The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  “I know where we are,” Jack said. But Enoch prevailed on him to check the compass anyway. Jack got it out and removed the cover: It was just a magnetized needle coated with wax and set afloat in a dish of water, and to get a reading, it was necessary to set it down on something solid and wait for a minute or two. Jack put it on a rock at the lip of the Black Vale of Vhanatiya, and waited for two minutes, then five. But the needle pointed in a direction that obviously was not north. And when Jack moved it to another rock, it pointed in a different direction that was not north.

  “If you are trying to spook me, it has worked. Let’s get the hell out of here,” Jack said.

  Their inspection of the Carnaya’s equipment had left Danny and Jimmy baffled and suspicious respectively. “’Twas nought more’n some dark matter, as dull and gross as anything I’ve ever seeyen,” Danny reported.

  “Certain gemstones look thus, before they have been cut and polished,” Jack said.

  “It was all sand and grit, nothing bigger’n a pin-head,” Jimmy said. “But Jayzus! Those sacks were heavy.”

  Enoch was as close to being excited as Jack had ever seen him. “All right, Enoch—let’s have it!” Jack demanded. “I’m king in these parts—stand and deliver!”

  “You are not king there,” Enoch said, nodding in the direction of the Black Vale, “nor in the place we will visit tomorrow.”

  Jimmy and Danny rolled their eyes in unison, and made guttural scoffing noises. They had been traveling in the company of Enoch the Red for half a year.

  JACK WAS STANDING ON A beach, letting warm surf surge and foam around his sore feet, and watching a couple of Hindoo men working with a fragile-looking bow-drill, using it as a sort of lathe to shape a round peg of wood from the purple heartwood of some outlandish tree. “Peg-makers are a wholly different caste from plank-whittlers, and will on no account intermarry with them, though on certain days of the year they will share food,” he remarked.

  No one answered him; no one even heard.

  Enoch, Jimmy, Danny, and Surendranath were standing on the beach a few yards away with their backs to him. On one side they were lit up by the reddish light of the sun, which (because they were so near the Equator) was making a meteoric descent behind the hills from which they had just descended. They were as motionless as figures in a stained-glass window, and in fact this was no mean similitude, since their heads were tilted back, their lips parted, their eyes clear and wide, much like Shepherds in the hills above Bethlehem or the Three Women in the empty tomb. Waves surged around their ankles and leapt up as high as their knees and they did not move.

  They were beholding a vast Lady that lay on the beach. She was the color of teak. The light of the sun made her flesh glow like iron in a forge. She was far larger than the largest tree that had ever been, and so must have been pieced together from many individual bits of wood, such as this peg that the peg-maker was shaping next to Jack, or that plank that the plank-maker over there was assiduously sculpting out of a giant rough timber. Indeed, if they had come a year ago they might have seen her ribs jutting into the air, and courses of hull-planks still being cut to length, and it would have been evident that she had after all been pieced together. But in her current state it seemed as if she had just grown on the beach, and the way that the grain-lines of the teak followed her every curve did everything to enhance that illusion.

  “Aye,” Jack said, after he had allowed a proper silence to go by, “sometimes I think her curves are too perfect to’ve been shaped by man.”

  “They were not shaped, but only discovered, by man,” said Enoch Root, and risked a single step towards her. Then he fell into silence again.

  Jack busied himself inspecting various works higher up the beach. For the most part these were makers of planks and pegs. But in one place a shed of woven canes had been erected, and thatched with palm-fronds. Inside it, a woodcarver of higher caste was at work with his chisels and mallets; wood-chips covered the sandy floor and spilled out onto the beach. Jack went in there, bringing Surendranath as his interpreter.

  “For Christ’s sake! Look at her! Will you just look at her!? Look at her!” Then a pause while Jack drew breath and Surendranath translated this into Marathi, a couple of octaves lower, and the sculptor muttered something back.

