THE System OF THE WORLD

by Neal Stephenson

  “Do the same rivers always spring up? Or is it new ones, in different places, at every tide?” Daniel mused.

  “One will recur, again and again, for years, perhaps undergoing slow alterations from tide to tide,” Isaac answered.

  “It was a rhetorical question,” Daniel muttered.

  “Then some day, perhaps after a storm or an exceptional high tide, the water draws back, and it is gone, never to be seen again. There is much in the subterranean realm that is as opaque to the mind, as it is to the eye.”

  Isaac now moved across the poop deck to view Shive Tor. Daniel felt compelled to stay at his elbow.

  To their left, gray spread to infinity. Ahead, it extended only to the shore of the Isle of Grain, a couple of miles distant. Most of the isle barely rose above the horizon, but there was one hill, perhaps fifty to a hundred feet above sea level, grassy, with a few weather-shocked trees flinging their arms back aghast. Atop that stood a small, blocky, ancient stone church. It stood broadside to the sea, as if the masons had begun by erecting a wind-wall so that they would have something to stand in the lee of, then topped it with a steep roof to deflect the gales heavenwards. On its western front was a square tower with a flat roof and a crenellated top, which the Black Torrent Guard had pressed into service as a watch-tower.

  Between Atalanta and the foot of that hill, the gray expanse was divided into an upper and a lower part by an irregular line of heaving froth. Below, this was tinged with blue and aqua. Above-nearer the land-it was washed with brownish and yellowish and greenish hues and mottled by scattered swellings in the mud. Sea-birds skimmed along just above it, moving in twos and threes as if hanging together for safety. From time to time they would alight and skitter about on twiglike legs, pecking at the mud. Some of them were doing so around the very foundations of Shive Tor, which stood high, but not dry, halfway between Atalanta and the foot of the hill.

  The Tor’s dredged ship-channel was aimed obliquely downriver, so to find its entrance Atalanta would have to glide a short distance past the Shive and come about. The sailors were making ready to accomplish that and to launch the longboat, and they were going about it smartly, for it now seemed quite possible that they might lose the fleeing whaler in the dark. A silver-greyhound flag had been produced from somewhere and was being lashed to a stunted flagpole on the longboat’s transom, so that, for what it was worth, everyone who saw them would know that they were the Queen’s Messengers. Two dragoons had been pressed into service throwing sounding-leads over the rail and calling out depths, one on the port and one on the starboard side of the bow.

  Barnes was arguing with the sloop’s captain as to which of them would need more dragoons. The latter wanted it understood that this was Mr. Charles White’s pleasure-jacht, not an Admiralty ship, and that, in consequence, he did not have any Marines aboard; and as the fleeing whaler probably contained the leaders of Jack’s organization-possibly even Jack himself-at any rate, the most notorious and dangerous criminal traitors in the Realm-most of the dragoons really ought to remain aboard the sloop.

  “But you are overhauling a single boat,” Barnes was saying. “We are assaulting a stone fortress. There’s no telling what we shall find-”

  But it was useless. Charles White-who would be staying on the sloop, that he might have the glory of catching Jack the Coiner-came down on his captain’s side, and pointed out that Barnes’s party would in a few minutes be reinforced by nearly a full company of dragoons charging across from the Isle of Grain. The number of dragoons put off in the longboat, not including Colonel Barnes and Sergeant Shaftoe, would be eight. If that was not enough, they could always draw back and await the onslaught from shore.

  “It is like playing a part in a masque,” Daniel heard Barnes muttering, “a farce entitled ‘How bad plans are made.’ ”

  “If Jack understood the true nature of the Solomonic Gold, he would not use it to coin false guineas,” Isaac said to Daniel, apparently feeling some need to justify his tactics aloud. “To him it is only gold. Slightly above common gold in value, but still gold. Finding himself under attack, he would get it out of the Tor and aboard the hooker. But when the hooker ran aground, he would resolve to abandon it. For he would have other hoards elsewhere.”

