Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
But now that the galleys had got themselves sorted out into parallel courses, they emitted a sudden fusillade of snapping noises—Jack thought, some sort of outlandish gunfire. Immediately the singing grew louder. Jack could just make out the heathen syllables:
Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, v’nism’chah!
Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, v’nism’chah.
“It is like the bagpipes of the Scots,” he announced, “a sort of shrill noise that they make before battle, to cover the sound of their knees knocking together.”
One or two men laughed. But even these were shushed by others, who were now listening intently to the song of the corsairs. Rather than proceeding to a steady beat, as good Christian music always did, it seemed to be getting faster.
Uru, uru achim
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Havah nagilah…
It was most certainly getting faster; and as the oars bit into the water on each beat of the song, this meant that they were now rowing as well as singing faster. And indeed the gap between the bow of the foremost galley, and the stern of God’s Wounds, was getting rapidly narrower.
Uru, uru achim
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Havah nagilah.
Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, v’nism’chah!
Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, v’nism’chah.
The corsairs were singing and rowing with abandon now, easily coming up along both flanks, maintaining just enough distance to give their oars the freedom to claw at the waves. Even not counting the unseen oar-slaves, the number of men aboard was insane, reckless, as if a whole pirate-city had crowded into each galley.
The one to port came alongside soonest, its sails and rigging struck and furled for the attack, its rail, and the poop deck, crowded with corsairs, many of them swinging grappling-hooks on the ends of ropes, others brandishing boarding-ladders with vicious curved spikes on the ends. Jack—and all of the others aboard God’s Wounds—saw, and understood, the same thing at the same time. They saw that almost none of the fighting men were Arabs except for the agha shouting the orders. They were, instead, white men, black Africans, even a few Indians. They understood that all of them were Janissaries, which is to say non-Turks who did the Turks’ fighting for them.
Having understood that, they would not be slow to grasp that becoming a Barbary Corsair might, for men such as them, constitute a fine opportunity.
Jack, being half a step quicker than the average sea-scum, understood this a moment sooner than anyone else, and decided that he would blurt it out, so that everyone would think it had been his idea. He picked up a grappling-hook and coil of rope that had been rattling around in the bottom of the weapons-chest, and returned to his former podium atop the pilot-house, and hollered, “All right! Who’s for turning Turk?”
A lusty cheer came up from the crew. It seemed to be unanimous, with the single exception of Yevgeny, who as usual had no idea what was being said. While the others were all shaking hands and congratulating one another, Jack clenched his sword in his teeth, tossed the rope-coil over his shoulder, and began ascending the ladderlike web of rigging—the fore shrouds, so called—that converged on the fore-top: a platform about halfway up the mast. Reaching it, he jammed the point of the sword into the planking, and regarded the galleys from above. The singing had sped up into a frenzy now, and the movements of the oars were beginning to get into disarray, as not all of the slaves could move their implements fast enough!
Uru, uru achim
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Havah nagilah…
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach
Both of the galleys had moved half a length ahead of God’s Wounds now. Upon a signal from one of the aghas, both suddenly folded their oars and steered inwards, falling back and converging on God’s Wounds. The oar-slaves collapsed onto their benches, and the only thing that kept all of them from landing flat on their backs was that they were packed into the hull too tightly to lie down.
“You men are only seeing the turbans and jewels and polished weapons of the Janissaries!” Jack hollered. “I can see the slaves pulling the oars now—she’s a coffin packed with half-dead wretches. Did you hear those snapping noises before? ’Twas not gunfire—’twas the long bullwhips of the slave-drivers! I see a hundred men with fresh stripes torn from their backs, slumped over their oars. We’ll all be slaves in half an hour’s time—unless we show the agha that we know how to fight, and deserve to be Janissaries instead!”
As Jack was delivering this oration, he was laying his rope-coil out on the planking of the fore-top, so it would unfurl cleanly. A grappling-hook flung from the rail of the port galley nearly struck him in the face. Jack ducked and shrugged. It bit into the planking at his feet, which popped and groaned as some Janissary put his weight on the attached line. Jack jerked his sword loose and chopped through it, sending a corsair down to be crushed between the converging hulls of the two ships.
The engagement, which had been miraculously quiet—almost serene—until now, became a cacophony of booms as the Barbary pirates fired all of their guns. Then it became silent again, as no one would have time to reload before it was all over. Jack’s view below was temporarily clouded by smoke. He was looking almost level across to the port galley’s tall mainmast, which had a narrow crow’s nest near the top. It was an obvious target for a grappling-hook and indeed Jack snagged it on the first throw—then, pulling the slack out of the line, was almost torn off the fore-top as the ships rocked in opposite directions and their masts suddenly spread apart. Jack decided to construe this as an opportunity, and quickly wrapped the rope round his left forearm several times. The next movement of the ships ripped him off the fore-top, putting a few thousand splinters into his abdomen, and sent him plunging into space. The rope broke his fall, by nearly pulling his arm off. He whizzed across the middle of the galley in an instant, seeing just a blur of crimson and saffron, and a moment later found himself hanging out over the blue ocean, ponderously changing direction. Looking back the way he’d just come, and was shortly to go again, he saw a few non-combatants staring back at him curiously—including one of those slave-drivers. When Jack’s next pendulum-swing took him back over the galley’s deck, he reached out with the sword and cut that man’s head in two. But the impact of sword on skull sent him spinning round, out of control. Flailing, he swung back over the deck of God’s Wounds and slammed into the base of the foremast hard enough to knock the wind out of his lungs and make him let go of the rope. He slid to the deck and looked around at a number of men’s legs—but not legs he recognized. The whole ship was covered with Janissaries, and Jack was the only one who’d done any fighting at all.
