Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “When were you in a brig?”

  “It’s just like you to ask. Er, I believe it was after we sailed from Jamaica, but before the pirate attack.”

  “What were you doing in Jamaica?” Eliza asked suspiciously.

  “Worked my extensive military connections to stow away on a ship bringing balls and powder to His Majesty’s fortifications there.”

  “Why?”

  “Port Royal. I wanted to see Port Royal, which is to pirates as Amsterdam is to Jews.”

  “You wanted to become a pirate?”

  “I wanted freedom. As a Vagabond, I have it—so long as I keep my wits about me. But a pirate is (or so I thought) like a Vagabond of the seas. They say that all of the seas, put together, are larger than all of the dry land, put together, and I supposed that pirates must be that much freer than Vagabonds. Not to mention a good deal richer—everyone knows that the streets of Port Royal are paved with Spanish silver.”

  “Are they?”

  “Very near, lass. All of the world’s silver comes from Peru and Mexico—”

  “I know it. We used pieces of eight in Constantinople.”

  “—and all of it must pass by Jamaica in order to reach Spain. Those Port Royal pirates siphoned off a goodly fraction of it. I reached the place in seventy-six—only a few years since Captain Morgan had personally sacked Portobelo and Panama, and brought all the proceeds back to Port Royal. It was a rich place.”

  “I’m pleased that you wanted to be a buccaneer…I was afraid you had ambitions of being a sugar planter.”

  “Then, lass, you are the only person in the world who esteems pirates above planters.”

  “I know that in the Cape Verde Islands and Madeira, all sugar is cultivated by slaves—the same is true in Jamaica?”

  “Of course! The Indians all died, or ran away.”

  “Then better to be a pirate.”

  “Never mind. A month aboard ship taught me that there’s no freedom at all to be had on the high seas. Oh, the ship might be moving. But all water looks the same, and while you wait for land to crawl over the horizon, you’re locked up in a box with a lot of insufferable fools. And pirate-ships are no different. There is no end of rules as to how booty and swag are to be collected, valued, and divided among the numerous different classes and ranks of pirates. So after a bad month in Port Royal, trying to keep my arsehole away from randy buccaneers, I sailed for home on a sugar-ship.”

  Eliza smiled. She did not do this frequently. Jack did not like the effect it had on him when she did. “You have seen much,” she said.

  “I’m more than twenty years old, lass. An old gaffer like me, in the twilight of his years, has had plenty of time to live a full life, and to see Port Royal and other wonders—you’re only a child, you’ve a good ten or, God willing, twenty years left.”

  “It was on the sugar-ship that you were thrown into the brig?”

  “Yes, for some imagined offense. Then pirates attacked. We were holed by a cannonball. The ship’s master saw his profits dissolving. All hands were called on deck, all sins pardoned.”

  ELIZA WENT ON WITH FURTHER interrogations. Jack heard not a word of it, as he was making observations of this pond, and of the mostly abandoned village that crowded along one shore of it. He paid particular attention to a gossamer-thread of smoke that rose and piled up against some invisible barrier in the atmosphere above. It was coming from a lean-to thrown up against the wall of an old collapsed house. A dog whined somewhere. The scrub between the pond and a nearby forest was scored with various trails cutting purposefully toward water’s edge, and the forest itself trapped in a miasma of smoke and vapors.

  Jack followed the pond-shore, fish-bones crackling beneath the soles of his boots, until he’d come to the village. A man was dragging a faggot as big as himself down a road toward the lean-to. “No axes—they therefore must burn twigs, instead of cordwood, all winter,” Jack said to Eliza, significantly patting the axe that they’d taken from the chamber beneath Vienna.

  The man was wearing wooden shoes, and was dressed in rags that had gone the color of ash, and he shimmered in an oily cloud of flies. He was staring lustfully at Jack’s boots, with an occasional, sad glance at the sword and the horse, which told him he would never get the boots.

  “J’ai besoin d’une cruche,” Jack offered.

  Eliza was amused. “Jack, we’re in Bohemia! Why are you speaking French?”

  “Il y a quelques dans la cave de ça—là-bas, monsieur,” said the peasant.

