The Confusion

by Neal Stephenson

  "Is this art Japanese?" he inquired, breaking in abruptly.

  "Yes—or at least, the fellow who made it is," Jack said. "We were just talking about him. Let's go and introduce you to Father Gabriel Goto of the Society of Jesus."

  I was driven out of my native country by a dreadful sound that was in mine ears, to wit, that unavoidable destruction did attend me, if I abode in that place where I was.

  —JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim's Progress

  Gabriel Goto had politely declined to work as a pirate and so Queen Kottakkal had put him to work as a gardener. Some suspected that he did not work very hard, for compared to most of the palace—which was continually in danger of being overrun and conquered by its vegetation—Gabriel Goto's plot was a desert. He'd been put in charge of a courtyard in the landward corner of the palace grounds that was perpetually shaded by tall trees and by an adjacent stone watch-tower, yet sorely exposed to storm-winds, and poorly drained. It had defeated many a gardener. Gabriel Goto settled the matter by growing nothing there, except for moss, and the odd stand of bamboo. Most of the "garden" consisted of stones, raked gravel, and a pond sporting a brace of bloated, mottled carp. Every so often the Jesuit would drag a rake across the gravel or throw some food at the fish, but most of the work involved in the upkeep was mental in nature, and could not be accomplished unless his mind was clear. Clearing his mind was an extraordinarily demanding project requiring him to sit crosslegged on a wooden patio for hours at a time, dipping a brush into ink and drawing pictures on palm leaves. At any rate, this corner of the palace no longer bred mosquitoes and poisonous frogs as it had formerly been infamous for doing, and so the Queen left him alone.

  The results of Gabriel Goto's artistic labors were neatly stacked, and in some cases baled, almost to the ceiling of the apartment behind his patio. More recent work had been hung from lines to dry in the breeze.

  "It is the same landscapes over and over," Enoch Root observed, browsing his way down a clothes-line of rugged and none-too-cheerful-looking scenes: mostly hills and cliffs plunging into waters speckled with outlandish square-sailed vessels.

  "The work, as a whole, is called One Hundred and Seven Views of the Passage to Niigata," said Moseh de la Cruz helpfully.

  "This is my favorite: Breakers on the Reef Before Katsumoto," said Monsieur Arlanc—delighted to have someone to speak full-dress French to. "So much is suggested by so little—it is a humbling contrast with our Barock style."

  "Bor-ing! Give me Korean Pirate Attack in the Straits of Tsushima any day!" Jack put in.

  "That is fine if you like vulgar sword-play, but I believe his finest work is in the Wrecks: Chinese Junk Aground in Shifting Sands, and Skeleton of a Fishing-Boat Caught in Tree Branches being two notable examples."

  "Are all of his pictures about Hazards to Navigation?" asked Enoch Root.

  "Have you ever seen a nautical picture that wasn't?" Jack demanded.

  "Over here, you can see the Massacre of Hara triptych," said Moseh.

  "Let's go find the samurai," Jack said. And they did, passing in a few steps through the wee house he'd fabricated out of sticks and paper—or, to be precise, palm leaves. His swords—a long two-hander and a shorter cutlass—rested one above the other in a little wooden stand. Jack went over and peered at the longer of the two. It had come from the collection of an Algerian corsair-captain, but according to Gabriel Goto it had unquestionably been forged in Japan at least a hundred years ago. And indeed the shape of its blade, the style of the handle, and the carving of the guard were unlike anything else Jack had ever seen, which argued in favor of its being from what by all accounts was the queerest country on the face of the earth. But the actual steel of the blade was (as Jack had noted, and remarked on, in Cairo years before) marked with the same swirling pattern shared by every other watered-steel blade, be it a Janissary-sword forged in Damascus, a shamsir from the forge of Tamerlane in Samarkand, or a kitar from the wootz-vale.

  Having confirmed this memory to his own satisfaction, Jack straightened up and turned around and nearly butted heads with Enoch Root, who was just in the act of noticing the same thing. To his great satisfaction Jack saw amazement on the alchemist's face, followed by a few moments of what looked almost like fear, as he came aware of what it might mean.

