The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  “Stop, I pray you. Do you suppose my mind is as empty as this?” He kicked the strong-box with the side of his foot and it boomed like a drum. “I know that you would never have come to Leipzig had you not so arranged matters that you could hold out to me the choice of destruction or salvation. It is all very ingenious, I am sure, the sort of thing I’d have found fascinating at your age; but I am not your age.”

  “Of course I am well aware that you have moved beyond money, to Alchemy—”

  “Oh, you are? And I suppose you have some morsel to dangle above my mouth, where the Solomonic Gold is concerned?”

  Having been anticipated thus made Eliza disinclined to say it, but she did: “I know who has it, and where; if that is your desire—”

  “My desire was to conquer Death, which took my brothers young and unfairly,” said Lothar von Hacklheber. “It is a common desire. Most come to terms with Death sooner or later. My failure to do so was an unintended consequence of a pact that my family had made with Enoch Root. In order for him to dwell among humankind he must don identities, and later, before his longevity draws notice, shed them. My father knew about Enoch—knew a little of what he was—and struck a deal with him: he would vouch for Enoch as a long-lost relative named Egon von Hacklheber, and suffer him to dwell among us under that name for a period of some decades, if, in exchange, ‘Egon’ would serve as a tutor to his three sons. Of the three, I was in some sense the quickest, for I came to know that Enoch was not like us. And I guessed that this was a matter of his having discovered some Alchemical receipt that conferred life eternal. A reasonable guess—but wrong. At any rate, it fired my interest in Alchemy until of late.”

  “And what came of late to damp that fire?”

  “I adopted an orphan.”

  “Oh.”

  “It is trite, I know. To defeat Death, or to phant’sy that one has defeated it, by having a child. But I could not manage it before. For the same pox that slew my brothers left me unable to get a woman pregnant. I’ll not speak of the motives that led to the taking of the boy from the orphanage where you kept him at Versailles. They were, as you have collected, quite beastly motives. I did not intend to love the boy. I did not even intend to keep him in my house. But as things came out, I did both—first kept him, then loved him—and as time went on, my mind turned to Alchemy, and to the lost Gold of Solomon, less and less frequently. I’d not thought of it for half a year until you reminded me of it just now.”

  “Then whatever other differences you and I may have, we are united in seeing it as foolishness.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it is the least bit foolish,” said Lothar, raising the pocked ridges where eyebrows had once sprouted, “all I said was that I no longer think of it. I’m ready to die. And whether I die rich or poor is of little account to me. But you are gravely mistaken if you believe that you can take Johann away from me. For that truly would be kidnapping; it would break his heart, and that would break yours.”

  “As to that, I am not mistaken. I know this, and have known it, ever since I learned, from the Doctor, that he was being raised as your son.” Eliza looked up to solicit a confirmation from Leibniz. But it seemed that the Doctor had some minutes ago quietly taken Caroline aside, and led her off to some other corner of the courtyard so that Eliza and Lothar could talk privily.

  “Son and sole heir,” Lothar corrected her, “though, thanks to your intrigues, I have nothing to will to him save debts.”

  “That could be changed.”

  “Then why do you not change it? What is it you want? Why are you here?”

  “To see him. To hold him.”

  “Granted! Truly and happily granted. You may move in with me here, for all I care; you’re welcome to do so. But you can’t take him.”

  “You are in no position to dictate terms.”

  “Foolish girl! They’re not my terms, and I am not dictating them! They are the terms of the world. You cannot admit to this world that you bore a child out of wedlock. You cannot even admit it to the boy—until he is older, perhaps, and able to fathom such things. You can take him back and give him to the Jesuits, who will raise him up to be a priest, who will fault his mother for having sinned. Or you can leave him in my care, and visit him whenever you will. In a year or two he’ll be old enough to travel—he can visit you incognito in France, if that shall please you. He shall be a Baron and a banker, a gentleman, a Protestant, the cleverest scholar in Leipzig; but he shall never be yours.”

