The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (164 page)

Now this, of course, was an overt attack, the brig’s first inarguable proof that she was under assault by pirates. So her captain moved just as van Hoek had predicted: He ordered that a cannon be run out and fired, as a signal to whomever was keeping watch over the harbor from the battlements of Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

But a single cannon-shot in the night-time is an ambiguous statement, and difficult to interpret—especially when what it is trying to say is something extremely implausible, such as that a Viceroy’s treasure-brig is being assaulted by a Corsair-galley in the midst of
one of Spain’s most important harbors. And no sooner had the brig fired its distress-shot than another ship, a bit farther out to sea, fired
several:
this was
Météore,
the
jacht
that had appeared out of the Gulf towards sunset, flying Dutch colors. In response, a ragged patter of signals were fired from the town’s batteries. This had been done at the request of the
cargador metedoro,
who had been talked into believing that he had incoming goods on that
jacht
and did not want to wake up tomorrow morning to discover that she had run aground on the bar.

The Viceroy’s brig, spinning helplessly in the swirling currents, was swept out over the bar and into the Gulf of Cadiz without anyone in the town’s having a clear idea of what was going on.

There was a half-moon that night, and as they drifted into the Gulf Jack watched it chasing the lost sun towards the western ocean, all aglow on its underside, like a ball of silver heated on one side by the burning radiance of a forge. It was shrouded in ripped and frayed tissues of cloud that stole some of its light: new weather coming in from the ocean, which was bad for them, because it meant that tomorrow their pursuers would have wind.

And tonight their prey were beginning to have it: a chilly breeze coming in straight from the Atlantic. Seamen had already gone to stations on the upperdeck to raise sails and get under way as best they might. Jack sensed that the Spaniards were breathing easier now: The ride down the dark river among anchored ships and over the shallow bar had been dangerous, but now they had a lot of water under their keel, and they had a bit of wind. After a few minutes’ preparations they could raise some sails and move out a bit farther from the town, to eliminate the risk of running aground, and wait for daylight.

They were unaware that the galleot, after shearing away their oars, had rowed out into the Gulf and transformed herself into another kind of ship entirely. Stowed in the aisle that ran up her center, between the benches, had been an uncommonly large carpet, rolled up into a bundle some ten yards long. But that carpet (if all had gone according to the Plan) was now jetsam, unrolled and adrift in the Gulf of Cadiz somewhere. Its former contents—a tree-trunk of straight-grained fir from the slopes of the Atlas Mountains, spoke-shaved to a smooth needle shape, bolstered with iron hoops, and tipped with a barbed iron spearhead—had been brought forward and mounted on the nose of the galleot, somewhat like a bowsprit, but nearer to the waterline, and not so encumbered with stays and martingales. That iron spearhead should even now be skimming
over the waves at a velocity of about ten knots, with fifty tons of galleot behind it, and one Spanish treasure-brig dead ahead.

The general plan was to strike the brig on her quarter, which meant towards the stern, where large cannons were somewhat less plentiful. The only drawback was that this made it impossible for the five boarders who were clinging to the stempost to see the galleot approaching (to the extent they could see
anything
by the flat chalky light of the setting half-moon). But the sudden screaming from the other end of the ship gave them a good clue that the time was now. They waited for a moment, as many footsteps receded, and then finally swung their grapples up and over the rail. Each man pulled on his rope until he felt the flukes catch in something (no way of guessing what, or how sturdy it might be) and after testing it with a few sharp tugs, abandoned his foot-loop and gave himself up to his rope. Because the hull flared out overhead they all swung far away from it, and swept to and fro above the water like pendulums.

Jack’s arms nearly gave way, for they had grown stiff in the fresh breeze coming off the ocean, and he slid down a short distance before finally whipping a leg round the rope and trapping it between shins and ankles. After that it was just rope-climbing, which was something he had done far too much of in his life. Consequently he surprised himself by being the first boarder to tumble over the rail and feel the blessing of wood against the soles of his feet.

