LATE APRIL 1684
LEAVING LEIPZIG WITH THE DOCTOR did not happen at any one particular moment—it was a ceremonial procession that extended over a day. Even after Jack and Eliza and Turk the Horse had located the Doctor’s entourage, several hours of wandering around the town still awaited them: there was a mysterious call at the von Hacklheber factory, and a stop at the Nicolaikirche so that the Doctor could make devotions and take communion, and then it was over to the University (which like all else in Leipzig was small and serious as a pocket-pistol), where the Doctor simply sat in his carriage for half an hour, chatting with Eliza in French, which was the language he preferred for anything of a high-flown nature. Jack, restlessly circling the carriage—which was chocolate-brown, and painted all over with flowers—put his ear to the window once and heard them talking about some noble lady named Sophie, a second time, a few minutes later, it was dressmaking, then Catholic vs. Lutheran views on transubstantiation…Finally Jack pulled the door open. “Pardon the interruption, but I had a notion to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, crawling there and back on my hands and knees, and wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t delay our departure…”
“Ssh! The Doctor’s trying to make a very difficult decision,” Eliza said.
“Just make it—that’s what I say—doesn’t get easier if you think about it,” Jack advised. The Doctor had a manuscript on his lap, and a quill poised above it, a trembling drop of ink ready to break loose, but his hand would not move. His head teetered and tottered through a ponderous arc (or maybe it was the wig that magnified all movements) as he read the same extract over and over, under his breath, each time adopting a different sequence of facial expressions and emphasizing different words, like an actor trying to make sense of some ambiguous verse: should this be read as a jaded pedant? A dim schoolmaster? A skeptical Jesuit? But since the words had been written by the Doctor himself, that couldn’t be it—he was trying to imagine how the words would be received by different sorts of readers.
“Would you like to read it out loud, or—”
“It is in Latin,” Eliza said.
More waiting. Then: “Well, what is the decision that wants making?”
“Whether or not to heave it over the transom of yonder doorway,” Eliza said, pointing to the front of one of those Leipziger houses-that-weren’t-houses.
“What’s it say on that door?”
“Acta Eruditorum—it is a journal that the Doctor founded two years ago.”
“I don’t know what a journal is.”
“Like a gazette for savants.”
“Oh, so that stack of papers is something he wants to have printed?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if he founded it, it’s his journal, so why’s he got leeches in his breeches?”
“Ssh! All the savants of Europe will read the words on that page—they must be perfect.”
“Then why doesn’t he take it with him and work on it some more? This is no place to make anything perfect.”
“It has been finished for years,” the Doctor said, sounding unusually sad. “The decision: should I publish it at all?”
“Is it a good yarn?”
“It is not a narrative. It is a mathematical technique so advanced that only two people in the world understand it,” the Doctor said. “When published, it will bring about enormous changes in not only mathematics, but all forms of natural philosophy and engineering. People will use it to build machines that fly through the air like birds, and that travel to other planets, and its very power and brilliance will sweep old, tottering, worn-out systems of thought into the dustbin.”
“And you invented it, Doctor?” Eliza asked, as Jack was occupied making finger-twirling movements in the vicinity of his ear.
“Yes—seven or eight years ago.”
“And still no one knows about it, besides—”
“Me, and the other fellow.”
“Why haven’t you told the world about it?”
“Because it seems the other fellow invented it ten years before I did, and didn’t tell anyone.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve been waiting for him to say something. But it’s been almost twenty years since he did it, and he doesn’t show the slightest inclination to let anyone else in on it.”
“You’ve waited eight years—why today? It’s well after midday,” Jack said. “Take it with you—give it another two or three years’ thought.”
“Why today? Because I do not believe God put me on this earth, and gave me either the best or second-best mind currently in existence, so that I could spend my days trying to beg money from the likes of Lothar von Hacklheber, so that I could dig a large hole in the ground,” the Doctor said. “I don’t want my epitaph to be, ‘He brought the price of silver down one-tenth of one percent.’”
“Right! Sounds like a decision to me,” Jack said. Reaching into the carriage he gathered up the manuscript, carried it up the walk to the door in question, and heaved it through the transom. “And now, off to the mountains!”
“One more small errand in the Booksellers’ Quarter,” the Doctor said, “as long as I’m getting myself into trouble.”
THE BOOKSELLERS’ QUARTER LOOKED AND worked like the rest of Leipzig except all the goods were books: they tumbled out of casks, rose in unsteady stacks, or were arranged into blocks that were wrapped and tied and then stacked into larger blocks. Bent porters carried them around in hods and back-baskets. The Doctor, never one to accomplish anything in a hurry, devoted several minutes to arranging his carriage and escort-train before the widest and clearest of the Book-Fair’s exits. In particular he wondered if Jack wouldn’t mind mounting Turk and (for lack of a better word) posing between the booksellers and the carriage. Jack did so, and was reasonably merry about it, having given up any hope that they’d escape the city before nightfall.
The Doctor squared his shoulders, adjusted numerous subsystems of clothing (today he wore a coat embroidered with flowers, just like the ones painted on his carriage), and walked into the Book-Fair. Jack couldn’t see him any more, but he could hear him. Not his voice, actually, but rather the effect that the Doctor’s appearance had on the overall sound of the fair. As when a handful of salt is thrown into a pot that’s about to boil: a hush, then a deep steady building.
