The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (55 page)

Now, Bob, who’d been observing Jack carefully for many years, had observed that when these moments arrived, Jack was almost invariably possessed by something that Bob had heard about in Church called the Imp of the Perverse. Bob was convinced that the Imp of the Perverse rode invisibly on Jack’s shoulder whispering
bad ideas into his ear, and that the only counterbalance was Bob himself, standing alongside, counseling good sense, prudence, caution, and other Puritan virtues.
^*

But Bob was in England.

“Might as well get this over with, then,” Jack muttered, and gave his Turkish steed some vigorous heel-digs, and galloped forward. One of the Turks was just raising his saber to strike down the last of the tent-wearing women. And he would’ve done just that, except that this woman suddenly darted away (as much as a person in such a garment could dart), forcing a postponement of the attack. He shuffled forward—directly into the path of Jack and Jack’s horse. They simply rode the Turk down. It was clear that the horse was well-trained in this maneuver—Jack made a mental note to treat the animal kindly.

Then with one hand Jack gave a stiff tug on a rein while unslinging his musket from the opposite shoulder. The horse wheeled around, giving Jack a view of the ground he’d just ridden over. One of the Turks was flattened into the ground, crushed in two or three places under the horse’s hooves, and the other was actually striding towards Jack and sort of wiggling his saber in the way of a man limbering up his wrist for a display of swordsmanship. Not wanting to see any such thing, Jack aimed his musket carefully at this Turk and pulled the trigger. The Turk stared calmly into Jack’s eyes, up the barrel of the weapon. He had brown hair and green eyes and a bushy mustache flecked with gold, all of which vanished in a smoky flash when the powder in the pan ignited. But the musket did not kick. He heard the
foosh
of the flash in the pan, but not the
boom
of the barrel.

This was known as a hang fire. The fire in the pan had not traveled into the barrel—perhaps the touch-hole had become blocked by a bit of dirt. Nonetheless, Jack kept the weapon aimed in the general direction of the Turk (which involved some guesswork because the Turk was hidden behind the cloud of smoke from the pan). There might still be a slow fire working its way through the touch-hole—the musket was likely to fire, without warning, at any point during the next couple of minutes.

By the time Jack could see again, the Turk had grabbed the horse’s bridle with one hand and raised the other to strike. Jack, peering out sidelong through burning eyes, wheeled his musket about to make some kind of barrier between him and the bloody
saber and felt a mighty shock when the two weapons connected, instantly followed by a hot blast that knocked his hands apart and spat metal into his face. The horse reared up. Under other circumstances, Jack might’ve been ready for this. As it was, blind, shocked, and burnt, he performed a reverse-somersault down the animal’s muscular ass, plunged to the ground, and then rolled away blindly, terrified that the hind hooves might come down on top of him.

At no time during these acrobatics did Jack stop holding the stock of the musket very firmly with his right hand. He staggered up, realized his eyes were clenched shut, buried his face in the crook of his left arm, and tried to wipe away the heat and pain. The raw feel of his sleeve against his eyelids told him that he had been burnt, but not badly. He took the arm away and opened his eyes, then spun around like a drunk, trying to bring the enemy in view. He raised his musket again, to defend himself from any more sword-blows. But it moved far too easily. The weapon had been broken in half only a few inches past the flintlock—a yard of barrel was simply gone.

The female in the tent had already stepped forward and seized the horse’s reins and was now speaking to it in soothing tones. Jack couldn’t see the second Turk at all, which panicked him for a moment, until he finally saw him on the ground, arms wrapped around his face, rolling from side to side and making muffled cries. That much was good, but the situation was, in general, not satisfactory: Jack had lost his weapon to some sort of accident, and his mount to some Saracen female, and had not acquired any loot yet.

