Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  Jack, as former execution facilitator, watched with professional interest. The man with the rope pulled hard on it while the fire was started, strangling the woman probably within seconds, and ruining the entire execution in the opinion of some. Most of them watched but didn’t see. Jack had found that people watching executions, even if they kept open eyes turned to the entire performance, did not really see the death, and could not remember it later, because what they were really doing was thinking about their own deaths.

  But this one affected Jack as if it were Eliza who’d been burnt (the witch was a young woman), and he walked away with shoulders drawn tightly together and watery snot trickling out of his nose. Blurry vision did him no favors vis-à-vis navigation. He walked so fast that by the time he realized he was on the wrong street, the town square—his only star to steer by—was concealed around the bends of Bockboden. And he did not think that aimless wandering, or anything that could be considered suspicious by anyone, was a good idea here. The only thing that was a good idea was to get out of town.

  So he did, and got lost in the woods.

  The Harz Mountains

  WALPURGISNACHT 1684

  Me miserable! which way shall I flie

  Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?

  Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;

  And in the lowest deep a lower deep

  Still threatning to devour me opens wide,

  To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.

  —MILTON, Paradise Lost

  JACK SAT ON A DEAD tree in the woods for a time, feeling hungry, and, what was worse, feeling stupid. There was little daylight left and he thought he should use it wisely (he was not above being wise as long as there was no preacher or gentleman demanding that he do so). He walked through the trees over a little rise and down into a shallow basin between hills where he was fairly certain he could light a fire without announcing himself to the citizenry of Bockboden. He spent the remainder of the daylight gathering fallen branches and, just as the sun was setting, lit a fire—having learned that the tedious and exacting work of flint, steel, and tinder could be expedited if you simply used a bit of gunpowder in lieu of the tinder. With some pyrotechnics and a cloud of smoke, he had a fire. Now he need only throw sticks on it from time to time and sit there like the lost fool he was until sleep finally caught him unawares. He did not want to think about the witch he’d seen burnt, but it was hard not to. Instead he tried to make himself think about brother Bob, and his two boys, the twins Jimmy and Danny, and his long- and oft-delayed plan to find them a legacy.

  He was startled to find three women and a man, their faces all lit up by firelight, standing nearby. They looked as if they had ventured into the woods in the middle of the night expecting to find some other vagrant sitting by a fire sleeping.* Jack’s first thought might’ve been Witch-hunters! if not for that they’d had longer to react to him than he to them, and they looked worried (they’d noticed the sword)—besides, they were mostly females and they were unarmed, unless the fresh-cut tree-branches that they used as leafy walking-sticks were meant as weapons. At any rate, they turned and hustled off, their sticks giving them the look of a group of stout chamber-maids going off to sweep the forest with makeshift brooms.

  After that Jack could not sleep. Another group much like the first came by a few minutes later. This forest was damnably crowded. Jack picked up his few belongings and withdrew into the shadows to observe what other moths were attracted to the flame. Within a few minutes, a squadron of mostly women, ranging from girls to hags, had taken over the fire, and stoked it up to a blaze. They’d brought along a black iron kettle that they filled with buckets of water from a nearby creek and set up on the fire to boil. As steam began to rise from the pot—illuminated by firelight down below, vanishing into the cold sky as it ascended—they began to throw in the ingredients of some kind of stew: sacks of some type of fat dark-blue cherries, red mushrooms with white speckles, sprigs of herbs. No meat, or recognizable vegetables, to the disappointment of Jack. But he was hungry enough to eat German food now. The question was: how to secure an invitation to the feast?

  In the end, he just went down and got some, which was what everyone else seemed to be doing. Traffic through this part of the woods had become so heavy that he could not rely on going unnoticed anyway. First he used his sword to cut a leafy branch like everyone else’s. None of these persons was armed, and so he stuck the sword and scabbard down his trouser-leg and then, to conceal it better, fashioned a false splint of sticks, and rags torn from his shirt, around the leg so that he would look like a man with a frozen knee, hobbling round with the aid of the staff. Thus disguised, he limped into the firelight and was politely, not to say warmly, greeted by the stew-cookers. One of them offered him a ladle full of the stuff and he swallowed it down fast enough to burn his insides all the way down to his stomach. Probably just as well—it was foul-tasting. On the principle that you never know when you’ll find food again, he gestured for more, and they somewhat reluctantly handed him a second ladle, and uneasily watched him drink it. It was as bad as the first, though it had chunks of mushrooms or something on the bottom that might give some nourishment.

  He must have looked lost, then, because after he’d stood near the fire for a few minutes warming himself the stew-makers began helpfully pointing in the direction that all the other people were migrating. This happened to be generally uphill, which was the way Jack planned to travel anyhow (either it would take him to the Doctor’s tower, or to a height-of-land whence he could see the tower come morning) and so off he hobbled.

