The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (160 page)

“So much for lonely hearts, desperate for love,” said Eliza. “What of those who were married, and whose husbands dropped dead? Did they act out of love?”

“Do
you
propose to act out of love, mademoiselle? I have not heard the word
love
escape your pretty mouth. I heard something about
honor
instead; which tells me that you and I have more in common than you would like to admit. You are not the only woman in the world who is capable of taking offense at a violation of her honor, and who has the steel to respond.
Tout le monde
knows that Étienne de Lavardac seduced you—”

Eliza snorted. “Do you think it’s that? I don’t care about that.”

“Frankly, mademoiselle, I could not care less why it is that you want your marriage to be brief and your widowhood long.”

“Oh, no. It is not Étienne who deserves this.”

“The duc d’Arcachon, then? Very well. There is no accounting for taste. But you must understand that refinement is not compatible with haste. If you want the Duke dead
now,
go and stab him. If you want to enjoy his being dead for a little while, and to see your orphan grow up, you will have to be patient.”

“I can be patient,” Eliza said, “until the fourteenth of October.”

5
AUGUST
1690

W
ITH ONE EYE
J
ACK
peered through his oar-lock across the gulf. He was looking edge-on through a slab of dry heat that lay dead on the water, as liquefacted glass rides above molten tin in a glass-maker’s pan. On a low flat shore, far away, white cabals of ghosts huddled and leaped, colossal and formless. None of the slaves quite knew what to make of it until they crawled in closer to shore, a cockroach on a skillet, and perceived that this Gulf was lined with vast salt-pans, and the salt had been raked up into cones and hillocks and step-pyramids by workers who were invisible from here. When they understood this, their thirst nearly slew them. They had been rowing hard for days.

Cadiz was a shiv of rock thrust into the gulf. White buildings had grown up from it like the reaching fingers of rock crystals. They put into a quay that extended from the base of its sea-wall, and took on more fresh water; for one of the ways that the Corsairs kept them on a leash was by making sure that the boat was always short of it. But the Spanish harbor-master did not suffer them to stay for very long, because (as they saw when they came around the point) the lagoon sheltered in the crook of the city’s bony arm was crowded with a fleet of Ships that Jack would have thought most remarkable, if he had never seen Amsterdam. They were mostly big slab-sided castle-arsed
ships, checkered with gun-ports. Jack had never seen a Spanish treasure-galleon in good repair before—off Jamaica he had spied the wrack of one slumped over a reef. In any event, he had no trouble recognizing these. “We have not arrived too early,” he said, “and so the only question that remains is, have we arrived too late?”

He and Moseh de la Cruz, Vrej Esphahnian, and Gabriel Goto were all looking to one another for answers, and somehow they all ended up looking to Otto van Hoek. “I smell raw cotton,” he said. Then he stood up and looked out over the gunwale and up into the city. “And I see
cargadores
toting bales of it into the warehouses of the Genoese. Cotton, being bulky, would be the first cargo to come off the ships. So they cannot have dropped anchor very long ago.”

“Still, it is likely we are too late—surely the Viceroy’s brig would waste no time in going to Bonanza and unloading?” This from the
raïs
or captain, Nasr al-Ghuráb.

“It depends,” van Hoek said. “Of these anchored fleet-ships, only
some
are beginning to unload—
most
have not broken bulk yet. This suggests that the customs inspections are not finished. What do you see to larboard, Caballero?”

Jeronimo was peering towards the anchored fleet through an oar-lock on his side. “Tied up alongside one of the great ships is a barque flying the glorious colors of His Majesty the Deformed, Monstrous Imbecile.” Then he paused to mutter a little prayer and cross himself. When Jeronimo attemped to say the words “King Carlos II of Spain,” this, or even less flattering expressions, would frequently come out of his mouth. “More than likely, this is the boat used by the tapeworms.”

“You mean the customs inspectors?” Moseh inquired.

“Yes, you bloodsucking, scalp-pilfering, half-breed Christ-killer, that is what I meant to say—please forgive my imprecision,” answered Jeronimo politely.

“But the Viceroy’s brig would not have to clear customs here at Cadiz—it could do so at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and avoid the wait,” Moseh pointed out.

“But as part of his ransackings, the Viceroy would be certain to have cargo of his own loaded on some of these galleons. He would have every reason to linger until the formalities were complete,” Jeronimo said.

“Hah! Now I can see up into the Calle Nueva,” said van Hoek. “It is gaudy with silks and ostrich-plumes today.”

“What is that,” Jack asked, “the street of clothes-merchants?”

