The Confusion

Book 4
Bonanza
Southern Fringes of the Mogul Empire
LATE 1696

We say of some Nations, the People are lazy, but we should say only, they are poor; Poverty is the Fountain of all Manner of Idleness.

–DANIEL DEFOE,

A Plan of the English Commerce

A LAKE OF YELLOW DUST lapped at the foundations of some cobra-infested hills in the far west. Eastwards it ran to the horizon; if you went that way long enough, and survived the coastal marshes, you would reach the Bay of Bengal. To the north lay a country that was similar, except that it encompassed the richest diamond mines in the world; this was the King of Aurangzeb’s favorite nephew, Lord of Righteous Carnage. To the south lay some hills and mountains that, except for the scattered citadels of the Marathas, were not really controlled by anyone just now. Beyond, at the very tip of Hindoostan, lay Malabar.

A pair of bamboo tripods supported the ends of a timber cross-piece that spanned a tiny puncture wound in the sheet of dust. The timber had been polished by a rope that slid over it all day long. On one end of that rope was a bucket, which dangled in the well-shaft. On the other end was a yoke thrown over the cartilaginous hump of a bullock. A gaunt man, armed with a bamboo cane, stood behind the animal. The bullock trudged away from the well. Here and there it would insolently pause and prod the dust with its snout for a minute or two, pretending that there was something edible there. The man would begin talking to it. At first his tone was conversational, then whining, then pleading, then irked, then enraged. Finally he would go to work with the cane and the bullock would stomp forward another few steps.

From time to time the bullock would reach the end of his rope, which signified that the bucket had emerged from the hole. The man with the bamboo cane would then shout at a couple of younger men who were dozing in the shade of the low dung rampart that surrounded the well’s opening, giving it the general appearance of a giant rugged nipple. These men would bestir themselves, scale the rampart, get a grip on the bucket, swing it off to one side, and dump a few gallons of water onto the ground. The water would embark on a senseless quest for the nearest ocean. The bullock would turn round and come back.

These people were all People (as they name themselves in their language). The bucket-emptiers belonged to a separate subcaste from the bullock-spanker, but both could trace their lineage back for a hundred generations to the same ur-Person. And even if Sword of Divine Fire had not already known as much, it could have been guessed from following a given bucket-load of water downhill, and observing the scenery on either hand. For thousands of years’ hourly bucket-emptyings had cut a meandering drainage channel into the dust. It careered and zigzagged for a mile, heading generally eastwards, until it petered out in a crazed salt-pan, which sported the locally renowned Large Hole in the Ground, and other improvements. In most places, a grown man could comfortably plant one foot on either side of the channel. In some parts one had to jump over it. In one stretch it spread out so wide that one needed a running start. Consequently the local children never wanted for sports and entertainment.

Each bank of the ditch was green from the water’s edge to the point, about an arm’s length away, where the desert took over again. Seen from the high ground at the well-mouth, it looked as if some Hindoo deity had dipped a quill in green ink and dragged it aimlessly across a blank parchment-which was not extremely far from what the People actually believed. Their king of the last two years and two hundred and forty-eight days scoffed at this creed, but since it had sustained them in adverse circumstances for a couple of thousand years, he had to admit it was no worse than any other religion.

The People furthermore believed that the same deity had divided the ditch’s length (some two thousand paces in all) into five zones, and portioned them out to the five daughters of the ur-Person, and laid down certain rules as to what should be cultivated where. These five zones had inevitably been divided and subdivided as the five subcastes spawned from the loins of the five daughters had ramified into diverse clans, which had distinguished themselves from other clans by intermarrying with groups that were viewed as higher or lower, or, in some cases, destroyed themselves by not intermarrying enough. So each of those two thousand paces, on each side of the ditch, was now spoken for by someone.

Most of the someones were present and accounted for, dressed in brilliant fabrics, and squatting behind their tiny farms-therefore, packed shoulder-to-shoulder along the banks all the way from the well to the Large Hole in the Ground. Sword of Divine Fire had come to make his monthly inspection.

Sword of Divine Fire was mounted on a donkey. His aides, bodyguards, and attendants were on foot, except for two rowzinders on horseback and one zamindar in a palanquin.

“Very well,” said Sword of Divine Fire, “which is to say, it looks the same as last time, and the time before that.”

His words were translated into Marathi by the man in the palanquin, who then said, “Shall we have a look at the Large Hole in the Ground, then, and call it a day?”

“The Large Hole in the Ground can wait. First, we will inspect our potato,” said Sword of Divine Fire.

This pronouncement, once it had been translated, touched off the most urgent conspirings and shushings among the aides, hangers-on, courtiers, camp-followers, and the khud-kashtas or head-men of the Ditch’s various segments. Sword of Divine Fire gave his donkey a few smart heel-jabs and began steering for the Fourth Meander of the Third Part of the Ditch. His zamindar shortly caught up with him-the feet of his palanquin-bearers creating bursts of dust that flourished, paled, and dissolved in the still air.

“Your majesty’s potato can hardly have changed much since the last visit. On the other hand, I am informed by the most highly placed sources that the Large Hole in the Ground is not only deeper-but wider, too!”

“We would view our potato,” the king said doggedly. They were definitely getting close-the kids tear-assing around had the high noses and elongated skulls that set Fourth Meander folk apart from the less prestigious subcastes who cultivated the left bank of the Third Part. Only last week, one of them had been made an out-caste for Jumping the Ditch, i.e., having sex with one of the hillbilly girls on the Right Bank.

“Is one potato really so different from the next?” asked his zamindar philosophically.

“In general, no-but in our jagir, there is no next!”

“And yet-assuming that some potato materializes on your plate on the day specified, does the fate of a specific potato really amount to so much?”

“You are a tax collector, not a philosopher-mind your place.”

“Excuse me, Your Royal Highness, but we were philosophizing when Aristotle’s grandparents were banging rocks together.”

“Where has it gotten you though?”

Ahead, Sword of Divine Fire could see the Flat Brown Rock, which-together with the Little Gray Rock, which stood about a hundred yards distant-accounted for most of the local topography. The Fourth Meander made a small excursion to go around it. The clan of the Flat Brown Rock Excursion were reputed to be the finest horticulturalists of the whole Ditch, and on cold nights were known to stay up sitting on their cabbages like hens warming their eggs. Normally, they would be turning round to smile proudly at their monarch. But today they squatted on the bank, hunched over with their backs turned to him, and refused to meet his gaze. Sword of Divine Fire could not fathom it until he noticed a gap forming in the line of persons. They were packed in nearly shoulder-to-shoulder, but still they were finding some way to shift sideways, creating an open space two yards across, which gradually expanded to three. In the center of that open space, a bony woman in a threadbare garment was hunched over a dead plant.

Sword of Divine Fire’s reaction was succinct: “Fuck!” The woman cringed as if he’d hit her with a bullwhip. Then: “What has happened to our potato?”