  “I know. I know all of these things—have known them for years.”

  Lothar’s ravaged face was a difficult one to read, but he seemed exasperated now, or bewildered. “After all this,” he said, “I did not expect you to be such a confused person.”

  “You did not? How unreasonable of you. You belabor me for being confused—yet you took the boy, not for love of him, but for hate of me, and out of lust for Alchemical gold—only to change your mind!”

  Lothar shrugged. “Perhaps that is the real Alchemy.”

  “Would that such Alchemy could work its spell on me, and make me as content as you seem.”

  “I shall grant you this much,” said Lothar. “The taking of the gold at Bonanza put me into a vengeful rage that kept me awake at night, and filled all of my days, for a long time, and drove me to hurt you as badly as I supposed you had hurt me. I wanted you to fathom my anger. You then went on to destroy me, cleverly and systematically, over a span of years. You used my own greed as a weapon against me. And if I seem content to you, why, in part it is because I have a son. But in part it is because of you, Eliza, your Barock fury, sustained for so long and expressed so Barockly. You showed, you expressed, what I once felt; and from that, I knew that I had struck home, that a spark had passed between us.”

  “Very well. Enough of this. Do you have, Lothar, a spare banca at which I could sit down for some minutes, and write a letter?”

  Lothar spread his hands out, palms up, as if handing the place over to her. “Take your pick, madame.”

  SHE WOULDN’T HAVE NOTICED FLAIL-ARM if not for this gesture of Lothar’s, so stealthily had the big amputee crept into the House. But as it happened, she turned on the balls of her feet to gaze into the court, and saw in the corner of her eye that a new thing had been added to the jumble-sale: a tall man with a beard, who had chosen this moment to step out from behind a crate. As before, he held a long walking-staff; but now something had been added to its end: the leaf-shaped warhead of a harpoon, its twin edges white where the whetstone had scoured them. This he hefted in his one hand, bringing it up above his shoulder, and he swung the shining adder’s head about so that it pointed at the heart of Lothar.

  Now Eliza—who only a couple of hours ago had been preaching to Caroline about the importance of noticing, and connecting—at last took her own advice. There was no telling how long it might have taken for her to recognize Flail-arm as Yevgeny the Raskolnik if he had not suddenly appeared gripping a harpoon, and making ready to kill Lothar; but these two data did the trick. She remembered now seeing this Yevgeny in the company of Jack in Amsterdam. Eliza had even borrowed his harpoon, and in a fit of pique hurled it at Jack. Yevgeny must have become, and might still be, a member of Jack’s pirate-band. He must have peeled off from the group and come back to Christendom for some reason. He’d been keeping an eye on Eliza, and, in consequence, had found himself in Leipzig, before the gates of the house of the man who, as he supposed, was Jack’s worst enemy. And now he was about three heartbeats away from doing what any red-blooded pirate would, when presented with such an opportunity.

  This hefting and pointing of the harpoon was only the first move in some procedure that involved running some steps toward the prey. Yevgeny also extended his stump, which he had fortified with what appeared to be a cannonball on the end of a stick: a counterweight to augment the force of the throw. Eliza began moving sideways toward Lothar. She would interpose herself between harpoon and target, and Yevgeny would break off the attack. Yevgeny’
s blue eyes flicked towards her as she moved.

  But a small person flitted out of the shades of the gallery. He had built up a running start and so was able to bound up and over the empty strong-box next to Lothar and thence to the top of the baluster that surrounded the courtyard. He already had an arrow nocked to his tiny bow, for as Yevgeny had stolen around the courtyard, getting into position to attack, Johann must have stalked him, and plotted intercepts, and looked for his opportunity. Eliza, seeing him flash across her vision, had already changed course, and flung out both arms toward the boy; but quick as a fingersnap he drew back his arrow and let it fly. Its blunted tip caught Yevgeny in the eye just as he was winding up to throw. The counterweight dropped like Thor’s hammer. His body convulsed forward. The arm cracked like a knout. The harpoon was launched. It hurtled past Lothar’s shoulder and crashed into the banca behind him. Lothar dropped onto his arse. Eliza, unable to stop herself, ran into Johann and hammered him off the railing; he tumbled into the dusty cobbles below and became one large abrasion. Yevgeny had ended up on his knees, staring forward. Eliza assaulted the baluster with her midsection and toppled over it, diving to the courtyard and catching her weight on her hands.

