The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (222 page)

Very little of Queen Kottakkal’s palace was really indoors: It was a complex of gardens, terraces, temple-courts, and plazas divided one from the next by a sparse net-work of roofed galleries, with apartments situated here and there.

“Normally it is teeming with Nayars,” Jack offered, “especially when so many pirate-ships are in the harbor. But they are all down in the town, enjoying the mock-battle.”

He led Enoch on a short excursion down a gallery and across agarden to the very door of a large stone dwelling with diverse balconies
and windows. But he drew up short when he noticed a sheathed sword leaning against the door-post. Jack shushed Enoch with a finger to his lips, and did not speak until they had put a hundred paces behind them.

“It was a good enough sword,” Enoch said, “some sort of Persian
shamsir,
to judge from its extreme curvature and slender blade. But methinks you show it more respect than is warranted…”

“These Malabar women are as free with
men,
as Charles II himself was with
women,
” Jack explained. “In these parts, a man can never tell which children are
his
. Or to put it another way, every man knows his mother but hasn’t the faintest idea who his
father
might be. Consequently, all property passes down the
female
line.”

“Including the crown?”

“Including the crown. One peculiarity of this arrangement is that a man, going in to pay a call on a lady, never knows what
other
man he might discover in her bed. To prevent awkward situations, a gallant therefore leaves his weapon leaning against the door-post when he enters—as a sign to all who pass by that the lady’s attentions are spoken for.”

“So the Queen is passing some time with a Persian? Odd, that.”

“The
weapon
is Persian. Dappa—our linguist—bought it in Mocha when we passed through there years ago. Of all of us, he is the only one who has made much headway in learning the Malabar language.”

“He is putting it to good use!”

“He has
already
put it to good use by convincing the Queen that he and the others have a higher calling than to be slaves.”

And with that Jack opened the door to another, much smaller apartment, and led Enoch through to a terrace at the back that looked out over the harbor. European-style tables and chairs had been brought out here. Two men were working over messes of palm-leaves covered with writing, figures, maps, and diagrams: Monsieur Arlanc and Moseh de la Cruz.

They were only mildly surprised to see Jack. Enoch Root required a bit of explanation—but once Jack adumbrated that the stranger had something to do with cannons, the others welcomed him. Moseh, Jack, and Monsieur Arlanc fell quickly into a detailed conversation about the ship. They were speaking Sabir, which was the only tongue they all shared. Enoch could not perfectly follow it. He drifted away to gaze out over the Laccadive Sea, and then turned his attention to some ink drawings that had been pegged to the wall.

“Is this art Japanese?” he inquired, breaking in abruptly.

“Yes—or at least, the fellow who made it is,” Jack said. “We were just talking about him. Let’s go and introduce you to Father Gabriel
Goto of the Society of Jesus.”

Gabriel Goto had politely declined to work as a pirate and so Queen Kottakkal had put him to work as a gardener. Some suspected that he did not work very
hard
, for compared to most of the palace—which was continually in danger of being overrun and conquered by its vegetation—Gabriel Goto’s plot was a desert. He’d been put in charge of a courtyard in the landward corner of the palace grounds that was perpetually shaded by tall trees and by an adjacent stone watch-tower, yet sorely exposed to storm-winds, and poorly drained. It had defeated many a gardener. Gabriel Goto settled the matter by growing nothing there, except for moss, and the odd stand of bamboo. Most of the “garden” consisted of stones, raked gravel, and a pond sporting a brace of bloated, mottled carp. Every so often the Jesuit would drag a rake across the gravel or throw some food at the fish, but most of the work involved in the upkeep was
mental
in nature, and could not be accomplished unless his mind was clear. Clearing his mind was an extraordinarily demanding project requiring him to sit crosslegged on a wooden patio for hours at a time, dipping a brush into ink and drawing pictures on palm leaves. At any rate, this corner of the palace no longer bred mosquitoes and poisonous frogs as it had formerly been infamous for doing, and so the Queen left him alone.

The results of Gabriel Goto’s artistic labors were neatly stacked, and in some cases baled, almost to the ceiling of the apartment behind his patio. More recent work had been hung from lines to dry in the breeze.

