Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  A company was a couple of hundred men like Jack walking around packed into a tight square, not because they liked crowds but because this made it harder for an opponent to ride up with an edged weapon and cut pieces off of them. The reason it was harder was because in the center of the square was a smaller square of men carrying extremely long pointed sticks called pikes. The dimensions of the squares and the length of the pikes were worked out so that when the pikes were levelled at the enemy (passing between the surrounding musketeers) their points would project some distance beyond the edge of the formation—provided the musketeers stood close together—discouraging enemy horsemen from simply galloping up and having at the musketeers as they went through their loading rituals, which, even under ideal conditions, seemed to take as long as a Mass.*

  That was the general plan. Exactly what would happen when the Turks strung their outlandish recurved bows and began to shower iron-tipped arrows into these formations had not been specified. From Linz onwards, anyway, Jack walked in the midst of such an organization. It made many, many noises, each traceable to something like the wooden powder-flasks. Unlike a company of matchlocks, it did not smolder, nor make huffing and puffing noises.

  They turned away from the Danube, leaving it off to their left, and then the formations piled into one another because they were going uphill now, assaulting the tail of that mountain range. The drums and trumpets, muffled now by trees, echoed along river-valleys as formations split again and again, finding passes over the hills. Jack was frequently confused, but when he wasn’t, he sensed that the Poles were on his right, the Bavarians and Saxons on his left.

  Compared to the hills of England, these were high, steep, and well-forested. But between them lay broad valleys that made for easy marching, and even when they had to go over hills, instead of between them, the going was easier than it looked—the trees were tall handsome ones with bare white trunks, and what little undergrowth there was had long since been trampled down by others when Jack reached it.

  The only way he knew that they’d reached the environs of Vienna was that they stopped marching and began camping. They made a bivouac in a narrow steep valley where the sun rose late and set early. Some of Jack’s brothers in arms were impatient to get on with it, but he appreciated that the Army of Christendom had become an immense machine for turning barley into horseshit and that the barley would fast run out. Something had to happen soon.

  After they’d bivouacked for two nights, Jack slipped away one morning before dawn and clambered uphill until the ground became level under his feet. He did this partly to get away from the stink of the camp and partly because he wanted to get a look at the city from a high place. Red sunlight was weaving among white tree-trunks as he wandered to a high bluff from which he had a clear view several miles down into the city.

  Vienna was a small town dwarfed by its own defenses, in turn engulfed by a larger Turkish city only a few months old. The town itself was, then, the smallest part of what he saw, but it was to the rest as a chalice was to a cathedral. Even from miles off he could see it was a miserable place—actual streets were visible nowhere, just the red tile roofs of long skinny buildings heaped up six and seven stories, wending black crevices between them indicating streets, which he could tell would be sunless trenches, thick with hurtling shit and echoing voices. He could see the foaming stain of the city spreading across the adjacent canal and, farther downstream, into the Danube itself, and from its color he could almost guess that there was a major flux epidemic underway—as indeed there was in the Turkish camp.

  Just off-center in the heart of Vienna stood the tallest building Jack had ever seen—a cathedral with a dunce-cap tower topped by a curious symbol, a star wedged in the craw of a crescent moon, like a stick jammed into a shark’s mouth. It seemed a prophetic map of the entire scene. Vienna was protected on the north by a canal that split away from the Danube, moated the city on that side, and later rejoined it. The bridges had been wrecked so no one could enter or leave that way. The entire remainder of the city was enveloped by the Turkish camp, narrowest at the two points where it touched the river, and, in the middle, as fat as Vienna itself—therefore, a crescent with the city trapped between its horns. It was a fluttering world of heathenishly colored tents and flags and streamers, with the ruins of Vienna’s burnt suburbs poking out here and there like ribs of wrecked ships from a foaming sea.

