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

by Neal Stephenson

  A pair of rowzinders—Mogul cavalrymen—came riding up, all turbaned and scimitared, black studded shields dangling from their brawny arms, to see what was the matter. Immediately they were engulfed in angry Swapaks telling their side of the story and demanding that the kotwal and his retinue of whip-, cudgel-, and mace-brandishing goons be summoned to favor Jack with a bastinado, or worse. The Swapaks’ protests got them nowhere, as they spoke only Gujarati and the rowzinders spoke only Persian. But these Moguls, like conquerors everywhere, had a keen sense of how to profit from local controversies, and their dark eyes were wide open, following the stabbing fingers of the Swapaks, examining the guilty parties. Surendranath was obviously a Banyan, which was to say that he and his lineage had been more or less condemned by God to engage in foreign trade and make vast amounts of money all their lives. Jack, on the other hand, was a Frank wearing a snatch of leather held on by a crusty thong wedged up his butt-crack. The numerous scars on his back testified to his having been in trouble before—a nearly inconceivable amount of trouble. The rowzinders sized the Banyan up as a likely source of baksheesh, and made gestures at him indicating that he had better stay put for now. Jack they beckoned over.

  Jack unfastened his gaze, with reluctance, from the thickening drama in the street. Industrious monkeys had evidently been opening up bird-cages. The entire Flamingo Ward emerged at once. It looked as if a hogshead of fuchsia paint had been spilled down the steps of the hospital. Most of them were in for broken wings, so all they could do was mill around until one of them appointed himself leader and led them away on a random migration into the Habitation of Dust, pursued or accompanied by a couple of Japalura lizards making eerie booming noises. This hospital had recently admitted a small colony of bearded vultures who were all suffering from avian cholera, and these now gained the rooftop; wiggled their imposing chin-bristles in the gritty breeze; and deployed their wings, which rumbled and snapped like rugs being shaken. They had been well-fed on a sort of carrion slurry made from patients that had died of natural causes, and so as they took to the air they jetted long spates of meaty diarrhea that fell like shafts of light across the backs of fleeing beasts: a praying mantis the size of a crossbow bolt, a spotted deer with a boa constrictor entwined in its antlers, and a nilgai antelope being pursued by the hospital’s world-famous two-legged dog, which, miraculously, could not only run, but had been known to outpace many three-legged dogs.

  Jack approached the rowzinders from downwind. The crowd of Swapaks parted to make room for him, though a few spat on him as he went by. Others had already forgotten about Jack and were running towards the animals. Jack got into position between the heads of the two rowzinders’ horses and then began to protest his innocence in English whilst surreptitiously crumbling a tiger-turd in each hand. A distinctive fragrance made the horses extremely nervous all of a sudden. “There now, settle down, you two,” Jack said to them, and stroked each on the nose, one with each hand—smearing streaks of tiger shit from their brows all the way down to their flaring nostrils.

  Then he had to step back to save his own life. Both horses reared up and began slashing at the air with their front hooves, and it was all the rowzinders could do to stay in their saddles. They galloped off screaming in opposite directions. One charged straight through the middle of a crowd of Hanuman monkeys who were carrying hairy arm-loads of coconut-meat, figs, mangoes, jamboleiras, papayas, yellow pears, green bilimbins, red cashews, and prickly jack-fruit from the dissolving market, pursued by enraged bazaaris who were in turn pursued by a toothless cheetah. A huge Indian bison, as high at the shoulder as Jack was tall, burst out through a rickety wall, shoving a heap of wrecked tables before him, and shambled into the street with a durian fruit dangling from one of his scimitar-like horns.

  A formation of running men veered around the bison and headed straight for Jack and Surendranath. Jack mastered the impulse to turn and flee from them. There were four men in all, a pair supporting each end of a giant spar of bamboo, thick as a mast and four fathoms long. Suspended from the middle of the bamboo was a sort of mobile balcony, a lacquered platform surrounded by a low gilded balustrade and artfully strewn with embroidered cushions. The device had four legs of carven ebony, which dangled an arm’s length above the pavement. When these palanquin-bearers drew near, they broke stride and began to negotiate with each other.

