The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (234 page)

Jack sighed. “We are a Cabal no longer,” he said. “What began on
the roof of the
banyolar
in Algiers has dissolved in this Japanese
smugglers’-cove.”

“We are all business partners now, and not brothers-in-arms,” said
Dappa.

“There is no difference to
me,
” said Vrej
Esphahnian, moderately annoyed. “Why should the bonds holding a business partnership together
be inferior to those joining brothers-in-arms? For me the venture does not end here—it only
begins.”

Jack laughed. “A great adventure to other men is a routine thing for an
Armenian, it seems.”

A different top-knot appeared at the gunwale, and a different Samurai came aboard
and exchanged bows with van Hoek. It was obvious from the way he looked around that he had never
seen a ship of any size before, to say nothing of sailors with red hair, blue eyes, or black skin.
But he kept his composure and carried on with the next phase of the protocol: van Hoek presented him
with a single egg of
wootz,
which had been cleverly boxed and wrapped,
with great ceremony, by an ancient Japanese lady in Manila. The Samurai made as great a ceremony of
unwrapping it, then handed it off to
one of his archers, who had to scamper up
the ladder to get it.

Van Hoek gave the visitor a tour of
Minerva
’s
hold, where many more eggs of
wootz,
and diverse other goods besides,
were waiting for inspection. Meanwhile Enoch Root caused his black chest to be lowered into the
boat. Then he descended the ladder. In a few minutes he was followed by the Samurai, who’d
finished his inspection belowdecks. The Japanese boat cast off its lines, raised a sail, and quickly
made its way into a pier, where it was tied up next to a much larger vessel, a sort of cargo-barge
that looked as if it might be used for ferrying goods between shore and ship. Under the watchful
spyglasses of various men on
Minerva,
everyone disembarked onto the
pier. Enoch was escorted to a sort of warehouse on the shore.

Half an hour later the alchemist came out by himself and boarded the boat.
Immediately it shoved off and began rowing towards
Minerva
. At the same
time a few score boat-men swarmed over the barge and cast off its mooring-lines, and began laboring
with oars and push-poles to move it away from shore.

Enoch Root ascended the pilot’s ladder like a young man, though when his face
appeared above the rail he had a grave look about him. To van Hoek he said, “I performed every
test I know of. More tests than the assayers in New Spain will likely do. I submit to you that the
stuff is as pure as any from the mines of Europe.” To Jack the only thing he said was,
“It is a very strange country.”

“How strange?” Jack asked.

Enoch shook his head and answered “Enough to make me understand how strange
Christendom is.” Then he retired to his cabin.

Minerva
’s sailors pulled his belongings up on
ropes: first his chest of alchemical whatnot, and second a box, still partly covered in gaudy
wrapping paper. Dappa caught this as it was hoisted over the rail and set it down on a table that
they’d brought up from van Hoek’s wardroom. Nestled in crumpled paper inside the box was
an egg of fired clay: a flask, stoppered at one end by a wooden bung. Wax had been dribbled over
this to seal it, but Enoch Root had already violated the seal so that he could perform his tests.
Dappa thrust his hands down into the nest of paper and cupped the egg in his hands and raised it up
into cold blue sunlight. Van Hoek drew out his dagger and used its tip to worry the bung loose. When
this had been removed, Dappa tipped the flask. Fluid sloshed inside with momentum so potent that it
nearly pulled him off his feet. A bead of liquid silver leapt out into the sun and built speed until
it struck the tabletop with the impact of a hammer. Then it exploded in a myriad gleaming balls that
glided across the table and cascaded over its
edge like a waterfall and
spattered heavily on
Minerva
’s deck. The quicksilver probed
downhill, seeking gaps between planks, spattering down into the gundeck and making an argent rain
among the men who stood tense by their guns. A murmur and then a thrill ran through the ship. It was
to every man aboard as if
Minerva
had received a second christening,
with quicksilver instead of Champagne, and that she was now re-consecrated to a new mission and
purpose.

