Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “Why then?”

  “I’m of a particular type. The Devil’s Poor.”

  “Oh.”

  “Shames me to say it—but when I was drunk and battle-flushed I showed you my other secret and so now I’ve no way, I’m sure, to fall any lower in your esteem.”

  “What is the Devil’s Poor? Are you a Satan-worshipper?”

  “Only when I fall in among Satan-worshippers. Haw! No, it is an English expression. There are two kinds of poor—God’s and the Devil’s. God’s poor, such as widows, orphans, and recently escaped white slave-girls with pert arses, can and should be helped. Devil’s poor are beyond help—charity’s wasted on ’em. The distinction ’tween the two categories is recognized in all civilized countries.”

  “Do you expect to be hanged down there?”

  They’d stopped on a hill-top above the Danube’s flood-plain. Linz was below. The departure of the armies had shrunk it to a tenth of its recent size, leaving a scar on the earth like the pale skin after a big scab has fallen away. “Things will be loose there just now—many discharged soldiers will be passing through. They can’t all be hanged—not enough rope in Austria for that. I count half a dozen corpses hanging from trees outside the city gate, half a dozen more heads on pikes along the walls—low normal, for a town of that size.”

  “Let’s to market, then,” Eliza said, peering down into Linz’s square with eyes practically shooting sparks.

  “Just ride in, find the Street of Ostrich-Plume Merchants, and go from one to the next, playing ’em off against each other?”

  Eliza deflated.

  “That’s the problem with specialty goods,” Jack said.

  “What’s your plan then, Jack?”

  “Oh, anything can be sold. In every town is a street where buyers can be found for anything. I make it my business to know where those streets are.”

  “Jack, what sort of price do you suppose we’ll fetch at a thieves’ market? We could not conceivably do worse.”

  “But we’ll have silver in our pockets, lass.”

  “Perhaps the reason you’re the Devil’s Poor is that, having gotten something, you slip into town like a man who expects ill-treatment—possibly including capital punishment—and go straight to the thieves’ market and sell it to a middleman’s middleman’s middleman.”

  “Please note that I am alive, free, that I have boots, most of my bodily parts—”

  “And a pox that’ll make you demented and kill you in a few years.”

  “Longer than I’d live if I went into a town like that one pretending to be a merchant.”

  “But my point is—as you yourself said—you need to build up a legacy for your boys now.”

  “Precisely what I just proposed,” Jack said. “Unless you’ve a better idea?”

  “We need to find a fair where we can sell the ostrich plumes directly to a merchant of fine clothes—someone who’ll take them home to, say, Paris, and sell them to rich ladies and gentlemen.”

  “Oh, yes. Such merchants are always eager to deal with Vagabonds and slave-girls.”

  “Oh, Jack—that’s simply a matter of dressing up instead of down.”

  “There are sensitive men—touchy blokes—who’d find something disparaging in that remark. But I—”

  “Haven’t you wondered why, whenever I move, I make all of these rustling and swishing noises?” She demonstrated.

  “I’m too much the gentleman to make inquiries about the construction of your undergarments—but since you mentioned it—”

  “Silk. I’ve about a mile of silk wrapped around me, under this black thing. Stole it from the Vizier’s camp.”

  “Silk! I’ve heard of it.”

  “A needle, some thread, and I’ll be every inch a lady.”

  “And what will I be? The imbecile fop?”

  “My manservant and bodyguard.”

  “Oh, no—”

  “It’s just play-acting! Only while we’re in the fair! The rest of the time, I’m as ever your obedient slave, Jack.”

  “Since I know you like to tell fables, I’ll play-act with you briefly. Now begging your pardon, but doesn’t it take time to sew fine costumes out of Turkish silk?”

  “Jack, many things take time. This will only take a few weeks.”

  “A few weeks. And you’re aware that you are now in a place that has winters? And that this is October?”

  “Jack?”

  “Eliza?”

  “What does your zargon-network tell you of fairs?”

  “Mostly they are in spring or autumn. We want the Leipzig one.”

  “We do?” Eliza seemed impressed. Jack was gratified by this—a bad sign. No man was more comprehensively doomed than him whose chief source of gratification was making favorable impressions on some particular woman.

