Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “Where’s Turk?”

  “I stabled him,” Churchill said, pointing with his eyes toward an adjacent stable. The duc had several stables, of which this was the smallest and meanest, and used only for shoeing horses.

  “So the ball you mean to attend is here.”

  “At the Hotel d’Arcachon, yes.”

  “What’re you supposed to be—a Turk? Or a Barbary Corsair?”

  “Do I look like a Turk?” Churchill asked hopefully. “I understand you have personal knowledge of them—”

  “No. Better say you’re a Pirate.”

  “A breed of which I have personal knowledge.”

  “Well, if you hadn’t fucked the King’s mistress, he wouldn’t have sent you to Africa.”

  “Well, I did, and he did—send me there, I mean—and I came back.”

  “And now he’s dead. And you and the duc d’Arcachon have something to talk about.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Churchill asked darkly.

  “Both of you have been in contact with the Barbary Pirates—that’s all I meant.”

  Churchill was taken aback—a small pleasure and an insignificant victory for Jack. “You are well-informed,” he said. “I should like to know whether everyone in the world knows of the duc d’Arcachon’s intercourse with Barbary, or is it just that you are special?”

  “Am I, then?”

  “They say l’Emmerdeur is King of the Vagabonds.”

  “Then why didn’t the duc put me up in his finest apartment?”

  “Because I have gone to such extravagant lengths to prevent him from knowing who you are.”

  “So that’s why I’m still alive. I was wondering.”

  “If they knew, they would tear you apart with iron tongs, over the course of several days, at the Place Dauphine.”

  “No better place for it—lovely view from there.”

  “Is that all you have for me, in the way of thanks?”

  Silence. Gates were creaking open all round the Hotel d’Arcachon as it mobilized for the ball. Jack heard the hollow grumbling of barrels being rolled across stone courtyards, and (since his nose had stopped being able to smell shit) he could smell birds roasting, and buttery pastries baking in ovens. There were less agreeable odors, too, but Jack’s nose sought out the good ones.

  “You could at least answer my question,” Churchill said. “Does everyone know that the duc has frequent dealings with Barbary?”

  “Some small favor would be appropriate at this point,” Jack said.

  “I can’t let you go.”

  “I was thinking of a pipe.”

  “Funny, so was I.” Churchill went to the stable door and flagged down a boy and demanded des pipes en terre and du tabac blond and du feu.

  “Is King Looie coming to the duc’s fancy-dress ball, too?”

  “So it is rumored—he has been preparing a costume in great secrecy, out at Versailles. Said to be of a radically shocking nature. Impossibly daring. All the French ladies are aflutter.”

  “Aren’t they always?”

  “I wouldn’t know—I’ve taken a sound, some would say stern, English bride: Sarah.”

  “What’s she coming as? A nun?”

  “Oh, she’s back in London. This is a diplomatic mission. Secret.”

  “You stand before me, dressed as you are, and say that?”

  Churchill laughed.

  “You take me for an imbecile?” Jack continued. The pain in his leg was most annoying, and shaking away flies had given his neck a cramp, as well as raw sores from the abrasion of his iron collar.

  “You are only alive because of your recent imbecility, Jack. L’Emmerdeur is known to be clever as a fox. What you did was so stupid that it has not occurred to anyone, yet, that you could be he.”

  “So, then…in France, what’s considered suitable punishment for an imbecile who does something stupid?”

  “Well, naturally they were going to kill you. But I seem to have convinced them that, as you are not only a rural half-wit, but an English rural half-wit, the whole matter is actually funny.”

  “Funny? Not likely.”

  “The duc de Bourbon hosted a dinner party. Invited a certain eminent writer. Became annoyed with him. Emptied his snuff-box into the poor scribbler’s wine when he wasn’t looking, as a joke. The writer drank the wine and died of it—hilarious!”

  “What fool would drink wine mixed with snuff?”

  “That’s not the point of the story—it’s about what French nobility do, and don’t, consider to be funny—and how I saved your life. Pay attention!”

  “Let’s set aside how, and ask: why did you save my life, guv’nor?”