The Doctor came running. He moved well for a man on high heels. He was pursued by the booksellers of* Königsberg, Basel, Rostock, Kiel, Florence, Strasbourg, Edinburgh, Düsseldorf, Copenhagen, Antwerp, Seville, Paris, and Danzig, with a second echelon not far behind. The Doctor made it past Jack well before any of them. The sight of a mounted man with a heathen saber brought them to a jagged halt. They contented themselves after that with flinging books: any book that was handy. They gang-tackled porters, molested promotional displays, kicked over casks to get ammunition, and the air above and around Jack grew rather dark with books, as when a flock passes overhead. They fell open on cobblestones and spilled out their illustrative woodcuts: portraits of great men, depictions of the Siege of Vienna, diagrams of mining-engines, a map of some Italian city, a dissection of the large bowel, vast tables of numbers, musketeer drills, geometers’ proofs, human skeletons in insouciant poses, the constellations of the Zodiac, rigging of foreign barkentines, design of alchemical furnaces, glaring Hottentots with bones in their noses, thirty flavors of Baroque window-frames. This entire scene was carried out with very little bellowing, as if ejection of the Doctor was a routine matter for the booksellers. At the crack of the coachman’s whip, they made a few desultory final heaves and then turned back to resume whatever conversations the Doctor had interrupted. Jack for his part adopted a ceremonial rear-guard position behind the Doctor’s baggage-cart (inadvertently laden, now, with a few random books). The brittle sparking impacts of horse-shoes and wheel-rims against cobblestones were like heavenly chimes to his Vagabond-ears.
HE COULD NOT GET AN explanation until hours later, when they had put Leipzig’s north gate a few miles behind them, and stopped at an inn on the road to Halle. By this time Eliza had been thoroughly saturated with the Doctor’s view of events as well as his gloomy and resentful mood. She stayed in the Ladies’ Bedchamber, he stayed in the Men’s, they met in the Common-Room. “He was born in Leipzig—educated himself in Leipzig—went to school in Leipzig—”
“Why’d he go to school if he educated himself? Which is it?” “Both. His father was a professor who died when he was very young—so he taught himself Latin at the same age when you were hanging from dead men’s legs.”
“That’s funny—you know, I tried to teach myself Latin, but what with the Black Death, the Fire, et cetera…”
“In lieu of having a father, he read his father’s library—then went to school. And you saw for yourself how they treated him.”
“Perhaps they had an excellent reason,” Jack said—he was bored, and getting Eliza steamed up would be as good an entertainment as any.
“There is no reason for you to be gnawing at the Doctor’s ankles,” Eliza said. “He is one of that sort of man who forms very profound friendships with members of the gentler sex.”
“I saw what sort of friendship he had with you when he was pointing out your gentle bosom to Lothar von Hacklheber,” Jack returned.
“There was probably a reason—the Doctor is a tapestry of many threads.”
“Which thread brought him to the Book-Fair?”
“For some years he and Sophie have been trying to persuade the Emperor in Vienna to establish a grand library and academy for the entire Empire.”
“Who is Sophie?”
“Another one of the Doctor’s woman friends.”
“What fair did he pick her up at?”
Eliza arched her eyebrows, leaned forward, and spoke in a whisper that could etch glass: “Don’t speak of her that way—Sophie is none other than the daughter of the Winter Queen herself. She is the Duchess of Hanover!”
“Jeezus. How’d a man like the Doctor end up in such company?”
“Sophie inherited the Doctor when her brother-in-law died.”
“What do you mean by that? Is he a slave?”
“He is a librarian. Sophie’s brother-in-law hired him in that capacity, and when he died, Sophie inherited the library, and the Doctor along with it.”
“But that’s not good enough—the Doctor has ambitions—he wants to be the Emperor’s librarian?”
“As it is now, a savant in Leipzig may never become aware of a book that’s been published in Mainz, and so the world of letters is fragmented and incoherent—not like in England, where all the savants know each other and belong to the same Society.”
“What!? A Doctor here wants to make things more like England?”
“The Doctor proposed to the Emperor that a new decree be drawn up, ordering that all booksellers at the Leipzig and Frankfurt fairs must write up a description of every book they publish, and send these, along with copies of each book, to—”
“Let me guess—to the Doctor?”
“Yes. And then he would make them all part of some vast, hard-to-understand thing he wants to build—he couldn’t restrain himself from breaking into Latin here, so I don’t know exactly—part library, part academy, part machine.”
“Machine?” Jack was imagining a mill-wheel assembled from books.
But they were interrupted by ribald, helpless, snorting laughter from the corner of the Common-Room, where the Doctor himself was sitting on a stool, reading (as they saw when they came over and joined him) one of the hurled books that had lodged in the baggage-cart. As usual their progress across the room, or to be specific Eliza’s, was carefully tracked by lonely merchants whose eyeballs were practically growing out of their heads on stalks. Jack had at first been surprised, and was now growingly annoyed, that other men were capable of noticing Eliza’s beauty—he suspected that they did so in some base way altogether different from how he did it.
