The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (168 page)

The galley to which Monsieur Arlanc was chained survived most of the battle without serious damage. Then (according to van Hoek) she was called in to ram a certain Dutch ship. Along the way she came under fire from others, and a bomb apparently went off in her sterncastle, starting a fire that, a few minutes later, detonated her powder magazine and essentially blew open her stern. Very quickly her bow began to point up in the air, her ram sweeping relentlessly upwards like the hand of a clock. The
galériens
in the forward half of the ship—presumably including Monsieur Arlanc—let go their oars and hooked their arms over their benches, though some of them broke loose, so that skeins of slaves dangled and swung like strings of trout hanging before a fishmonger’s stall.

“Let us row in that direction,” Jack said, “because it is no more dangerous than what we are doing anyway, and because it is good form.”

There was profound apprehension on the faces of other members of the Cabal. Vrej Esphahnian opened his mouth as if to lodge an objection but then a large cannonball hummed past, a couple of yards over their heads, confirming Jack’s point and sparing them many tedious deliberations. So Nasr al-Ghuráb brought the tiller around and they made for the sinking galley.

Meanwhile Jack went down among the oar-slaves—but not before asking Yevgeny to fetch a certain large hammer, and an anvil.

On the night before their departure from Malta, when most of the fleet’s ordinary seamen had been ashore carousing and/or receiving Holy Communion, and most of its officers attending formal dinners, the Cabal had armed themselves with blunderbusses and then worked their way down the aisle, unchaining one pair of slaves at a time and searching them. Turbans, head-rags, and loincloths had been shaken out and groped, jaws and butt-cheeks pried apart, hair combed through or cut off. Jeronimo had scoffed at this—more so after being told it was all because of a warning from a “heretic Frog slave.” But he went silent as soon as he saw a complete set of fine lock-picks being drawn out through the anal sphincter of a stocky middle-aged
galérien
named Gerard. And he remained silent as an increasingly astounding variety of hardware was produced, like conjurors’ tricks, from diverse orifices and bits of clothing. “If I see a granado coming from some man’s nostril I will be no more surprised
than I am now,” he said. Finally a mirror was found, and then another—confirming Jack’s story. Nyazi was uncharacteristically pensive, and said: “Honor dictates that we send the Investor to Hell forthwith, along with as many of his clan as we can get our daggers into.” But El Desamparado flew into a rage that did not abate until he had ranted for the better part of an hour and made many trips up and down the length of the galleot flailing away with a
nerf du boeuf.

Now these
galériens
were no more impressed by Jeronimo’s prowess with the whip than they were by his Classical allusions.
*
At the height of his rage Jeronimo was no more or less prepossessing than any
comité
of the French Navy. It was, rather, the odd comments he made when he calmed down that convinced them all that El Desamparado was a madman, and scared them all into silence and submission.

In any event, the French padlocks that had secured the slaves when they’d been brought over had been tossed into the bilge, and their chains heated up in the galleot’s portable brazier and hammered shut, just in case any lock-picks had escaped the search.

Now, as the galleot rowed through the wreckage of the French flotilla with clouds of grapeshot and lengths of smoking chain flying overhead, Jack fished one of those padlocks out of the bilge. As Yevgeny parted the chain of Gerard with a few terrible hammer-blows, Jack worked his way through the giant key-ring that the French had handed over to them, and got that padlock open. Then Jack, Yevgeny, Gerard, and Gabriel Goto got into the skiff and rowed the last few yards to the slowly sinking galley.

Hundreds of chained men had already been pulled below the water, and perhaps two score remained above it. The bench to which Monsieur Arlanc and his four companions were joined by a common chain, and from which they’d all been dangling for the last quarter of an hour, was only a couple of yards above the water now, and their legs were washed by every wave. Jack clambered onto that bench holding one end of the chain that went around Gerard’s waist, then wrapped Gerard’s chain around Arlanc’s and padlocked them together. He threw away the key and, for good measure, smashed the body of the lock with a hammer to make it unpickable.

Gerard’s eyes went immediately to the chain that went round the
waists of Monsieur Arlanc and his four comrades, and terminated at the end of the bench along the aisle, where it was padlocked to a stout loop of iron.

Jack jumped back into the skiff; handed Gerard his set of lock-picks; and threw him overboard, saying, “Go and redeem thyself.”

