Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “Yes, milady.”

  “Jack, carry me across yonder mud-puddle.”

  “With pleasure, milady.”

  “Don’t say ‘with pleasure’—sounds naughty.”

  “As you wish, milady.”

  “Jack, that is very good—there’s been a marked improvement.”

  “Don’t suppose it has anything to do with that you’ve got your fist lodged in my arsehole.”

  Eliza laughed gaily. “Fist? Jack, this is but two fingers. A fist would be more like—this!”

  Jack felt his body being turned outside in—there was some thrashing and screaming that was cut short when his head accidentally submerged in the sulfurous water. Eliza got a grip on his hair and hauled his head back up into the cold air with her other hand.

  “You’re sure this is how they do it in India?”

  “Would you like to register…a complaint?”

  “Aaugh! Never.”

  “Remember, Jack: whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”

  There followed a long, long, mysterious procedure—tedious and yet somehow not.

  “What’re you groping about for?” Jack muttered faintly. “My gall-bladder is just to the left.”

  “I’m trying to locate a certain chakra—should be somewhere around here—”

  “What’s a chakra?”

  “You’ll know when I find it.”

  Some time later, she did, and then the procedure took on greater intensity, to say the least. Suspended between Eliza’s two hands, like a scale in a market-place, Jack could feel his balance-point shifting as quantities of fluids were pumped between internal reservoirs, all in preparation for some Event. Finally, the crisis—Jack’s legs thrashed in the hot water as if his body were trying to flee, but he was staked, impaled. A bubble of numenous light, as if the sun were mistakenly attempting to rise inside his head. Some kind of Hindoo apocalypse played out. He died, went to Hell, ascended into Heaven, was reincarnated as various braying, screeching, and howling beasts, and repeated this cycle many times over. In the end he was reincarnated, just barely, as a Man. Not a very alert one.

  “Did you get what you wanted?” she inquired. Very close to him.

  Jack laughed or wept soundlessly for a while.

  “In some of these strange Gothickal German towns,” he at last said, “they have ancient clocks that are as big as houses, all sealed up most of the time, with a little door where a cuckoo pops out upon the hour to sing. But once a day, it does something special, involving more doors, and once a week, something even specialer, and, for all I know, at the year, decade, and century marks, rows of great doors, all sealed shut by dust and age, creak open, driven by sudden descent of ancient weights on rusted chains, and the whole inner workings of the thing unfold through those openings. Hitherto unseen machines grind into action, strange and surprising things fly out—flags wave, mechanical birds sing—old pigeon-shit and cobwebs raining down on spectators’ heads—Death comes out and does a fandango—Angels blow trumpets—Jesus writhes on the cross and expires—a mock naval battle plays out with repeated discharge of cannons—and would you please take your arm out of my asshole now?”

  “I did a long time ago—you nearly broke it!” Peeling off the knotted length of sheep-gut like an elegant lady removing a silken glove.

  “So this is a permanent condition?”

  “Stop whining. A few moments ago, Jack, unless my eyes deceived me, I observed a startlingly large amount of yellow bile departing your body, and floating away downstream.”

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t barf.”

  “Think harder, Jack.”

  “Oh—that kind. I should not call it yellow but a pearly off-white. Though it has been years since I saw any. Perhaps it has yellowed over time, like cheese. Very well! Let’s say ’twas yellow.”

  “Do you know what yellow bile is the humour of, Jack?”

  “What am I, a physician?”

  “It is the humour of anger and ill-temper. You were carrying a lot of it around.”

  “Was I? Good thing I didn’t let it affect my behavior.”

  “Actually I was hoping you might have a change of heart concerning needle and thread.”

  “Oh, that? I was never opposed to it. Consider it done Eliza.”

  Leipzig

  APRIL 1684

  From all I hear of Leibniz he must be very intelligent, and pleasant company in consequence. It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink, and have a sense of humour.

