Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  The reason for this merry chase was plain now: the ostrich, if caught, could be plucked, and its plumes taken to markets where fine things from exotic lands were sold, and exchanged for silver.

  Now, Jack calculated. If he scoured the entire Turkish camp, he might find finer things to loot—but the legions of Christendom were all running wild through this place and others were likely to have found them first. The finest things of all would be taken by lords on horseback, and the musketeers and pikemen would be left to brawl over trifles. The plumes of this ostrich were not the finest prize to be had in this camp, but a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, and this one was almost in his hand. Ostrich-plumes were small and light, easy to conceal from the prying fingers and eyes of customs men, no burden to carry all the way across Europe if need be. And as the chase continued, his odds only improved, because this ostrich was speeding away from all noise and commotion, tending toward parts of the Grand Turk’s camp where nothing was going on. If only it would hold still long enough for him to bring it down with a musket-shot.

  The ostrich flailed, squawked, and vanished. Jack reined in his mount and proceeded carefully, and arrived at the lip of a trench. He hadn’t the faintest idea where he was, but this trench looked like a big one. He nudged the horse forward, expecting it to balk, but it cheerfully set to work, planting its hooves carefully in the loose earth of the trench’s sloping wall and picking its way down. Jack saw fresh ostrich prints in the muck on the bottom, and set the horse to trotting that direction.

  Every few yards a smaller trench intersected this one at right-angles. None of these trenches had the palisades of sharpened outward-pointing sticks that the Turks would’ve installed if they’d been expecting an attack, and so Jack reckoned that these trenches did not belong to the camp’s outer works, which had been put up to defend it from encircling armies of Christians. These trenches must, instead, be part of the assault against Vienna. The smoke and dust were such that Jack could not see whether the city was ahead of, or behind, him and the ostrich. But by looking at the way that the earth had been piled up to one side of those trenches, to protect the inhabitants from musket-balls, any fool could make out in which direction the city lay. The ostrich was going towards Vienna, and so was Jack.

  The walls of the big trench steadily became higher and steeper, to the point where they’d had to be shored up with pilings and retaining walls of split logs. Then all of a sudden the walls curved together above him, forming an arch. Jack reined the horse in and stared forward into a dark tunnel, large enough for two or three horsemen to ride abreast. It was cut into the foundation of a steep hill that rose abruptly from generally flat land. Through a momentary parting in the drifting clouds of smoke, Jack looked up and saw the mutilated face of the great bastion looming up above him, and glimpsed the high roof of the Emperor’s Palace beyond and above that.

  This must be a mine, an enormous one, that the Turks had dug beneath the bastion in the hopes of blowing it to kingdom come. The tunnel floor had been paved with logs that had been mostly driven down into the mud by the weight of oxen and wagons as they hauled dirt out, and gunpowder in. In the mud, Jack could see ostrich-prints. Why should that bird settle for merely burying its head in the sand when it could go wholly underground, and not even have to bend over? Jack did not love the idea of following it, but the die was cast; loot-wise, it was the ostrich or nothing.

  As one would expect in any well-organized mining operation, torches were available near the entrance, soaking head-down in a pot of oil. Jack grabbed one, shoved it into the coals of a dying fire until flames emerged, then rode his horse forward into the tunnel.

  It had been carefully timbered to keep it from collapsing. The tunnel descended gently for some distance, until it pierced the water table and became a sort of unpleasant mire, and then it began to climb again. Jack saw lights burning ahead of him. He noticed that the floor of the tunnel was striped with a bright line of steaming blood. This triggered what little Jack had in the way of prudent instincts: he threw the torch into a puddle and nudged the horse along at a slow walk.

  The lights ahead of him illuminated a space larger than the tunnel: a room that had been excavated, deep underneath—where? Thinking back on the last few minutes’ ride, Jack understood that he had covered a considerable distance—he must have passed all the way beneath the bastion—at least as far as the city’s inner wall. And as he drew closer to the lights (several large torchières), he could see that the Turks’ tunnel-work, and its supporting timbers, were all involved with things that had been planted in the earth hundreds of years ago: tarred pilings, driven in one alongside the next, and footings of mortared stone and of brick. The Turks had burrowed straight through the foundations of something enormous.

  Following the rivulet of blood into the illuminated space, Jack saw a few small, bright, billowing tents that had been pitched, for some unfathomable Turkish reason, in the middle of this chamber. Some were standing, others had collapsed into the dirt. A pair of men were striking those gay tents with curt sword-blows. The ostrich stood to one side, cocking its head curiously. The tents tumbled to the floor with blood flying out of them.

  There were people in those tents! They were being executed, one by one.

  It would be easy to kill the ostrich here with a musket-shot, but this would certainly draw the attention of those Turkish executioners. They were formidable-looking fellows with handsome sabers, the only Turks Jack had laid eyes on today who were actually alive, and the only ones who were in any condition to conduct violence against Christians. He preferred to leave them be.

  A saber struck at the top of one of those colorful tents, and a woman screamed. A second blow silenced her.