  “When a man is being torn apart with pliers, there’s no telling what he’ll blurt out.”

  “Aha.”

  “The last time I saw you, you were ordinary Vagabond scum. If there happened to be an old connexion between the two of us, it scarcely mattered. Now you are legendary Vagabond scum, a picaroon, much talked of in salons. Now if the old link between us came to be widely known, it would be inconvenient for me.”

  “But you could have let that other fellow run me through with his rapier.”

  “And probably should have,” Churchill said ruefully, “but I wasn’t thinking. It is very odd. I saw him lunging for you. If I had only stood clear and allowed matters to take their natural course, you’d be dead. But some impulse took me—”

  “The Imp of the Perverse, like?”

  “Your old companion? Yes, perhaps he leapt from your shoulder to mine. Like a perfect imbecile, I saved your life.”

  “Well, you make a most splendid and gallant perfect imbecile. Are you going to kill me now?”

  “Not directly. You are now a galérien. Your group departs for Marseille tomorrow morning. It’s a bit of a walk.”

  “I know it.”

  Churchill sat on a bench and worried off one boot, then the other, then reached into them and pulled out the fancy Turkish slippers that had become lodged inside, and drew the slippers on. Then he threw the boots at Jack and they lodged in the manure, temporarily scaring away the flies. At about the same time, a stable-boy came in carrying two pipes stuffed with tobacco, and a taper, and soon both men were puffing away contentedly.

  “I learned of the duc’s Barbary connexions through an escaped slave, who seems to consider the information part of a closely guarded personal secret,” Jack said finally.

  “Thank you,” said Churchill. “How’s the leg, then?”

  “Someone seems to’ve poked it with a sword…otherwise fine.”

  “Might need something to lean on.” Churchill stepped outside the door for a moment, then returned carrying Jack’s crutch. He held it crosswise between his two hands for a moment, weighing it. “Seems a bit heavy on this end—a foreign sort of crutch, is it?”

  “Exceedingly foreign.”

  “Turkish?”

  “Don’t toy with me, Churchill.”

  Churchill spun the crutch around and chucked it like a spear so that it stuck in the manure-pile. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it soon and then get the hell out of France. The road to Marseille will take you, in a day or two, through the pays of the Count of Joigny.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “That’s the fellow you knocked off his horse. Notwithstanding my earlier reassuring statements, he does not find you amusing—if you enter his territory…”

  “Pliers.”

  “Just so. Now, as insurance, I have a good friend lodging at an inn just to the north of Joigny. He is to keep an eye on the road to Marseille, and if he sees you marching down it, he is to make sure that you never get past that inn alive.”

  “How’s he going to recognize me?”

  “By that point, you’ll be starkers—exposing your most distinctive feature.”

  “You really are worried I’ll make trouble for you.”

  “I told you I’m here on a diplomatic mission. It is important.”


  “Trying to work out how England is to be divvied up between Leroy and the Pope of Rome?”

  Churchill puffed on his pipe a few times in a fine, but not altogether convincing, display of calmness, and then said, “I knew we’d reach this point in the conversation, Jack—the point where you accused me of being a traitor to my country and my religion—and so I’m ready for it, and I’m actually not going to cut your head off.”

  Jack laughed. His leg hurt a great deal, and it itched, too.

  “Through no volition of my own, I have for many years been a member of His Majesty’s household,” Churchill began. Jack was confused by this until he recollected that “His Majesty” no longer meant Charles II, but James II, the whilom Duke of York. Churchill continued: “I suppose I could reveal to you my innermost thoughts about what it’s like to be a Protestant patriot in thrall to a Catholic King who loves France, but life is short, and I intend to spend as little of it as possible standing in dark stables apologizing to shit-covered Vagabonds. Suffice it to say that it’s better for England if I do this mission.”

  “Suppose I do get away, before Joigny…what’s to prevent me from telling everyone about the longstanding connexions between the Shaftoes and the Churchills?”