  —LISELOTTE IN A LETTER TO SOPHIE, 30 JULY 1705

  “JACQUES, SHOW THE GENTLEMAN THAT bolt of the yellow watered silk…Jacques? Jacques!” Eliza moved on smoothly to some cruel jest about how difficult it was to find reliable and hard-working varlets nowadays, speaking in a French that was too good for Jack to understand. The gentleman in question—evidently a Parisian in the rag trade—took his nose out of Eliza’s cleavage long enough to glance up into her eyes and chuckle uncertainly—he sensed a bon mot had been issued but he hadn’t heard it.

  “Cor, he’s surprised your tits come wi’ a head attached,” Jack observed.

  “Shut up…one of these days, we’re going to meet someone who speaks English,” Eliza returned, and nodded at the bolt. “Would you please stay awake?”

  “Haven’t been so awake in half a year—that’s the difficulty,” Jack said, stooping down to unroll an arm’s length of silk, and drawing it through the air like a flag, trying to make it waft. A shaft of sunlight would’ve been useful. But the only radiant heavenly body shedding light into this courtyard was Eliza’s—turned out in one of a few dresses she’d been working on for months. Jack had watched them come together out of what looked to him like scraps, and so the effect on him was not as powerful. But when Eliza walked through the market, she drew such looks that Jack practically had to bind his right arm to his side, lest it fly across his body and whip out the Damascus blade and teach the merchants of Leipzig some manners.

  She got into a long difference of opinion with this Parisian, which ended when he handed her an old limp piece of paper that had been written on many times, in different hands, and then collected the bolt of yellow silk from Jack and walked away with it. Jack once again had to restrain his sword-hand. “This kills me.”

  “Yes. You say that every time.”

  “You’re certain that those scraps are worth something.”

  “Yes! Says so right here,” Eliza said. “Would you like me to read it to you?” A dwarf came by selling chocolates.

  “Won’t help. Nothing will, but silver in my pocket.”

  “Are you worried I’m going to cheat you—being that you can’t read the numbers on these bills of exchange?”

  “I’m worried something’ll happen to ’em before we can turn ’em into real money.”

  “What is ‘real’ money, Jack? Answer me that.”

  “You know, pieces of eight, or, how d’you say it, dollars—”

  “Th—it starts with a T but it’s got a breathy sound behind it—‘thalers.’”

  “D-d-d-dollars.”

  “That’s a silly name for money, Jack—no one’ll ever take you seriously, talking that way.”

  “Well, they shortened ‘Joachimsthaler’ to ‘thaler,’ so why not reform the word even further?”

  A KIND OF STEADILY WAXING madness had beset them after a month or so at their hot-springs encampment—Jack had assumed it was the slow-burning fuse of the French Pox finally reaching significant parts of his mind, until Eliza had pointed out they’d been on bread and water and the occasional rasher of carp jerky for months. A soldier’s pay was not generous, but put together with what Jack had previously looted from the rich man’s house in Strasbourg, it would supply not only Turk with oats but also them with cabbages, potatoes, turnips, salt pork, and the occasional egg—as long as Jack didn’t mind spending all of it. As his
commission-agents, he employed those two brimstone-miners, Hans and Hans. They were not free agents, but employees of one Herr Geidel of Joachimsthal, a nearby town where silver was dug out of the ground. Herr Geidel hired men like Hans and Hans to dig up the ore and refine it into irregular bars, which they took to a mint in the town to be coined into Joachimsthalers.

  Herr Geidel, having learned that a strange armed man was lurking in the woods near his brimstone mine, had ridden out with a few musketeers to investigate, and discovered Eliza all alone, at her sewing. By the time Jack returned, hours later, Eliza and Herr Geidel had, if not exactly become friends, then at least recognized each other as being of the same type, and therefore as possible business partners, though it was by no means clear what kind of business. Herr Geidel had the highest opinion of Eliza and voiced confidence that she would make out handsomely at the Leipzig Fair. His immediate opinion of Jack was much lower—the only thing Jack seemed to have going for him was that Eliza was willing to partner up with him. Jack, for his part, put up with Herr Geidel because of the flabbergasting nature of what he did for a living: literally making money. The first several times this was explained to Jack, he put it down to a translation error. It couldn’t be real. “That’s all there is? Dig up some dirt, run it through a furnace, stamp a face and some words on it?”

