The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (236 page)

At any rate, ten days of this sort of travel brought them, late one afternoon, to
the point of Mariveles, where several rocks projected from the surf like daggers. The garrison on
the nearby island of Corregidor caught sight of
Minerva
around sunset
and lit some fires to prevent her from running aground. By triangulating against these they were
able to bring the ship gingerly around the south side of the island and drop anchor in the bay
there. The next morning the Spanish ensign in command of the garrison came out on a longboat for an
hour’s visit; they knew him thoroughly, as
Minerva
had passed this
way a dozen or so times on her triangular voyages among Manila, Macao, and Queena-Kootah. He gave
them the latest jokes and gossip from Manila and they gave him some packets of spices and a few
trinkets they’d picked up in Japan.

They weighed anchor and sailed across Manila Bay. The Spanish castle on the point of
Cavite came into view first, and later they could make out, beyond it, the bell-towers and
fortifications of Manila, and a thicket of masts and spars, shot through with furling silk banners,
around the outlet of the Pasig River. It was the expectation of most aboard that they would make
direct for there. But as they weathered the point of Cavite and entered into calmer water in the lee
of the castle, van Hoek ordered most of the sails taken in. A
banca
—a sort of longboat hewn from the trunk of a single colossal tree—came
toward them, and as it drew closer, Jack was able to recognize Moseh and Surendranath, who had
stayed behind to settle some business affairs, and Jimmy and Danny, who had been acting as their
bodyguards. One by one these men clambered up the pilot’s ladder and joined their brethren on
the upperdeck. Moseh and Surendranath went back into van Hoek’s wardroom to confer with the
captain and
the other chief men of the enterprise. Jack could have participated
in this meeting but declined to because he could tell from the look on Moseh’s face that it
had all gone more or less well, and that their next voyage would be eastbound.

This was the innermost harbor of Manila Bay: a hammock-shaped anchorage slung
between two points of land several miles apart, each of which had been built up into a fortress by
the Spaniards, or rather by their Tagalian minions, during the century and a half that they had held
sway over these islands. The closer of the two forts, just off their starboard, was Cavite: a
conventional square, four-bastioned castle thrust out into the water on a slender neck of land, so
that the bay served as its moat. A ditch had been dug across that neck so that the landward approach
could be controlled by a drawbridge. This ditch was situated at some distance from the castle
proper, and the intervening space had been covered with buildings: a crowd of cane houses with more
substantial wood-frame dwellings rising out of it from place to place, and three stone churches that
had been erected, or were being erected, by various Popish religious orders.

The opposite end of the harbor was the city of Manila proper. The Spaniards had
taken a small peninsula framed on one side by the Bay and on two others by rivers: the Pasig, and a
welter of pissant tributaries that joined the Pasig just short of where it emptied into the Bay.
They had enclosed this peninsula in a modern sort of slope-sided wall, a couple of miles in circuit,
and erected noble bulwarks and demilunes at its corners, rendering it impregnable to land assault by
Dutch, Chinese, or native legions. The outlet of the Pasig was dominated by a considerable fortress
whose guns commanded the river, the Bay, and certain troublesome ethnic
barangays
across the river.

From this point of view—or any point of view, for that matter—it did not
look like a fabled citadel of inconceivable wealth. If the Spaniards had built Manila anywhere else,
her church-spires and watch-towers would have reached into the clouds. As it was, even the noblest
buildings hugged the ground and had a stoop-shouldered look about them, because they had learned the
hard way that anything more than two storeys high, and built of stone, would be brought down by an
earthquake while the mortar was scarcely dry. So as Jack stood there on
Minerva
’s deck he perceived Manila as something very dark, low, and heavy, and
overlaid with smoke and humidity, softened only a little by the high coconut palms that lined her
shore.

