, and came more frequently. Even then, the supply was not equal to the demand. The priests who served as our judges began to pass the sentence of enslavement on more and more persons, for smaller and smaller offenses. They grew rich and haughty, the priests did, and were carried through the streets on gilded sedan-chairs. Yet this magnificence was viewed, by a certain type of African, as proof that these priests must be very powerful wizards and oracles. So, just as the slave-trains waxed, so did the crowds of pilgrims coming from all over the Niger Delta to have their illnesses healed, or to ask questions of the oracle."

  "Nothing we haven't seen in Christendom," Jack observed.

  "Yes—the difference being that, after a time, the priests ran out of crimes, and slaves."

  "What do you mean, they ran out of crimes?"

  "They reached a point, Jack, where they would punish every crime, no matter how trivial, with enslavement. And still there were not enough slaves to sell down the river. So they decreed that henceforth, any person who appeared before the Aro oracle and asked a stupid question would be immediately seized by the warriors who stood guard in the temple, and flung into slavery."

  "Hmmm…if stupid questions are as common in Africa as they are where I come from, that policy must've produced a flood of wretches!"

  "It did—yet still the pilgrims flocked to our town."

  "Were you one of those pilgrims?"

  "No, I was a fortunate boy—the son of an Aro priest. When I was very young, I talked all the time, so it was decided I would be a linguist. Thereafter, whenever a white or Arab trader came to our town, I would stay in his lodgings and try to learn what I could of his language. And when the missionaries came, too, I would pretend to be interested in their religions, so that I could learn their languages."

  "But how did you become a slave?"

  "One time I traveled downriver to Bonny, which is the slave-fort at the mouth of the Niger. En route I passed many towns, and understood for the first time that mine was only one of many feeding slaves down the river. The Spanish missionary I was traveling with told me that Bonny was only one of scores of slave-depots up and down the coast of Africa. For the first time, then, I understood how enormous the slave trade was—and how evil. But since you are a slave yourself, Jack, and have expressed some dissatisfaction with your estate, I'll not belabor this. I asked the Spanish missionary how such a thing could be justified, given that the religion of Europe is founded on brotherly love. The Spaniard replied that this had been a great controversy in the Church, and much debated—but that in the end, they justified it only by one thing: When white slavers bought them from black slavers, Africans were baptized, and so the good that was done to their immortal souls, in that instant, more than compensated for the evils done to their temporal bodies during the remainder of their lives. ‘Do you mean to tell me,' I exclaimed, ‘that it would be against the law of God for an African who was already a Christian to be enslaved?' ‘That is so,' said the missionary. And so now I was filled with what you call zeal. I love this word. In my zeal I got on the next boat bound upriver—it was a Royal Africa Company longboat carrying pieces of India cloth to trade for slaves. When I reached my town I went straight to the temple and—how do you say it—‘jumped the queue' of pilgrims, and went before the highest of the high Aro priests. He was a man I had known all my life—he had been a sort of uncle to me, and many times we had eaten from the same bowl. He was sitting there resplendent on his gold throne, with his lion-skin, all draped about with fat garlands of cowrie-shells, and in great excitement, I said ‘Do you realize that this evil could be brought to an end today? The law of the Christian Church states that once a man has been baptized it is unlawful to make him a slave!' ‘What is your point—or, to put it another way, what is your question?' asked the oracle. ‘It is very simple,' I said, ‘why don't we simply baptize everyone in the whole town—for these Catholics make a specialty of mass baptisms—and furthermore why don't we baptize every pilgrim and slave who walks into the city-gates?' "

  "What was the oracle's answer?"

  "After no more than a heartbeat's hesitation, he turned towards the four spear-men who stood by him, and made a little twitching motion with his fly-whisk. They rushed forward and began to bind my arms behind my back. ‘What is the meaning of this? What are you doing to me, uncle?' I cried. He answered: ‘That makes two—no, three stupid questions in a row, and so I would enslave you thrice if such a thing were possible.' ‘My god,' I said, as I began to understand the full horror of what was being done to me, ‘can you not see the evil of what you are doing? Bonny—and all the other slave-depots—are filled with our brothers, dying of disease and despair before they even get on those hellish slave-ships! Hundreds of years from now, their descendants will live on in faraway lands as outcasts, embittered by the knowledge of what was perpetrated against their forefathers! How can we—how can you—seemingly a decent man—capable of showing love and affection towards your wives and children—perpetrate such unspeakable crimes?' To which the oracle replied, ‘Now, that is a good question!' and with another flick of his fly-whisk sent me off to the holding-
pit. I returned to Bonny on the same English boat that had brought me up the river, and my uncle had a new piece of India cloth to brighten his household." Dappa now laughed out loud, his teeth gleaming handsomely in the rapidly deepening dusk of a crevasse-like Algiers back-street.