  “You think he threw it overboard?”

  “The band of criminals on the hooker, in their panic, might have thrown anything heavy overboard. So we might find it strewn along the bank of the dredged channel. Or it might still be aboard the hooker. I don’t think it is in the Tor, or on the whaler-come! It’s now!” And Isaac moved with short quick steps to the head of the stair that ran down to the upperdeck. His box of gear was slung over his shoulder on a leather strap, and it banged on his hip as he went, and threatened to pull him off balance. Daniel scurried up behind him and put a steadying hand on the box, and in this way the two old philosophers moved down the steps and across to where the longboat was a-dangle from a pair of out-thrust yards. Soon enough they, Barnes, Shaftoe, eight dragoons, and an able seaman from the sloop’s crew were aboard; though Daniel nearly toppled into the water, and in the scramble, lost his periwig. Lines were worked, and the boat jostled and slanted beneath them. They fell into the looming shadow of the sloop’s hull. Between the darkness and the loss of his wig, Daniel felt chilly, and called for someone to throw a blanket down to him. Soon a wadded-up lump of gray wool thudded down, followed by a knit watchman’s cap, which Daniel gratefully pulled down over his naked skull. As the sloop pulled away from them he saw his wig spinning in a vortex, its long white ponytail pointing this way and that, like a compass needle that has lost its fix on true north.

  The sloop-which seemed to move so slowly when one was aboard-sprang away from them. Or perhaps it only felt that way to one who was being marooned. Within a minute they were beyond shouting-range, and might signal the larger vessel only by having a dragoon fire a musket into the air.

  The platoons on the Isle of Grain were not moving nearly so quickly. When this plan had first been conceived, Daniel had phant’sied that Atalanta, and those mounted platoons, would converge on the Tor at the same instant. But here they were in this longboat at the mouth of the dredged channel, perhaps a musket-shot from the Tor, and the companies on the isle had not stirred yet. Supposedly they were at the foot of the hill, below the steeple of the church. But they were hidden in the dusky shadows, and obscured by grass. That they existed at all was merely a comforting assumption, like that there was a God and that He meant well.

  And so for a moment Daniel, and everyone else on the boat with the probable exception of Isaac, were overcome with the sense that it was all a terrible mistake.

  Then they could hear the faint sound of a horse blowing air through its lips, out somewhere along the shore. Then faint crackling sounds that came and went in pulses. For the isle was belted with a strand of cockleshells rejected by the surf, and some men must be treading on them as they came down on to the tide flats.

  “Let’s go for a bit of a row then,” Barnes said. “I’ll wager Jack has some claret inside.” He addressed these words to Bob Shaftoe, who bellowed something to his dragoons who were manning the oars. And rowing boats might not have been their metier; but they applied themselves to it cheerfully enough and began bashing their oars against each other. “Move some bloody water!” Bob told them. “This ain’t duelling with quarter-staves. Do I look like Robin bloody Hood to you? Stop banging ’em together and get ’em in the water!” And much more in that vein as the longboat began to spin and dodge forward across the pale water that lay thin on the mud-bank. They had crossed over the surf-line now, and the foam of the breakers looked as if it were above their altitude. This illusion was mildly unnerving even to Daniel, who had the advantage of being in a boat; it could not have been comforting to the approaching dragoons.

  Finally a horn sounded from the marshes, a cheer went up from the dragoons, and the edge of the island turned red as the First Company of the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards emerged
from the grass, all in a wide line, and began to advance over the flats at a trot.

