The Confusion

by Neal Stephenson

  "I was wondering where you were going to obtain masts."

  "Come with me, O Bringer of Armaments," said Queen Kottakkal, and whirled around and stalked out through Gabriel Goto's paper house. She moved so decisively that the wind of her passage peeled dry palm-leaves from stacks of finished artwork. The men hastened to catch up with her, creating a wind of their own, and gloomy drawings of Hazards to Navigation rose into the air and careered back and forth, spinning and sailing lazily on the heavy air. Among these Jack noticed some letters brushed in what he took to be the Japanese script—these were on rice-paper and had a weather-beaten and well-traveled look about them.

  "What news from your brush-buddies in Nippon and Manila?"

  Gabriel Goto's face did not betray any particular reaction, but he turned his head suddenly toward Jack. "Normally I do not look to you to voice any interest in the internal broils of Nippon and the exiled Christian ronin of Manila," he announced starkly.

  "But now that I am a king of sorts I must broaden my interests—so indulge me."

  "The shogun continues to hoard silver for internal use—which amounts to saying that he has been making the Dutch at Nagasaki accept gold coins for the goods that they unload from their ships. But recently the shogun devalued gold to the point that the Dutch are forced to take their compensation in the form of vast quantities of copper coins instead." He stopped and inspected Jack's face for signs of incomprehension or boredom. They were following the others across a courtyard where Hindoo statuary lurked in cascades of ripe flowers, and fountains fed melodious brooks.

  "Don't be such a tease!"

  "All such matters are now firmly controlled by a family called Mitsui—they have founded what you would call a banking house."

  "I ween you've been in touch with your uncle's people—the miners."

  "How did you know this?"

  "Why, it's obvious that the devaluation of gold had great import for anyone running a copper mine in Nippon."

  Gabriel Goto, seemingly shocked at having been found out, said nothing. They had entered into the Queen's apartments and were pursuing her down a gallery. She was deep in conversation with Enoch Root, but Jack got the impression that during the pauses, when Dappa was translating, Enoch was cocking an ear towards them.

  Gabriel went on: "Since your inexplicable and new-found interest in Nipponese currency fluctuations is so marked, then, Jack, I shall warn you that it is all very complicated. The shogun has actually made several devaluations, trying to draw more metal from the ground and increase the supply of money, which in his view will bring about a corresponding increase in the amount of goods produced. Or so it seems from a miner's perspective—which, after all, is the only perspective available to me."

  They were ascending a stone staircase, working against a current of cooler salt air. "Tell me of more complications," Jack said.

  "You probably imagine my people still working the same land that we were bequeathed many centuries ago. But we lost that land as part of the evolutions I spoke of, and my surviving relatives fled generally northwards, to be closer to the smuggling ports, and farther from Edo. Edo has a million people now."

  "It is impossible for a city to be that large."

  "It is the largest city in Creation, and no place for Christians."

  They had gained the top of the stairs now, and were crowding into a chamber that opened onto a balcony. From the rail of this balcony—the highest part of the palace—they could look down the vine-and flower-covered cliff below and out across the inlet where most of the Queen's pirate-fleet rode at anchor. The ships seemed to float in mid-air, such was the transparency of the water, and underneath them schools of bright fish maneuvered through coral formations.

  "Behold!" said the Queen, sweeping out one bangle-covered arm. Actually she said something in Malabari, but obviously it meant "Behold" and Dappa did not bother with a translation.

  A peculiar sort of cargo-handling operation was under way down below: two pairs of small boats, each pair lashed together abeam of each other with logs spanning the gap between them. One of these makeshift catamarans was following several lengths behind the other, and the distance between them was bridged by a colossal tree-trunk, spoke-shaved smooth, and painted barn-red.

  Jack heard Dappa speaking in English to Enoch Root: "Normally I would not be so presumptuous as to proffer advice to you on any subject, least of all manners and protocol—but I urge you, sir, not to ask the Queen where she obtained that mast."

  "I accept your counsel with gratitude," said Enoch Root.