“Sire, I launched an investigation as soon as I was informed. The khud-kashta of the Fourth Meander has been sternly brought to account. Furthermore, I have made discreet inquiries with Lord of Righteous Carnage, as well as with Shambhaji, to ascertain whether it might be possible to buy a replacement potato…”

“Come off it! Where’s the money coming from? We can’t even feed the bullock.”

“If we put off purchasing a new rope…”

“The rope has been spliced so many times it’s naught but splices. Besides! Jesus Christ! Shambhaji!? You asked him? I was sent down here to make war on Shambhaji.”

“But you have not actually conducted an offensive operation against him in years.”

“What, I’m besieging his citadel.”

“You call it a Siege-others would describe it as a very long Picnic.”

“In any event-Shambhaji is the enemy.”

“In Hindoostan, all things are possible.”

“Then where is my fucking potato!?”

Silence. Then the woman flung herself on the ground and began to beseech Sword of Divine Fire for mercy.

“Oh, splendid! Now she’s probably going to go set fire to herself or something,” the king muttered. Then he sighed. “What has your investigation turned up?”

“It may have been sabotage.”

“Those Right Bankers, y’think?”

“Retribution for many Ditch-Jumpings.”

“Well, I don’t want to start a war,” mused Sword of Divine Fire, “or my rutabaga will be next.”

“I would not put anything beneath the Right Bank Vhadriyas, they are scarcely above apes.”

“Tell ’em it’s my fault.”

“I beg your pardon, sire?”

“Karma. I looked crossways at a cow, or something…make some shit up. You’re good at that, aren’t you?”

“Truly you are the wisest ruler this kingdom has ever had…”

“Yeah, too bad my term’s up in another four months.”

Half an hour later, Sword of Divine Fire alighted from his donkey, and his zamindar emerged from his palanquin, and they stood together at the brink of the Large Hole in the Ground. All of the water that struggled out to the end of the Ditch emptied into this Hole. Members of the local Koli caste brought wagon-loads of black dirt hither from their dirt-mines in other parts of the jagir and dumped it into the hole. Then they pounded it with timbers, mixing it with the ditch-water, and drew off the liquor that floated on top and put it into a motley collection of pots and pans. These they boiled over fires made with wood brought down out of the hills by the people of the wood-splitter caste. When the pots had nearly boiled dry, they dumped their contents out into flat shallow earthenware trays and left them out under the sun. After a while, those trays filled up with a whitish powder-

“Who the hell is that man in the robe, and why is he eating my saltpeter?” demanded Sword of Divine Fire, visoring his eyes with one hand and gazing over towards the tray-farm.

Everyone looked over to see that, indeed, a figure in a long off-white robe-a cross between a Frankish monk’s robe and an Arab djellaba-was nibbling at a handful of saltpeter-slush that he’d scooped up from one of the trays. His face was obscured by the hood of the robe, which he’d pulled over his head to shield himself from the sun.

A couple of rowzinders and three archers on foot-about half of Sword of Divine Fire’s body-guards-bestirred themselves, and began trotting over that way, unlimbering weapons as they went. But the robed visitor turned out to have a sort of body-guard of his own: two men on horseback who rode forth and took up positions on the flanks, and let it be known that they had muskets.

“Sire, this would appear to be a better-organized-than-usual assassination attempt,” said the zamindar, stepping over to his palanquin and retrieving a musket of his own. “May I suggest you climb down into the Large Hole in the Ground?”

The king for his part pulled a pistol from his garment and checked the pan. “This fitteth not the profile of an assassination,” he observed. “Perhaps they are wandering potato-merchants.” He spurred his donkey forward, and rode past his body-guards, who had been stopped in their tracks by the appearance of those muskets.

As he drew closer to the robed man, he was surprised-but then again, not really-to observe a red beard. The visitor pulled his hood back to divulge a fountain of silver hair. He spat saltpeter on the ground and smacked his lips for a few moments, like a connoisseur of wine.

“I’m afraid it is contaminated with much that is not actually saltpeter,” he said. “It would work for ballasting ships, but not for making gunpowder.”

“Strange you should mention that, Enoch, as I may be needing some ballast soon.”

“I know,” said Enoch Root. “Unfortunately, many others in Christendom know it, too, Jack.”

“That is most annoying, for I went to vast expense to bring in a scribe who knew how to employ cyphers.”

“The cypher was broken.”

“How is Eliza?”

“She is a Duchess in two countries.”

“Does she know that I am a King in one?”

“She knows what I knew, before I left. Namely that there are tales of a Christian sorcerer who, some years ago, was traveling in a caravan to Delhi that was attacked by a Maratha army that came down out of the hills on elephants. The Marathas had the upper hand until nightfall, when they and their elephants alike were thrown into a panic by a cold fire that limned the warriors and the horses of the caravan without consuming them. This caravan reached Delhi without further incident, and Aurangzeb, the Great Mogul, according to his long-standing practice, elevated the victor to the rank of omerah, and rewarded him with a three-year jagir.”

“And so you decided to come out and see who was putting your alchemical knowledge to such ill uses.”

“I came for many reasons, Jack, but that was not one of them…I knew who the sorcerer was.”

“Did you bring the thing I asked for?”

“We will speak of that later,” Enoch said judiciously. “But I did bring two things you should have asked for, and forgot to.”

“Hmm, let me think…I love riddles…a replacement penis, and a keg of decent beer?”

“I love riddles, too, Jack, but I hate guessing-games. Can we go somewhere that is not so, er…” And here Enoch Root turned his gaze one way, then the other, taking in most of the hundred-mile expanse between the hills and the coastal marshes. “…exposed?”

Jack laughed. “If it’s privacy you want, you’re in the wrong subcontinent.”

“So you say-and yet there is more here than meets the eye, no?” said Enoch Root, staring Jack in the eye.

Jack rode back to his zamindar and said, “That gentleman over there is a buyer of saltpeter from Amsterdam.”

“Is that the best you could come up with!?” answered Surendranath.

“’Twill serve, for now…I am going to take him on an inspection-tour of the dirt-mines. Dismiss the khud-kashta s with my compliments. Tell them not to give the potato-woman any grief. Meet me at the Royal Palace this evening, unless the roof has been blown off again, in which case, meet me by the tree.”

“Sire, the dirt-mines are situated in a rowdy and treacherous pargana, quite infested with stranglers. Are you quite certain you do not want me to send the rowzinders?”

Jack sized up the two horsemen who had arrived with Enoch Root. “What do you make of them?”

“Mercenaries. Judging from their coloration, most likely Pathans.”

“That was my guess, too, until I got closer. Methinks they are Christians with tans. They are barely even twenty years of age, but weathered like veterans, and they returned my gaze insolently.”

“They handle their weapons like drilled musketeers,” said the zamindar.

“They’ve made it all the way here, from Christendom…”

“But perhaps they are the last remnants of a whole Regiment.”

“I believe I will be safe in their hands,” Jack said.

“THAT’S FOR ME MUM!” said the one.

“She’s me mum, too, give ’im another!”

A large, bleeding fist filled most of Jack’s visual field, getting rapidly bigger. Then lights flashed and a loud popping noise went off in the base of his skull.