“I love reading novels,” the Doctor exclaimed. “You can understand them without thinking too much.”
“But I thought you were a philosopher,” Eliza said, apparently having waxed close enough to him now that she could get away with teasing and pouting maneuvers.
“But when philosophizing, one’s mind follows its natural inclination—gaining profit along with pleasure—whereas following another philosopher’s meditations is like stumbling through a mine dug by others—hard work in a cold dark place, and painful if you want to zig where they decided to zag. But this—” holding up the book “—you can read without stopping.”
“What’s the story about?”
“Oh, all these novels are the same—they are about picaroons—that means a sort of rogue or scoundrel—could be male or female—they move about from city to city like Vagabonds (than whom, however, they are much more clever and resourceful)—getting into hilarious scrapes and making fools—or trying to—out of Dukes, Bishops, Generals, and
“…Doctors.”
Lengthy silence, then, followed by Jack saying, “Errr…is this the chapter where I’m supposed to draw my weapon?”
“Oh, stop!” the Doctor said. “I didn’t bring you all this way to have an imbroglio.”
“Why, then?” Jack asked—quickly, as Eliza was still so red-faced he didn’t think it would be clever or resourceful to give her a chance to speak.
“For the same reason that Eliza sacrified some of your silk to make some dresses, and thereby fetched a higher price. I need to draw some attention to the mine project—make it seem exciting—fashionable even—so that people will at least think about investing.”
“I’m guessing, then,” Jack said, “that my role will be to hide behind a large piece of furniture and not emerge until all rich fashionable persons have departed?”
“I gratefully accept your proposal,” the Doctor said. “Meanwhile, Eliza—well—have you ever seen how mountebanks ply their trade in Paris? No matter what they are selling, they always have an accomplice in the crowd, attired like the intended victims—”
“That means, like an ignorant peasant,” Jack informed Eliza. “And at first this accomplice seems to be the most skeptical person in the whole crowd—asking difficult questions and mocking the entire proceedings—but as it continues he is conspicuously won over, and gladly makes the first purchase of whatever the mountebank is selling—”
“Kuxen, in this case?” Eliza said.
The Doctor: “Yes—and in this case the audience will be made up of Hacklhebers, wealthy merchants of Mainz, Lyons bankers, Amsterdam money-market speculators—in sum, wealthy and fashionable persons from all over Christendom.”
Jack made a mental note to find out what a money-market speculator was. Looking at Eliza, he found her looking right back at him, and reckoned that she was thinking the same thing. Then the Doctor distracted her with: “In order to blend in with that crowd, Eliza, we shall only have to find some way to make you seem half as intelligent as you really are, and to dim your natural radiance so that they’ll not be blinded by awe or jealousy.”
“Oh, Doctor,” Eliza said, “why is it that men who desire women can never speak such words?”
“You’ve only been in the presence of men who are in the presence of you, Eliza,” Jack said, “and how can they pronounce fine words when the heads of their yards are lodged in their mouths?”
The Doctor laughed, much as he’d been doing earlier.
“What’s your excuse, Jack?” Eliza responded, eliciting some sort of violent thoracic Incident in the Doctor.
Tears of joy came to Jack’s eyes. “Thank God women have no way to rid themselves of the yellow bile,” he said.
At this same inn they joined up with a train of small but masty ore-wagons carrying goods that the Doctor had acquired at Leipzig and sent on ahead to wait for them. Some of these were laden with saltpeter from India, others with brimstone from the Ore Range.* The others—though laden only with a few small crates—sagged and screeched like infidels on the Rack. Peering between the boards of same, Jack could see that they contained small earthenware flasks packed in straw. He asked a teamster what was in them: “Quecksilber” was the answer.
Mammon led them on,
Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell
From heav’n, for ev’n in heav’n his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heav’ns pavement, trod’n Gold,
Then aught divine or holy else enjoy’d
In vision beatific; by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransack’d the Center, and with impious hands
Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth
For Treasures better hid.
—MILTON, Paradise Lost
THE ENTIRE TRAIN, amounting to some two dozen wagons, proceeded west through Halle and other cities in the Saxon plain. Giant stone towers with dunce-cap rooves had been raised over city gates so that the burghers could see armies or Vagabond-hordes approaching in time to do something about it. A few days past Halle, the ground finally started to rise up out of that plain and (like one of the Doctor’s philosophical books) to channel them this way and that, making them go ways they were not especially inclined to. It was a slow change, but one morning they woke up and it was no longer disputable that they were in a valley, the most beautiful golden valley Jack had ever seen, all pale green with April’s first shoots, thickly dotted with haystacks even after cattle had been reducing them all winter long. Broad fells rose gently but steadily from this valley and developed, at length, into shapes colder and more mountainous—ramps built by giants, leading upwards to mysterious culminations. The highest ridge-lines were indented with black shapes, mostly trees; but the Saxons had not been slow to construct watch-towers on those heights that commanded the most sweeping views. Jack couldn’t help speculating as to what they were all waiting for. Or perhaps they sparked fires in them at night to speed strange information over the heads of sleeping farmers. They passed a placid lake with what had been a brown stone castle avalanching into it; wind came up and raised goose-bumps on the water, destroying the reflection.