This was just the sort of weather that culminated in a bracing
thunder-shower—a fact
Minerva
’s crew knew well, for Manila
had been their home port for most of the three years since the ship had made her maiden voyage out
of Malabar, and at any rate half the crew had grown up along the shores of this bay. They also knew
that this bay offered no protection from north winds, and that a big ship like
Minerva
would be cast away if she were caught between Cavite and Manila when the wind
shifted round that way; she would run a-ground in the shallows and fall prey to Tagalians who would
come out in their tree-trunk boats and Chinese
sangleys
who would come
out in their sampans to salvage her. So instead of being boisterous, as one might reasonably expect
of sailors who’d just made a perilous and improbable voyage to Japan and back, they were
solemn as monks on Sunday, and angrily shushed anyone who raised his voice. Malabaris had suspended
themselves in the ratlines like spiders in webs and were hanging there motionless with eyes half
closed and mouths half open, waiting for meaningful stirrings in the air.

The sky and air were all white, and of a uniform brightness, so that it was
impossible to get even a general notion of where the sun might be. According to the hour-glasses
they used to keep track of watches, it must be an hour or so before sunset. The whole bay was as
still and hushed as
Minerva
’s upperdeck; the only noise,
therefore, came from the vast shipyard that spread along the shore below the sullen arsenal of
Cavite. There five hundred Filipino slaves were at work under the whips and guns of helmeted
Spaniards, constructing the largest ship Jack had ever seen. Which, considering the places he had
been, meant that it was very likely the largest ship the world had seen since Noah’s Ark had
run a-ground on a mountain-top and been broken up for firewood.

Piled on the shore in pyramids were the stripped boles of giant trees that these
Filipinos, or others in the same predicament, had cut down in the bat-infested jungles that crowded
in along the shores of Laguna de Bay (a great lake just inland of Manila) and floated in rafts down
the Pasig. Some of the workers were cutting these into beams and planks. But the great ship was
close to being finished and so the demand for huge timbers was not what it had been months ago when
the keel and frames had stood out like stiff fingers against the sky. Most of the laborers were
concerned with finer matters now: making cables (indeed, Manila made the finest cordage in the
world), caulking joints between hull-planks, and doing finish carpentry on the cabins where the most
ambitious merchants of the South Seas would dwell for most of the next year, or drown within weeks,
depending on how it went.

“Dad, either my eyes play tricks, or else you’ve finally traded in that
Mahometan spadroon for
proper
armaments,” said Daniel Shaftoe,
eyeing the
katana
and
wakizashi
of Gabriel
Goto, thrust into Jack’s belt.

“I’ve been trying to grow accustomed to ’em,” Jack allowed,
“but it’s all for naught. One-handed is how I learned to fight, and it’s all
I’ll ever know. I wear these to honor Goto-san, but when next I venture into some place where
I might need to do some
defensing,
it’s the Janissary-sword
I’ll be wearing.”

“Aw, it ain’t that hard, Dad,” said Jimmy, coming up to shoulder
past his brother. “By the time we reach Acapulco we’ll have you swingin’ that
katana
like a Samurai.” Jimmy patted the hilt of a Japanese sword,
and now Jack noticed that Danny was armed in the same manner.

“Been broadening your horizons?”

“Manila is better than the
’varsity,
”
Danny proclaimed, “as long as you remain a step ahead o’ that pesky
Spanish Inquisition
…”

“From the fact that Moseh is still alive, and has all his fingernails,
I’m guessing you succeeded there.”

“We fulfilled our obligations,” Jimmy said hotly. “We took
lodgings on the edge of the
barangay
of the Japanese
Christians—”

“—an orderly place—” Danny offered

“Perhaps a bit
too
orderly,” Jimmy said.
“But we were hard up against the wicker walls of the
sangley
neighborhood, which is a perpetual riot, and so whenever the Inquisitors came after us we withdrew
into that place for a while, and kept a sharp eye on one another’s backs until such time as
Moseh could settle the matter.”

“I did not appreciate that Moseh had any such influence with the Sons of
Torquemada,” Jack said.

“Moseh has let it be known, to a few of the Spaniards, what we are
planning,” said Danny. “Suddenly those Spaniards are our friends.”

“They call off the Inquisitor’s dogs whenever Moseh lets out a
squawk,” Jimmy said airily.

“I wonder what their friendship will cost us,” Jack said.