“You can do be’er’n that, Jimmy!” said one, shoving the other aside. “Let me show you-now, how’s about that! An’ that! For our sainted mum!”

Suddenly they got six feet taller-either that, or Jack’s head was resting on the ground. The one called Jimmy wound up for a kick.

“That is for mayakin’ it neces’ry for us to travel all the way out to the butt o’ the world to beat the bejesus out o’ ye!”

Enoch hovered nervously in the background encouraging them to stop, or at least slow down-but they were having none of it.

“That is for bein’ a friggin’ shite-head!”

“Can you be more specific?” Jack said (he had found that a bit of levity sometimes worked wonders in these situations). But the words came out all a-mumble, for his lips stuck together whenever they got near each other-and they’d ballooned to the point where they were always near each other. But somehow the one named Jimmy understood, and went wide-eyed.

“Oh, you want specificity!? Danny, he’s requested we wax specific at this time!”

Jack got up on all fours, then staggered to his feet. Being on the ground only tempted them to kick him, and that was worse, in the long run, than being punched.

“That is specifically for tayakin’ up with another lady when the urth on Mum’s grayave hadn’t even been tamped down yet!”

“That is specifically for tradin’ in yer French jools on a shite-load o’ malarkey!”

Jack tumbled backwards into a stand of bamboo, and Jimmy and Danny-perhaps fearing cobras-did not come in after him. They stood where they were for a moment, getting their wind back. For the first time since Jimmy had tackled him out of the saddle a few minutes ago, it occurred to Jack that he was armed with a serviceable Janissary-sword, and knew a thing or two about how to use it; but cutting up his own flesh and blood wouldn’t be right. Instead he eased it quietly from its scabbard and swung it into the base of a bamboo cane about as thick as his wrist, easily cutting it through. Then he staggered out of the thicket dragging it behind him.

“Powers o’ Darkness!” Jack exclaimed, focusing his one eye that hadn’t swollen shut on a point in the middle distance. “I do believe that elephant is fookin’ that camel up the arse-or is it t’other way round?”

Jimmy and Danny turned around to look. Jack yanked on the bamboo, bringing it forward into his hands like a pike, and jammed the butt of it into Jimmy’s left kidney, which caused Jimmy to topple backwards clawing at his lower spine with both hands. Danny turned round to see why Jimmy was screaming. Jack got the bamboo between his knees, sending him a-sprawl, and just as the young man’s legs made a broad V in the air, Jack brought the cane down smartly. It was impossible to miss.

Stillness descended on the scene, save for the twittering of exotic birds and the groaning of the two lads.

“Enoch, if you could just keep an eye out for snakes, stranglers, and hordes whilst I give my boys a brief talking to.”

“Glad to-but please do be brief.”

“Now, Jimmy and Danny. Thank you for coming all the way out to Hindoostan to catch up with your dear father. You’re probably afraid I’m going to be angry that you beat the shite out of me. But really it gives me no strong feelings one way or the other. I don’t hold it against you that you turned out Irish, either. I wasn’t there to make Englishmen of you, and so it’s Irish you are, by default. That’s all right; that can be remedied. But I must take exception to your saying-what was it? ‘A shite-load o’ malarkey.’ You underestimate me, lads. Which you’ve plenty of reasons to do, I admit, since this is the first time you’ve ever laid eyes on me, and Mary Dolores’s folk have been filling your heads with venom. I want you to understand that when I set forth on my trading voyage, twelve or thirteen years ago, I did it for you. And I’m still doin’ it for you-I’m just not finished yet, is all. I’ve had diverse treasures to steal and Dukes to assassinate and pirates to escape from. But no voyage is finished until the ship drops anchor in London or Amsterdam-and you’ll admit we’re a hell of a long way from those places!”

Danny was the first to struggle to his feet. Still bent over at a right angle, he dug Jimmy’s hand out of the brush and tried to heave him to his feet. “C’mon, now, Seamus, we’ve had our say-let’s turn round an’ head for Whitechapel now.”

“Go if you must,” Jack said, “but if you can bring yourselves to stay for a little while, I believe I can offer you transportation.”

“SHAHJAHANABAD IS A BASKET of asps,” Jack remarked the next day, as they were all riding through some wooded hills in the southeastern quarter of his domain. “Most of the Mogul’s omerah s go there and become entangled with the intrigues and doings of other omerah s, not to mention diverse courtiers, concubines, eunuchs, Banyans of the sodagar and the katari class, Brahmins and Fakirs of diverse Hindoo sects, spies and intriguers from wild ’stans to the Northwest, the agents of the French, Dutch, and English East India Companies, and anyone else who just happens to be hanging around. Aurangzeb has a great palace there, which he stole from his pa and his brothers. So you see, lads, you’re not the first men to violate the Fourth Commandment in Hindoostan-”

“ ‘Remember the Sabbath?’ ” quoth Jimmy, incredulous.

“Beg your pardon, I must’ve meant the Seventh.”

“ ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery?’ ” said Jimmy and Danny in unison.

“I can see the Papists have left their mark on you lads-again, my fault.”

“His Royal Highness meant to say the Fifth-honor thy father and mother,” hollered Enoch Root-who, along with Surendranath, had been dropping farther and farther behind them, but who was still within earshot.

Danny made a sort of throat-clearing noise. “We came here to do that specifically-honor our mum, that is. It’s just that in order to do it, we had to settle a score wi’ Dad.”

“Well, now that you’ve settled it,” said Jack, pointing to various large swellings on his face, “shut up, because I’m trying to educate you. Before we embarked on theologickal disputations, I was talking about the Palace of the Great Mogul in Shahjahanabad, outside Delhi. It rises above the flood plain of a river, and on that plain, the Great Mogul stages mock-battles between armies of hundreds of elephants, and as many horse and camel. The expense, for elephant-feed alone, is damnable.”

“Let’s go! I ha’ to see it!” exclaimed Jimmy, all starry-faced.

“Doahn’t be such a shite-for-brayans!” said Danny. “Cahn’t you perceive, he’s tryin’ to payant a picture of Oriental decadence?”

“I can perceive it as clearly as your ugly fayace! But I ha’n’t rode all this friggin’ way to beat up Dad an’ then go hoahm! I’d not be above seein’ a wee sahmple of Oriental decadence afore I leave-assoomin’ that’d be all right wi’ ye, Parson Brown.”

“You’ll see Oriental decadence and then some, if you’ll only shut up-but you won’t see it in my kingdom. Because the point I was leading up to is as follows. Among those omerah s is a fair sprinkling of Christian artillerymen-renegadoes and Vagabond soldiers from the armies of King Looie and the Holy Roman Emperor. Aurangzeb needs ’em, you see, because they’ve mastered the al-jebr, which is a sort of mathematickal sorcery that we had the good sense to steal from the Arabs. And by wielding this al-jebr they can predict where cannonballs will land, which is a useful thing to know in a battle. Consequently, Aurangzeb simply cannot make do without ’em.”

“What has this t’do wi’ you, Dad, who doahn’t know al-jebr from jabber?” said Danny.