  Between Turkish camp and Christian city was a belt of what a naïve person would identify as empty (albeit curiously sculpted and chiseled) terrain. Jack, a trained professional, by squinting and tilting his head this way and that, could imagine that it was as densely crisscrossed with sight-lines and cannonball-arcs and other geometrickal phant’sies of engineers as the space above a ship’s deck was with ropes and rigging. For this corridor between camp and fort had been claimed by the engineers—as anyone who stepped into it would learn in as little time as it took a musket-ball to cover the distance. The Engineer-Empire, Jack’d been noticing, waxed as older ones waned. Just as Turks and Franks had their own styles of building, so did Engineers rehearse, again and again, the same shapes: sloping walls, backed up by earth (to deflect and absorb cannonballs) laid out in nested zig-zags, a bastion at each corner from which to shoot at anyone who tried to climb the neighboring stretches of wall. Oh, Vienna had a traditional pre-Engineer wall: a thin curtain of masonry, crenellated on top. But that was nothing but an antiquarian curiosity now, enveloped and shamed by the new works.

  Besides that cathedral, there was only one building in Vienna worth a second look, and that was a great big cream-colored, many-windowed building, five stories high and a crossbow-shot in length, constructed right on the edge of the city and rising high above the wall, with wings behind it enclosing courtyards he’d never see. It was obviously the Palace of the Holy Roman Emperor. It had a steep high roof—plenty of attic space—with a row of tiny dormers surmounted by funny copper domes like spiked helmets. Each dormer had a little window, and through one of them (though the distance was very great) Jack convinced himself he could see a figure dressed in white peering out. He wanted to arrange something involving a trapped princess, a dashing rescue, and a reward; however, in between him and whomever was peering out that window were certain complications, viz. directly below the Palace, a huge bastion was thrust out into the glacis, like a giant’s plowshare parting an empty field, and against this very stronghold the Grand Vizier had chosen to mount his attack.

  Apparently the Turks had been in too much of a hurry to trundle siege artillery all the way across Hungary and so they were undoing the work of the Engineers one shovel-load at a time. Vienna’s walls and bastions had been smooth regular shapes, so the Turks’ handiwork was as obvious as a mole-hill in a Duke’s bowling-green. They had dug a metropolis of trenches in what had been a perfectly flat glacis. Each trench was surrounded by the dirt that had been flung out of it, giving it the swollen look of an infected wound. A few of these trenches led straight from the heart of the Turkish camp toward the Emperor’s Palace, but these were just the great avenue-trenches from which countless street-trenches branched off left and right, running generally parallel to the city’s walls, and spaced as closely together as they could be without collapsing. These trenches were as rungs in a horizontal ladder by which the Turks had advanced until they’d reached the foot of the first ravelins: outlying, arrowhead-shaped earthworks between bastions. Here they had gone underground and undermined the ravelins, packed the mines with black powder, and blown them up, creating avalanches where walls had stood—as when molten wax spills from the top of a candle and mars its regular shape with a lumpy cataract. Fresh trenches, then, had been cut across those irregular debris-piles, bringing the Turks into a position whence they could bring musketry to bear on the city walls, to protect their sappers and miners as they advanced, ditch by ditch, across the dry moat. Now they were attacking the great bastion directly before the Palace in the same way. But it was a gradual sort of war, like watc
hing a tree absorb a stone fence, and nothing was happening at the moment.

  All well and good; but the question on Jack’s mind was: where was the best looting to be found? He chose some likely targets, both in the Turk’s camp and in the city of Vienna itself, and committed to memory a few landmarks, so that he could find what he desired when things were smoky and confused.

  When he turned to go back to the camp, he discovered that there was another man up on this hill, a stone’s throw away: some kind of monk or holy man, perhaps, as he was dressed in a rough sackcloth robe, with no finery. But then the bloke whipped out a sword. It was not one of your needle-thin rapiers, such as fops pushed at each other in the streets of London and Paris, but some kind of relic of the Crusades, a two-handed production with a single crossbar instead of a proper guard—the sort of thing Richard the Lionhearted might’ve used to slay camels in the streets of Jerusalem. This man went down on one knee in the dirt, and he did it with verve and enthusiasm. You see your rich man kneeling in church and it takes him two or three minutes, you can hear his knees popping and sinews creaking, he totters this way and that, creating small alarums amongst the servants who are gripping his elbows. But this brute knelt easily, even lustily if such a thing were possible, and facing toward the city of Vienna, he planted his sword in the ground so that it became a steel cross. The morning light was shining directly into his grizzled face and glinting from the steel of the blade and glowing in some indifferent colored jewels set into the weapon’s hilt and crossbar. The man bowed his head and took to mumbling in Latin. The hand that wasn’t holding the sword was thumbing through a rosary—Jack’s cue to exit stage right. But as he was leaving he recognized the man with the broadsword as King John Sobieski.