  “Yes, I see quite plainly that you were so good as to remove the elephant-trunk, and that the lady has a proper nose now, and for that you have my undying gratitude,” Jack hollered sarcastically, “and as long as I am helping you with your self-esteem, sirrah, allow me to thank you for scraping off the blue paint. But! For! Christ’s! Sake! Do you know, sirrah, how to count? You do!? Oh, excellent! Then will you be so good, sirrah, as to count the number of arms possessed by this Lady? I will patiently stand here while you take a full inventory—it may take a little while…oh, very good! That is the same reckoning that I have arrived at! Now, sirrah, if you will be so kind, how many arms do you observe on my body? Very good! Once again, we agree. How about Surendranath—how many arms has he? Ahh, the same figure has come up once again. And you, sirrah, when you carve your idols, you hold the hammer in one, and the chisel in another, hand—how many makes that? Remarkable! Yet again we have arrived at the same figure! Then will you please explain to me how come it is that This! Lady! is formed as you have formed her? Why the numerical discrepancy? Do I need to import a Doctor of al-jebr to explain this?”

  Jack stormed out of the shed, followed closely by Surendranath, who was saying, “You told the poor fellow she was supposed to represent a goddess—what on earth were you expecting?”

  “I was being poetickal.”

  Jimmy and Danny had long since clambered aboard, and were running from stem to stern and back again, hooting like schoolboys. Enoch had been walking about her, tracing short segments of arcs on the wet sand, and was now standing in violet light with the water up around his knees.

  “My first thought was that she couldn’t have been wrought by a Dutchman, on account of her marked dead-rise,* which will make her fast but will bar her from most Dutch harbors.”

  “There are no Dutch harbors around here, you’ll notice,” Jack observed.

  “Her stem is strongly raked, more like a jacht than a typical East Indiaman. It looks as if two and maybe three exceptionally noble teaks were sacrificed to fashion that curve. There are no such trees in Europe any more, and so stems are pieced together, and rarely have such a rake. How did you find trees that were curved just so?”

  “In this country, as you have seen, there is a whole sub-civilization of woodcutters who carry in their heads an inventory of every tree that grows between the Roof of the World in the north, and the Isle of Serendib in the south,” Jack said. “We stole those trees from other jagirs. It took six months and was complicated.”

  “And yet her keel is no shorter, for all her stem-rake. So yet again, the builder seems to have valued speed above other desirables. Being so long and so rakish, she had to be narrow—quite a bit of volume has been sacrificed to that. And even more has been given up to riders and other reinforcements—you’ve put two ships’ worth of teak into her. Expecting her to carry a lot of guns, are you?” Enoch asked.

  “Assuming you’ve held up your end of the transaction.”

  “She should last thirty or forty years,” Enoch said.

  “Longer than most of us will,” Jack answered, “present company excepted, that is—if the rumors about you are true.”

  “Anyone who looks at her will know she is hauling valuable cargo,” said Enoch. “If ship-building is the art of compromise, then your builder has everywhere chosen speed and armament at the expense of volume. Such a ship can only pay for her upkeep if she is hauling items of small bulk and great value. She is pirate-bait.”

  “If there is anything we have learned in our wanderings, it is that every ship on the sea, even one as humble as God’s Wounds, is pirate-bait,” said Jack. “And so we have built a pirate-slayer. There is a reason why the Dutch make their merchan
tmen almost indistinguishable from their Ships of Force. Why should we go to the expense of fashioning a teak-built ship, only to lose her to some boca-neers six months after she is launched?”

  Enoch nodded. Jack had become a bit furious.

  “So let me hear your guess, Enoch. You said that she didn’t look like a ship built by a Dutchman. Who was the shipwright, then?”

  “A Dutchman, of course! For only they are so free in adopting outlandish notions—only they have the confidence. Everyone else only parrots them.”

  “You are both right and wrong,” Jack said after a moment’s pause, and then turned away and began slogging down the beach in the direction of a fire that had been kindled in the last few minutes, as the sun had finally disappeared and stars came out overhead. “Our shipwright is one Jan Vroom of Rotterdam. Van Hoek recruited him.”

  “His name is well-known. What on earth is he doing here?”