“In the clouded and furious imaginings of the Great Mogul, I am just another Frankish sorcerer. Which is to say that I could be reclining on a silken pillow in Shahjahanabad right now while some Hindoo lass played knick-knack on my chakras. But instead I am here!” And at this point Jack was secretly glad that his sons had been interrupting him the whole way, because the timing had worked out just as in some reasonably well-produced theatrical production: He spurred his donkey forward to the bare top of a hill and swept out a vast arc with his arm. “Look well and carefully upon these domains, my sons-for one day, they will not be yours!”

“Fook it in that case-we’ve already seen ’em,” said Jimmy. “Which way to Shahjahanabad?”

“As you can see, my jagir resembles one of those large earthenware trays in which we make saltpeter. It has a flat hard bottom caked with salty mud, in which what little grows is immediately eaten. The sloped sides of the tray, then, are these ranges of hills that surround it on all sides-save in one place, down below us here, which-in this similitude-is the spout of the tray. It is a stretch of marshes, a sort of Reptile Paradise, that leads eventually to the Bay of Bengal.”

“Beggin’ your pardon, Dad, but your royal highness’s rayan lasts another-what-four months?”

“One hundred sixteen days and counting.”

“Then whoy should me ’n’ Danny give a fook?”

“If you would shut up for ten consecutive minutes, I’d get to that,” said Jack, and took advantage of his altitude to try to find Surendranath and Enoch Root-who seemed to think that the only purpose of going on journeys was to wander about and gawk at all and sundry. Not long after they’d all left the Royal Palace at Bhalupoor (Jack’s summer capital, up in the hills), the Banyan and the alchemist had fallen into conversation. Not long after that, they’d evidently lost all interest in the incessant banter of the Shaftoes, and in the last few minutes they had dropped out of the caravan altogether. A retinue of spare palanquin-bearers, bodyguards, aides, and other wallahs had come along with them, and these were spreading out as the gap between Jack’s and Enoch’s group widened, trying to maintain some sort of contact; Jack could barely see the closest one, and could only hope that that fellow could see the next. The danger lay not in getting lost (for Surendranath knew the way better than Jack), and not in wild animals (according to Jimmy and Danny, Enoch could take care of himself), but in Thugs, Dacoits, and Maratha raiding-parties. Today’s journey was taking them along the southern rim of the metaphorical Tray, and at no point were they more than a few miles away from some Maratha fort or outpost.

Jack realized with mild astonishment that Jimmy and Danny were actually listening to him.

“Oh, yes. Precisely because the Great Mogul hands out his king-ships on a strictly limited three-year term, every king must devote his energies, from the first day of his reign, to preparing for the day when he will be a king no more. Now here I could speak to you of details for twelve hours, and those of you who are fascinated by tales of Oriental decadence would hear much to marvel at. Instead I will summarize it as follows: There are two approaches to being a king. One, remain in Shahjahanabad and maneuver and strive against all the others in hopes that the Great Mogul will reward thee with another kingship at the end of the three years.”

“I can guess two,” said Danny. “Avoid Shahjahanabad as if ’twere a plague-town. Go dwell in your jagir and do all you can to suck it dry, so you can get out wi’a shite-loahd o’ money…”

“Just like an English lord in Ireland,” Jimmy added.

Jack heaved a great sigh; sniffled once; and wiped a tear from his eye. “My sons, you do me proud.”

“That is the course you be steerin’, then, Dad?”

“Not quite. Sucking this jagir dry is like getting blood from beef jerky. My illustrious predecessors have been sucking it dry for millennia. Really it is one great sucking apparatus-there is a zamindar or chief tax collector, who does the sucking on behalf of whomever is king at the moment.”

“That’d be the wog in the palankeen, then…”

“Surendranath is my zamindar. His agents hover over the markets in my two cities-Bhalupoor in the hills, where we stayed last night, and Dalicot on the coast, where we are going now. For those are the places where the produce of the earth or sea is exchanged for silver. And since I must pay my taxes to the Great Mogul in silver, that is the only place to collect it. The tax rate is fixed. Nothing ever changes. The jagir produces a certain meager income, and there is no way to increase it.”

“So what’ve you been doin’ all these years, Dad?” Jimmy demanded.

“My first move was to lose some battles-or, at the very least, fail to win them-against the Marathas.”

“Why? Y’know how t’make phosphorus. You could’ve scared those Marathas shitless and driven ’em into the sea.”

“This was tactical losing, Danny boy. The other omerah s-I mean the intriguing types in Shahjahanabad-had heard tales of that phosphorus. It was in their nature to look on me as a dangerous rival. If I’d gone out and started winning battles, they’d’ve begun sending assassins my way. And I already have my hands full with French, Spanish, German, and Ottoman assassins.”

“But by makin’ yerself out to be a feckless Vagabond shite-for-brayans, you assured yourself of some security,” said Jimmy.

“Moguls and Marathas alike want me to stay alive-for another one hundred and sixteen days, anyway. Otherwise I never would’ve lasted long enough for you boys to journey out and beat me up.”

“But what then, Dad? Have you done anything here besides losin’ battles and mulctin’ wretches for pin-money?”

“Ssh! Listen!” Jack said.

They listened, and mostly heard their own stomachs growling, and a breeze in the trees. But after a few moments they were able to make out a distant chop, chop, chop.

“Woodcutters?” Danny guessed.

“Not just any wood, and not just any cutters,” said Jack, spurring his donkey down off the hilltop and riding toward the sound. “Mark this tree over here-no, the big one on the right! That is teak.”

“Tea?”

“Teak. Teak. It grows all over Hind.”

“What’s it good for?”

“It grows all over Hind, I said. Think about what that means.”

“What’s it mean? Just give it to us straight, Dad. We’re no good at riddles,” Jimmy said; at which Danny took offense.

“Speak for yourself, ninny-hammer. He’s tryin’ to tell us that nothin’ succeeds in eatin’ this type o’ wood.”

“Danny’s got it,” Jack said. “None of the diverse worms, ants, moths, beetles, and grubs that, sooner or later, eat everything here, can make any headway against teak-wood.”

SEVERAL TALL TEAKS HAD BEEN felled in the clearing, but even so, Danny and Jimmy had to peer around for a quarter of an hour to realize what the place was. In Christendom there would have been a pit full of wood-shavings, and a couple of sawyers playing tug-of-war with a saw-frame the size of a bed-stead, slicing the logs into squarish beams, and looking forward to the end of the day when they could go home to a village some distance down the road. But here, a whole town had sprung up around these fallen trees. It had been a wild place before, and would be wild again in a year, but today, hundreds dwelt here. Most of them were gathering food, cooking, or tending children. Perhaps two score adult males were actually cutting wood, and the largest tool that any of them had was a sort of hand-adze. This trophy was being wielded by an impressive man of perhaps forty, who was being closely supervised-some would say nagged-by a pair of village elders who had an opinion to offer about every stroke of the blade.