It was high noon before the barge was alongside
Minerva
and the transfer of cargo could begin. This was an awkward way to do it, but the Japanese officials
would on no account suffer
Minerva
to approach shore. With larger cargo
it would have been well nigh impossible. But
Minerva
was laden with
wootz,
silk, and pepper, and the barge carried nothing but flasks of
quicksilver, and bales of straw for packing it. Any of these items could be passed or thrown from
hand to hand, and once they had got it organized the transfer went on at a terrific pace—a
hundred men, sweating and breathing hard, could transfer tons of cargo in a minute. Steel, spice,
and silk streamed out of
Minerva
’s holds and were replaced by
quicksilver. The outgoing and incoming flows grazed each other at one place on the upperdeck, where
Monsieur Arlanc and Vrej Esphahnian sat at the table facing each other, each armed with a stockpile
of quills, one tallying the quicksilver and the other tallying other goods. Every so often they
would call out figures to each other, just making sure that the flows were balanced, so that
Minerva
would not rise too high or sink too low in the water.

Enoch Root emerged, rubbing sleep from his eyes, when the transfer was perhaps
two-thirds complete. He flicked his eyes at Jack, and then van Hoek, and then returned to his
cabin.

Twenty seconds later Jack and van Hoek were in there with him.

“I was trying to sleep but that lanthorn kept me awake,” Enoch said,
nodding at an oil lamp that was suspended from the ceiling of his cabin on a chain. It was swinging
back and forth dramatically even though the ship was only rocking slightly from side to side.

“Why don’t you take it down?” Jack asked.

“Because I think it is trying to tell me something,” Enoch said. He then
turned his gaze on van Hoek. “You told me, once, that every harbor, depending on its size, has
a characteristic wave. You said that even if you were lying in your cabin with the curtains drawn
you could tell the difference between Batavia and Cavite simply by the period of the
waves.”

“It’s true,” van Hoek said. “Any captain can tell you
stories of
ships that were proven seaworthy, but that were cast away entering an
unfamiliar harbor, because the period of that harbor’s waves happened to match the natural
frequency of the ship’s hull.”

“Every ship, depending on how it is ballasted and laden, rocks in a particular
rhythm—just as this lantern swings at a fixed rate,” said Enoch, explaining it for Jack.
“If waves strike that ship in the same rhythm, then she soon begins moving so violently that
she overturns and is cast away.”

“Just as a lute-string that is plucked makes its partner, which is tuned to
the same note, vibrate in natural sympathy,” said van Hoek. “Go on, Enoch.”

“When we sailed into this harbor early this morning, my lanthorn suddenly
began to swing so violently that it was bashing against the ceiling and spilling oil about the
cabin,” Enoch said. “And so I took it down and adjusted the chain to a different length,
as you see it now.” Enoch now lifted the lanthorn’s chain from its hook in the
ceiling-beam, and began to feel his way along, link by link, until he came to one that was worn
smooth. “This is how it was when we entered the harbor,” he said, and then re-hung the
lanthorn so that it dangled a few inches lower than before. He pulled it away to the side and then
let it go, and it began swinging back and forth in the center of the cabin. “So it follows
that the frequency we observe now—swing, swing, swing—is tuned to the natural period of
this harbor’s waves.”

“With all due respect to you and your friends of the Royal Society,” van
Hoek said, “can this demonstration not wait until we are out in the middle of the Sea of
Japan?”

“It cannot,” Enoch said calmly, “because we will never reach the
Sea of Japan. This is a death-trap.”

Van Hoek was about to spring to his feet, but Enoch restrained him with a hand on
the shoulder, and glanced out his cabin window lest they be observed by some Japanese.
“Hold,” he said, “it is a subtle trap and subtle we must be to escape it. Jack, on
my bed there is a flask.”

Jack, who was too tall to stand upright in the cabin, crab-walked sideways a step or
two, and found one of the quicksilver-flasks nestled among Enoch’s bed-clothes.

“Hold it out at arm’s length,” Enoch said.

Jack did so, though it took the strength of both arms. The quicksilver inside the
flask swirled about as he moved it, but then it settled. His hands became still. Then the liquid
metal began sloshing back and forth, forcing his hands to move left, right, left, right, no
matter how hard he tried to hold it still.

“Mark the lantern,” said Enoch. Attention shifted from the sloshing
flask to the swinging light.

Van Hoek saw it first. “They move at the same period.”

