Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “But what about their Oath of Celibacy?”

  “Oh, that makes no difference to me, Blue Eyes—look.” He was struggling with his codpiece.

  “A Turk would already be finished,” the woman said, patiently observing. “They have, in the front of their trousers, a sort of sallyport, to expedite pissing and raping.”

  “I’m no Turk,” he said, finally rising up in the stirrups to afford her a clear view.

  “Is it supposed to look like that?”

  “Oh, you’re a sly one.”

  “What happened?”

  “A certain barber-surgeon in Dunkirk put out the word that he had learnt a cure for the French Pox from a traveling alchemist. My mates and I—we had just got back from Jamaica—went there one night—”

  “You had the French Pox?”

  “I only wanted a beard trim,” Jack said. “My mate Tom Flinch had a bad finger that needed removal. It had bent the wrong way during a naval engagement with French privateers, and begun to smell so badly that no one would sit near him, and he had to take his meals abovedecks. That was why we went, and that was why we were drunk.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We had to get Tom drunk so he’d make less of a fuss when the finger went flying across the barber-shop. The rules of etiquette stated that we must therefore be as drunk as he.”

  “Pray continue.”

  “But when we learned that this Barber could also cure the French Pox, why, codpieces were flying around the place like cannonballs.”

  “So you did have the said Pox.”

  “So this barber, whose eyes had gotten as big as doubloons, stoked up his brazier and began to heat the irons. While he was performing the amputation of Tom Flinch’s digit, the irons were waxing red- and then yellow-hot. Meantimes his young apprentice was mixing up a poultice of herbs, as dictated by the alchemist. Well, to make a long story short, I was the last of the group to have the afflicted member cauterized. My mates were all lying in a heap on the floor, holding poultices over their cocks and screaming, having completed the treatment. The barber and his apprentice tied me into the chair with a large number of stout lines and straps, and jammed a rag into my mouth—”

  “They robbed you!?”

  “No, no, missy, this was all part of the treatment. Now, the afflicted part of my member—the spot that needed cauterizing, you understand—was on the top, about halfway along. But my Trouser-Snake was all shrunk into m’self by this point, from fear. So the apprentice grasped the tip of my Johnson with a pair of tongs and stretched old One-Eyed Willie out with one hand—holding a candle with the other so that the site of the disease was plainly visible. Then the barber rummaged in his brazier and chose just the right sort of iron—methinks they were all the same, but he wanted to put on a great show of discretion, to justify his price. Just as the barber was lowering the glowing iron into position, what should happen but the tax-man and his deputies smashed down both front and back door at the same instant. ’Twas a raid. Barber dropped the iron.”

  “ ’Tis very sad—a strapping fellow such as you—strong and shapely—buttocks like the shell-halves of an English walnut—a fine set of calves—handsome, after a fashion—never to have children.”

  “Oh, the barber was too late—I already have two little boys—that’s why I’m chasing ostriches and killing Janissaries—got a family to support. And as I still have the French Pox, there’s only a few years left before I go crazy and die. So now’s the time for building up a handsome legacy.”

  “Your wife is lucky.”

  “My wife is dead.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Nah, I didn’t love her,” Jack said bravely, “and after the Barber dropped the iron I’d no practical use for her. Just as I have no practical use for you, Trouble.”

  “How do you suppose?”

  “Well, just take a look. I can’t do it.”

  “Maybe not as the English do. But certain arts have been taught to me from Books of India.”

  Silence.

  “I’ve never had high regard for book-learning,” Jack said, his voice sounding a bit as though a noose were drawing tight around his neck. “Give me practical experience any day.”

  “I have that, too.”

  “Aha, but you said you were a virgin?”

  “I did my practicing on women.”

  “What!?”

  “You don’t think the entire harem just sits around waiting for the master to stiffen up?”

  “But what’s the point—what is the very meaning—of doing it when there is no penis available?”

  “It is a question you might even have asked yourself,” said Blue Eyes.