The one exception to that rule was Yevgeny, who had got the gist of Jack’s stirring first speech, but not understood the more pragmatic second one. Accordingly, he had harpooned the rais, or captain of the starboard galley, right through the throrax.
This and other statistics of the battle (such as it was) were conveyed to Jack by Mr. Foot later, after they had been stripped of all clothes and possessions and moved onto a galley, where a blacksmith was stoking up his forge and making ready to weld fetters around narrow parts of their bodies.
The corsairs rifled the holds of God’s Wounds in all of about fifteen minutes, and obviously lacked enthusiasm for the cowrie shells. The only captive who wasn’t transferred to a galley was Mr. Vliet, who had been ferr
“What was all that nonsense you were raving from the fore-top?” Mr. Foot asked. “No one could understand a word you were saying. We were all just looking at each other—” Mr. Foot pantomimed a bewildered shrug.
“That you’d all better show what magnificent fighters you were,” Jack summarized, “or else they’d have you chained up straight off.”
“Hmph,” Mr. Foot said, too diplomatic to point out that it hadn’t worked in Jack’s case. Though a few discreet winks from some of the bleeding sunburned wretches told Jack that his partial decapitation of that one slave-driver might make him as popular among galley-slaves as he’d formerly been among Vagabonds.
“Why should you care?” Mr. Foot asked a few minutes later, as the anal violation of his erstwhile business partner showed no sign of coming to a climax any time soon. The barrel supporting Mr. Vliet had slowly worked its way across the deck of God’s Wounds until it lodged against a rail, and was now booming like a drum. “You’re not long for this world anyway.”
“If you ever visit Paris, you can take this question up with St.-George, mort-aux-rats,” Jack said. “He taught me a few things about correct form. I have a reputation, you know—”
“So they say.”
“I hoped that you, or one of the younger men, might show some valor, and become a Janissary, and one day make his way back to Christendom, and tell the tale of my deeds ’gainst the Barbary Corsairs. So that all would know how my story came out, and that it came out well. That’s all.”
“Well, next time enunciate,” Mr. Foot said, “because we literally could not make out a word you were saying.”
“Yes, yes,” Jack snapped—hoping he would not be chained to the same oar as Mr. Foot, who was already becoming a bore. He sighed. “That is one prodigious butt-fucking!” he marveled. “Like something out of the Bible!”
“There’s no butt-fucking in the Good Book!” said the scandalized Mr. Foot.
“Well, how should I know?” Jack said. “Back off! Soon, I’ll be in a place where everyone reads the Bible all the time.”
“Heaven?”
“Does it sound like heaven to you?”
“Well, it appears they are leading me off to a different oar, Jack,” Mr. Foot said. Indeed, a dead man was being cut loose from an oar at the stern, and Mr. Foot was being signalled for. “So if we never speak again—as seems likely—Godspeed!”
“Godspeed? Godspeed! What kind of a thing is that to say to a fucking galley slave?” were Jack’s last words, or so he supposed, to Mr. Foot.
Mr. Vliet was being pushed overboard by a couple of Janissaries. Jack heard the splash just as he was sitting down on the shit-stained bench where he would row until he died.
BOOK THREE
Odalisque
In all times kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbors; which is a posture of war.
—HOBBES, Leviathan
Whitehall Palace
FEBRUARY 1685
LIKE A HORSEMAN WHO REINS in a wild stallion that has borne him, will he, nill he, across several counties; or a ship’s captain who, after scudding before a gale through a bad night, hoists sail, and gets underway once more, navigating through unfamiliar seas—thus Dr. Daniel Waterhouse, anno domini 1685, watching King Charles II die at Whitehall Palace.
Much had happened in the previous twelve years, but nothing was really different. Daniel’s world had been like a piece of caoutchouc that stretched but did not rupture, and never changed its true shape. After he’d gotten his Doctorate, there’d been nothing for him at Cambridge save lecturing to empty rooms, tutoring dull courtiers’ sons, and watching Isaac recede further into the murk, pursuing his quest for the Philosophic Mercury and his occult studies of the Book of Revelation and the Temple of Solomon. So Daniel had moved to London, where events went by him like musket-balls.
