Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
Young Jack, and Bob, the elder of the pair,
To dangle from my legs, which lacking ballast,
Do flail most ineffectu’lly in the air,
And make a sort of entertainment for
The mobile.
Bob removes the noose from Jack’s neck.
But soft! The end approaches—
Earth fades—new worlds unfold before my eyes—
Can this be heaven? It seemeth warm, as if
A brazier had been fir’d ’neath the ground.
Perhaps it is the warmth of God’s sweet love
That so envelops me.
Bob, dressed as a Devil, approaches with a long pointed Stick.
How now! What sort
Of angel doth sprout Horns upon his pate?
Where is thy Harp, O dark Seraph?
Instead of which a Pike, or Spit, doth seem
To occupy thy gnarled claws?
DEVIL:I am
The Devil’s Turnspit. Sinner, welcome home!
JACK: I thought that I had made my peace with God.
Indeed I had, when I did mount the scaffold.
If I had but died then, at Heaven’s Gate
I’d stand. But in my final agony,
I took God’s name in vain, and sundry mortal
Sins committed, and thus did damn myself
To this!
DEVIL: Hold still!
Devil shoves the point of his Spit up Jack’s arsehole.
JACK: The pain! The pain, and yet,
It’s just a taste of what’s to come.
If only I had hired Jack and Bob!
Jack, by means of a conjuror’s trick, causes the point of the spit, smeared
with blood, to emerge from his mouth, and is led away by the Devil, to violent
applause and foot-stomping from the Crowd.
After the applause had died down, Jack, then, would circulate among the condemned to negotiate terms, and Bob, who was bigger, would watch his back, and mind the coin-purse.
The Continent
LATE SUMMER 1683
When a woman is thus left desolate and void of counsel, she is just like a bag of money or a jewel dropt on the highway, which is a prey to the next comer.
—DANIEL DEFOE, Moll Flanders
JACK HAD KEPT A SHREWD eye on the weather all spring and summer. It had been perfect. He was living in unaccustomed comfort in Strasbourg. This was a city on the Rhine, formerly German and, as of quite recently, French. It lay just to the south of a country called the Palatinate, which, as far as Jack could make out, was a moth-eaten rag of land straddling the Rhine. King Looie’s soldiers would overrun the Palatinate from the West, or the Emperor’s armies would rape and pillage it from the East, whenever they couldn’t think of anything else to do. The person in charge of the Palatinate was called an Elector, which in this part of the world meant a very noble fellow, more than a Duke but less than a King. Until quite recently the Electors Palatinate had been of a very fine and noble family, consisting of too many siblings to keep track of, most quite magnificent; but since only one (the oldest) could be Elector, all of the rest of them had gone out of that country, and found better things to do, or gotten themselves killed in more or less fascinating ways. Eventually the Elector had died and turned matters over to his son: an impotent madman named Charles, who liked to stage mock battles around an old Rhine-castle that wasn’t good for much else. The fighting was imaginary, but the trenches, siege-works, dysentery, and gangrene were real.
Now Jack had been making a sort of living, for several years, from being a fake soldier in France—a line of work that had been brought to ruin by many tiresome reforms that had recently been introduced to the French Army by one Martinet. When he’d heard about this crazy Elector he’d wasted no time in going to the Palatinate and finding gainful employment as a pretend musketeer.
Not long afterwards, King Louis XIV of France had attacked the nearby city of Strasbourg and made it his, and as frequently happened in sacked cities in those days, there had been a bit of the old Black Death. At the first appearance of buboes in the groins and armpits of the poor, the rich of Strasbourg had boarded up their houses and fled to the country. Many had simply climbed aboard boats and headed downstream on the Rhine, which had naturally taken them past that old wrack of a castle where Jack and others were playing at war for the amusement of the crazy Elector Palatine. One rich Strasbourgeois, there, had disembarked from his river-boat and struck up a conversation with none other than Jack Shaftoe. It was not customary for rich men to speak to the likes of Jack, and so the whole business seemed a mystery until Jack noticed that, no matter how he moved about, the rich man always found some pretext to stay well upwind of him.