  The next time he was really aware of anything (he seemed to be walking and sleeping at the same time, though everything had a dreamlike quality now, so the whole thing might be a dream) he had evidently covered a couple of miles uphill, judging from that it was much colder and the wind was blowing so hard that he could hear trees being struck down all over, like reports of guns in a battle. Clouds stampeded across the face of a full moon. Occasionally something would rip through the branches overhead and shower him with twigs and brush. Looking up, he saw it was broken-off tree branches, or maybe even small uprooted trees, propelled through the air by the hurricanoe. He was working his way uphill, though not sure why anymore. Others were all around him. The forest was very tall skinny black trees closely packed together like the massed pikes of a military formation, the eruptions of moonlight between fleeing clouds like the bursting of bombs, and Jack heard, or dreamed, the tramping of feet and blowing of trumpets. Forgetting why his leg was splinted, he supposed he must have been wounded in action (possibly in the head as well as the leg) and the wound dressed by a barber. For a while he was almost certain he was still fighting Turks in Vienna and all of the Eliza stuff just a long, elaborate, cruel dream.

  But then he was back in the woods above Bockboden. Branches and heavier things were still ripping through space above his head like cannonballs. He looked up at the moon trying to see them, and with the torn clouds streaming by, it was difficult to make out their shapes, but he was fairly certain now that people were riding on those branches, as Winged Hussars rode on chargers. They were charging the hilltop! Jack finally stumbled out onto a path that wound up the mountain, and was nearly run over by the infantry part of the charge: a river of people with cut branches, and other ornaments, such as the forks farmers used to shovel manure. Forgetting about the splinted leg, Jack wheeled and tried to run with them, but fell, and took a while getting up.

  He reached the collection of outcroppings that was the mountain-top somewhat after the main group, but in time to see them chasing away half a dozen musketeers who had apparently been posted there, and who were not welcome. None of them fired his weapon, as they had no desire to kill a few people only to be surrounded by hundreds of their stick-brandishing friends. As this occurred, people farther from the action were shouting threats and offering sour comments in much the same vein as the spectators at the witch-burning had earlier, except
that they were using the word Wächer, which (Jack’s murderously overtaxed mind guessing wildly here) perhaps meant “Watchers.”

  Battle won, the Hexen (no point in denying it any more) quickly lit up the whole mountain-top with fires (many people had carried faggots on their backs), which burnt with white heat in the continuing wind-blast. Jack hobbled around and looked. He could see that many ages ago a tall stone column had risen from the top of the mountain, bifurcated at the top into what might have been shaped like a pair of goat’s horns. It might’ve looked something like a crossbow standing up on end. But it had been toppled so long ago that it was now covered in moss and dirt. A couple of dozen standing-stones had ringed it; most of them had been toppled as well. The Hexen had led a black goat up onto the ruin of the high column and leashed him there to look out over the whole fiery prospect.

  People, frequently naked, danced around those bonfires. Many spring flowers had been brought up and used to decorate rocks, or people. A certain amount of fucking went on, as one would expect, but at least some of it seemed to be ceremonial fucking—the participants, actors in a sort of immorality play—the woman always bedecked with garlands of spring wildflowers and the man always donning an eye-patch. Certain small animals might have died unnatural deaths. There was chanting and singing in a language that wasn’t exactly German.

  Of course, presiding over the entire thing was Satan the Prince of Darkness, or so Jack assumed—as what else would you call a jet-black figure, horned and bearded, maybe a hundred feet high, dancing in the boiling, smoky, cloudy sky just above the summit, sometimes visible and sometimes not, occasionally seen in profile as he lifted his bearded chin to howl, or laugh, at the moon. Jack fully believed this, and knew beyond doubt that every word the preachers had ever said about Lucifer was true. He decided that running away wasn’t a bad idea. Choosing the direction he happened to be pointed in at the moment he panicked, he ran. The moon came out a few moments later and showed him he had one or two strides left on rock before he would find himself running in midair—a fantastical gorge plunged straight down for farther than could be seen by moonlight. Jack stopped and turned around, having no other choices, and with a forced and none too sincere calmness, looked at the entire panorama of fire and shadow hoping to find a route that wouldn’t take him too near Satan—or actually any of the several Satans of different sizes who seemed to be huddling in council around the mountain-top.

  His eye was caught by a tiny black silhouette outlined in a brilliant hairy fringe, elevated above the whole scene: the black goat, tilting its head back to bray. One of the vast Satans duplicated the move precisely. Jack understood that he had been running from shadows of the goat cast against clouds and smoke by the light of the fire.

  He sat down at the point where he’d almost hurled himself into the gorge, laughed, and tried to clear his head, and to get his bearings. The cliff, and the somewhat lower bluff across from it, were craggy, with great big shards and flakes of rock angling crazily into the air—and (by the way) exploding the Doctor’s idea of how these rocks had been formed, because the grain of these rocks ran straight up and down. Obviously it was the remains of a giant, killed in some antediluvian rock fight, who’d died on his back with his bony fingers thrust up into the air.

