Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  “Yeah, I know about this,” Jack said, but Artan could not be stopped: there were piles of silver lying on the ground in Porto Belo, he insisted—consequently its value, compared to that of gold, was plunging—so in Spain (where they used silver money) there was inflation, because it was not worth as much as it had been, whereas in France all gold coins were being hoarded, because gold was expected to be worth more in the future. So now Monsieur Esphahnian had lots of rapidly depreciating silver. He should have sailed to the Levant where silver was always in demand, but he didn’t. Instead he sailed for Amsterdam expecting to make some kind of unspecified, brilliant commodities deal that would more than recoup his exchange-rate losses. But (as luck would have it) his ship ran aground, and he got his nuts caught in the mangle of the Thirty Years’ War. Sweden happened to be just in the act of conquering Holland when Monsieur Esphahnian’s ship eased up onto the sandbank and stopped moving; and, to make a long story short, the Esphahnian dynastic fortune was last seen northbound, strapped to the ass of a Swedish pack-horse.

  This, by the way, was all first-act material—before the first act, really—if it were a play, it would open with the young Monsieur Esphahnian, huddled in the beached wreckage of a ship, spewing expository pentameter, gazing miserably off into the audience as he pretended to watch the Swedish column dwindle into the distance.

  The upshot, anyway, was that Monsieur Esphahnian, at that point, fell from the graces of his own family. He somehow made his way back to Marseille, collected Madame Esphahnian and her (already!) three sons, and perhaps a daughter or two (daughters tended to be shipped east at puberty), and, in time, drifted as far as Paris (end of Act I), where, ever since, they’d all been trying to work their way off the shit list of the rest of the family in Isfahan. Primarily they did this by retailing coffee, but they would move just about anything—

  “Ostrich plumes?” Jack blurted, not really trusting himself to be devious and crafty around such as the Esphahnians. And so at that point the selling of those ostrich plumes, which Jack could’ve accomplished in a trice a year and a half ago in a thieves’ market in Linz, became a global conspiracy, yoking together Esphahnians as far away as London, Alexandria, Mocha, and Isfahan, as letters were sent to all of those places and more inquiring as to what ostrich-plumes were selling for, whether the trend was up or down, what distinguished a Grade A ostrich-plume from a B, how a B could be made to look like an A, et cetera. While they waited for the intelligence to come back, Jack had very little to do on the plume front.

  His addled brain forgot about Turk for a while. When he finally went back to the livery stable, the owner was just about to sell him off to pay for all the hay he’d been eating. Jack paid the debt, and began to think seriously about how to turn the war-horse into cash.

  NOW IN THE OLD DAYS it was like this: he would go and loiter around the Place Dauphine, which was the sharp downstream tip of the Île de la Cité, spang in the center of the Pont-Neuf. It was the royal execution grounds and so there was always something to see there. Even when there were no executions underway, there were mountebanks, jugglers, puppeteers, fire-eaters; failing that, you could at least gawk at the dangling remains of people who’d been executed last week. But on days of big military parades, the aristocrats who were supposedly in command—at least, who were being paid by King Looie to be in command—of various regiments would issue from their pieds-à-terre and hôtels particuliers on the Right Bank and come across the Pont-Neuf, recruiting vagrants along the way to bring their regiments up to strength. The Place Dauphine would become a vigorous body-market for a few hours. Rusty firelocks would be passed out, money would change hands, and the new-made regiments would march south over to the Left Bank, to the cheers of the patriotic onlookers. They’d follow those aristocrats’ high-stepping chargers out through the city gates, there at the carrefours where the meaner sorts of criminals dangled unconscious from the whipping-posts, and they would come into St. Germain des Pres, outside the walls: a large quadrangle of monks’ residences surrounded by open land, where huge fairs of rare goods would sometimes convene. Following the Seine downstream, they’d pass by a few noble families’ hotels, but in general the buildings got lower and simpler and gave way to vegetable- and flower-patches tended by upscale peasants. The river was mostly blocked from view by the piles of timber and baled goods that lined the Left Bank. But after a while, it would bend around to the south, and they would cross the green before Les Invalides—surrounded by its own wall and moat—and arrive at the Champs de Mars where King Looie would be, with all of his pomp, having ridden up from Versailles to inspect his troops—which, in those pre-Martinet days, basically meant counting them. So the passe-volantes (as people like Jack were called) would stand up (or if unable to stand, prop themselves up on someone who could) and be counted. The aristocrats would get paid off, and the passe-volantes would fan out into innumerable Left Bank taverns and bordellos and spend their money. Jack had become aware of this particular line of work during a ride from Dunkirk to Waterloo with Bob, who had spent some time campaigning under John Churchill, alongside the French, in Germany, laying waste to various regions that had the temerity to lie adjacent to La France. Bob had complained bitterly that many French regiments had practically zero effective strength because of this practice. To Jack it had sounded like an opportunity only a half-wit would pass up.

