Quicksilver (56 page)

“Er—”

“Would you like to stop, so that I can draw you a picture?”

“No. What sort of man was he, then?”

“Unknown. He never left his cabin in that high-windowed castle at the stern of the ship. It seemed he had a fear of sunlight, or at least of tanning. When Mummy was taken into that place, that curved expanse of glass was carefully shuttered, and the curtains drawn—heavy curtains they were, in a dark green shade like the skin of the
aguacate,
which is a fruit of New Spain. But with thread of gold woven through, here and there, to produce a sparkling effect. Before my mother could react, she was thrown back against the carpet—”

“You mean,
down onto
the carpet.”

“Oh, no. For the walls, and even the ceiling, of the cabin were lined, every inch of them, in carpet. Hand-knotted wool, with a most deep and luxurious pile (or so it seemed to Mummy, who’d never seen or touched a carpet before), all in a hue that recalled the gold of fields ripe for harvest—”

“I thought you said it was dark.”

“She came back from these trysts with the fibers all over her. And even in the dark she could feel, with the skin of her back, that cunning artisans had sculpted the golden carpet into curious patterns.”

“Doesn’t sound that bad, so far—that is, by the standards of white women abducted and enslaved by Barbary Corsairs.”

“I haven’t gotten to the part about the smell yet.”

“The world smells bad, lass. Best to hold your nose and get on with it.”

“You are a child in the world of bad smells, until—”

“Excuse me. Have you ever been to Newgate Prison? Paris in August? Strasbourg after the Black Death?”

“Think about fish for a moment.”

“Now you’re on about fish again.”

“The only food that the Personage would eat was fish that had gone bad—quite some time ago.”

“That’s it. No more. I’ll not be made a fool of.” Jack put his fingers in his ears and sang a few merry madrigal tunes with a great deal of “fa la la” material in them.

A
FEW DAYS
might have passed here—the road West was long. But in time she inevitably resumed. “The Barbary Corsairs were no less incredulous than you, Jack. But it was evident that the Personage
was a man of tremendous power, whose wishes must be obeyed. Every day, some sailor who’d committed an infraction would be sentenced to dress the rotten fish for this man’s private table. He’d drop to his knees and beg to be flogged, or keel-hauled, rather than carry out that duty. But always one would be chosen, and sent over the side, and down the ladder—”

“How’s that?”

“The fish was ripened in an open long-boat towed far, far behind the ship. Once a day, it would be pulled up alongside, and the luckless sailor would be forced, at pistols drawn, to descend a rope-ladder, clutching a scrap of paper in his teeth on which was inscribed whatever receipt the Personage had selected. Then the tow-rope was hastily paid out again by a gagging team of sailors, and the chef would go to work, preparing the meal on a little iron stove in the long-boat. When he was finished, he’d wave a skull and crossbones in the air and be pulled in until he was just astern. A rope would be thrown out the windows of that gaudy castle—below, the chef would tie it to a basket containing the finished meal. The basket would be drawn up and in through the window. Later, the Personage would ring a bell and a cabin-boy would be heartily bastinadoed until he agreed to go aft to recover the china, and toss it overboard.”

“Fine. The cabin smelled bad.”

“Oh, this Personage tried to mask it with all the spices and aromatic gums of the East. The place was all a-dangle with small charms, cleverly made in the shape of trees, impregnated with rare perfumes. Incense glowered through the wrought-gold screens of exotic braziers, and crystalline vials of perfumed spirits, dyed the colors of tropical blossoms, sloshed about with great sodden wicks hanging out of ’em to disperse the scent into the air. All for naught, of course, for—”

“The cabin smelled bad.”

“Yes. Now, to be sure, Mummy and I had noticed an off odor about the ship from about a mile out, as we were being rowed to it, and had chalked it up to the corsairs’ barbarous ways and overall masculinity. We had watched the spectacle of the dinner preparation twice without understanding it. The second time, the chef—who, that day, was the very man Mummy had saved—never waved the Jolly Roger, but seemed to fall asleep in the long-boat. Efforts were made to rouse him by blowing horns and firing cannon-salvos, to no avail. Finally they pulled him in, and the ship’s physician descended the rope-ladder, breathing through a compress soaked in a compound of citrus oil, myrrh, spearmint, bergamot,
opium, rose-water, camphor, and anise-seed, and pronounced the poor man dead. He had nicked his hand while chopping some week-old squid-meat, and some unspeakable residue had infected his blood and slain him, like a crossbow bolt ’tween the eyes.”