“Which is the same as what?” Enoch asked, like a schoolmaster leading
his pupils forward onto new ground.

“The natural rhythm of the waves at the entrance to this harbor,” Jack
said.

“I have tried three flasks in this way, and all of them slosh at the same
frequency,” Enoch said. “I submit to you that they have been tuned, as carefully as the
pipes in a cathedral-organ. When this ship is fully loaded, and we try to sail out the
harbor’s mouth—”

“We will hit those waves…ten tons of quicksilver will began to heave
back and forth…we will be torn apart,” van Hoek said.

“It is a simple matter to remedy,” Enoch said. “All we need is to
go down and open the flasks and fill each one up so that they cannot slosh. But we must not let the
Japanese know that we have figured out their plan, or else they will swarm on us. The warehouse on
shore has an oily smell. I believe that there are many archers concealed in the woods, waiting with
fire-arrows.”

T
HEY FINISHED THE TRANSFER
OF
goods with plenty of daylight left. The Samurai in charge of the barge bid them
farewell with a perfunctory bow and then turned his attention to getting his hoard of exotic goods
in to shore. Van Hoek ordered preparations made for sailing, but they were of a highly elaborate
nature, and took much longer than they might have. Belowdecks he had pulled one man off of each gun
crew and put as many as he could muster to work unstoppering the quicksilver-flasks and decanting
the mercury from one to the next, until each one was brim-full. Aboard ship there was never a
shortage of pitch and black stuff used for caulking seams, and so each one of the flasks was sealed
shut in that way. Half an hour before sunset van Hoek ordered the anchors weighed, a procedure that
lasted until twilight had fallen over the harbor.

From that point onwards it was mad, black toil for many hours. There was a full moon
(they’d planned it that way long in advance, so that they’d have better light during the
tricky parts of the journey) and it shone very bright in the cold sky. As they traversed the harbor
entrance, all of the ship’s officers gathered in Enoch’s cabin to watch the one
quicksilver flask that had not been changed; it seemed to come alive at a certain point, when the
rhythmic waves struck the hull, and thrashed around as if some djinn were trapped inside trying to
fight its way out.

This was the point when the Japanese must have realized that their trap had been
foiled, and out they came in longboats that were all ablaze with many points of fire from burning
arrows. But van Hoek was ready. Abovedecks, the riggers had quietly readied all the courses of sail
that
Minerva
had to offer, and they spread it all before the wind as
soon as they heard the war-drums booming from the shore. Belowdecks, every cannon had been loaded
with grape-shot. The Japanese boats could not hope to match
Minerva
’s speed once she got under way, and the few that came close were driven back
by her cannons. All of about half a dozen burning arrows lodged in her teak-wood and were quickly
snuffed out by officers with buckets of sand and water. They were able to get well clear of the
shore, and of their pursuers, by the moon’s light.

When the sun rose over Japan the next morning, a soldier’s wind came up out of
the west—which meant it blew perpendicular to their southerly heading, and was therefore so
easy to manage that even soldiers could have trimmed the sails. Nevertheless van Hoek kept her speed
low at first, because he was concerned that the flasks would shift about in their straw packing as
they entered into heavier seas. As
Minerva
worked through various types
of waves, van Hoek prowled around her decks sensing the movements of the cargo like a clairvoyant,
and frequently communing with the spirit of Jan Vroom (who had died of malaria a year ago). His
verdict, of course, was that they’d done a miserable job of packing the flasks, and that it
would all have to be re-done when they got to Manila, but that, given the hazards of pirates and
typhoons, they had no choice but to raise more sail anyway. So that is what they did.

They added one or two more knots to their speed thereby, and after three days, ran
the Straits of Tsushima: a procedure that might have been devised by some fiendish engineer
specifically to drive van Hoek mad with anxiety, as it involved running down a complex and
current-ridden, yet poorly charted chute hemmed in on one side by pirate-islands of Korea and on the
other by a country (Japan) where it was death for a foreigner to set foot. The paintings of Gabriel
Goto’s father were of very little use because that
ronin
had been
piloting a boat of much shallower draft than
Minerva
and invariably
chose to hug shorelines and squirt through gaps between islands where
Minerva
could not go.