  In any case, this procedure was the central tent-pole holding up Jack’s understanding of how Paris worked. Applied to the problem of selling Turk, it told him that somewhere in the southern part of the Marais, near the river, there lived rich men who had no choice to be in the market for war-horses—or, if they had any brains in their heads at all, for stud-horses capable of siring new ones. Jack talked to the man who managed the livery stable, and he followed hay-wains coming in from the countryside, and he tailed aristocrats riding back from the military parades at the Champs de Mars, and learned that there was a horse-market par excellence at the Place Royale.

  Now this was one of those places that Jack’s kind of person knew only as a void in the middle of the city, sealed off by gates through which an attentive loiterer could sometimes get a flash of sunlit green. By trying to penetrate it from all sides, Jack learnt that it was square, with great barn-doors at the four cardinal compass-points, and high grand buildings rising above each of these gates. Around its fringes were a number of hôtels, which in Paris meant private compounds of rich nobles. Twice a week, the gates were jammed solid with carts bringing hay and oats in, and manure out, and an astounding number of fine horses being burnished by grooms. Some horse-trading went on in surrounding streets, but Jack could plainly see that this was little more than a flea-market compared to whatever was going on in the Place Royale.

  He bribed a farmer to smuggle him into the place in a hay-wain. When it was safe to get out, the farmer poked him in the ribs with the handle of a pitchfork, and Jack wriggled and slid out onto the ground—the first time he had stood on growing grass since he’d reached Paris.

  The Place Royale was found to be a park shaded by chestnut trees (in theory, that is; when Jack saw it the leaves had fallen, and been raked off). In the center was a statue of King Looie’s dear old pop, Looie the Thirteenth—on horseback, naturally. The whole square was surrounded by vaulted colonnades, like the trading-courts at Leipzig and the Stock Exchange at Amsterdam, but these were very wide and high, with barn-doors giving way to private courtyards beyond. All of the gates, and all of the arcades, were large enough, not merely for a single rider, but for a coach drawn by four or six horses. It was, then, like a city within the city, built entirely for people so rich and important that they lived on horseback, or in private coaches.

  Only that could explain the size of the horse-market that was raging all around him when Jack climbed out of the hay-wain. It was as crowded with horses as the streets of Paris were with people—the only exceptions being a few roped-off areas where the merchandise could prance around and be judged and graded
by the buyers. Every horse that Jack saw, he would’ve remembered as the finest horse he’d ever seen, if he’d encountered it on a road in England or Germany. Here, not only were such horses common, but they were meticulously groomed and brushed almost to the point of being polished, their manes and tails coiffed, and they’d been taught to do tricks. There were horses meant to be saddled, horses in matched sets of two and four and even six, for drawing coaches, and—in one corner—chargers: war-horses for parading beneath the eyes of the King on the Champ de Mars. Jack went thataway and had a look. He did not see a single mount there that he would’ve traded Turk for, if he were about to ride into battle. But these were in excellent condition and well shod and groomed compared to Turk, who had been languishing in a livery stable for weeks, with only the occasional walk round the stable-yard for exercise.

