Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “You must come to the Inn, and see that I do in fact have sons,” said Monsieur Arlanc. “They are still only boys, but…”

  “I have never seen my own—I cannot see yours,” Jack said. “Besides, I cannot tolerate these French Inns—”

  Monsieur Arlanc nodded understandingly. “In your country, goods are free to move on the roads—?”

  “—and an Inn is a hospitable place for travelers, not a choke-point.”

  So he bade good-bye to Monsieur Arlanc, from whom he had learned a thing or two about where in Paris he should sell his ostrich-plumes and his war-horse. In return, the Huguenot had learned some things about phosphorus, silver mines, and Calicoe-smuggling from Jack. Both men had been safer together than they would’ve been apart.

  JACK THE ONE-LEGGED TINKER, leading his plow-horse, smelled Paris half a day before he saw it. The fields of grain gave way to market-gardens crowded with vegetables, and pastures for dairy cattle, and dark, heavy carts came endlessly up the road from the city laden with barrels and tubs of human shit collected from the gutters and stoops, which were worked into the vegetable-fields by peasants using rakes and forks. Parisians seemed to shit more than other humans, or perhaps the garlic in their food made it seem that way—in any case Jack was glad when he got clear of those rank vegetable-fields and entered into the suburbs: endless warrens of straw-roofed huts crowded with misplaced country folk, burning whatever sticks and debris they could rake together to cook their food and ward off the autumn chill, and publicly suffering from various picturesque ailments. Jack didn’t stop moving until he reached the perpetual pilgrim-camp around St.-Denis, where almost anyone could get away with loitering for a few hours. He bought some cheese for himself and some hay for Turk from some farmers who were on their way down to the city. Then he relaxed among the lepers, epileptics, and madmen who were hanging around the Basilica, and dozed until a couple of hours before dawn.

  When it got light enough to move about, he joined in with the thousands of farmers who came into the city, as they did every morning, bringing vegetables, milk, eggs, meat, fish, and hay into the markets. This crowd was larger than he remembered, and it took longer for them to get into the city. The gate of St.-Denis was impossibly congested, so he tried his luck at the gate of St. Martin, a musket-shot away. By the time he passed under it, dawn-light was glancing prettily off its new stone-work: King Looie as a primordial naked Hercules leaning insouciantly on a tree-sized club, naked except for a periwig the size of a cloud, and a lion skin slung over one arm so that a flapping corner just covered the royal Penis. Victory was swooping down from Heaven, one arm laden with palm-branches and the other reaching out to slap a laurel-wreath atop that wig. The King’s foot rested on the mangled form of someone he’d just apparently beaten the crap out of, and, in the background, a great Tower burnt.

  “God damn you, King Looie,” Jack muttered, passing under the gate; because he could feel himself cringing. He’d tried to ride across France as fast as he could, specifically to prevent this: but still, it had taken several days. The sheer vastness of it compared to those tiny German principalities, and the component states of the Dutch Republic, was such that by the time you reached Paris, you’d been traveling across this King’s dominions for so long that as you passed through the gate you couldn’t not cringe beneath his power.

  Never mind; he was in Paris. Off to his left the sun was rising over the towers and bastions of the Temple, where those Knights of Malta had their own city within the city—though the old curtain-walls that once enclosed it had lately been torn down. But for the most part his views in all directions were sealed off by vertical walls of white stone: Paris’s six- and seven-story buildings rising on either side of the street, funneling the farmers and the fishwives, and the vendors with their loads of flowers, oranges, and oysters into narrow race-ways wherein they jostled sharply for position, all trying to avoid falling into the central gutter. Not far into the city, much of this traffic angled off to the right, toward the great market-place of Les Halles, leaving a (for Paris) clear vista straight down to the Seine and the Île de la Cité.