He was standing in that part of the ship known as the head, gazing down her length. The moonlight was horizontal and so the masts, the rigging, and a few standing figures were columns of silver, but the deck was a black pool, completely invisible. A vast commotion was underway astern. Several pistols were suddenly discharged, making Jack startle. At the same moment he heard a gaseous eruption from very nearby, and turned to discover a Spaniard seated on a bench with his breeches round his ankles, gazing up, moonfaced with astonishment, at Jack. He made as if to stand, but Jack simply fell into him, driving one shoulder into the man’s abdomen to prevent him from calling out, shoving his buttocks into the hole he’d been sitting on, and wedging him into place with gleaming knees projecting into the sky. The Spaniard threw out one hand like a grapple on a rope, reaching for his coat, neatly folded on the bench, where a loaded pistol lay. But out came the Janissary-sword. Jack put its point against the Spaniard’s belly. “I’ll have that, señor,” he said, and took the pistol up in his free hand.

The other four boarders were just struggling over the rail. The timing was apt, because now there was a mighty splintering pop from
astern. One of the benefits of having been a galley-slave of the Barbary Corsairs for several years was that Jack knew and recognized that sound: It was a large iron spear-head piercing the hull of a European ship. And it was followed a moment later by a crash that made them all hop to keep their balance.

Nyazi had clambered aboard farther astern than anyone else, and was all of a sudden blind-sided by a Spaniard who came at him silently with a dagger. The weapon lunged forward and met only air. Nyazi had somehow sensed the attack and gone elsewhere. Then he was back, swinging his cutlass, and felled his attacker with a frantic back-handed slash.

Then Dappa, Gabriel, Yevgeny, and Jack all moved at once, without discussion. Some parts of the Plan were complicated, but not this one. A brig had but two masts, and each mast had a platform halfway up called a top, reachable by clambering up a ladderlike web of shrouds. At this moment the fore-top was unoccupied. Jack handed the pistol to Dappa, who tucked it into his belt and began climbing. Yevgeny was loading some pistols he had brought with him (it being impractical to keep them loaded, and their powder dry, when they were bumping about in a partly submerged bag). Jack and Gabriel worked their separate ways astern along the larboard and starboard rails respectively, Jack swinging his Janissary-sword and Gabriel a sort of queer two-handed scimitar of Nipponese manufacture, on loan from some Corsair-captain’s trophy case. They were severing not heads, but haul-yards: the lines, running in parallel courses through large blocks, that were used to hoist up the yards from which the ship’s sails were all suspended.

Finally, then, Jack and Gabriel began to ascend the main shrouds, converging on the maintop where three Spanish sailors had belatedly realized that they were under siege. One of these drew out a pistol and pointed it down at Jack, but was struck in the arm by a pistol-ball from Dappa, shooting from a few yards away on the fore-top. A moment later Yevgeny fired from down on the deck, and apparently missed—assuming he was even trying to hit anything. For the two unhurt sailors on the maintop were dumbfounded to find themselves under fire from the bows of their own ship, only moments after being rammed astern, and it was probably better to have them stunned and indecisive than wounded and angry. Jack and Gabriel gained the maintop at about the same time, disarmed the two unhurt sailors at sword-point, and encouraged them, in the strongest possible terms, to descend to the deck. Yevgeny tossed up a couple of muskets, which were not even loaded yet.

Not that it mattered. For Jeronimo, standing back on the quarterdeck
of the galleot, had seen Jack’s and Gabriel’s exploits. Raising to his lips the same speaking trumpet that Mr. Foot had used, only hours before, to try to sell carpets to the Viceroy, he now delivered a flowery oration in noble Spanish. Jack did not know the language that well, but caught the obligatory reference to Neptune (in whose jurisdiction they now were) and Ulysses (representing the Cabal) who had gone into a certain cave (the estuary of the Guadalquivir) that turned out to contain a Cyclops (the Viceroy and/or his brig) and escaped by poking said Cyclops in the eye with a pointed stick (no metaphor here; they had done it literally). It would have sounded magnificent, booming out of that trumpet and across the water, except that it was commingled with bewildering spates of profanity that made the sailors edge backwards and cross themselves.

Jeronimo identified himself, then, as El Desamparado Returned from Hell—as if he could have been any other. He reminded the brig’s captain that he was now adrift in the Gulf with a completely disabled ship and a skeleton crew, that his tops were now commanded by boarders armed with muskets, and, in case anyone was insufficiently scared, he told the lie that ten pounds of gunpowder were encased in the hollow head of the battering-ram now buried deep in the brig’s vitals, not far away from the powder magazine, and that it could easily be detonated at the whim of who else but El Desamparado.

