The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

  Now, a lengthy conversation in Turkish between the Pasha and their owner. Finally the translation into Sabir resumed: “Slipper, rumors have reached us that a rabble of galley-slaves propose to do battle against the Spaniards in the estuary before Bonanza, seemingly a desperate undertaking, and this would seem to raise the possibility of what the Jesuits would call a quid pro quo.”

  “Floor, it would demean you to be subjected to the numerical calculations, which have been worked out in paralyzing detail by me and my Armenian comrade, here; but when the smoke clears, and the galleot returns from Cairo laden with coffee-beans and other treasures of the East, the proceeds—after various taxes, fees, commissions, baksheesh, rake-offs, and profit-takings—should suffice to pay the embarrassingly modest ransoms of all ten of the oar-slaves concerned.”

  “Slipper, it is written in the Holy Koran that the holding of hostages is a sin, and so it grieves us indescribably that, owing to circumstances not of our making, we have, at any given time, several tens of thousands of them languishing in our banyolars. Therefore the plan, as described, is not lacking in virtue. And yet all men are subjected to temptation, and Christians are evidently more susceptible than most; and so what is to prevent these slaves, once unchained, from assaulting their overseers, and rowing this galleot—and the silver—to freedom?”

  “Floor so hard and cool, it would indeed be foolish to trust a brace of slaves in this manner. Of course, if they went south, and ran the Straits of Gibraltar, they would be caught by the war-galleys of this Citadel of Islam and suffer the Penalty of the Hook. If they went directly to shore, the Spaniards would seize them. But what, an intelligent floor might ask, if they set their course to the north, circumventing the whole Iberian Peninsula, and made for France or England? This is a most trying question, and potentially a grievous fault in the Plan; but, thanks to Allah, there is another slave whose lips are pressed against you at this very moment and whose misfortunes have taught him much concerning such things.”

  Jack was wondering to himself what the Penalty of the Hook was, and so almost missed his cue; but Dappa nudged him and he began to rattle off the speech he had rehearsed, albeit with certain improvements that had only just entered his mind. “My words are addressed, not even to the floor, but rather to the dirt wedged between the tiles, as, until such time as I have regained my dignity and rank as a Janissary, I do not feel worthy to address even the Floor directly; and yet here’s hoping that some of my reflections will make their way up to the ears of some piece of furniture or whatnot that is in a position of responsibility.” Several more nudges from Dappa and throat-clearings from Moseh had punctuated this first part of his oration, and made it difficult for him to establish a rhythm. “Unforgivably, I allowed myself to be taken prisoner at the Siege of Vienna, and knocked around Christendom for a while—it is a long story with no clear beginning, middle, or end. Suffice it to say, O magnificent Dirt of the Floor-Cracks, that before I completely lost my mind and became the wretch that I am today, I learned that there is, in France, a Duke who has polluted the seas with hundreds of infidel war-ships, brand-new and heavily armed; and that said Duke, who dines on the most unclean foods imaginable, is not wholly unknown to the Corsairs of this city, perhaps even to the extent of investing in some of their galleys; and that he owns several of the white, pink-eyed horses considered so desirable by the exalted. This Duke, if he were made aware of our Plan in advance, could easily give orders to his fleet that infests the Bay of Biscay, and tell them to monitor the coast (for our galleot, lacking navigational aids, can on no account stray out of sight of land) and stop any vessels matching the description of ours.”

  Much discussion in Turkish. Then: “Slipper, if you should encounter any dirt on my floor, which strikes me as unlikely given the immaculate condition of my dwelling, tell it that I know of this French Duke. He is not the sort of man to take part in such a plan out of charitable motives.”