  "Let's hear what the artist has to say for himself," said Jack, and slid a translucent screen aside to reveal the flinty garden, and Gabriel Goto sitting with his back to them, holding a brush with an ink-drop poised on its sharp tip.

  GABRIEL GOTO'S STORY

  [AS NARRATED IN CLERICAL LATIN TO ENOCH ROOT]

  "I have never seen Japan. I know it only from pictures my father drew, of which these are but miserable plagiarisms.

  "From the others you have heard stories that are as complicated as a Barock church or Ottoman mosque. But the Japanese way is to be simple, like this garden, so I will tell my tale with as few brush-strokes as possible. Even so it will be too many.

  "Those who have ruled Japan, be they monks, emperors, or shoguns, have always depended upon local knights, each of whom is responsible for looking after some particular piece of land—seeing to it that this land produces well and that the people who work it are orderly and content. Those knights are called Samurai, and as with the knights of Christendom, it is their responsibility to keep arms and to bear them in the service of their lord when called upon. My family have been Samurai for as long as we choose to remember. The lands for which we were responsible were of little account, being in a high cold stony place, and we were held in no special regard by others of our class.

  "The story is related that an ancestor of ours had split his holdings between two sons, giving the paddies to his first-born and the rocks to the other. Each spawned his own branch of the family: one rich, dwelling in low-lands and distinguishing itself in wars, the other a clan of coarse mountain-dwellers, not known for their loyalty, but allowed to remain in existence because neither were they known for martial prowess.

  "The tale of these two clans goes on for centuries, and is as fraught with complications as the history of Japan itself—someday when we are on a long sea-voyage perhaps I will relate more of it. What is important is that copper and then silver were discovered in the rocky up-lands. This was about two hundred years ago, at a time when the shogun turned his back on the affairs of the world and went into retirement, and Japan ceased being a unified country for a very long time—like Germany today. All power fled from Kyoto to the provinces, and each part of the country was controlled by a lord called a daimyo, something like a baron in Germany. These daimyos clashed and strove against each other ceaselessly, like stones on a pebble beach grinding each other. Ones who met with success built castles. Markets and cities formed round their walls. Markets require coins, and so each daimyo began to mint his own currency.

  "What it amounts to is that this was a dangerous time to be a warrior but an excellent time to be a miner. As my ancestors—being Buddhists—would have expressed it, the two clans were bound to opposite points of the Wheel, and the Wheel was turning. Those lowland warriors allied themselves with a daimyo who was not deserving of their trust, and lost two consecutive generations of males in battle. My ancestors—the uplanders—moved down from the mountains and into apartments in another daimyo's castle, not far from Osaka Bay, near Sakai, which in those days was a free city devoted to foreign trade, like Venice or Genoa. This happened about a hundred and fifty years ago, which was the same time that the Portuguese began to come up from Macao in tall ships.

  "The Portuguese brought Christianity and guns. My ancestors embraced both. To people living in Sakai in those days it must have seemed an intelligent choice. The harbor was crowded with European ships bristling with cannons and flying Christian banners from every spar. Also, the Jesuits liked to establish missions in poor areas, and despite the silver mines, our ancestral land was still poor. So when a mission was established there at the invitation of my great-great-grandfather, the miners and peasa
nts embraced Christianity without hesitation. Here was a creed that preached to the poor and the meek, and they were both.

  "At the same time my great-great-grandfather was learning the secrets of gunsmithing, and teaching this skill to the local artisans. Men whose fathers had hammered out hoes and shovels were now making firelocks worth a hundred times as much.

  "Now the peasants who lived down below, working the paddies, began to make trouble for their Samurai, our cousins. Some of these peasants began to turn Christian, which our cousins abhorred; others were growing disrespectful of their lords, who seemed to have lost the mandate of heaven. In those days there was a thing called katana-gari which means sword-hunt, in which the Samurai would search the peasants' homes for armaments. They began to find not only swords but firearms.