  “Yes, because it is where goods of the East, coming out of Russia and Turkey, are exchanged for goods of the West.”

  “For silver, more likely—no one wants Western stuff.”

  “That’s correct, actually. Your elder Vagabonds will tell you that the Parisian merchants are best robbed on the road to Leipzig, as that’s when they carry silver, whereas on the way back they have goods that must be tediously hauled around and fenced. Though your young fellows will take issue with that, and say that no one carries silver anymore—all business is done with bills of exchange.”

  “At any rate, Leipzig is perfect.”

  “Except for the small matter that the autumn fair’s already over, and we’ll have a winter to survive before the next one.”

  “Keep me alive through that winter, Jack, and come spring, in Leipzig, I’ll fetch you ten times what you’d get down there.”

  This was not a proper Vagabond method—making a plan six months in advance. The error was compounded a thousandfold by the prospect of spending so much time with one particular woman. But Jack had already trapped himself by mentioning his sons.

  “Still thinking about it?” Eliza asked, some time later.

  “Stopped thinking about it long ago,” Jack said. “Now I’m trying to remember what I know of the country between here and Leipzig.”

  “And what have you remembered thus far?”

  “Only that we’ll see nothing alive that is more than fifty years old.” Jack began walking toward a Danube ferry. Turk followed and Eliza rode in silence.

  Bohemia

  AUTUMN 1683

  THREE DAYS NORTH of the Danube, the road focused to a rut in a crowd of scrawny trees that were striving to rise clear from a haze of grasping weeds. The weeds seethed with bugs and stirred with small unseen beasts. Paving-blocks skewed out of pounded ground, forming a sort of shoal that unsettled Turk, who straightened, blinked suspiciously, and slowed. Jack drew the Janissary’s sword out of the rolled blanket where it had been hid since Vienna and washed the dried blood off in a creek-bend. When it was clean, he stood in a buttress of sunlight, thigh-deep in brown water, nervously wiping it and swinging it in the air.

  “Something troubling you, Jack?”

  “Since the Papists slew all the decent folk, this is a country of bandits, haiduks, and Vagabonds—”

  “I guessed that. I meant, something about the sword?”

  “Can’t seem to get it dry—that is, it’s dry to the touch, but it ripples like a brook in the sun.”

  Eliza answered with a scrap of verse:

  Watered steel-blade, the world perfection calls,

  Drunk with the viper poison foes appals.

  Cuts lively, burns the blood whene’er it falls;

  And picks up gems from pave of marble halls.

  “…or so says the Poet.”

  “What manner of poet speaketh such barbarities?” Jack scoffed.

  “One who knew more of swords than you. For that is Damascus steel, more than likely. It might be more valuable than Turk and the ostrich plumes summed.”

  “Save for this defect,” Jack said, fitting the ball of his thumb into a notch in the edge, n
ot far from the point. Around it the steel was blackened. “I wouldn’t’ve thought it could happen.”

  “That’s where it cut into your musket’s soft belly?”

  “Soft? You saw only the wooden stock. But concealed within was an iron ramrod, running the whole length of the weapon through a skinny hole augered into the wood, alongside the musket-barrel itself. This sword cut through the wood—no great feat—but then it must’ve sliced clean through the ramrod, and then well into the barrel—deep enough to make it weak there. When the powder finally caught, it shoved the ball up only as far as the weak place, and then the barrel burst—that was the end of the Janissary, for he had his face up practically—”

  “I saw it. You’re rehearsing the story, aren’t you, to entertain your friends?”

  “I have no friends. It’s to cow mine enemies.” Jack thought this sounded formidable, but Eliza stared at the horizon and heaved a sigh.

  “Or,” she said, “it could entice a buyer who was in the market for a legendary blade…”

  “I know it’s difficult, but put all thoughts of markets out of your mind. As the Grand Vizier recently learned, all the riches in the world are of no use if you can’t defend ’em. This is wealth, and the means to defend it, combined into one—perfection.”

  “Do you suppose that a man with a sword and a horse will be defense enough, in a place like this?”

  “No highwayman of standing would situate himself in a waste.”

