Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  If Jack had just arrived in France recently he’d have said, But that’s crazy—why not? but as it was he knew Arlanc spoke the truth. Arlanc recommended such-and-such a broker, to be found at the House of the Red Cat in the Rue du Temple, but then recollected that this fellow was himself a Huguenot, hence probably dead and certainly out of business.

  They ended up talking through the night, Jack feeding him bits of bread and cheese from time to time, and tossing a few morsels to the others to shut them up. By the time dawn broke, Jack had given up his boots as well as his food, which was stupid in a way. But he was riding, and Monsieur Arlanc was walking.

  He rode north cold, hungry, exhausted, and essentially barefoot. The horses had not been rested or tended to properly and were in a foul mood, which they found various ways to inflict on Jack. He groggily took a wrong turn and ended up approaching Paris by an unfamiliar route. This got him into some scrapes that did nothing to improve his state of mind. One of these misadventures led to Jack’s staying awake through another night, hiding from some nobleman’s gamekeepers in a wood. The rented horses kept whinnying and so he had no choice but to leave them staked out as decoys, to draw his pursuers while he slipped away with stalwart Turk.

  So by the time the sun rose on the next day he was just one step away from being a miserable Vagabond again. He had lost two good horses for which he was responsible, and so all the livery stables and horse-brokers in Paris would be up in arms against him, which meant that selling Turk would be even more thoroughly impossible. So Jack would not get his money, and Turk would not get the life he deserved: eating good fodder and being fastidiously groomed in a spacious nobleman’s stable, his only responsibility being to roger an endless procession of magnificent mares. Jack would not get his money, which meant he’d probably never even see his boys, as he couldn’t bring himself to show up on their Aunt Maeve’s doorstep empty-handed…all of Mary Dolores’s brothers and cousins erupting to their feet to pursue him through East London with their shillelaghs…

  It would’ve made him mad even if he hadn’t been afflicted with degeneration of the brain, and awake for the third consecutive day. Madness, he decided, was easier.

  As he approached Paris, riding through those vegetable-fields where steam rose from the still-hot shit of the city, he came upon a vast mud-yard, within sight of the city walls, streaked with white quick-lime and speckled with human skulls and bones sitting right out on the surface. Rude crosses had been stuffed into the muck here and there, and jutted out at diverse angles, spattered with the shit of the crows and vultures that waited on them. When Jack rode through it, those birds had, however, all flown up the road to greet a procession that had just emerged from the city-gates: a priest in a long cloak, so ponderous with mud that it hung from his shoulders like chain-mail, using a great crucifix as walking-stick, and occasionally hauling off a dolorous clang on a pot-like bell in the opposite hand. Behind him, a small crowd of paupers employing busted shovels in the same manner as the priest did the crucifix, and then a cart, driven by a couple of starveling mules, laden with a number of long bundles wrapped and sewn up in old grain-sacks.

  Jack watched them tilt the wagon back at the blurred brink of an open pit so that the bundles—looked like three adults, half a dozen children, and a couple of babies—slid and tumbled into the ground. While the priest rattled on in rote Latin, his helpers zigzagged showers of quick-lime over the bodies and kicked dirt back into the hole.

  Jack began to hear muffled voices: coming from under the ground, naturally. The skulls all around him began to jaw themselves loose from the muck and to rise up, tottering, on incomplete skeletons, droning a monkish sort of chant. But meanwhile those grave-diggers, now pivoting on their shovels, had begun to hum a tune of their own: a jaunty, Irish-inflected hornpipe.

  Cantering briskly out onto the road (Turk now positively sashaying), he found himself at the head of a merry procession: he’d become the point man of a flying wedge of Vagabond grave-diggers, whose random shufflings had resolved into dazzling group choreography, and who were performing a sort of close-order drill with their shovels.