“It is the same landscapes over and over,” Enoch Root observed, browsing his way down a clothes-line of rugged and none-too-cheerful-looking scenes: mostly hills and cliffs plunging into waters speckled with outlandish square-sailed vessels.

“The work, as a whole, is called
One Hundred and Seven Views of the Passage to Niigata,
” said Moseh de la Cruz helpfully.

“This is my favorite:
Breakers on the Reef Before Katsumoto,
” said Monsieur Arlanc—delighted to have someone to speak full-dress French to. “So much is suggested by so little—it is a humbling contrast with our
Barock
style.”

“Bor-ing! Give me
Korean Pirate Attack in the Straits of Tsushima
any day!” Jack put in.

“That is fine if you like vulgar sword-play, but I believe his finest work is in the Wrecks:
Chinese Junk Aground in Shifting Sands,
and
Skeleton of a Fishing-Boat Caught in Tree Branches
being two notable examples.”

“Are
all
of his pictures about Hazards to Navigation?” asked Enoch Root.

“Have you ever seen a nautical picture that
wasn’t
?” Jack demanded.

“Over here, you can see the
Massacre of Hara
triptych,” said Moseh.

“Let’s go find the samurai,” Jack said. And they did, passing in a few steps through the wee house he’d fabricated out of sticks and paper—or, to be precise, palm leaves. His swords—a long two-hander and a shorter cutlass—rested one above the other in a little wooden stand. Jack went over and peered at the longer of the two. It had come from the collection of an Algerian corsair-captain, but according to Gabriel Goto it had unquestionably been forged in Japan at least a hundred years ago. And indeed the shape of its blade, the style of the handle, and the carving of the guard were unlike anything else Jack had ever seen, which argued in favor of its being from what by all accounts was the queerest country on the face of the earth. But the actual steel of the blade was (as Jack had noted, and remarked on, in Cairo years before) marked with the same swirling pattern shared by every other watered-steel blade, be it a Janissary-sword forged in Damascus, a
shamsir
from the forge of Tamerlane in Samarkand, or a
kitar
from the
wootz
-vale.

Having confirmed this memory to his own satisfaction, Jack straightened up and turned around and nearly butted heads with Enoch Root, who was just in the act of noticing the same thing. To his great satisfaction Jack saw amazement on the alchemist’s face, followed by a few moments of what looked almost like fear, as he came aware of what it might mean.

“Let’s hear what the artist has to say for himself,” said Jack, and slid a translucent screen aside to reveal the flinty garden, and Gabriel Goto sitting with his back to them, holding a brush with an ink-drop poised on its sharp tip.

G
ABRIEL
G
OTO’S
S
TORY
[AS NARRATED IN CLERICAL LATIN TO ENOCH ROOT]

“I have never seen Japan. I know it only from pictures my father
drew, of which these are but miserable plagiarisms.

“From the others you have heard stories that are as complicated as a Barock church or Ottoman mosque. But the Japanese way is to be simple, like this garden, so I will tell my tale with as few brush-strokes as possible. Even so it will be too many.

“Those who have ruled Japan, be they monks, emperors, or shoguns, have always depended upon local knights, each of whom is responsible for looking after some particular piece of land—seeing to it that this land produces well and that the people who work it are orderly and content. Those knights are called Samurai, and as with the knights of Christendom, it is their responsibility to keep arms and to bear them in the service of their lord when called upon. My family have been Samurai for as long as we choose to remember. The lands for which we were responsible were of little account, being in a high cold stony place, and we were held in no special regard by others of our class.

“The story is related that an ancestor of ours had split his holdings between two sons, giving the paddies to his first-born and the rocks to the other. Each spawned his own branch of the family: one rich, dwelling in low-lands and distinguishing itself in wars, the other a clan of coarse mountain-dwellers, not known for their loyalty, but allowed to remain in existence because neither were they known for martial prowess.