Eliza and the Doctor mostly shared the coach, she amending her dresses according to what he claimed was now in fashion, and he writing letters or reading picaroon-novels. It seemed that Sophie’s daughter, Sophie Charlotte, was fixing to marry the Elector of Brandenburg later this year, and the trousseau was being imported direct from Paris, and this gave occasion for them to talk about clothing for days. Sometimes Eliza would ride in the seat atop the carriage if the weather was fine, giving the teamsters reason to live another day. Sometimes Jack would give Turk a rest by walking alongside, or riding on, or in, the coach.
The Doctor was always doing something—sketching fantastic machines, writing letters, scratching out pyramids of ones and zeroes and rearranging them according to some set of contrived rules.
“What’re you doing there, Doc?” Jack asked one time, just trying to be sociable.
“Making some improvements to my Theory of Matter,” the Doctor said distantly, and then said no more for three hours, at which time he announced to the driver that he had to piss.
Jack tried to talk to Eliza instead. She’d been rather sulky since the conversation at the Inn. “Why is it you’ll perform intimate procedures on one end of me, but you won’t kiss the other end?” he asked one evening when she returned his affections with eye-rolling.
“I’m losing blood—the humour of passion—what do you expect?”
“Do you mean that in the normal monthly sense, or—”
“More than usual this month—besides I only kiss people who care about me.”
“Aw, whatever made you think otherwise?”
“You know almost nothing about me. So any fond emotions you might have, proceed from lust alone.”
“Well, whose fault is that, then? I asked you, months ago, to tell me how you got from Barbary to Vienna.”
“You did? I remember no such thing.”
“Well, p’r’aps it’s just the French Pox going to my brain, lass, but I clearly remember—you gave it a few days’ profound thought, hardly speaking, and then said, ‘I don’t wish to reveal that.’”
“You haven’t asked me recently.”
“Eliza, how’d you get from Barbary to Vienna?”
“Some parts of the story are too sad for me to tell, others too tedious to hear—suffice it to say, that when I reached an age that a horny Moor construes as adulthood, I came, in their minds, to bear the same relationship to my mother as a dividend does to a joint stock corporation—viz. a new piece of wealth created out of the normal functioning of the old. I was liquidated.”
“What?”
“Tendered to a Vizier in Constantinople as part of a trade, no different from the trades that sustain the City of Leipzig—you see, a person can also be rendered into a few drops of mercury, and combine with the mysterious international flow of that substance.”
“What’d that Vizier have to pay for you? Just curious.”
“As of two years ago the price of one me, in the Mediterranean market, was a single horse, a bit slimmer and faster than the one you’ve been riding around on.”
“Seems, er…well, any price would seem too low, of course—but even so—for Christ’s sake…”
“But you’re forgetting that Turk’s an uncommon steed—a bit past his prime, to be sure, and worn round the edges—but, what matters, capable of fathering others.”
“Ah…so the horse that paid for you was a thoroughbred stallion.”
“A strange-looking Arab. I saw it on the docks. It was perfectly white, except for the hooves of course, and its eyes were pink.”
“The Berbers are breeders of racehorses?”
“Through the network of the Society of Britannic Abductees, I learned that this stallion was bound, eventually, for la France. Someone there is connected to the Barbary pirates—I assume it is the same person who caused me and my mother to be made slaves. Because of that man I shall never see Mum again, for she had a cancer when I left her in Barbary. I will find that man and kill him someday.”
Jack counted silently to ten, then said: “Oh, hell, I’ll do it. I’m going to die of the French Pox anyway.”
“First you have to explain to him why you’re doing it.”
“Fine, I’ll try to plan in an extra few hours—”
“It shouldn’t take that long.”
“No?”
“Why would you kill him, Jack?”
“Well, there was your abduction from Qwghlm—perverse goings-on in the ship—years of slavery—forcible separation from an ailing—”
“No, no! That’s why I want to kill him. Why do you?”
“Same reason.”
“But many are involved in the slave trade—will you kill all of them?”
“No, just—oh, I get it—I want to kill this evil man, whoever he is, because of my fierce eternal pure love for you, my own Eliza.”
She did not swoon, but she did get a look on her face that said This conversation is over, which Jack took as a sign he was going in the right direction.
Finally, after a couple of days of skirting and dodging, the Doctor gave the word and they turned north and began straightforwardly ascending into what had plainly become a mountain range. At first this was a grassy rampart. Then strange dark hummocks began to pock the fields. At the same time, they began frequently to see pairs of men turning windlasses, like the ones mounted above wells, but this equipment was stouter and grimier, and it brought up not buckets of water but iron baskets filled with black rock. Jack and Eliza had seen it before at Joachimsthal and knew that the dark mounds were the fœces left behind when the metal (copper here) had been smelted out of the ore. Germans called it schlock. When they were wet with rain (which was frequently, now), the schlock-heaps glistened and gave back light tinged blue or purple. Men collected the ore from the hand-haspels (as the winches were called) into wheelbarrows and staggered behind them, among schlock-piles, to smoking furnaces tended and stirred by coal-smeared men.
