The Confusion

The Surat-Broach Road, Hindoostan
A MONTH LATER (OCTOBER 1693)

For the works of the Egyptian sorcerers, though not so great as those of Moses, yet were great miracles.

–HOBBES,

Leviathan

“LORD HELP ME,” said Jack, “I have begun thinking like an Alchemist.” He snapped an aloe-branch in half and dabbed its weeping stump against a crusted black patch on his forearm. He and certain others of the Cabal were reclining in the shade of some outlandish tree on the coastal plain north of Surat. Strung out along the road nearby was a caravan of bullocks and camels.

“Half of Diu believes you are one, now,” said Otto van Hoek, squinting west across the fiery silver horizon of the Gulf of Cambaye. Diu lay safely on the opposite side of it. Van Hoek had been busy unwinding a long, stinking strip of linen from his left hand, but the pain of forcing out these words through his roasted voice-box forced him to stop for a few moments and prosecute a fit of coughing and nose-wiping.

“If we had stayed any longer the Inquisition would have come for us,” said Monsieur Arlanc in a similarly hoarse and burnt voice.

“Yes-if for no other reason than the stench,” put in Vrej Esphahnian. Of all of them, he had taken the most precautions-viz. wearing leather gloves that could be shaken off when his hands burst into flame spontaneously. So he was in a better state than the others.

“It is well that we had Mr. Foot with us,” said Surendranath, “to bamboozle the Inquisitors into thinking that we pursued some sacred errand!” Surendranath had not spent all that much time among Christians, and his incredulous glee struck them all as just a bit unseemly.

“I’ll take a share of the credit for that,” said Padraig Tallow, who had lost his dominant eye, and all the hair on one side of his head. “For ’twas I who supplied Mr. Foot with all of his churchly clap-trap; he only spoke lines that I wrote.”

“No one denies it,” said Surendranath, “but even you must admit that the inexhaustible fount and ever-bubbling wellspring of nonsense, gibberish, and fraud was Ali Zaybak!”

“I cede the point gladly,” said Padraig, and both men turned to see if Jack would respond to their baiting. But Jack had been distracted by an odor foul enough to register even on his raspy and inflamed olfactory. Van Hoek had got the bandage off his right hand. The tips of his three remaining fingers were swollen and weeping.

“I told you,” said Jack, “you should have used this stuff.” He gestured to the aloe-plant, or rather the stump of it, as Jack had just snapped off the last remaining branch. It was growing in a pot of damp dirt, which was carried on its own wee palanquin: a plank supported at each end by a boy. “The Portuguese brought it out of Africa,” Jack explained.

“Truly you are thinking like an Alchemist, then,” muttered van Hoek, staring morosely at his rotting digits. “Everyone knows that the only treatment for burns is butter. It is proof of how far gone you are in outlandish ways, that you would rather use some occult potion out of Africa!”

“When do you think you’ll amputate?” Jack inquired.

“This evening,” said van Hoek. “That way I shall have twenty-four hours to recuperate before the battle.” He looked to Surendranath for confirmation.

“If our objective were to make time, and to cross the Narmada by day, we could do it tomorrow,” said Surendranath. “But as our true purpose is to ‘fall behind schedule,’ and reach the crossing too late, and be trapped against the river by the fall of night, we may proceed at a leisurely pace. This evening’s camp would be a fine time and place to carry out a minor amputation. I shall make inquiries about getting you some syrup of poppies.”

“More chymistry!” van Hoek scoffed, and dipped his hand into a pot of ghee. But he did not object to Surendranath’s proposal. “I could have been a brewer,” he mused. “In fact, I was!”

VAN HOEK HAD SURRENDERED his brewing-coppers to Jack and gone down to the harbor of Diu to see about hiring a dhow or something like it. Jack, spending Surendranath’s capital, had set some local smiths to work beating the copper tuns into new shapes-shapes that Jack chalked out for them from his memories of Enoch Root’s strange works in the Harz Mountains. Surendranath had sent messengers north to the kingdom of Dispenser of Mayhem, along with money to buy the freedom of Vrej Esphahnian and Monsieur Arlanc. Then the Banyan, somewhat against his better instincts, had set about turning himself into a urine mogul.

Some simple deals struck with the caste of night-soil-collectors and chamber-pot-emptiers caused jugs, barrels, and hogsheads of piss to come trundling into van Hoek’s brewery-compound every morning. By and large these had been covered, to keep the stink down, but Jack insisted that the lids be taken off and the piss be allowed to stand open under the sun. Complaints from the neighbors-consisting largely of religious orders-had not been long in coming. And it was then that Mr. Foot had come into his own; for he’d been at work with needle and thread, converting his black Puritan get-up into a sort of Wizard’s robe. His line of patter consisted half of Alchemy-which Jack had dictated-and half of Popery, which Padraig Tallow could and did rattle off in his sleep.

