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

by Neal Stephenson

  TWO MONTHS LATER, while Minerva was lost in fog off of Outer Qwghlm, a loud noise came up from her hold, and she stopped moving.

  Van Hoek drew his cutlass and went after the pilot, James Hh, and at length tracked him down at the head. He was perched on the bowsprit. “Welcome to Qwghlm,” he announced, “you are hard aground on the rock that we call the Dutch-hammer.” Then he jumped.

  By this point van Hoek had been joined by several other men with pistols, and all of them rushed forward in the hope of getting a shot off at Hh. But they did not see him in that icy water (which soon would have killed him anyway); all they saw was a faint impression in the fog, like a woodcut pressed with diluted ink, of a longboat rowing away. That longboat fired a signal from its swivel-gun, and when the boom had finished echoing among the Three Sghrs, the men on Minerva could hear the distant shouting of men on other ships—a whole squadron, arrayed all around them, riding safely at anchor, well clear of the stony reef. All of these voices were speaking in French except for one or two, shouting through speaking-trumpets: “Welcome home, Jaaack!”

  The men on Minerva remained perfectly still. It was not that they were trying to be stealthy—there was little point in hiding now. This was a ceremonial silence, as at a funeral. Too, there was a process of mental rearrangement taking place in the minds of the ship’s officers, as they sorted through the memories of everything that had occurred in the last few months, and began to understand it all as an elaborate deception, a trap laid by the French.

  As the fog began to lift, and the outlines of French frigates started to resolve and solidify all around them. Van Hoek ambled back to the poop deck, laid his right arm out carefully on the rail, and brought his cutlass down on it, a few inches above the wrist. The blade caught in his bones and he had to worry it out and chop several more times. Finally the hand—already mangled and truncated from diverse mishaps—made a splash in the water below. Van Hoek lay down on the deck and turned white. He probably would have died if he had not been aboard a ship where treating amputations was a routine affair. This at least gave the sailors something to do while the French longboats converged on them.

  At some point Dappa got a distracted look on his face, excused himself from van Hoek’s side, and began to walk briskly in the direction of Vrej Esphahnian.

  Vrej drew one of several pistols from his waist-band and aimed it at Dappa. A whirring blade flew into his arm, like a steel hummingbird, and spoiled his aim. It was a hunting yo-yo and it had been flung by a Filipino crewman standing off to Vrej’s side.

  Vrej dropped the weapon and flung himself overboard. He was wearing a scarlet cape that billowed up as he fell, like a sail, and formed a bubble on the water below, an island of satin that kept him afloat until a Frenchman on a longboat flung a rope to him.

  “Say the word, Dad,” said Jimmy, who was manning a loaded swivel-gun, and holding a lighted torch above its touch-hole.

  “It’s me they want,” Jack said, matter-of-factly, as if he were captured by the French Navy every day.

  “It’s us they have,” Danny answered, pointedly, bringing another swivel-gun to bear on another longboat, “and we’ll soon make ’em wish they didn’t.”

  Jack shook his head. “This is not to be another Cairo.”

  QWGHLM CASTLE WAS a Dark Ages citadel that had all too obviously failed its essential purpose. Indeed, most of it was not even competent to keep out sleet and rats. Its lee corner, where it gripped the living rock of the Sghr, had, however, at least put up a struggle against gravity. It supported a row of stark crenels that finger-combed the tangled winds above the crunchy wilderness of smithereens and guano that accounted for the rest of the Castle.

  To re-roof such a thing was to waste money; but to embed a whole brand-new Barock château in it, as the duc d’Arcachon had recently finished doing, was to make some sort of ringing proclamation. In the visual language of architects and decorators, the proclamation said something about whatever glorious principles were personified by all its swooping, robed, wreathed, winged demigods. Translated into English it said, “I am rich and powerful, and you are not.”

  Jack got the message. They put him under house-arrest in a grand bedchamber with a high Barock window through which the Duke and Duchess, presumably, could watch the comings and goings of ships in the harbor. The room’s back wall, facing these windows, consisted mostly of mirrors—which as even Jack knew was an homage to the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles.