This rich man had hired Jack and arranged for him to get something called a Plague Pass: a large document in that Gothickal German script with occasional excursions into something that looked like either Latin (when it was desirable to invoke the mercy and grace of God) or French (for sucking up to King Looie, only one rung below God at this point).* By flourishing this at the right times, Jack was able to carry out his mission, which was to go into Strasbourg; proceed to the rich man’s dwelling; wash off the red chalk crosses that marked it as a plague-house; pry off the deals he’d nailed over the doors and windows; chase out any squatters; fend off any looters; and live in it for a while. If, after a few weeks, Jack hadn’t died of the plague, he was to send word to this rich man in the country that it was safe to move back in.
Jack had accomplished the first parts of this errand in about May, but by the beginning of June had somehow forgotten about the last. In about mid-June, another Vagabond-looking fellow arrived. The rich man had hired him to go to the house and remove Jack’s body so that it wouldn’t draw vermin and then live in it for a while and, after a few weeks, if he hadn’t died of the plague, send word. Jack, who was occupying the master bedchamber, had accommodated this new fellow in one of the children’s rooms, showed him around the kitchen and wine-cellar, and invited him to make himself at home. Late in July, another Vagabond had showed up, and explained he’d been hired to cart away the bodies of the first two, et cetera, et cetera.
All spring and summer, the weather was ideal: rain and sun in proportions suitable for the growing of grain. Vagabonds roamed freely in and out of Strasbourg, giving wide berths to those mounds of decomposing plague-victims. Jack sought out the ones who’d come from the east, treated them to the rich man’s brandy, conducted broken conversations with them in the zargon, and established two important facts: one, that the weather had been just as fine, if not finer, in Austria and Poland. Two, that Grand Vizier Khan Mustapha was still besieging the city of Vienna at the head of an army of two hundred thousand Turks.
Round September, he and his fellow-squatters found it necessary to depart from that fine house. It did not make him unhappy. Pretending to be dead was not a thing that came naturally to Vagabonds. The population of the house had swollen to a dozen and a half, most of them were tedious people, and the wine-cellar was nearly empty. One night Jack caused the window-shutters to be thrown open and the candles to be lit, and played host and lord over a grand squatters’ ball. Vagabond-musicians played raucous airs on shawms and pennywhistles, Vagabond-actors performed a comedy in zargon, stray dogs copulated in the family chapel, and Jack, presiding over all at the head of the table, dressed in the rich man’s satin, almost fell asleep. But even through the commotion of the ball, his ears detected the sound of hoofbeats approaching, swords being whisked from scabbards, firelocks being cocked. He was vanishing up the stairs even as the owner and his men were smashing down the door. Sliding down an escape-rope he’d long ago fixed to a balcony’s rail, he dropped neatly into the rich man’s saddle, still warm from thrashing the master’s chubby ass. He galloped to a potter’s field on the edge of town where he had stored some provisions against this very sort of event, and took to the road well supplied with salt-cod and biscuit. He rode southwards through the nig
The barley harvest was underway, and most of it was destined for the same place as Jack. He was able to ride along on barley-carts, and to talk his way across the Neckar and the Danube, by telling people he was off to join the legions of Christendom and beat back the Turkish menace.
This was not precisely a lie. Jack and brother Bob had come to the Netherlands more than once to soldier under John Churchill, who was in the household of the Duke of York. York spent a lot of time abroad because he was Catholic and most everyone in England hated him. But in time he had returned home anyway. John Churchill had gone with him and Bob, dutiful soldier that he was, had gone home with Churchill. Jack had stayed on the Continent, where there were more countries, more Kings, and more wars.
