Quicksilver (67 page)

Before doing anything else, Jack slipped back into the water, swam back through the sump, retrieved his boots and clothes, and then returned to the glowing cavern. He got dressed and then crept toward the light on hands and knees, trying but failing to control a violent shiver. The glint he’d noticed earlier turned out to come from a patch of clear crystals, the size of fingers, growing out of a wall—diamonds! He had entered into some place of fabulous riches. The walls were fuzzy with gems. Perhaps the light was green because it was shining through a giant emerald?

Then he came round a bend and was nearly struck blind by a smooth disk of brilliant green light, flat on the floor of a roundish chamber. As his eyes adjusted he could see that a circle of persons—or of
something
—stood around the edge, dressed in outlandish and bizarre costumes.

In the center stood a figure in a long robe, a hood drawn over his head, enclosing his face in shadow, though the light shone upwards against chin and cheek-bones to give him a death’s-head appearance, and it glinted in his eyes.

A voice spoke out in French—Eliza’s voice! She was angry, distressed—the others turned towards her. This was Hell, or Hell’s side entrance, and the demons had captured Eliza—or perhaps she was
dead
—dead because of Jack’s failure to return with medicine—and she was at this moment being inducted—

Jack plunged forth, drawing his sword, but when he set foot on the green disk it gave way beneath him and he burst
through
it—suddenly he was
swimming
in green light. But there was solid rock underneath. He jumped back up, knee-deep in the stuff, and hollered, “Let her go, ye demons! Take me instead!”

They all screamed and ran away, including Eliza.

Jack looked down to find his clothes saturated with green light.

The hooded figure was the only one left. He sloshed calmly up out of the pool, opened a dark-lantern, took out a burning match,
and went round igniting some torchières stuck into the ground all around. Their light was infinitely brighter, and made the green light vanish. Jack was standing in a brown puddle and his clothes were all wet.

Enoch pulled the hood back from his head and said, “What was really magnificent about that entrance, Jack, was that, until the moment you rose up out of the pool all covered in phosphorus, you were invisible—you just seemed to materialize, weapon in hand, with that Dwarf-cap, shouting in a language no one understands. Have you considered a career in the theatre?”

Jack was still too puzzled to take umbrage at this. “Who, or what, were those—?”

“Wealthy gentlefolk who, until just moments ago, were thinking of buying
Kuxen
from Doctor Leibniz.”

“But—their freakish attire, their bizarre appearance—?”

“The latest fashions from Paris.”

“Eliza sounded distressed.”

“She was interrogating the Doctor—demanding to know just what this conjuror’s trick, as she called it, had to do with the viability of the mine.”

“But why even bother with mining silver, when the walls of this cavern are encrusted with diamonds?”

“Quartz.”

“What is the glowing stuff anyway, and while I’m on that subject, what
does
it have to do with the mine?”

“Phosphorus, and nothing. Come, Jack, let’s get you out of those wet clothes before you burst into flame.” Enoch began leading Jack down a side-passage. Along the way they passed a large item of machinery that was making loud booming and sucking noises as it pumped water out of the mine. Here Enoch prevailed on Jack to strip and bathe.

Enoch said, “I don’t suppose that this story shall ever be told in the same admiring way as the Strasbourg Plague House Takeover and the Bohemian Carp Feast.”

“What!? How did you know about those?”

“I travel. I talk to Vagabonds. Word gets around. You might be interested to know that your achievements have been compiled into a picaresque novel entitled
L’Emmerdeur,
which has already been burnt in Paris and bootlegged in Amsterdam.”

“Stab me!” Jack for the first time began to think that Enoch’s friendly behavior toward him might be well-meaning, and not just an extremely subtle form of mockery. Enoch shouldered a six-inch-thick door open and led Jack into a windowless crypt, a vaulted
room with a large table in the middle, candles, and a stove, which happened to look exactly like the sort of place Dwarves would inhabit. They sat down and started smoking and drinking. Presently the Doctor came in and joined them. Far from being outraged, he seemed relieved, as if he’d never wanted to be in the mining business anyway. Enoch gave the Doctor a significant look, which Jack was fairly sure meant
I warned you not to involve Vagabonds,
and the Doctor nodded.

“What are the, er, investors doing?” Jack asked.

“Standing up above in the sunlight—the females trying to outdo each other in swooning, the males engaging in a learned dispute as to whether you were an enraged Dwarf come to chase us away from his hoard, or a demon from Hell come to seize us.”

“And Eliza? Not swooning I assume.”