  Jack managed a polite chuckle. Though the other slaves had probably never heard Dappa's story told in English before, they recognized its rhythms, and grinned on cue. The Spaniard laughed heartily and said, "You have got to be one stupid nigger to think that's funny!" Dappa ignored him.

  "It is a good enough yarn," Jack allowed, "but it does not explain how you ended up here."

  Dappa responded by pulling his ragged shirt down to expose his right breast. In the gloom Jack could barely make out a pattern of scars. "I don't know letters," he said.

  "Then I'll teach you two of them," said Dappa, reaching out quickly and grasping Jack's index finger before Jack could flinch away. "This is a D," he continued, running the tip of Jack's finger along the ridge of a scar, "for Duke. And this is a Y, for York. They trade-marked me thus with a silver branding-iron when I reached Bonny."

  "Not to rub salt in your wound, there, Dappa, but that same bloke is King of England now—"

  "Not any more," Moseh put in, "he was run off by William of Orange."

  "Well, there's a bit of good news at least," Jack muttered.

  "From that point my story's unremarkable," Dappa said. "I was traded from fort to fort up the coast. Bonny slaves fetch a low price because, since we grew up in paradise, we are unaccustomed to agricultural labor. Otherwise I would've been shipped straight to Brazil or the Caribbean. I ended up in the hold of a Portuguese ship bound for Madeira, which was captured by the same Rabat corsairs who'd earlier taken your ship."

  "We must hurry," Moseh said, bending his neck to stare straight up. Down here it had been night for hours, but fifty feet above them, the corner of a wall was washed in the red light of the sunset. The little slave-column doubled its pace, trotted around several more corners, and came out into a street that was relatively wide (i.e., Jack could no longer touch both sides of it at the same time). Onion-skins and vegetable-trimmings were strewn about, and Jack reckoned it to be some sort of a market, though all of the tables had been cleared and the stalls shuttered. A young, dark-haired man, oddly familiar-looking, was standing there waiting for them, and fell in stride as they passed. His Sabir was infused with an accent that Jack recognized, from his last Paris sojourn, as Armenian.

  But before he'd had time to think on this, they'd spilled out into an open space: some sort of public square, difficult to make out in the dusky light, with a public fountain in the center and a few large, but very plain, buildings around the sides. One of these was all lit up, with hundreds of men trying to get in the doors. Quite a few of them were slaves, but there were many members of the ocak, too, as well as the usual Algerine assortment of Berbers, Jews, and Christians. As they came up against the fringes of this crowd, Moseh de la Cruz stepped aside and allowed the Spaniard to lunge past him, suddenly bellowing every vile insult Jack had ever heard, as well as diverse new-made ones, and jabbing various large, heavily armed Turks in the ribs, treading on the curly toes of their slippers, and kicking them in the shins to clear a path towards the building's entrance. Jack expected to have his head scimitared off merely for being in the general vicinity of this uncivil Spaniard, but all the victims of his jabs and insults grinned and laughed the moment they recognized him, and then derived all manner of entertainment from watching him assail whomever stood in his path next. Moseh and the others, meanwhile, followed along in his wake, so that they arrived at the front door quickly—yet apparently none too soon. For the Turks standing guard there spoke angrily to Moseh and the others, pointing at the western sky, which had faded to a deep and nearly invisible blue now, like candle-light trying to penetrate a porcelain saucer. One of the guards slugged Dappa and the Nipponese Jesuit as they went by, and aimed a blow at Jack, which he dodged.

  Moseh had mentioned to him earlier that they lived in something called a banyolar and Jack reckoned this must be it: a courtyard surrounded by galleries divided into many small cells, one ring of galleries piled upon the next to a height of several storeys. To Jack, the overall design was much like certain old-fashioned theatres that stood along Maid Lane between the marshes of Southwark and the right bank of the Thames, viz. the Rose, the Hope, and the Swan. The big difference, of course, was that those Bankside theatres had armed men trying to keep Jack out whereas here they were abusing him for not having entered soon enough.

  This, of course, was no theatre, but a slave-quarters. And yet the galleries, up to and including the flat roof of the banyolar, were crowded (at the moment anyway) with free Algerines, and so was most of the courtyard. But one part of that yard, off to one side of its central cistern, had been roped off to form a stage, or ring; and any number of torchères had been planted around it, so close to one another that their flames practically merged into a square window-frame of fire that shed fair illumination on the empty plot in the center.

