The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  The ceremony was all in Latin. Sunstroke probably would have slain them all if it hadn’t been December. About four hours into it, Jack noticed that Moseh was humming to himself, which was the one thing Jack would never have expected. He was tempted to bend his head close to Moseh’s, but given that he was wearing a dunce-cap three feet high, the movement would have been about as subtle as dancing a tarantella on the Lord’s Table. So he stood straight, along with everyone else in Mexico. To his other side Edmund de Ath was muttering some Latin phrases of his own, but rather than closing his eyes and bowing his head, he seemed to be staring straight forward into a phalanx of wealthy nuns seated below and to the left hand of the Archbishop. Jack had nothing but time, and so he looked at each nun in turn until finally he recognized Elizabeth de Obregon staring right back at him.

  The auto da fé continued there until shortly after sundown and then devolved: the nuns and monks marched away in color-coded processions and the poor people staged a bread-riot. Which seemed like an interesting story, but Jack wanted no part of it. He and Moseh and Edmund de Ath made rendezvous with Jimmy and Danny and Tomba, and out of the city they went.

  When finally it was safe to talk out loud, Jack said to Moseh, “Never was a Jew so happy during an auto da fé—have you been chewing those Peruvian leaves that the Spaniards are so fond of?”

  “No, I was watching the sun swing low over the mountains and pondering matters astrologickal. First: This is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and the longest in the Southern, which is good for us at both ends. Here it made the ceremonies an hour or two shorter than they might have been, and much cooler. Down Tierra del Fuego way, the weather’s as balmy as it ever gets, and the days exceptionally long. If van Hoek knows what he’s doing—which I think he does—he’ll be venturing into the Straits of Magellan about now. Which brings me to my Second observation, namely: a new year is about to begin. It is the second year of the Eighteenth Century, and van Hoek will celebrate it (God Willing) by rounding Cape Horn, and I will celebrate it by trading this cursed sanbenito for a poncho and this dunce-cap for a sombrero and riding north, beyond the reach of the Inquisition. It is the Century of the Enlightenment—I can feel it!”

  “You have been chewing leaves from Peru,” Jack concluded.

  THAT NIGHT THEY LODGED at an inn where they had to suspend their boots and stirrups from the ceiling in order to prevent them from being carried away and eaten by rats. They paid an outrageous price and departed before dawn, and after getting clear of certain fœtid suburbs where Vagabonds dwelt, they began the first leg of their journey north: traveling through the high Valley of Mexico. This was quite a bit more interesting to Edmund de Ath than to the others, who had seen it before. The Belgian was silent as they trudged over marshy plains gouged with the remains of failed flood-control projects, and splotched here and there with weirdly colored mineral springs. From cocoa and vanilla plantations rose gaudy churches and monasteries thrown up by Spaniards who had made ludicrous amounts of money, and in some cases half torn down by the thieves and Vagabonds who infested this country far in excess of Europe.

  Moseh’s ineffable Leadership Qualities had caused a whole retinue of sanbenito-and-dunce-cap-wearing crypto-Jews to fall in step behind them. They paraded through inexplicable concentrations of Negroes and Filipinos and over foamy puddles of congealed lava, past sugar-works smoking and steaming. At riverbanks they struck complicated bargains with Indians, naked except for loincloths and lines of tattooed dots on their faces, and were towed across on balsas made of planks lashed across bundles of air-filled calabashes, while other Indians back-carried the burros across fords. They steered clear of settlements or else rode through them as directly as possible, for now that they were out of the city, most of the townspeople were criollos (mixed-blood, born here) who bore a mad hostility towards Europeans. They’d have drawn much unwanted attention, and criollo boys would have been darting out and chucking stones at them, even if they hadn’t been wearing sanbenitos.

  All in all it seemed advisable to get clear of settled areas as quickly as possible, so Jack, Moseh, Jimmy, Danny, and Tomba payed very little attention to all of the Roadside Attractions that so fascinated Edmund de Ath, and bent all efforts to putting miles between them and the City. Only food was worth slowing down for, as when a miniature deer appeared at the edge of a copse or they happened upon a large tree whose branches were crowded with turkeys. Then sudden loud noises, clouds of smoke, and roadside butchery.