“She is too busy receiving the compliments, and credentials, of the others, who are all dumbfounded by her acumen.”

“Ah, then it’s possible she
won’t
kill me.”

“Far from it, Jack, the girl is blushing, she is radiant, and not in a dipped-in-phosphorus sense.”

“Why?”

“Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute
minimum
(unless I’m mistaken) that any female requires from her man.”

“So
that’s
what they’re all after,” Jack mused.

Eliza backed through the door, unable to use her arms, which were hugging a bundle of letters of introduction, visiting-cards, bills of exchange, scraps with scrawled addresses, and small purses a-clink with miscellaneous coinage. “We’ve missed you, Jack,” she said, “where’ve you been?”

“Running an errand—meeting some locals—partaking of their rich traditions,” Jack said. “Can we get out of Germany now, please?”

SUMMER
1684

Trade, like Religion, is what every Body talks of, but few understand: The very Term is dubious, and in its ordinary Acceptation, not sufficiently explain’d.

—D
ANIEL
D
EFOE,
A Plan of the English Commerce

“I
F NOTHING HAPPENS IN
A
MSTERDAM,
save that everything going
into
it, turns round and comes straight back
out
—”

“Then there must be nothing else
there,
” Eliza finished.

Neither one of them had ever been to Amsterdam—yet. But the amount of stuff moving toward that city, and away from it, on the roads and canals of the Netherlands, was so vast that it made Leipzig seem like a smattering of poor actors in the background of a play, moving back and forth with a few paltry bundles to create the
impression
of commerce. Jack had not seen such bunching-together of people and goods since the onslaught on Vienna. But that had only happened once, and this was continuous. And he knew by reputation that what came in and out of Amsterdam over land, compared to what was carried on ships, was a runny nose compared to a river.

Eliza was dressed in a severe black ensemble with a high stiff white collar: a prosperous Dutch farmer’s wife to all appearances, except that she spoke no Dutch. During their weeks of almost mortally tedious westing across the Duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, the Duchy of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, the Bishopric of Hildesheim, Duchy of Kalenberg, Landgraviate of something-or-other, County of Lippe, County of Ravensburg, Bishopric of Osnabrück, County of Lingen, Bishopric of Münster, and County of Bentheim, she had mostly gone in man’s attire, booted, sworded, and spurred. Not that anyone really believed she was a man: she was pretending to be an Italian courtesan on her way to a tryst with a Genoese banker in Amsterdam. This made hardly any sense at all, but, as Jack had learned, border guards mostly just wanted something to relieve the tedium. It was easier to flaunt Eliza than to hide her. Trying to predict when they’d reach the next frontier, and whether the people
on the far side of it would be Protestant or Catholic, and how
serious
about being Prot. or Cath. they’d be, was simply too difficult. Much simpler to be saucily irreligious
everywhere
and, if people got offended, run away. It worked most places. The locals had other concerns: if half the rumors were true, then King Looie—not satisfied with bombarding Genoa, laying siege to Luxembourg, challenging Pope Innocent XI to a staredown, expelling Jewry from Bordeaux, and massing his armies on the Spanish border—had just announced that he owned northwestern Germany. As they happened to
be
in northwestern Germany, this made matters tense, yet fluid, in a way that was not entirely bad for them.

Great herds of scrawny young cattle were being driven across the plain out of the East to be fattened in the manmade pastures of the Netherlands. Commingled with them were hordes of unemployed men going to look for work in Dutch cities—Holland-gänger, they were called. So the borders were easy, except along the frontier of the Dutch Republic, where all the lines of circumvallation ran across their path: not only the natural rivers but walls, ditches, ramparts, palisades, moats, and pickets: some new and crisp and populated by soldiers, others the abandoned soft-edged memories of battles that must have happened before Jack had been born. But after being chased off a time or two, in ways that would probably seem funny when remembered later, they penetrated into Gelderland: the eastern marches of that Republic. Jack had patiently inculcated Eliza in the science of examining the corpses, heads, and limbs of executed criminals that decorated all city gates and border-posts, as a way of guessing what sorts of behavior were most offensive to the locals. What it came down to, here, was that Eliza was in black and Jack was on his crutch, with no weapons, and as little flesh as possible, in sight.