What Jack knew of Alchemy-talk came partly from the mountebanks who would stand along the Pont-Neuf peddling bits of the Philosopher’s Stone; partly from Enoch Root; and partly from tales that he had been told, more recently, by Nyazi, who knew nothing of chymistry but was the last word on all matters to do with camels.

“Amon, or Amon-Ra, was the great god of the ancient peoples of al-Khem.* And just as al-Khem gave its name to Alchemy, so did the god Amon serve as namesake of a magickal substance well known to practitioners of that Art. For behold, when the Romans made al-Khem a part of their empire, they perceived in this Amon a manifestation of Jupiter, and dubbed him Jupiter-Ammon, and made idols depicting him as a mighty King with ram’s horns sprouting from his temples. To him they raised up a great temple at the Oasis of Siwa, which lies in the desert far to the west of Alexandria. As well as being a great caravanserai, long has that place been a center of mystickal powers and emanations; lo, an oracle of Amon was there from the time of the Pharaohs, and the Roman temple of Jupiter-Ammon was erected upon the same site. It was, and is, a very hotbed of Alchemy, and has become renowned for the production of a pungent salt, which is prepared from the dung of the thousands of camels that pass through the place. The secret of its preparation is known to but a few; but the Salt of Ammon, or sal ammoniac, is taken by the caravans to Alexandria and the other trading-centers of North Africa, whence it is distributed the world over by the infinitely various channels of Commerce. Thus have its extraordinary, and some would say magical, powers become known throughout the world. Now, if ignorant pagans could make so much out of what was literally a heap of shit, consider how much more Christians, who know the Bible, and who have access to the writings of Paracelsus, amp;c., might accomplish! What is present in camel shit, may also be found in the urine of humans, for Aristotle would say that both of these substances are of the same essential nature. Though Plato would observe that the latter is as much more refined and closer to the Ideal as human beings are compared to camels…”

All of this was, of course, a long-winded way of letting the neighbors know that Jack and company were about to stink the place up to a degree that no one who had not been near a mountain of fermenting camel shit could even imagine; but Mr. Foot delivered the terrible news at such numbing length and so laden down with homiletical baggage as to beat his auditors into submission before the essential point of what he was saying had even penetrated their minds.

As was ever true of any work that entailed the bending and beating of metal, the conversion of the tuns took longer than anticipated. What Jack was after was a single great round-bottomed wide-mouthed boiler, and a means to suspend it over a “bloody enormous” fire. This was simple enough. But at a later, critical stage of the operation he needed to clamp a sort of hat down over the maw of the kettle, and channel the vapors along a tube to another, smaller vessel where they could be bubbled through water. For the most practical of reasons, it was preferable that this latter vessel be made of glass. But it had proved difficult to get a glass container so large, and so they made do with copper. This explained what happened to Padraig; for against Jack’s express instructions, he had, while they were making a trial batch, lifted the lid to peer inside, and been greeted by a jet of white flame.

Around the time of this mishap, managerial acumen arrived in the person of Monsieur Arlanc, and, in Vrej Esphahnian, entrepreneurial legerdemain. Arlanc pointed out that it would be difficult to hire good people, or to maintain their reputation as proficient Alchemists, if the principals were forever torching off body parts, and making the Kathiawar Peninsula ring with screams of agony. Vrej, for his part, had proffered the observation that they would soon need to procure a large number of glass vessels anyway, and so it was high time to begin investigating the local market in such wares.

The results were none too encouraging. In Diu there was no Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers, as in London. Indeed, it seemed that glass-making was one of the few arts and crafts that Christians did better than anyone else. There had, according to Vrej, been many brilliant glassworkers in Damascus three hundred years ago, but then Tamerlane had sacked the place and carried them all off to Samarkand, and they had not been heard from since. There was no time just now to send a delegation to Samarkand and make inquiries. So they had to make do with what glass could be collected from the diverse Portuguese chapter-houses, factories, and fortifications around Diu. For the bubbling-vessel, Vrej procured a single windowpane about a hand-span on a side. Jack put his coppersmiths to work letting a hole into the side of the vessel, and van Hoek used his caulking acumen to seal the pane into place so that not too much water would leak out around the edges. All of which took a while. But it required upwards of a fortnight for a given bucket of piss to reach the point where it was ready to be used, and so the hurry was not great. And Arlanc had been kept busy for some while procuring charcoal from the wooded hills in the north. This had to be prepared by locals making countless small batches in countless tan-doors, then collected and gathered and shipped. Capital ran low. Vessels came across from Surat bearing news, or at least rumors, that this or that Banyan was readying a caravan and a puissant force of mercenaries to punch through the Maratha blockade along the Narmada; and each such message sent Surendranath into an ecstasy of rage, and caused him to run about the compound (weaving carefully between urine-receptacles) flinging his turban on the ground and then picking it up so that he could fling it down again, while wondering aloud to the gods why he had ever chosen to take up with all of these crazy ferangs. For a week, it seemed that all they had to show for their efforts was a sea of putrescent urine; a lot of copper, beaten to outlandish shapes and stuck together with solder and with tar; and a few patches of dirt where dusk seemed to linger even after black night had covered the rest of Hindoostan.