Of course there was much more to it than that, and when Jack told the tale afterwards he would give the full report, with all due embellishments: the hysterical blubbering of some
galériens,
the pious praying of others, the many strong hands that shot up out of the water to grip the gunwales of their skiff and were cut away by Gabriel’s sword. The officers and French Marines still clinging to the galley’s forecastle, trying to buy passage on the galleot, or failing that, to fight their way aboard, only to be beaten back by Jeronimo and Nyazi and van Hoek and the others. The banks of powder-smoke drifting by overhead, and the bodies of the drowned
galériens
below: pale blurred forms in strings of five, like pearls.

But at the time Jack took little notice of this
ambience
and concentrated on the matter of the lock and the chain almost as intently as Gerard. At the moment that the galley pulled Gerard under water he still had not got the lock open, and Jack began to think his plan had failed. The Turk who sat in the aisle was pulled under crying “Allahu Akbar!” and then the man who sat next to Monsieur Arlanc went down intoning “Father into your hands I commend my spirit.” Then it came to the point where Monsieur Arlanc’s face was only visible in the troughs of the waves. But then the head of Gerard re-appeared, followed by that of the Turk; they were clambering uphill, using the galley as a ladder even as it slid deeper. Gerard reached a temporarily secure place, turned around, hefted the opened padlock in one hand, and flung it at Jack’s head. Jack ducked it and laughed. “There is your redemption, English!” screamed Gerard, weeping with rage.

N
OW THEY MADE
direct for the Mouths of the Nile, sailing by day and rowing by night. Every few hours they sighted remnant ships of the French fleet, now scattered across fifty miles. Several times they saw
Météore,
which had survived the battle with the amputation of her mizzenmast, and she signalled to them with mirror-flashes.

“A group of two, then a group of three,” said Nasr al-Ghuráb.

“According to the Plan, this is a signal that we are to curtail the voyage, and put in at Alexandria instead of going on to Abu Qir,” Moseh said.

Al-Ghuráb rolled his eyes. “That would be as good as going direct to Marseille. In
El Iskandariya,
the French are almost more powerful than the Turks.”

“There is no point in making it
easy
for the Investor to bugger us,” Jeronimo scoffed.

“Then we shall go to Cairo and make it slightly more difficult,” said the
raïs.

“Cairo I like better than Alexandria,” Jack said, “but I do not like Cairo
much.
It is a cul-de-sac—the end of the line.”

“Not so—we could row up the Nile to Ethiopia!” Dappa said.

Nyazi, viewing Dappa’s jest as a challenge to his hospitality, declared that he would gladly sleep naked in the dirt to the end of his days in order to provide the Cabal with comfortable beds—providing they could get as far as the foothills of the Mountains of Nuba.

“The entire point of choosing Cairo was that it is as far East as Mediterranean vessels can go,” Moseh reminded them, “and so our cargo should have the highest value there, at the reputedly stupendous bazaar of the Khan el-Khalili, in the very heart of that ancient city, called by some the Mother of the World. And this is as true
now
as it was
before.”

“But once we go in we cannot come out—the Investor needs only to post ships before the two Mouths of the Nile, at Rosetta and Damietta, and we are bottled up,” van Hoek pointed out.

“Nonetheless, this half of the Mediterranean is yet Turkish. Turks control every harbor,” said the
raïs,
“and word has gone out, on faster boats than ours, that if a galleot should appear, with a crew of mostly infidels, and such-and-such markings, it is to be impounded at once, and the crew put in irons. Going to Cairo and trading our cargo for a vast array of goods in the Khan el-Khalili is not such a miserable fate compared to the alternatives—”

“One, being buggered by the Investor in Alexandria,” said Jeronimo.

“Two, being thrown into a dungeon-pit in some flyblown port in the Levant,” said Dappa.

“Three, running the ship aground in some uninhabited place and trudging off into the Sahara bent under the weight of our cargo,” said Vrej.

“Ethiopia sounds better every minute,” said Dappa.

“I shall distribute my wives equally among the nine of us who still have penises,” proclaimed Nyazi, “and Jack can have my finest camel!”

“Jack, fear not,” said Monsieur Arlanc, taking him aside. “I know one or two
negociants
in Grand Caire. Through them, I can help you sell your share of the goods, and get a bill of exchange, payable in Amsterdam.”

Jack sighed. “I do not predict any of us will sleep easy in Cairo.”