  She, Johann, and Yevgeny now formed an equilateral triangle, maybe two yards on a side, in the court. Lothar, enthroned on his empty coffer, gazed down upon them in stupefaction. Yevgeny was no less dumbfounded. Johann was still winding up to bawl. Eliza, having just narrowly evaded death by smallpox, was the least taken aback, and the first to get up. She took a step toward Yevgeny. She didn’t know Russian, and assumed he knew little French. But if he’d been a galley-slave in Algiers, he must know Sabir; so she scraped up a few leavings of that tongue that were to be found in rarely-visited corners of her brain, and said to him—quietly, so that only he could hear—“If your loyalty is to Jack, then know that this man is no longer your enemy. Instead go to Versailles and throw some harpoons at Father Édouard de Gex.”

  Yevgeny nodded once, clambered to his feet, and went up to the level of the gallery to extract the tool of his trade from the tool of Lothar’s. Because of the head’s barbed flukes, this was not to be accomplished without half-destroying the banca; a task for which Yevgeny was superbly equipped in that he had the strength of ten men, and in lieu of one hand, a cannonball. A city-sacking’s worth of splintering and shattering was packed into a brief span of time; then he popped up with the terrible head in his hand, and the shaft under one arm. He turned toward Lothar and favored him with a very civil nod and half-bow, then stalked out of the House of the Golden Mercury, glancing up once to get the sun’s bearing.

  “Who was that!?” asked Leibniz. He and Caroline had been oblivious to the harpoon-attack but had been drawn to the banca-demolition.

  Eliza had Johann on her hip; he had got through all of the bawling and gone into child-shock.

  “My dear Doctor,” she answered, “if I explained every little thing to you, you’d grow bored with me, and stop writing me those charming letters.”

  “I simply wish to know, for practical reasons, whether you are being stalked by any more giant murderous harpooneers.”

  “He is the only one, as far as I know. His name is Yevgeny the Raskolnik.”

  “What’s a Raskolnik?”

  “As I said before, if I explain everything…”

  “All right, all right, never mind.”

  Our heart oft times wakes when we sleep, and God can speak to that, either by words, by proverbs, by signs, and similitudes, as well as if one was awake.

  —JOHN BUNYAN,

  The Pilgrim’s Progress

  She chose an ancient desk that had been dragged out into the court and left to die. Rain had fallen on it, and its planks had warped and split, and its drawers were stuck. But the sun shone on it, which felt good on her skin. From another banca she fetched a sheet of foolscap, and in a recess of this one she quarried out a glass inkwell whose cork was cemented in place by a rime of hardened ink. In the end the only way to get it open was to take that stiletto out of her waist-sash and scrape off the crust, then pry the cork loose. The ink had become sludge. She thinned it with saliva and gathered some of it up into a quill.

  Leibniz and Caroline were sitting on crates, doing lessons: “Tactics,” said the Doctor, “are what the Duchess of Arcachon has been pursuing; Baron von Hacklheber has quite neglected tactics for strategy.”

  “Who won?” Caroline asked.

  “Neither,” said the Doctor, “for neither pure tactics nor pure strategy constitutes a wise course for a Prince, or a Princess. Perhaps the winner shall be Johann Jean-Jacques von Hacklheber.”

  “Let us hope so,” said Caroline, “for he has been saddled with the most ungainly name I have ever heard.”