  “Your ransom cost us a fortune,” Danny remarked, “but as luck would have it, we have several.”

  “Have you been making new deals during our absence,” Moseh said nervously, “or only making deliveries on the old?”

  “We sold all the mercury for sixpence a ton,” Jimmy answered sharply, “and spent that on whiskey and prostitutes.”

  Silence, then, for a mile or two. Then Moseh tried again, patiently: “As I am still part owner of the quicksilver, I am entitled to know how much has been delivered, how much committed, and how much held back.”

  “Before we came on the scene, the King of Spain’s men were gouging the mine-owners to the tune of three hundred pieces of eight per hundred-weight of quicksilver,” Danny reminded him, “and when we began selling it for two hundred, the Spaniards dropped the price to one hundred, which is nearer its natural market-price. At the time you and Dad were arrested by that Inquisition, we were takin’ a breather from sellin’ of it, waitin’ for the price to stiffen up a bit.”

  Jimmy continued, “When Danny and Tomba and I came back from the Cape of Currents with a mule-train of quicksilver, and learned you’d been arrested, the price was still no higher than a hundred twenty-five, and so we contented ourselves making good on the deliveries you’d arranged, Moseh, and hidin’ the proceeds in various locations ’tween here and Vera Cruz. But lately we’ve had nothin’ to occupy ourselves, and the price has crept up to one-sixty—”

  “Near two hundred in Zacatecas,” Tomba put in.

  “And so we’ve been strikin’ some deals of our own, if that’s all right with you.”

  “It is perfect,” Moseh said. Three sombreros swiveled in his direction, looking for sarcasm, but Moseh was sincere: “Without delay, I want to liquidate my assets.”

  “Or since we are speaking of quicksilver, solidify ’em,” Jack said.

  “Very well, I want to take my share of the Plan, in the form of silver, or better yet gold, and strike out for the north with them.” He looked back over his shoulder at the crowd of red Xs shuffling along in their wake. “Lately these Spaniards have conquered a new territory up beyond the pissant ditch known as the Rio Grande, which they style New Mexico. It can’t possibly be worse than Old. Word has it that six hundred cavalry are garrisoned in that territory, and each one is paid five hundred pieces of eight a year, but most of that ends up in the coffers of the governor, who sells those soldiers food and other necessaries at outrageous prices. That is upwards of three hundred thousand pieces of eight a year! I am going to go up and sell them victuals at a fair price, and while I’m at it, I’m going to convert every Indian I see to Judaism.”

  “Er, if half of what they say of those Comanches is true,” said Danny, “’tweren’t wise to go up to ’em and prate about religion.”

  “Or any subject,” said Tomba.

  “Truth be told, ’tweren’t wise to go up to ’em at all,” said Jimmy.

  “That is enough!” Jack said. “Moseh has cashed out of one Plan to invest in another, and naturally the new one needs a little refinement…he’ll have plenty of time to make improvements on the ride north.”

  AFTER A FEW DAYS they rode up out of the Valley and into mountains that were much less inhabited. Other than pockets of wretched Indians who’d been chased up out of the lowlands by the Spaniards, the only folk who lived up here were miners. The mines were old, deep, and famous, and surrounded by adobe houses and churches. Most of the workers were forced labor, and most were Indi
ans. In many ways the landscape was like that of the Harz Mountains, with schlock-heaps all over the place, and large outdoor furnaces where the ore was refined, and mounds of earth in long rows where quicksilver was being used to extract silver from lower-grade ore. To Jack it was a toss-up as to whether the Harz with its icy wind and leaden skies was a bleaker landscape than this sunburnt place where nothing grew except cactus. Moseh’s ruminations were bleaker yet: “They’ve been turning the land inside out for almost two hundred years, and here are the bones and guts strewn about…I’m reminded of the Expulsion in 1492. Spanish Jews fled to Portugal. They rode down roads strewn with the bodies of the ones who’d gone before them—friends and relatives who’d been waylaid by bandits and eviscerated, on a rumor that they swallowed gold and diamonds to smuggle them out of the country. These Spaniards are giving a like treatment to this country, and getting the Indians who used to own it to do the dirty work for them.”