  It was obvious that the mast had just been brought in by one of the Queen's fleet: a frigate of European design. She was the largest ship in the harbor, but much smaller than the one being built on the beach in Dalicot, and so the mast dwarfed her—it was longer than the frigate's deck, and must have projected forward and aft before it had been unlashed and let down onto those boats.

  The boat-crews were paddling toward the shore as gamely as they could, though half the men were laboring with bails; gouts of water flew from the boats in all directions and slapped the surface of the harbor, only to rush back in over the gunwales during the next swell. Jack wondered whether he was about to witness a disaster, until he heard men in the boats, and on the shore, laughing.

  Then he turned his attention back to Gabriel Goto. "But if your family are reduced to Vagabonds, how comes it they know so much of currency devaluations—and how do they write you letters on fair-looking rice-paper?"

  "The short answer is that they remain bound to the same ancient Wheel, which has not ceased to turn."

  "The shogun wants metal to come from the ground—and in order to make it so, the House of Mitsui needs your cousins and nephews."

  "That is not the only thing on the shogun's mind. In the far north, the Russians are on the move. Mostly it has been adventurers and fur-traders, ranging from outposts in Kamchatka, the Kurils, and the isles of the Aleuts. But there is a new Tsar in Russia named Peter, a man with a formidable reputation, who has even traveled to Holland to learn the art of shipbuilding—"

  "I know all about this Peter," said Jack. "Jan Vroom worked by his side, and Peter wanted him to come to Russia and build ships there. But Vroom saw the prospect of more profit, and warmer climes, in the offer of van Hoek."

  "In any event," said Gabriel Goto, "Peter's fame has reached the court of the shogun. Obviously Russia will one day threaten Nippon from the north. When that day arrives, Nippon will be defenseless against Peter's Dutch-style ships and al-jebr-trained gunners, unless we are well established in northern Honshu and on the vast island to the north—a wilderness full of blue-eyed savages, called Ezo, or Hokkaido."

  "So your family may be doubly useful to the shogun. You can mine copper, and you have an interest in moving northwards."

  Gabriel Goto said nothing, which Jack took to mean yes.

  "Tell me—has the shogun's concern about this military threat led him to relax his ban on firearms?"

  "He imports books of rangaku, which means ‘Dutch learning,' so as to keep abreast of developments in fortifications and artillery. But the ban on guns will never be lifted," said Gabriel Goto firmly. "The sword is the symbol of nobility—it is what marks a man as a Samurai."

  "How many Samurai are there in Japan?"

  Gabriel Goto shrugged. "Their proportion to the entire population is somewhere between one in ten, and one in twenty."

  "And there are a million souls in Edo alone?"

  "That is what I am told."

  "So, between fifty and a hundred thousand Samurai in that one city—each of whom must possess a sword?"

  "Two—the long and the short. Many have more than one set, of course."

  "Of course. And is watered steel as desirable there as it is everywhere else?"

  "We may be isolated, but we are not ignorant."

  "And where do the sword-smiths of Nippon get this kind of steel?"

  Gabriel Goto inhaled sharply, as if Jack had strayed
into the middle of his garden and left muddy foot-prints in the white gravel. "This is a great secret, the subject of legends," he said. "You know that most Japanese are Buddhists."

  "Of course," said Jack, who hadn't known.

  "Buddhism came from Hindoostan. And so did some of our other traditions that are very ancient—such as tea…"

  "And steel," Jack said, "which for centuries has been imported, by the finest swordsmiths of Nippon, from India, in the form of small egg-shaped ingots with a distinctive cross-hatch pattern."

  For once Gabriel Goto was openly dumbfounded. "How did you come to know this!?"

  Down below, the narrow end of the giant mast had plowed into the beach. One pair of boats was being abandoned by drenched rowers. The other group was thrashing the water, trying to wheel the trunk around so it could be rolled up onto dry land. At a glance it seemed not to be moving at all. But move it did, as slowly as the minute-hand of a clock—as steadily as that mysterious Wheel that Gabriel Goto was always speaking of.

  "You want to return to this homeland that you have never seen," Jack said. "It could hardly be more obvious."

