The Confusion

by Neal Stephenson

  "Those sound like Danish hooves to me."

  Upnor made a sound like heh-heh, a completely unconvincing simulation of a laugh.

  "Why are you playing message-boy, my lord? Why is not St. Ruth doing his job?"

  "Because his head was carried off by a cannonball," Upnor responded. He brought the back of his hand to his mouth, pretending to cover a yawn. "It is a dull sword-fight so far," he complained.

  "Let me across and it will become exciting soon enough."

  "No, it is that you lack passion! A Frenchman would have leaped over by now. Perhaps it would help if I told you that I have fucked your sweet Abigail."

  "I assumed as much," Bob said levelly.

  "And you…haven't?"

  "It is none of your business."

  "It is all of my business, as she is my property, and I broke her maidenhead with this rapier, just as I am about to break yours with this one! So do not be coy, Sergeant, I know you have not enjoyed Abigail. Perhaps you shall, one day. But be sure to bring some sheep-gut. I am afraid that I, or one of my friends, have given her a nasty social disease."

  Bob jumped over the ditch at this time. Upnor backed away and let him land safely, but then closed in on him quickly, twitching the rapier with his right hand and now drawing a dagger with his left.

  "Don't look at the poniard, silly man," Upnor chided him. "You must fix your gaze upon your opponent's eyes—just as Abigail Frome stares into mine when I am pleasuring her."

  Bob, reckoning that this was enough, wrapped his right arm across his body, drawing the blade back in position to let go a hay-maker. Part of the plan was to convince Upnor that his predictable taunts had actually made Bob angry. So Bob let out a bellow as he launched himself toward Upnor while letting go a mighty backhanded swing.

  This was something he had practiced for a whole month with Monsieur LaMotte. Upnor's light blade could never stand up to a scything attack by the heavier spadroon, and so he had little choice but to drop his blade and step back to let it whoosh by. But Bob's forward rush would bring him into dagger range. So Upnor drew his right foot (which had been foremost) back, while pivoting on his left, turning sideways to let Bob charge past him. At the same time he raised his left hand so that he could plunge the dagger into Bob's ribs as he went by.

  All of which went according to plan except for the last bit. For instead of rushing by standing up, Bob had planted his feet and dived forwards, so that his trunk was too low to receive Upnor's dagger. The back-handed cut had flung his body into a twisting movement from his left to his right, and so as he hurtled past he was spinning to face his opponent's legs. Bob's left arm and shoulder went through first, extended to take his impact on the ground. Then his head, and the right arm and spadroon trailing along his body. As soon as his left elbow struck the peat he curled that arm around and caught Upnor's right leg, trapping it against his body.

  Upnor needed that leg to take his weight as he moved backwards, and thus had no choice but to fall down, even as Bob was getting his own knees under him. Upnor knew that to fall on his stomach was death, so he spun and landed on his arse and rolled up onto his back, his legs going straight up in the air. If this were a Parisian Salle d'Armes he might have turned it into a backwards somersault and come up fighting, but this was nearly impossible in a stiff cuirass. So Upnor's legs and arse reached apogee and then came down again. He was going to come up forwards. He planted his right elbow to push off against the ground but kept his guard up with the left, keeping that dagger pointed in the air. Bob had now got up on one knee and managed to take a swing at it. He fully intended to take Upnor's hand off at the wrist, but either his aim was bad or Upnor reacted with exceptional speed, because instead the blow struck the dagger's handle just behind the guard, right where Upnor's thumb and index finger gripped it, and ripped it loose from Upnor's hand. It whirred off and vanished in gloom and mist.

  Upnor did a sideways roll away from Bob and came up angry. "You are a cold, cold, cold-blooded knave!" he exclaimed. "I think you do not care about Abigail at all!"

  "I care enough to win this."

  "You have been practicing against someone who knows the rapier," Upnor said. "Tell me, did he show you this?"

