The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  The same was repeated all the way to the horizon on both sides of the road. Some of the weavers were working with coarse undyed thread, but most of their work was in vivid colors that burned in the light of the sun. In some places there would be an irregular patch of green, or blue, or yellow, where some group of weavers were filling a large order. In other zones, each weaver worked with a different thread and so there might be an acre or two in which no two frames were of the same color. The only people who were standing were a few boys carrying water; a smattering of bony wretches bent under racks of thread that were strapped to their backs; and a two-wheeled ox-cart meandering about and collecting finished bits of cloth. A rutted road cut through the middle of it all, headed off in the general direction of Diu: a Portuguese enclave at the tip of Kathiawar. This was the third day of their journey from Ahmadabad. The Charan continued to plod along ahead of them, humming to himself, occasionally eating a handful of something from a bag slung over his shoulder.

  Out of all the thousands of Pieces of India stretched out for viewing, one caught Jack’s eye, like a familiar face in a crowd: a square of blue Calicoe just like one of Eliza’s dresses. He decided that he had better get some conversation going.

  “Your narration puts me in mind of a question I have been meaning to ask of the first Hindoo I met who had the faintest idea what the hell I was saying,” he said.

  Down in the palanquin, Surendranath startled awake.

  Padraig sat up straighter in his saddle and blinked. “But no one has said a word these last two hours, Jack.”

  Surendranath was game. “There is much in Hindoostan that cries out, to the Western mind, for explanation,” he said agreeably.

  “Until we washed ashore near Surat, I fancied I had my thumb on the ‘stan’ phenomenon,” Jack said. “Turks live in Turkestan. Balochs live in Balochistan. Tajiks live in Tajikistan. Of course none of ’em ever stay put in their respective ’stans, which causes the world no end of trouble, but in principle it is all admirably clear. But now here we are in Hindoostan. And I gather that it soon comes to an end, if we go that way.” Jack waved his right arm, which, since they were going south, meant that he was gesturing towards the west. “But—” (now sweeping his left arm through a full eight points of the compass, from due south to due east) “—in those directions it goes on practically forever. And every person speaks a different language, has skin a different color, and worships a different graven image; it is as varie-gated as this” (indicating a pied hillside of weavers). “Leading to the question, what is the basis for ’stanhood or ’stanitude? To lump so many into one ’stan implies you have something in common.”

  Surendranath leaned forward in his palanquin and looked as if he were just about to answer, then settled back into his cushions with a faint smile under the twin spirals of his waxed moustachio. “It is a mystery of the Orient,” he said gravely.

  “For Christ’s sake, you people need to get organized,” Jack said. “You don’t even have a common government—it’s Moguls up here, and from what you are telling me, if we went south we would soon enough run afoul of those Marathas, and farther south yet, it’s those fiends in human form, who’ve got Moseh and Dappa and the others—”

  “Your memories of that day have run together like cheaply dyed textiles in the monsoon rain,” Surendranath said.

  “Excuse me, I was trying not to drown at the time.”

  “So was I.”

  “If they weren’t fiends in human form, why did you jump overboard?” Padraig asked.

  “Because I wanted to get to Surat, and those pirates, whoever or whatever they were, they would have taken us the opposite direction,” said Surendranath.

  “Why do you suppose we jumped out, then?”

  “You feared that they were Balochi pirates,” Surendranath said.

  Padraig: “Those are the ones who cut their captives’ Achilles tendons to prevent them escaping?”

  Surendranath: “Yes.”

  Jack: “But wait! If they are Balochis, it follows that they are from Balochistan! If only they would stay put, that is.”

  Surendranath: “Of course.”

  Jack: “But Balochistan is that hellish bit that went by to port—the country that vomited hot dust on us for three weeks.”

  Surendranath: “The description is cruel but fair.”

  Jack: “That would be a Mahometan country if ever there was one.”

  Surendranath: “Balochis are Muslims.”