  Jack knew how to fix that. But before he left the Place Royale, he raised his sights for a few minutes, and spent a while looking at the buildings that rose over the park—trying to learn something about his customers-to-be.

  Unlike most of Paris, these were brick, which warmed Jack’s heart strangely, reminding him of Merry England. The four great buildings rising over the gates at the cardinal points of the compass had enormous steep rooves, two and three stories high, with balconies and lace-curtained dormers, currently all shut up against the cold—but Jack could well imagine how a wealthy horse-fancier would have his Paris pied-à-terre here, so that he could keep an eye on the market by gazing out his windows.

  In one of the great squares hereabouts—Jack had lost track of all of them—he’d seen a statue of King Looie riding off to war, with blank spaces on the pedestal to chisel the names of victories he hadn’t won yet, and of countries he hadn’t captured. Some buildings, likewise, had empty niches: waiting (as everyone in Paris must understand) to receive the statues of the generals who would win those victories for him. Jack needed to find a man whose ambition was to stand forever in one of those niches, and he needed to convince him that he was more likely to win battles with Turk, or Turk’s offspring, between his legs. But first he needed to get Turk in some kind of decent physical condition, and that meant riding him.

  He was on his way out of the Place Royale, walking under the gate on its south side, when behind him a commotion broke out. The hiss of iron wheel-rims grinding over paving-stones, the crisp footfalls of horses moving in unnatural unison, the shouts of footmen and of bystanders, warning all to make way. Jack was still getting about with the crutch (he daren’t let the sword out of his sight, and couldn’t bear it openly). So when he didn’t move fast enough, a burly servant in powder-blue livery crushed him out of the way and sent him tumbling across the pavement so that his “good” leg plunged knee-deep in a gutter filled with stagnating shit.

  Jack looked up and saw the Four Horses of the Apocalypse bearing down on him—or so he imagined for a moment, because it seemed that they all had glowing red eyes. But as they went past, this vision cleared from his mind, and he decided that their eyes, actually, had been pink. Four horses, all white as clouds, save for pink eyes and mottled hooves, harnessed in white leather, pulling a rare coach, sculpted and painted to look like a white sea-shell riding a frothy wave over the blue ocean, all encrusted with garlands and laurels, cherubs and mermaids, in gold.

  Those horses put him in mind of Eliza’s story; for she had been swapped for one such, back in Algiers.

  Jack proceeded crosstown to Les Halles where the fishwives—pretending to be dismayed by the shit on his leg—flung fish-heads at him while shouting some sort of pun on par fume.

  Jack inquired whether it ever happened that some rich man’s servant would come around specifically to purchase rotten fish for his master.

  It was clear, from the looks on their faces, that he had struck deep with this question—but then, looking him up and down, one of them made a certain guttural jeering noise, and then the fishwives all sneered and told him to hobble back to Les Invalides with his ridiculous questions. “I am not a veteran—what idiot goes out and fights battles for rich men?” Jack answered.

  They liked that, but were in a cautious mood. “What are you then?” “Passe-volante!” “Vagabond!”

  Jack decided to try what the Doctor would call an experiment: “Not any Vagabond,” Jack said, “here stands Half-Cocked Jack.”

  “L’Emmerdeur!” gasped a younger, and not quite so gorgon-like, fishwife, almost before he’d gotten it out of his mouth.

  There was a moment of radical silence. But then the guttural noise again. “You are the fourth Vagabond to make that claim in the last month—”

  “And the least convincing—”

  “L’Emmerdeur is a King among Vagabonds. Seven feet tall.”

  “Goes armed all the time, like a Gentleman.”

  “Carries a jeweled scimitar he tore from the hands of the Grand Turk himself—”

  “Has magic spells to burn witches and confound Bishops.”

  “He’s not a broken-down cripple with one leg withered and the other dipped in merde!”

