Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
He could not move away from Churchill when the satyr was gripping Turk’s bridle. “Are you going to make me cut that off?” he inquired.
“I freely confess that I deserve no better,” said the satyr. “In fact—I am so humiliated that I must do it myself, to restore my, and my father’s, honor.” Whereupon he pulled a dagger from his belt and began to saw through the red leather glove on the hand that was gripping the bridle—attempting to cut off his left hand with his right. In doing so he probably saved Jack’s life, for this spectacle—the man sawing at his own arm, blood welling out of the glove and dribbling onto the white floor—stopped Churchill in his curly-toed tracks, no more than a fathom away. It was the only time Jack had ever seen Churchill hesitate.
There was a ripping and whooshing noise from one end of the room. The East Wind had been split open by a sagging crevice that unloaded a sheet of dirty, lumpy water onto the floor. A whole strip of ceiling, a couple of yards wide, peeled away now, like a plank being ripped away from the side of a boat. It led straight to the French Navy—half a ton of plaster, bone dry—which came off in a single unified fleet action and seemed to hang in space for a moment before it started accelerating toward the floor. Everyone got out of the way. The plaster exploded and splayed snowballs of damp crud across the floor. But stuff continued to rain down from above, small dark lumps that, when they struck the floor, shook themselves and took off running.
Jack looked at Churchill just in time to see the flint whipping round on the end of its curved arm, a spray of sparks, a preliminary bloom of smoke from the pan. Then a lady blundered in from one side, not paying attention to where she was going because she had realized that there were rats in her wig—but she didn’t know how many (Jack, at a quick glance, numbered them at three, but more were raining down all the time and so he would’ve been loath to commit himself to a specific number). She hit Churchill’s arm. A jet of fire as long as a man’s arm darted from the muzzle of Churchill’s pistol and caught Turk in the side of the face, though the ball apparently missed. The polite satyr was lucky to be alive—it had gone off inches from his head.
Turk was stunned and frozen, if only for a moment. Then a Barbary pirate-galley, driven downwards by a gout of water/rat slurry, exploded on the floor nearby. Some of the water, and some of the rats, poured down on Turk’s neck—and then he detonated. He tried to rear up and was held down by the satyr’s bloody but steadfast clutch, so he bucked—fortunately Jack saw this coming—and then kicked out with both hind-legs. Anyone behind him would’ve been decapitated, but the center of the ballroom had been mostly given over to rats now. A few more of those bucks and Jack would be flung off. He needed to let Turk run. But Churchill was now trying to get round the satyr to lay a second hand on Turk’s bridle. “This is the worst fucking party I’ve ever been to!” Jack said, whirling his sword-arm around like a windmill.
“Sir, I am sorry, but—”
The polite satyr did not finish the apology, because Jack delivered a cut to the middle of his forearm. The blade passed through sweetly. The dangling hand balled itself into a fist and maintained its grip on the bridle, even as the now one-armed satyr was falling back on top of Churchill. Turk sensed freedom and reared up. Jack looked down at Churchill and said, “Next time you want one of my horses—pay in advance, you rogue!”
Turk tried to bolt for the front door, but his hard fers de cheval slipped and scrabbled on the marble, and he could not build up speed. A sea-monster came down across his path, shedding a hundred rats from its crushed entrails. Turk wheeled and scrambled off toward a crowd of ladies who were doing a sort of tarantella, inspired by the belief that rats were scaling their petticoats. Then, just as Jack was convinced that the charger was going to crush the women under his hooves, Turk seemed to catch sight of a way out, and veered sideways, his hooves nearly sliding out from under him, and made for a doorway set into the back corner of the ballroom. It was a low doorway. Jack had little time to react—seeing the lintel headed for his face, decorated in the middle with a plaster d’Arcachon coat of arms,* and not wanting to have it stamped on his face forever, he flung himself backwards and fell off the horse.
