The Confusion

by Neal Stephenson

  "Really the coiner was a flattering knave," Jack said. "In person he is not half so handsome as all that."

  Van Hoek let go his pistol, yanked a dagger from his belt, and assaulted the mast. Jack guessed he was trying to get the point of the weapon beneath the coin and worry it loose; but the way he was flailing and jabbering he was unlikely to succeed. Anyway Vroom, who was two heads taller, grabbed van Hoek's arm on the backswing and stopped it. "It is bad luck! Leave the coin be!" Jack understood that much Dutch, anyway. He did not understand what van Hoek said in return—some sort of advanced calculus of luck, he gathered, in which the sacrilege of removing the coin was weighed against the ill omen of having a golden effigy of Leroy eternally planted in the heart of the ship.

  Jack looked carefully left, right, and behind, in case cobras or crocodiles were creeping up on them, which in these parts was a routine precaution to take before fastening one's attention on any particular thing for more than a few moments. Then he stepped round this dangerous pair of struggling Dutchmen, drew out his own pistol, and struck one of the other coins. Paint fell away to reveal William of Orange on an English guinea. A blow to the last remaining coin produced King Carlos II on a Spanish doubloon.

  "For God's sake, hasn't he died yet!?" Jack exclaimed. "Twenty years ago people were expecting him to drown in his own spit at the next moment."

  Van Hoek calmed down and Vroom relaxed, but did not let go of his arms.

  "As I read the signs, the Spanish made this mast in America for a treasure-galleon. English privateers then took it as a prize, or perhaps salvaged its wreck after some hurricanoe. Later those poor Englishmen ran afoul of the French Navy—courtesy of my old friend the duc d'Arcachon." Jack pointed with his pistol-barrel to each of the coins in turn as he made this all up. "That French ship later came east, escorting some merchant-vessels of the Compagnie des Indes, where God only knows what befell it. At any rate, the Wheel has now turned again—you may consult our new Pilot, Father Gabriel Goto, for more concerning the Wheel—and the mast is now ours. So let's put a fucking rupee underneath it and be on our way, shall we?"

  "Still I do not like it," said van Hoek, and fired a broadside of spit at the golden Louis. He aimed high, but the tobacco-brown loogie rolled down over the coin like a cloud of battle-smoke darkening the face of the sun.

  FIRST THEY BROUGHT THE CANNONS aboard, which was unspeakably tedious and toilsome, but gave them something to pass the time while Monsieur Arlanc, Vrej Esphahnian, and Moseh de la Cruz journeyed back and forth to and from the wootz-forge. Refining the terms of the deal was no less exacting than making watered steel from river-sand. Transporting gold north and wootz-eggs south across frequently hostile territory was no easier, and would have been impossible without pervasive bribery, and an escort of mounted Nayars; Jimmy and Danny came home with wild yarns of sword-and gun-play in jungle and mountain.

  But the day came when the ship had been sufficiently ballasted, with cannons, cannonballs, wootz-eggs, and other heavy objects, that the masts could be stepped without risk of capsizing her. It was agreed that this would be as good a day as any to christen her. So Jack made ready a bottle of fizzing wine from the province of Champagne that he had acquired at staggering expense from a French factor in Surat. The Cabal assembled upon the shore of the river, where the three masts had been lashed together along with some lighter, more buoyant logs and made into a sort of raft. The river's current strove to push them out to sea, and this raft tugged at a line that had been tied around a tree-trunk a few yards upstream. A couple of juvenile crocodiles, no more than two yards long, had clambered up onto the mast-raft to warm themselves in the morning sun. Standing on the quay above said reptiles, Jack could gaze downstream to a flower-bedecked boat; a few hundred yards of mangrove-lined river; and finally out into the harbor where the mastless ship was riding at anchor with all of her cannons run out of her gunports in preparation to fire a salute.