Several times they entered into wooded valleys full of smoke, and followed the traces of dragged logs across the ground until they came to gunpowder-mills. Here, tall whip-thin trees, the trunks hairy with miserable scrawny branches,* were cut and burnt endlessly until they became charcoal. This was taken to a water-powered mill to be ground to dust and mixed with the other ingredients. Men came out of these mills looking all drawn and nervous from never really knowing when they’d be blown up, and the Doctor supplied them with brimstone and saltpeter from the wagons. Teaching Jack that wars, like great rivers, had their well-springs in numerous high remote valleys.
Eliza was beginning to see some of the enormous trees of Mum’s færy-tales, though many had blown down and could be viewed only as fists of roots thrust into the air still clutching final handfuls of dirt. The air up here was not still for a moment—it was never rainy, cloudy, or sunny for more than a quarter of an hour at a time—but when they were out of those smoky valleys, it was cold and clear. Their progress was slow, but one time the sky cleared as they came through an open place in the woods (it was clear that Harz was a rock and the forest no more substantial than the film of hop-vines that sometimes grew on an ancient schlock-heap), and then it was obvious that they’d risen to a great height above the plains and valleys. Those schlock-heaps like cowls of robed men in a procession. Patrols of black vultures chased and swirled about one another like ashes ascending a flue. Here and there a tower braced itself on a mountain-top or a conspiracy of trees huddled. Crows raided distant fields for the farmers’ seed-corn, and flocks of silver birds wheeled and drilled for some unvoiced purpose on invisible breezes.
So the Doctor decided to cheer them up by taking them down into an old abandoned copper mine.
“Sophie was the first woman to enter a mine,” he said helpfully. “You, Eliza, might be the second.”
This mine’s vein (or the vein-shaped cavity where the vein had once been) was close to the surface and so there was no need to descend numerous ladders in some deep shaft: they pulled up before an old semi-collapsed building, rummaged in a skewed cabinet for lights, sledded down a ramp where once a short staircase had been, and there they were in a tunnel as high as Jack’s head and an arm’s length wide. Their lights were called kienspans: splits of dry resinous wood about the dimensions of a rapier blade, dipped in some kind of wax or pitch, which burnt enthusiastically, and looked like the flame-swords wielded by Biblical standouts. By this means, they could see that the mine-tunnel was lined with logs and timbers: a hefty post-and-beam lintel every couple of yards, and many horizontal logs, as thick as a person’s thigh, laid parallel down the tunnel so as to join each post-and-lintel with the ones before and after it. In this way a long tubular wooden cage was formed, not to keep them in (though it did) but to protect them from a stalled avalanche of loose rubble pressing in from all sides.
The Doctor led them down this tunnel—the entrance quickly lost from view. Frequently, side-tunnels took off to one side or another, but these came up only to mid-thigh on Jack and there was no question of entering them.
Or so he thought until the Doctor stopped before one. The floor all around was strewn with curiously wrought planks, half-moon-shaped pieces of ox-hide, and tabular chunks of black rock. “There is a wonder at the end of this tunnel—no more than half a dozen fathoms back—which you must see.”
Jack took it for a joke until Eliza agreed to scurry down the tunnel without hesitation—which meant that according to Rules that applied even to Vagabonds, Jack had to do it first, in order to scout for danger. The Doctor told him that the pieces of ox-hide were called arsch-leders, which was self-explanatory, so Jack put one on. The Doctor then demonstrated the use of the planks, which miners used to protect elbows and forearms from the stony floor when creeping along on their sides. All of this settled, Jack lay down on the floor and crept into it, wielding the plank with one arm and the kienspan with the other. He found it reasonably easy going as long as he didn’t think about…well, about anything.
The kienspan, lunging ahead of him, shed sparks against the end of the tunnel and dazzled him. When his vision settled he found that he was sharing a confined space with a giant black bird—or something—like the ostrich—but with no wings—pawing at the ore, or maybe at Jack’s face, with talons bigger than fingers—its long bony neck twisted round almost into a knot, an arrowhead of a skull at the end, jaws open with such…big…teeth…
He only screamed once. Twice, actually, but number two didn’t count because it came from smashing his head on the ceiling in a poorly thought-out bid to stand up. He scurried back a couple of fathoms, working on blind fear and pain, stopped, listened, heard nothing but his heart.
Of course it was dead—it was all bones. And the Doctor might be a human oddity in several respects, but he wouldn’t send Jack into a monster’s lair. Jack retreated slowly, trying not to make his head ache any worse. He could hear the Doctor talking to Eliza: “There are shells scattered upon the mountains! See, this rock has a grain like wood—you can split it into layers—and look at what’s between the strata! This creature must’ve been buried in mud—probably the fine dirt that rivers carry—smashed flat, as you can see—its body decomposed leaving a void, later filled in by some other sort of rock—as sculptors cast bronze statues in plaster molds.”
“Where do you get this stuff? Who told you that one?” Jack demanded, a bloody head popping out between their feet, looking up at them.
“I reasoned it out myself,” said the Doctor. “Someone has to come up with new ideas.”