  “Merci.”

  “De rien, monsieur.”

  “You have to look at the shoes,” Jack explained airily, after allowing a minute for Eliza’s embarrassment to ripen. “No one but a Frenchman wears those sabots.”

  “But how…?”

  “France is a worse than normal place to be a peasant. Some pays especially. They know perfectly well there’s empty land to the east. As do our dinner guests.”

  “Guests?”

  Jack found a great earthenware jug in a cellar and set Eliza to work dropping pebbles into its open neck until it was so weighed down as to sink. Meanwhile he was working with the contents of his powder-horn, which had been useless weight to him since the destruction of Brown Bess. He tore a long thin strip of linen from a shirt and rolled it in powder until it was nearly black, then sparked one end of it with flint and steel and observed a steady and satisfactory progress of sputtering and smoky flame. The Frenchman’s children had come over to watch. They were so infested with fleas that they rustled. Jack made them stay well back. The fuse demonstration was the most wondrous event of their lives.

  Eliza was finished with the pebble work. The rest was simple enough. All the remaining supply of gunpowder, plus a piece of new fuse, went into the jug. Jack lit the fuse, dropped it in, jammed a warm candle-stub into the neck to keep water out, and hurled the apparatus as far as he could into the pond, which swallowed it. A few moments later it belched—the water swelled, foamed, and produced a cloud of dry smoke, like a miracle. A minute later the water became lumpy and thick with dead or unconscious fish.

  “Dinner is served!” Jack hollered. But the murky forest had already come alive—queues of people were moving down the paths like flame down the fuse. “Up on the horse, lass,” Jack suggested.

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “Depends on what’s catching. I have the good fortune to’ve been born immune and impervious to plague, leprosy, impetigo…” but Eliza was up on the horse already, in a performance of a scampering nature that no man alive (excepting sodomites) would not have enjoyed watching. Jack, for lack of other occupations, had taught her what he knew of riding, and she backed Turk off expertly and rode him up onto a little mossy hummock, gaining as much altitude as possible.

  “ ’Twas the Year of our Lord sixteen hundred and sixty-five,” Jack said. “I was coming up in the world—having established a thriving business of sorts with brother Bob, providing specialized services to the condemned. My first clew was the scent of brimstone—then heavy yellow smoke of it hanging in the streets, thicker and fouler than the normal fogs of London. People burnt it to purify the air.”

  “Of what?”

  “Then it was wains trundling down streets piled with corpses of rats, then cats, then dogs, then people. Red chalk crosses would appear on certain houses—armed watchmen stood before them to prevent any of the miserable residents from breaking out of those nailed-shut doors. Now, I couldn’t’ve been more than seven. The sight of all those blokes planted in the brimstone-fog, like hero-statues, with pikes and muskets at the ready—churches’ bells sounding death-knells all round—why, Bob and I had voyaged to another world without leaving London! Public entertainments were outlawed. Irish even stopped having their Popish feasts, and many absconded. The great hangings at Tyburn stopped. Theatres: shut down for the first time since Cromwell. Bob and I had lost both income and the entertainment to spend it on. We left London. We went to the forest. Everyone did. They were
infested. The highwaymen had to pack up and move away. Before we—the Londoners fleeing the Plague—even came into those woods, there had been towns of lean-tos and tree-houses there: widows, orphans, cripples, idiots, madmen, journeymen who’d thought better of their contracts, fugitives, homeless reverends, victims of fire and flood, deserters, discharged soldiers, actors, girls who’d gotten pregnant out of wedlock, tinkers, pedlars, gypsies, runaway slaves, musicians, sailors between sailings, smugglers, confused Irishmen, Ranters, Diggers, Levellers, Quakers, feminists, midwives. The normal Vagabond population, in other words. To this was added, now, any Londoner fleet enough to outrun the Black Death. Now, a year later London burnt to the ground—there was yet another exodus. Same year, the Naval Pay Office went into default—thousands of unpaid sailors joined us. We moved around the South of England like Christmas Carolers from Hell. More’n half of us expected the Apocalypse within a few weeks, so we didn’t trouble with planning. We broke down walls and fences, undoing Enclosure, poached game in forests of some extremely worshipful lords and bishops. They weren’t happy.”