“Your description of the Personage’s cabin was suspiciously complete and particular,” Jack observed.

“Oh, I was taken there, too—after Mummy failed the sniff-test, he flew into a rage, and in desperation they offered me up as a sacrifice. He got no satisfaction from me, as I’d not, at that age, begun to exude the womanly humours that—”

“Stop. Only stop. My life, since I approached Vienna, is become some kind of Bartholomew-Fair geek-baiting.”

H
OURS
,
OR A DAY
or two, might’ve passed.

“So, then, I suppose I’m meant to believe that you and dear Mummy were originally taken from the mud-flats simply in hopes that Mummy would pass the sniff-test.”

“ ’Twas thought she
had
passed it—but the officer who administered that olfactory examination was deceived—his sensorium overwhelmed—by—”

“By the miasma of those Qwghlmian mud-flats and guano-mountains. My God, it is the worst thing I have ever heard—to think I feared that
you
would be appalled by
my
story.” Jack waved his arms in the air, gaining the attention of an approaching friar, and shouted: “Which way is Massachusetts? I’m become a Puritan.”

“Later in the voyage, finally, the Personage had his way with poor Mummy on one or two occasions, but only because no other choices were available to him, and we did not pass near any more remote settlements where women could be easily abducted.”

“Well, c’mon, let’s have it—what’d he do in that carpeted castle?”

Eliza then became uncharacteristically shy. Now, by this time they were several days out of Vienna. She had taken off the wounded-officer disguise and was sitting in the saddle with a blanket wrapped around her, covering the tent she’d been wearing the first time Jack had seen her. From time to time she’d offer to dismount and walk, but she was barefoot, and Jack didn’t want to be slowed down. Her head, anyway, projected from a vast whorl of fabric, and Jack could therefore turn round and look at it anytime he chose. Generally he didn’t, because he knew that only trouble could come of paying undue attention to that visage—its smooth symmetry, its fine set of teeth, and all of those ever-so-important Feelings flickering across it, supple and quick and mesmerizing as fire-light. But at this particular moment he did turn
round to look, because her silence was so sudden that he supposed she’d been punched out of the saddle by a stray cannon-ball. She was there, gazing at some other travelers just ahead of them: four nuns.

They overtook the nuns shortly and left them behind. “Now you can say it,” Jack said. But Eliza just set her jaw and gazed into the distance.

A quarter of an hour later they passed the actual nunnery. And a quarter of an hour after
that
suddenly she was back to normal, relating the details of what had gone on behind those aguacate-colored curtains on the carpet of harvest gold. Several odd practices were described—Books of India stuff, Jack suspected.

The high points of Eliza’s story were, in sum, curiously synchronized with the appearance of nunneries and towns along their route. At a certain point Jack had heard all he wanted to—a bawdy tale, when told in so much detail, became monotonous, and then started to seem calculated to inspire Feelings of profound guilt and self-loathing in any male listeners who happened to be nearby.

Reviewing his memories of the last few days’ journey from Vienna, Jack observed that, when they’d been in open country or forest, Eliza had kept to herself. But whenever they’d neared any kind of settlement, and especially nunneries (which were thick as fleas in this Popish land), the tongue would go into action and reach some highly interesting moment in the tale just as they were passing by the town’s gate or the nunnery’s door. The story would never resume until they’d passed some distance onwards.

“Next stop: the Barbary Coast. As we’d proven unsatisfactory to the Personage, we were added to the general pool of European slaves there—some tens of thousands of ’em.”

“Damn, I’d no idea!”