  Bob liked to sit in a meadow and throw bits of bread to the birds. He had done this once with a flock of some hundred pigeons who had, once they'd gotten the general idea, surrounded him and waited patiently for him to throw out each scrap. But presently a sparrow had come along and begun to collect evey last crumb that Bob tossed, even though it had been one against a hundred. Even if Bob lured the sparrow to one side, then threw the morsel to the other, the little bird would come across like a flash of light from a signal-mirror and wend its way among the stumbling pigeons and pluck the bread right out from under their open beaks, which would snap together on thin air.

  Bob now learned that he was a pigeon and Upnor a sparrow. One moment he was certain that his spadroon was about to take Upnor's leg off at the knee, and the next, the Earl was somewhere else, and the point of the rapier was headed for Bob's heart. In desperation he pawed at it with his left hand and diverted it so that it got him just under the ribs on the right side and passed out his back. As Bob fell back, his flailing left hand struck the guard of the rapier, a swirl of silvery bars, and his fingers closed around it. This would prevent Upnor from drawing it out and stabbing Bob again and again as he lay on the ground. Bob landed flat on his back, preceded by that part of the rapier that had gone all the way through him, and found himself pinned, nailed like Jesus. Upnor was pulled forward and ended up staring down into Bob's face from not far away.

  "Lung?" Upnor guessed.

  "Liver," Bob said, "or else I could never do this." He inhaled and then spat at Upnor's face, but it came out as a feckless spray.

  "'Twill be a slow-festering wound then," Upnor said. "I will gladly supply you with a quicker death if you will be so good as to let go my weapon." He glanced up for a moment, distracted by the sound of hurtling cavalry. "Sarsfield," he pronounced. "Let us finish, I must go to them."

  Bob turned his head sideways, just to get Upnor's visage out of his sight. He saw a queer thing silhouetted against the deepening gray sky above the hill: a fellow in a gray coat perched on a pole above a ditch, not far away. No, he was not perched, but swinging across it, a matted ponytail trailing behind him like a profusion of battle-streamers from a regimental flag. It was an Irish infantryman, pole-vaulting across the ditch. Coming to the aid of Upnor, his English overlord. He would probably have a dirk or something to finish Bob off with.

  "When you go to the next world," Upnor said, "tell the angels and demons that we know everything about your infamous cabal, and that we will have the gold of Solomon!"

  "What the bloody hell are you talking about!?" Bob exclaimed. But before answering, Upnor peeled Bob's hand off the guard, pinky first. He planted his foot in Bob's stomach and stood up, yanking the blade out.

  "You know perfectly well," he said indignantly, "Now go and do as I have instructed you!" He aimed a death-blow at Bob's heart. Bob put his hands up to slap it aside. Then a large object hurtled across the sky and smashed into the rapier's guard, crumpling the bars and sending it spinning away.

  Upnor staggered back, gripping a damaged hand. Bob looked up to see a bulky figure in a ragged muddy gray coat, gripping eight feet or so of pike-staff: the same bit that Bob had broken off the cavalry standard.

  Bob levered himself up on his elbow and rose to a seated position to find the cool, level gaze of Teague Partry directed his way. Teague had a head like a cube of limestone, and brown hair pulled back tight against his skull, though many strands had come loose during the day's fighting and been plastered back with mud. His blue-gray eyes were set close together, redoubling the intensity of his glare.

  "What d'you think y'are, a character in a friggin' novel, Bob? Can you not perceive that the gentleman is wearin' armor, and knows more concernin' swordsmanship than you ever will?"

  "I per
ceive it well enough now, Teague."

  Upnor had, during Teague's scolding of Bob, gone over and retrieved his rapier. He held it now in his left hand, advancing crab-wise toward Teague.

  "Look out, Teague, he's as dangerous with his left as he is with his right—"

  "Bob! You make too much and too little of him at the same time. As a 'fencer he's a caution, 'tis plain enough to see, but in the larger scheme, Bob, what is he but a friggin' tosser wavin' a poker around in the dark." By this time Upnor had advanced to within about eight feet and so Teague gave his stave a toss upward, gripped it with both hands at the end, and with a grunt, swung it round in a long arc parallel to the ground, catching Upnor in the side and flattening him. Upnor made a grab at the end of the staff, which had ended up hovering over his face, but his movements were cramped by his steel cuirass, which now sported a huge dent jabbing deep into his side. Teague withdrew the stave, shifted his grip so that he was holding it in the middle, raised it up above his head, and began to execute a series of brisk stabbing motions, with the occasional mighty swing. These were accompanied by metallic bashing sounds and screams from Upnor's end of the stick.