  By this time, the Vagabonds had mostly come out into the open. Jack didn’t look at them—he knew what they’d be—but rather at Eliza, who’d become anxious. Turk the Horse sensed this and looked askance at Jack, showing a white Mohametan crescent-moon in the eye. Jack knew, then, that, as it was with Turk, so it’d be with every person and beast they met along their way: they’d gladly suffer Eliza to climb on their backs and ride them, they’d feel her feelings as if she were an actress on a Southwark stage, and they’d shoot dirty looks at Jack. He’d only have to find a way to use it.

  Eliza breathed easier when she saw that the Vagabonds were just people. If anything they were cleaner and less brutish than those peasants who’d settled in the village, especially after they swam out into the pond to retrieve fish. A couple of Gypsy boys drew a crowd as they struggled to wrestle a prodigious carp, the size of a blacksmith, up onto the shore. “Some of these fish must remember the war,” Jack mused.

  Several people came near, but not too near, to pay their respects to Jack and (more so) Eliza. One was a stringy fellow with pale green eyes staring out of an anatomical complex that looked like anything but a face—his nose was gone, leaving twin vertical air-holes, and his upper lip was missing, and his ears were perforated baby’s fists stuck to the sides of this head, and angry words were burnt into his forehead. He came toward them, stopped, and bowed deeply. He had an entourage of more complete persons who obviously loved him, and they all grinned at Eliza, encouraging her not to throw up or gallop away screaming.

  She was politely aghast. “A leper?” she asked. “But then he wouldn’t be so popular.”

  “A recidivist,” Jack said. “When Polish serfs run away, their lords hunt ’em down and brand ’em, or cut off this or that piece—saving the pieces that can do useful work, needless to say—so if they’re seen out on the roads again they’ll be known as runners. That, lass, is what I mean by the Devil’s Poor—one who keeps at it regardless—who won’t be mastered by any man, nor reformed by any church. As you can see, his perseverance has won him a whole Court of admirers.”

  Jack’s gaze had drifted to the lakeshore, where Vagabonds were now scooping guts out of carp-bellies by the double handful, exerting a hypnotic power over various mangy dogs. He looked up at Eliza and caught her in the act of examining him. “Trying to picture me without a nose?”

  Eliza looked down. He’d never seen her eyes downcast before. It affected him, and made him angry to be affected. “Don’t look at me—I’ll not be the subject of such investigation. The last person who peered at me that way, from the back of a fine horse, was Sir Winston Churchill.”

  “Who’s that? Some Englishman?”

  “A gentleman of Dorsetshire. Royalist. Cromwell’s men burnt down his ancestral estate and he squatted in the cinders for ten or fifteen years, siring children and fighting off Vagabonds and waiting for the King to come back—that accomplished, he became a man about town in London.”

  “Then whyever was he peering at you from horseback?”

  “In those days of Plague and Fire, Sir Winston Churchill had the good sense to get himself posted to Dublin on the King’s business. He’d come back from time to time, suck up to the Royals, and inspect what was left of his country estates. On one of those occasions, he and his son came back to Dorset for a visit and rallied the local militia.”

  “And you happened to be there?”

  “I did.”

  “No coincidence, I presume.”

  “Bob and I and certain others had come to partake of a charming local custom.”

  “Clog-dancing?”

  “Clubmen—armies of peasants who’d once roamed that part of the country with cudgels. Cromwell had massacred them, but they were still about—we hoped for a revival of the tradition, as Vagabondage of the meek school had become overly competitive in those dark years.”

  “What did Sir Winston Churchill think of your idea?”

  “Didn’t want his home burnt again—he’d just gotten a roof on it, finally, after twenty years. He was Lord Lieutenant thereabouts—that’s a job that the King gives to the gents with the brownest noses of all—entitled him to command the local militia. Most Lord Lieutenants sit in London all the time, but after the Plague and the Fire, the countryside was in an uproar because of people like me, as I’ve been explaining, and so they were given the power to search for arms, imprison disorderly persons, and so on.”