  Jack had the feeling now—hardly for the first time—that a Change of Subject was urgently called for. He said, “I know that you were lying when you said that I was handsome, when really I’m quite bashed, gouged, pox-marked, rope-burned, weather-tanned, and so on.”

  “Some women like it,” Blue Eyes said, and actually batted her eyelashes. Her eyes, and a few patches of skin in their vicinity, were the only parts of her that Jack could actually see, and this magnified the effect.

  It was important that he put up some kind of defense. “You look very young,” he said, “and you talk like a girl who is in need of a spanking.”

  “Books of India,” she said coolly, “have entire chapters about that.”

  Jack began riding the horse around the chamber, inspecting its walls. Scraping away packed earth with one hand, he observed the staves of a barrel, branded with Turkish letters, and with more digging and scraping he found more barrels stacked around it—a whole cache of them, jammed into a niche in the chamber wall and mortared together with dirt.

  In the center of the chamber was a pile of timbers and planks where the Turkish carpenters had built the reinforcements to prevent the chamber from caving in. Diverse tools were strewn around, wherever the Turks had dropped them when they’d decided to flee. “Here, make yourself useful, lass, and bring me that axe,” Jack said.

  Blue Eyes brought him the axe, staring him coolly in the eyes as she handed it over. Jack rose in the stirrups and swung it round so it bit into one of those Turkish kegs. A stave crumpled. Another blow, and the wood gave way entirely, and black powder poured out and hissed onto the ground.

  “We’re in the cellar of that Palace,” Jack said. “Directly above us is the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor, and all around us are his vaults, full of treasure. Do you know what we could get, if we touched this off?”

  “Premature deafness?”

  “I intend to plug my ears.”

  “Tons of rock and earth collapsing atop us?”

  “We can lay a powder-trail up the tunnel, put fire to it, and watch from a safe distance.”

  “You don’t think that the sudden explosion and collapse of the Holy Roman Emperor’s Palace will draw some attention?”

  “ ’Twas just an idea.”

  “If you do that, you’re going to lose me, brother…besides, that is not how you become ennobled. Blowing a hole in the palace floor and slinking in like a rat, with smoke coming out of your clothes…”

  “I’m supposed to take advice on ennoblement from a slave?”

  “A slave who has lived in palaces.”

  “How would you propose to do it, then? If you’re so clever—let’s hear your plan.”

  The blue eyes rolled. “Who is noble?”

  Jack shrugged. “Noblemen.”

  “How do most of them get that way?”

  “By having noble parents.”

  “Oh. Really.”

  “Of course. Is it different in Turkish courts?”

  “No different. But from the way you were talking, I thought that, in the courts of Christendom, it had something to do with being clever.”

  “I don’t believe it has any connection at all to cleverness,” Jack said, and prepared to relate a story about Charles the Elector Palatine. But before he could do this, Blue Eyes asked:


  “Then we don’t need a clever plan at all, do we?”

  “This is an idle conversation, lass, but I am an idle man, and so I don’t mind it. You say we do not need any clever plan to become ennobled. But we lack noble birth—so how do you propose to become noble?”

  “It’s easy. You buy your way in.”

  “That requires money.”

  “Let’s get out of this hole and get us some money, then.”

  “How do you propose to do that?”

  “I’ll need an escort,” the slave-girl said. “You have a horse and a sword.”

  “Blue Eyes, this is a battlefield. Many do. Find a knight.”

  “I’m a slave,” she said. “A knight will take what he wants and then leave me.”

  “So it’s matrimony you’re after?”

  “Some kind of partnership. Needn’t be matrimonial.”

  “I’m to ride in front, slaying Janissaries, dragons, knights, and you’ll tag behind and do—what, exactly? And don’t speak to me about Books of India any more.”

  “I’ll handle the money.”

  “But we have no money.”

  “That is why you need someone to handle it.”

  Jack didn’t follow, but it sounded clever, and so he nodded sagely, as if he’d taken her meaning very clearly. “What’s your name?”