  “What tongue is that?” Jack asked.

  “Marathi.”

  “Your palanquin is carried by rebels?”

  “Think of it as a merchant-ship. In the parts of Hindoostan where we will be going, they will be her insurance policy.”

  The bearers were maneuvering the ends of the bamboo so as to bring the palanquin up alongside Surendranath. When they were finished, they set it down on its ebon legs, so close that their master had only to swivel his arse a compass-point to starboard, and sit down. He busied himself for a few moments arranging some glorious floral cushions against a polished backrest in the stern, then scooted back against them.

  “If they are the insurance policy, what am I?”

  “You, and any of your Frank comrades you may be able to round up, are the Marines on the quarterdeck.”

  “Marines are paid at a flat rate—when they are paid at all,” Jack observed. “The last time our merry crew were together, we each had a share.”

  “How much is your share worth now?”

  Jack was not, in general, a sigher of sighs, but now he sighed.

  “Take inventory of your BATNA,” Surendranath suggested, eyeing Jack’s naked and lumpy form, “and meet me in an hour’s time at the Caravanserai.” And then he uttered words in the Marathi tongue, and the four Marathas (as Marathi-speakers were called) got their shoulders under the bamboo and hoisted the palanquin into the air. They spun the conveyance end-for-end in the middle of the vast street and trotted away.

  Jack scratched a bug-bite, then another half an inch to the left, then forced himself to stop, before it got out of hand.

  The clouded leopard emerged from the hospital, quiet as fog, and curled up in the middle of the street to blink at goings-on; her enormous protruding fangs shone like twin stars in the firmament of swirling dust.

  Bearded vultures were raiding a butcher’s shop in the market. One of them pounded up into the air with all the grace of a porter lugging a side of beef up a staircase.

  Jack trudged upwind, headed for the Triple Gate: a set of three arches at the end of the street. Behind him he heard a rustling commotion, approaching fast. By the time he could turn round to look, it had already overtaken him: a trio of bustards—long-legged black and white birds—disputing possession of some dripping morsel. They reminded Jack of the ostrich in Vienna. Tears came to his eyes, which astonished and annoyed him. He slapped himself in the face, swung wide around a huge waddling porcupine, and headed briskly for the Tin Darwaza, as the Triple Gate was called hereabouts.

  THE TIN DARWAZA formed one end of the central square of “The House of Hell” (as Jahangir, the father of Shah Jahan, affectionately referred to Ahmadabad). This square—the Maidan Shah—ran for perhaps a quarter of a mile to the opposite end, which was walled off by a clutter of towers, balconies, pillars, arches, and toy fortifications: the Palace of the local King, whose name was Terror of the Idolaters. The middle of the square was mostly open so that rowzinders could practice their horsemanship and archery there, and parade for the amusement of Terror of the Idolaters and his wives. There were a few low undistinguished buildings where the kotwals held their tribunals and inflicted the bastinado on anyone who did not measure up to their standards of conduct. Jack avoided these.

  Several Hindoo pagodas had once stood around the Maidan Shah, and they still did; but they were mosques now. Jack’s knowledge of local history was limited to what he’d picked up by talking to Dutch, French, and English traders. But he gathered that this Shah Jahan fellow had spawned a boy named Aurangzeb and despised him so thoroughly that he had made him King of Gujarat, which meant tha
t he had had to come and reside in “the abode of sickness” (another one of Jahangir’s pet names for Ahmadabad) and continually do battle against the Marathas. Later Aurangzeb had returned the favor by forcibly overthrowing his father and tossing him into a prison cell in Agra. But in the meantime he’d had many years to kill in The Abode of Sickness and to hone his already keen dislike of all things Hindoo. So he had slaughtered a cow in the middle of the main Hindoo pagoda, defiling it forever, and then gone round with a sledgehammer and knocked the noses off all the idols for good measure. Now it was a mosque. Jack gazed into it as he walked by and saw the usual crowd of fakirs—perhaps two hundred of them—sitting on the marble pavement with their arms crossed behind their heads. Of these, some were mere novices. Other had been doing it for long enough that their joints had frozen that way. These had begging-bowls in front of them, never without a few rupees, and from time to time junior fakirs would bring them water or food.