  “The coca has worn off, I see—this might be a good time to think harder about your new Plan,” said Jack.

  As they worked north into Guanajuato, the mines became newer, shallower, more slapdash—typically these were owned by individual prospectors. More and more, the workers were free men. But this country had been settled long enough that some towns had been built, churches erected, and families moved in. It was in one of those towns—which a generation earlier had marked the absolute northern boundary of civilization—that they paused for a day to make a grand reckoning.

  Starting from that night in the Gulf of Cadiz when they’d sacked the ex-Viceroy’s treasure-brig, Moseh had kept, in his mind, a ledger-book of all that the Cabal had gained and lost. At certain times, as when they’d fallen into the hands of Queen Kottakkal, whole pages had been torn out and thrown away. Some of the Cabal had died, others had joined in late, some had taken their shares out in intangibles, such as Gabriel Goto, who only wanted to see Japan. Some of the Cabal’s value was in Minerva, which, God willing, would continue generating revenues, other was in the quicksilver-hoard that they’d brought across the Pacific. This had been split into two batches, one for New Spain and one for Peru; the former had already been liquidated, the latter might have been sold for greater or lesser amounts of money that, now, might or might not be on the bottom of the Straits of Magellan. Whatever the current Bottom Line might be, part was owed to Queen Kottakkal and part to Electress Sophie of Hanover. But Moseh worked through all of these complications, committing it to paper so that Jack could show it to van Hoek later, and patiently explaining the difficult bits until Jack agreed.

  This reckoning stretched over three days, and in the end Moseh was reduced to bringing in a sack of dried beans and making piles of them on the table, shoving them from place to place to demonstrate to Jack where the money had gone. A great many beans ended up on the floor, representing what they’d simply lost. But when Moseh was finished, an impressive pile of beans still remained on the table, and when Moseh told him that each bean amounted to a hundred pieces of eight, Jack had to admit that the Plan Moseh had proposed to him long ago in Algiers had been a pretty good one after all.

  Jimmy and Danny and Tomba meanwhile ventured out into certain desolate places and recovered enough silver pigs to pay Moseh what was due him. Lacking banks, they had deposited their assets in holes in the ground, carefully hidden.

  On the fifth of January 1702, then, Moseh and a score of others donned their sanbenitos and dunce-caps and formed a mule-train on the edge of this little adobe town, and set out for New Mexico. Jack rode with them until they were well out of sight of the bell-tower beside the town’s church. There, every man except Jack stripped off his sanbenito and his cap, and they made a bonfire of them by the roadside. Jack shook every man’s hand, but he embraced Moseh, and with tears washing the dust from his face, issued several ludicrous promises, e.g., that after he’d bought himself an earldom in England he’d come out to New Mexico for a social call. The parting lasted for a long time, which only made it worse when Moseh finally climbed astride his mule and hauled on one rein and got it pointed north. Jack stood there for an hour or so, making sure the sanbenitos were thoroughly burnt to ashes, and watching the dust-trail of the mule-train swirl up into a blue sky: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and…

  “Quicksilver to silver,” he said, turning towards the town. “Then Jack to London.”

  “AS FAR AS I CAN DISCERN, all that remains here is to collect the final remnants of what was cached around Cabo Corrientes, make certain deliveries, and get the pigs down to Vera Cruz, where we’ll await Minerva,” said Edmund de Ath that evening, as they sat in front of the cantina availing themselves of the liquor of the maguey.

  “It is not so easy as you make it sound,” Jimmy growled.

  “On the contrary, I think it is much too difficult for a man of my limited capacities,” said de Ath. “Here, I’ll be an impediment. In Vera Cruz, on the other hand, there is much I could be doing to smooth the way for us, when Minerva, God willing, arrives.”