  “Eliza.”

  Rising in his stirrups, doffing his hat, and bowing slightly at the waist. “And I am Half-Cocked Jack at the lady’s service.”

  “Find me a Christian man’s clothes. The bloodier the better. I’ll pluck the bird.”

  Erstwhile Camp of Grand Vizier Khan Mustapha

  SEPTEMBER 1683

  “AND ANOTHER THING—” JACK SAID.

  “What, yet another!?” said Eliza, in an officer’s bloody coat, her head swaddled in ripped shirts, slumped over in the saddle so that her head wasn’t far from that of Jack, who was directing the horse.

  “If we make it as far as Paris—and that’s by no means easily done—and if you’ve given me so much as a blink of trouble—one cross look, one wifely crossing of the arms—cutting thespian-like asides, delivered to an imaginary audience—”

  “Have you had many women, Jack?”

  “—pretending to be shocked by what’s perfectly normal—calculated moods—slowness to get underway—murky complaints about female trouble—”

  “Now that you mention it, Jack, this is my time of the month and I need you to stop right here in the middle of the battlefield for, oh, half an hour should suffice—”

  “Not funny at all. Do I look amused?”

  “You look like the inside of a handkerchief.”

  “Then I’ll inform you that I don’t look amused. We are skirting what’s left of Khan Mustapha’s camp. Over to the right, captive Turks stand in file in a trench, crossing themselves—that’s odd—”

  “I can hear them, uttering Christian prayers in a Slavic tongue—those are Janissaries, most likely Serbs. Like the ones you saved me from.”

  “Can you hear the cavalry-sabers whipping into their necks?”

  “Is that what that is?”

  “Why d’you think they’re praying? Those Janissaries are being put to the sword by Polish hussars.”

  “But why?”

  “Ever stumble into a very old family dispute? It wears that face. Some kind of ancient grievance. Some Janissaries must’ve done something upsetting to some Poles a hundred years ago.”

  Echelons of cavalry traversed the ruins of the Grand Vizier’s camp like ripples snapped across a bedsheet. Though ’twere best not to begin thinking of bedsheets. “What was I just saying?”

  “Oh, you were adding another codicil to our partnership agreement. Just like some Vagabond-lawyer.”

  “That’s another thing—”

  “Yet still another?”

  “Don’t call me a Vagabond. I may call myself one, from time to time, as a little joke—to break the ice, charm the ladies, or whatnot. All in good fun. But you must never direct that notorious epithet my way.” Jack noticed that with one hand he was rubbing the base of the other hand’s thumb, where a red-hot iron, shaped like a letter V, had once been pressed against his flesh, and held down for a while, leaving a mark that itched sometimes. “But to return to what I was trying to say, before all of your uncouth interruptions—the slightest trouble from you, lass, and I’ll abandon you in Paris.”

  “Oh, horror! Anything but that, cruel man!”

  “You’re as naïve as a rich girl. Don’t you know that in Paris, any woman found on her own will be arrested, cropped, whipped, et cetera, by that Lieutenant of Police—King Looie’s puissant man, who has an exorbitant scope of powers—a most cruel oppressor of beggars and Vagabonds.”

  “But you’d know nothing of Vagabonds, O lordly gentleman.”

  “Better, but still not good.”

  “Where do you get this stuff like ‘notorious epithet’ and ‘exorbitant scope’ and ‘puissant’?”

  “The thyuhtuh, my dyuh.”

  “You’re an actor?”

  “An actor? An actor!?” A promise to spank her later was balanced on the tip of his tongue like a ball on a seal’s nose, but he swallowed it for fear she’d come back at him with some flummoxing utterance. “Learn manners, child. Sometimes Vagabonds might, if in a generous Christian humour, allow actors to follow them around at a respectful distance.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “Are you rolling your eyes, under those bandages? I can tell, you know—but soft! An officer is nearby. Judging from heraldry, a Neapolitan count with at least three instances of bastardy in his ancestral line.”