  All of the Turks packed turban-to-turban around the galleries were very excited, and rowdier than any group Jack had ever seen outside of a Vagabond camp. When not jostling for position or transacting elaborate wagers, they were paying close attention to certain preparations underway at the corners of the ring. As far as Jack was concerned, only two attractions could account for this degree of excitement among so many young men; and since sex, for Janissaries, was banned, Jack reckoned that they must be about to witness some form of violence.

  Following Moseh towards one of the corners of the fiery square, Jack was struck—but not particularly surprised—to discover Yevgeny, stark naked save for leather underpants and a thick coating of oil, and Mr. Foot, dressed up in scarlet finery and shaking a leather purse bloated with what Jack could only assume was specie. But before Jack could push his way in closer and begin asking questions, Yevgeny went down on his right knee: in and of itself, nothing remarkable. But here it was like setting off a granadoe. Everyone near him flung himself back, making an empty space with Yevgeny in the center. The crowd in the gallery went silent for a moment—then exploded with cheers of "Rus! Rus! Rus!"

  Yevgeny spread his arms out to their full seven-foot span, then clapped his hands together, close enough to the ground to raise a puff of dust, then spread his arms again and did the same thing twice more. After the third clap he let his right hand fall to the earth, palm up, then raised it to his face and kissed his fingertips, then touched them to his forehead. During this little ceremony the cheering of "Rus! Rus!" continued at subdued volume—but now Yevgeny got up and vaulted into the square and the cheering rose to a level that made Jack's ears ring, reminding him of the fifteen-hundred-gun salute. Yevgeny planted his feet in the middle of the square and adopted a strangely insouciant pose: supporting his left elbow in his cupped right hand, he rested his head on his left hand, and froze in that position.

  Nothing changed for several minutes, except that the torchères blazed and the cheers rang down from the deepening night sky. Finally another well-lubricated man in leather underpants performed the same series of movements and ended up standing next to Yevgeny in the same pose: this was a very dark-skinned Negro, not as tall as Yevgeny, but heavier. The cheering redoubled. Mr. Foot, who had added an expensive-looking cape to his ensemble, now came into the ring and hollered some sort of announcement up into the galleries, turning slowly round as he did, so that every member of the audience could inspect his tonsils even if hearing him was out of the question. Having concluded this, he scurried out of the ring. Yevgeny and the Negro turned to face each other in the middle of the fiery ring. Soon they had clasped their hands together, palm to palm like children playing at pat-a-cake. Rearing their heads back they smashed their faces together as hard as they could. Jack was startled; then they reared back like vipers preparing to strike, and did it a second time, and he was fascinated. Then they did it a third time, with no less viole
nce, and Jack started to be appalled, wondering whether they would continue it until one of them was left senseless. But then they let go of each other and staggered apart with blood running down their faces from lacerations on their brows.

  Now, finally, they got down to the actual business at hand: wrestling. And this was not greatly different from most other wrestling matches Jack had seen, except messier. Immediately both men got oil on their hands, then had to back away from each other and rub their palms on the ground to pick up dirt, which was shortly transferred to their bodies the next time they closed. So within a few minutes Yevgeny and the Negro were covered head-to-toe in a paste of blood, sweat, oil, and Algerian dust. Yevgeny had a wide stance, but the Negro knew how to keep his weight low, and so neither could throw the other. The crisis occurred several minutes into the bout when the African got a grip on Yevgeny's testicles and squeezed, which was a good idea, while looking up expectantly into Yevgeny's face, which wasn't. For Yevgeny accepted the ball-squeezing with a forbearance that made Jack's blood run a little cool, and paid the Negro back with another vicious downward head-butt that produced a clearly visible explosion of blood and audible splintering noises. The African let go of Yevgeny's private parts the better to clap both hands over his devastated face, and Yevgeny easily threw him into the dust—which ended the match.

  "Rus! Rus! Ruuuuus!" howled the worthies of the ocak. Yevgeny paraded around the ring, looking philosophical, and Mr. Foot pursued him holding up a yawning purse into which Turks flung money—mostly, whole pieces of eight. Jack liked the looks of this—until the whole purse was delivered direct into the hands of a large Turkish gentleman who was sitting on a sort of litter at ringside, his feet mummified in white linen and propped up on an ottoman.

  "IN RUSSIA, I BELONGED to a secret society, wherein we trained one another to feel no pain under torture," Yevgeny said, offhandedly, later.