“The tale of these two clans goes on for centuries, and is as fraught with complications as the history of Japan itself—someday when we are on a long sea-voyage perhaps I will relate more of it. What is important is that copper and then silver were discovered in the rocky up-lands. This was about two hundred years ago, at a time when the shogun turned his back on the affairs of the world and went into retirement, and Japan ceased being a unified country for a very long time—like Germany today. All power fled from Kyoto to the provinces, and each part of the country was controlled by a lord called a
daimyo,
something like a baron in Germany. These daimyos clashed and strove against each other ceaselessly, like stones on a pebble beach grinding each other. Ones who met with success built castles. Markets and cities formed round their walls. Markets require coins, and so each daimyo began to mint his own currency.

“What it amounts to is that this was a dangerous time to be a warrior but an excellent time to be a miner. As my ancestors—being Buddhists—would have expressed it, the two clans were bound to opposite points of the Wheel, and the Wheel was turning. Those lowland warriors allied themselves with a daimyo who was not deserving of their trust, and lost two consecutive generations of males in battle.
My
ancestors—the uplanders—moved down from the mountains and into apartments in another daimyo’s castle, not far from Osaka Bay, near Sakai, which in those days was a free city devoted to foreign trade, like Venice or Genoa. This happened about a hundred and fifty years ago, which was the same time that the Portuguese began to come up from Macao in tall ships.

“The Portuguese brought Christianity and guns. My ancestors embraced both. To people living in Sakai in those days it must have seemed an intelligent choice. The harbor was crowded with European ships bristling with cannons and flying Christian banners from every spar. Also, the Jesuits liked to establish missions in poor areas, and despite the silver mines, our ancestral land was still poor. So when a mission was established there at the invitation of my great-great-grandfather, the miners and peasants embraced Christianity without hesitation. Here was a creed that preached to the poor and the meek, and they were both.

“At the same time my great-great-grandfather was learning the secrets of gunsmithing, and teaching this skill to the local artisans. Men whose fathers had hammered out hoes and shovels were now making firelocks worth a hundred times as much.

“Now the peasants who lived down below, working the paddies, began to make trouble for
their
Samurai, our cousins. Some of these peasants began to turn Christian, which our cousins abhorred; others were growing disrespectful of their lords, who seemed to have lost the mandate of heaven. In those days there was a thing called
katana-gari
which means sword-hunt, in which the Samurai would search the peasants’ homes for armaments. They began to find not only swords but firearms.

“So naturally the cousins allied themselves with powerful men who sought to unify Japan. This tale extends across three generations and as many shoguns—the first two being Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi—and has more twists and turns than a game trail over the mountains. The long and the short of it is that they threw in their lot with Tokugawa Ieyasu, who, a hundred years ago, won the Battle of Sekigahara, in part by using foot-soldiers armed with guns. In that battle my cousins won glory, and they won even more in the storming and the destruction of Osaka Castle, which took place in the Year of Our Lord 1615. My father was eighteen years old at the time, and he was one of the defenders of that castle, and of the Toyotomi family which was extinguished on that day.

“The Wheel had turned again. The Tokugawa shogunate claimed a monopoly on the minting of coins—my family lost its chief source of revenue. Firearms were banned—another source of income vanished.
Foreign trade was strictly controlled—Sakai became an island cut off from the rest of Japan. But worst of all, for my family, was that Christianity had been outlawed. My father had not been the only Christian to have allied himself with the Toyotomi family, and Tokugawa Ieyasu believed that the Jesuits and the Toyotomis, allied together, were the only force that could defeat him. Both were extirpated.

“At the time of my father’s birth there were a quarter of a million Christians in Japan and at the time of his death there were none. This did not occur all at once but gradually, beginning with the execution of a few Jesuit missionaries in the Year of Our Lord 1597 and culminating forty years later in a few great battles and massacres. My father perhaps did not really grasp what was happening until it was nearly finished. His brother had gone back to our ancestral land to look after the mines and practice Christianity in secret. My father remained in Sakai for a while trying to make a living in foreign trade. But first this fell under the strict control of the shogun, and from there it was gradually choked off. The Portuguese were banned altogether because they kept bringing over priests disguised as mariners. Sakai and Kyoto were closed to foreign trade altogether. Only Nagasaki was left open, and only to the Dutch, who—being heretics—did not care about saving Japanese souls from eternal fire, and only wanted our money.