  “That’s what he seems to be saying,” Eliza had answered, puzzled for once. “In Barbary, all the coins were pieces of eight from Spain—I’ve never been anywhere near a mint. I was about to say ‘wouldn’t know a mint from a hole in the ground,’ but apparently that’s just what it is.”

  When it had gotten warm enough to move, they’d gone down into Joachimsthal and confirmed that it was little more than that. In essence the mint was a brute with a great big hammer and a punch. He was supplied with blank disks of silver—these were not money—put the punch on each one and bashed it with the hammer, mashing the portrait of some important hag, and some incantations in Latin, into it—at which point it was money. Officials, supervisors, assayers, clerks, guards, and, in general, the usual crowd of parasitical gentlefolk clustered around the brute with the hammer, but like lice on an ox they could not conceal the simple nature of the beast. The simplicity of money-making had fascinated Jack into a stupor. “Why should we ever leave this place? After all my wanderings I’ve found Heaven.”

  “It can’t be that easy. Herr Geidel seems depressed—he’s branching out into brimstone and other ores—says he can’t make any money making money.”

  “Obvious nonsense. Just trying to scare away competition.”

  “Did you see all those abandoned mines, though?”

  “Ran out of ore,” Jack had attempted.

  “Then why were the great mining-engines still bestriding the pit-mouths? You’d think they’d’ve moved them to shafts that were still fruitful.”

  Jack had had no answer. When next they’d seen Herr Geidel, Eliza had subjected him to a round of brutal questioning that would’ve gotten Jack into a duel had he done it, but coming from Eliza had only given Herr Geidel a heightened opinion of her. Geidel’s French was as miserable as Jack’s and so the discussion had gone slowly enough for Jack to follow: for reasons that no one around here fathomed, the Spanish could mine and refine silver in Mexico, and ship it halfway round the world (in spite of the most strenuous efforts by English, Dutch, French, Maltese, and Barbary pirates) cheaper than Herr Geidel and his drinking buddies could produce it in Joachimsthal and ship it a few days’ journey to Leipzig. Consequently, only the very richest mines in Europe were still operating. Herr Geidel’s strategy was to put idle miners to work digging up brimstone (before the European silver mines had crashed, this never would’ve worked because they had a strong guild, but now miners were cheap), then ship the brimstone to Leipzig and sell it cheap to gunpowder-makers, in hopes of bringing the cost of gunpowder, and hence of war, down.* Anyway, if war got cheap enough, all hell would break loose, some Spanish galleons might even get sunk, and the cost of silver would climb back to a more wholesome level.

  “But won’t that also make it cheaper for highwaymen to attack you on the way to Leipzig?” Jack had asked, always working the violent crime angle.

  Eliza had given him a look that promised grim penalties the next time she got her hand on the chakra. “‘What if war breaks out between here and Leipzig?’ is what Jack meant to say.”

  But Herr Geidel had been completely unfazed. Wars broke out all the time, all over the place, with no effect on the Leipzig Fair. If all of this came to pass, he’d be a rich merchant again. And for five hundred years the Leipzig fairs had operated under a decree from the Holy Roman Emperor stating that as long as the merchants stuck to certain roads and paid a nominal fee to local princes whose lands they traversed, they could pass freely to and from Leipzig, and must not be molested even if they were traipsing across an active battlefield. They were above wars.

  “But what if you were carrying gunpowder to sell to the enemy?” Eliza had tried, but for once Herr Geidel had looked impatient and waved her off, as if to say that wars were mere diversions for bored princes, but trade fairs were serious.

  It turned out to be perfectly all right that Jack had mentioned highwaymen, because Herr Geidel had been doing a lot of thinking on that very subject. His wagon-train had been forming up in the open places of Joachimsthal. Harnessed pairs of draft-horses were being walked down streets by teamsters leaning back to put tension on the traces, talking the animals into place before wagons. Mule-drivers were pretending to be flabbergasted when their animals balked after testing the weight of their loads: the first act of a timeless play that would eventually lead to profanity and violence. Herr Geidel was not a rich merchant now, and for the first part of the journey, he would not be taking any of those roads where armed escorts were for hire anyway, and so the trip to the Easter fair in Leipzig might be exciting. Herr Geidel had a few men who could go through the motions needed to charge and discharge a musket, but he wouldn’t mind adding Jack to his escort, and of course Eliza was welcome to ride along in one of the wagons.

