The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  When Jack was satisfied with the progress of the caulking and sealing of the great dunce-cap, he ascended the platform—a tinker’s shop and an apothecary-store of ladles, funnels, bottles, and terra-cotta vessels of clove-oil—and was pleased to observe a slight rise in the water-level, followed by a blurp and a collapse as some residual steam forced its way through the water-trap in the U-bend. This happened several more times in the next few minutes as the very last of the moisture was exhaled from the humid cake in the kettle, but then it stopped. There was then an interlude, which grew awkward the longer it went on; but Jack bid them keep stoking the fire and have faith. He was viewing the water level with respect to a wee bubble trapped in the glass pane, and for a while it did not move at all. But then it rose up distinctly, and a moment later a little belch of vapor shimmered up through the water and broke out the top. “It begins!” he announced.

  Contrary to claims lately issued by Mr. Foot to the good people of Diu, Jack did not have the power to command the wheeling of the heavens. It was wholly fortuitous that the sun went down a few minutes later. The window in the side of the bubbler gleamed in the light of the sunset, as shiny objects were wont to do. But after the sun had gone down it continued to glow for a length of time that was odd, then remarkable, and, finally, unnatural. For it only got brighter as the night grew darker. Had it not been square, it might have been mistaken for a full moon. It grew so bright that if Jack stared at it full-on he became dazzled, and then could see nothing else. He assigned to Monsieur Arlanc the duty of monitoring the level of the water and adding more as needed to keep it from boiling dry; which had been the error that had led to Padraig’s injury. Jack then turned his back on the window and let his eyes adjust. From the platform, he saw, as if he were an actor on a stage, a lake of faces, all turned his way, many with mouths open in wonder, all lit up by the blue-green radiance of the kaltes Feuer, the cold fire, of Phosphorus: light-bearer. They were all out of doors, of course, and the cold fire confined to a small vessel of beaten copper; but that was not how it seemed. It seemed that these people were all walled up inside some black dungeon, which had only a single square window, high up in the wall, through which light shone in from another world.

  “This will all be smoking ruins by break of day,” he announced, “let us gather what we may of the kaltes Feuer and preserve it from the air, and ourselves from fiery death!”

  They went about that in two ways. First, someone would from time to time dip a ladle into the top of the bubbler and scoop out portions of the water, and along with it, flecks and flakes of cold fire that swirled through it like sparks above a campfire. This they decanted through funnels into the bottles that Vrej had procured. The glowing bottles were handed down to others on the ground, who stopped them with rags to prevent air from getting in. These were then placed into a tray of simmering water that was going over a bed of coals. Gradually, over a period of hours, the level of water within these bottles declined as it escaped through the rag stoppers. But the amount of light escaping from them did not diminish, for the waxy phosphorus was trapped inside, and tended to cling to the walls, so that each bottle over time acquired a blotchy lining of weird light. When these bottles were nearly dry, they were plucked out and plunged neck-first into a tar-pot, to seal them against infiltration of air.

  Second, they dumped ladles of the stuff into clay pots each of which contained a small amount of clove oil. The water fell through the oil and found the bottom of the pot, shedding some of its burden of phosphorus along the way. These pots were then subjected to a similar process of gentle heating, so that the water trapped beneath the oil was driven out as steam. When these pots stopped blurping and steaming, it meant that all the water was gone, and nothing was left but phosphorus suspended in oil. The oil coated the tiny particules of phosphorus and prevented air from touching them, which rendered the stuff safe.