He managed to get his right foot, but not his left, out of the stirrup, and so Turk simply dragged him down the ensuing corridor (which had a smooth floor, but not smooth enough for Jack). Nearly upside-down, Jack pawed desperately against that floor with the hand that wasn’t gripping the sword, trying to pull himself sideways so that Turk’s hooves wouldn’t come down on him. Time and again his hand slammed down onto the backs of rats, who all seemed to be fleeing down this particular corridor—drawn by some scent, perhaps, that struck them as promising. Turk outpaced the rats, of course, and was making his own decisions. Jack knew that they were passing into diverse rooms because the thresholds barked his hips and ribs and he got fleeting views of servants’ breeches and skirts.
But then, suddenly, they were in a dimly lit room, alone, and Turk wasn’t running anymore. Nervous and irritable to be sure, though. Jack cautiously wiggled his left foot. Turk startled, then looked at him.
“Surprised to see me? I’ve been with you the whole way—loyal friend that I am,” Jack announced. He got his boot out of that stirrup and stood. But there was no time for additional banter. They were in a pantry. Squealing noises heralded the approach of the rats. Pounding of boots was not far behind, and where there were boots, there’d be swords. There was a locked door set into the wall, opposite to where they had come in, and Turk had gone over to sniff at it curiously.
If this was not a way out, Jack was dead—so he went over and pounded on it with the pommel of his sword, while looking significantly at Turk. It was a stout door. Curiously, the crevices between planks had been sealed with oakum, just like a ship’s planking, and rags had been stuffed into the gaps round the edges.
Turk wheeled around to face away from it. Jack hopped out of the way. The war-horse’s hindquarters heaved up as he put all weight on his forelegs, and then both of his rear hooves smashed into the door with the force of cannonballs. The door was half caved in, and torn most of the way loose from its upper hinge. Turk gave it a few more, and it disappeared.
Jack had sunk to his knees by that point, though, and wrapped a manure-plastered sleeve up against his nose and mouth, and was trying not to throw up. The stench that had begun to leak from the room beyond, after the first blow, had nearly felled him. It nearly drove Turk away, too. Jack just had the presence of mind to slam the other door and prevent the horse’s fleeing into the hallway.
Jack grabbed the candle that was the pantry’s only illumination, and stepped through, expecting to find a sepulchre filled with ripe corpses. But instead it was just another small kitchen, as tidy a place as Jack had ever seen.
There was a butcher’s block in the center of the room with a fish stretched out on it. The fish was so rotten it was bubbling.
At the other end of this room was a small door. Jack opened it and discovered a typical Parisian back-alley. But what he saw in his mind’s eye was the moment, just a few minutes ago, when he had ridden right past the duc d’Arcachon while carrying an unsheathed sword. One twitch of the wrist, and the man who (as he now knew) had taken Eliza and her mother off into slavery would be dead. He could run back into the house now, and have a go at it. But he knew he’d lost the moment.
Turk planted his head in Jack’s back and shoved him out the door, desperate to reach the comparative freshness of a Paris alley choked with rotting kitchen-waste and human excrement. Back inside, Jack could hear men battering at the pantry door.
Turk was eyeing him as if to say, Shall we? Jack mounted him and Turk began to gallop down the alley without being told to. The alarm had gone up. So as Jack thundered out into the Place Royale, sparks flying from his mount’s new shoes, the wind blowing his cape out behind him—in other words, cutting just the silhouette he’d intended—he turned round and pointed back into the alley with his sword and shouted: “Les Vagabonds!
Amsterdam
1685
Must businesse thee from hence remove?
Oh, that’s the worst disease of love,
The poore, the foule, the false, love can
Admit, but not the busied man.
He which hath businesse, and makes love, doth doe
Such wrong, as when a maryed man doth wooe.
—JOHN DONNE, “Breake of Day”
“WHO IS YOUR GREAT BIG tall, bearded, ill-dressed, unmannerly, harpoon-brandishing, er—?” asked Eliza, and ran out of adjectives. She was peering out the windows of the Maiden coffee-house at a loitering Nimrod who was blotting out the sun with an immense, motley fur coat. The management had been reluctant to let even Jack come into the place, but they had drawn the line at the glaring wild man with the harping-iron.
“Oh, him?” Jack asked, innocently—as if there were more than one such person who owned that description. “That’s Yevgeny the Raskolnik.”