  “Are all the forests of Christendom like this? From Mummy’s færy-tales I was expecting great majestic trees.”

  “Two or three generations ago, ’twas a wheat-field,” Jack said, using the sword to harvest a sheaf of overripe stalks growing wild in a sunny break on the bank of the stream. He sheathed the sword and smelled the grain. “The good peasants would come here during the harvest with their dulled whistles slung over their tired shoulders.” Before Jack had waded in he had kicked off his boots. He waded around the swirling pool, groping at the bottom with his bare toes, and after a minute bent down, reached in, and brought up a long curved scythe-blade, notched from striking rocks—just a solid crescent of rust now, a few fingers of slimy black wood projecting from the handle-socket. “They would whet their whistles using rocks that had been worn smooth by the river.” He brought up one such rock in his other hand and scrubbed it against the blade for a moment, then tossed it up on the bank. “And while they were doing so they might not be above taking a bit of refreshment.” Still probing with his feet, he bent down again and produced an earthenware drinking-jug, turned it over, and poured out a green-brown tube of stagnated water. The jug he tossed also onto the bank. Still holding the long rusty arc of the whistle in one hand, he turned round and waded back in search of an exhibit he had detected earlier. He found it again, and nearly fell over, the stream’s current dividing round his thigh as he stood flamingo-style and passed the other foot over something down there. “And so went their simple, happy lives—until something intervened—” Jack now swung the whistle-blade slowly and (he liked to suppose) dramatically across the surface of the pool, a pantomime Grim Reaper.

  “Plague? Famine?”

  “Religious controversy!” Jack said, and produced from the pool a browned human skull, jaw-bone absent, an obvious sword-dent caving in one of the temples. Eliza (he thought) seemed quite struck by his presentation—not by the skull (she’d seen worse) so much as by the cleverness of the performance. He posed with whistle and skull, extending the moment. “Ever seen a morality play?”

  “Mummy told me about ’em.”

  “The intended audience: Vagabonds. The purpose: to impress on their feeble and degenerate minds some idiotic moral.”

  “What is the moral of your play, Jack?”

  “Oh, it could be a number of things: stay the hell out of Europe, for example. Or: when the men with swords come, run away! Especially if they’ve got Bibles, too.”

  “Sound advice.”

  “Even if it means giving up things.”

  Eliza laughed like a wench. “Ah, now we are coming to a moral, I can sense it.”

  “Laugh all you like at this poor fellow,” Jack said, hefting the skull. “If he’d left his wheat-harvest behind, and taken to the road, instead of clinging to his land and his hut like a miser, why he might be alive today.”

  “Are there such things as fourscore-year-old Vagabonds?”

  “Probably not,” Jack admitted, “they just look twice as old as they are.”

  THEY WENT NORTH into the dead country of Bohemia, following spoors and traces of old roads, and the trails of the game that had flourished here in the absence of hunters. Jack lamented the loss of Brown Bess, which would have brought down all the deer they might have wanted, or at least scared the hell out of them.

  Sometimes they would come down out of the wooded hills to cross over plains—probably old pastures that had grown up into vast thickets. Jack would put Eliza up into the saddle so that thorns, nettles, and bugs wouldn’t make a mess of her—not that he cared—but her chief reason for existence was to give him something pleasant to look at. Sometimes he’d put the Damascus blade to the ignoble purpose of hacking through brush. “What do you and Turk see?” he’d say, because all he could see was useless vegetation, gone all brown in preparation for winter.

  “To the right, the ground rises to a sort of shelf, high dark hills behind it—on the shelf the walls of a castle, thick and ill-made compared to Moorish ones, which are so elegant—but not thick enough to resist whatever destroying force knocked it down—”

  “Artillery, lass—the doom of all ancient forts.”

  “The Pope’s artillery, then, breached the walls in several places—creating spills of rock across the dry-moat. White mortar clings to the dark stones like shards of bleached bone. Then fire burnt out the insides, and took all but a few blackened rafters from the roof—all the windows and gunports have spreading smoke-stains above them, as if flames jetted from those openings for hours—it is like an Alchemist’s furnace in which a whole town was purified of heresy.”

  “You have alchemists in Barbary?”