  This anyway was the general plan of action. For the most part it actually went this way; but what made it interesting were the mishaps. Every splash and spill remained visible as a pool, burst, or dribbling trail of cold fire. Jack got some splashed on a forearm and did not notice it until he went and stood by the bottle-simmering place for a few minutes; the warmth shining from the bed of coals dried the damp place on his arm, leaving a fine layer of phosphorus that burst into unquenchable flame. Many had similar stories. Presently most of them were naked, having frantically stripped off clothing when it was pointed out to them by excited spectators that they were glowing. Ladles were spilled on the scaffolding by burnt and nervous hands, obliging Monsieur Arlanc to stand his ground with more than human courage as he implored someone to come up and wash away the spill with buckets of fresh water before it dried out. The caulking around the windowpane weeped, then seeped, then began to dribble a steady stream of cold fire. They made shift to catch what they could of this, and confine it to bottles or oil-pots; but matters deteriorated as more and more of the scaffold, the ground beneath it, and the men working on it became tinged with the fire, which could have only one consequence when it dried. Finally Jack ordered Monsieur Arlanc to abandon ship. The Huguenot vaulted down with spryness odd in a man of his age, rending his garments even as he hit the ground; men converged on him with buckets of sea-water and sluiced him off until he was dark. Then all ran away, for the leak around the windowpane had opened wide, and the fire was raining down in a blinding cataract. The water all came out. Air found its way in through the empty bubbler to the chimney, which had become thickly lined with condensed phosphorus. White fire shrieked out of it. The sun rose. What a moment ago had been glowing pools of spilled fire on the black velvet ground, were revealed as damp patches on khaki dirt. The bubbler ripped loose, hurtled away, and impacted on the roof of a monastery half a mile downrange. The chimney and dunce-cap shot into the air, spiraling and pin-wheeling through the night sky as if the Big Dipper had scooped up a load of the sun’s own fire. It landed somewhere out to sea. Left in the vicinity of the scaffold was a metropolis of small sputtering conflagrations that erupted here and there without warning over the next several hours. Fortunately they had had the wisdom to establish the double-boilers for the bottles and the clove-oil pots at a respectful distance. So they abandoned the center and toiled at the periphery until daybreak. This was not without some dangers of its own; sometimes a bottle would crack from the heat, and then some intrepid person would have to pluck it out with tongs and fling it away, lest in burning and exploding it would detonate the others. This led to the burning-down of the house where they had all been dwelling. In other circumstances, the loss of their domicile would have been rated a grave setback; as it was, they knew they were going to be kicked out of town anyway. A formation of Portuguese pikemen came for them at daybreak. Working amid the smoldering ruins of what had, a month earlier, been a perfectly respectable brewery, Jack and the others had already loaded the bottles (packed very carefully in straw) and the pots of oil into crates, and the crates onto those wagons that remained unburnt, and harnessed these to the few domesticated beasts that had not run away or simply dropped dead of terror during the night-time. They were escorted, not to say pursued, by the pikemen down to the quay where they boarded their hired boat with the phosphorus and what few possessions they still had. Winds favored them; pirates, who had witnessed strange apparitions in the night sky above Diu, avoided them; and a day and half a later they were in Surat, taking up their position near the head of a great armed trade-caravan, and beginning the long march north and east to Shahjahanabad.

  “YOU WILL BE AMUSED to know that where I come from, swords are straight,” Jack said. “Some are broader, and indeed, being a plain-spoken people, we call those broadswords. Some are of intermediate size, as rapiers, others whisker-thin, as the small-swords that are lately in vogue. Oh, admittedly one sees a few blades with a bit of a curve to them, as in your cutlass or saber. But compared to these, they’re all straight as a line, as are the style and tactics of their usage. Compared to which…”
Jack extended a hand towards a Mobb of warriors that they had picked up in Surat. There were Yavanas—which was to say, Muslims—who had come across the water from the lands to the west, or down out of Afghanistan, Balochistan, or this or that Khanate. And there were Hindoos of diverse martial castes who for whatever reason had elected to throw in their lot with the Moguls. But even within the smallest discernible sub-sub-subtribe each warrior had a weapon—or at least, a dangerous-looking object—completely different from the next bloke’s.