The village’s approach to cutting up these great teak-logs had much in common, overall, with how freemasons chipped rough blocks of stone one tiny chisel-blow at a time. At the other end of the village, some of them were scraping away at almost-finished timbers with potshards or fragments of chipped rock. Some of these timbers were square and straight, but others had been carved into very specific curves.

“That there would be a knee brace,” Danny said, looking at a five-hundred-pound V of solid teak.

“Do not fail to marvel at how the grain of the wood follows the bend of the knee,” Jack said.

“It’s as if God formed the tree for this purpose!” said Jimmy, crossing himself.

“Aye, but then the Devil planted it in the middle of a million others.”

“That might’ve been part of God’s plan,” Danny demurred, “as a trial and a test for the faithful.”

“I think I have made it abundantly clear that I am no good at tests of that sort,” Jack said, “but these kolis are another matter. They will wander the hills for weeks and look at every single tree. They’ll send a child scampering up a promising teak to inspect the place where a bough branches off from the trunk, for that is where the grain-lines of the wood curve just so-and, too, it’s where the wood is strongest and heaviest. When they’ve found the right tree, down it comes! And they move the whole village there until the wood has been shaped and the timbers delivered.”

“I didn’t think the Hindoos were seafarin’ folk,” Jimmy said, “other than wee fishin’ boats and such.”

“Most of these kolis will go to their graves, or to be precise, their funeral-pyres, without ever having laid eyes on salt water. They have been roaming the hills forever, going where they find work, supplying timbers for buildings, palanquins, and whatnot. When I became king they started coming here from all over Hindoostan.”

“You must pay ’em summat. I thought you had no revenue.”

“But this comes from a different purse. I am not paying these folk with tax money.”

“Where is the friggin’ money comin’ from, then?” Jimmy demanded.

“More than one source. You’ll learn in good time.”

“He an’ that Banyan must’ve made a shite-load of money when they brought that caravan home to Shahjahanabad,” Danny observed.

“It wasn’t just me and the Banyan, but the whole Cabal-or rather the half of it that had not fallen into the snares of Kottakkal, the Malabar pirate-queen.”

“Hah! Now, there is your Oriental decadence!” Danny exclaimed to Jimmy, who was momentarily speechless.

“You have no idea,” Jack muttered.

IT TOOK THEM ALMOST TWO hours to track down Enoch and Surendranath, who had wandered quite beyond the frontier of Jack’s kingdom and into a sort of lawless zone between it and a Maratha stronghold. Through the center of that no-man’s-land ran a small river in a large gulley-a steep-sided channel that the water had cut down through black earth every bit as slowly and patiently as the kolis whittling their beams.

“I should’ve predicted that we would find Enoch in the Black Vale of Vhanatiya,” Jack said, when he finally caught sight of the alchemist down below.

“Who’s that bloke in the turban?” Jimmy demanded, peering down over the lip of the gulley. Ten fathoms below them, in the bottom of the gorge, Enoch was standing in knee-deep water, conversing with a Hindoo who squatted in the shallows nearby.

“I have seen men like him once or twice before,” Jack said. “He is a Carnaya, which I realize means nothing to you.”

“Obviously he is a gold-miner,” Danny said. The Carnaya was holding a round pan between his hands and swirling it around, causing a foamy surge of black river-sand to gyrate around its rim.

“If this were Christendom, where everything is obvious, he would be a gold-miner,” Jack said. “But there is no gold, and naught is simple, in these parts.”

“He must be panning for agates then,” Jimmy said.

“An excellent guess. But there are no agates here.” Jack cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered: “Enoch! It is a long ride to Dalicot, and we do not want to be caught in this country after dark!”

Enoch paid him only the slightest notice. Jimmy and Danny pounded down into the gulley, following their own avalanches into the river, which became cloudy-to the exasperation of the Carnaya. Enoch wound up his conversation. There was much significant pointing, and Jack got the impression that directions were being given out. Jimmy and Danny peered at the Carnaya’s pan, and at the heavy bags that he had filled with the results of his panning.

In time the whole caravan got re-assembled up above, and made ready for a forced march to Dalicot. “Be sure to check your pocket-compass,” Enoch suggested before they set out.

“I know where we are,” Jack said. But Enoch prevailed on him to check the compass anyway. Jack got it out and removed the cover: It was just a magnetized needle coated with wax and set afloat in a dish of water, and to get a reading, it was necessary to set it down on something solid and wait for a minute or two. Jack put it on a rock at the lip of the Black Vale of Vhanatiya, and waited for two minutes, then five. But the needle pointed in a direction that obviously was not north. And when Jack moved it to another rock, it pointed in a different direction that was not north.

“If you are trying to spook me, it has worked. Let’s get the hell out of here,” Jack said.

Their inspection of the Carnaya’s equipment had left Danny and Jimmy baffled and suspicious respectively. “’Twas nought more’n some dark matter, as dull and gross as anything I’ve ever seeyen,” Danny reported.

“Certain gemstones look thus, before they have been cut and polished,” Jack said.

“It was all sand and grit, nothing bigger’n a pin-head,” Jimmy said. “But Jayzus! Those sacks were heavy.”

Enoch was as close to being excited as Jack had ever seen him. “All right, Enoch-let’s have it!” Jack demanded. “I’m king in these parts-stand and deliver!”

“You are not king there,” Enoch said, nodding in the direction of the Black Vale, “nor in the place we will visit tomorrow.”

Jimmy and Danny rolled their eyes in unison, and made guttural scoffing noises. They had been traveling in the company of Enoch the Red for half a year.

JACK WAS STANDING ON A beach, letting warm surf surge and foam around his sore feet, and watching a couple of Hindoo men working with a fragile-looking bow-drill, using it as a sort of lathe to shape a round peg of wood from the purple heartwood of some outlandish tree. “Peg-makers are a wholly different caste from plank-whittlers, and will on no account intermarry with them, though on certain days of the year they will share food,” he remarked.

No one answered him; no one even heard.

Enoch, Jimmy, Danny, and Surendranath were standing on the beach a few yards away with their backs to him. On one side they were lit up by the reddish light of the sun, which (because they were so near the Equator) was making a meteoric descent behind the hills from which they had just descended. They were as motionless as figures in a stained-glass window, and in fact this was no mean similitude, since their heads were tilted back, their lips parted, their eyes clear and wide, much like Shepherds in the hills above Bethlehem or the Three Women in the empty tomb. Waves surged around their ankles and leapt up as high as their knees and they did not move.

They were beholding a vast Lady that lay on the beach. She was the color of teak. The light of the sun made her flesh glow like iron in a forge. She was far larger than the largest tree that had ever been, and so must have been pieced together from many individual bits of wood, such as this peg that the peg-maker was shaping next to Jack, or that plank that the plank-maker over there was assiduously sculpting out of a giant rough timber. Indeed, if they had come a year ago they might have seen her ribs jutting into the air, and courses of hull-planks still being cut to length, and it would have been evident that she had after all been pieced together. But in her current state it seemed as if she had just grown on the beach, and the way that the grain-lines of the teak followed her every curve did everything to enhance that illusion.