There were tolls everywhere, but no center of power. The cattle-herds spread out away from the high road and into pastures flat as ponds, leaving them and the strewn parades of Hollandgänger to traipse along for a day or two, until they began joining up with other, much greater roads from the south and east: nearly unbroken queues of carts laden with goods, fighting upstream against as heavy traffic coming from the north. “Why not just stop and trade in the middle of the road?” Jack asked, partly because he knew it would provoke Eliza. But she wasn’t provoked at all—she seemed to think it was a good question, such as the philosophical Doctor might’ve asked. “Why indeed? There must be a reason. In commerce there is a reason for
everything.
That’s why I like it.”

The landscape was long skinny slabs of flat land divided one
from the next by straight ditches full of standing water, and what happened on that land was always something queer: tulip-raising, for example. Individual vegetables being cultivated and raised by hand, like Christmas geese, and pigs and calves coddled like rich men’s children. Odd-looking fields growing flax, hemp, rape, hops, tobacco, woad, and madder. But queerest of all was that these ambitious farmers were doing things that had nothing to do with farming: in many places he saw women bleaching bolts of English cloth in buttermilk, spreading it out in the fields to dry in the sun. People raised and harvested thistles, then bundled their prickly heads together to make tools for carding cloth. Whole villages sat out making lace as fast as their fingers could work, just a few children running from one person to the next with a cup of water for them to sip, or a bread-crust to snap at. Farmers whose stables were filled, not with
horses,
but with
painters
—young men from France, Savoy, or Italy who sat before easels making copy after copy of land- and sea-scapes and enormous renditions of the Siege of Vienna. These, stacked and bundled and wrapped into cargo-bales, joined the parade bound for Amsterdam.

The flow took them sometimes into smaller cities, where little trade-fairs were forever teeming. Since none of the farmers in this upside-down country grew food, they had to buy it in markets like city people. Jack and Eliza would jostle against rude boers and haggle against farmers’ wives with silver rings on their fingers trying to buy cheese and eggs and bread to eat along their way. Eliza saw storks for the first time, building their nests on chimneys and swooping down into streets to snatch scraps before the dogs could get them. Pelicans she liked, too. But the things Jack marveled at—four-legged chickens and two-headed sheep, displayed in the streets by boers—were of no interest to her. She’d seen better in Constantinople.

In one of those towns they saw a woman walking about imprisoned in a barrel with neck- and arm-holes, having been guilty of adultery, and after this, Eliza would not rest, nor let Jack have peace or satisfaction, until they’d reached the city. So they drove themselves onwards across lands that had been ruined a dozen years before, when William of Orange had opened the sluices and flooded the land to make a vast moat across the Republic and save Amsterdam from the armies of King Looie. They squatted in remains of buildings that had been wrecked in that artificial Deluge, and followed canals north, skirting the small camps where canal-pirates, the watery equivalent of highwaymen, squatted round wheezing peat-fires. Too, they avoided the clusters of huts
fastened to the canal-banks, where lepers lived, begging for alms by flinging ballasted boxes out at passing boats, then reeling them in speckled with coins.

One day, riding along a canal’s edge, they came to a confluence of waters, and turned a perfect right angle and stared down a river that ran straight as a bow-string until it ducked beneath the curvature of the earth. It was so infested with shipping that there seemed to be not enough water left to float a nutshell. Obviously it led straight to Amsterdam.

Their escape from Germany (as that mess of Duchies, Electorates, Landgraviates, Margraviates, Counties, Bishoprics, Archbishoprics, and Principalities was called) had taken much longer than Jack had really wanted. The Doctor had offered to take them as far as Hanover, where he looked after the library of the Duchess Sophia
^*
when he wasn’t building windmills atop their Harz silver-mines. Eliza had accepted gratefully, without asking whether Jack might have an opinion on the matter. Jack’s opinion would have been
no,
simply because Jack was in the habit of going wherever he wished whenever the mood took him. And accompanying the Doctor to Hanover meant that they could not leave Bockboden until the Doctor had settled all of his business in that district.

“W
HAT’S HE WASTING
TODAY
ON
?” Jack demanded of Enoch Root one morning. They were riding along a mountain road, followed by a couple of heavy ox-carts. Enoch went on errands like this one every morning. Jack, lacking any other kind of stimulation, had decided to take up the practice.

“Same as yesterday.”

“And that is? Forgive an ignorant Vagabond, but I am used to men of
action
—so when the Doctor spends all day, every day,
talking
to people, it seems to me as if he’s doing
nothing.”

“He’s
accomplishing
nothing—that’s very different from
doing
nothing,” Enoch said gravely.

“What’s he trying to
accomplish
?”

“He’d persuade the masters of the Duke’s mines not to abandon all of his innovations, now that his latest attempt to sell
Kuxen
has gone the way of all the others.”