  “Floor-dirt—or perhaps that is a dust-mote that I carried in on an eyelash—said Duke would almost have to be in on the plan anyway. For the galleot will require some sort of escort to Cairo, lest she fall into the hands of the pirates of Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Calabria, or Rhodes. The terrifying armada of this City has other errands; but the French fleet plies those waters anyway, shepherding the merchant-galleys of Marseille to and from Smyrna and Alexandria—”

  But here the Pasha had apparently heard enough, for he clapped his hands and uttered something in Turkish that caused all of the slaves, and their owner, to be ejected from his audience-chamber and into the octagonal yard of the Kasba. Which Jack looked upon as bad, until he saw the smile on the face of their owner, who was being lifted onto his sedan-chair by Nubian slaves.

  Jack, Dappa, Vrej, and Moseh ambled out of the gate into the City of Algiers, and happened to end up standing beneath a row of large iron hooks that projected from the outer wall of the Kasba, a couple of yards below the parapet, some with enormous, gnarled chunks of what appeared to be jerky dangling from them. But others were unoccupied. Above one of those, a group of Janissaries had gathered around a man who was sitting on the brink of the wall.

  “What did the Pasha say, there at the end?” Jack asked Dappa.

  “In more words, Jack, he said: ‘Make it so.’ ” Dappa had spent a lot of time rowing with Turks, and knew their language thoroughly, which is why he had been invited along.

  A solemn look then came over the face of Moseh de la Cruz, as if he were uttering a prayer. “Then we are on our way to Bonanza, as soon as the season wheels round.”

  Above them, the Janissaries suddenly shoved the seated man off the edge of the wall. He fell for a short distance, gathering speed, and then the iron hook caught him between the buttocks and brought him up short. The man screamed and wriggled, but the point of the hook had gone too far up into his vitals to allow him to squirm off of it, and so there he stayed; the Janissaries turned and departed.

  But that was not the only reason Jack felt somewhat uneasy as he and the others made their way down into the lower city. The Pasha had, several times, gone on at great length in Turkish. And furthermore Dappa was regarding Jack with a certain type of Look that Jack had seen many times before, from persons such as Sir Winston Churchill and Eliza, and that usually boded ill. “All right,” Jack finally said, “let’s have it.”

  Dappa shrugged. “Most of what passed between the Pasha and his advisors was of a practical nature—he was far more concerned with how to do it than whether.”

  “That much is good for us,” Jack said. “Now, tell me why you are favoring me with the evil eye.”

  “When you mentioned that execrable French Duke, the Pasha knew who you meant immediately, and mentioned, in passing, that the same Duke had lately been pestering him for information as to the whereabouts of one Ali Zaybak—an English fugitive.”

  “’Tis not an English name.”

  “It is a sort of cryptical reference to a character in the Thousand and One Nights: a notorious thief of Cairo. Time and again the police tried to entrap him but he always squirted free, like a drop of quicksilver when you try to put your finger on it. Zaybak is the Arabic word for quicksilver—accordingly, this character was given the sobriquet of Ali Zaybak.”

  “A pleasant enough sounding færy-tale. Yet Cairo is a long way from England…”

  “Now you are playing stupid, Jack—which in some jurisdictions is as good as a signed confession.” Dappa glanced up at the wall of the Kasba where the man squirmed on the hook.

  “Perhaps you are right about Jack, Dappa, but my confusion is wholly genuine,” said Moseh.

  “In Paris, Jack has a reputation,” put in Vrej Esphahnian. “There is a Duke there who does not love our Jack ever since he crashed a party, strangled one of the guests, chopped off the hand of the Duke’s first-born son and heir, and made a spectacle of himself in front of the Sun King.”

  “Then perhaps this Duke got wind of Jack’s misadventures on the high seas,” Dappa said,
“and began to make inquiries.”

  “Well, as a lost Janissary, recovering from a grievous head injury, I know nothing of such matters,” Jack said. “But if it will help our chances, by all means let it be known that information as to the whereabouts of Ali Zaybak is to be had—if the duc d’Arcachon will only invest in the Plan.”

  Book 5

  The Juncto

  Château Juvisy

  10 DECEMBER 1689

  AFTER CARDINAL RICHELIEU HAD RECOGNIZED, and Louis XIII had rewarded, the genius of Monsieur Antoine Rossignol, he had built himself a little château. In later years he had hired no less a gardener than Le Nôtre to fix up the grounds. The château was at Juvisy. This had made sense at the time, as the King’s court had been in Paris, and Juvisy lay just outside of it.