“What’s a Raskolnik?”
“Beats me—all I know is they’re all getting out of Russia as fast as they can.”
“Well, then…how did you meet him?”
“I’ve no idea. Woke up in the Bomb & Grapnel—there he was, snuggled up against me—his beard thrown over my neck like a muffler.”
Eliza shuddered exquisitely. “But the Bomb & Grapnel’s in Dunkirk…”
“Yes?”
“How’d you get there from Paris? Weren’t there adventures, chases, duels—?”
“Presumably. I’ve no idea.”
“What of the leg wound?”
“I was fortunate to engage the services of a fine, lusty crew of maggots along the way—they kept it clean. It healed without incident.”
“But how can you simply forget about a whole week’s journey?”
“It’s how my mind works now. As in a play, where only the most dramatic parts of the story are shown to the audience, and the tedious bits assumed to happen offstage. So: I gallop out of the Place Royale; the curtain falls, there is a sort of intermission; the curtain rises again, and I’m in Dunkirk, in Mr. Foot’s finest bedchamber, upstairs of the Bomb & Grapnel, and I’m with Yevgeny, and stacked around us on the floor are all of his furs and skins and amber.”
“He’s some sort of commodities trader, then?” Eliza asked.
“No need to be waspish, lass.”
“I’m simply trying to work out how he found his way into the drama.”
“I’ve no idea—he doesn’t speak a word of anything. I went down stairs and asked the same question of Mr. Foot, the proprietor, a man of parts, former privateer—”
“You’ve told me, and told me, and told me, about Mr. Foot.”
“He said that just a week or two earlier, Yevgeny had rowed a longboat into the little cove where the Bomb & Grapnel sits.”
“You mean—rowed ashore from some ship that had dropped anchor off Dunkirk.”
“No—that’s just it—he came from over the horizon. Rode a swell up onto the beach—dragged the longboat up as far as it would go—collapsed on the threshold of the nearest dwelling, which happened to be the old Bomb. Now, Mr. Foot has been lacking for customers these last few years—so, instead of throwing him back like a fish, as he might’ve done in the B & G’s heyday, and discovering, furthermore, that the longboat was filled to the gunwales with Arctic valuables, he toted it all upstairs. Finally he rolled Yevgeny himself onto a cargo net, and hoisted him up through the window with a block and tackle—thinking that when he woke up, he might know how to obtain more of the same goods.”
“Yes, I can see his business strategy very clearly.”
“There you go again. If you’d let me finish, you wouldn’t judge of Mr. Foot so harshly. At the cost of many hours’ backbreaking labor, he gave a more or less Christian burial to the remains—”
“Which? There has been no discussion of remains.”
“I may’ve forgotten to mention that Yevgeny was sharing the longboat with several comrades who’d all succumbed to the elements—”
“—or possibly Yevgeny.”
“The same occurred to me. But then, as the Good Lord endowed me with more brains, and less bile, than some, I reckoned that if this had been the case, the Raskolnik would’ve thrown the victims overboard—especially after they waxed gruesome. Mr. Foot—and I only tell you this, lass, in order to clear Yevgeny’s name—said that the meatier parts of these corpses had been picked clean to the bone by seagulls.”
“Or by a peckish Yevgeny,” Eliza said, lifting a teacup to her lips to conceal a certain triumphal smile, and looking out the window toward the furry Russian, who was whiling away the time by puffing on a rude pipe and honing the flukes of his harping-iron with a pocket-whetstone.
“Making a good character for my Raskolnik friend—though he truly has a heart of gold—will be impossible when, tidy and stylish girl that you are, you are gaping at his rude exterior form. So let us move on,” Jack said. “Next thing Mr. Foot knows, I show up, all decorated with baubles from France, nearly as spent as Yevgeny. So he took me in, in the same way. And finally, a French gentleman approached him and let it be known that he’d like to purchase the Bomb & Grapnel—proving the rule that things tend to happen in threes.”
“Now you’ve amazed me,” Eliza said. “What do those events have in common with each other, that you should conceive of them as a group of three?”