  Padraig: “It’s all coming back to me. We thought they were Balochi pirates at first because they came after us in a Balochi-looking ship. Which, if true, would have been good for all of us save Dappa and you, Surendranath, because we were all Christians or Jews, hence People of the Book. Our Achilles tendons were safe.”

  Surendranath: “I must correct you: it wasn’t all right for van Hoek.”

  Jack: “True, but only because he’d made that asinine vow, when we were in Cairo, that he’d cut his hand off if he were ever taken by pirates again. Consequently he, you, and Dappa were making ready to jump ship.”

  Padraig: “My recollection is that van Hoek meant to stay and fight.”

  Jack: “The Irishman speaks the truth. The cap’n took us between two islands, in the Gulf of Cambaye over yonder—whereupon we were beset by the second pirate ship, which was obviously acting in concert with the first.”

  Padraig: “But this one was much closer and was manned by—how do you say—”

  Surendranath: “Sangano pirates. Hindoos who steal, but do not kidnap, enslave, maim, or torture, except insofar as they have to in order to steal.”

  Jack: “And who had apparently taken that first ship from some luckless Balochi pirates, which is why we mistook them for Balochis at first.”

  Surendranath: “To this point, you are speaking the truth, as I recollect it.”

  Padraig: “No wonder—this is the point when you jumped out!”

  Surendranath: “It made sense for me to jump out, because it was obvious that we were going to lose all of the gold to the Sangano pirates. But van Hoek was preparing to fight to the death.”

  Jack: “I must not have heard the splash, Surendranath, as my mind was occupied with other concerns. Van Hoek, as you say, was steering a course for open water in the middle of the Gulf, probably with the intention of fighting it out to the end. But we hadn’t gone more than a mile when we stumbled directly into the path of a raiding-flotilla, whereupon all of the boats—ours, and our pursuers’—were fair game for this new group.”

  Padraig: “Darkies, but not Africans.”

  Jack: “Hindoos, but not Hindoostanis, precisely.”

  Padraig: “Only pirate-ships I’ve ever heard of commanded by women.”

  Jack: “There are rumored to be some in the Caribbean—but—none the less—it was a queer group indeed.”

  Surendranath: “You are describing Malabar pirates, then.”

  Jack: “As I said—fiends in human form!”

  Surendranath: “They do things differently in Malabar.”

  Padraig: “At any rate, even van Hoek could now see it was hopeless, and so he jumped, which was preferable to cutting his hand off.”

  Surendranath: “Why did you jump, Padraig?”

  Padraig: “I fled from Ireland, in the first place, specifically to get away from matriarchal oppression. Why did you jump, Jack?”

  Jack: “Rumors had begun to circulate that the Malabar pirates were even more cruel to Christians than the Balochi pirates were to Hindoos.”

  Surendranath: “Nonsense! You were misinformed. The Mohametan Malabar pirates are that way, to be sure. But if the ships you saw were commanded by women, then they must have been Hindoo Malabar pirates.”

  Padraig: “They are rich female Hindoo Malabar pirates now.”

  Jack: “Mr. Foot had run to the head, either to take a shite (which is what he normally does at such times) or to wave a white flag. But he tripped on a loose gold bar and pitched overboard. I went af
ter him, knowing he couldn’t swim. The water turned out to be less than two fathoms deep—I nearly broke my leg hitting the bottom. Accordingly, our ship ran aground at nearly the same moment. The rest is a blur.”

  Padraig: “It’s not such a blur. You and I, Monsieur Arlanc, Mr. Foot, van Hoek, and Vrej waded, bobbed, and dog-paddled across those endless shallows for a day or two. At some point we re-encountered Surendranath. Finally we washed up near Surat. The Armenian and the Frenchman later failed the Intelligence Test and wound up in the army of Dispenser of Mayhem.”

  Surendranath: “Concerning those two, by the way, I have sent out some messages to my cousin in Udaipur—he will make inquiries.”