  Daniel looked at the Tor. It was square-floored, each face of the building something less than ten yards wide. Perhaps twenty yards’ altitude separated its gaptoothed parapet from its foundation-a pile of boulders atop a lens of greasy black stone that poked up through the bank. “Shive” was a primeval English word for knee-cap, and Daniel, who had sliced a patella or two from cadavers, could see how the rock had come by its name. Slime and barnacles coated the lower reaches and made it difficult to tell where the natural plinth left off and the man-made work began. The Tor had been built up out of bulky brown boulders probably prised from a quarry upriver, barged down at high tide, and rolled overboard. White mortar held it together. There was but a single door, which looked out onto a silted pool at the terminus of this long gouge that they were fitfully navigating. The threshold was an arm’s length above where the fur of wee crusty creatures and rank weeds gave way to bare, wave-washed stone. So that was where they had built a floor. From the situation of windows (if that was not too grand a term for them) higher up, Daniel estimated there was a wooden platform above, forming an upper storey, and above that a roof, on which lookouts and gunners might stand to look out over, or through, the woebegone parapet.

  “Is there room here for so many horses, when the tide comes in?” Daniel asked.

  “First you were worried they would not come at all-I could see it in your phizz-now you’re worried because they’re coming!” Barnes returned. “It is nonetheless a question that deserves an answer. We are dragoons, Doctor. The horses are mere vehicles. When the men are here, the beasts will be sent back straightaway-they’ll be back on the Isle of Grain half an hour from now.”

  “I do beg your pardon, Colonel. As a wise man once told me, we are all scared.”

  Barnes nodded gracefully. But he could sense a Newtonian glare boring into the other side of his head, so without delay he said to the sergeant, “Let us advance, and see if we draw fire from the Tor.”

  “I did not understand that Sir Isaac Newton’s role was to draw fire,” Daniel shot back peevishly, then bit his tongue as even Isaac was smiling at Barnes’s jest. Annoyed now with everyone on the boat, including himself, Daniel snatched the blanket-ten pounds of greasy Qwghlmian wool-and settled it over his shoulders. It prickled him through his clothes like a heap of thistles, but it would eventually be warmer.

  The longboat balked mulishly as it scraped its keel on the sandy bottom every few yards. Sergeant Bob became exasperated, then profane, to the point where Sir Isaac became visibly offended. Half of the dragoons divested themselves of their powder-horns and granadoes, and vaulted over the gunwales to land waist-deep in the channel. This lightened the boat’s load enough to get its keel out of the muck, and it enabled them to move it along by pushing on it with their shoulders, as if it were a gun-carriage mired in Flanders. “Take advantage of the shallow water,” Barnes said approvingly, “we’ll not have it much longer.” The colonel had mostly been keeping an eye on the parapet, clearly worried about snipers. Isaac’s gaze was fixed on the hooker, which was now rolling freely on the bank of the channel-the direction of the tide had reversed! The sergeant was attending to his men.

  Daniel was the only one aware that the charge of the First Company from the Isle of Grain had come to a halt as soon as it had got started. Only a few yards beyond the cockle-belt, a few of the horses had gone down. The rest had halted, and the line of redcoats had split and spread into two wings, trying to probe around some obstacle. A pistol-shot tolled for a broken-legged horse. This got everyone’s attention. They heard, too, a distant thudding noise: an axe striking wood.

  “Jack’s men drove pilings into the mud,” was Bob’s guess, “and stretched chains between ’em, to stop the horses. This they would’ve done in the highest and driest parts, where the best footing was to be had; which tells us that the flanks are now in a mire. Someone is trying to chop through a piling with an axe.”

  “There are nails embedded in that piling, then, and his axe is already ruined,” announced Isaac absent-mindedly, without taking his eyes off the hooker.

  “Sir Isaac has good ears,” Daniel explained to the incredulous Bob.

  “Then he’d best plug them,” answered Bob and picked up a musket. A moment later the boat flinched from its recoil as he fired it into the air. He handed it to one of the dragoons, who set about furiously reloading.

  “As long as you are wasting balls and powder, waste them on the parapet,” said the Colonel.