  So, they were all women. Probably one of those famous harems. Jack wondered, idly, whether the mudlarks of East London would ever believe him if he went home and claimed he had seen a live ostrich, and a Turk’s harem.

  But thoughts of this sort were chased away by others. One of those moments had arrived: Jack had been presented with the opportunity to be stupid in some way that was much more interesting than being shrewd would’ve been. These moments seemed to come to Jack every few days. They almost never came to Bob, and Bob marveled that two brothers, leading similar lives, could be so different that one of them had the opportunity to be reckless and foolish all the time while the other almost never did. Jack had been expecting such a moment to arrive today. He’d supposed, until moments ago, that it had already come: namely, when he decided to mount the horse and ride after the ostrich. But here was a rare opportunity for stupidity even more flagrant and glorious.

  Now, Bob, who’d been observing Jack carefully for many years, had observed that when these moments arrived, Jack was almost invariably possessed by something that Bob had heard about in Church called the Imp of the Perverse. Bob was convinced that the Imp of the Perverse rode invisibly on Jack’s shoulder whispering bad ideas into his ear, and that the only counterbalance was Bob himself, standing alongside, counseling good sense, prudence, caution, and other Puritan virtues.*

  But Bob was in England.

  “Might as well get this over with, then,” Jack muttered, and gave his Turkish steed some vigorous heel-digs, and galloped forward. One of the Turks was just raising his saber to strike down the last of the tent-wearing women. And he would’ve done just that, except that this woman suddenly darted away (as much as a person in such a garment could dart), forcing a postponement of the attack. He shuffled forward—directly into the path of Jack and Jack’s horse. They simply rode the Turk down. It was clear that the horse was well-trained in this maneuver—Jack made a mental note to treat the animal kindly.

  Then with one hand Jack gave a stiff tug on a rein while unslinging his musket from the opposite shoulder. The horse wheeled around, giving Jack a view of the ground he’d just ridden over. One of the Turks was flattened into the ground, crushed in two or three places under the horse’s hooves, and the other was actually stridi
ng towards Jack and sort of wiggling his saber in the way of a man limbering up his wrist for a display of swordsmanship. Not wanting to see any such thing, Jack aimed his musket carefully at this Turk and pulled the trigger. The Turk stared calmly into Jack’s eyes, up the barrel of the weapon. He had brown hair and green eyes and a bushy mustache flecked with gold, all of which vanished in a smoky flash when the powder in the pan ignited. But the musket did not kick. He heard the foosh of the flash in the pan, but not the boom of the barrel.

  This was known as a hang fire. The fire in the pan had not traveled into the barrel—perhaps the touch-hole had become blocked by a bit of dirt. Nonetheless, Jack kept the weapon aimed in the general direction of the Turk (which involved some guesswork because the Turk was hidden behind the cloud of smoke from the pan). There might still be a slow fire working its way through the touch-hole—the musket was likely to fire, without warning, at any point during the next couple of minutes.

  By the time Jack could see again, the Turk had grabbed the horse’s bridle with one hand and raised the other to strike. Jack, peering out sidelong through burning eyes, wheeled his musket about to make some kind of barrier between him and the bloody saber and felt a mighty shock when the two weapons connected, instantly followed by a hot blast that knocked his hands apart and spat metal into his face. The horse reared up. Under other circumstances, Jack might’ve been ready for this. As it was, blind, shocked, and burnt, he performed a reverse-somersault down the animal’s muscular ass, plunged to the ground, and then rolled away blindly, terrified that the hind hooves might come down on top of him.

  At no time during these acrobatics did Jack stop holding the stock of the musket very firmly with his right hand. He staggered up, realized his eyes were clenched shut, buried his face in the crook of his left arm, and tried to wipe away the heat and pain. The raw feel of his sleeve against his eyelids told him that he had been burnt, but not badly. He took the arm away and opened his eyes, then spun around like a drunk, trying to bring the enemy in view. He raised his musket again, to defend himself from any more sword-blows. But it moved far too easily. The weapon had been broken in half only a few inches past the flintlock—a yard of barrel was simply gone.

  The female in the tent had already stepped forward and seized the horse’s reins and was now speaking to it in soothing tones. Jack couldn’t see the second Turk at all, which panicked him for a moment, until he finally saw him on the ground, arms wrapped around his face, rolling from side to side and making muffled cries. That much was good, but the situation was, in general, not satisfactory: Jack had lost his weapon to some sort of accident, and his mount to some Saracen female, and had not acquired any loot yet.

  He ran forward to seize the horse’s reins, but a glitter on the ground caught his eye: the Turk’s sword. Jack snatched it up, then shouldered the woman out of the way, mounted the horse again, and got it turned around to where he could keep a good eye on matters. Where was the damned ostrich? Over there—cornered. Jack rode over to it, cutting the air a few times to learn the balance of the saber. Striking heads off, from the back of a moving horse, was normally a job for highly trained specialists, but only because the neck of a man was a small target. Decapitating an ostrich, which consisted almost entirely of neck, was almost too easy to be satisfying. Jack did the deed with one swift backhand slash. The head fell into the dirt and lay there, eyes open, making swallowing motions. The rest of the ostrich fell down, then climbed up and began to stalk around the chamber with blood spraying out of its severed neck. It fell down frequently. Jack did not especially want to get blood sprayed on him and so he guided the horse away from the bird—but the bird changed direction and came after him! Jack rode the other way and the ostrich once again changed tack and plotted an intercept course.