  Jack had developed a suspicion that he was being tailed by an agent of King Looie’s Lieutenant of Police, who had unfortunately caught his eye for a moment as he’d gone through the gate. Jack knew not to turn around and look. But by watching the faces of oncoming pedestrians—particularly, scum—he could see that they were surprised by, and then scared of, someone. Jack could hardly slip off into the crowd when he was leading a great big horse, but he could try to make himself not worth following. Les Halles would be a good place for that, so he followed the crowd to the right. The dramatickal option—mounting Turk, producing a weapon—would lead to the galleys. In fact, there were very few roads out of Paris that would not end with Jack chained to an oar in Marseille.

  Someone behind him came in for brutal tongue-lashings from the fishwives at Les Halles. Jack overheard comparisons between his pursuer’s moustache, and the armpit hair of various infidel races. The hypothesis was floated, and generally agreed upon, that this policeman spent rather too much of his time performing oral sex on certain large farm animals infamous for poor hygiene. Beyond that, Jack’s French simply was not quick or vile enough. He trolled several times through Les Halles, hoping that the crowd, the smell of yesterday’s fish-guts, the fishwives, and sheer boredom would shake this man off his tail, but it didn’t work. Jack bought a loaf, so that he could explain why he’d come here, if someone bothered to ask, and to demonstrate that he was not a penniless vagrant, and also because he was hungry.

  He put the sun to his back and began to dodge and maneuver through various streets, headed for the Rue Vivienne. The police wanted to arrest him for being in Paris with no business, which normally would have been the case for him. So much so, that he’d forgotten that this time he actually did have business.

  The streets had begun to congest with strolling retailers: a cheese-seller pushing a large wheel of blue-veined stuff on a sort of wheelbarrow, a mustard-seller carrying a small capped pail and a scoop, numerous porteurs d’eau, their stout bodies harnessed into frames all a-dangle with wooden buckets, a butter-seller with baskets of butter-pats strapped to his back. This kind of thing would only get worse, to the point that it would immobilize him. He had to get rid of Turk. No trouble: the horse business was everywhere, he’d already passed by several livery stables, and hay-wains filled narrow streets with their thatched bulk and narcotic fragrance. Jack followed one to a stable and made arrangements to have Turk put up there for a few days.

  Then out the other side, and into a large open space: a plaza with (surprisingly enough) a monumental statue of King Looie in the center. On one side of its pedestal, a relief of Looie personally spearheading a cavalry charge across a canal, or perhaps that was the Rhine, into a horizontal forest of muskets. On the other, Looie on the throne with a queue of Kings and Emperors of Europe waiting, crowns in hand, to kneel down and kiss his high-heeled booties.

  He must be on the right course, because he was beginning to see a higher class of vendor: sellers of books strolling along holding advertisements over their heads on sign-boards, a candy-man carrying small scales, a seller of eau-de-vie carrying a basket of tiny bottles, and a goblet; a seller of pâtés carrying a sort of painter’s palette with smudges of different varieties, and many orange-girls: all of them crying the particular cries that belonged to that sort of vendor, like birds with their own distinct calls. Jack was on Rue Vivienne. It was starting to look like Amsterdam: finely-dressed men of many lands, strolling along having serious conversations: making money by exchanging words. But it also looked a bit like the Booksellers’ Quarter in Leipzig: whole cart-loads of books, printed but not bound, disappearing into one especially fine House: the King’s Library.

  Jack crutched his way up one side of the street and down the other until he found the House of the Golden Frigate, adorned with a sculpture of a warship. This had obviously been made by an artisan
who’d never come near the ocean, as it was queerly distorted and had an unlikely profusion of gun-decks. But it looked good. An Italian gentleman was there on the front stoop, worrying a hand-wrought iron key of many curious protuberances into a matching keyhole.

  “Signor Cozzi?” Jack inquired.

  “Si,” replied he, looking only a little surprised to be accosted by a one-legged wanderer.