  Among the personal effects of the Doctor, Jack had once seen books, filled not with letters but with depictions of curves. These he had leafed through in times of boredom; for though he could not read, he could stare at a strange curve as well as any other man. Eliza had sat next to him and pronounced their names: the Limaçon of Pascal, the Kampyle of Eudoxus, the Conchoid of de Sluze, the Quadratrix of Hippias, the Epitrochoid, Tractrix, and the Cassinian Ovals. At the onset of the recitation Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of curves. Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true miracle was that poets, or writers, or whoever it was that was in charge of devising new words, could keep pace with those hectic geometers, and slap names on all the whorls and snarls in the pages of the Doctor’s geometry-books. Now, though, he understood that geometers and word-wrights alike were nothing more than degraded and by-passed off-shoots of the South Asian weapons industry. There was not a straight blade in all of Hindoostan. Some weapons had grips at one end and were sharpened elsewhere; these might be classed as swords. Others consisted mostly of handle, with a dangerous bit at one end; these Jack conceived of as axes or spears, depending on whether they looked like they were meant to be swung, or shoved. Still others had strings, and seemed capable of projecting arrows. Jack put these down as bows. But of the sword-like ones, some were bent all the way round to form hooks; some curved first one way, then thought better of it and veered back the other; some had a different curve on either edge, so that they became broad as shovels in parts; some quivered back and forth like wriggling snakes; some forked, or spun off hooks, beaks, barbs, lobes, prongs, or even spirals. There were swords shaped like feathers, horseshoes, goat-horns, estuaries, penises, fish-hooks, eyebrows, hair-combs, Signs of the Zodiac, half-moons, elm-leaves, dinner-forks, Persian slippers, baker’s paddles, pelican’s beaks, dog’s legs, and Corinthian columns. This did not take into account the truly outlandish contraptions that seemed to have been made by piling two or more such weapons atop each other, heating, and beating. Of long-handled swinging-weapons (axes, maces, hammers, halberds, and weaponized farm-implements, viz. war-sickles, combat-flails, assault-shovels, and tactical adzes) there was a similar variety. Most troublesome to Jack’s mind, for some reason, were the bows which instead of the good old crescent of English yew, here seemed to’ve been made from the legs of giant spiders; they were black, sinewy, glossy, spindly things that curved this way and that, and were sometimes longer on one end than the other, so that Jack could not even make out which end was up; which part was the handle; or which side was supposed to face the enemy. For each of these weapon-styles, he knew, there must be a six-thousand-year-old martial art with its own set of unfathomable rites, lingo, exercises, and secrets that could only be mastered through a lifetime of miserable study.

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me it is all quite mundane compared to the weaponry of our adversaries,” Jack muttered.

  “In truth you have waxed so peevish that I have avoided that, and all other topics of conversation, these last few hours,” said Surendranath.

  The Banyan was in his palanquin. Jack rode a horse. This helped explain the peevishness, for the former reclined in the shade of a roof while the latter was protected only by a turban.

  “Verily this must be the kingdom of Gordy himself,” said Jack.

  “Who or what is Gordy?”

  “Some bloke who had a Knot once, so tangled that the only way to get it undone was to chop it in twain. The story is proverbial among ferangs. It is what we are about to do at the crossing of the Narmada. Rather than see all of these blokes cross scimitars, kitars, khandas, jamdhars, tranchangs, et cetera with the Marathas, we are going to cut the Gordian Knot.”

  “To you it may be a proverb of great significance but to me it is meaningless,” said Surendranath, “and I would fain have something like an actual plan of battle before we meet the foe, which will probably occur this very night.”

  Here Surendranath was only pointing out something that had been weighing on Jack’s mind anyway, which was that they had been so preoccupied with making the phosphorus, and recovering from having made it, that they’d not thought much about what to do with it. So Padraig, Vrej, Monsieur Arlanc, and Mr. Foot were sent for, and presently rode up to join Jack and Surendranath. Van Hoek had chopped off the tips of his fingers the night before and, still woozy from shock and opium, was being carried behind on another palanquin.