But then finally a cart-train came down out of the north laden with charcoal and with firewood, and Vrej Esphahnian unveiled a wooden crate containing a gross of glass bottles (smoky brown, striated, and bubbly, but more or less transparent), and they were ready to go. Jack had mentioned to them, and Padraig had demonstrated beyond all question, that the apparatus would destroy itself in a spitting storm of white fire shortly after they were finished using it; they had, in other words, one and only one chance.

At last one morning Jack and van Hoek and some local representatives of the chamber-pot-handling caste wrapped cloths around their mouths and noses and set about lugging the vast motley collection of kegs, urns, and pots of f?tid urine up to the great kettle and dumping them in. At the same time, the largest and hottest possible bonfire was kindled beneath. It took some time for the fire to take hold, for the piss had grown chilly sitting out overnight. But when it did, all fled the compound, and many fled the neighborhood. They would have fled screaming, if they’d had the power to draw breath. Not that they were any strangers to the stench of old piss, by this point; but what the kettle exhaled was of an altogether different order. The broad rim of that kettle might as well have been the maw of Jupiter-Ammon himself, striking mortals dead, not with thunderbolts from on high, but with burning exhalations drawn up from Hell. It made the air shiver as it came on, and made birds fold their wings and smack their little heads into the ground. Men could do nothing but hide their eyes in the crooks of their arms, plug their noses, and bump into one another until they found a way out. When they had escaped to a radius where it was possible to draw breath, they turned inwards and watched the kettle through sheets of burning tears. From time to time someone would draw in a deep breath and hold it while he sprinted back to the hell-mouth to shove a few more pieces of cord-wood into the fire.

After a while the stench dissipated, and not long after that, steam began to rise. Presently the kettle came to a galloping boil, and they found that they could approach. The Breath of Ammon had all been expelled. But this was not the last time they smelled it, for the kettle had not been capacious enough to hold all the urine they had collected, and much remained strewn about the compound in diverse small containers. As the level of the boiling brew fell, they dumped in more urine to top it off again, and each time they did, it let off another scream of Ammon-breath. This went on for much of the day; but finally the last chamber-pot had been emptied and tossed into the street. A few minutes later the stench of sal ammoniac abated for good. There followed an interlude of some hours during which the kettle merely boiled, and threw off a column of steam that rose high over Diu and drifted away into the blue sky over the sea. Jack, peering in over the kettle’s rim, saw it boiled down to a small fraction of its former volume, and glimpsed just beneath the foaming surface a churning mass of solid yellow-brown stuff. From time to time he reached into it with a paddle, checking its consistency as he had seen Enoch Root do. When it became difficult to stir, he called for charcoal. The mass was stained with black as sacks of the stuff, ground up to the consistency of meal, were dumped in. Jack stirred until the mix was gray, and so dry and thick that the paddle nearly became lodged in it. Moisture was still condensing on his brow, but he knew all the water was nearly gone now, and they must work quickly. The others knew as much as Jack did, having been in on the trial batch that had taken Padraig’s eye. So when Jack jumped back from the kettle’s rim they did not need to be told what to do: pulling on lines and pushing with sticks, they maneuvered over the kettle’s rim an upside-down funnel of the same diameter, and set it down so that the two were joined in an open-mouth kiss, and packed oakum and dribbled tar around the junction so that no fume could escape. All of the vapors emanating from the hot gray mass in the bottom of the kettle were now channeled up into the copper dunce-cap, which had but one outlet: a copper chimney that bent round to the side and developed into a snergly tube, terminated by a U-bend that led into the bottom of the smaller vessel-the bubbler-with the glass port-hole in its side. This was filled with water, as anyone who looked at the window could see. It was two fathoms above the ground, and they had erected a scaffold and a platform of bamboo so that they could work there.

When Jack was satisfied with the progress of the caulking and sealing of the great dunce-cap, he ascended the platform-a tinker’s shop and an apothecary-store of ladles, funnels, bottles, and terra-cotta vessels of clove-oil-and was pleased to observe a slight rise in the water-level, followed by a blurp and a collapse as some residual steam forced its way through the water-trap in the U-bend. This happened several more times in the next few minutes as the very last of the moisture was exhaled from the humid cake in the kettle, but then it stopped. There was then an interlude, which grew awkward the longer it went on; but Jack bid them keep stoking the fire and have faith. He was viewing the water level with respect to a wee bubble trapped in the glass pane, and for a while it did not move at all. But then it rose up distinctly, and a moment later a little belch of vapor shimmered up through the water and broke out the top. “It begins!” he announced.