  “It seems that in the days of Vroom’s apprenticeship, shipwrights were held in high esteem by the V.O.C. and the Admiralty, and given a free hand. Each ship was built a little differently, according to the wisdom—or as some would say, the whim—of the shipwright. But recently the V.O.C. have become prideful, thinking that they know everything that will ever be known about how to build ships, and they have begun specifying sizes and measurements down to a quarter of an inch—they want every ship the same. And if a shipwright dares to show any artistry, why, then, some rival shipwright will be brought in to take measurements and write up a report, laying out how these rules and regulations have been violated, and causing no end of trouble. What it comes down to is that Jan Vroom did not feel appreciated. And when a worm-gnawed and weatherbeaten letter arrived in his hands, a couple of years ago, from an old acquaintance of his named Otto van Hoek, he dropped what he was doing and took passage on the next ship out of Rotterdam.”

  “Looks as if more followed,” said Enoch, for they were now close enough that they could see a whole semicircle of muttering Dutchmen around the fire, lighting up their clay pipes with flaming twigs. In the middle were the red-headed captain, and a tall man with a blond-going-gray beard who was obviously Vroom. But four younger men were around them, listening and nodding.

  “Before we interrupt these gentlemen, let us conspire in the darkness here,” said Enoch.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Along with these very Dutchmen, you imported some scribe, skilled—or so you were told—in the cryptographickal arts. You had this scribe write me an encyphered letter saying, ‘Dear Enoch Root, I require forty-four large naval cannons, preferably of finest and most modern sort, please provide.’ And several months later I decrypted and read this document in London—though not before some spy had intercepted it, and copied it out. At any rate, I read this document and I laughed. I hope you were laughing when you dictated it.”

  “A smile might have played round my lips.”

  “That is good, because it was an absurd request. And if you did not have the wit to recognize it as such, it would mean you had turned into some sort of addle-pated Oriental despot.”

  “Enoch. Do you, or do you not, have certain large metal items for me?”

  “The items you refer to are not free for the taking. One does not acquire such goods without accepting certain obligations.”

  “You’re saying you’ve found us an investor? That is acceptable. What are his terms?”

  “You should rather say, her terms.”

  Jack levitated. Enoch clapped a hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eye. Enoch was facing toward the fire and the light glinted weirdly in the dilated pupils of his eyes: a pair of red moons in the night. “Jack, it is not her. She has done well for herself, it’s true—but not so well that she can dispatch an arsenal halfway around the world, simply because a Vagabond writes her a letter.”

  “What woman can?”

  “A woman you saw once, from a steeple in Hanover.”

  “Stab me!”

  “And now you appreciate, I trust, how deep the matter is.”

  “But I should not have addressed the letter to Enoch Root, if I did not want it to become deep. What are her terms?”

  The red moons were eclipsed for a little while. Enoch sighed. His breath on Jack’s face was hot and warm like a Malabar breeze, and laced—or so Jack imagined—with queer mineral fragrances.

  “Investors who dictate terms are common as the air, Jack,” Enoch said. “This is a different matter altogether. You are not borrowing capital from an investor in exchange for specific terms. You are entering into a relationship with a woman. Certain things will simply be expected of you. I cannot even begin to guess what. If you and your partners fail to act as gentlemen should, you will incur the lady’s displeasure. Is that specific enough? Is it clear?”

  “It is neither.”

  “Good! Then this has been a successful conversation,” Enoch said. “Now I must convey the same maddening ambiguity to your partners. That being accomplished, I must show due diligence, and—”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Certain items are conspicuously absent—such as masts and sails. Cordage. A crew. I cannot release the weapons until I have seen these. Also, her position on the beach is vulnerable.”

  “We will float her soon, and complete her on the water—as is traditional. If she had a few cannons on board she would be a difficult prize to take from land.”

  “Agreed. Have you made plans for her maiden voyage?”

  “We were thinking perhaps of running saltpeter to Batavia, and then bringing spices back to one of the Great Mogul’s ports—for Hindoostan consumes more spices than all Europe combined, and they have no lack of silver with which to pay for it.”