  “Were you imprisoned, then?”

  “What? No, we were mere boys, and we looked younger than we were because of not eating enough. Sir Winston decided to carry out a few exemplary hangings, which was the normal means of persuading Vagabonds to move to the next county. He picked out three men and hanged them from a tree-limb, and as a last favor to them, Bob and I hung from their legs to make ’em perish faster. And in so doing we caught Sir Winston’s eye. Bob and I looked similar, though for all we know we’ve different fathers. The sight of these two matched urchins plying their trade, with coolness born of experience, was amusing to Sir Winston. He called us over and that was when he (and his son John, only ten years older than meself) gave us that look you were giving me just now.”

  “And what conclusion did he arrive at?”

  “I didn’t wait for him to arrive at conclusions. I said something like, ‘Are you the responsible official here?’ Bob’d already made himself scarce. Sir Winston laughed a little too heartily and allowed as how he was. ‘Well, I’d like to register a complaint,’ I said. ‘You said you were going to carry out one or two exemplary hangings. But is this your notion of exemplary? The rope is too thin, the noose is ill-made, the tree-limb is barely adequate to support the burden, and the proceedings were, if I may say so, carried out with a want of pomp and showmanship that’d have the crowd at Tyburn baying for Jack Ketch’s blood if he ever staged one so shabbily.’”

  “But Jack, didn’t you understand that ‘exemplary’ meant that Sir Winston Churchill was making an example of them?”

  “Naturally. And just as naturally, Sir Winston began to give me the same tedious explanation I’ve just now had from you, albeit I interrupted with many more foolish jests—and in the middle of it, young John Churchill happened to glance away and said, ‘I say, look, Father, the other chap’s going through our baggage.’”

  “What—Bob?”

  “My performance was a diversion, girl, to keep them looking at me whilst Bob pilfered their baggage-train. Only John Churchill had a lively enough mind to understand what we were doing.”

  “So…what did Sir Winston think of you, then?”

  “He had his horsewhip out. But John spoke with him sotto voce, and, as I believe, changed his mind—Sir Winston claimed, then, that he’d seen qualities in us Shaftoe boys that would make us useful in a regimental setting. From that moment on we were boot-polishers, musket-cleaners, beer-fetchers, and general errand-boys for Sir Winston Churchill’s local r
egiment. We’d been given the opportunity to prove we were God’s, and not the Devil’s, Poor.”

  “So that’s where you got your knowledge of matters military.”

  “Where I began to get it. This was a good sixteen years ago.”

  “And also, I suppose, it’s how you became so sympathetic to the likes of these,” Eliza said, flicking her blue eyes once toward the Vagabonds.

  “Oh. You suppose I arranged this carp-feast out of charity?”

  “Come to think of it—”

  “I—we—need information.”

  “From these people?”

  “I have heard that in some cities they have buildings called libraries, and the libraries are full of books, and each book contains a story. Well, I can tell you that there never was a library that had as many stories as a Vagabond-camp. Just as a Doctor of Letters might go to a library to read one of those stories, I need to get a certain tale from one of these people—I’m not sure which one, yet—so I drew ’em all out.”

  “What sort of tale?”

  “It’s about a wooded, hilly country, not far north of here, where hot water spills out of the ground year-round and keeps homeless wanderers from freezing to death. You see, lass, if we wanted to survive a northern winter, we should’ve begun laying in firewood months ago.”

  Jack then went among the Vagabonds and, speaking in a none too euphonious stew of zargon, French, and sign language, soon got the information he needed. There were many haiduks—runaway serfs who’d made a living preying on the Turks farther east. They understood the tale told by Jack’s horse and sword, and wanted Jack to join them. Jack thought it wise to slip away before their friendly invitations hardened into demands. Besides which, the entire scene of motley Vagabonds gutting and mutilating these immense fifty-year-old carp had become almost as strange and apocalyptic as anything they’d seen in the Turk’s camp, and they just wanted to put it behind them. Before dark, Jack and Eliza were northbound. That night, for the first time, it got so chilly that they were obliged to sleep curled up next to the fire under the same blanket, which meant Eliza slept soundly and Jack hardly at all.