  LATER IN THE MORNING, a ration of brandy was issued to each man—it being a military axiom that a drunk soldier was an effective soldier. The brandy gave the men, at last, something to gamble with, and so dice and cards came out of pockets. This led to Jack having half a dozen brandy-rations in his belly, and his comrades-in-arms glaring at him suspiciously and muttering foul accusations in barbarous tongues. But then there was more trumpet-blowing and drum-beating and they were up on their feet (Jack barely so), and now another few hours of tromping around staring at the backs of the men in front of them, the horizon in all directions a fur of bayonets and pikes.

  Like a storm that has fallen upon the mountains, the companies and regiments drained through trees into ravines and down ravines into valleys, coming together into black thundering floods that foamed out across the plain, finally, and rushed toward Vienna.

  The artillery began to fire, first on one side, then the other. But if men were being cut down in swathes by Turkish grape-shot, it was not happening anywhere near Jack. They were moving double-time. They marched from hot, clear air into dust-clouds, then from dust-clouds into permanent banks of gunpowder-smoke.

  Then the earth seemed to quail beneath their feet and their entire formation shied back, men piling into one another’s backs, and the smoke roiled and parted. Glints of gold and polished brass bobbed through it, and Jack understood that right along their flank, King John Sobieski was charging into the Turks at the head of the Winged Hussars.

  Divots of earth continued to rain down for long moments after they had passed. In the Poles’ wake, an empty corridor was left across the battlefield, and suddenly there was no man in front of Jack. A yard of open space was more inviting than a pitcher of beer. He couldn’t not bolt forward. The other men did likewise. The formation was broken and men of various regiments were simply boiling into the beaten path of the Polish cavalry. Jack followed along, as much out of a desire not to be trampled by the men behind him as to reach the looting. He was listening carefully for the sounds of Turkish cannonades from the front, or the rumble of retreating hussars, coming back toward them in panic, but he heard no such thing. There was plenty of musket-fire, but not in the sputtering waves of organized combat.

  He nearly tripped over a severed arm, and saw that it was clad in a curious Oriental fabric. After limbs came bodies—mostly Turkish ones, some clad in vests of fine mail studded with jeweled badges and gold stars. The men around him saw the same thing, and a cheer went up. They were all running now, and they kept getting farther and farther apart, dispersing into some place that, in the dust and smoke, Jack knew as a city, maybe not so great as London, but much bigger, say, than Strasbourg or Munich. It was a city of tents: huge cones supported by central poles and guyed off to the sides with many radiating lines, and curtains hanging down from the rims of the cones to form the walls. The tents were not of rude canvas but of embroidered stuff, all decorated with crescents and stars and spidery words.

  Jack ran into a tent and found thick carpet under his feet, a pattern like twining flowers woven into the pile, and then discovered a cat the size of a wolf, with spotted golden fur, chained to a post, a jewelled collar round its neck. He had never seen a cat large enough to eat him before and so he backed out of that tent and continued to wander. At an intersection of great ways, he discovered a tiled fountain with huge golden fish swimming in it. The overflow spilled into a ditch that led to a garden planted with sweet white flowers.

  A tree grew in a pot on wheels, its branches burdened with strange fruit and inhabited by emerald-green and ruby-red birds with hooked beaks, which screamed sophisticated curses at him in some tongue he had never heard. A dead Turk with an enormous waxed mustache and a turban of apricot silk lay in a marble bath full of blood. Other pikemen and musketeers wandered about, too flabbergasted to loot.