He ran forward to seize the horse’s reins, but a glitter on the ground caught his eye: the Turk’s sword. Jack snatched it up, then shouldered the woman out of the way, mounted the horse again, and got it turned around to where he could keep a good eye on matters. Where was the damned ostrich? Over there—cornered. Jack rode over to it, cutting the air a few times to learn the balance of the saber. Striking heads off, from the back of a moving horse, was normally a job for highly trained specialists, but only because the neck of a man was a small target. Decapitating an ostrich, which consisted almost entirely of neck, was almost too easy to be satisfying. Jack did the deed with one swift backhand slash. The head fell into the dirt and lay there, eyes open, making swallowing motions. The rest of the ostrich fell down, then climbed up and began to stalk around the chamber with blood spraying out of its severed neck. It fell down frequently. Jack did not especially want to get blood sprayed on him and so he guided the horse away from
the bird—but the bird changed direction and came after him! Jack rode the other way and the ostrich once again changed tack and plotted an intercept course.

The woman was laughing at him. Jack glared at her. She stifled herself. Then a voice came out of that tent, saying something in a barbarian tongue. Jack circumvented another blind ostrich-charge, moving the horse around smartly.

“Sir knight, I know none of the tongues of Christendom, save French, English, Qwghlmian, and a dash of Hungarian.”

I
T WAS THE FIRST TIME
that Jack Shaftoe had been called “sir” or mistaken for a knight. He glared meanly at the ostrich, which was staggering around in circles and losing the strength to stand. The woman had meanwhile switched into yet another strange language. Jack interrupted her: “My Qwghlmian is rusty,” he announced. “Wandered up to Gttr Mnhrbgh once when I was a boy, as we’d heard a rumor that a Spanish Treasure-Galleon had been wrecked, and pieces of eight scattered up and down the shore, as thick as mussels. But all we found was a few drunken Frenchmen, stealing the chickens and burning the houses.”

He was prepared to relate many more dramatic details, but at this point he faltered because there’d been a violent shifting-around of the contents of the tent, exposing, up towards its summit, a complex arrangement of silk handkerchiefs: one tied over the bridge of the nose, hiding everything below, and another tied round the forehead, hiding everything above. Between them, a slit through which a pair of eyes was looking up at him. They were blue eyes. “You are an Englishman!” she exclaimed.

Jack noted that this one was not preceded by a “Sir knight.” To begin with, Englishmen were not accorded the respect given naturally to the men of great countries, such as France or Poland-Lithuania. Among Englishmen, Jack’s way of speaking, of course, marked him out as No Gentleman. But even if he spoke like an Archbishop, from the nature of the yarn he’d just been relating to her, concerning his scavenging-trip to Qwghlm, it was now obvious that he
had been
at some point an actual Vagabond. Damn it! Not for the first time, Jack imagined cutting his own tongue out. His tongue was admired by that small fraction of mankind who, owing to some want of dignity or wit, were willing to let it be known that they admired any part of Jack Shaftoe. And yet if he had merely held it back, reined it in, this blue-eyed woman might still be addressing him as Sir Knight.

That part of Jack Shaftoe that, up until this point in his life, had
kept him alive, counseled him to pull sharply on one rein or the other, wheel the horse around, and gallop away from Trouble here. He looked down at his hands, holding those reins, and noted that they failed to move—evidently, the part of Jack that sought a merry and short life was once again holding sway.

Puritans came frequently to Vagabond-camps bearing the information that at the time of the creation of the Universe—thousands of years ago!—certain of those present had been predestined by God to experience salvation. The rest of them were doomed to spend eternity burning in hellfire. This intelligence was called, by the Puritans, the Good News. For days, after the Puritans had been chased away, any Vagabond boy who farted would claim that the event had been foreordained by the Almighty, and enrolled in a cœlestial Book, at the dawn of time. All in good fun. But now here Jack Shaftoe sat astride a Turkish charger, willing his hands to pull one rein or the other, willing his boot-heels to dig into the sides of the beast, so that it would carry him away from this woman, but nothing happened. It must have been the Good News at work.

The blue eyes were downcast. “I thought you were a Knight at first,” she said.

“What, in these rags?”

“But the horse is magnificent, and it blocks my view somewhat,” Trouble said. “The way you fought those Janissaries—like a Galahad.”

“Galahad—he’s the one who never got laid?” Again with the tongue. Again the sense that his movements were predestined, that his body was a locked carriage running out of control down a hill, directly towards the front entrance of Hell.

“That is one of the few things that
I
have in common with that legendary Knight.”

“No!”