  Some fakirs were Hindoos. As their temples had been desecrated, these had no central place to congregate. Instead they were scattered around the Maidan Shah, under trees or in the lee of walls, performing various penances, some of which were more bizarre and some less bizarre than those of the Mohametan fakirs. The common objective of all fakirs was to get money out of people, and by that definition, Jack and Padraig were fakirs themselves.

  After a few minutes’ search Jack found his partner seated between the two rows of trees that lined the Maidan Shah. Coincidentally, Padraig had chosen a spot along the south side of the square, beneath one of the jutting balconies of the Caravanserai. Or perhaps it was no coincidence. This was one of the more beautiful buildings in the city. It attracted the wealthy men who made Ahmadabad work, just as the Damplatz did in Amsterdam. Neither its beauty nor its wealth meant much to Jack and Padraig in their current estate. But when they loitered here they could watch caravans coming in from Lahore, Kabul, Kandahar, Agra, and places even farther distant: Chinamen who had brought their silks down from Kashgar over the wastes of Leh, and Armenians who had sallied far to the east from their ghetto in Isfahan, and Turkomans from Bokhara, looking like poorer and shorter versions of the mighty Turks who held sway over Algiers. The Caravanserai reminded them, in other words, that it was possible, at least in theory, to escape “The Thorn Bed” (as Jahangir had referred to Ahmadabad in his Memoirs).

  Padraig was sitting crosslegged on a snatch of rug (or, to be precise, the coarse weavings that rugs came wrapped in). He had a captured mouse, a rock, and a bowl. When he saw an approaching pedestrian who looked like a Brahmin, he would pin the mouse down on the ground and then raise the rock as if he intended to smash it. Of course he never actually did smash the mouse, and neither did Jack, when Jack took his turn. If they smashed the mouse they would not get money from the Brahmin, and they would have to spend valuable time searching for a replacement mouse. But by assiduously threatening to smash the mouse all day long, they could collect a few paisas in ransom money.

  “We’ve been presented—assuming I am reading the signs correctly—with an opportunity to get ourselves killed for money,” Jack announced.

  Padraig looked up alertly.

  A bloody ox femur fell out of the sky and smashed into the pavement, where it shattered. Two bearded vultures plunged down after it and began to squabble over the marrow.

  “Here, or somewhere else?” Padraig inquired, watching the vultures coolly.

  “Somewhere else.”

  Padraig let the mouse run away.

  THE CARAVANSERAI SPRAWLED along the southern side of the Maidan Shah, and had many balconies and lodges, all surrounded by delicately carved stone screens, but you got into it through an octagonal porch that was topped with an onion-dome. Four sides of the porch were open to the street and four were archways giving entry to the building itself, or to the yard in the middle, where queues of horses and camels were assembled or dispersed, and loaded or unloaded. It was in that yard that they found the palanquin of Surendranath. The Banyan himself was negotiating with a one-eyed Pathan for a couple of horses, and when he saw Jack’s and Padraig’s condition he decided to acquire some clothing for them, too. This turned out to be long tunics over loose breeches, and turbans to protect their heads.

  “Now that we are out of the bug-feeding business we shall have to let our hair grow back,” Jack mused as they rode out of town along the Kathiawar Road, which is to say that they were going a little south of west.

  “I could have gotten you European clothes with a little effort, but I did not want to spend any longer than was absolutely necessary in the Place of the Simoom,” hollered Surendranath, clutching the balusters of his palanquin as it was slugged by another wind-blast. Leaves of exotic trees, curled and spiked like the shells of sea-creatures, whipped past their heads and cartwheeled madly down the road. Jack and Padraig, on horses, were flanking Surendranath’s palanquin, and three of the Banyan’s aides were following behind on foot, leading a couple of asses laden with baggage.

  “With our backs to the wind it is not so bad,” said Padraig; but only because he prided himself on making the best of bad situations. Indeed, the street to the Kathiawar Gate was lined with much that would have been scenic, if not for the dust in their eyes: vast gardens of wealthy Banyans and Moguls, mosques, pagodas, reservoirs, and wells.