  Behind them went the priest, walloping his bell and walking ahead of the corpse-wain, where the dead people—who had hopped up out of the pit and back into the wagon—but who were still wrapped up in their shrouds—made throaty moaning noises, like organ-pipes to complement the grim churchly droning of the skeletons. Once all were properly arranged on the road, the skeletons finally broke into a thudding, four-square type of church-hymn:

  O wha-at the Hell was on God’s mind,

  That sixteen-sixty day,

  When he daubed a vagabond’s crude form

  From a lump of Thames-side clay?

  Since God would ne’er set out to make

  A loser of this kind

  Jack’s life, if planned in Heaven, doth prove

  Jehovah’s lost His mind.

  Switching to Gregorian chant for the chorus:

  Quod, erat demonstrandum. Quod, erat demonstrandum…

  But at this point, as they were all nearing the city gates, they encountered a southbound column of galériens, obviously Huguenots, who were shuffling along in a syncopated gait that made their chains jingle like sleigh-bells; the guards riding behind them cracked their whips in time with a sprightly tune that the Huguenots were singing:

  Chained by the necks,

  Slaves of Louis the Rex,

  You might think that we’ve lost our freedom,

  But the Cosmos,

  Like clock-work,

  No more than a rock’s worth

  Of choices, to people, provides!

  But now at this point the grave-diggers were greeted by an equal number of fishwives, issuing from the city-gates, who paired up with them, kicked in with trilling soprano and lusty alto voices, and drowned out both the Huguenots and the Skeletons with some sort of merry Celtic reel:

  There once was a jolly Vagabond

  To the Indies he did sail,

  When back to London he did come

  He wanted a female.

  He found a few in Drury-Lane

  In Hounsditch found some more

  But cash flow troubles made him long

  For a girlfriend, not a whore.

  Now Jack he loved the theatre

  But didn’t like to pay

  He met an Irish actress there

  While sneaking in one day.

  Now the Priest, far from objecting to this interruption, worked it into his solemn hymnody, albeit with a jarring change of rhythm:

  He could have gone to make his peace

  With Jesus and the Church

  Instead he screwed a

  showgirl Then he left her in the lurch.

  Now God in Heaven ne’er could wish

  That Irish lass so ill

  Jack’s life’s proves irrefutably

  Th’existence of Free Will

  Quod, erat demonstrandum. Quod, erat demonstrandum…

  And the irrepressible galériens seemed to pop their heads into the middle of this scene and take it over with the continuation of their song:

  Will he, or nill he,

  It’s all kinda silly

  When predestination prevails!

  He can’t make decisions

  His will just ain’t his, and

  His destiny runs on fix’d rails!

  Now the Priest again:

  The Pope would say, that he who blames

  The Good Lord for his deeds

  Is either cursed with shit for brains

  Or is lost ’mong Satan’s Weeds.

  The former group should take good care

  To do as they are told

  The latter’d best clean up their act

  And come back to the fold.

  Quod, erat demonstrandum. Quod, erat demonstrandum…

  And then the galériens, obviously wanting to stay and continue the debate, but driven southward, ever southward, by the guards:

&nbs
p; We’re off to row boats

  Off the Rhone’s sunny côtes

  Because God, long ago, said we must

  If it makes you feel better

  You too, Jack, are fettered

  By your bodily humours and lusts.

  They were now pulled “offstage,” as it were, in the following comical way: a guard rode to the front of the column, hitched the end of their chain to the pommel of his saddle, and spurred his horse forward. The tightening chain ran free through the neck-loops of the galériens until it jerked the last man in the queue violently forward so that he crashed into the back of the slave in front of him, who likewise was driven forward into the next, et cetera in a chain reaction as it were, until the whole column had accordioned together and was dragged off toward the Mediterranean Sea.

  Now at the same time the rest of the procession burst through the city-gates into lovely Paris. The skeletons, who’d been exceptionally gloomy until this point, suddenly began disassembling themselves and bonking themselves and their neighbors with thigh-bones to produce melodious xylophony. The priest jumped up on the corpse-wain and began to belt out a new melody in a comely, glass-shattering counter-tenor.