  Jack lay in bed for several days, unable to bring himself to look into any mirrors, or to go near that window and see Minerva stuck on the Dutch-hammer. Sometimes he would get out of bed and hug the cannonball that was attached to his neck-collar by a four-foot length of chain and carry it into the en suite garderobe: a closet with a wooden bench decorated with a hole. Being ever so careful not to let the cannonball fall into that hole—for he’d not quite decided to kill himself yet—he’d sit down and void himself into a chute that spilled out onto the stone cliff-side far below.

  Years ago—the last time a collar of iron had been locked around his neck by an Arcachon—John Churchill had warned him that angry Frenchmen were bound to come after him with pliers sooner or later. Jack could only assume that this was still true, and that in the meantime he was being kept in luxurious surroundings as part of some highly refined campaign of sarcasm.

  After a week they moved him to a stone chamber. The windows were crossbow-embrasures that had recently been chocked up with pigs of glass. But they did afford him a view of the Dutch-hammer and its latest victim. Minerva had languished there, an object of ridicule, as gold and silver were extracted from her hold, and replaced with rocks to keep her ballasted.

  “Did Vrej survive the fall, and the water?” was Jack’s first question when Edmund de Ath—who had revealed himself to be, in fact, one Édouard de Gex, a Jesuit, and a hater of the Jansenists and of the Enlightenment both—came around to taunt him.

  Édouard de Gex looked surprised. “Why do you ask? Surely you’re not naïve enough to think you’ll have an opportunity to kill him.”

  “Oh no, I was just wondering how it came out in the end.”

  “How what came out?”

  “The story. You see, all along I’ve been supposing that this was my story, but now I see it has really been Vrej’s.”

  Édouard de Gex shrugged. “He lives. He has a bit of a catarrh. When he’s feeling better he’ll probably come around and explain matters to you.”

  “That should be a lively conversation…but pray tell, why the hell are you here?”

  “I am here to look after your immortal soul.”

  De Gex had traded his former garb for a Jesuit’s black robes, and even his language had changed. Formerly he had spoken Sabir, but now it was English. “It is my intention to convert all of Britain to the true faith,” he remarked, “and so I have made a study of your language.”

  “And you’re going to begin with me? Weren’t you paying attention in Mexico City?”

  “The Inquisition there has grown lax. You said you were a Catholic and they took you at your word…. I prefer a more rigorous approach.” De Gex produced a letter from his sleeve. “Does this look familiar?”

  “It looks like the one Eliza sent me in New Spain…” Jack blinked and shook his head. “The one we opened and read on the ship…which was obviously a fake…but that one hasn’t even been opened.”

  “Poor Jack. This is the true letter that was delivered to you in New Spain, and that you sealed up inside van Hoek’s book-chest. But it was not sent by Eliza. It was sent by Elizabeth de Obregon. That fickle bitch smuggled it out of the convent where she was being held in Mexico City. Then later, when we were in Vera Cruz—”

  “You took it out of the crate where I’d stored it, and substituted a fake one you’d written. Van Hoek complained that the caulking was badly done…. I should’ve suspected tampering.”

  “I am a better forger than a caulker, it would seem,” de Gex said.
/>   “The forgery worked,” Jack allowed.

  “Monsieur Esphahnian listened to your talk of Eliza for years, and knew every detail of the story by heart…without his information, I could never have composed that letter.”