  “With our backs to Ahmadabad it will be better,” said Surendranath. “Kathiawar is reasonably settled, and we can make do with the usual Charan escort. But when we begin the journey to the northeast, you will have to dress as Europeans, to cow the Marathas.”

  “Northeast…so our destination is Shahjahanabad?” Jack inquired.

  “He would prefer to say Delhi,” Padraig put in, after Surendranath failed to answer.

  “Of course, because he is a Hindoo, and Shahjahanabad is the Mogul name,” Jack said. “Leave it to an Irishman.”

  “The English have given our cities any number of inventive names,” Padraig allowed.

  “The monsoon season has brought much valuable cargo from the West this year, but all of it lies piled up in warehouses in Surat,” said Surendranath. “Shambhaji and his rebels have made the passage to Delhi a dangerous one. Now I have heard, from mariners who have sailed far to the south, that there are strange birds in those regions who live on ice floes, and that when these birds become hungry they will congregate on the edge of the floe, desiring the small fish that swim in the water below, but fearing the ravenous predators that lurk in that same water. The hunters are subtle, so there is no way for these birds to know whether one is lying in wait for them. Instead they wait for one bird, who might be exceptionally bold, or exceptionally stupid, to jump in alone. If that bird returns with a belly full of fish, they all jump in. If that bird never comes back, they wait.”

  “The similitude is clear,” Jack said. “The merchants of Surat are like the birds on the ice floe, waiting to see who will be bold, or stupid, enough to attempt the passage to Delhi first.”

  “That merchant will reap incomparably higher profits than the others,” Surendranath said encouragingly.

  “Assuming his caravan actually makes it to Delhi, that is,” said Padraig.

  SHORTLY THEY PASSED out through the gate and proceeded south-westwards into Kathiawar, which was a peninsula, a couple of hundred miles square, that projected into the Arabian Sea between the Mouths of the Indus on the west, and the Indian subcontinent on the east. The city of Ahmadabad bestrode a river called Sabarmati that flowed south from there for a few miles and spilled into the Gulf of Cambaye—a long, slender inlet that lay along the east coast of this Kathiawar.

  The weather rapidly calmed down as they climbed up out of the valley of the Sabarmati and entered into the hilly, sporadically forested country that would eventually become the Kathiawar Peninsula. They stopped for a night in one of the open roadside camps that tended to form spontaneously all over Hindoostan, whenever shadows began to stretch and travelers’ stomachs began to growl. These reminded Jack of gypsy camps in
Christendom, and indeed the people looked a good deal like gypsies and spoke a similar language. The difference was that in Christendom they were wretched Vagabonds, but here they were running the place. Wandering from one part of the camp to the next, Jack could see not only penniless wanderers and fakirs but also rich Banyans like Surendranath, as well as various Mogul officials.

  But both of these types—the Banyans and the Moguls—eyed Jack in a way that made him uneasy, and tried to beckon him over. It was just like being in Amsterdam or Liverpool, where solitary males who did not keep their wits about them were liable to be press-ganged. When Jack understood this he disappeared, which was something he had become good at, and made his way back to Surendranath’s little camp.

  “There are quite a few people hereabouts who look as if they’d like to administer the Intelligence Test to us,” he said to Padraig.

  Padraig accepted this news with a tiny nod of the head. But Surendranath had overheard them. He had retreated into his palanquin and drawn red curtains around it for privacy, and it was easy to forget he was there.

  “What is the Intelligence Test?” he demanded to know, and swept the curtain aside.

  “A private joke,” said the annoyed Padraig.

  But Jack saw good reasons to explain it, and so he said, “Cast your memory back to when Fortune had set us ashore in Surat—”

  “I remember it every day,” said Surendranath.

  “You stayed there to pursue your career. We fled inland to get away from the diverse European assassins who infested that town, and who were all looking for us. Soon enough, we came upon a Mogul road-block. Hindoos and Mohametans were allowed to pass through with only minor harassment and taking of baksheesh, but when it became known that we were Franks, they took us aside and made us sit in a tent together. One by one, each of us was taken out alone, and conducted to a field nearby, and handed a musket—which was unloaded—and a powder-horn, and pouch of balls.”