“Why, just as Yevgeny and I were wandering lost—yet, in possession of things of great value—Mr. Foot was cast out into the wilderness—I am making a similitude, here—”
“Yes, you have the daft look you always get, when you are.”
“Dunkirk’s not the same since Leroy bought it from King Chuck. It is a great base navale now. All the English, and other, privateers who used to lodge, drink, gamble, and whore at the Bomb & Grapnel have signed on with Monsieur Jean Bart, or else sailed away to Port Royal, in Jamaica. And despite these troubles, Mr. Foot had something of value: the Bomb & Grapnel itself. An opportunity began to take shape in Mr. Foot’s mind, like a stage-ghost appearing from a cloud of smoke.”
“Much as a profound sense of foreboding is beginning to take shape in my bosom.”
“I had a vision in Paris, Eliza—rather of a complex nature—there was considerable singing and dancing in it, and ghastly and bawdy portions in equal measure.”
“Knowing you as I do, Jack, I’d expect nothing less from one of your visions.”
“I’ll spare you the details, most of which are indelicate for a lady of your upbringing. Suffice it to say that on the strength of this heavenly apparition, and other signs and omens, such as the Three Similar Events at the Bomb & Grapnel, I have decided to give up Vagabonding, and, along with Yevgeny and Mr. Foot, to go into Business.”
Eliza faltered and shrank, as if a large timber, or something, had snapped inside of her.
“Now why is it,” Jack said, “then when I suggest you reach in and grab me by the chakra, it’s nothing to you, and yet, when the word business comes out of my mouth, you get a wary and prim look about you, like a virtuous maiden who has just had lewd proposals directed her way by a bawdy Lord?”
“It’s nothing. Pray continue,” Eliza said, in a colorless voice.
But Jack’s nerve had faltered. He began to digress. “I’d hoped brother Bob might be in town, as he commonly traveled in John Churchill’s retinue. And indeed Mr. Foot said he had been there very recently, inquiring after me. But then the Duke of Monmouth had surprised them all by coming to Dunkirk incognito, to meet with certain disaffected Englishmen, and proceeding inland toward Brussels in haste. Bob, who knows that terrain so well, had been dispatched by one of Churchill’s lieutenants to follow h
At the mention of the Duke of Monmouth, Eliza began to look Jack in the face again—from which he gathered that one of two things might be the case: either she was looking for a romantic fling with a claim (highly disputable) to the English throne, or else she numbered political intrigues among her interests now. Indeed, when he had surprised her by coming into the Maiden, she’d been writing a letter with her right hand while doing that binary arithmetic on her left, according to the Doctor’s practice.
At any rate—as long as he had her attention—he decided to strike. “And that is when I was made aware, by Mr. Foot, of the Opportunity.”
Eliza’s face became a death mask, as when a physician says, Please sit down…
“Mr. Foot has many contacts in the shipping industry—”
“Smugglers.”
“Most shipping is smuggling to some degree,” Jack said learnedly. “He had received a personal visit from one Mr. Vliet, a Dutch fellow who was in the market for a seaworthy vessel of moderate size, capable of crossing the Atlantic with a cargo of such-and-such number of tons. Mr. Foot was not slow in securing the God’s Wounds, a well-broken-in double-topsail brig.”
“Do you even know what that means?”
“It is both square, and fore-and-aft rigged, hence well-suited for running before the trade winds, or plying the fickle breezes of coastlines. She has a somewhat lopsided but seasoned crew—”
“And only needed to be victualled and refitted—?”
“Some capital was, of course, wanted.”
“So Mr. Vliet went to Amsterdam and—?”
“To Dunkirk went Mr. Vliet, and explained to Mr. Foot, who then explained to me and, as best he could, Yevgeny, the nature of the proposed trading voyage: of lapidary simplicity, yet guaranteed to be lucrative. We agreed to cast in our lots together. Fortunately, it is not difficult to sell goods quickly in Dunkirk. I liquidated the jewelry, Yevgeny sold his furs, whale-oil, and some fine amber, and Mr. Foot has sold the Bomb & Grapnel to a French concern.”