  De Gex broke the seal on the letter of Elizabeth de Obregon. “It would weigh on my conscience, Jack, if I did not read you your mail. This is written in florid Spanish…. I will translate it into English. She begins with the usual complicated salutation and apology…then complains of persistent nightmares that have plagued her ever since she arrived in New Spain, and prevented her from getting a single good night’s sleep. In these nightmares, she is on the Manila Galleon, in the middle of the Pacific, when it falls into the hands of the Inquisition. There is no mutiny and no violence…one day the Captain is simply gone, as if he had fallen overboard when no one was looking, and the officers are in irons, confined to their cabins, but none of them knows it yet because they are all in a drugged sleep. A man in a black robe has seized control of the ship…like any other Inquisitor, he has a staff of familiars, who until now have been disguised as merchants’ servants. They have been gathering information about their employers’ blasphemies and heresies. And, too, he has bailiffs, alguaciles, who’ve been disguised as ordinary seamen but who are now armed with pistols, whips, and blunderbusses, and are not slow to use them against anyone who challenges the authority of the man in the black robe…. She goes on, Jack, to narrate this nightmare (she calls it a nightmare) in considerable detail, but much of it is well-known to you, who have such an intimate knowledge of the workings of the Inquisition. Suffice it to say that the Holy Office carried out its duties exactingly on that ship, and many of the merchants aboard were discovered to be Jews. Really, the entire Galleon was a nest of vipers, a ship of infamous degradation…”

  “Is that what she wrote, or are you ‘translating’ a bit freely?”

  “But even as he was decorating the yard-arms with dangling merchants, giving them the strappado so that they would unburden themselves of their sins, this black-robe was keeping lookouts posted for any sign of Minerva.”

  “Does she explain the firing of the signal-cannon?”

  “The hereticks mutinied. They fired the cannon in an attempt to summon help. There was general warfare—the black-robe was driven belowdecks…”

  “Where he kindled a fire, to make an auto da fé of the entire ship.”

  “When Elizabeth de Obregon woke aboard Minerva, the first thing she saw was that same black-robe staring her in the face. With opium and with clever arguments he induced her to believe that the burning of the Galleon had been an accident, and that now, on Minerva, they were prisoners of the hereticks, who would kill the black-robe if they knew him to be a Jesuit. After that they would make her their whore. So she played the role that the black-robe devised for her…but after recuperating in Mexico City, and suffering diverse tortures from want of opium, and coming out from the influence of the black-robe, these nightmares had begun. She decided that they were not nightmares but true memories, and that all the black-robe’s doings must have been part of a plan having something to do with Minerva, and something to do with the gold of Solomon, which Minerva’s owners had stolen from the ex-Viceroy.”

  “And she wrote to warn us of this? That was a noble act on the lady’s part,” Jack mused, “but I cannot imagine why she cared whether we lived or died.”

  “She was of a converso family,” de Gex said. “She was a Jewess.”

  “I cannot help but notice you are using the past tense.”

  “She lies in a pauper’s grave outside Mexico City. The Inquisition there, so corrupt and pusillanimous, gave her nothing more than routine treatment. She died of some pestilence that was sweeping through the prison. But one day I will see her burned in effigy in a great auto da fé in St. James’s Park, Jack. You’ll be there, too—you’ll put the torch to her pyre and pray the rosary while her effigy burns.”

  “If you can arrange an auto da fé in Westminster, I’ll do that,” Jack promised.

  JACK HAD ASSUMED during the first days in Qwghlm that everyone aboard Minerva would be put to the sword, or at least sent to the galleys in Marseille. But as days had gone by it had become clear that only Jack and Vrej would be getting off at this stop—the ship and her crew, and van Hoek, Dappa, Jimmy, and Danny, were free to go, albeit without their gold. Jack liked to believe that this was because he had given himself up willingly. Later he came to suspect that it was because Electress Sophie was a part-owner of the ship. She was being shown a Professional Courtesy by whatever noble Frenchman was behind all of this—the duc d’Arcachon, or Leroy himself.

  After Minerva’s holds and lockers had been stripped to the bare wood, they waited for a high tide and began throwing ballast-rocks overboard, trying to float her off the reef. Jack watched this operation from a battlement of the Castle, where he was allowed to carry his cannonball to and fro sometimes, under guard. After a while de Gex joined him, greeting him with: “I remind you, Jack, that suicide is a mortal sin.”

  Jack was baffled by this non sequitur until he followed de Gex’s gaze over the mossy crenellations and down a hundred feet of sheer stone to icy surf flailing away at rocks. Then he laughed. “I’ve been expecting some Arcachon to come up here and put me to a slow death—d’you really think I’d do the deed for him, and spare him such a pleasant journey?”

  “Perhaps you would wish to avoid being tortured.”