  The other members of the Cabal, dressed in the finest clothes they had, were already aboard the Queen's boat. Jack wasn't, because Queen Kottakkal had instructed him that "according to our traditions" he, Jack, was supposed to board last—after the Queen. And the Queen was still on the bank, talking to various Nayars who belonged to her court of pirate-captains and cavaliers. From time to time one of these Malabaris would glance interestedly at Jack. The Queen herself shot him an occasional glare. She had liked Jack's looks as much as he'd liked hers when he had made his first state visit to Malabar almost three years ago, and after a day or two of steamy flirtation Jack had leaned his Janissary-sword against the door-post of her apartments. He had been making the (in retrospect rash) assumption that the Queen would know why he was called Half-Cocked Jack, but that she would be familiar with certain Books of India—that Her Majesty would, in other words, know certain lore that would make Jack's shortcomings irrelevant.

  As it had turned out—to make a long story (a story Jack wished every day he could forget) short—the tryst had gone more badly than Jack could ever have imagined. It turned out that Jack did not know the half of it where Books of India were concerned. That there existed certain advanced Books, unknown to, or at least unmentioned by, Eliza. That these Books enumerated diverse additional Sexes above and beyond the usual Male and Female, including a plethora of different categories of hermaphrodites. That each of these was not merely a Sex but a Caste unto itself, subject to diverse limits and regulations like any other caste. That, depending upon how certain ancient writings were translated into Malabari, Jack belonged to one or another of these hermaphroditic castes, and that consequently he ought to have gone about dressed in a certain type of clothing so that all and sundry would know what he was, and treat him well or poorly depending on whether they were of a lower or higher caste. That Queen Kottakkal was of a higher caste whose members were (to put it very mildly) not in the general habit of entertaining hermaphrodites in their bedchambers.

  At any rate Anglo-Malabari relations had been set back centuries. Jack had barely escaped with his life. Moseh and other Cabal members who were the Queen's slaves had spent the better part of a year apologizing. Since then, Jack had had difficulty meeting the Queen's eye, and she had not spoken more than a few words to him—he had become a sort of out-caste, a sexual and social Cheruman.

  Jack was reflecting upon these very topics, and watching a third, somewhat larger crocodile struggle up onto the mizzen-mast, when he realized with a bit of a shock that the Queen was speaking to him (albeit through Dappa), and in complete sentences, no less. She had boarded her boat now and was standing in the bow, facing upstream towards Jack. The rest of the Cabal, in their breeches, periwigs, robes, and kimonos, were seated behind her, listening with obvious curiosity.

  "The gold is mine, Vagabond, not yours—dared you think otherwise?" said Dappa, translating for the Queen. Then, as an aside, he added, "She used a much more degrading term than ‘Vagabond,' but…"

  "You're trying to spare my feelings—I understand. Tell the Queen that she stole it from us fair and square, just as we did from the Viceroy, and I've never imagined else-wise. Dappa, do you think she is on the rag or something?"

  The Queen responded, "Then why do you try to deceive me by sailing away over the horizon on a great ship in which I have invested so much of what is mine?"

  "Dappa, have you not acquainted Her Majesty with the basic principles of the ship-owning business? Do I have to explain shares? Do I have to remind her that most of the ship's crew is to be hand-picked Malabaris? That both of her sons will be aboard? What is going on in her mind?"

  "Very likely she is on the rag as you said," Dappa responded, "and in a bit of a Mood because her boys are leaving the nest."

  The Queen said something. At the same moment she reached up with both hands and carefully removed one of the metal ornaments from her neck: a single watered-steel ring, like a dinner plate with a large hole in the center. She gripped it in one hand and curled it in towards her belly while turning sideways to Jack. T
hen suddenly her hand sprang outwards. The ring hissed through the air, narrowly missing Jack, and buried itself, shockingly deep, in the trunk of a tree.

  "Stop talking to each other, and talk to me," she said. Another ring came off her neck, and every man within a hundred yards cringed. She flung this one at a closer target: the line mooring her boat to the quay. It sang through the rope as easily as flying through a shaft of sunlight and vanished into the water with a sizzle. The boat began to drift downstream. Jack caught movement in the corner of his eye and turned back to look at the masts: they too had gone into ponderous movement, and were adrift in the river now—Queen Kottakkal's first throw had cut their line.