Contrary to claims lately issued by Mr. Foot to the good people of Diu, Jack did not have the power to command the wheeling of the heavens. It was wholly fortuitous that the sun went down a few minutes later. The window in the side of the bubbler gleamed in the light of the sunset, as shiny objects were wont to do. But after the sun had gone down it continued to glow for a length of time that was odd, then remarkable, and, finally, unnatural. For it only got brighter as the night grew darker. Had it not been square, it might have been mistaken for a full moon. It grew so bright that if Jack stared at it full-on he became dazzled, and then could see nothing else. He assigned to Monsieur Arlanc the duty of monitoring the level of the water and adding more as needed to keep it from boiling dry; which had been the error that had led to Padraig’s injury. Jack then turned his back on the window and let his eyes adjust. From the platform, he saw, as if he were an actor on a stage, a lake of faces, all turned his way, many with mouths open in wonder, all lit up by the blue-green radiance of the kaltes Feuer, the cold fire, of Phosphorus: light-bearer. They were all out of doors, of course, and the cold fire confined to a small vessel of beaten copper; but that was not how it seemed. It seemed that these people were all walled up inside some black dungeon, which had only a single square window, high up in the wall, through which light shone in from another world.

“This will all be smoking ruins by break of day,” he announced, “let us gather what we may of the kaltes Feuer and preserve it from the air, and ourselves from fiery death!”

They went about that in two ways. First, someone would from time to time dip a ladle into the top of the bubbler and scoop out portions of the water, and along with it, flecks and flakes of cold fire that swirled through it like sparks above a campfire. This they decanted through funnels into the bottles that Vrej had procured. The glowing bottles were handed down to others on the ground, who stopped them with rags to prevent air from getting in. These were then placed into a tray of simmering water that was going over a bed of coals. Gradually, over a period of hours, the level of water within these bottles declined as it escaped through the rag stoppers. But the amount of light escaping from them did not diminish, for the waxy phosphorus was trapped inside, and tended to cling to the walls, so that each bottle over time acquired a blotchy lining of weird light. When these bottles were nearly dry, they were plucked out and plunged neck-first into a tar-pot, to seal them against infiltration of air.

Second, they dumped ladles of the stuff into clay pots each of which contained a small amount of clove oil. The water fell through the oil and found the bottom of the pot, shedding some of its burden of phosphorus along the way. These pots were then subjected to a similar process of gentle heating, so that the water trapped beneath the oil was driven out as steam. When these pots stopped blurping and steaming, it meant that all the water was gone, and nothing was left but phosphorus suspended in oil. The oil coated the tiny particules of phosphorus and prevented air from touching them, which rendered the stuff safe.

This anyway was the general plan of action. For the most part it actually went this way; but what made it interesting were the mishaps. Every splash and spill remained visible as a pool, burst, or dribbling trail of cold fire. Jack got some splashed on a forearm and did not notice it until he went and stood by the bottle-simmering place for a few minutes; the warmth shining from the bed of coals dried the damp place on his arm, leaving a fine layer of phosphorus that burst into unquenchable flame. Many had similar stories. Presently most of them were naked, having frantically stripped off clothing when it was pointed out to them by excited spectators that they were glowing. Ladles were spilled on the scaffolding by burnt and nervous hands, obliging Monsieur Arlanc to stand his ground with more than human courage as he implored someone to come up and wash away the spill with buckets of fresh water before it dried out. The caulking around the windowpane weeped, then seeped, then began to dribble a steady stream of cold fire. They made shift to catch what they could of this, and confine it to bottles or oil-pots; but matters deteriorated as more and more of the scaffold, the ground beneath it, and the men working on it became tinged with the fire, which could have only one consequence when it dried. Finally Jack ordered Monsieur Arlanc to abandon ship. The Huguenot vaulted down with spryness odd in a man of his age, rending his garments even as he hit the ground; men converged on him with buckets of sea-water and sluiced him off until he was dark. Then all ran away, for the leak around the windowpane had opened wide, and the fire was raining down in a blinding cataract. The water all came out. Air found its way in through the empty bubbler to the chimney, which had become thickly lined with condensed phosphorus. White fire shrieked out of it. The sun rose. What a moment ago had been glowing pools of spilled fire on the black velvet ground, were revealed as damp patches on khaki dirt. The bubbler ripped loose, hurtled away, and impacted on the roof of a monastery half a mile downrange. The chimney and dunce-cap shot into the air, spiraling and pin-wheeling through the night sky as if the Big Dipper had scooped up a load of the sun’s own fire. It landed somewhere out to sea. Left in the vicinity of the scaffold was a metropolis of small sputtering conflagrations that erupted here and there without warning over the next several hours. Fortunately they had had the wisdom to establish the double-boilers for the bottles and the clove-oil pots at a respectful distance. So they abandoned the center and toiled at the periphery until daybreak. This was not without some dangers of its own; sometimes a bottle would crack from the heat, and then some intrepid person would have to pluck it out with tongs and fling it away, lest in burning and exploding it would detonate the others. This led to the burning-down of the house where they had all been dwelling. In other circumstances, the loss of their domicile would have been rated a grave setback; as it was, they knew they were going to be kicked out of town anyway. A formation of Portuguese pikemen came for them at daybreak. Working amid the smoldering ruins of what had, a month earlier, been a perfectly respectable brewery, Jack and the others had already loaded the bottles (packed very carefully in straw) and the pots of oil into crates, and the crates onto those wagons that remained unburnt, and harnessed these to the few domesticated beasts that had not run away or simply dropped dead of terror during the night-time. They were escorted, not to say pursued, by the pikemen down to the quay where they boarded their hired boat with the phosphorus and what few possessions they still had. Winds favored them; pirates, who had witnessed strange apparitions in the night sky above Diu, avoided them; and a day and half a later they were in Surat, taking up their position near the head of a great armed trade-caravan, and beginning the long march north and east to Shahjahanabad.