  Eliza to Jean Bart

  MAY 1694

  Captain Bart,

  My dear friend Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, being the contrôleur-général of France, has, and shall have, numberless opportunities to channel the flow of the King’s revenues in those ways that are most satisfactory to him, and so I feel I do him no great disfavor by suggesting that you sail your treasure-ship to the port of Dieppe, so that the King’s loan to the House of Hacklheber may at last be repaid. France is helpless to defend her interests on foreign soil, so long as her credit, in foreign eyes, is bad; and repayment of even a single loan shall go far towards repairing the damage done in recent years. The German and Swiss bankers have already abandoned Lyon, but this need not prevent the payment from being sent through more modern channels, perhaps in Paris. It might help if you could suggest as much to the gentleman in Dieppe.

  I thank you for having consulted me before taking action in this matter. Please know that one of the beneficiaries shall be your long-lost godson, who, as I write these words, is creeping up on me from behind with a bow and arrow, like a dirty little Cupid.

  Eliza

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MADAME?”

  “Finishing up a letter.” She scattered sand across the page to blot it.

  “To whom?”

  “The most famous and daring pirate-captain in the world,” Eliza said matter-of-factly. She let the sand slide off onto the ground, folded the letter up, and began ransacking the old desk’s drawers for a bit of sealing-wax.

  “Do you know him?”

  Using a scrap of paper as a spatula, Eliza scraped some beads of sealing-wax out of a drawer-bottom. “Yes—and he knows you. He held you when you were baptized!”

  Johann von Hacklheber quite naturally wanted to know more—which was how Eliza wanted it. He pursued her like an Indian tracker through the dusty rooms of the House of Hacklheber, pelting her not with arrows but with questions, as she scared up a melting-spoon, a candle, and fire. Presently she had a flame going under the blackened belly of the spoon. Into it she poured the crumbs of wax that she had looted from the desk: mostly scarlet, but a few black, and some the natural color of beeswax. Those on the bottom quickly succumbed to the heat. Those above stubbornly maintained their shapes. The similarity of these to smallpox-vesicles was very obvious to her. “When a thing such as wax, or gold, or silver, turns liquid from heat, we say that it has fused,” Eliza said to her son, “and when such liquids run together and mix, we say they are con-fused.”

  “Papa says I am confused sometimes.”

  “As are we all,” said Eliza. “For confusion is a kind of bewitchment—a moment when what we supposed we understood loses its form and runs together and becomes one with other things that, though they might have had different outward forms, shared the same inward nature.” She gave the melting-spoon a little shake, and the beads of wax that had been floating on its top—which had become sacs of liquid wax, held together by surface tension—burst and collapsed into the pool of molten wax below, giving off a puff of sweet fragrance, vestiges of the flowers visited long ago by the bees that had made this stuff. It was sweeter by far than the telltale fragrance of smallpox, which she hoped never to smell again, though she caught a whi
ff of it from time to time as she moved about the town.

  Before the black and red could mix together into mud, Eliza dumped the contents of the spoon onto her folded letter, and mashed her ring into it. The seal, when she pulled her ring away from it, was of scarlet marbled through with black and pale streaks—most attractive, she thought, and perhaps the beginning of a new trend at Court.

  Lothar had summoned a rider who was willing to carry the message at least as far as Jena, where other messengers might be found to take it into the west. The rider waited just inside the gates with one horse that was saddled, and a second to spell it. Eliza handed him the letter and wished him Godspeed, and he mounted up without further ceremony and set to trotting down the street. When he reached the great square, he got his mount turned toward the west gate, and cantered out of sight. Along his wake were any number of curious onlookers, peering out the windows, and opening up the doors, of diverse factories and trading-houses. A man emerged from a door, pulling a big wig down over his stubbled scalp. He turned toward the House of the Golden Mercury and began to hustle toward it, eager to get some explanation from Lothar; and before he’d reached Lothar’s gate, two others, not to be outdone, had fallen in stride with him. Eliza returned their courteous greetings as they went in the gate, curtseying to each in turn. But she did not follow them in. She stayed out in the street to watch the news spread and to hear the slow-building murmur of Leipzig coming alive.

  Book 4

  Bonanza

  Southern Fringes of the Mogul Empire

  LATE 1696