So they made no response to messages from the Investor’s
jacht,
and used their (now) superior speed to stay well clear of her. And yet they did not attempt to pull away and vanish during the night-times, as there was no advantage in throwing the Investor into a rage.

High sere country, veiled in dust, began to appear off to starboard. The water took on a brown tinge and then became polluted with mud, sticks, and straw, which Nasr al-Ghuráb called
sudd.
He said it had been washed down out of Egypt by the Nile. The river, he said, would be at its fullest now, as it was the month of August.

Then one midday they spied a hill with a single Roman column rising out of its top, and a city jumbled about its base. “It looks as if a movement of the earth has shaken the whole city down into rubble,” Jack said, but the
raïs
said that Alexandria always looked that way, and pointed to the fortifications as proof. Indeed a square-sided stone castle rose from the middle of the harbor, at the end of a broad causeway; it seemed orderly and showed no signs of damage. One or two of the faster French ships had already dropped anchor under the shelter of its guns. Gazing for a few moments through a borrowed spyglass, Jack could see men in periwigs going to and fro in longboats, parleying with the customs officials, who here as in Algiers were all black-clad Jews.

“The French pay three percent—merchants of other nations pay twenty,” Monsieur Arlanc commented, “probably thanks to the machinations of your Investor, and of other great Frenchmen.” Since his being rescued from the galley, he had been accepted as a sort of advisor to the Cabal.

“Once the Turks see how the French fleet was mangled by the Dutch, perhaps they’ll change their policy,” van Hoek said.

“Not if the Duc d’Arcachon bribes them with a galleot-load of gold bars,” Jack put in.

Most of the French fleet, including
Météore,
set their courses direct for the harbor of Alexandria proper. Nasr al-Ghuráb, however, pointed them straight up the coast; raised all the sail he could; and put the
galériens
to work, driving them at a blazing speed of nine knots for two hours. This brought them to a cusp of land called Abu Qir. From here Alexandria was still plainly visible through dust and heat-waves, and presumably the reverse was true; no doubt some French officer had watched every oar-stroke through a spyglass.

There was no city at Abu Qir, other than a few huts of Arab fishermen surrounded by spindly racks where they put fish out to dry in the sun. But there was a solid Turkish fort with many guns, and a customs house below it, having its own pier. Moseh and Dappa went in using the skiff while the
raïs
and the others managed the ticklish job
of bringing the galleot alongside the pier. Out of the customs house came the Jew who was in charge of the place, followed by Moseh, Dappa, and a couple of younger Jews—his sons—who carried sticks of red wax, bottles of ink, and other necessaries. The Jew was speaking a queer kind of Spanish to Moseh. He spent a couple of hours going through the hold, putting a customs-seal on each of the wooden crates without actually inspecting them, and without exacting any duties—this, of course, had all been pre-arranged on the Turkish side, by the Pasha working through his contacts in Egypt. This customs house at Abu Qir was the only one in the Ottoman Empire, or the world for that matter, where they could have done it.

The inspector made it clear to everyone within earshot that he was not happy with any part of the arrangement, but he did his part and departed without creating any obstructions or demanding any
baksheesh
above and beyond what he was getting anyway: a purse of pieces of eight, handed to him by Nasr al-Ghuráb after the “inspection” was complete.

This inspector turned out to be a hospitable soul, who importuned Moseh to come in and share an evening meal—making the reasonable assumption that the galleot would remain tied up to his pier all night. And indeed this would have been easiest. But a French sloop-of-war had been dispatched from Alexandria and was halfway to them now, her triangular sail apricot-colored in the late afternoon sun, and no one liked the looks of that. Furthermore, according to this Jew, a fine high-road called the Canopic Way joined Alexandria to Abu Qir, and riders on good horses could easily make the trip in a couple of hours. Having no particular desire to be trapped between the French sloop and a hypothetical squadron of French night-riders, Nasr al-Ghuráb ordered the galleot to put to sea about an hour before sunset. Under other conditions this would have been most unwise. But the current of the Nile would tend to push them away from the land, and according to the weather-glass that van Hoek had improvised from a glass tube and a flask of quicksilver, the skies would be clear for at least another day. So they abandoned themselves to the waves, and spent an uneasy night throwing the sounding-lead over the side and hauling it in again, over and over and over, lest they run aground in the Nile’s shifting sands.