“Aye,” Jack said, after he had allowed a proper silence to go by, “sometimes I think her curves are too perfect to’ve been shaped by man.”

“They were not shaped, but only discovered, by man,” said Enoch Root, and risked a single step towards her. Then he fell into silence again.

Jack busied himself inspecting various works higher up the beach. For the most part these were makers of planks and pegs. But in one place a shed of woven canes had been erected, and thatched with palm-fronds. Inside it, a woodcarver of higher caste was at work with his chisels and mallets; wood-chips covered the sandy floor and spilled out onto the beach. Jack went in there, bringing Surendranath as his interpreter.

“For Christ’s sake! Look at her! Will you just look at her!? Look at her!” Then a pause while Jack drew breath and Surendranath translated this into Marathi, a couple of octaves lower, and the sculptor muttered something back.

“Yes, I see quite plainly that you were so good as to remove the elephant-trunk, and that the lady has a proper nose now, and for that you have my undying gratitude,” Jack hollered sarcastically, “and as long as I am helping you with your self-esteem, sirrah, allow me to thank you for scraping off the blue paint. But! For! Christ’s! Sake! Do you know, sirrah, how to count? You do!? Oh, excellent! Then will you be so good, sirrah, as to count the number of arms possessed by this Lady? I will patiently stand here while you take a full inventory-it may take a little while…oh, very good! That is the same reckoning that I have arrived at! Now, sirrah, if you will be so kind, how many arms do you observe on my body? Very good! Once again, we agree. How about Surendranath-how many arms has he? Ahh, the same figure has come up once again. And you, sirrah, when you carve your idols, you hold the hammer in one, and the chisel in another, hand-how many makes that? Remarkable! Yet again we have arrived at the same figure! Then will you please explain to me how come it is that This! Lady! is formed as you have formed her? Why the numerical discrepancy? Do I need to import a Doctor of al-jebr to explain this?”

Jack stormed out of the shed, followed closely by Surendranath, who was saying, “You told the poor fellow she was supposed to represent a goddess-what on earth were you expecting?”

“I was being poetickal.”

Jimmy and Danny had long since clambered aboard, and were running from stem to stern and back again, hooting like schoolboys. Enoch had been walking about her, tracing short segments of arcs on the wet sand, and was now standing in violet light with the water up around his knees.

“My first thought was that she couldn’t have been wrought by a Dutchman, on account of her marked dead-rise,* which will make her fast but will bar her from most Dutch harbors.”

“There are no Dutch harbors around here, you’ll notice,” Jack observed.

“Her stem is strongly raked, more like a jacht than a typical East Indiaman. It looks as if two and maybe three exceptionally noble teaks were sacrificed to fashion that curve. There are no such trees in Europe any more, and so stems are pieced together, and rarely have such a rake. How did you find trees that were curved just so?”

“In this country, as you have seen, there is a whole sub-civilization of woodcutters who carry in their heads an inventory of every tree that grows between the Roof of the World in the north, and the Isle of Serendib in the south,” Jack said. “We stole those trees from other jagirs. It took six months and was complicated.”

“And yet her keel is no shorter, for all her stem-rake. So yet again, the builder seems to have valued speed above other desirables. Being so long and so rakish, she had to be narrow-quite a bit of volume has been sacrificed to that. And even more has been given up to riders and other reinforcements-you’ve put two ships’ worth of teak into her. Expecting her to carry a lot of guns, are you?” Enoch asked.

“Assuming you’ve held up your end of the transaction.”

“She should last thirty or forty years,” Enoch said.

“Longer than most of us will,” Jack answered, “present company excepted, that is-if the rumors about you are true.”

“Anyone who looks at her will know she is hauling valuable cargo,” said Enoch. “If ship-building is the art of compromise, then your builder has everywhere chosen speed and armament at the expense of volume. Such a ship can only pay for her upkeep if she is hauling items of small bulk and great value. She is pirate-bait.”

“If there is anything we have learned in our wanderings, it is that every ship on the sea, even one as humble as God’s Wounds, is pirate-bait,” said Jack. “And so we have built a pirate-slayer. There is a reason why the Dutch make their merchantmen almost indistinguishable from their Ships of Force. Why should we go to the expense of fashioning a teak-built ship, only to lose her to some boca-neers six months after she is launched?”

Enoch nodded. Jack had become a bit furious.

“So let me hear your guess, Enoch. You said that she didn’t look like a ship built by a Dutchman. Who was the shipwright, then?”

“A Dutchman, of course! For only they are so free in adopting outlandish notions-only they have the confidence. Everyone else only parrots them.”

“You are both right and wrong,” Jack said after a moment’s pause, and then turned away and began slogging down the beach in the direction of a fire that had been kindled in the last few minutes, as the sun had finally disappeared and stars came out overhead. “Our shipwright is one Jan Vroom of Rotterdam. Van Hoek recruited him.”

“His name is well-known. What on earth is he doing here?”

“It seems that in the days of Vroom’s apprenticeship, shipwrights were held in high esteem by the V.O.C. and the Admiralty, and given a free hand. Each ship was built a little differently, according to the wisdom-or as some would say, the whim-of the shipwright. But recently the V.O.C. have become prideful, thinking that they know everything that will ever be known about how to build ships, and they have begun specifying sizes and measurements down to a quarter of an inch-they want every ship the same. And if a shipwright dares to show any artistry, why, then, some rival shipwright will be brought in to take measurements and write up a report, laying out how these rules and regulations have been violated, and causing no end of trouble. What it comes down to is that Jan Vroom did not feel appreciated. And when a worm-gnawed and weatherbeaten letter arrived in his hands, a couple of years ago, from an old acquaintance of his named Otto van Hoek, he dropped what he was doing and took passage on the next ship out of Rotterdam.”

“Looks as if more followed,” said Enoch, for they were now close enough that they could see a whole semicircle of muttering Dutchmen around the fire, lighting up their clay pipes with flaming twigs. In the middle were the red-headed captain, and a tall man with a blond-going-gray beard who was obviously Vroom. But four younger men were around them, listening and nodding.

“Before we interrupt these gentlemen, let us conspire in the darkness here,” said Enoch.

“I’m listening.”

“Along with these very Dutchmen, you imported some scribe, skilled-or so you were told-in the cryptographickal arts. You had this scribe write me an encyphered letter saying, ‘Dear Enoch Root, I require forty-four large naval cannons, preferably of finest and most modern sort, please provide.’ And several months later I decrypted and read this document in London-though not before some spy had intercepted it, and copied it out. At any rate, I read this document and I laughed. I hope you were laughing when you dictated it.”

“A smile might have played round my lips.”

“That is good, because it was an absurd request. And if you did not have the wit to recognize it as such, it would mean you had turned into some sort of addle-pated Oriental despot.”

“Enoch. Do you, or do you not, have certain large metal items for me?”

“The items you refer to are not free for the taking. One does not acquire such goods without accepting certain obligations.”

“You’re saying you’ve found us an investor? That is acceptable. What are his terms?”

“You should rather say, her terms.”