  The woman was laughing at him. Jack glared at her. She stifled herself. Then a voice came out of that tent, saying something in a barbarian tongue. Jack circumvented another blind ostrich-charge, moving the horse around smartly.

  “Sir knight, I know none of the tongues of Christendom, save French, English, Qwghlmian, and a dash of Hungarian.”

  IT WAS THE FIRST TIME that Jack Shaftoe had been called “sir” or mistaken for a knight. He glared meanly at the ostrich, which was staggering around in circles and losing the strength to stand. The woman had meanwhile switched into yet another strange language. Jack interrupted her: “My Qwghlmian is rusty,” he announced. “Wandered up to Gttr Mnhrbgh once when I was a boy, as we’d heard a rumor that a Spanish Treasure-Galleon had been wrecked, and pieces of eight scattered up and down the shore, as thick as mussels. But all we found was a few drunken Frenchmen, stealing the chickens and burning the houses.”

  He was prepared to relate many more dramatic details, but at this point he faltered because there’d been a violent shifting-around of the contents of the tent, exposing, up towards its summit, a complex arrangement of silk handkerchiefs: one tied over the bridge of the nose, hiding everything below, and another tied round the forehead, hiding everything above. Between them, a slit through which a pair of eyes was looking up at him. They were blue eyes. “You are an Englishman!” she exclaimed.

  Jack noted that this one was not preceded by a “Sir knight.” To begin with, Englishmen were not accorded the respect given naturally to the men of great countries, such as France or Poland-Lithuania. Among Englishmen, Jack’s way of speaking, of course, marked him out as No Gentleman. But even if he spoke like an Archbishop, from the nature of the yarn he’d just been relating to her, concerning his scavenging-trip to Qwghlm, it was now obvious that he had been at some point an actual Vagabond. Damn it! Not for the first time, Jack imagined cutting his own tongue out. His tongue was admired by that small fraction of mankind who, owing to some want of dignity or wit, were willing to let it be known that they admired any part of Jack Shaftoe. And yet if he had merely held it back, reined it in, this blue-eyed woman might still be addressing him as Sir Knight.

  That part of Jack Shaftoe that, up until this point in his life, had kept him alive, counseled him to pull sharply on one rein or the other, wheel the horse around, and gallop away from Trouble here. He looked down at his hands, holding those reins, and noted that they failed to move—evidently, the part of Jack that sought a merry and short life was once again holding sway.

  Puritans came frequently to Vagabond-camps bearing the information that at the time of the creation of the Universe—thousands of years ago!—certain of those present had been predestined by God to experience salvation. The rest of them were doomed to spend eternity burning in hellfire. This intelligence was called, by the Puritans, the Good News. For days, after the Puritans had been chased away, any Vagabond boy who farted would claim that the event had been foreordained by the Almighty, and enrolled in a cœlestial Book, at the dawn of time. All in good fun. But now here Jack Shaftoe sat astride a Turkish charger, willing his hands to pull one rein or the other, willing his boot-heels to dig into the sides of the beast, so that it would carry him away from this woman, but nothing happened. It must have been the Good News at work.

  The blue eyes were downcast. “I thought you were a Knight at first,” she said.

  “What, in these rags?”

  “But the horse is magnificent, and it blocks my view somewhat,” Trouble said. “The way you fought those Janissaries—like a Galahad.”

  “Galahad—he’s the one who never got laid?” Again with the tongue. Again the sense that his movements were predestined, that his body was a locked carriage running out of control down a hill, directly towards the front entrance of Hell.

  “That is one of the few things that I have in common with that legendary Knight.”

  “No!”

  “I was gozde, which means that the Sultan had taken note of me; but before I was made ikbal which means bedded, he gave me to the Grand Vizier.”

  “Now I am not a learned fellow,” said Jack Shaftoe, “but from what little I know of the habits of Turkish Viziers, it is not usua
l for them to keep beautiful, saucy young blonde slaves about their camps—as virgins.”

  “Not forever. But there is something to be said for saving a few virgins up to celebrate a special occasion—such as the sacking of Vienna.”

  “But wouldn’t there be plenty of virgins to be rustled in Vienna?”

  “From the tales told by the secret agents that the Wazir sent into the city, he feared that there would be none at all.”

  Jack was inclined to be suspicious. But it was no less plausible for the Vizier, or the Wazir as Blue Eyes called him, to have English virgins than it was for him to have ostriches, giant bejeweled cats, and potted fruit-trees. “These soldiers haven’t gotten to you?” asked Jack. He waved the saber around at the dead Turks, inadvertently flicking bullets of blood from the tip.

  “They are Janissaries.”

  “I’ve heard of ’em,” Jack said. “At one point I considered going to Constantinople, or whatever they’re calling it now, and joining ’em.”