Great big dark mounds were visible off to his right, far away. After they continued to be there for several days in a row, he realized that they must be mountains. He’d heard of them. He had fallen in with a cart-train belonging to a barley-merchant of Augsburg, who was contemptuous of the low grain prices in Munich’s great market and had decided to take his goods closer to the place where they were needed. They rode for days through rolling green country, dotted with bent peasants bringing in the barley-harvest. The churches were all Papist, of course, and in these parts they had a queer look, with domes shaped like ripe onions perched atop slender shafts.
Over days those mountains rose up to meet them, and then they came to a river named Salz that pierced the mountain-wall. Churches and castles monitored the valley from stone cliffs. Endless wagon-trains of barley came together, and clashed and merged with the Legions of the Pope of Rome who were coming up from Italy, and Bavarians and Saxons, too: mile-long parades of gentleman volunteers, decorated like knights of old with the Crusaders’ red cross, bishops and archbishops with their jeweled shepherd’s-hooks, cavalry-regiments that beat the earth as if it were a hollow log—each horseman accompanied by his cheval de bataille, a fresh cheval de marche or two, a cheval de poursuite for hunting stags or Turks, and a cheval de parade for ceremonial occasions, and the grooms to care for them. There were armies of musketeers, and finally a vast foaming, surging rabble of barefoot pikemen, marching with their twenty-foot-long weapons angled back over their shoulders, giving those formations the look of porcupines when they are in a mellow and complacent mood and have flattened their quills.
Here the barley-merchant of Augsburg had at last found a market, and might have sold his goods at a handsome profit. But the sight of Christendom at war had inflamed both his avarice and his piety, and he was seized with a passion to ride farther and see what more wonders lay to the east. Likewise Jack, sizing up those pike-men, and comparing their rags and bare feet to his stolen traveling-togs and excellent leather boots, suspected he could strike a better deal closer to Vienna. So they joined together with the general flood and proceeded, in short confused marches, to the city of Linz, where (according to the merchant) there was a very great Messe. Jack knew that Messe was the German word for a Mass, and reckoned that Herr Augsburg meant to attend church in some great cathedral there.
At Linz they grazed the south bank of the River Danube. In the plain along the river was a fine market that had been swallowed and nearly digested by a vast military camp—but no cathedral. “Die Messe!” Herr Augsburg exclaimed, and this was when Jack understood something about the German language: having a rather small number of words, they frequently used one word to mean several different things. Messe meant not only a Mass but a trade-fair.
Another army had marched down from the north and was laboriously crossing the Danube here, trickling across Linz’s bridges and keeping Linz’s watermen busy all day and all night, poling their floats across the stream laden with artillery-pieces, powder-kegs, fodder, rations, luggage, horses, and men. Jack Shaftoe spoke a few words of German. He had picked up quite a bit of French, and of course he knew English and the zargon. These men who had ridden down out of the north did not speak any of those tongues, and he could not guess whether they might be Swedes or Russians or of some other nation. But one day cheering came up from the bridges and the ferries, mingled with the thunder of thousands of war-horses, and from the woods on the north bank emerged the mightiest cavalry that Jack, in all his travels in England, Holland, and France, had ever seen. At its head rode a man who could only be a King. Now this wasn’t Jack’s first King, as he’d seen King Looie more than once during French military parades. But King Looie was only play-acting, he was like a whoreson actor in a Southwark theatre, got up in a gaudy costume, acting the way he imagined that a warrior King might act. This fellow from the north was no play-actor, and he rode across the bridge with a solemn look on his face that spoke of bitter days ahead for Grand Vizier Khan Mustapha. Jack wanted to know who it was, and finally locating someone who spoke a bit of French he learned that what he was looking at, here, was the army of Poland-Lithuania, and their terrible King was John Sobieski, who had made an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor to drive the Turks all the way back to Asia, and his mighty, gleaming cavalry were called the Winged Hussars.