  Gabriel Goto closed his eyes and turned towards the Laccadive Sea. The onshore breeze blew his long hair back from his face and made his kimono billow like a colorful sail. "When I was a boy standing at my father's knee and watching him paint his pictures of the Passage to Niigata, he told me, over and over again, that Nippon was now a forbidden land to us, and that the places he was drawing were places I would never see. And that is just what I believed for most of my life. But let me tell you that when I stood in Saint Peter's, in Rome, waiting to kiss the Pope's ring, I looked up at the ceiling of that place, which was magnificently adorned by a painter named Michelangelo. Not in Latin, English, or Nipponese are there words to express its magnificence. And that is the very reason for its being there, for sometimes pictures say more than words. There is a place in that painting where the Heavenly Father reaches out with one finger toward Adam, whose hand is outstretched as I am doing here, and between the fingertips of the Father and the Son there is a gap. And something has leapt across that gap, something invisible, something that not even Michelangelo could portray, but anyway it has crossed from the Father into the Son, and the Son has been awakened by it, and been infused with awareness and purpose. At the moment that I stood there in Saint Peter's and saw all of these things, understanding suddenly came into my mind, bridging the gap of miles and years that separated me from my father, and I became aware for the first time. I understood that even though with his words he had forbidden me to return to Nippon, in his pictures he had told me that one day I must return—and in those same pictures he had given me the means."

  "You believe that the Hundred and Seven Views of the Passage to Niigata are a sort of nautical chart, telling you how to return?"

  "They are better than a chart," said Father Gabriel Goto of the Society of Jesus. "They are a living memory."

  HALF THE TOWN WAS PULLED away from their mock-battle to heave the mast up onto the beach, and eventually three elephants were brought into play. Through the Queen's spyglass, which had evidently been pilfered from some Portuguese sea-captain's personal effects, Jack could see his sons—now half-naked, and covered with bruises—striving alongside Nayar youths to land this prize. Eventually it was paraded through the town, garlanded with flowers, bristling with incense-sticks, and then it was made the centerpiece of more merry-making, which continued into the night. In earlier years Jack would have been at the center of this, but as it was, he delegated the revelry to Jimmy and Danny, and spent most of the evening huddled with Enoch and the other members of the Cabal.

  Everyone in the town slept late the next morning, save a few sentries and low-caste laborers. Jack reckoned it would be a simple matter to find his sons passed out under a palm-tree somewhere. But he could not find them. The tide was about to go out, and men on ships were calling his name. Jack returned to the top of the cliff, intending to wake up Monsieur Arlanc and ask him to search for Jimmy and Danny later. But on his way to the apartment where the Huguenot slept, Jack detected volcanic emanations from the Queen's chambers, and detoured thataway out of curiosity. As he approached her door he saw not just one but two sets of weapons leaned up against the door-posts: European muskets and cutlasses. Dim moanings, mutterings, and controversies emanating from the other side of that door told Jack that the boys had finally found what they had been looking for in the way of Oriental decadence, though Jack honestly could no longer tell it apart from the Occidental kind. In any event Jack left the boys there to pursue their own story while he sailed away to pursue his.

  Two of Queen Kottakkal's ships sailed on that tide, and turned opposite ways when they cleared the harbor. The one on which Jack was a passenger planned to coast southwards until it rounded Cape Comorin at the tip of Hindoostan. Then it would turn north and sally through one of the gaps in Adam's Bridge—the chain of reefs and isles that stretched between the mainland and the Island of Serendib. From there it would be a short voyage to Dalicot, where the Cabal's ship was being built. Their eventual purpose was to raid shipping around the Dutch settlements of Tegnapatam and Negapatam, and the English ones at Tranquebar and Fort St. David, but they said they would be happy to deposit Jack on the shores of his jagir, which was not too far north of those places. Enoch Root, meanwhile, took passage on a northbound ship, intending to make a rendezvous in Surat with a Danish merchantman that was ballasted with cannons, and that wanted to unload them to make space for saltpeter and cloth.