  "So naturally the cousins allied themselves with powerful men who sought to unify Japan. This tale extends across three generations and as many shoguns—the first two being Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi—and has more twists and turns than a game trail over the mountains. The long and the short of it is that they threw in their lot with Tokugawa Ieyasu, who, a hundred years ago, won the Battle of Sekigahara, in part by using foot-soldiers armed with guns. In that battle my cousins won glory, and they won even more in the storming and the destruction of Osaka Castle, which took place in the Year of Our Lord 1615. My father was eighteen years old at the time, and he was one of the defenders of that castle, and of the Toyotomi family which was extinguished on that day.

  "The Wheel had turned again. The Tokugawa shogunate claimed a monopoly on the minting of coins—my family lost its chief source of revenue. Firearms were banned—another source of income vanished. Foreign trade was strictly controlled—Sakai became an island cut off from the rest of Japan. But worst of all, for my family, was that Christianity had been outlawed. My father had not been the only Christian to have allied himself with the Toyotomi family, and Tokugawa Ieyasu believed that the Jesuits and the Toyotomis, allied together, were the only force that could defeat him. Both were extirpated.

  "At the time of my father's birth there were a quarter of a million Christians in Japan and at the time of his death there were none. This did not occur all at once but gradually, beginning with the execution of a few Jesuit missionaries in the Year of Our Lord 1597 and culminating forty years later in a few great battles and massacres. My father perhaps did not really grasp what was happening until it was nearly finished. His brother had gone back to our ancestral land to look after the mines and practice Christianity in secret. My father remained in Sakai for a while trying to make a living in foreign trade. But first this fell under the strict control of the shogun, and from there it was gradually choked off. The Portuguese were banned altogether because they kept bringing over priests disguised as mariners. Sakai and Kyoto were closed to foreign trade altogether. Only Nagasaki was left open, and only to the Dutch, who—being heretics—did not care about saving Japanese souls from eternal fire, and only wanted our money.

  "So my father had become a masterless Samurai, or ronin—one of a large host of Christian ronin brought into being by the policies I have described. He moved round to the opposite coast of Honshu—the coast that faces towards Korea and China—and worked as a smuggler. He smuggled silk, pepper, and other goods to Japan, and smuggled fugitive Christians out to Manila.

  "Now, formerly my family had had no contacts with Manila whatsoever, because we were exporters of silver. If the commerce of Asia is like a fire, then silver is like the air blown into it to make it blaze up, and Manila is the bellows. For it is to Manila that the Spanish galleon sails every year, full of silver from the mines of New Spain. My family's mines could not compete against this, and so in generations past we had been more apt to trade with Macao, and other ports on the coast of China—a vast country that is eternally ravenous for silver.

  "But in that time Japan refused to accept ships from Macao, even at Nagasaki, because Portuguese priests, who longed for martyrdom, used Macao as their point of departure. My father's contacts in Macao dried up, or moved to Manila. By that time he was no longer in the silver business anyway. So he began to trade between Manila and a certain smuggler's harbor in northern Honshu, near Niigata. His fame spread as far as Rome, and soon Jesuits began to arrive in Manila from Goa in the west and Acapulco in the east, and to request him by name. He would take them up to Niigata, where they would be met by Japanese Christians who would take them up into the mountains to preach the Word of the Lord and serve holy communion in secret. But at the same time my father would bring aboard other Japanese Christians who had fled from this persecution. He would convey them down to Manila where there was, and is, a large community of such persons.

  "So it went for a time. But in the Year of Our Lord 1635 the shogun decreed that thenceforward no Japanese could leave the Home Islands on pain of death, and that all Japanese currently abroad must return home within three years or face the same penalty. Two years after that, the Christian ronin staged a great rebellion on Kyushu and fought the forces of the shogun for half a year, but they were wiped out. Not much later the remaining Christians were obliterated at the Massacre of Hara. My father survived by virtue of several miraculous interventions by various Saints, which I will not enumerate since I know that you are a heretic who does not believe in such things, and made one last voyage to Manila where he took a young Japanese wife.

  "I was born in Manila three years after Japan closed itself off from the world. When I was a boy I would beg my father to take me up on his boat so that I could see where we came from, but by then he was an old man and the boat was a worm-eaten wreck. He contented himself with painting pictures of the landmarks that he had used to navigate from Manila to his smuggler's cove on Honshu. My efforts here—One Hundred and Seven Views of the Passage to Niigata—are a miserable pastiche of the art that he made.