  Within a few moments, several other muskets had been fired at the top of the tower, and a large glutinous mass of smoke had been set adrift on the calm evening air. No answering fire came back from Shive Tor. But the little fusillade had the effect Bob wanted: the dragoons off the Isle of Grain were dismounting, sending their horses back to dry land, and advancing on foot. Daniel was noticing that they now looked like dark motes against the gray sand. A few minutes ago their coats had been a proud red. The difference was not that they were all covered in greasy mud now (though they probably were), but that it was getting dark, and the colors were draining from everything. The evening star had come out, very bright, near the Tor.

  A colossal thud came out of the far west. It was impressive enough to divert Isaac’s concentration from the hooker. “What was that?” he demanded-the first voice to violate the stillness that had descended upon all.

  “A lot of powder was touched off at once,” said Colonel Barnes. “On a field of battle, it would signify a dreadful accident. Here, I guess it was the bridge over Yantlet Creek being demolished by a mine.”

  “Why did you mine the bridge, Colonel?”

  “I didn’t.”

  Isaac was gobsmacked. “Then-who did!?”

  “Now you ask me to speculate, Sir Isaac,” Barnes said coldly.

  “But you have men posted at that bridge,” Isaac said.

  “Or had, sir.”

  “How could it have been mined, when it was under guard?”

  “Again, speculation: it was mined in advance, the mine concealed from view,” Barnes said.

  “Then, pray tell, who put fire to the fuse?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “No man was needed to put fire to it,” Daniel said.

  “Then how was it lit?” Barnes demanded.

  “The same way as that was,” Daniel answered, and shrugged an arm free of the blanket to point at the Tor.

  Moments earlier he had seen a blue spark in his peripheral vision, and mistaken it for the evening star coming out near Shive Tor. But by now it had become brighter than any heavenly body save the Sun, brighter by far than any Comet. And it was not in the sky, but in one of those small irregular windows in the wall of the Tor.

  Everyone was now looking at it, though it was growing brilliant enough to burn the eyes. Only Daniel and Isaac knew what it was.

  “Phosphorus is burning inside the Tor,” Isaac remarked, more fascinated than alarmed.

  “Then someone must be in there,” said Bob reaching for a musket.

  “No,” Daniel said. “It was lit by an Infernal Device.”

  The door of the Tor swung inward, shouldered out of the way by a waxing draught. The archway was a gem of yellow light. A small mountain of split and dried cord-wood had been piled on the floor, and had now been set a-blaze. Sparks had begun to fountain up into the sky, jetting through orifices that had been hacked through the upper floor and the roof.

  “It is an admirable piece of work,” said Sir Isaac Newton, flatly and with no trace of rancor. “The rising tide obliges all to run inward to the Tor. But packed as it is with excellent fuel, this will soon become a furnace, and anyone near it will be roasted like a suckling pig. It truly is a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

  Barnes stood up in the boat, putting all his weight on his one leg and bracing his peg against a bench. He cupped his hands round his mouth and bellowed towards the darkling isle: “
Turn back! Retreat! There is not room for you here!” And then he fell back on his arse as the boat was lifted and shoved by a tidal swell. “I do not wish to hear my First Company being drowned,” he said.

  “Colonel, let us row toward the Isle of Grain-you can warn them all, and rescue most,” Daniel suggested.

  “Leave me on yonder vessel,” Isaac demanded, gesturing toward the hooker, which was now upright and adrift.

  “I cannot abandon Sir Isaac Newton on a derelict fishing-boat!” shouted Barnes, exasperated.

  “Then do you stay with him, Colonel,” suggested Sergeant Bob, “and take a few men. I’ll row toward the land, advancing with the tide-warning the men off as I go, rescuing the mired.”

  A thud and crackle from the Tor as a floor-beam gave way. A billion orange sparks spewed from the openings and schooled in the dark.

  “I too shall remain with Sir Isaac,” Daniel heard himself saying, like a man lying in state, listening to his own eulogy. “We’ll get the hooker clear of the fire, and navigate by the stars. Sir Isaac and I have some knowledge of the stars.”