  Jack drew nearer to a fire, partly because he was cold and partly because he wanted a closer look at one particular naked girl who was dancing around it—somewhat on the fleshy side and clearly destined to become another broom-wielding hag in the long run, but the least columnar German female Jack had recently seen. By the time he got close enough to have a good look at her, the fire was uncomfortably hot, which should have warned him that the light was very bright, on his face. But he did not consider this important fact at all until he heard the fatal word Wache! Turning towards the voice he saw, almost close enough to touch, one of those women who had woken him up earlier in the evening, down below, when he’d been sleeping by his little fire with his sword in view. His sword was exactly what she was looking for, now that she’d gained everyone’s attention by uttering their least favorite word. Concealing the weapon in a leg-splint had worked when it was dark, and people were not specifically looking for a sword, but here and now it did not work at all—the woman hardly needed do more than glance at Jack before screaming, in a voice that could probably be heard in Leipzig, “Er ist eine Wache! Er hat ein Schwert!”

  So the party was over for everyone and most of all Jack. Anyone could’ve given him a smart shove and sent him into the fire and that would’ve been the end, or at least an interesting beginning, but instead they all ran away from him—but, he had to assume, not for long. The only one who stayed behind was the one who’d fingered him. She hovered out of sword-range giving him a piece of her mind, so furious she was sobbing. Jack had no desire to draw his sword and get these people more angry than they were, but (a) they couldn’t possibly get much more angry no matter what he did, and (b) he had to get the damn splint off his leg if he were going to do any serious fleeing. And fleeing was the order of the night. So. Out came his dagger. The woman gasped and jumped back. Jack controlled the urge to tell her to shut up and calm down, and slashed through all the rag bands around his leg so that the splint-sticks fell away from him. Then he freed his leg by pulling out the scabbard and sword. The woman now screamed. People were running towards Jack now, and cries of “Wächer!” were making it difficult to hear anything else—Jack had absorbed enough German by now to understand that this meant not “the Watcher” but “the Watchers.” They’d made up their minds that Jack must be only one of a whole platoon of armed infiltrators, which of course would be the only way his presence there would make any sense. Because to be here alone was suicide.

  Jack ran.

  He hadn’t been running for long before he understood that the Hexen were generally trying to drive him in the direction of the cliff—an excellent idea. But, as yet, they were not very organized and so there were gaps between them. Jack sallied through one of these and began to lose altitude the slow, safe, and sane way. The commotion had dropped a couple of octaves in pitch. At first it had mostly been shocked females spreading the alarm (which had worked pretty well), and now it was angry males organizing the hunt. Jack had to assume it wasn’t the first time they had hunted for large animals in these woods.

  Even so, the hunt lasted for perhaps an hour, making its way generally downhill. Jack’s only hope was to get out in front of them and flee through the darkness. But they had torches and they knew their way around, and had spread the alarm down the mountain and so no matter what Jack achieved in the way of running, he found himself always surrounded. There were any number of near-escapes that ended in failure. The million poky branches of the alder trees clawed his face and threatened to blind him and caused him to make more noise than he wanted to as he moved about.

  Toward the end, he got into situations where he could have escaped, or at least added a few minutes to his life, by killing one or two people. But he didn’t—an act of forbearance he wished could have been observed and noted down by some other sort of Watcher, a lurking mystery with a mirror on a stick, so that news of his noble decisions could be provided to Eliza and everyone else who’d ever looked at him the wrong way. Far from earning him universal admiration, this only led to his being surrounded by some half a dozen men with torches, standing just out of sword-range and darting in to sweep flames past his face when they thought they saw an opening. Jack risked a look back over his shoulder and saw no one behind him, which seemed a poor way to surround someone. He wheeled, ran a couple of steps, and hit a wall. A wall. Turning back around, he saw a torch-flame headed right for his face and reflexively parried the blow. Another came in from another direction and he parried that, and when the third came in from yet another direction he parried it with the edge instead of the flat of his blade, and cut the handle of the torch in two. The burning half spun in the air and he snatched it while slashing blindly in the other direction and hurting someone.
Now that he’d drawn blood, the other hunters stepped back, knowing that reinforcements were on their way.* Jack, keeping his back to the building, crept sideways, sword in one hand and torch in the other, occasionally taking advantage of the latter’s light to glance over his shoulder and gain some knowledge of what he’d run into.

  It was an old wooden building. The door was closed by a padlock the size of a ham. Wooden shutters had been pulled shut over the windows and bolted from the inside. A gentleman would’ve been stymied, but Jack knew that the weakest part of any building was usually the roof—so as soon as he found a wood-pile stacked against the wall, he climbed up it and got up on top, and found clay tiles under his boots. These were thick and heavy, made to withstand hail-storms and tree-branches, but Jack with the strength of panic stomped until a few of them cracked. Fist-sized rocks were pelting down around him now. He stopped one that was trying to roll off, and used it as a hammer. Finally he created a hole through the tiles, threw in the torch, squeezed through feet-first between the wooden laths on which the tiles were mounted, and dropped through, landing on a table. He snatched up the torch lest it set fire to the place, and found himself looking at a portrait of Martin Luther.