“YOU WILL BE AMUSED to know that where I come from, swords are straight,” Jack said. “Some are broader, and indeed, being a plain-spoken people, we call those broadswords. Some are of intermediate size, as rapiers, others whisker-thin, as the small-swords that are lately in vogue. Oh, admittedly one sees a few blades with a bit of a curve to them, as in your cutlass or saber. But compared to these, they’re all straight as a line, as are the style and tactics of their usage. Compared to which…” Jack extended a hand towards a Mobb of warriors that they had picked up in Surat. There were Yavanas-which was to say, Muslims-who had come across the water from the lands to the west, or down out of Afghanistan, Balochistan, or this or that Khanate. And there were Hindoos of diverse martial castes who for whatever reason had elected to throw in their lot with the Moguls. But even within the smallest discernible sub-sub-subtribe each warrior had a weapon-or at least, a dangerous-looking object-completely different from the next bloke’s.

Among the personal effects of the Doctor, Jack had once seen books, filled not with letters but with depictions of curves. These he had leafed through in times of boredom; for though he could not read, he could stare at a strange curve as well as any other man. Eliza had sat next to him and pronounced their names: the Limacon of Pascal, the Kampyle of Eudoxus, the Conchoid of de Sluze, the Quadratrix of Hippias, the Epitrochoid, Tractrix, and the Cassinian Ovals. At the onset of the recitation Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of curves. Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true miracle was that poets, or writers, or whoever it was that was in charge of devising new words, could keep pace with those hectic geometers, and slap names on all the whorls and snarls in the pages of the Doctor’s geometry-books. Now, though, he understood that geometers and word-wrights alike were nothing more than degraded and by-passed off-shoots of the South Asian weapons industry. There was not a straight blade in all of Hindoostan. Some weapons had grips at one end and were sharpened elsewhere; these might be classed as swords. Others consisted mostly of handle, with a dangerous bit at one end; these Jack conceived of as axes or spears, depending on whether they looked like they were meant to be swung, or shoved. Still others had strings, and seemed capable of projecting arrows. Jack put these down as bows. But of the sword-like ones, some were bent all the way round to form hooks; some curved first one way, then thought better of it and veered back the other; some had a different curve on either edge, so that they became broad as shovels in parts; some quivered back and forth like wriggling snakes; some forked, or spun off hooks, beaks, barbs, lobes, prongs, or even spirals. There were swords shaped like feathers, horseshoes, goat-horns, estuaries, penises, fish-hooks, eyebrows, hair-combs, Signs of the Zodiac, half-moons, elm-leaves, dinner-forks, Persian slippers, baker’s paddles, pelican’s beaks, dog’s legs, and Corinthian columns. This did not take into account the truly outlandish contraptions that seemed to have been made by piling two or more such weapons atop each other, heating, and beating. Of long-handled swinging-weapons (axes, maces, hammers, halberds, and weaponized farm-implements, viz. war-sickles, combat-flails, assault-shovels, and tactical adzes) there was a similar variety. Most troublesome to Jack’s mind, for some reason, were the bows which instead of the good old crescent of English yew, here seemed to’ve been made from the legs of giant spiders; they were black, sinewy, glossy, spindly things that curved this way and that, and were sometimes longer on one end than the other, so that Jack could not even make out which end was up; which part was the handle; or which side was supposed to face the enemy. For each of these weapon-styles, he knew, there must be a six-thousand-year-old martial art with its own set of unfathomable rites, lingo, exercises, and secrets that could only be mastered through a lifetime of miserable study.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me it is all quite mundane compared to the weaponry of our adversaries,” Jack muttered.