  Oh, Jaaaack—

  Can’t say I blame you for feeling like shit

  Oh, Jaaaack—

  Never seen any one step into it

  Like Jaaack—

  Corporal punishment wouldn’t suffice

  The raaack—

  Would be too good for you,

  Would simply be

  Too slaaack—

  Even if all of the skin were whipped off of

  Your baaack—

  Not only evil,

  But stupid to boot,

  Not charismatic

  And not even cute,

  The brains that God granted

  You now indisputably gone down the tubes

  And you don’t give a hoot,

  You stink!

  No getting round it,

  It’s true, Jack, confound it,

  You stink!

  And so on; but then here there was a little pause in the music, occasioned by a small and perfectly adorable French girl in a white dress, which Jack recognized as the sort of get-up that young Papists wore to their first communion. Radiant—but gloomy. The priest reined in the mules and vaulted down off the corpse-wain and squatted down next to her.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned!” said the little girl.

  Awww, gushed all of the skeletons, corpses, grave-diggers, fishwives, et cetera, gathered round in vast circle as if to watch an Irish brawl.

  “Believe me, girl, you ain’t alone!” hollered a fishwife through cupped hands; the others grinned and nodded supportively.

  The priest hitched up his muddy cassock and scooted even closer to the girl, then turned his ear toward her lips; she whispered something into it; he shook his head in sincere, but extremely short-lived dismay; then stood, drawing himself up to his full height, and said something back to her. She put her hands together, and closed her eyes. All of Paris went silent, and every ear strained to listen as she in her high piping voice said a little Papist prayer in Latin. Then she opened her baby blues and looked up in trepidation at the priest—whose stony face suddenly opened up in a big grin as he made the sign of the cross over her. With a great big squeal of delight, the girl jumped up and turned a cartwheel in the street, petticoats a-flying’, and suddenly the whole procession came alive again: the priest walking along behind the handspringing girl and the dancers, the wrapped corpses up in the cart swinging their hips in time to the music and uttering pre-verbal woo! woo! noises to fill in the chinks in the tune. The grave-diggers and fishwives, plus a number of flower-girls and rat-catchers who joined in along the way, were now dancing to the priest’s song in a medley of different dance steps, viz. high-stepping whorehouse moves, Irish stomping, and Mediterranean tarantellas.

  When you have been bad

  A naughty young lad

  Or lass who has had

  A man or two sans—marriage,

  When painting the town

  Carousing around

  You run a child down

  While driving your big—carriage,

  And so on at considerable length, as they had the whole University to parade through, and then the Roman baths at Cluny. As they came over the Petit Pont, about a thousand wretches emerged from the gates of the Hôtel-Dieu—that colossal poorhouse just by Notre Dame, which was where the priest, grave-diggers, and dead persons had all originated—and, accompanied by Notre Dame’s organ, boomed out a mighty chorus to ring down the curtain on this entire pageant.

  Everyone does it—everyone sins

  Everyone at the party has egg on their chins

  Everyone likes to get, time to time, skin to skin

  With a lad or a lass, drink a tumbler of gin.

  So confess all your sins and admit you were bad,

  It isn ’t a fashion, nor is it a fad,

  It’s what the Pope says we should do when we’ve had

  Just a bit too much fun, and we need to be paddled or spanked on the buttocks (unless we enjoy it)

  If there’s sin in our hearts then it’s time to destroy it,

  From the poorest of poor all the way to Le Roi, little sins or mass murder, if you made the wrong choice it

  Is fine if you say so, and change your bad ways

  You can do it in private, only God sees your face

  In a church or cathedral, your time and your place

  What’s the payoff? UNDESERVED GRACE!