John Comstock’s ruin, his moving out of his house, and his withdrawal from the Presidency of the Royal Society had seemed epochal at the time. Yet within weeks Thomas More Anglesey had not only been elected President of the Royal Society but also bought and moved into Comstock’s house—the finest in London, royal palaces included. The upright, conservative arch-Anglican had been replaced with a florid Papist, but nothing was really different—which taught Daniel that the world was full of powerful men but as long as they played the same roles, they were as interchangeable as second-rate players speaking the same lines in the same theatre on different nights.
All of the things that had been seeded in 1672 and 1673 had spent the next dozen years growing up into trees: some noble and well-formed, some curiously gnarled, and some struck down by lightning. Knott Bolstrood had died in exile. His son Gomer now lived in Holland. Other Bolstroods had gone over the sea to New England. This was all because Knott had attempted to indict Nell Gwyn as a prostitute in 1679, which had seemed sensational at the time. The older King Charles II had grown, the more frightened London had become of a return to Popery when his brother James ascended to the throne, and the more the King had needed to keep a nasty bleak Protestant—a Bolstrood—around to reassure them. But the more power Bolstrood acquired, the more he was able to whip people up against the Duke of York and Popery. Late in 1678, they’d gotten so whipped up that they’d commenced hanging Catholics for being part of a supposed Popish Plot. When they’d begun running low on Catholics, they had hanged Protestants for doubting that such a Plot existed.
By this point Anglesey’s sons Louis, the Earl of Upnor, and Philip, Count Sheerness, had gambled away most of the family’s capital anyway, and had little to lose except their creditors, so they had fled to France. Roger Comstock—who had been ennobled, and was now the Marquis of Ravenscar—had bought Anglesey (formerly Comstock) House. Instead of moving in, he had torn it down, plowed its gardens under, and begun turning it into “the finest piazza in Europe.” But this was merely Waterhouse Square done bigger and better. Raleigh had died in 1678, but Sterling had stepped into his place just as easily as Anglesey had stepped into John Comstock’s, and he and the Marquis of Ravenscar had set about doing the same old things with more capital and fewer mistakes.
The King had dissolved Parliament so that it could not murder any more of his Catholic friends, and had sent James off to the Spanish Netherlands on the “out of sight, out of mind” principle, and, for good measure, had gotten James’s daughter Mary wedded to the Protestant Defender himself: William of Orange. And in case none of that sufficed, the Duke of Monmouth (who was Protestant) had been encouraged to parade around the country, tantalizing England with the possibility that he might be de-bastardized through some genealogical sleight-of-hand, and become heir to the throne.
King Charles II could still dazzle, entertain, and confuse, in other words. But his alchemical researches beneath the Privy Gallery had come to naught; he could not make gold out of lead. And he could not levy taxes without a Parliament. The surviving goldsmiths in Threadneedle Street, and Sir Richard Apthorp in his new Bank, had been in no mood to lend him anything. Louis XIV had given Charles a lot of gold, but in the end the Sun King turned out to be no different from any other exasperated rich in-law: he had begun finding ways to make Charles suffer in lieu of paying interest. So the King had been forced to convene Parliament. When he had, he had found that it was controlled by a City of London/friends of Bolstrood alliance (Foes of Arbitrary Government, as they styled themselves) and that the first item on their list had been, not to raise taxes, but rather to exclude James (and every other Catholic) from the throne. This Parliament had instantly become so unpopular with those who loved the King t
A crier marching up Piccadilly had related this news to Daniel as he and Robert Hooke had stood in what had once been Com-stock’s and then Anglesey’s ballroom and was by that point a field of Italian marble rubble open to a fine blue October sky. As a work table they had been using the capital of a Corinthian column that had plunged to earth when the column had been jerked out from under it by Ravenscar’s merry Irish demolition men. The capital had half-embedded itself in the soil and now rested at a convenient angle; Hooke and Waterhouse had unrolled large sheets and weighed down the corners with stray bits of marble: tips of angels’ wings and shards of acanthus leaves. These were surveyor’s plats laying out Ravenscar’s scheme to embed a few square blocks of Cartesian rationality on the pot-bound root-ball that was the London street system. Surveyors and their apprentices had stretched cords and hammered in stakes plotting the axes of three short parallel streets that, according to Roger, would sport the finest shops in London: one was labeled Anglesey, one Comstock, and one Ravenscar. But that afternoon, Roger had showed up, armed with an inky quill, and scratched out those names and written in their stead Northumbria,* Richmond,† and St. Alban’s.‡
A month after that there’d been no Parliament and no more Bolstroods in Britain. James had come home from exile, Monmouth had been removed from the King’s service, and England had become, effectively, a department of France, with King Charles openly accepting a hundred thousand pounds a year, and most of the politicians in London—Whigs and Tories alike—receiving bribes from the Sun King as well. Quite a few Catholics who’d been tossed into the Tower for supposed involvement in the Popish Plot had been released, making room for as many Protestants who had supposedly been involved in a Rye House Plot to put Monmouth on the throne. Just like many Popish Plotters before them, these had promptly begun to “commit suicide” in the Tower. One had even managed the heroic feat of cutting his own throat all the way to the vertebrae!