Jack rolled over on his belly to find the floor loosely paved with rock-slabs bearing imprints of sundry other Book-of-Revelation fauna. “What river carried this supposed dirt? We’re in the middle of a mountain of rock. There is no river,” Jack informed the Doctor, after they had gotten Eliza on her way down the tunnel. Jack waited with her traveling-dress slung over his arm while she inched down the tunnel in her knickers and an arsch-leder.
“But there used to be,” the Doctor said, “Just as there used to be such creatures—” playing his light over impressions of fish with fins too many and jaws too big, swimming creatures shaped like grappling-hooks, dragonflies the size of crossbow-bolts.
“A river in a mountain? I don’t think so.”
“Then where did the shells come from?”
FINALLY THEY TRAVELED to the rounded top of a mountain where an old stone tower stood, flanked by schlock-heaps instead of bastions. A half-wit could see that the Doctor had been at work here. Rising from the top of the tower was a curious windmill, spinning round sideways like a top instead of rolling like a wheel, so that it didn’t have to turn its face into the wind. The base of the tower was protected by an old-fashioned stone curtain-wall that had been repaired recently (they were afraid of being attacked by people who, however, did not have modern artillery). Likewise the gate was new, and it was bolted. A musket-toting engineer opened it for them as soon as the Doctor announced himself, and wasted no time bolting it behind them.
The tower itself was not a fit place for people to lodge. The Doctor gave Eliza a room in an adjoining house. Jack put the fear of God into all the rats he could find in her room, then climbed the stone stair that spiraled* up the inside of the tower. The tower did its part by moaning in wind-gusts like an empty jug when an idler blows over the top. From the windmill at the top a shaft, consisting of tree-trunks linked one to the next with collars and fittings hammered out of iron, dropped through the center of the tower to an engineering works on the dirt floor. The floor, then, was pierced by a large hole that was obviously the mouth of a mine-shaft. An endless chain of buckets had been rigged so that the windmill’s power raised them up from the shaft laden with water. As they went round a giant pulley they emptied into a long wooden tray: a mill-race that carried the water out through a small arched portal in the tower wall. Then the empty buckets dove back into the shaft for another go-round. In this way water was drained away from some deep part of the mines that would normally be flooded. But up here, the water was a good thing to have. After gathering a bit of head in a system of trenches outside, it powered small mill-wheels that ran bellows and trip-hammers for the smiths, and finally collected in cisterns.
Up top, Jack, who’d wisely spent some of their profits on warm clothes, had a view over a few days’ journey in every direction. The mountains (excepting one big one to the north) were not of the craggy sort, but swelling round-topped things separated by bottomless cleavages. The woods were dappled—partly leaf-trees with pale spring growth and partly needle-trees that were almost black. Here and there, pools of pasture-land lay on south-facing slopes, and of snow on north-facing ones. Villages, with their red tile rooves, were strewn about unevenly, like blood-spatters. There was a big one just below, in the gorge that divided this mountain from an even higher one to the north: a bald crag whose summit was crowned with a curious arrangement of long stones. Clouds whipped overhead, as fast and furious as the Winged Hussars, and this made Jack feel as if the tower were eternally toppling. The strangely curved blades of the Doctor’s windmill hummed over his head like poorly aimed scimitar-cuts.
“JUST A MINUTE, DOCTOR—with all due respect—you’ve replaced miners-on-treadwheels with a windmill to pump out the water—but what happens when the wind stops blowing? The water floods back in? Miners are drowned?”
“No, they simply follow the old underground drainage channel, using small ore-boats.”
“And how do these miners feel about being replaced by machines, Doctor?”
“The increase in productivity should more than—”
“How easy would it be to slip a sabot off one’s foot and ‘accidentally’ let it fall into the gears—”
“Err…maybe I’ll post guards to prevent any such sabotage.”
“Maybe? What will these guards cost? Where will they be housed?”
“Eliza—please—if I may just interrupt the rehearsal,” the Doctor said, “don’t do this job too well, I beg of you—avoid saying anything that will make a lasting impression on the, er, audience…”
“But I thought the whole idea was to—”
“Yes, yes—but remember drinks will be served—suppose some possible investor feels the need to step out and relieve himself at the climax of the performance, when the scales fall from your eyes and you see that this is, after all, a brilliant opportunity—”
Thus the rehearsal. Eliza performed semi-reclining on a couch, looking pale. Crawling down that cold tunnel probably had not been a good idea for one in her delicate state. It occurred to Jack that, since they had a bit of money now, there was no reason not to go down into the town he’d noticed below, find an apothecary, and buy some kind of potion or philtre that would undo the effects of the bleeding and bring pink back to her cheeks and, in general, the humour of passion back to her veins.
Of this town, which was called Bockboden, the Doctor had had little to say, save for a few mild comments such as “I wouldn’t go there,” “Don’t go there,” “It’s not a very good place to be in,” and “Avoid it.” But none of these had been reinforced by the lurid fabrications that a Vagabond would’ve used to drive the point home. It seemed an orderly town from above, but not dangerously so.