  “Oh no, Édouard, I’m inspired by your example.”

  “You are referring to the Inquisition in Mexico?”

  “I was wondering: Did the Inquisitor know you were a fellow-Jesuit? Did he go easy on you?”

  “If he had given me light treatment, you and Moseh would have detected it—and you would not have decided to trust me. No, I fooled the Inquisitor as thoroughly as I fooled you.”

  “That is the most bizarre thing I have heard in my entire circuit of the world.”

  “It is not so strange,” said de Gex, “if only you knew more. For, contrary to what you suppose, I do not consider myself some kind of saint. Nay, I have secrets so dark that I myself do not know them! I phant’sied the Inquisitor might somehow wrest out of me through torture what I could not discover by prayer and meditation.”

  “That is more bizarre yet. I preferred the first version.”

  “Really, it was not so bad as the Jews are always claiming. There are any number of ways it could be made far more painful. When the Holy Office is reëstablished in London, I’ll institute some improvements—we’ll have a lot of hereticks to prosecute in a short time, and this desultory Mexican style simply will not do.”

  “I had not considered suicide when I came up here,” Jack muttered, “but you are bringing me around smartly.” He stuck his head out through a gap between crenels and leaned over the edge of the wall to see what the final few seconds of his life might look like. “Pity the tide is so unusually high—I’d hit water instead of rocks.”

  “Pity we are abjured to deliver you in one piece,” de Gex said, gazing at Jack almost lovingly. “I would love to put what I learned in Mexico City to use, here and now, against your person, and get a full accounting of what you did with King Solomon’s gold.”

  “Oh, is that all you wanted to know? We took it to Surat, excepting some trivial expenditures in Mocha and Bandar, and there Queen Kottakkal took it from us. If it’s that particular gold you want, get thee to Malabar!”

  Édouard de Gex shook his finger at Jack. “I know from Monsieur Esphahnian that the true story is far more complicated. He spent years in the north of Hindoostan, fighting in some infidel army—”

  “Only because he failed the Intelligence Test.”

  “—and by the time he finally got to Malabar, the Jew had had plenty of time to insinuate himself into the confidence of that pagan Queen. A substantial part of the gold had already been diverted into the ship-building project. What became of it?”

  “You said yourself it ha
d gone to the ship-building project!”

  Jack naturally turned to look towards the ship in question now. She had foundered perhaps two miles away, but seen from this tower through clear Arctic air, she seemed much closer. She was riding unusually high by this point, which was no wonder since for the last half-hour her hull had been veiled in splashes made by the ballast-stones that the crew were rolling out through the gun-ports. The waves began to nudge her back and forth as her keel lifted off the reef. Finally a cheer sounded, and several cannons were fired as signals and celebrations. Triangles and trapezoids of canvas began to cloud her spars. “Note how upright she carries herself, even when underloaded,” Jack had pointed out.

  “I will not be taken in by this ruse of changing the subject,” de Gex said.

  “Oh, but I’m not,” Jack answered, but de Gex plodded onwards with his interrogation.

  “Vrej claims that timber and labor are practically free in Hindoostan. According to his review of the accounts, too much gold was missing and whatever I may think of his theology, I would not dream of calling into question his accounting.”

  “Vrej has been tiresome on this particular subject for nigh on eight years now,” Jack answered. “When he vaulted over the rail the other day, right out there, the first thing that came to my mind—even before I really grasped that he’d betrayed us—was joy. Joy that I’d never again have to listen to him on this subject. Now, you have picked up the torch.”

  “Vrej has related his suspicions to me. He says that whenever he raised this subject, the others would shrug it off with all sorts of vague similitudes, about ‘greasing the path’ or some such…”

  “We are all old salts now, and prefer nautickal terms,” Jack answered. “Instead of talking about some path needing to be greased, we’d more likely think of hulls that become barnacle-covered, which slows them down, and we’d speak of the desirability of keeping ’em smooth, for easy movement through the water.”

  “In any event—I assume this is a Delphic way of saying that bribes were paid to some Mogul or Maratha chieftain?”