  "My life has been uneventful by comparison. I grew up in Manila. The only people I ever saw were Japanese Catholics, and a few Spanish priests. Jesuit fathers taught me to read and write. Christian ronin taught me the martial arts. In time I took holy orders and was sent to Goa. I lived there for a few years, and developed some familiarity with the language of Malabar. Then I was dispatched to Rome, where I saw Saint Peter's and kissed the Holy Father's ring. I had hoped that the Pope would send me to Nippon to achieve martyrdom, but he said nothing to me. I was crushed, and in my self-indulgence I went through a time of doubting my faith. Finally I volunteered to travel to China to work as a missionary and perhaps be granted martyrdom there. I boarded a ship bound for Alexandria—but along the way we were captured by a galley of the Barbary corsairs. I killed a fairly large number of them, but then a member of my own ship's crew, seeking to curry favor with the Turks who were soon to be his masters, hit me from behind with a belaying-pin, and ended my struggle. The Turks took us back to Algiers and gave the one who had betrayed me slow death on the hook. Me they offered work on a corsair-galley, as a Janissary. I refused, and was made to pull an oar instead."

  A paper door slid open, and from the darkness on the far side of it emerged a pair of ebony breasts and a tummy, followed in short order by their owner: Kottakkal, the Pirate Queen of Malabar. Behind her came Dappa, who was also naked from the waist up, but who had belted on his Persian scimitar. This accounted for the dim muttering sounds that had been audible through the paper wall for the last quarter of an hour: Dappa had been translating this story for the Queen.

  She was a big woman, about as tall as an average European man, with broad hips that gave her exceptional stability when standing barefoot on the rolling deck of a pirate-ship, and were equally convenient to child-bearing—she had produced five daughters and two sons. She had a marvelous round belly covered in an expanse of smooth purplish-black skin. Jack always had the vague, dizzying sense that he was falling into it, and he suspected that other men felt the same. Her breasts showed the aftermath of many babies, but her face was quite beautiful: round and smooth except for a swor
d-scar under one cheekbone, with complicated lips that always had a knowing grin, or even a sneer, and eyelashes as black and thick as paint-brushes. Her head always seemed to be resting on a steel platter, or rather a whole stack of them, for whenever the Queen ventured out she wore—in addition to diverse gold bangles and rings—a stack of flat watered-steel collars that went over her head, and piled up into a sort of hard glittering neck-ruff.

  Now the Queen spoke and Dappa translated her words into Sabir: "When we captured the gold-ship with Father Gabriel, Dappa, and Moseh—for Jackshaftoe and the others lacked the courage of those three, and had already lost their nerve, and jumped off into the water like panicked rats—"

  Jack bowed low and muttered, "A pleasure to see you as always, Your Majesty." but the Queen ignored him and continued:

  "At any rate, my men were about to put them to death, for they assumed that this would please me. But then Father Gabriel recognized us as Malabari, and spoke to me in a way that pleased me even more, and so I suffered them all to live."

  "What did he say?" asked Enoch Root.

  "He said, ‘It is your prerogative to cut my head off, but then I cannot tell you the story of how the Vagabond named Quicksilver achieved his long-planned revenge against a Frankish Duke in Cairo, and stole this hoard of Mexican gold.' So I commanded him to tell me that tale before he was put to death. And this he did; but what he was really telling me was that he and his companions were worth more to me alive, as slaves, than as headless corpses bobbing in the Gulf of Cambaye."

  "Your Majesty chose wisely," said Enoch Root.

  "Often I have doubted it," said the Pirate Queen. "Dappa is a linguist, which (he informs me) means a man with an excellent tongue, and he has found more than one way of putting his tongue to work pleasing me. Gabriel Goto makes a good, if peculiar, garden. Moseh seemed like a useless mouth. Many times my advisors urged me to break the group up and sell them at a loss. Indeed I was on the brink of doing so several times in the early going, for there is an excellent slave-market in Goa and another in Malacca. But when Jackshaftoe secured his jagir from the Great Mogul, everything changed, and the construction of the ship began. Lately even my most skeptical captains have been vying with each other for the honor of supplying the ship's masts."