Jack had the benefit of watching this performance from an exclusive private loge, as it were, at the back of the theatre. He noticed a sigh run through the brig’s crew when the fell sobriquet of El Desamparado first rang from the trumpet. The battle turned at that instant. When the gunpowder was mentioned, pistols and cutlasses began clattering to the deck. Jack judged that the captain, and one or two officers, were willing to fight—but it scarcely mattered, because the crew, exhausted from the passage of the Atlantic, were not keen on giving their lives to make the Viceroy slightly richer, when the taverns and whorehouses of Sanlúcar de Barrameda glowed so warmly from the shore a couple of miles away.

Six Barbary Corsairs—now resplendent in turbans and scimitars—came aboard the brig, along with the other members of the Cabal. Two of the Corsairs remained on the galleot, prowling up and down the aisle with whips and muskets to remind the oar-slaves that they were yet in the power of Algiers. The brig’s crew were disarmed and herded up to the poop deck, and several swivel-guns were charged with double loads of buckshot and aimed in their direction, manned by Corsairs or Cabal-members with burning torches. The officers were put in leg-irons and locked into a cabin guarded by a
Corsair. They were joined by Mr. Foot, who made them chocolate; as it was felt by many in the Cabal that the best way to keep several Spanish officers in a helpless stupor was to have Mr. Foot engage them in light conversation.

Jeronimo led Nasr al-Ghuráb, Moseh, Jack, and Dappa belowdecks to the shot-locker, and hacked off a giant padlock, and flung its hatch open. Jack was expecting to see lead cannonballs, or nothing but rat-turds, because life had trained him to expect grievous disappointments and double-crossings at every turn. But the contents of that locker gleamed as only precious metals could—and gleamed yellow.

Jack thought of finding Eliza in the hole beneath Vienna.

“Gold!” Dappa said.

“No, it is a trick of the light,” Jeronimo insisted, moving his torch to and fro, experimenting with different positions. “These are silver pigs.”

“They are too regular in their shape to be pigs,” Jack pointed out. “Those are bars of refined metal.”

“Nonetheless—silver it must be, for gold is not produced by the mines of New Spain,” said El Desamparado doggedly. Now Jack had a small insight concerning Excellentissimo Domino Jeronimo Alejandro Peñasco de Halcones Quinto: He had a tale worked out in his head, like the tales written in the moldy books of his ancestors. The tale was the only way for him to make sense of his life. It ended with him finding a hoard of silver pigs, tonight, here. To find anything other than silver pigs was to suffer some sort of cruel mockery at the hands of Fate; finding gold was as bad as finding nothing.

But Jack’s reflections, and the Caballero’s denials, were interrupted by a sharp noise. The
raïs
had taken a coin from his belt-pouch and tossed it onto one of the bars. It spun and buzzed, a disk of silvery white on a slab of yellow. “That is a piece of eight—if you have forgotten the color of silver,” said Nasr al-Ghuráb. “What it lies on is gold.”

Then, for a long time, none of them uttered a sound. Even Jeronimo’s tongue had been silenced.

Moseh cleared his throat. “I think Jews have no word for this,” he said, “because we do not expect to get so lucky. But Christians, I believe, call it Grace.”

“I would call it blood money,” said Dappa.

“It was
always
blood money,” Jeronimo said.

“You told us, once, that the silver mines of Guanajuato were worked by free men,” Dappa reminded him. “This, being gold, must
come from the mines of Brazil—which are worked by slaves taken from Africa.”

“I have watched you shoot a Spanish sailor not half an hour ago—where were all your scruples then?” Jack asked.

Dappa glared back at him. “Overcome by a desire not to see my comrade get shot in the face.”

Jeronimo said, “The Plan does not allow for finding gold where we expected silver. It means we have thirteen times as much money as we reckoned. Most likely we will all end up killing each other—perhaps this very night!”

“Now your demon is talking,” said al-Ghuráb.

“But my demon always speaks the truth.”

“We will continue with the Plan as if this were silver,” Moseh said nervously.