  When the son of Louis XIII had moved his court to Versailles, the son of Antoine Rossignol—who had inherited Antoine’s château, his knowledge of cryptanalysis, and his responsibilities—had found himself exiled. He had not moved, but the center of power had, and Juvisy had all of a sudden begun to seem like a remote outpost. Another man might have sold the place at a loss, and built a new château somewhere around Versailles. But Bonaventure Rossignol had been content to remain in the old place. His work did not require continual attendance at Court. If anything, the distance, and the peace and quiet that came with it, made him more productive. Le Roi had ratified the younger Rossignol’s decision by coming to visit him at Juvisy from time to time. In its smallness, its seclusion, and the prim perfection of its walled garden, the château at Juvisy seemed to Eliza like a perfect little kingdom of secrets, with Bon-bon its king, and Eliza its queen, or at least concubine.

  The garden was of an altogether different style from what Le Nôtre had done at Versailles, being, of course, much smaller, with fewer sculptures. But it had in common with the King’s garden that it was made to look splendid when seen from the high windows of the château, which was how Eliza was seeing it. Bon-bon’s bedchamber was on the upper storey, in the center of the building, so that when Eliza climbed out of his bed she could walk three paces over a cold floor and stand in a dormer and gaze straight down the path that formed the garden’s axis. Of course the plantings were dead and brown now, but the curlicues of its sculpted hedges still drew her eye, and gave her something to stare at while she began to answer a question that Bon-bon had just asked her.

  He wanted to know, in effect, what the hell she was doing here. For some reason the question irked her a little bit.

  She had showed up exhausted and dirty last night, with no thought of doing anything save putting Jean-Jacques to bed somewhere, and then collapsing into some bed of her own and sleeping for a few decades. Instead she’d been up half the night making love to Bon-bon. Yet she felt more awake, more refreshed now than if she’d spent the same amount of time slumbering. And so perhaps what she had taken for tiredness, yester evening, had been some other condition.

  He’d had the good grace not to inquire what was going on. Instead he had accepted, with grace and even humor, the sudden arrival of Eliza and her entourage at his gates. She’d liked it that way, and she’d liked what had happened after. But now that the sun was up and they had gotten the sex out of their systems, there was this tedious need to explain matters. Certain parts of her mind had to be woken up, and were not happy about it. She stared at the dead garden, tracing the patterns of the hedges with her eyes, and mastered her annoyance.

  “You had mentioned in a note to me that you contemplated a journey to Lyon,” Rossignol said, trying to prime the pump. “That was six weeks ago.”

  “Yes,” Eliza said. “The journey to Lyon took ten days.”

  “Ten days! Did you walk?”

  “I could have done it faster by myself, but I was traveling with a five-month-old. The train consisted of two carriages, a baggage-cart, and some outriders and footmen borrowed from Lieutenant Bart and from the Ozoirs,” Eliza said.

  Rossignol grimaced. “Unwieldy.”

  “The first twenty miles were the most difficult, as you know.”

  “Dunkerque is scarcely connected to France at all,” Rossignol agreed.

  “Have you been to Lyon?”

  “Only a little, passing through en route to Marseille.”

  “And did you find it strangely bleak and austere compared to Paris?”

  “Mademoiselle, I found it bleak and austere even compared to the Hague!”

  Eliza did not laugh at the witticism, but only turned her back on the window, for a moment, to regard Rossignol. He was propped up in bed on a mountain of pillows, exposed to the chilly air from the waist up. The man burned food like a forge burned coal, and never grew fat, and never seemed to feel cold.

  “That is because you have no regard for commerce. I found it most interesting.”

  “Oh. Yes, I know about that,” Rossignol conceded. “The great crossroads where the Mediterranean trades with the North. It sounds as if it ought to be interesting. But if you go there, you see only warehouses and silk-factories, and tracts of plain open ground.”