“No, it is the exchange. Half the
commerçants
of Christendom are
gathered there in their French fashions. Last year these men shipped goods to America—now, they have gathered to collect their profits.”

“I see her,” said Jeronimo, with a frosty calm in his voice that Jack found moderately alarming. “She is hidden behind a galleon, but I see the Viceroy’s colors flying from her mast.”

“The brig!?” said several of the Ten.

“The brig,” said Jeronimo. “Providence—which buggered us all for so many years—has brought us here in time.”

“So the thunder that rolled across the Gulf last night was not a storm, but the guns of Cadiz saluting the galleons,” Moseh said. “Let us drink fresh water, and take a siesta, and then make for Bonanza.”

“It would be useful if we could send someone into the city now, and let him loiter around the House of the Golden Mercury for a while,” van Hoek said. Which to Jack would have meant no more than the singing of birds, except that the name jogged a memory.

“There is a house in Leipzig of the same name—it is owned by the Hacklhebers.”

Van Hoek said, “As salmon converge from all the wide ocean toward the mouths of swift rivers, Hacklhebers go wherever large amounts of gold and silver are in flux.”

“Why should we care about their doings in Cadiz?”

“Because
they
are sure to care about
ours,”
van Hoek said.

“Be that as it may, there’s not a single man, free or slave, aboard this galleot who could get through the city-gate. So this discussion is idle,” said Moseh.

“You think it will be any different at Sanlúcar de Barrameda?” van Hoek scoffed.

“Oh, I can get us into that town, Cap’n,” Jack said.

A
FTER THE HEAT
of midday had broken, they rowed north, keeping the salt-pans to starboard. Their ship was a galleot or half-galley, driven by two lateen sails (which were of little use today, as the wind was feeble and inconstant) and sixteen pairs of oars. Each of the thirty-two oars was pulled by two men, so the full complement of rowers was sixty-four. Like everything else about the Plan, this was a choice carefully made. A giant war-galley of Barbary, with two dozen oar-banks, and five or six slaves on each oar, and a hundred armed Corsairs crowding the rails, would of course bring down the wrath of the Spanish fleet as soon as she was sighted. Smaller galleys, called bergantines, carried only a third as many oarsmen as the galleot that they were now rowing across the Gulf of Cadiz. But on such a tiny vessel it was infeasible, or at least unprofitable, to maintain oar-slaves,
and so the rowers would be freemen; rowing alongside a larger ship they’d snatch up cutlasses and pistols and go into action as Corsairs. A bergantine, for that reason, would arouse more suspicion than this (much larger) galleot; it would be seen as a nimble platform for up to three dozen boarders, whereas the galleot’s crew (not counting chained slaves) was much smaller—in this case, only eight Corsairs, pretending to be peaceful traders.

The galleot was shaped like a gunpowder scoop. Beneath the bare feet of the oarsmen there was loose planking, covering a shallow bilge, but other than that there was no decking—the vessel was open on the top along its entire length, save for a quarterdeck at the stern, which in the typical style of these vessels was curved very high out of the water. So any lookout gazing down into the galleot would clearly see a few dozen naked wretches in chains, and cargo packed around and under their benches: rolled carpets, bundles of hides and of linen, barrels of dates and olive oil. A spindly swivel-gun at the bow, and another at the stern, both fouled by lines and cargo, completed the illusion that the galleot was all but helpless. It would take a closer inspection to reveal that the oarsmen were uncommonly strong and fresh: the best that the slave-markets of Algiers had to offer. The ten participants in the Plan were distributed in outboard positions, the better to peer through oarlocks.

“In this calm we’ll have at least a night and a day to await the Viceroy’s ship,” Jack noted.

“Much hangs on the tides,” van Hoek said. “We want a low tide in the night-time. And the weather must remain calm, so that we can row away from any pursuers during the hours of darkness. At sunrise the wind will come up, and then anyone who can see us will be able to catch us…” His voice trailed off to a mumble as he pondered these and other complications, which had seemed hardly worth mentioning when they had been developing the Plan, and now, like shadows at sunset, stretched out vast, vague, and terrifying.

The brassy light of late afternoon was gleaming in through their larboard oar-locks when the galleot sank slightly lower into the water, and began to quiver and squirm in a current. At first they did not even recognize it—this was the first river of any significance they’d encountered since passing Gibraltar, or for that matter since leaving Algiers. Jack knew in his arms and his back why the Moors who’d roved up this way ages ago had named it al-Wadi al-Kabir, the Great River. When Jeronimo felt it tugging at his oar, he stood up and thrust an arm through his oar-lock to clip the top of a wave with one cupped hand. Slurping up a mouthful of water, he coughed, and then affected a blissful expression. “It is fresh water, the water of
the Guadalquivir, rushing down from the mountains of my ancestors,” he announced, and more in that vein. During this ceremony his oar did not move, which meant that no oars on that side could.