“Their plight is ignored by all Europe!” Eliza said, and Jack realized too late he’d set her off. A torrential rant ensued. If only her head was still wrapped in those fake bandages—some tightening and knotting and his troubles would be over. Instead, by paying out the reins Jack was able to lead the noble horse, which he’d named, or re-named, Turk, from a distance, much as the Corsair-ship in Eliza’s ridiculous fable had towed the unspeakable fish-boat. Snatches and fragments of the Rant occasionally drifted his way. He learned that Mummy had been sold into the harem of an Ottoman military official at the Qasbah of Algiers, and in her copious spare time had founded the Society of Britannic Abductees, which now had branches in Morocco, Tripoli, Bizerta, and Fez; which met on a fortnightly rotation except during Ramadan;
which had bylaws running to several hundred pages, which Eliza had to copy out by hand on filched Ottoman stationery whenever a new chapter was founded…

They were close to Linz. Monasteries, nunneries, rich men’s houses, and outlying towns came frequently. In the middle of Eliza’s sermon about the plight of white slaves in North Africa, Jack (just to see what would happen) slowed, then stopped before the gates of an especially gloomy and dreadful Gothickal convent. Eerie Papist chanting came out of it. Suddenly Eliza was off on a new topic.

“Now, when you started that sentence,” Jack observed, “you were telling me about the procedure for amending the bylaws of the Society of Britannic Abductees, but by the time you got to the end of it, you had begun telling me about what happened when the ship packed to the gunwales with Hindoostani dancing-girls ran aground near a castle of the Knights of Malta—you’re not
worried
that I’m going to drop you off, or sell you to some farmer, are you?”

“Why should you care about my
feelings
?”

“Now has it never occurred to you that you might be
better off
in a nunnery?”

Clearly it
hadn’t,
but now it
did.
A most lovely consternation flooded into her face, and she turned her head, slightly, toward the nunnery.

“Oh, I’ll hold up my end of the partnership. Years of dangling from hanged men’s feet taught me the value of honest dealings.” Jack stopped talking for a moment to stifle his mirth. Then, “Yes, the advantages of being on the road with Half-Cocked Jack are many: no man is my master. I have boots. A sword, axe, and horse, too. I cannot be but chaste. Secret smugglers’ roads are all known to me. I know the zargon and the code-signs of Vagabonds, who, taken together, constitute a sort of (if I may speak poetically) network of information, spreading all over the world, functioning smoothly even when damaged, by which I may know which
pays
offer safe haven and passage, and which oppress wandering persons. You could do worse.”

“Why then did you say I might be better off there?” Eliza said, nodding toward the great nunnery with its wings curling around toward the road like a beetle’s tongs.

“Well, some would say I should’ve mentioned this to you earlier, but: you’ve taken up with a man who can be hanged on arrival in most jurisdictions.”

“Ooh, you’re an infamous criminal?”

“Only some places—but that’s not why.”

“Why then?”

“I’m
of a particular type.
The Devil’s Poor.”

“Oh.”

“Shames me to say it—but when I was drunk and battle-flushed I showed you my other secret and so now I’ve no way, I’m sure, to fall any lower in your esteem.”

“What is the Devil’s Poor? Are you a Satan-worshipper?”

“Only when I fall in among Satan-worshippers. Haw! No, it is an English expression. There are two kinds of poor—God’s and the Devil’s. God’s poor, such as widows, orphans, and recently escaped white slave-girls with pert arses, can and should be helped. Devil’s poor are beyond help—charity’s wasted on ’em. The distinction ’tween the two categories is recognized in all civilized countries.”

“Do you expect to be hanged down there?”

They’d stopped on a hill-top above the Danube’s flood-plain. Linz was below. The departure of the armies had shrunk it to a tenth of its recent size, leaving a scar on the earth like the pale skin after a big scab has fallen away. “Things will be loose there just now—many discharged soldiers will be passing through. They can’t all be hanged—not enough rope in Austria for that. I count half a dozen corpses hanging from trees outside the city gate, half a dozen more heads on pikes along the walls—low normal, for a town of that size.”

“Let’s to market, then,” Eliza said, peering down into Linz’s square with eyes practically shooting sparks.

“Just ride in, find the Street of Ostrich-Plume Merchants, and go from one to the next, playing ’em off against each other?”

Eliza deflated.

“That’s the problem with specialty goods,” Jack said.

“What’s your plan then, Jack?”

“Oh, anything can be sold. In every town is a street where buyers can be found for
anything.
I make it my business to know where those streets are.”

“Jack, what sort of price do you suppose we’ll fetch at a thieves’ market? We could not conceivably do
worse.
”