“I was
gozde,
which means that the Sultan had taken note of me; but before I was made
ikbal
which means bedded, he gave me to the Grand Vizier.”

“Now I am not a learned fellow,” said Jack Shaftoe, “but from what little I know of the habits of Turkish Viziers, it is not usual for them to keep beautiful, saucy young blonde slaves about their camps—
as virgins.
”

“Not forever. But there is something to be said for saving a few virgins up to celebrate a special occasion—such as the sacking of Vienna.”

“But wouldn’t there be plenty of virgins to be rustled in Vienna?”

“From the tales told by the secret agents that the Wazir sent into the city, he feared that there would be none at all.”

Jack was inclined to be suspicious. But it was no less plausible for the Vizier, or the Wazir as Blue Eyes called him, to have English virgins than it was for him to have ostriches, giant bejeweled cats, and potted fruit-trees. “These soldiers haven’t gotten to you?” asked Jack. He waved the saber around at the dead Turks, inadvertently flicking bullets of blood from the tip.

“They are Janissaries.”

“I’ve heard of ’em,” Jack said. “At one point I considered going to Constantinople, or whatever they’re calling it now, and joining ’em.”

“But what about their Oath of Celibacy?”

“Oh, that makes no difference to me, Blue Eyes—look.” He was struggling with his codpiece.

“A Turk would already be finished,” the woman said, patiently observing. “They have, in the front of their trousers, a sort of sallyport, to expedite pissing and raping.”

“I’m no Turk,” he said, finally rising up in the stirrups to afford her a clear view.

“Is it supposed to look like that?”

“Oh, you’re a sly one.”

“What happened?”

“A certain barber-surgeon in Dunkirk put out the word that he had learnt a cure for the French Pox from a traveling alchemist. My mates and I—we had just got back from Jamaica—went there one night—”

“You had the French Pox?”

“I only wanted a beard trim,” Jack said. “My mate Tom Flinch had a bad finger that needed removal. It had bent the wrong way during a naval engagement with French privateers, and begun to smell so badly that no one would sit near him, and he had to take his meals abovedecks. That was why we went, and that was why we were drunk.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We had to get Tom drunk so he’d make less of a fuss when the finger went flying across the barber-shop. The rules of etiquette stated that we must therefore be as drunk as he.”

“Pray continue.”

“But when we learned that this Barber could also cure the French Pox, why, codpieces were flying around the place like cannonballs.”

“So you did have the said Pox.”

“So this barber, whose eyes had gotten as big as doubloons, stoked up his brazier and began to heat the irons. While he was
performing the amputation of Tom Flinch’s digit, the irons were waxing red- and then yellow-hot. Meantimes his young apprentice was mixing up a poultice of herbs, as dictated by the alchemist. Well, to make a long story short, I was the last of the group to have the afflicted member cauterized. My mates were all lying in a heap on the floor, holding poultices over their cocks and screaming, having completed the treatment. The barber and his apprentice tied me into the chair with a large number of stout lines and straps, and jammed a rag into my mouth—”

“They robbed you!?”

“No, no, missy, this was all part of the treatment. Now, the afflicted part of my member—the spot that needed cauterizing, you understand—was on the top, about halfway along. But my Trouser-Snake was all shrunk into m’self by this point, from fear. So the apprentice grasped the tip of my Johnson with a pair of tongs and stretched old One-Eyed Willie out with one hand—holding a candle with the other so that the site of the disease was plainly visible. Then the barber rummaged in his brazier and chose just the right sort of iron—methinks they were all the same, but he wanted to put on a great show of discretion, to justify his price. Just as the barber was lowering the glowing iron into position, what should happen but the tax-man and his deputies smashed down both front and back door at the same instant. ’Twas a raid. Barber dropped the iron.”

“ ’Tis very sad—a strapping fellow such as you—strong and shapely—buttocks like the shell-halves of an English walnut—a fine set of calves—handsome, after a fashion—never to have children.”

“Oh, the barber was too late—I already have two little boys—that’s why I’m chasing ostriches and killing Janissaries—got a family to support. And as I still have the French Pox, there’s only a few years left before I go crazy and die. So now’s the time for building up a handsome legacy.”