Jack set out on foot, as Turk had been favoring one leg the last day or so, and followed an overgrown path that wound among old schlock-heaps and abandoned furnaces down towards Bockboden. As he went, the idea came to him that if he kept a sharp eye out, he might learn a few more things about the money-making trade, perhaps to include: how to profit therefrom without going through the tedious steps of investing one’s own money and waiting decades for the payoff. But the only novel thing he saw on his way into Bockboden was some kind of improvised works, situated well away from dwellings, where foul-smelling steam was gushing from the mouths of iron tubs with Faulbaum-bonfires raging beneath them. It smelled like urine, and so Jack assumed it was a cloth-fulling mill. Indeed, he spied a couple of disgusted workmen pouring something yellow from a cask into one of the boiling-tubs. But there was no cloth in sight. It seemed they were boiling all of this perfectly good urine away to no purpose.
As Jack entered the town, shrewdness came to him belatedly, and he perceived it had not been a good idea—not because anything in particular happened but because of the old terror of arrest, torture, and execution that frequently came upon him in settled places. He reminded himself that he was wearing new clothes. As long as he kept a glove on his hand, where a letter V had been branded years ago, in the Old Bailey, he bore no visible marks of being a Vagabond. Moreover, he was a guest of the Doctor, who must be an important personage hereabouts. So he kept walking. The town gradually embraced and ensnared him. It was all built half-timbered, like most German towns and many English ones—meaning that they began by raising a frame of heavy struts, and then filled in the open spaces between them with whatever they could get. Around here, it looked like they’d woven mats of sticks into the gaps and then slathered them with mud that stiffened as it dried. Each new building borrowed strength, at first, from an older one, i.e., there was hardly an isolated freestanding house in the whole town; Bockboden was a single building of many bodies and tentacles. The frames of the houses—nay, the single frame of the entire town—had probably been level, plumb, and regular at one point, but over centuries it had sagged, warped, and tottered in different ways. The earthen walls had been patched to follow these evolutions. The town no longer looked like something men had built. It looked like the root-ball of a tree, with dirt-colored stuff packed between the roots, and hollowed out to provide a living-place.
Even here there were little schlock-heaps, and dribbles of ore up and down the streets. Jack heard the unsteady ticking of a hand-haspel behind a door. Suddenly the door was rammed open by a wheelbarrow full of rocks, pushed by a man. The man was astonished to find a stranger there staring at him. Jack however did not even have time to become edgy and to adopt an expression of false nonchalance before the miner got an aghast look and made a pitifully abject bowing maneuver, as best he could without letting go the wheelbarrow and precipitating a merry sequence of downhill mishaps. “Apothecary?” Jack said. The man answered in a strangely familiar-sounding kind of German, using his head to point. Behind the door, the hand-haspel stopped ticking for about six heartbeats, then started again.
Jack followed the wheelbarrow-man to the next cross-street, the latter trying to scurry away from him but impeded by his own weight in rocks. Jack wondered whether all of the mines beneath this country might be interconnected so that they all benefited from the Doctor’s project of pumping away the ground-water without having to share in the costs. Perhaps that explained why strangers, coming from the direction of the tower, made them so nervous. Not that one really needed a reason.
The apothecary shop, at least, stood alone, on the edge of a grassy, schlock-mottled yard, cater-corner from a blackened church. The roof was high and steep as a hatchet-blade, the walls armored in overlapping plates of charcoal-colored slate. Each of its stories was somewhat larger than the one below, and sheltered ’neath the overhangs were rows of carved wooden faces: some faithful depictions of nuns, kings, helmeted knights, hairy wild-men, and beady-eyed Turks, but also angels, demons, lycanthropes, and a goatlike Devil.
Jack entered the place and found no one minding the dispensary window. He began to whistle, but it sounded plaintive and feeble, so he stopped. The ceiling was covered with huge grotesque forms molded in plaster—mostly persons changing into other beings. Some of them he recognized, dimly, from hearing the tales referred to in plays—there was for example the poor sap of a hunter who chanced upon the naked hunt-goddess while she was bathing, and was turned to a stag and torn apart by his own hounds. That wretch, caught in mid-metamorphosis, was attached to the ceiling of the dispensary room in life-size.
Perhaps the apothecary was hard of hearing. Jack began to wander about in a loud, obvious, banging way. He entered a big room filled with things he knew it would be a bad idea to touch: glowing tabletop furnaces, murky fluids bubbling in retorts above the flames of spirit-burners, flames as blue as Eliza’s eyes. He tried another door and found the apothecary’s office—jumping a little when he caught sight of a dangling skeleton. He looked up at the ceiling and found more heavy plaster-works, all of female goddesses: the goddess of dawn, the spring-goddess riding a flowery chariot up out of Hell, the one Europe was named after, the goddess of Love preening in a hand-mirror, and in the center, helmeted Minerva (he knew some names at least) with a cold and steady look about her, one arm holding her shield, decorated with the head of a monster whose snaky hair descended almost into the middle of the room.