  Following the cue, Eliza, who fortunately had a deep, unsettlingly hoarse alto, commenced moaning.

  “Monsieur, monsieur,” Jack said to her, in attempted French, “I know the saddle must pain those enormous black swellings that have suddenly appeared in your groin the last day or two, since you bedded that pair of rather ill-seeming Gypsy girls against my advice—but we must get you to a Surgeon-Barber, or, failing that, a Barber-Surgeon, so that the Turkish ball can be dug out of your brains before there are any more of those shuddering and twitching fits…” and so on until the Neapolitan count had retreated.

  This led to a long pause during which Jack’s mind wandered—though, in retrospect, Eliza’s apparently didn’t.

  “Jack, is it safe to talk?”

  “For a man, talking to a woman is never precisely safe. But we are out of the camp now, I no longer have to step over occasional strewn body-parts, the Danube is off to the right, Vienna rises beyond that. Men are spreading out to set up camp, queuing before heavily guarded wagons to receive their pay for the day’s work—yes, safe as it’ll ever be.”

  “Wait! When will you get paid, Jack?”

  “Before the battle we were issued rations of brandy, and worthless little scraps of paper with what I take to’ve been letters inscribed on them, to be redeemed (or so the Captain claimed) in silver at the end of the day. They did not fool Jack Shaftoe. I sold mine to an industrious Jew.”

  “How much did you get for it?”

  “I drove an excellent bargain. A bird in the hand is worth two in the—”

  “You got only fifty percent!?”

  “Not so bad, is it? Think, I’m only getting half of the proceeds from those ostrich plumes—because of you.”

  “Oh, Jack. How do you suppose it makes me feel when you say such things?”

  “What, am I speaking too loudly? Hurting your ears?”

  “No…”

  “Need to adjust your position?”

  “No, no, Jack, I’m not speaking of my body’s feelings.”

  “Then what the hell are you on about?”

  “And, when you say ‘one funny look and I’ll drop you off among the Poles who brand runaway serfs on the forehead’ or ‘just wait until King Looie’s Lieutenant of Police gets his hands on you…’”

  “You’re only cherry-picking the worst
ones,” Jack complained. “Mostly I’ve just threatened to drop you off at nunneries and the like.”

  “So you do admit that threatening to brand me is more cruel than threatening to make me into a nun.”

  “That’s obvious. But—”

  “But why be cruel to any degree, Jack?”

  “Oh, excellent trick. I’ll have to remember it. Now who is playing the Vagabond-lawyer?”

  “Is it that you feel worried that, perhaps, you erred in salvaging me from the Janissaries?”

  “What kind of conversation is this? What place do you come from, where people actually care about how everyone feels about things? What possible bearing could anyone’s feelings have on anything that makes a bloody difference?”

  “Among harem-slaves, what is there to pass the long hours of the day, except to practice womanly arts, such as sewing, embroidery, and the knotting of fine silk threads into elaborate lace undergarments—”

  “Avast!”

  “—to converse and banter in diverse languages (which does not go unless close attention is paid to the other’s feelings). To partake of schemes and intrigues, to haggle in souks and bazaars—”

  “You’ve already boasted of your prowess there.”

  “—”

  “Was there something else you were going to mention, girl?”

  “Well—”

  “Out with it!”

  “Only what I alluded to before: using all the most ancient and sophisticated practices of the Oriental world to slowly drive one another into frenzied, sweaty, screaming transports of concupiscent—”

  “That’s quite enough!”

  “You asked.”

  “You led me to ask—schemes and intrigues, indeed!”

  “Second nature to me now, I’m afraid.”

  “What of your first nature, then? No one could look more English.”

  “It is fortunate my dear mother did not hear that. She took extravagant pride in our heritage—pure Qwghlmian.”

  “Unadulterated mongrel, then.”

  “Not a drop of English blood—nor of Celtic, Norse, or what-have-you.”

  “A hundred percent what-have-you is more likely. At what age were you abducted, then?”