  A third ring spun out and embedded itself in the mainmast next to a coil of rope with a throwing-lead tied to its end. "Mark that rope," said the Queen. "If you throw it to one of your friends on my boat, here, your masts are saved. If not, they drift out to sea, and all of you are my slaves to the end of your days."

  "Are you certain you translated that aright?" Jack inquired.

  "I translated it perfectly," said Dappa, gazing nervously at the departing masts.

  "Have I gotten her general drift—that she wants me to swim through crocodile-infested waters to retrieve the masts?"

  "The judicial machinery here is not well-developed," Dappa announced. "There is only one sort of trial: and that is Trial by Ordeal."

  "I'm being put on trial here? For what offense?"

  "For offenses you might commit in the future—which is to say that your honesty is being tried. Sometimes this might mean walking across fire. Other times, the defendant must swim through crocodiles. It is said to be an astonishing thing to watch—which may account for the custom's perpetuation. I can supply all manner of lurid detail later, after you have survived—"

  "If I survive, you mean!"

  "But for now, would you please do something!?"

  As the Queen had begun flinging her lethal jewelry about, half a dozen Nayars had vaulted aboard the boat and trained loaded blunderbusses upon the other members of the Cabal. They could do nothing but sit tidily on their benches, like churchgoers, and watch Jack. Looking at them Jack was struck—and not for the first time, either—by the fact that, ever since Cairo, all of them had tended to look to Jack to take action. In other lives or other circumstances they might've been doers of deeds and leaders of men. But put 'em all together, pose 'em a problem, and they'd all turn their eyes Jack's way to see what he was going to do.

  Which (come to think of it) had probably been noticed by Queen Kottakkal—so wise in the ways of men crowded together on armed Vessels, so backwards in her approach to judicial proceedings—and probably accounted for that it was Jack, and not van Hoek, or Moseh, who had been chosen to undergo the Trial by Ordeal.

  The others followed his lead because of what he had done in Cairo. And Jack had done that deed because the Imp of the Perverse had somehow tracked him down in the Khan el-Khalili and convinced him that, rather than let the Duke live, and accept the perfectly reasonable deal that he was holding out, it would be better to slay him, and bring down consequences on himself and the others.

  Everything that had happened since had been born in that moment. All of this Jack understood well enough. His only difficulty, just now, was that the said Imp had not followed him out as far as Malabar—or if it had, it had been waylaid by pirates and was now chained up in some dusty 'stan and being put to work (one could only suppose) getting rag-heads to do rash and imprudent things. At any rate the Imp was absent. And Jack—who at earlier times of his life would have dived without hesitation into the river—was strangely fixed to the spot, as if he were an old banyan-tree that had sunk a million roots into the earth. There were so many things to be said in favor of not attempting to swim through crocodiles that he simply could not move.

  His comrades sat meekly in the Queen's boat, staring at him. Jack loved certain of those men as well as he'd ever loved anyone, not counting Eliza. But various experiences of war, mutilation, slavery, and Vagabonding had made him into a hard man. He knew perfectly well that any galley chosen at random from the Mediterranean would contain a complement of slaves every bit as deserving of freedom as van Hoek, Moseh, and the others, and that none of them would ever be free. So why swim through crocodile-infested waters for these?

  His sons were on the boat. Jimmy and Danny were not even looking at him. They were affecting boredom, convinced he would fail them, as always.

  Enoch was on the boat, too. One day, Enoch would escape from Malabar. It might take a hundred years, but Enoch would escape and return to Christendom and spread the tale of how Jack Shaftoe had lost his nerve in the end and consequently spent his last years as a hermaphrodite butt-slave in a heathen pagoda.

  Jack noticed, as if from a distance, that he was sprinting down the river-bank.

  The masts had a bit of a head start. Jack's path was eventually barred by mangroves, which formed a sort of living breakwater at the edge of the village. But there was a way through it, a path that people took over exposed roots and through brackish sumps, to get to the edge of the river where they would collect fish with nets or spears. Jack detoured through a cane house, snatching a couple of chickens as he ran across the yard. Too, a piece of bamboo caught his eye. It was rumored that you could wedge a crocodile's jaws open with such a thing and so he grabbed this and tucked it under his arm.