“Well, why should they listen to him?”

“We are going where the Doctor went yesterday,” Enoch said, “and heard what he wanted to from the master of a mine.”

“Beggin’ yer pardon, guv’nor, but that striketh me not as an answer to my question.”

“This entire day will be your answer,” Enoch said, and then looked back, significantly, at a heavy cart following behind them, which was laden with quicksilver flasks packed in wooden crates.

They came to a mine like all the others: schlock-heaps, hand-haspels, furnaces, wheelbarrows. Jack had seen it in the Ore Range and he’d seen it in the Harz, but today (perhaps because Enoch had suggested that there was something to be learned) he saw a new thing.

The shards of ore harvested from the veins growing in the earth, were brought together and dumped out in a pile on the ground, then raked out and beaten up with hammers. The fragments were inspected in the light of day by miners too old, young, or damaged to go down into the tunnels, and sorted into three piles. The first was stone with no silver in it, which was discarded. The second was ore rich in silver, which went straight to the furnaces to be (if what Jack had seen in the Ore Range was any guide) crushed between millstones, mixed with burning-lead, shoveled into a chimney-like furnace blown by great mule-powered bellows, and melted down into pigs of crude silver. The third, which Jack had not seen at Herr Geidel’s mine, was ore that contained silver, but was not as rich as the other. Geidel would have discarded this as not worth the trouble to refine it.

Jack followed a wagon-load of this down the hill to a flat meadow decorated by curious mounds hidden under oiled canvas tarps. Here, men and women were pounding this low-grade ore in big iron mortars and turning the proceeds out into clattering sieves. Boys shook these to sift out powdered ore, then mixed it with water, salt, and the dross from copper-making to produce a sticky clay. This they emptied into large wooden tubs. Then along came an elder, trailed by a couple of stout boys sweating under heavy backloads that looked familiar: they were the quicksilver-flasks that the Doctor had bought in Leipzig, and that Enoch had delivered to them this very morning. The elder stirred through the mud with his hand, checking its quality and consistency, and, if it was right, he’d hug a flask and draw out the wooden bung and tip it, making a bolt of quicksilver strike into the mud like argent lightning. Barefoot boys went to work stomping the mercury into the mud.

Several such vats were being worked at any one time. Enoch explained to Jack that the amalgam had to be mixed for twenty-four hours. Then the vat was upended to make a heap of the stuff
on the ground. At this particular mine, there were dozens of such heaps arrayed across the meadow, each one protected from the rain by a canopy of rugged cloth, and each stuck with a little sign scrawled with information about how long it had been sitting there. “This one was last worked ten days ago—it is due,” Enoch told him, reading one of the signs. Indeed, later some of the workers rolled an empty tub up to that pile, shoveled the amalgam into it, added water, and began to work it with their feet again.

Enoch continued to wander about, peeling back canvas to inspect the heaps, and offering suggestions to the elders. Locals had begun filtering out of the woods as soon as visitors had arrived, and were now following him around—greed for knowledge drawing them closer, and fear pushing them back. “This one’s got too much quicksilver,” he said of one, “that’s why it’s black.” But another was the color of bran. More quicksilver was wanted. Most of them were shades of gray, which was apparently desirable—but Enoch thrust his hand into these to check their warmth. Cold ones needed to have more copper dross added, and overly hot ones needed water. Enoch was carrying a basin, which he used to wash samples of the heaps in water until little pools of silver formed in the bottom. One of the heaps, all of a uniform ash color, was deemed ready. Workers shoveled it into wheelbarrows and took it down to a creek, where a cascade had been set up to wash it. The water carried the ashy stuff away as swirling clouds, and left silvery residue. This they packed into conical bags, like the ones used to make sugar-loaves, and hung them up over pots, rows of them dangling like the tits on a sow, except that instead of producing milk they dripped quicksilver, leaving a gleaming semisolid mass inside the bags. This they formed into balls, like boys making snowballs, and put them, a few at a time, into crucibles. Over the top of each crucible they put an iron screen, then flipped the whole thing upside-down and placed it over a like crucible, half-buried in the ground, with water in the bottom, so that the two were fitted rim-to-rim, making a capsule divided in half by the iron screen. Then they buried the whole thing in coal and burned it until it was all red-hot. After it cooled, they raked off the ash and took it all apart to reveal that the quicksilver had been liberated from the balls of amalgam and escaped through the screen, to puddle below, leaving above a cluster of porous balls of pure silver metal all stuck together, and ready to be minted into thalers.