“They’d be more expensive as enemies, Dad,” Danny said, and in his
voice was a confidence that Jack had not felt about anything in about twenty years.

The teak deck was changing color from a weathered iron-gray to a warmer hue, almost
as if a fire had been kindled belowdecks and was trying to burn its way through. Jack looked away
toward the exit of the bay, and saw the cause: The sun, now a hand’s breath above the horizon,
had bored a hole through the miasma of vapor over the bay. Wisps and banks that still lurked in
pockets of shade and stagnant
coves round the foundations of the arsenal were
fleeing from its sudden heat like smoke driven before a gust. For all that, the air was still. But a
faint rumble prompted Jack to turn around and look east. Manila stood out in the clear now, her
walls and bastions glowing in the sunlight as if they had been hewn out of amber and lit from behind
by fire. The mountains behind the city were visible, which was a rare event. By comparison with
them, the highest works of the Spaniards were low and flat as paving-stones. But those mountains in
turn were humbled by phantasmic interlocking cloud-formations that were incarnating themselves in
the limitless skies above, somewhat as if the personages and beasts of the Constellations had become
fed up with being depicted in scatterings of faint stars, and had decided to come down out of the
cosmos and clothe themselves in the stuff of typhoons. But they seemed to be having a dispute as to
which would claim the most gorgeous and brilliant vapors, and the argument showed every sign of
becoming a violent one. No lightning had struck the ground yet, and the cataracts of rain shed by
some clouds were swallowed by others before they descended to the plane of the mountain-tops.

Jack altered his focus to the yards of
Minerva,
which
compared to all of this were like broom-straws tangled together in a gutter. The men of the current
watch were quietly making ready to be hit. Below, the head men of what had formerly been the Cabal
had emerged from van Hoek’s cabin and were moving forward. Some of them, such as Dappa and
Monsieur Arlanc, had gone to the trouble of changing into gentlemanly clothes: breeches, hose, and
leather shoes had been broken out of foot-lockers. Vrej Esphahnian and van Hoek were wearing actual
periwigs and tri-cornered hats.

Van Hoek stopped just in front of the mainmast, at the edge of the quarterdeck,
which loomed above the broadest part of the upperdeck like a balcony over a plaza. Most of the
ship’s complement had gathered there, and those who couldn’t find room, or who were too
short to see over their fellows’ heads, had ascended to the forecastledeck whence they could
look aft and meet van Hoek’s eye from the same level. The sailors had grouped themselves
according to color so that they could hear translations: the largest two groups were the Malabaris
and the Filipinos, but there were Malays, Chinese, several Africans from Mozambique by way of Goa,
and a few Gujaratis. Several of the ship’s officers were Dutchmen who had come out with Jan
Vroom. To look after the cannons they had rounded up a French, a Bavarian, and a Venetian
artilleryman from the rabble of mercenaries that hung around Shahjahanabad. Finally there were the
surviving members of the Cabal: van Hoek, Dappa,
Monsieur Arlanc, Padraig
Tallow, Jack Shaftoe, Moseh de la Cruz, Vrej Esphahnian, and Surendranath. When Jimmy and Danny
Shaftoe were added, the number came to a hundred and five. Of these, some twenty were active in the
rigging, readying the ship for weather.

Jack ascended the stairs to the quarterdeck and took up a position behind van Hoek,
among the other share-holders. As he turned round to look out over the upperdeck—facing in the
general direction of Manila—one of those constellation-gods in the sky above the city, furious
because he had ended up in possession of nothing more than a few shredded rags of dim gray-indigo
stuff, flung a thunderbolt horizontally into the mid-section of a rival, who was dressed in
incandescent coral and green satin. The distance between them must have been twenty miles. It seemed
as if a sudden crack had spanned a quarter of Heaven’s vault, allowing infinitely more
brilliant light to shine through it, for an instant, from some extremely well-illuminated realm
beyond the known universe. It was just as well that the crew were facing the other way—though
some of them noticed startled expressions on the faces of the worthies on the quarterdeck, and
swiveled their heads to see what was the matter. They saw nothing except a blade of rain sinking
into the black jungle beyond Manila.