  Jack tripped and landed face-first on red cloth, then stood up to find that he had stepped on a scarlet flag twenty feet on a side, embroidered with swords and heathen letters in gold thread. This was too big to carry away and so he let it lie, and wandered down tent-streets and tent-avenues scattered with collapsible lanterns; wrought-silver incense burners; muskets with stocks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, lapis, and gold; grapefruit-sized hand grenades; turbans clasped with jeweled badges; hand-drums; and vatlike siege mortars, their bombs nearby, half-covered by spiderwebs of fuse. Standards with long horsehair tassels topped by copper crescent moons gaping like dead men at the sky. Embroidered quivers and discarded ramrods, both wooden and iron. Stray Bavarian matchlock men ran to and fro, smouldering ropes still tangled in their fingers, glowing red from the wind of their movement so that they appeared as bobbing red sparks in the smoke and dust, trailing long wavy tendrils of finer smoke behind them.

  Then there was the sound of hooves nearby, coming closer, and Jack spun around and stared into face of a horse, in glowing armor. Above it an armed man in a winged helmet, shouting at him in what he now recognized as Polish, holding up some reins. The reins belonged to a second horse, a cheval de bataille, also richly armored and saddled, but in a wholly different style, adorned with crescents rather than crosses, and boxlike metal stirrups. It must be the war-horse of some Turkish lord. The Winged Hussar was thrusting its reins toward Jack and bellowing orders in his thick, sneering language. Jack reached out and accepted a fistful of reins.

  Now what? Did this Polish lord want Jack to mount the other horse and ride with him through the camp? Not likely! He was pointing at the ground, repeating the same words over and over until Jack nodded, pretending to understand. Finally he drew his sword and pointed it at Jack’s chest and said something very impolite and galloped away.

  Jack now understood: this Winged Hussar had very grand ambitions for the day’s looting. He had found this horse early in the day. It was a prize worth keeping, but it would only hinder him if he tried to lead it around. If he tied it to a tree it would be looted by someone else. So he had looked for an armed peasant (to him, anyone on foot would be a peasant) and enlisted him as a sort of flesh-and-blood hitching-post. Jack’s job was to stand still holding these reins until the Winged Hussar came back—all day if need be.

  Jack had scarcely had time to reflect on the fundamental unsoundness of this plan when a bea
st darted out of the smoke, headed right for him, then changed direction and ran past. It was the strangest thing Jack had ever seen, certainly one for the Book of Revelation: two-legged, feathered, therefore, arguably, a bird. But taller than a man, and apparently not capable of flight. It ran in the gait of a chicken, pecking the air with each stride to keep its balance. Its neck was as long and bare as Jack’s arm and as wrinkled as his Jolly Roger.

  A small mob of infantrymen came running after it.

  Now, Jack did not have the faintest idea what the giant trotting bird (supposing it was a bird) was. It hadn’t occurred to him to chase it, except perhaps out of curiosity. And yet the sight of other men chasing it, working so hard, with such desperate looks on their faces, gave him a powerful urge to do the same. They must be chasing it for a reason. It must be worth something, or else good to eat.

  The bird had gone by very fast, easily out-loping the scrambling, miserably shod pursuers. They’d never catch it. On the other hand, Jack was holding the reins of a horse, and (he began to notice) a magnificent horse it was, with a saddle the likes he’d never seen, decorated in golden thread.

  It probably had not even occurred to that Winged Hussar that Jack would know how to ride. In his part of the world, a serf could no more ride on horseback than he could speak Latin or dance a minuet. And disobeying the command of an armed lord was even less likely than riding around on a horse.

  But Jack was not Polish scum of the earth, barefoot and chained to the land, or even French scum of the earth, in wooden clogs and in thrall to the priest and the tax-farmer, but English scum of the earth in good boots, equipped with certain God-given rights that were (as rumor had it) written down in a Charter somewhere, and armed with a loaded gun. He mounted the horse like a lord, spun it round smartly, reached back and slapped it on the ass, and he was off. In a few moments he had ridden through the middle of that knot of men who were hoping to catch the giant bird. Their only hope had been that their prey would forget that it was being chased, and stop running. Jack had no intention of letting that happen and so he jabbed his boot-heels into his mount’s sides and lit out after the bird in a way that was calculated to make it run like hell. Which it did, and Jack galloped after it, far outdistancing his competition. But the bird was astoundingly swift. As it ran, its wings splayed this way and that like an acrobat’s balancing-pole. Seeing into those wings from behind, Jack was reminded of decorations he’d seen in the hats of fine French gentlemen, and their mistresses, during military parades: those were the plumes of the, what’s it called the, the…the ostrich.