  “You have them in Christendom?”

  “It is very poetickal—as were the previous half-dozen ruined-castle-descriptions—but I was more interested in practical matters: do you see the smoke of cook-fires anywhere?”

  “I’d have mentioned it. Trails in the brush, trampled down by men or horses, I’d have mentioned, too.”

  “Anything else?”

  “To the left a pond—rather shallow-looking.”

  “Let’s go there.”

  “Turk’s been taking us thither—he’s thirsty.”

  They found several such ponds, and after the third or fourth (all of them near ruins) Jack understood that these ponds had been excavated, or at least enlarged and rounded out, by (safe to say) thousands of wretches with picks and shovels. It recalled to his mind some bit of zargon-lore he’d picked up from a gypsy in Paris, who’d ranted to him about lakes, far to the East, but not so far as Romania, where big fish were raised just as herdsman raised beef-cattle in pastures. From the fish skeletons scattered along the shores of these ponds, Jack could see others had been here, harvesting the vestiges of those dead Protestants’ clammy flocks. It made his mouth water.

  “Why’d the Papists hate this country so much?” Eliza inquired. “Mummy told me there are many Protestant lands.”

  “It is not the sort of thing I would bother to know about, as a rule,” Jack said, “but, as it happens, I’ve just come from an almost equally ruined land where every peasant knows the tale, and won’t leave off telling it. That country is called the Palatinate and its lords, for a few generations anyway, were Protestant heroes. One of those lords married an English girl, name of Elizabeth—the sister of Chuck the First.”

  “Charles the First—isn’t he the one who ran afoul of Cromwell, and got his head chopped off in Charing Cross?”

  “The same—and his sister fared little
better, as you’ll soon see. Because right here in Bohemia, some Protestants got weary of being ruled by Papists, and threw several of ’em out a castle window into a dung-heap, and declared this country free of Popery. But unlike the Dutchmen, who have little use for royalty, these Bohemians couldn’t imagine having a country without monarchs. As Protestant monarchs were in short supply hereabouts, they invited Elizabeth and this Palatine fellow to come here and rule them. Which they did—for a single winter. Then the Pope’s legions came up here and made it what it is today.”

  “What of Elizabeth and her husband?”

  “The Winter Queen and the Winter King, as they were called after that, ran away. They couldn’t go to the Palatinate because that had likewise been invaded (which is why the people who live there won’t shut up about it, even today), so they roamed about like Vagabonds for a while and finally ended up at The Hague, where they sat out the war that had been started by all this.”

  “Did she have children?”

  “She wouldn’t stop having ’em. My god. To hear people talk, she must’ve been punching them out, nine and a half months apart, all through the war…I cannot remember how many.”

  “You cannot remember? How long was this war?”

  “Thirty years.”

  “Oh.”

  “She had at least a dozen. The eldest became Elector Palatinate after the war, and the others scattered to the four winds, as far as I know.”

  “You speak very callously of them,” Eliza sniffed, “but I am certain that each bears in his or her heart the memory of what was done to the parents.”

  “Forgive me, lass, but now I’m confused: are you talking about those Palatine whelps, or yourself?”

  “Both,” Eliza admitted.

  He and Eliza had hit on a new way of subsisting, mostly on wheat. As Jack liked to remind Eliza several times a day, he was not the sort who accumulated possessions. But he had a sharp eye for what might be useful in a pinch, and so had filched a hand-mill from a military baggage-train when the cooks had gone off to loot. Wheat poured into the top would become flour if one only turned the crank a few thousand times. All they needed, then, was an oven. Or so Jack had supposed until one evening between Vienna and Linz when Eliza had thrust a couple of sticks into the ashes of their fire and pulled out a flat blackened disk. Brushed off, it proved to be brown and tan underneath—torn apart, it steamed and smelled more or less like bread. It was, Eliza said, a Mohametan style of bread, requiring no oven, and reasonably good to eat if you didn’t mind grinding a few cinders between your teeth. They’d now been eating it for upwards of a month. Compared to real viands it was miserable, compared to starvation it was extremely palatable. “Bread and water, bread and water—it’s like being in the brig again. I’m for some fish!” Jack said.