  Between these efforts he sent the following, loosely connected string of comments and observations Bob's way:

  "You have responsibilities now, Bob. You must lose this naïve understanding of violence! You are embarrassin' me in front of the lads! You can't play by their rules or they'll win unfailingly! You don't engage in courtly play-fightin' with one such as this. You get a great friggin' tree-branch and keep hittin' him with it until he dies. Like that. D'you see, boys?"

  "Aye, Uncle Teague," came back two voices in unison.

  Bob looked to the other side of the ditch and saw a pair of blond lads there, each holding the reins of a horse. One of them—it looked like Jimmy—had the horse Bob had rode in on, and the other—by process of elimination, Danny—had the standard-bearer's.

  "There," Teague said. "Now get you over the ditch and be gone with the lads."

  "I've been run through the liver."

  "All the more reason to stop your lollygaggin'. You'll bleed to death shortly or heal up in a few weeks—the liver has a miraculous power of regeneration, while the body lives. Take it from an Irishman."

  Bob slumped forward on his hands, then got his knees under him. He could hear blood dripping onto the ground. But it was only dripping, not coming in a continuous stream, or (worse) a series of spurts. If he had seen a private soldier with such a wound, he'd have guessed that the fellow would live, once the wound was packed with something to stop the bleeding. Upnor had been right; if Bob died of this, it would be because it festered in the days to come.

  "I'm not askin' you to walk. You may ride one horse and the boys may share the other."

  "And you, Teague?"

  "Oh, it's into the ditch with me, Bob, into the bog. I'll collect a musket from one of the Englishmen I killed today, and go a-rappareein'." Teague's eyes now turned into running pools, and he tilted his head back and sniffled. "Get you gone, none of us has a moment to waste."

  "I'll raise a monument in London," Bob promised, and got up slowly. He did not pass out.

  "To me? They wouldn't have it!"

  "To Upnor," Bob said, staggering past the Earl's smashed corpse, and kicking the rapier aside into the watercourse. "A fine statue of him, looking just as he does now, and an inscription: ‘In Memoriam, Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, finest swordsman in England, beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.' "

  Teague considered it for a moment, then nodded. "In Connaught," he added.

  "In Connaught," Bob agreed, then eyed the ditch. It looked as wide as the Shannon. But the boys were waiting on the other side: Jack's boys, and now Bob's. For under the circumstances they were likely the only children Bob would ever have. Teague gave him a mighty shove in the arse as he flew back over the water. By the time Bob got up from a rough, agonizing tumble on the far side and turned to thank him, Teague Partry was gone.

  9 APRIL 1692

  The mind is its own place, and in it self

  Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

  —MILTON, Paradise Lost

  "THIS MUST BE how syphilis spreads: blokes like me, hopping from place to place."

  "Why, Bob! I don't believe anyone's ever said anything quite so romantick to me."

  "I can't guess what you were expecting when you roger an old sergeant in hay."

  "Come, lace me back up."

  "Would you hold your hair up out of the way? There, that's better…"

  "…"

  "…tedious work, ain't it?"

  "Oh, stop complaining."

  "I've no complaints. But we could have left this bit on, you know."

  "Yes, and the stockings as well, and we could have done it standing up, and you with your boots and breeches on. But for me to enjoy it, Bob, I require a sense of abandon, of freedom, that only comes with removal of clothes."

  "This tight enough?"

  "It is fine…for the same reason, Bob, I could do without your idle ruminations on syphilis, and how it spreads."

  "I don't have it, mind you. Haven't rogered anyone in years."

  "Nor do I. And neither have I."

  "What d'you mean, you told me you've a baby boy, six months old—"

  "Last time we met. Now, seven months."

  "Be that as it may, how can you say you haven't rogered anyone in years?"

  "Sex with my husband I leave out of the reckoning altogether."