  “It is not a bad plan. But you may have a different plan tomorrow, Jack.”

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON FOUND THEM in dangerous territory south of the Black Vale of Vhanatiya. The Carnaya miner had given Enoch deliberately misleading directions that would have led him directly into a Maratha trap. But Enoch had anticipated this, and tracked the miner through the hills like a hunter stalking wild game.

  They passed for some hours through a high terrain overgrown with vicious scrub. All of the large trees seemed to have been cut down long ago and never grown back. Just when Jack was convinced that they were utterly lost in the most God-forsaken part of the world, he smelled camels, and they stumbled upon a caravan of Persians headed the same direction. This was a bit like running into a clan of kilted Scotsmen in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

  The way became broad and trampled; Enoch no longer had to use his tracking skills. Finally even the scrub and thorn plants vanished. Like a few pebbles rattling down into a stoneware bowl, they descended into a rocky crater, maculated with schlock-heaps and filled with a perpetual miasma of wood-smoke.

  “Even if your taste is abominable, I must grant you credit for consistency,” Jack muttered. “How is it you always end up in the same sort of place?”

  “By following the spoors of men such as the Carnaya,” said Enoch, speaking in a hush, like a Papist who’s just entered a basilica. “Now you see why I insisted that we come here alone—if we’d brought an escort of rowzinders, imagine how this place would have been upset.”

  “Isn’t it already?” Jack asked. “What the hell are they up to? And why are those Persians here? And do my smoke-burnt eyes deceive me, or is that a contingent of Armenian long-range traders?”

  Enoch said only: “Watch.” So Jack followed Enoch and watched Enoch watch.

  Now in the beginning Jack was certain that they had come to the place where all of Europe’s teacups were manufactured, for there were clay-pits all over, and Hindoos squatted in them fashioning teacup-sized vessels. These were carried up to kilns to be fired. But if they were teacups, they were rough thick-walled ones without handles or decoration, and each came with a domed lid. And other peculiar operations were going on nearby: Canes of bamboo, and odds and ends of teak-wood, were being loaded
into smoky furnaces to be turned into charcoal. Jack was certain that some of this teak was scrap left over from his ship-building project, and was peeved at first, then amused, to realize that his kolis had another operation going on the side.

  Teak and bamboo were not the only vegetable matter being brought up to this stony vale. Wizened hill-people were staggering down under twig-bundles bigger than they were, and being paid in silver by important-looking characters. Jack did not recognize the twigs, but he gathered from the price paid for, and the reverence accorded, them that they were of some sort of plant sacred to the Hindoos.

  All of these ingredients came together before a towering mud hearth, a sort of blazing termite-mound the size of a small church that rose from the center of the compound, looking twice as ancient as anything Jack had seen in Egypt. An old man with a priestly look about him squatted on his haunches next to a pyramid of rough teacups. He stirred his hand around in a sack of black sand just like what the Carnaya had panned out of the riverbank, and sifted it between his fingers into the crucible, seemingly feeling every single grain between his wrinkled fingertips, flicking away any that didn’t feel right. Then he chose a few shards of charcoal and distributed them around atop the black sand, crumbling them into smaller bits as necessary, and finally plucked some leaves and blossoms from a giant spraying faggot of magic twigs and arranged these on the charcoal like a French chef placing a garnish atop a cassoulet. Then his hand went back into the sack of black sand and he repeated the procedure, layer upon layer, until the tiny vessel was full. Now the lid went on, and it was passed with great care to an assistant who sealed the lid in place with wet clay.

  The finished crucibles, looking like slightly flattened balls of mud, were stacked like cannonballs near the great furnace. But they did not go in just now, because a firing was in progress: Jack could look in and see a heap of similar crucibles glowing in the heat like a bunch of ripe fruit.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Enoch Root, “they are only red-, not yellow-hot. That means that the iron ore is not actually being melted. Instead the charcoal is being absorbed by the iron, though the iron is yet solid.”