  They came over the top of a gentle rise and saw new country ahead. A mile or two distant, the road crossed a small river that ran from right to left towards the Gulf of Cambaye, which was barely visible as a grayish fuzz on the eastern horizon. The river crossing was commanded by a mud-brick fort, and around the fort was a meager walled town. Jack already knew what they would find there: a landing for boats coming up the river from the Gulf, and a marketplace where Pieces of India were peddled to Banyans or European buyers.

  Jack said, “It will be good to see Vrej and Arlanc again, assuming they are still alive, and I will enjoy listening to their war-stories. But I already know what they would tell us, if they were here.”

  This announcement seemed to startle Padraig and Surendranath, and so Jack explained, “There must be some advantage to growing old, or else why would we put up with it?”

  “You’re not old,” Padraig said, “you can’t be forty yet.”

  “Stay. I have lived through more than most old men. Letters I have not learned, nor numbers, and so I cannot read a book, nor navigate a ship, nor calculate the proper angle for an artillery-piece. But people I know well—better than I should like to—and so the situation of Hindoostan is all too clear to me. It is clear when I watch you, Surendranath, speaking of the Moguls, and you, Padraig, speaking of the English.”

  “Will you share your wisdom with us then, O Jack?” Padraig asked.

  “If Vrej Esphahnian and Monsieur Arlanc were here, they would tell us that the Marathas are angry, well-organized, and not afraid to die, and that the Moguls are orgulous and corrupt—that the rulers of this Empire live better while besieging some Maratha fortress than the Hindoos do when they are at peace. They would tell us, in other words, that this rebellion is a serious matter, and that we cannot get the caravan of Surendranath from Surat to Delhi by dint of charm or bribery.”

  “You seem to be telling me that it is impossible,” Surendranath said. “Perhaps we should turn around and go back to the Habitation of Dust.”

  “Surendranath, which would you rather be: the first bird to jump off the ice floe, or the first bird to climb back onto it with a belly full of fish?”

  “The question answers itself,” Surendranath said.

  “If you listen to my advice, you will not be the former, but you will be the latter.”

  “You think other caravans will leave Surat first, and fall prey to the rebels,” Surendranath translated.

  “I believe that any caravan headed to Delhi will have to face the Maratha army at some point,” Jack said. “The first such caravan to drive the Marathas from the field shall be the first to reach its destination.”

  “I cannot hire an army,” Surendranath said.

  “I did not say you need to hire an army. I said you need to drive the Marathas from the field.”

  “You speak like a fakir,” Surendranath said darkly.

  THE MAIDAN OF THIS KATHIAWAR river-town sported a more or less typical assortment of fakirs both Hindoo and Mahometan. Several were content with the old arms-crossed-behind-the-head trick. A Hindoo one was swallowing fire, a red-skirted Dervish was whirling around, another Hindoo was standing on his head covered with red dust. And yet most of them had empty begging-bowls and were going ignored by the townspeople. A score of idlers, barefoot boys, passersby, strolling pedlars and river-traders had gathered around one spectacle at the end of the maidan.

  They were crowded so closely together that if Jack had not been mounted he wouldn’t have been able to see the object of their attention: a gray-haired European man dressed up in clothes that had been out-moded, in England, before Jack had been born. He wore a black frock coat and a broad-brimmed black Pilgrim-hat and a frayed shirt that made him look like a wandering Puritan bible-pounder. And indeed there was an old worm-eaten Bible in view, resting on a low table—actually a plank, just barely spanning the gap between a couple of improvised sawbucks, with a stained and torn cloth thrown over it. Next to the Bible was another tome that Jack recognized as a hymn-book, and next to the hymnal, a little place setting: a china plate flanked by a rusty knife and fork.

  Jack seemed to have arrived during a lull, which soon came to an end as an excited young Hindoo came running in from the market nearby, a dripping object held in his cupped hands. The crowd parted for him. He scampered up and deposited it in the center of the fakir’s plate: a metal-gray giblet leaking blood and clear juice. Then he jumped back as if his hands had been burned, and ran over to wipe his hands on a nearby patch of grass.