  Jack, wotting that Eliza and his boys’ inheritance were at stake, had taken this soldiering job more seriously than most. From time to time he had sallied ahead of the cart-train to look for ambushes. Twice he’d found rabbles of unemployed miners loitering sheepishly in narrow parts of the way, armed with pikes and cudgels, and gotten them to disperse by explaining Herr Geidel’s plan to restore vigor to the silver mining business. In truth it wasn’t his oratory that moved them out of the way so much as that he and his comrades were carrying flintlocks and pistols. Jack, who knew his wretches, could tell at a glance that these men weren’t hungry enough, or persuasively led enough, to buy loot with their lives—particularly when the loot was brimstone, which, he reminded them, would be difficult to turn into silver—they’d have to lug it to a fair and sell it, unless there was an Alchemist among them. He did not mention that buried under the rubble of brimstone in one of Herr Geidel’s wagons was a chest full of freshly minted Joachimsthalers. He did think about mentioning it, and then leading an ambush himself, but he knew that in that event he’d ride away without Eliza, the one woman in the world, or at least the only one he personally knew, capable of providing him with carnal satisfaction. He understood then why Herr Geidel had observed his conversations with Eliza so intently—trying to see whether Jack could be trusted. Apparently he’d concluded Eliza had Jack well in hand. This did not sit well with Jack—but he’d be rid of Herr Geidel soon enough, though not of Eliza.

  Anyway, they had ridden north out of those mountains, which Herr Geidel had referred to in his tongue simply as the Ore Range, and into Saxony, about which there was nothing to say except that it was flat. They joined up with a very great and old road that according to Herr Geidel ran from Verona all the way north to Hamburg. Jack was impressed by the mileposts: ten-foot-high stone spikes, each ornately carved with the arms of some dead King, each giving the number of miles to Leipzig. This r
oad was congested with many other merchants’ wagon-trains.

  In a moist flat basin scribbled all over with the courses of aimless rivers, it intersected another great road that was said to run from Frankfurt to the Orient, and Leipzig was that intersection. Jack had most of a day to ramble around and view it from its outskirts, which he did on the general principle of wanting to know where the exits were before entering any confined place. The wagon-trains were backed up for half a mile waiting to get in at the south gate. Leipzig, he found, was smaller and lower-slung than Vienna—a city of several modest spires, not one sky-raking cathedral, which Jack guessed was a sign of its being a Lutheran burg. Of course it was surrounded by the obligatory ramparts and bastions. Outside these were estates and gardens, several of ’em larger than the entire city, all of them belonging not to nobles but to merchants.* Between these estates lay the usual embarrassing swine-crowded suburbs cowering in makeshift barricades that were more like baskets than walls. A few lazily turning mill-wheels took advantage of the nearly imperceptible stirring of the rivers, but millers scarcely ranked above peasants in a town so topheavy with merchants.

  JACK AND ELIZA HAD PAID ten pfennigs each at the town gate, then had their silks weighed, and paid duty on them (Eliza had sewn the ostrich-plumes between layers of petticoats, and they were not detected). From the gate a broad street ran north to the center of the town, no more than a musket-shot away. Climbing down from the saddle, Jack was startled by the feel of cobblestones under his feet for the first time in half a year. He was treading on ground that pushed back now, and he knew that his boots needed re-soling. The street was lined with vaulted orifices spewing noise; he felt continually under ambush from left and right, and kept patting his sword-pommel, then hating himself for behaving like a stupid peasant on his first trip to Paris. But Eliza was no less amazed, and kept backing into him, liking to feel his pressure against her back. Queer signs and effigies, frequently in gold leaf, loomed on the fronts of the buildings: a golden snake, a Turk’s head, a red lion, a golden bear. So they were a bit like English taverns, which had effigies instead of names, so that people like Jack, who could not read, could know them. But they were not taverns. They were like large town-houses, with many windows, and each had this large vaulted opening giving way to a courtyard full of Bedlam.