  “No one of Quality will ever believe a word you say, Jack, unless you say it while you are being expertly tortured…it’s only when you are stretched out on some important person’s rack that you are dangerous. Besides, there is the Shaftoe legacy to think of.” Churchill pulled out a little purse and jiggled it to make the coins ring.

  “I did notice that you’d taken possession of my charger, without paying for it. Very bad form.”

  “The price in here is a fair one—a handsome sum, even,” Churchill said. Then he pocketed the purse.

  “Oh, come on—!”

  “A naked galérien can’t carry a purse, and these French coins are too big to stuff up even your asshole, Jack. I’ll make sure your spawn get the benefit of this, when I’m back in England.”

  “Get it, or get the benefit of it? Because there is a slipperiness in those words that troubles me.”

  Churchill laughed again, this time with a cheerfulness that really made Jack want to kill him. He got up and plucked the empty pipe from Jack’s mouth, and—as stables were notoriously inflammable, and he did not wish to be guilty of having set fire to the duc’s—went over to the little horseshoe-forge, now cold and dark, and whacked the ashes out of the pipes. “Try to concentrate. You’re a galley slave chained to a post in a stable in Paris. Be troubled by that. Bon voyage, Jack.”

  Exit Churchill. Jack had been meaning to advise him not to sleep with any of those French ladies, and to tell him about the Turkish innovation involving sheep-intestines, but there hadn’t been time—and besides, who was he to give John Churchill advice on fucking?

  Equipped now with boots, a sword, and (if he could just reach it, and slay a few stable-boys) a horse, Jack began considering how to get the damned chain off his neck. It was a conventional slave-collar: two iron semicircles hinged together on one side and with a sort of hasp on the other, consisting of two loops that would align with each other when the collar was closed. If a chain was then threaded through the loops, it would prevent the collar from opening. This made it possible for a single length of chain to secure as many collars, and hence slaves, as could be threaded onto it, without the need for expensive and unreliable padlocks. It kept the ironmongery budget to a minimum and worked so handily that no French Château or German Schloss was without a few, hanging on a wall-peg just in case some persons needed enslaving.

  The particular chain that went through Jack’s collar-hasp had a circular loop—a single oversized link—welded to one end. The chain had been passed around the stone pillar and its narrow end threaded through this loop, then through Jack’s collar, and finally one of the duc’s smiths had heated up the chain-end in the stable’s built-in forge, and hammered an old worn-out horseshoe onto it, so it could not be withdrawn. Typical French extravagance! But the duc had an infinite fund of slaves and servants, so it cost him nothing, and there was no way for Jack to get it off.

  The tobacco-embers from the pipes had formed a little mound on the blackened hearth of the forge and were still glowing, just barely. Jack squirmed free of the manure-pile and limped over to the forge and blew on them to keep them alive.

  Normally this whole place was swarming with stable-boys, but now, and for the next hour or two, they’d be busy with ball duty: taking the horses of the arriving guests and leading them to stalls in the duc’s better stables. So a fire in this hearth would be detectable only as a bit of smoke coming out of a chimney, which was not an unusual sight on a cool March evening in seventeenth-century Paris.

  But he was getting ahead of himself. This was a long way from being a fire. Jack began looking about for some tinder. Straw would be perfect. But the stable-boys had been careful not to leave anything so tinderlike anywhere near the forge. It was all piled at the opposite end of the stable, and Jack’s chain wouldn’t let him go that far. He tried lying flat on the floor, with the chain stretched out taut behind him, and reaching out with the crutch to rake some straw towards him. But the end of the crutch came a full yard short of the goal. He scurried back and blew on the tobacco some more. It would not last much longer.

  His attention had been drawn to the crutch, which was bound together with a lot of the cheapest sort of dry, fuzzy twine. Perfect tinder. But he’d have to burn most of it, and then he’d have no way to hold the crutch together, and therefore to conceal the existence of the sword—so, if the attempt failed tonight, he was doomed. In that sense ’twere safer to wait until tomorrow, when they’d take the chain off of him. But only to chain him up, he supposed, to a whole file of other galériens—doddering Huguenots, most likely. And he wasn’t about to wait for that. He must do it now.