Jack levitated. Enoch clapped a hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eye. Enoch was facing toward the fire and the light glinted weirdly in the dilated pupils of his eyes: a pair of red moons in the night. “Jack, it is not her. She has done well for herself, it’s true-but not so well that she can dispatch an arsenal halfway around the world, simply because a Vagabond writes her a letter.”

“What woman can?”

“A woman you saw once, from a steeple in Hanover.”

“Stab me!”

“And now you appreciate, I trust, how deep the matter is.”

“But I should not have addressed the letter to Enoch Root, if I did not want it to become deep. What are her terms?”

The red moons were eclipsed for a little while. Enoch sighed. His breath on Jack’s face was hot and warm like a Malabar breeze, and laced-or so Jack imagined-with queer mineral fragrances.

“Investors who dictate terms are common as the air, Jack,” Enoch said. “This is a different matter altogether. You are not borrowing capital from an investor in exchange for specific terms. You are entering into a relationship with a woman. Certain things will simply be expected of you. I cannot even begin to guess what. If you and your partners fail to act as gentlemen should, you will incur the lady’s displeasure. Is that specific enough? Is it clear?”

“It is neither.”

“Good! Then this has been a successful conversation,” Enoch said. “Now I must convey the same maddening ambiguity to your partners. That being accomplished, I must show due diligence, and-”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Certain items are conspicuously absent-such as masts and sails. Cordage. A crew. I cannot release the weapons until I have seen these. Also, her position on the beach is vulnerable.”

“We will float her soon, and complete her on the water-as is traditional. If she had a few cannons on board she would be a difficult prize to take from land.”

“Agreed. Have you made plans for her maiden voyage?”

“We were thinking perhaps of running saltpeter to Batavia, and then bringing spices back to one of the Great Mogul’s ports-for Hindoostan consumes more spices than all Europe combined, and they have no lack of silver with which to pay for it.”

“It is not a bad plan. But you may have a different plan tomorrow, Jack.”

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON FOUND THEM in dangerous territory south of the Black Vale of Vhanatiya. The Carnaya miner had given Enoch deliberately misleading directions that would have led him directly into a Maratha trap. But Enoch had anticipated this, and tracked the miner through the hills like a hunter stalking wild game.

They passed for some hours through a high terrain overgrown with vicious scrub. All of the large trees seemed to have been cut down long ago and never grown back. Just when Jack was convinced that they were utterly lost in the most God-forsaken part of the world, he smelled camels, and they stumbled upon a caravan of Persians headed the same direction. This was a bit like running into a clan of kilted Scotsmen in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

The way became broad and trampled; Enoch no longer had to use his tracking skills. Finally even the scrub and thorn plants vanished. Like a few pebbles rattling down into a stoneware bowl, they descended into a rocky crater, maculated with schlock-heaps and filled with a perpetual miasma of wood-smoke.

“Even if your taste is abominable, I must grant you credit for consistency,” Jack muttered. “How is it you always end up in the same sort of place?”

“By following the spoors of men such as the Carnaya,” said Enoch, speaking in a hush, like a Papist who’s just entered a basilica. “Now you see why I insisted that we come here alone-if we’d brought an escort of rowzinders, imagine how this place would have been upset.”

“Isn’t it already?” Jack asked. “What the hell are they up to? And why are those Persians here? And do my smoke-burnt eyes deceive me, or is that a contingent of Armenian long-range traders?”

Enoch said only: “Watch.” So Jack followed Enoch and watched Enoch watch.

Now in the beginning Jack was certain that they had come to the place where all of Europe’s teacups were manufactured, for there were clay-pits all over, and Hindoos squatted in them fashioning teacup-sized vessels. These were carried up to kilns to be fired. But if they were teacups, they were rough thick-walled ones without handles or decoration, and each came with a domed lid. And other peculiar operations were going on nearby: Canes of bamboo, and odds and ends of teak-wood, were being loaded into smoky furnaces to be turned into charcoal. Jack was certain that some of this teak was scrap left over from his ship-building project, and was peeved at first, then amused, to realize that his kolis had another operation going on the side.

Teak and bamboo were not the only vegetable matter being brought up to this stony vale. Wizened hill-people were staggering down under twig-bundles bigger than they were, and being paid in silver by important-looking characters. Jack did not recognize the twigs, but he gathered from the price paid for, and the reverence accorded, them that they were of some sort of plant sacred to the Hindoos.

All of these ingredients came together before a towering mud hearth, a sort of blazing termite-mound the size of a small church that rose from the center of the compound, looking twice as ancient as anything Jack had seen in Egypt. An old man with a priestly look about him squatted on his haunches next to a pyramid of rough teacups. He stirred his hand around in a sack of black sand just like what the Carnaya had panned out of the riverbank, and sifted it between his fingers into the crucible, seemingly feeling every single grain between his wrinkled fingertips, flicking away any that didn’t feel right. Then he chose a few shards of charcoal and distributed them around atop the black sand, crumbling them into smaller bits as necessary, and finally plucked some leaves and blossoms from a giant spraying faggot of magic twigs and arranged these on the charcoal like a French chef placing a garnish atop a cassoulet. Then his hand went back into the sack of black sand and he repeated the procedure, layer upon layer, until the tiny vessel was full. Now the lid went on, and it was passed with great care to an assistant who sealed the lid in place with wet clay.

The finished crucibles, looking like slightly flattened balls of mud, were stacked like cannonballs near the great furnace. But they did not go in just now, because a firing was in progress: Jack could look in and see a heap of similar crucibles glowing in the heat like a bunch of ripe fruit.

“I’ll be damned,” said Enoch Root, “they are only red-, not yellow-hot. That means that the iron ore is not actually being melted. Instead the charcoal is being absorbed by the iron, though the iron is yet solid.”

“Why doesn’t the charcoal just burn?”

“No air can get into the sealed crucibles,” Enoch snapped. “Instead it fuses with the iron to make steel.”

“We’ve come all this way to watch a bunch of wogs make steel!?”

“Not just any steel.” Enoch stroked his beard. “The diffusion must be very slow. Mark how carefully they tend the fire-they must keep it at a red heat for days. You have no idea how difficult that is-that boy with the poker must know as much of fire as Vroom knows of ships.”

The alchemist continued gazing at the furnace until Jack feared they would remain in that very spot for as many days as the firing might take. But finally Enoch Root turned away from it. “There are secrets about the construction of that forge that have never been published in the Theatrum Chemicum,” he said. “More than likely they are forgotten secrets, or else these people would have built more of them.”

They moved on to a pile of crucibles that had been removed from the furnace and allowed to cool. A boy picked these up one at a time, tossing them from hand to hand because they were still too hot to hold, and dashed them against a flat stone to shatter the clay crucible. What remained among those smoking pot-shards was a hemisphere of spongy gray metal. “The egg!” exclaimed Enoch.