  “Of course it seems boring if all you do is look at it,” Eliza said. “What renders it interesting is to take part in what goes on in those boring warehouses.”

  Rossignol’s black eyes strayed to some papers resting on a bedside table. He was already regretting having asked her to explain this, and was hoping she’d make it quick.

  Eliza stepped over to the side of the bed and swept the papers off onto the floor. Then she got a knee up on the bed and crab-walked across it until she was straddling Rossignol, sitting down firmly on his pelvis. “You asked,” she reminded him. “and I have got an answer for you, which you are going to listen to, and what is more, by the time I am finished, you will confess that it is interesting.”

  “You have my attention, mademoiselle,” said Rossignol.

  “Lyon. I suppose they used to hold sprawling country-style fairs there, two hundred years ago. It was colonized, you know, by Florentines hoping to make fortunes selling goods to this wild northern place called France. There are still fairs, four times a year, but it is not so rustic. It is more like Leipzig now.”

  “That means nothing to me.”

  “It means people standing in courtyards of trading-houses, screaming at each other, and trading goods not physically present.”

  “But the warehouses—?”

  “Silly, the goods are not present in the trading-houses. But neither can they be terribly remote, for they must be inspected before and delivered after the sale. Much of the traffic on the streets is commerçants going to this or that warehouse to look at a shipment of silks, herring, figs, hides, or what-have-you.”

  “That helps me to understand some of what was, to a gentleman, so incomprehensible about the place.”

  “You’d never guess that the place does more business than all of Paris. From the street it is desolate. You can die of loneliness or starvation there. It is not until you get inside the houses that you discover the inner life of the place. Bon-bon, all of the people who have been lured here by trade have created, behind their iron-bound doors and shuttered windows, little microcosms of the worlds they left behind in Genoa, Antwerp, Bruges, Geneva, Isfahan, Augsburg, Stockholm, Naples, or wherever they came from. When you are in one of those houses, you might as well be in one of those faraway cities. So think of Lyon as a capital of trade, and the streets around the Place au Change as its diplomatic quarter, where the Jews, Armenians, Dutch, English, Genoans, and all the other great trading-nations of the world have established their embassies: shards of foreign territory embedded in a faraway land.”

  “What were you doing there, mademoiselle?”

  “Buying timber for Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir. I required some expert help. After I had been a week in Lyon, I was joined by my Dutch associates: Samuel and Abraham de la Vega and their cousin. I had sent a letter to them before I left Dunkerque, for I knew they were in London. It had caught up to them at Gravesend. They had
changed their plans and made direct for Dunkerque, which they passed through five days after I had departed. As they passed through Paris they enlisted their cousin, one Jacob Gold, and the three of them followed me down and encamped at the house of a man they knew there—a wholesaler of beeswax that he imports from Poland-Lithuania.”

  “Now I see why this thing took six weeks! Ten days to creep down to Lyon, a week to wait for all of these Jews to show up—”

  “The delay was not a problem for me. It took me and my staff that long anyway to recover from the journey, and to set up housekeeping in Lyon. Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir, bless him, had sent word ahead, and arranged for us to stay at the pied-à-terre of someone who owed him a favor. Once we had established ourselves, I had begun to make contacts among the crowd who frequent the Place au Change. For I knew that the brothers de la Vega would spare no effort in ransacking the wholesale timber market and finding the best wood on the best terms. But their efforts would be of no use unless I had made arrangements for a bill of exchange to be drawn up, transferring the agreed-on sum from the King’s treasury to whomever sold us the timber. Likewise we would need to strike a deal with the shipper, and to purchase insurance, et cetera. So even if the de la Vegas had arrived at the same time as I, they should have little to do for a few days. And the need to feed little Jean-Jacques posed the most absurd complications.”

  It was a mistake to mention this, for now Rossignol’s eyes drifted from Eliza’s face down to her left breast. Earlier she had wrapped herself in a sheet, but this had slipped down as she wrestled with him.