  So he unwound the crutch and frizzed the ends of the twine and put it to the last mote of red fire in the pipe-ashes, and blew. The flame almost died, but then one fiber of twine warped back, withered, flung off a little shroud of steam or smoke, then became a pulse of orange light: a tiny thing, but as big in Jack’s vision as whole trees bursting into flames in the Harz.

  After some more blowing and fidgeting he had a morsel of yellow flame on the hearth. While supplying it more twine with one hand, he rummaged blindly for kindling, which ought to be piled up somewhere. Finding only a few twigs, he was forced to draw the sword and shave splints off the crutch-pole. This didn’t last long, and soon he was planing splinters off pillars and beams, and chopping up benches and stools. But finally it was big and hot enough to ignite coal, of which there was plenty. Jack began tossing handfuls of it into his little fire while pumping the bellows with the other hand. At first it just lay in the fire like black stones, but then the sharp, brimstony smell of it came into the stable, and the fire became white, and the heat of the coal annihilated the remaining wood-scraps, and the fire became a meteor imprisoned in a chain—for Jack had looped the middle part of his chain around it. The cold iron poisoned the fire, sucked life from it, but Jack heaped on more coal and worked the bellows, and soon the metal had taken on a chestnut color which gave way to various shades of red. The heat of the blaze first dried the moist shit that was all over Jack’s skin and then made him sweat, so that crusts of dung were flaking off of him.

  The door opened. “Où est le maréchal-ferrant?” someone asked.

  The door opened wider—wide enough to admit a horse—then did just that. The horse was led by a Scot in a tall wig—or maybe not. He was wearing a kiltlike number, but it was made of red satin and he had some sort of ridiculous contrivance slung over one shoulder: a whole pigskin, sewn up and packed with straw to make it look as if it had been inflated, with trumpet-horns, flutes, and pennywhistles dangling from it: a caricature of a bagpipe. His face was painted with blue woad. Pinned to the top of his wig was a tam-o’-shanter with an approximate diameter of three feet, and thrust into his belt
, where a gentleman would sheathe his sword, was a sledgehammer. Next to that, several whiskey-jugs holstered.

  The horse was a prancing beauty, but it seemed to be favoring one leg—it had thrown a shoe on the ride over.

  “Maréchal-ferrant?” the man repeated, squinting in his direction. Jack reckoned that he, Jack, was visible only as a silhouette against the bright fire, and so the collar might not be obvious. He cupped a hand to his ear—smiths were notorious for deafness. That seemed to answer the question—the “Scot” led his horse toward the forge, nattering on about a fer à cheval and going so far as to check his pocket-watch. Jack was irritated. Fer meant “iron,” fer à cheval as he knew perfectly well meant “horseshoe.” But he had just understood that the English word “farrier” must be derived somehow from this—even though “horseshoe” was completely different. He was aware, vaguely—from watching certain historical dramas, and then from roaming round la France listening to people talk—that French people had conquered England at least one time, and thereby confused the English language with all sorts of words such as “farrier,” and “mutton,” which common folk now used all the time without knowing that they were speaking the tongue of the conquerors. Meanwhile, the damned French had a tidy and proper tongue in which, for example, the name of the fellow who put shoes on horses was clearly related to the word for horseshoe. Made his blood boil—and now that James was King, Katie bar the door!

  “Quelle heure est-il?” Jack finally inquired. The “Scot” without pausing to wonder why a maréchal-ferrant would need to know the time went once again into the ceremony of withdrawing his pocket-watch, getting the lid open, and reading it. In order to do this he had to turn its face towards the fire, and then he had to twist himself around so that he could see it. Jack waited patiently for this to occur, and then just as the “Scot” was lisping out something involving sept Jack whipped the chain out of the fire and got it round his neck.

  It was stranglin’ time in gay Paree. Most awkwardly, the red-hot part of the chain ended up around the throat of the “Scot,” so Jack could not get a grip on it without first rummaging in the tool-box for some tongs. But it had already done enough damage, evidently, that the “Scot” could not make any noise.