  “Get thee to Vera Cruz, then,” Jack suggested.

  “I am interested to see the place,” said de Ath. “Properly it is called New Vera Cruz. The old city was burnt to the ground, almost twenty years ago, by the notorious and terrible outlaw called El Desamparado…”

  “I have already heard the story,” Jack said.

  WINDING UPMINERVA’S affairs in New Spain took several months. Jack, Jimmy, Danny, and Tomba moved north to a frontier town in Zacatecas where no one cared if Jack failed to wear his sanbenito—or if they did, they were too scared to say anything, because this was a town of desperadoes, and every man went armed all the time. When Jack had lived in Europe, he had enjoyed and even profited from being a picaroon in a world of Lords, Ladies, and Chamber of Commerce members. But he found living in a whole society of picaroons to be tiresome if not downright dangerous. So he did not linger in that border-town long, but went west over the Sierra Madre Occidental with a mule-train to recover the last of the goods they’d cached around Cabo Corrientes: a ton of quicksilver, and all of van Hoek’s books—which he had left in the mountains so that they would not be seized and burnt by the Inquisition when Minerva called at Acapulco or Lima.

  The trip back to Zacatecas was exceptionally dangerous because no fewer than three groups of desperadoes were waiting to waylay them in the passes. But Jimmy and Danny, as the result of their journey halfway around the world, and their exploits with the warrior-caste of Malabar, had become expert in travel through hostile mountains. And Tomba, a man who’d escaped from a sugar-plantation in Jamaica and covered a lot of ground since then, in places that were not friendly to black Vagabonds, had developed a kind of guile and subtility that Jack thought of as Oriental. There was nothing he could tell those three boys except to remind ’em, now and then, that this was not Hindoostan, and so they were only allotted one life apiece. This was cheerfully ignored, or else taken as proof that, at the age of forty-one, Jack had become a fretful old man, and toothless in more than one way.

  Their trail back over the mountains was traced out by several set-piece battles in which the brigands found their ambushes ambushed, and many a desperado’s head was struck off by a ringing katana. They came back to discover that they were developing a legend, which Jack had come to believe was a good thing to leave behind but a bad thing to have.

  A letter was waiting in the saloon that they used as their headquarters; the innkeeper said it had been brought up from the south by a courier, and that it was addressed to either Moseh or Jack. Since Moseh and Edmund had gone away, the only person in this town capable of reading it was the parish priest. But the priest would turn Jack in to the Inquisition if Jack revealed his identity, for Jack hadn’t been wearing his sanbenito or attending Mass. Jack tossed the letter for safe-keeping into the caulked trunk that contained van Hoek’s books, and re-sealed it.

  Now their assets consisted of a ton of quicksilver (which needed to be delivered to various mine-heads and exchanged for pigs of silver)
and several tons of pigs distributed among a dozen buried caches. All of it had to be moved to Vera Cruz. Yet it would be folly to concentrate it in one gigantic wagon-train, and so the caches had to be dug up and moved one at a time, leap-frogging one another as they converged on Vera Cruz. It was a complicated business that really demanded the skills of a Moseh or a Vrej Esphahnian, and it sorely taxed Jack, who preferred things simpler. More than once he woke up in the middle of the night wondering whether they’d left a cache behind in the mountains.

  The one or two broad simple concerns of Jack’s early life, like the light and dark portions of a wootz-ingot, had been hammered out and folded over, hammered out and folded over, so many times that they had become involved and inter-tangled into a swirl of swirls, something too intricate to follow, or to be given the name of “pattern” or “design.” It registered on the mind as a blunt impression that could be talked about only by smearing it into some gray word like “complicated.” But he would tell Jimmy and Danny and Tomba that it was complicated, and they would not have the faintest understanding of what he meant. Jack could only pray that its complexity gave it the strength and keenness of a watered-steel blade. Much later he might be able to discern whether there was beauty in it, too.