  “This country that we have been traveling through,” said the Banyan, “is hardly the type of scene to make any of you write awe-struck letters home, but it is the most dangerous and unsettled part of Hindoostan.”

  They had made landfall at the port of Surat, which was at the mouth of the river Tapti, and since then had been heading north, following a caravan-road that ran parallel to the sea-coast, a few miles inland. From time to time they would cross some smaller stream that, like the Tapti, meandered down out of the country to their right on its way to the Gulf of Cambaye, to their left. All knew that the biggest such river was called the Narmada and that they would come to it today, but so flat was the landscape that it afforded no hints as to how near or far the great river might be. This coastal plain reminded Jack a little bit of the Nile Delta, which was to say that it was well-watered, populated with many villages, and presented to the traveler a mixed prospect of marshes, farms, and groves of diverse kinds of trees that were cultivated (or at least allowed to stay alive) because they provided fruit or oil or fiber. “We shall see wilder and stranger landscapes farther north,” Surendranath promised them, “but by then we shall be out of danger.

  “If you think of Hindoostan as a great diamond, then the valley of the Narmada, which we are about to cross, is like a flaw that runs through the heart of it. Hindoostan has ever been divided among several kingdoms. Their names change, and so do their borders—with one exception, and that is the Narmada, which is a natural boundary between the north and the south. North of it, invaders come and go, and control of the cities and strongholds passes from one dynasty to another. To the south, it is a different story. You cannot see them from here, but there is a line of mountains cutting across Hindoostan from east to west called the Satpura Range. The Narmada drains their northern slopes, flowing along the mountains’ northern flank through a straight deep gorge for many days’ journey. The westernmost extremity of this range is called the Rajpipla Hills, and if the air were not so hazy we would be able to see them off to our right. A day’s journey thataway, the Rajpipla Hills draw back away from the Narmada, which, thus freed from the constraints of the gorge, adopts a meandering habit, and snakes across this plain, and broadens to an estuary much like that of the Tapti which we have just put behind us.

  “The Moguls have proved little different from other martial races that controlled the north in millennia past, which is to say that the weapons and tactics that served them well in the plains and deserts proved ineffective in breaching the mountain-wall of Satpura. But unlike some who have been content simply to make the Narmada their southern border, they have nursed the ambition of making all Hindoostan a part of the dar al-Islam and so probed southwards via the only route that is passable: which happens to be the very road that we are treading on now. Coastal cities such as Broach on the Narmada and Surat on the Tapti they have conquered with ease, and, with a great deal of difficulty, retained. But south of Surat, the interior of Hindoostan is guarded from the western sea by a formidabl
e range of mountains, the Ghats, which are ever a refuge into which the Hindoo resistance—the Marathas—may withdraw when they desire not to meet the Moguls in pitched battle in the plain. Likewise the Satpura Range is mottled with strongholds of the Marathas, even as far west as the Rajpipla Hills. From time to time the Moguls will venture up there and expel them, for those Hills, because of their situation, are like a blade against the throat of the Moguls’ commerce; all Western trade, as you know, comes in to the ports of Daman, Surat, and Broach, and the Maratha chieftains well know that they may sever those ports’ links to the north by issuing from their forts in the Rajpipla Hills and descending the Ravines of Dh¯aroli to the Broach Plain—which is where we are now—and catching the caravans when they are backed against the River Narmada. Surat is infested with their sympathizers, and you may be assured that their spies saw us mustering there, and preceded us along this road and have already sent them word of our movements.”

  “Can we rely on them to attack us at night?” Jack asked.

  “Only if we are so foolish as to reach the south bank of the Narmada at dusk and attempt a night crossing.”

  “So be it then,” Jack said. “Clever stratagems are quite beyond my powers, but if it is rank foolishness you require, I have no end of it.”