  The fakir sat for a few moments regarding the kidney with extreme solemnity, waiting for the buzz of the crowd to die away. Only when complete silence had fallen over the maidan did he reach for the knife and fork. He gripped one in each hand and held them poised over the organ for a few agonizing moments. The crowd underwent a sort of convulsion as every onlooker shifted to a better viewing angle.

  The fakir appeared to lose his nerve, and set the utensils down. A sigh of mixed relief and disappointment ran through the onlookers. Someone darted up and tossed a paisa onto the table. The fakir put his hands together in a prayerful attitude and muttered indistinctly for a while, then reached for his Bible, opened it up, and read a paragraph or two, faltering as he came to bits that had been elided by book-worms. But this was something from the Old Testament with many “begats” and so it scarcely mattered.

  Again he took up the knife and fork and struggled with himself for a while, and again lost his nerve and set them down. Mounting excitement in the crowd, now. More and larger coins rang on the plank. The fakir took up the hymnal, rose to his feet, and bellowed out a few verses of that old Puritan favorite:

  If God thou send’st me straight to Hell

  When I have breath’d my Last,

  Just like a Stone flung in a Well

  I’ll go down meek and Fast…

  For even though I’ve done my Best

  T’obey thy Law Divine,

  Who am I, thee to contest?

  The Fault must all be Mine!

  …and so on in that vein until the fire-eater and the Dervish were screaming at him to shut up.

  Pretending to ignore their protests, the Christian fakir closed up the hymnal, took up knife and fork for the third time, and—having finally mustered the spiritual power to proceed—pierced the kidney. A jet of urine lunged out and nearly spattered an audacious boy, who jumped back screaming. The fakir took a good long time sawing off a piece of the organ. The crowd crept inwards again, not because anyone really wanted to get any closer, but because people kept blocking one another’s view. The fakir impaled the morsel on the tines of the fork and raised it on high so that even the groundlings in the back row could get a clear view. Then in one quick movement he popped it into his mouth and began to chew it up.

  Several fled wailing. Coins began to zero in on the fakir from diverse points of the compass. But after his Adam’s apple moved up and down, and he opened his mouth wide to show it empty, and curled his tongue back to show he wasn’t hiding anything, a barrage of paisas and even rupees came down on him.

  “A stirring performance, Mr. Foot,” said Jack, half an hour later, as they were all riding out of town together. “Lo these many months I have been worried sick about you, wondering how you were getting along—unfoundedly, as it turns out.”
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br />   “Very considerate of you, then, to show up unasked-for to share your poverty with me,” said Mr. Foot waspishly. Jack had extracted him from the maidan suddenly and none too gently, even to the point of leaving half the kidney sitting on the plate uneaten.

  “I regret I missed the show,” said Padraig.

  “Nothing you haven’t seen before in a thousand pubs,” Jack answered mildly.

  “E’en so,” said Padraig,” it had to’ve been better than what I’ve been doing the last hour: sneaking round peering at idolaters’ piss-pots.”

  “What learned you?”

  “Same as in the last village—they do it in pots. Untouchables come round once a day to empty them,” Padraig answered.

  “Are the piss and shit always mixed together or—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  “First kidney-eating and now chamber-pots!” exclaimed Surendranath from his palanquin. “Why this keen curiosity concerning all matters related to urine?”

  “Maybe we will have better luck in Diu,” Jack said enigmatically.

  THAT RIVER-CROSSING MARKED THE BEGINNING of a long, slow climb up into some dark hills to the south. Surendranath assured them that it was possible to circumvent the Gir Hills simply by following the coastal roads, but Jack insisted that they go right through the middle. At one point he led them off into a dense stand of trees, and spent a while tromping around in the undergrowth hefting various branches and snapping them over his knee to judge their dryness. This was the only part of the trip when they were in anything like danger, for (a) Jack surprised a cobra and (b) half a dozen bandits came out brandishing crude, but adequate, weapons. The Hindoo whom Surendranath had hired finally did something useful: viz. pulled a small dagger, hardly more than a paring-knife really, from his cummerbund and held it up to his own neck and then stood there adamantly threatening to cut his own throat.