  THREE MONTHS LATER JACK WAS a King no longer: merely a Vagabond sailor infringing on the hospitality of the Malabar pirate-queen. He and van Hoek, Jan Vroom, Surendranath, Padraig Tallow, and various Dutchmen sailed into Queen Kottakkal's harbor aboard something that was close to being a ship. Her hull was painted and ballasted, her decks were in place, and a temporary foremast had been jury-rigged, giving her the ability to crawl through the water before a following wind. Her gunports were caulked shut. She was unarmed and helpless, but four of the Queen's pirate-ships had escorted, and occasionally towed, her around Cape Comorin. She had not been christened yet—it had been decided to save that ceremony for when the masts were stepped, the guns installed, and all members of the Cabal on hand.

  The cannons had preceded them, and were stacked on logs just above the tide-line. Jack, ever disposed to view things from a wretch's standpoint, grasped right away that the movement of these objects from the hold of the Danish ship to their current position, concealed just within the first rank of palm trees, embodied a lavish expenditure of human toil—perhaps not so much as the Pyramids but still enough to give him pause.

  For his part van Hoek, once he had sloshed ashore, stomped past the cannons without breaking stride, and did not even pause to light his pipe until he had encountered his three masts lying side-by-side in the middle of the town, out back of the Temple of Kali. He walked up and down the length of each one, stooping to inspect how they had been blocked up off the ground. He stood at their narrow ends and peered down them to check for undue curvature, and ambled up and down pounding on them with a pistol-butt and listening to the wood's reverberations with a hand cupped to his ear. He frowned at cracks, as if he could weld these imperfections shut with his furious gaze, and rested his hand contemplatively on places that had been scarred by the sawing friction of hawsers, collisions with spars, and impacts of pistol-balls. At first van Hoek seemed in the grip of something that approached panic, such was his anxiety that the masts would be found wanting. Gradually this eased into the quotidian fretting and continual state of low-level annoyance that Jack knew to be the perpetual lot of all competent sea-captains.

  Then the Dutchman stopped for a while to gaze at the butt of the mainmast. Nowhere was it more obvious than from this standpoint that what they were really looking at, here, was a stupendous tree-trunk, most likely from a virgin forest in America. In other places its nature was somewhat concealed by the carpenters' work, and by
bands of iron that had been hammered out in some enormous forge somewhere and, while still red-hot, slipped onto it like rings onto a finger so that as they cooled and shrank they would cut into the wood and become one with it. But here at the foot of the mainmast—which was almost as thick as van Hoek was tall—the tree's growth rings, and the boundary between heartwood and sapwood, were obvious even through diverse layers of tar, caulk, and paint. Van Hoek had gazed upon it twice as he circled round the mast, and seen nothing untoward, But on this third circuit he came in closer and began to hammer at the wood with the pistol-butt. Jack heard a solid thunk, thunk and then a sharp whack; a moment's silence; and then a cry from the Dutchman.

  "What's amiss? Smash your finger?" Jack inquired. Meanwhile Jan Vroom came loping out of the trees, looking a bit peaked, asking in Dutch if van Hoek had discovered rot in the mast's heart.

  Van Hoek was gazing incredulously at a flake of yellow metal embedded in the foot of the mainmast.

  Now it was a longstanding tradition that whenever mariners stepped a mast they slipped a coin beneath it. Supposedly this was to placate sea-gods, or buy them passage to the afterlife when the ship went down to David Jones's Locker and took them with it. Normally such a coin became embedded in the bottom of the mast and could be viewed the next time it was pulled out. Masts that had been stepped several times had as many coins stuck to their bottoms. This particular mast had three of them, but they had been painted over, and so were visible only as blurred scabs. Van Hoek had just knocked a disk of paint clean off one of them with a blow of his pistol-butt. It was a French louis d'or. And that was how it came about that Jack Shaftoe, Otto van Hoek, Jan Vroom, and an ever-growing crowd of curious Nayar children found themselves staring into the face of King Louis XIV of France, stamped in fine gold, out behind the Temple of Kali in Malabar.