A big dead fish, all sucked into itself and desiccated, was suspended from a string. The walls were lined with shelves and cabinets dense with professional clutter: diverse tongs, in disturbingly specific shapes; a large collection of mortars and pestles with words on them; various animal skulls; capped cylinders made of glass or stone, again with words on them; a huge Gothickal clock out of whose doors grotesque creatures sallied when Jack least expected it, then retreated before he could turn and really see them; green glass retorts in beautifully rounded shapes that reminded him of female body parts; scales with vast arrays of weights, from cannon-balls down to scraps of foil that could be propelled into the next country by a sigh; gleaming silver rods, which on closer inspection turned out to be glass tubes filled, for some reason, with mercury; some kind of tall, heavy, columnar object, shrouded in heavy fabric and producing internal warmth, and expanding and contracting slowly like a bellows—
“Guten Tag, or should I say, good afternoon,” it said.
Jack fell back on his ass and looked up at a man, wrapped in a sort of traveling-cloak or monk’s robe, standing next to the skeleton. Jack was too surprised to cry out—not least because the man had spoken English.
“How’d you know…?” was all Jack could get out. The man in the robe had a silver robe and a look of restrained amusement nestled in his red beard, which suggested that Jack should wait a minute before leaping up, drawing his sword, and running him through.
“…that you were an Englishman?”
“Yes.”
“You may not know this, but you have a way of talking to yourself as you go about—telling yourself a story about what’s happening, or what you suppose is happening—for this reason I already know you are Jack. I’m Enoch. Also, there is something peculiarly English in the way you go about investigating, and amusing yourself with, things that a German or Frenchman would know to be none of his business.”
“There’s much to think about in that speech,” Jack said, “but I don’t suppose it’s too offensive.”
“It’s not meant to be offensive at all,” Enoch said. “How may I help you?”
“I am here on behalf of a Lady who has gone pale and unsteady from too much feminine, er…”
“Menstruation?”
“Yes. Is there anything here for that?”
Enoch gazed out a window at a dim gray sky. “Well—never mind what the apothecary would tell you—”
“You are not the apothecary?”
“No.”
“Where is he?”
“Down at the town square, where all decent folk should be.”
“Well, what does that make you and me then, brother?”
Enoch shrugged. “A man who wants to help his woman, and a man who knows how.”
“How, then?”
“She wants iron.”
“Iron?”
“It would help if she ate a lot of red meat.”
“But you said iron. Why not have her eat a horseshoe?”
“They are so unpalatable. Red meat contains iron.”
“Thank you…did you say the apothecary was in the town square?”
“Just that way, a short distance,” Enoch said. “There’s a butcher there, too, if you want to get her some red meat…”
“Auf wiedersehen, Enoch.”
“Until we meet again, Jack.”
And thus did Jack extricate himself from the conversation with the madman (who, as he reflected while walking down the street, had a thing or two in common with the Doctor) and go off in search of someone sane. He could see many people in the square—how would he know which one was the apothecary? Should’ve asked old Enoch for a description.
Bockboden had convened in a large open ring around a vertical post fixed in the ground and half buried in a pile of faggots. Jack did not recognize the apparatus at first because he was used to England, where the gallows was customary. By the time he’d figured out what was going on, he had pushed his way into the middle of the crowd, and he could hardly turn around and leave without giving everyone the impression that he was soft on witches. Most of them, he knew, had only showed up for the sake of maintaining their reputations, but those sorts would be the most likely to accuse a stranger of witchcraft. The real witch-haters were up at the front, hollering in the local variant of German, which sometimes sounded maddeningly like English. Jack could not make out what they were saying. It sounded like threats. That was nonsensical, because the witch was about to be killed anyway. But Jack heard snatches like “Walpurgis” and “heute Nacht,” which he knew meant “tonight” and then he knew that they were threatening not the woman who was about to die, but others in the town they suspected of being witches.
The head of the woman had been shaved, but not recently. Jack could guess, from the length of her stubble, that her ordeal had been going on for about a week. They had been going at her feet and legs with the old wedges-and-sledgehammers trick, and so she would have to be burnt in the seated position. When they set her down on the pile of faggots she winced from the pain of being moved, then leaned back against the stake, seeming glad that she was about to leave Bockboden for good. A plank was nailed into place above her, with a piece of paper on it, on which had been written some sort of helpful information. Meanwhile, a man tied her hands behind the stake—then passed the loose end of the rope around her neck a couple of times, and flung the slack away from the stake: a detail that infuriated the front-row crowd. Someone else stepped up with a big earthenware jug and sloshed oil all around.
Jack, as former execution facilitator, watched with professional interest. The man with the rope pulled hard on it while the fire was started, strangling the woman probably within seconds, and ruining the entire execution in the opinion of some. Most of them watched but didn’t see. Jack had found that people watching executions, even if they kept open eyes turned to the entire performance, did not really see the death, and could not remember it later, because what they were really doing was thinking about their own deaths.
But this one affected Jack as if it were Eliza who’d been burnt (the witch was a young woman), and he walked away with shoulders drawn tightly together and watery snot trickling out of his nose. Blurry vision did him no favors vis-à-vis navigation. He walked so fast that by the time he realized he was on the wrong street, the town square—his only star to steer by—was concealed around the bends of Bockboden. And he did not think that aimless wandering, or anything that could be considered suspicious by anyone, was a good idea here. The only thing that was a good idea was to get out of town.
So he did, and got lost in the woods.