“In truth you have waxed so peevish that I have avoided that, and all other topics of conversation, these last few hours,” said Surendranath.

The Banyan was in his palanquin. Jack rode a horse. This helped explain the peevishness, for the former reclined in the shade of a roof while the latter was protected only by a turban.

“Verily this must be the kingdom of Gordy himself,” said Jack.

“Who or what is Gordy?”

“Some bloke who had a Knot once, so tangled that the only way to get it undone was to chop it in twain. The story is proverbial among ferangs. It is what we are about to do at the crossing of the Narmada. Rather than see all of these blokes cross scimitars, kitars, khandas, jamdhars, tranchangs, et cetera with the Marathas, we are going to cut the Gordian Knot.”

“To you it may be a proverb of great significance but to me it is meaningless,” said Surendranath, “and I would fain have something like an actual plan of battle before we meet the foe, which will probably occur this very night.”

Here Surendranath was only pointing out something that had been weighing on Jack’s mind anyway, which was that they had been so preoccupied with making the phosphorus, and recovering from having made it, that they’d not thought much about what to do with it. So Padraig, Vrej, Monsieur Arlanc, and Mr. Foot were sent for, and presently rode up to join Jack and Surendranath. Van Hoek had chopped off the tips of his fingers the night before and, still woozy from shock and opium, was being carried behind on another palanquin.

“This country that we have been traveling through,” said the Banyan, “is hardly the type of scene to make any of you write awe-struck letters home, but it is the most dangerous and unsettled part of Hindoostan.”

They had made landfall at the port of Surat, which was at the mouth of the river Tapti, and since then had been heading north, following a caravan-road that ran parallel to the sea-coast, a few miles inland. From time to time they would cross some smaller stream that, like the Tapti, meandered down out of the country to their right on its way to the Gulf of Cambaye, to their left. All knew that the biggest such river was called the Narmada and that they would come to it today, but so flat was the landscape that it afforded no hints as to how near or far the great river might be. This coastal plain reminded Jack a little bit of the Nile Delta, which was to say that it was well-watered, populated with many villages, and presented to the traveler a mixed prospect of marshes, farms, and groves of diverse kinds of trees that were cultivated (or at least allowed to stay alive) because they provided fruit or oil or fiber. “We shall see wilder and stranger landscapes farther north,” Surendranath promised them, “but by then we shall be out of danger.

“If you think of Hindoostan as a great diamond, then the valley of the Narmada, which we are about to cross, is like a flaw that runs through the heart of it. Hindoostan has ever been divided among several kingdoms. Their names change, and so do their borders-with one exception, and that is the Narmada, which is a natural boundary between the north and the south. North of it, invaders come and go, and control of the cities and strongholds passes from one dynasty to another. To the south, it is a different story. You cannot see them from here, but there is a line of mountains cutting across Hindoostan from east to west called the Satpura Range. The Narmada drains their northern slopes, flowing along the mountains’ northern flank through a straight deep gorge for many days’ journey. The westernmost extremity of this range is called the Rajpipla Hills, and if the air were not so hazy we would be able to see them off to our right. A day’s journey thataway, the Rajpipla Hills draw back away from the Narmada, which, thus freed from the constraints of the gorge, adopts a meandering habit, and snakes across this plain, and broadens to an estuary much like that of the Tapti which we have just put behind us.

“The Moguls have proved little different from other martial races that controlled the north in millennia past, which is to say that the weapons and tactics that served them well in the plains and deserts proved ineffective in breaching the mountain-wall of Satpura. But unlike some who have been content simply to make the Narmada their southern border, they have nursed the ambition of making all Hindoostan a part of the dar al-Islam and so probed southwards via the only route that is passable: which happens to be the very road that we are treading on now. Coastal cities such as Broach on the Narmada and Surat on the Tapti they have conquered with ease, and, with a great deal of difficulty, retained. But south of Surat, the interior of Hindoostan is guarded from the western sea by a formidable range of mountains, the Ghats, which are ever a refuge into which the Hindoo resistance-the Marathas-may withdraw when they desire not to meet the Moguls in pitched battle in the plain. Likewise the Satpura Range is mottled with strongholds of the Marathas, even as far west as the Rajpipla Hills. From time to time the Moguls will venture up there and expel them, for those Hills, because of their situation, are like a blade against the throat of the Moguls’ commerce; all Western trade, as you know, comes in to the ports of Daman, Surat, and Broach, and the Maratha chieftains well know that they may sever those ports’ links to the north by issuing from their forts in the Rajpipla Hills and descending the Ravines of Dh?aroli to the Broach Plain-which is where we are now-and catching the caravans when they are backed against the River Narmada. Surat is infested with their sympathizers, and you may be assured that their spies saw us mustering there, and preceded us along this road and have already sent them word of our movements.”

“Can we rely on them to attack us at night?” Jack asked.