A smith picked up each egg with a pair of tongs, set it on an anvil, and struck it once with a hammer, then examined it carefully. Eggs that dented were tossed away on a discard-heap. Some were so hard that the hammer left no mark on them-these were put into a hod that was eventually carried across the compound to another pit where an entirely different sort of clay was being mixed up, according to some arcane recipe, by the stomping feet of Hindoo boys, while a village elder walked around the edge peering into it and occasionally tossing handfuls of mysterious powders into the mix. The eggs of metal were coated in thick jackets of this clay and then set aside to dry. The first clay had been red when wet and yellow when fired, but this stuff was grey, as if the clay itself were metalliferous.

Once the gray clay had dried around the eggs, these were carried to a different furnace to be heated-but only to a dull red heat. The difference become obvious to Jack only when the sun went down, and he could stand between the two furnaces and compare the glow of one with that of the other. Again, the firing continued for a long time. Again, the eggs that emerged were cooled slowly, over a period of days. Again they were subjected to the test on the anvil-but with different results. For something about this second firing caused the steel egg to become more resilient. Still, most of them were not soft enough to be forged after a single firing in the gray clay, and had to be put through it again and again. But out of every batch, a few responded in just the right way to the hammer, and these were set aside. But not for long, because Persians and Armenians bought them up almost before they had hit the ground.

Enoch went over and picked one of them up. “This is called wootz,” he said. “It’s a Persian word. Persians have been coming here for thousands of years to buy it.”

“Why don’t the Persians make their own? They seem to have the run of the place-they must know how it’s done by now.”

“They have been trying, and failing, to make wootz since before the time of Darius. They can make a similar product-your sons and I made a detour to one of their forges-but they cannot seem to manage this.”

Enoch held the egg of wootz up so that fire-light grazed its surface and highlighted its terrain. Jack’s first thought was that it looked just like the moon, for the color and shape were the same, and the rugged surface was pocked with diverse craters where, he supposed, bubbles had formed. On a closer look, these craters were few and far between. Most of the egg’s surface was covered with a net-work of fine cross-hatched ridges, as if some coarsely woven screen-a mesh of wires-had been mixed into the stuff, and was trying to break free of the surface. And yet Jack had seen the crucibles prepared with his own eyes and knew that naught had gone into them save black sand, fragments of charcoal, and magic leaves. He pressed a fingertip against a prominent lattice of ridges; they were as hard as stone, sharp as a sword-edge.

“Those reticules grow inside the crucible, as plants do from seeds. And they are not only at the surface, but pervade the whole egg, and are all involved with one another-they hold the steel together and give it a strength nothing else can match.”

“If this wootz is so extraordinary, why’ve I never heard of it?”

“Because Franks name it something else.” Enoch glanced up, attracted by a distant ringing sound: a smith was smiting something. But it was not just some dull clod of iron. This was not a horseshoe or poker in the making. It rang with a noble piercing sound that put Jack in mind of Jeronimo wielding his rapier in the Khan el-Khalili.

The forge was about five minutes’ walk away, and when they arrived they joined a whole crowd of Ottoman Turks and other travelers who had convened to watch this Hindoo sword-smith at work. He was using tongs to grip a scimitar-blade by its tang, and was turning it this way and that on an anvil, occasionally striking it a blow with a hammer. The metal was glowing a very dull red.

“It isn’t hot enough to forge,” Jack muttered. “It needs to be a bright cherry red at least.”

“As soon as it is heated a bright cherry red, the lattice-work dissolves, like sugar in coffee, and the metal becomes brittle and worthless-as the Franks discovered during the Crusades, when we captured fragments of such weapons around Damascus and brought them back to Christendom and tried to find out their secrets in our own forges. Nothing whatsoever was learned, except the depth of our own ignorance-but ever since, we have called this stuff Damascus steel.”

“Damascus steel comes from here!?” Jack said, jostling closer to the anvil.

“Yes-the reticules you saw in the egg of wootz, when patiently hammered out, at low temperature, produce the swirling, liquid patterns that we know as-”

“Watered steel!” Jack exclaimed. He was close enough, now, to see gorgeous ripples and vortices in the red-hot blade. Without thinking, he reached for the hilt of his Janissary-sword and began drawing it out for comparison. But Enoch’s hand clapped down on his forearm to restrain him. In the same moment the forge was filled with a storm of whisking, scraping, ringing, and keening noises. Jack looked up into a dense glinting constellation of drawn blades: serpentine watered steel daggers, watered steel scimitars, watered steel talwars, Khyber swords, and the squat fist-knives known as kitars. Inlaid passages from the Koran gleamed gold on some blades, as did Hindoo goddesses on others.

Jack cleared his throat and let go of his sword.

“This gentleman with the hammer and the tongs is extremely well-thought-of among connoisseurs of edged weapons the world round,” Enoch said. “They would be ever so unhappy if something happened to him.”

“ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, your point is well taken,” Jack said, after they had, by dint of Enoch’s diplomacy, extracted themselves from the forge with all of their body parts present and in good working order. “If we want valuable cargo for the ship’s maiden voyage, there is no need to go to Batavia and load up with spices.”

“Ingots of wootz will fetch an excellent price at any of the Persian Gulf or Red Sea ports,” Enoch said learnedly. “You could trade them for silk or pearls, then sail for any European port-”

“Where we would all be tortured to death ’pon arrival. It is an excellent plan, Enoch.”

“On the contrary, you might survive in London or Amsterdam.”

“I had in mind going the opposite direction.”

“It is true that in Manila or Macao you might find a market for wootz,” Enoch said, after a moment’s consideration. “But you would make out much better in the Mahometan countries.”

“Let us strike out south and west towards the Malabar coast tomorrow.”

“Will that not take us through Maratha territory?”

“No, they live in citadels up on mountain-tops. I know the way, Enoch. We will pass through a couple of independent kingdoms that pay tribute to the Great Mogul. I have an understanding with them. From there we can pass into Malabar.”

“Wasn’t it Malabaris who stole your gold, and enslaved half of your companions?”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“What is the other way?”

“Surendranath, Monsieur Arlanc, Vrej Esphahnian, and Moseh de la Cruz-our most cosmopolitan and sophisticated members-prefer to think of Malabar as a large, extremely queer, remote, hostile, and heavily armed goldsmith’s shop in which we have made an involuntary deposit.”

“We call such enterprises banks now.”

“Forgive me, I haven’t been in England for nigh on twenty years.”

“Pray continue, Jack.”

“They have our gold. We can never get it back. But it does them very little good, sitting there. Kottakkal, the Queen of the Malabar Pirates, can only spend so much of it fixing up her palace and refurbishing her ships. Beyond that, she must put that gold to work if she’s to derive any benefit of having stolen it from us.”

“Has she been putting it to work, then?”

“She owns twenty-five percent of our ship.”

Enoch laughed-an uncommon event. He did more than his share of winking, smirking, chuckling, and deadpan commentary, but laughing out loud was a rare thing with him. “I am trying to imagine how I will explain to the Electress of Hanover, and heiress to the Throne of England, that she is now in partnership with Kottakkal, the Queen of the Malabar Pirates.”

“Imagine how you’re going to explain it to Kottakkal, please,” Jack suggested, “because that will happen sooner.”