  “A message from Amsterdam,” Jack said in French, “from your cousin.” But this last was unnecessary, as Signor Cozzi had already recognized the seal. Leaving the key jutting from the lock, he broke it open right there and scanned a few lines of beautiful whirling script. A woman with a cask of ink on her back, noting his interest in written documents, shouted a business proposal to him, and before he could deflect it, there was a second woman with a cask of vastly superior and yet far cheaper ink on her back; the two of them got into an argument, and Signor Cozzi took advantage of it to slip inside, beckoning Jack in with a trick of his large brown eyes. Jack could not resist turning around, now, to look behind him for the first time since he had entered the city. He caught sight of a sworded man in a somber sort of cape, just in the act of turning around to slink away: this policeman had spent half the morning tailing a perfectly legitimate banker’s messenger. “You are being followed?” Signor Cozzi inquired, as if asking Jack whether he was breathing in and out.

  “Not now,” Jack answered.

  It was another one of those places consisting of bancas with large padlocked books, and heavy chests on the floor. “How do you know my cousin?” Cozzi asked, making it clear he wasn’t going to invite Jack to take a seat. Cozzi himself sat down behind a desk and began to pull quills out of a little jar and examine their points.

  “A lady friend of mine has, uh, made his acquaintance. When he learned, through her, that I was about to journey to Paris, he pressed that letter on me.”

  Cozzi wrote something down, then unlocked a desk-drawer and began to rummage through it, picking out coins. “It says that if the seal has been tampered with I should send you to the galleys.”

  “I assumed as much.”

  “If the seal is intact, and you get it to me within fourteen days of the date it was written, I’m to give you a louis d’or. Ten days gets you two. Fewer than ten, an additional louis d’or for each day you shaved off the trip.” Cozzi dropped five gold coins into Jack’s hand. “How the hell did you do it? No one travels from Amsterdam to Paris in seven days.”

  “Think of it as a trade secret,” Jack said.

  “You are dead on your feet—go somewhere and sleep,” Cozzi said. “And when you are ready to return to Amsterdam, come to me, and maybe I’ll have a message for you to take to my cousin.”

  “What makes you think I’m going back?”

  Cozzi smiled for the first time. “The look in your eye when you spoke of your lady friend. You are mad with love, no?”

  “Mad with syphilis, actually,” Jack said, “but still mad enough to go back.”

  WITH THE MONEY HE’D BROUGHT with him, and the money he’d earned, Jack could have stayed somewhere decent—but he didn’t know how to find such a place, or how to behave once he found one. The last year had been an education in how little having money really mattered. A rich Vagabond was a Vagabond still, and ’twas common knowledge that King Charles, during the Interregnum, had lived without money in Holland. So Jack wandered across town to the district called the Marais. Movement was now a matter of forcing his body into narrow, ephemeral gaps between other pedestrians—primarily vendors, as of (in some districts) peaux de lapins (bundles of rabbit-pelts), baskets (these people carried enormous baskets filled with smaller baskets), hats (small uprooted trees with hats dangling from branch-ends), linge (a woman all adrape with lace and scarves), and (as he came into the Marais) chaudronniers with pots and pans impaled by their handles on a stick. Vinegar-sellers with casks on wheels, musicians with bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies, cake-sellers with broad flat baskets of steaming confections that made Jack light in the head.

  Jack got into the heart of the Marais, found a pissing-corner where he could stand still, and scanned the air above the people’s heads for half an hour or so, and listened, until he heard a particular cry. Everyone in the street was shouting something, usually the name of whatever they were selling, and for the first couple of hours it had just been Bedlam to Jack. But after a while Jack’s ear learned to pick out individual voices—something like hearing drum-beats or bugle-calls in battle. Parisians, he knew, had developed the skill to a high degree, just as the Lieutenant of Police could scan a torrent of people coming in through a gate at dawn and pick out the Vagabond. Jack was just able to hear a high-pitched voice crying “Mort-aux-rats! Mort-aux-rats!” and then it was easy enough to turn his head and see a long pole, like a pike, being carried at an angle over someone’s shoulder, the corpses of a couple of dozen rats dangling from it by their tails, their freshness an unforgeable guarantee that this man had been working recently.

