The Confusion (86 page)

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.”

T
HE 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.”