  "Strikes me as a large omission."

  "It would not, if you had ever had sex with Étienne de Lavardac, duc d'Arcachon."

  "Can't say as I have, Madame."

  "Unless you did, and forgot about it. At any rate—he has been doing it to me again lately."

  "Lately…ah. You are saying that there was a cessation, round about the time of the birth of number two, and now he is trying for three."

  "In his mind they are One and Two respectively. For the first, being a bastard, is a zero; which means a nullity, something that does not exist."

  "That—the bastard I mean—is the one you had round about the time I shipped out to Dundalk, and you got marooned in Dunkerque?"

  "Yes. Why?"

  "Just refreshing my memory, my lady, no need to be getting all stiff in the spine—cor! It's gone loose, I shall have to re-lace from the beginning."

  "It is not necessary. Just get to work buttoning up the bodice."

  "Got ripped a bit, I'm afraid."

  "I'll have it mended. Come, I am apprehensive that someone will happen along and discover us."

  "Ah, but not to worry—I'm naked!"

  "How is it better to be naked?"

  "As long as I keep my mouth shut, I'll be indistinguishable from one of your French nobility. They'll run away in terror."

  "Especially when they see your scars. Very impressive."

  "You would never think so, if you had any notion of the pain that comes with these scars, the weakness, the helplessness—draining pus for months—not knowing from one moment to the next whether you shall live or die—"

  "You forget that I have given birth twice."

  "Touché. Ah, but now you've brought me back round to my topic."

  "What is your topic?"

  "You never talk about the bastard."

  "Perhaps, from that, you should collect that I do not wish to speak of him."

  "I was merely asking as a routine courtesy, as is common among parents."

  "How are Jack's boys?"

  "Jimmy and Danny are Regimental boys like their father and nuncle. If they're doing as they ought to—which is unlikely—they are, at this moment, peeling potatoes at our camp outside of Cherbourg."

  "Do they have any inkling that you are acting as a spy for Marlborough?"

  "Why, what an impolite question, Madame la duchesse! I am in no way certain that I am a spy. Haven't made up my mind yet. Haven't sent any information his way."

  "Well, wh
en you decide to do so, you may send it through me."

  "If I decide to do so."

  "You will. An invasion of England is planned, is it not?"

  "When French and Irish regiments march up to the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula and form great camps in the spring-time, it does make one tend to think 'long those lines, don't it?"

  "In the end you'll not suffer England to be invaded. You'll inform Marlborough."

  "Marlborough's in disgrace. He and his meddlesome wife got on the wrong side of William and Mary. He had to sell his offices, his commissions. He is nothing now."

  "Yes, it is the talk of every salon in Versailles. But if England is invaded, he will be un-disgraced very rapidly, and put at the head of some regiments. And you will rally to him."

  "As you seem so certain of these things, I deem all your questions answered, madame—so I turn them round. Does the Duke of Arcachon have any inkling that you are a spy?"

  "Your supposition is mistaken. I spied for England once. Now I do it for myself."

  "Ah. So, if we are to cross the Channel, you should like to know of it for your own purposes."

  "You say this—‘for your own purposes'—as if I am the only one in the world who had purposes."

  "Very well, very well…damned lot of buttons, ain't it?"

  "You did not seem to mind so much when you were undoing them ten minutes ago."

  "Twenty minutes, by your leave, madame, do allow me some pride. Ten minutes! Am I really so perfunctory?"

  "Perhaps I am."

  "Hmm, now, that is an unusual turning of the tables…it is supposed to be he who is perfunctory and selfish, and she who wants to stretch it out."

  "Ah, but I did stretch it out, Sergeant, when I was inspecting it for signs of the French Pox. And a long stretch it was."

  "You try to change the subject, and to distract me with flattery—but this methodical inspection of my yard is further proof of the businesslike nature of the transaction just concluded, is it not?"

  "Very well…I hope that Number Three, as you count them, or Two, as Étienne does, will be half-Shaftoe rather than half-Lavardac, and, in consequence, altogether fitter, handsomer, and cleverer than Number Two/One, bless his poor little heart."