Once King John Sobieski and the Winged Hussars had crossed the Danube and made camp, and a Messe in the religious sense had been said, and the thrill had died down a little, both Herr Augsburg the barley-merchant and Jack Shaftoe the vagabond-soldier made their own private calculations as to what it all meant for them. Two or (according to rumor) three great cavalry forces were now encamped around Linz. They were the spearheads of much larger formations of musketeers and pikemen, all of whom had to eat. Their rations were carried on wagons and the wagons were drawn by teams of horses. All of it was useless without the artillery, which was, as well, drawn by teams of horses. What it all amounted to, therefore, was the world’s richest and most competitive Messe for barley. Prices were thrice what they’d been at the crossing of the Salz and ten times what they’d been in Munich. Herr Augsburg, having chosen the moment carefully, now struck, playing John Sobieski’s barley-buyers off against those of the Bavarian, Saxon, and Austrian lords.
For his part, Jack understood that no force of cavalry as lordly, as magnificent, as the Winged Hussars could possibly exist, even for a single day, without a vast multitude of especially miserable peasants to make it all possible, and that peasants in such large numbers could never be kept so miserable for so long unless the lords of Poland-Lithuania were unusually cruel men. Indeed, after John Sobieski’s vivid crossing of the Danube a gray fog of wretches filtered out of the woods and congealed on the river’s northern bank. Jack didn’t want to be one of ’em. So he went and found Herr Augsburg, sitting on an empty barley-cart surrounded by his profits: bills of exchange drawn on trading-houses in Genoa, Venice, Lyons, Amsterdam, Seville, London, piled up high on the cart’s plankage and weighed down with stones. Mounting up onto the wagon, Jack the Soldier became, for a quarter of an hour, Jack the Actor. In the bad French that Herr Augsburg more or less understood, he spoke of the impending Apocalypse before the gates of Vienna, and of his willingness, nay, eagerness, to die in the midst of same, and his prayerful hope that he might at least take a single Turk down with him, or barring that, perhaps inflict some kind of small wound on a Turk, viz. by jabbing at him with a pointed stick or whatever he might have handy, so that said Turk might be distracted or slowed down long enough for some other soldier of Christendom, armed with a real weapon, such as a musket, to actually take aim at, and slay, that selfsame Turk. This was commingled with a great deal of generally Popish-sounding God-talk and Biblical-sounding quotations that Jack claimed he’d memorized from the Book of Revelation.
In any case it had the desired effect, which was that Herr Augsburg, as his contribution to the Apocalypse, went with Jack to an armaments-market in the center of Linz and purchased him a musket and various other items.
He spent the next two weeks staring at other men’s backs through clouds of dust, and stepping on ground that had already been stepped on by thousands of other men and horses. His ears were filled with the tromping of feet, boots, and hooves; the creaking of overladen barley-carts; nonsensical teamsters’ exhortations; marching-songs in unknown languages; and the blowing of trumpets and beating of drums of regimental signal-men desperately trying to keep their throngs from getting all mixed up with alien throngs.
He had a gray-brown felt hat with a gigantic round brim that needed to be pinned up on one or both sides lest it flop down and blind him. More established musketeers had fine feathered brooches for this purpose—Jack made do with a pin. Like all English musketeers, Jack called his weapon Brown Bess. It was of the latest design—the lock contained a small clamp that gripped a shard of flint, and when Jack pulled the trigger, this would be whipped around and skidded hard against a steel plate above the powder-pan, flooding the pan with sparks and igniting it in most cases. Half of the musketeer-formations were impaired by older, flintless weapons called matchlocks. Each of these matchlock-men had to go around with a long fuzzy rope twined through his fingers, one end of which was forever smouldering—as long as it didn’t get wet and he remembered to blow on it frequently. Clamped into the same sort of mechanism that held Jack’s flint-shard, it would ignite the powder, more often than not, by direct contact.
Jack, like all the other musketeers, had a leather belt over one shoulder whence dangled a dozen thumb-sized and -shaped wooden flasks, each sealed with its own stopper, each big enough to contain one charge of powder for the weapon. They clinked together musically when he walked. There was a powder-horn for refilling these during lulls. At the lowest point of the bandolier was a small pouch containing a dozen lead balls.