“Only if we are so foolish as to reach the south bank of the Narmada at dusk and attempt a night crossing.”

“So be it then,” Jack said. “Clever stratagems are quite beyond my powers, but if it is rank foolishness you require, I have no end of it.”

JACK RODE AHEAD to view the battle-field in daylight, and to put the mercenaries where he wanted them. With help from a hired guide, he found a suitable place to feign a crossing. A few miles inland of where the Narmada broadened to an estuary, it described a Z, swept around in an oxbow, described an S, and resumed its westward course. In the center of the SZ was a mushroom-shaped head of gravel and sand bulging northwards into the oxbow, and connected at its southern end by the neck of land pinched between the opposing river-bends. In each of these bends, the river’s flow had undercut the banks, which rose above the water to no more than the height of a man, but were steep, and covered with scrub. Anyone coming to the river from the south would be funneled through a quarter-mile-wide gap between these bends. Beyond that narrow pass, the neck broadened and flattened, sloping imperceptibly down to the inner bank of the oxbow. The river was broad and shallow there, and seemed an inviting place for a ford; but this was of course the inner or concave surface of the oxbow-bend, and anyone who knew rivers would expect the opposite bank-the oxbow’s outer or convex face-to be steeper. Looking across, Jack saw that this was likely the case, though it was obscured by reeds. His local guide assured him that camels, horses, and bullocks could ascend the far bank, and thereby cross over into the North of India, but only if they attempted it in certain places known to him, which he would divulge for a fee. Beasts of burden attempting to ford the river in the wrong places would, however, face slow going through the reeds, only to find their way barred by a bank too steep to scale.

“I’ll pay you the amount you have named,” Jack promised him, “and I’ll double it if you allow me to strike you a few times with this riding-crop.”

This required lengthy and difficult translation; but the result in the end was that a ferang on a horse could be seen chasing the poor guide all the way out of the oxbow, flailing at him wildly, and cursing the wretch for his greed. Having done which, he wheeled his mount, rode back to the ford, and began pointing out, to his mercenaries, those places that to him seemed best for a crossing.

An unexpected but desirable effect of this reconnaissance was that the mercenaries sorted themselves out. For they were scouting Jack, and what they understood to be Jack’s plan. They began clumping together, the better to conduct arguments, and presently whole bands of them turned their backs on the enterprise and bolted down-river, headed for Anklesvar or Broach. Though Jack put on a great show of outrage at this, he was in truth pleased with it. The loss of so many mercenaries would make them seem all the more vulnerable in the eyes of the Maratha scouts who, as he knew perfectly well, were observing his every move; and the ones who had remained probably could be depended on. As soon as the deserters were out of earshot, Jack called the remaining ones together.

The Cabal had gone out of their way to recruit men who were proficient in the use of that ancient and simple weapon, the sling. They had rounded up approximately two score of them. Almost none of these had deserted-for they were the lowest-paid and most desperate of all mercenaries. Jack divided them into two platoons and bade them make themselves comfortable on the mushroom-shaped peninsula: one platoon on the western or downstream lobe, the other on the eastern or upstream lobe.

Of the remaining mercenaries, some were edged-weapons men; he set these to work digging a line of fox-holes across the narrowest part of the neck. But he made certain that they could fall back somewhere; and he put those idle slingers to work scooping out some trenches for just that purpose. Others of the mercenaries were archers, and he arranged these in the center of the peninsula so that they could fire volleys over the heads of the men defending the neck.

A vanguard of the caravan arrived bringing a great rolled-up Turkish sort of tent and its single tree-sized pole, its ropes, stakes, amp;c., as well as some strange cargo packed in straw. The tent they pitched in the center of the peninsula, and the cargo they dragged inside of it to be unpacked. Some of this was distributed to the platoons of slingers. As dusk fell, these could be seen creeping away from the positions where they had spent the afternoon and descending to the river’s bank. In ones and twos they worked their way south, converging on the neck: but rather than occupying its open center, they were wading in the stream, sheltering behind the undercut banks, concealed from view by the scrubby vegetation and by darkness. It was just as well that they were on the move, for the caravan had now arrived in force, and horses, camels, bullocks, and even two elephants were crowding through the gap, dividing round the tent, and gathering along the inner bank of the oxbow. Jack had identified those parts of the opposite bank most difficult to climb, and now ordered that it be attempted by those creatures most likely to fail: bullocks drawing wagons.

Even from his less than ideal vantage-point, viz. standing in a tent slathering himself with strange-smelling oil, Jack could picture everything that went wrong just from the bellowing, the immense splashes, futile whip-cracks, curses in diverse tongues, and snapping of spokes and axles.