  This song developed into a sort of round, meant (Jack supposed) to emphasize the cyclical nature of the procedure: some of the wretches, fishwives, et cetera, engaging in carnal acts right there in the middle of the street, others rushing, in organized infantry-squares, toward the priest to confess, then turning away to genuflect in the direction of the Cathedral, then charging pall-mall back into fornication. In any case, every skeleton, corpse, wretch, grave-digger, fishwife, street-vendor, and priest now had a specific role to play, and part to sing, except for Jack; and so, one by one, all of Jack’s harbingers and outriders peeled away from him, or evaporated into thin air, so that he rode alone (albeit, watched and cheered on by the thousands) into the great Place before the Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was as fine and gorgeous a vision as had ever been seen. For all of King Looie’s Regiments were having their colors blessed by some sort of extremely resplendent mitre-wearing Papist authority figure, one or two notches shy of the Pope himself, who stood beneath a canopy of brilliant fleur-de-lis-embroidered cloth that burnt in the sun. The regiments themselves were not present—there wouldn’t’ve been room—but their noble commanders were, and their heralds and color-bearers, carrying giant banners of silk and satin and cloth-of-gold: banners meant to be seen from a mile away through squalls of gunpowder-smoke, designed to look resplendent when planted atop the walls of Dutch or German or English cities and to overawe the populace with the glory, might, and, above all, good taste of Leroy. Each one had its own kind of magickal power over the troops of its regiment, and so to see them drawn up here in rows, all together, was like seeing all Twelve of the Apostles sitting round the same table, or something.

  As much as Jack hated Leroy, he had to admit it was a hell of a thing to look at—so much so, that he regretted he hadn’t arrived sooner, for he only caught the terminal quarter-hour of the ceremony. Then it all broke up. The color-bearers rode off toward their regimental headquarters in the territory outside of the city walls, and the nobility generally rode north over the Pont d’Arcole to the Right Bank where some went down in the direction of the Louvre and others went round back of the Hôtel de Ville toward the Place Royale and the Marais. One of the latter group was wearing an Admiral’s hat and riding a white horse with pink eyes—a big one—apparently meant to be some sort of a war-horse.

  Jack was not set on what he should do next, but as he (for lack of any other purpose in life) followed this admiral i
nto the narrow streets he began to hear fidgety noises from the walls all around him, like the gnawing of mice, and noticed a lot of radiant dust in the air: on a closer look, he formed the impression that all of the tiny animals trapped in the stones of the city were coming alive and squirming about in their prisons, kicking up dust, as if some invisible tide of quicksilver had seeped up through the walls and brought them back to life; and construing this as an omen, Jack spurred Turk forward with the heels of his wooden sabots and, by taking certain back-streets, ducking beneath those jutting balconies, overtook the Admiral on the pink-eyed horse, and rode out into the street in front of him, just short of the entrance to the Place Royale—in the very street where he’d once been knocked into the shit by (he guessed) the same fellow’s servants.

  Those servants were now clearing the way for the Admiral and the large contingent of friends and hangers-on riding with him, and so when Jack rode out into the middle of the street, it was empty. A footman in blue livery came toward him, eyeing Jack’s wooden shoes and his crutch, and probably sizing him up as a peasant who’d stolen a plowhorse—but Jack gave Turk a little twitch of the reins that meant I give you leave and Turk surged toward this man and crushed him straight into the gutter where he ended up stopping turd-rafts. Then Jack drew up to face the Admiral from perhaps half a dozen lengths. Several other footmen were situated in the space between them, but having seen what Turk knew how to do, they were now shrinking back against walls.

  The Admiral looked nonplussed. He couldn’t stop looking at Jack’s shoes. Jack kicked off the sabots and they tumbled on the stones with pocking footstep-noises. He wanted to make some kind of insightful point, here, about how the shoe thing was just another example of Frogs’ obsession with form over substance—a point worth making here and now, because it related to their (presumed) inability to appreciate what a fine mount Turk was. But in his present state of mind, he couldn’t even get that out in English.