  Jack kicked off his fouled pants, and then his drawers, revealing his Credential. Then, to prove he wasn’t really a cripple, he flung the crutch down, and began to dance a bare-assed jig. The fishwives could not decide between swooning and rioting. When they recovered their self-possession, they began to fling handfuls of blackened copper deniers at him. This attracted beggars and street-musicians, and one of the latter began to play accompanying music on a cornemuse whilst shuffling around racking the worthless coins into a little pile with his feet, and kicking the beggars in the head as necessary.

  Having now verified his identity by personal inspection, each of the fishwives had to prance out, shedding glitt’ry showers of fish-scales from their flouncing, gut-stained skirts, and dance with Jack—who had no patience for this, but did take advantage of it to whisper into any ear that came close enough, that if he ever had any money, he’d give some of it to whomever could tell him the name of the noble personage who liked to eat rotten fish. But before he could say it more than two or three times, he had to grab his drawers and run away, because a commotion at the other end of Les Halles told him that the Lieutenant of Police was on his way to make a show of force, and to extract whatever bribes, sexual favors, and/or free oysters he could get from the fishwives in exchange for turning a blind eye to this unforgivable brouhaha.

  From there Jack proceeded to the livery stable, got Turk, and also rented two other horses. He rode to the House of the Golden Frigate on Rue Vivienne, and let it be known that he was on his way down to Lyons—any messages?

  This made Signor Cozzi very pleased. His place was crowded today with tense Italians scribbling down messages and bills of exchange, and porters hauling what looked like money-boxes down from the attic and up from the cellar, and there was a sparse crowd of street-messengers and competing bankers in the street outside, exchanging speculations as to what was going on in there—what did Cozzi know that no one else did? Or was it just a bluff?

  Signor Cozzi scrawled something on a scrap of paper and did not bother to seal it. He came up and lunged for Jack’s hand, because Jack was not reaching out fast enough, and shoved the message into his palm, saying, “To Lyons! I don’t care how many horses you kill getting there. What are you waiting for?”

  Actually Jack was waiting to say he didn’t particularly want to kill his horse, but Signor Cozzi was not in a mood for sentiment. So Jack whirled, ran out of the building, and mounted Turk. “Watch your back!” someone called after him, “word on the street is that L’Emmerdeur is in town!”

  “I heard he was on his way,” Jack said, “at the head of a Vagabond-Army.”

  It would have been amusing to stay around and continue this, but Cozzi was standing in the doorway glaring at him, and so, riding Turk and leading the rented horses behind him, Jack galloped down Rue Vivienne in what he hoped was dramatic style, and hung the first available left. This ended up taking him right back through Les H
alles—so he made a point of galloping through the fish-market, where the police were turning things upside-down searching for a one-legged, short-penised pedestrian. Jack winked at that one young fishwife who’d caught his eye, touching off a thrill that spread like fire through gunpowder, and then he was gone, off into the Marais—right past the Place Royale. He maneuvered round the trundling manure-carts all the way to the Bastille: just one great sweaty rock pocked with a few tiny windows, with grenadiers roaming around on top—the highest and thickest in a city of walls. It sat in a moat fed by a short canal leading up from the Seine. The bridge over the canal was crowded, so Jack rode down to the river and then turned to follow the right bank out of town, and thereby left Paris behind him. He was afraid that Turk would be exhausted already. But when the war-horse saw open fields ahead, he surged forward, yanking on the lead and eliciting angry whinnies from the spare horses following behind.

  To Lyons was a long journey, almost all the way to Italy (which was, he reckoned, why the Italian banks were situated there), or, if you wanted to look at it that way, almost all the way to Marseille. The countryside was divided up into innumerable separate pays with their own tolls, which were commonly exacted at inns controlling the important cross-roads. Jack, changing horses from time to time, seemed to be racing the whole way against a slippery narrow black coach that scuttled down the road like a scorpion, drawn by four horses. It was a good race, meaning that the lead changed hands many times. But in the end, those inns, and the need to change horse-teams frequently, were too much of an impediment for the coach, and Jack was the first to ride down into Lyons with the news—whatever it was.