Even this tumult, however, did not suffice to drown out the sound of the Maratha onslaught. Crafty and subtle these rebels might be when filtering down out of the hills, but on the attack they were as loud as any other army, and perhaps louder than some, as they were fond of drums, cymbals, and other means of terrifying the enemy’s critters at a distance. Jack put his eye to a hole in the tent to behold their approach. He had been told over and over again about the Marathas’ generous use of elephants in combat, but had scoffed. For all of the strange places Jack had been, there was in him enough of the East London mudlark that he could not believe such a thing was actually done in this world. And yet, on they came: moving battle-towers, lit with torches and agleam with metal, shingled all over with armor, swinging tusks a-bristle with scythe-blades of watered steel. Five abreast these creatures came on to the neck of land, and about their knees swarmed a moving carpet of infantry, their wicked blades gleaming by moonlight, a geometry-lesson from Hell. The air puckered with the peculiar sound made by many arrows: some out-bound from the archers who stood around the tent, but many incoming. A few snicked in through the roof of the tent.

“Bang!” suggested Jack, and a moment later a musket was fired outside by Vrej, as a signal.

Their plan was extremely simple, and so many events were triggered by the firing of this one shot. On the northern bank of the oxbow, local guides kindled bonfires; these shone out across the river as beacons marking the places where the bank was easiest to scale. The caravan-drivers, trapped between the river and the Maratha onslaught, needed no further incentive to make for those lights. Soon the river was striped in four places by columns of sloshing beasts.

The line of sword-wielding mercenaries barring the neck had already begun to desert their earthworks and to fall back, for the elephants were only a few yards away. When the musket sounded, those who had held their ground jumped out, to a man, and split into two groups, occupying the trenches that the slingers had prepared along the flanks of the expected Maratha advance. The archers fired a last volley of arrows. This, and the trenches, and some trip-ropes that had been pounded into place before them, and the congestion caused by the Marathas’ entire battle-front being compressed into the narrow pass, caused the onslaught to slow, just on the threshold. A few impetuous Marathas ventured across the line of fox-holes, or even jumped obstacles on horseback; but these were easy marks for the archers and for the few musketeers they had managed to round up.

All of which, wild and memorable though it was, remained well within the normal limits of what one saw in warfare. Night battles were unusual, and (to Jack anyway) ones involving elephants were outlandish; but for all that, it was just a battle. Until a hundred glowing bottles of phosphorus were lobbed out of the scrub to either side of the neck, and dropped out of the sky like falling stars, and burst upon the ground among the attackers. They came in a few ragged volleys, and by the time the last one had fallen, most of the ground that stretched before the Maratha vanguard was glowing. And as if that were not enough, some of it was bursting into flame.

One of the elephants made known his intention to turn around and go back. Jack could not discern, from this range, whether his driver was of the same mind, or not; but it did not matter, for the elephant was leaving. And perhaps he was some sort of a leader among pachyderms, for the idea spread to the others fast and unquenchable as phosphorus-fire. When several elephants with razor-sharp blades all over their tusks decide to pirouette in the midst of a tightly packed mob, there is apt to be disorder, and such was the case now; Jack could not really see through the arch of radiance, but could infer as much from the vocalizations of the Marathas, which sounded like every Italian opera ever written being sung at once.

As the phosphorus on the ground dried out, it burnt. This went on fitfully for longer than was really convenient. Jack and all of the others in the oxbow could not do anything, because they could not see. To their backs, the convoy dribbled across the fords like streams of molasses running down a chilly plate. It would be hours before they were all across. And Jack had been warned not to underestimate the Marathas. It was one thing to spook their beasts, another thing altogether to break the will of their men. For these were not just peasants with sticks, but veterans belonging to castes such as the Mahar and the Mang whose whole purpose was military service. Such warnings he had been slow to heed, for there was nothing in England that corresponded to it; but Surendranath had drawn a loose analogy between these castes and the Janissaries of the Turks, which began to give Jack the idea. He had accordingly ordered the slingers to hold a few of their bottles in reserve, and when the last of the phosphorus-fires burnt out, he insisted that the mercenaries move up again, and take up their former positions. The archers he moved to the flanks to join the slingers, so that they could fire from behind the protection of the riverbank. All of these measures were soon put to the test by attacks of Mahar and Mang infantry; and so it was that, as much as he had wanted to avoid it, Jack was finally obliged to ride out from the concealment of the tent, flanked by Mr. Foot on one side and Monsieur Arlanc on the other, and to sally across the neck and drive the die-hard Marathas back screaming all the way to the Ravines of Dh?aroli. For Jack, Foot, Arlanc, and their horses were all glowing in the dark. No one even had the temerity to shoot an arrow at them.

“Mr. Foot!” Jack called out to a fiery blob hurtling to and fro in pursuit of demoralized foe-men, “turn thee around and let’s to the river. Nothing but dust now lies between us and the Court of the Great Mogul in Shahjahanabad; and he had damn well better be grateful, lest we boil up some urine in his town.”