“Speaking personally,” Jack said loudly, “I have more experience of sewers than of mountain streams, and cannot believe we have come all this distance to row in circles in the run-off of Seville and Cordoba!”

Jeronimo thrust out his chest and prepared to challenge Jack to a duel—but then the
nerf du boeuf
came down across the Spaniard’s shoulder blades as their overseer reminded them that they were yet slaves. Jack wondered how long it would take Jeronimo to get into a sword-fight after he was allowed to have a sword.

The next few hours provided more reminders of their lowly station in the world as they stroked upstream with the sun clawing at their faces. Van Hoek cursed almost without letup, and Jack reflected that, for an officer, nothing could be more humiliating than to face backwards, and never see where you were headed. But at some point they began to see tops of masts around them, and heard the blessed sound of the anchor-chains rumbling through their hawse-holes, and bent forward over their warm oars to stretch out the muscles of their backs.

Nasr al-Ghuráb, the
raïs,
was
kul oglari,
meaning the son of a Janissary by a woman native to the territory round Algiers—in any event, he spoke passable Spanish as well as Sabir. In the latter tongue, he now said, “Bring out the spare wretches.” Planking was pulled up and four damp oar-slaves climbed out of the bilge and quickly replaced Jack, Moseh, Jeronimo, and van Hoek. This took place under cover of a sail that had been spread out above them as if to be mended, so that any curious sailors who might be looking down from a yard or maintop of a nearby ship would not witness the ennoblement going on in the aisle of this newly arrived galleot. Meanwhile—in case anyone was counting heads—four of the Corsair crew retreated beneath the shade of the quarterdeck to take refreshment and doze. A canvas sack full of old clothes—looted from persons who were now captives in Algiers—was also brought up, and the four began to paw through it like children playing dress-up.

“Turbans are advisable for going abovedecks,” Jack pointed out, “as my hair’s sandy, and van Hoek’s is red, and that of Moseh—”

They all stood and looked dubiously at Moseh until finally he said, “Get me a dagger and I’ll cut off the forelocks—
crypto
-Jews can expect no better.”

“May you become free and rich and grow them until you must tuck them into your boot-tops,” Jack said.

They spent the last hour before sunset up on the towering quarterdeck turbaned, and covered in the long loose garments of Algerines. The town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda rose above them on the south bank where the river flowed into the gulf. It resembled a feeble miniature rendition of Algiers—it was encompassed by a wall, and below it spread a beach of river-sand where some fishermen had spread out their nets to inspect them. Van Hoek gave the town but a glance, then seized a glass from the
raïs,
climbed up the mast, and devoted much time to scanning the water: apparently reading the currents, and fixing in his mind the location of the submerged bar. Moseh’s attention was captured by a suburb that spread along the bank upstream of the town, outside the walls: Bonanza. It seemed to consist entirely of large villas, each with its own wall. After a while the avid Jeronimo spied the Viceroy’s coat of arms flying from one of these, or so they all assumed from the invective that geysered forth.

Jack, for his part, was looking for a place to land their little rowboat after it got dark. In the interstices between walled places he could easily make out a fungal huddle of Vagabond-shacks, and with some concerted looking it was not difficult to make out a scrap of mucky, useless river-bank where those persons came down to draw water. Jack got a compass bearing to it, though it remained to be seen how this would serve them when it was dark and the current was pushing them downstream.

“’Twere foolish to go ashore in daylight,” Jeronimo said, “and, when night falls, ’twere foolish
not
to. For smuggling and illicit trade are the only reasons for anyone to visit Sanlúcar de Barrameda nowadays. If we don’t try to do something illegal the night we arrive—why, the authorities will become suspicious!”

“If someone asks…what
kind
of illegal thing should we say we are undertaking?” Jack asked.

“We should say we have a meeting with a certain Spanish gentleman—but that we do not know his real name.”

“Spanish gentlemen, as a rule, are insufferably proud of their names—what sort refuses to identify himself?”

“The sort who meets with heretic scum in the middle of the night,” Jeronimo returned, “and fortunately for
you,
there are many of that sort in yonder town.”

“That schooner is strangely over-crowded with Englishmen and Dutchmen of high rank,” van Hoek offered, pointing with his blue eyes at a rakish vessel anchored a few hundred yards downriver.