  Jack shoved his way into the throng, using the crutch now like a burglar’s jimmy to widen small openings, and after a few minutes’ rattling pursuit caught up with St.-George and clapped him on the shoulder, like a policeman. Many would drop everything and sprint away when so handled, but one did not become a legend in the rat-killer’s trade if one was easily startled. St.-George turned around, making the rats on his pole swing wide, like perfectly synchronized pole-dancers at a fun-fair, and recognized him. Calmly, but not coldly. “Jacques—so you did escape from those German witches.”

  “’Twas nothing,” Jack said, trying to cover his astonishment, then his pride, that word of this had spread as far as Paris. “They were fools. Helpless. Now, if you had been chasing me—”

  “Now you have returned to civilization—why?” Steely curiosity being another good rat-killer trait. St.-George had curly hair the color of sand, and hazel eyes, and had probably looked angelic as a boy. Maturity had elongated his cheekbones and (according to legend) other parts of his body in a way that was not so divine—his head was funnel-shaped, tapering to a pair of pursed lips, staring eyes that looked as if they were painted on. “You know that the passe-volante trade has been quashed—why are you here?”

  “To renew my friendship with you, St.-George.”

  “You have been riding on horseback—I can smell it.”

  Jack decided to let this pass. “How can you smell anything except man-shit here?”

  St.-George sniffed the air. “Shit? Where? Who has been shitting?” This, being a sort of joke, was a signal that Jack could now offer to buy St.-George something, as a token of friendship. After some negotiations, St.-George agreed to be the recipient of Jack’s generosity—but not because he needed it—only because it was inherent in human nature that one must from time to time give things away, and at such times, one needed someone to give things away to, and part of being a good friend was to be that someone, as needed. Then there were negotiations about what Jack was going to buy. St.-George’s objective was to figure out how much money Jack was carrying—Jack’s was to keep St.-George wanting to know more. In the end, for tactical reasons, St.-George agreed to allow Jack to buy him some coffee—but it had to be from a particular vendor named Christopher.

  They were half an hour tracking him down. “He is not a tall man—”

  “Hard to find, then.”

  “But he wears a red fez with a brave golden tassel—”

  “He’s a Turk?”

  “Of course! I told you he sold coffee, didn’t I?”

  “A Turk named—Christopher?”

  “Don’t play the clown, Jacques—remember that I know you.”

  “But—?”

  St.-George rolled his eyes, and snapped, “All of the Turks who sell coffee in the streets are actually Armenians dressed up as Turks!”

  “I’m sorry, St.-George, I didn’t know.”

  “I should not be so harsh,” St.-George admitted. “When you left Paris, coffee was not fashiona
ble yet—not until the Turks fled from Vienna, and left mountains of it behind.”

  “It’s been fashionable in England since I was a boy.”

  “If it is in England, it is not fashionable, but a curiosity,” St.-George said through clenched teeth.

  Onwards they searched, St.-George wending like a ferret through the crowd, passing round, e.g., furniture-sellers carrying fantastic complexes of stools and chairs all roped together on their backs, milk-men with pots on their heads, d’oublies carrying unlit lanterns, and bent under enormous dripping barrels of shit; knife-grinders trundling their wheels. Jack had to put the crutch to much rude use, and considered taking out the sword. Eliza had been right—Paris was retail—funny she’d known this without ever having set foot in the city, while Jack, who’d lived here, on and off, for years…

  Best to keep his mind on St.-George. Only the rat-pole prevented Jack from losing him. Though it helped that people were always running out of shops, or shouting from windows, trying to engage his services. The only people who could afford to keep fixed shops were members of a few princely trades, viz. makers of dresses, hats, and wigs. But St.-George treated all men alike, asking them a series of penetrating questions and then firmly sending them home. “Even noblemen and savants are as peasants in their understanding of rats,” St.-George said incredulously. “How can I be of service to them when their thinking is so pre-theoretical?”