  Then—moving as fast as a man could over wet slick tree-roots with one chicken-neck clenched in each fist—he picked his way out to the river-bank just in time to see the masts gliding by. They had reached a place where the river widened and slowed, and dropped silt on its bottom to form a submerged bar. Jack was praying that the masts would get hung up on this. But of course Queen Kottakkal's minions had put floats around the masts to make them ride high in the water and prevent it from happening.

  The masts were ten yards away, moving at a fast walking pace. The intervening water was murky and still, broken only by nostrils and eyeballs, some of which were disconcertingly far apart. Jack estimated the number of animals at somewhere between eight and a dozen. They had observed him, and were beginning to cruise in his direction.

  This was more or less how the Queen had planned it. In a few moments the masts would clear the bar and take to the harbor waters, which were much deeper and choppier. Jack could not swim in those waters; to stop those masts he had to make his move here in the shallows, and here was where all of the crocodiles lurked.

  As an experiment Jack flung one of the chickens out. It did not fall nor fly, but wandered through the air for a while, then snagged a wing-tip in the water and plowed to a stop. Its head came up once to squawk. Then the surface was broken by an upper jaw about the size of a tavern bench. Jack only glimpsed it. The chicken vanished like a candle-flame thrust into water.

  Like Frenchmen, crocodiles were what they were, and did what they did, and saw no point in making pretenses or apologies, and therefore possessed a sort of aplomb that Jack found admirable in a way. He wished only that God would send him some more mammalian enemies. Though, come to think of it, nothing was more evident than that Queen Kottakkal was a mammal—unless it was that she was his enemy, too. So perhaps it was a distinction without a difference.

  The only plan Jack could conceive of was to throw the other chicken in another direction and divert the crocodiles' attention long enough to make a dash for it. And this required shifting his burdens from hand to hand—the second chicken went to his right, the bamboo pole to his left. This was when he first became aware that the pole in question had a barbed metal head on one end. It was a fishing spear. A rope was trailing from the other end—Jack had been dragging it behind him, without knowing he was doing it, during his run through the swamp. Now he gave it a hard jerk. The knot at its far end (intended to keep the rope from slipping out of a fisherman's hand) bounced off a mangrove-root and came flying towards him. Jack dropped the spear and snatched the knot out of the air. Ten seconds later it was noosed ro
und the neck of the second chicken. He now tossed the chicken into a momentarily crocodile-free zone about halfway between him and the masts. The crocodiles naturally converged on that place, their warty backs lifting the surface of the water without breaking through. Jack took advantage of this to jump down into the water, wade forward several steps (it came up to mid-thigh), and fling the spear in a high arc over the masts. It landed flat in the water on the far side of them. Or Jack guessed as much from the sounds made—he could not linger to watch its trajectory, because two crocodiles were already climbing over each other to reach him. Jack scampered back up onto mangroves and drew his sword before turning around.

  The second chicken had long since been swallowed, without any tedious chewing, by a big croc. The rope was still attached—it ran up the crocodile's gullet, out of its mouth, and several yards across the water, over the mast-raft to the floating spear. As the masts moved downstream, the spear was dragged backwards across them, and inevitably the barbs in the spear-head snagged in some of the ropes binding the raft together. As to what happened inside of the crocodile's gut when the rope went taut and tried to pull the chicken out, Jack could only speculate—and as to what was going on in the mind of the chicken (which might be in some sense still alive), that was a matter for metaphysicians. The outward result was that the masts stopped moving and the crocodile became highly annoyed. Jack supposed that a very big and old crocodile must take a certain pride in his work, viz. swallowing and digesting whatever came along, and that an attempt to revoke a meal by yanking it out must be viewed, by such a Reptile, as a very serious affront. In any event it led to an amount of thrashing. And that led to a bit of good fortune Jack had not really looked for: All of the other crocodiles seemed to hear or feel this commotion and made it their business to get there as fast as they could—which was disturbingly fast.