Leipzig

APRIL 1684

From all I hear of Leibniz he must be very intelligent, and pleasant company in consequence. It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink, and have a sense of humour.

—LISELOTTE IN A LETTER TO SOPHIE, 30 JULY 1705

“JACQUES, SHOW THE GENTLEMAN THAT bolt of the yellow watered silk…Jacques? Jacques!” Eliza moved on smoothly to some cruel jest about how difficult it was to find reliable and hard-working varlets nowadays, speaking in a French that was too good for Jack to understand. The gentleman in question—evidently a Parisian in the rag trade—took his nose out of Eliza’s cleavage long enough to glance up into her eyes and chuckle uncertainly—he sensed a bon mot had been issued but he hadn’t heard it.

“Cor, he’s surprised your tits come wi’ a head attached,” Jack observed.

“Shut up…one of these days, we’re going to meet someone who speaks English,” Eliza returned, and nodded at the bolt. “Would you please stay awake?”

“Haven’t been so awake in half a year—that’s the difficulty,” Jack said, stooping down to unroll an arm’s length of silk, and drawing it through the air like a flag, trying to make it waft. A shaft of sunlight would’ve been useful. But the only radiant heavenly body shedding light into this courtyard was Eliza’s—turned out in one of a few dresses she’d been working on for months. Jack had watched them come together out of what looked to him like scraps, and so the effect on him was not as powerful. But when Eliza walked through the market, she drew such looks that Jack practically had to bind his right arm to his side, lest it fly across his body and whip out the Damascus blade and teach the merchants of Leipzig some manners.

She got into a long difference of opinion with this Parisian, which ended when he handed her an old limp piece of paper that had been written on many times, in different hands, and then collected the bolt of yellow silk from Jack and walked away with it. Jack once again had to restrain his sword-hand. “This kills me.”

“Yes. You say that every time.”

“You’re certain that those scraps are worth something.”

“Yes! Says so right here,” Eliza said. “Would you like me to read it to you?” A dwarf came by selling chocolates.

“Won’t help. Nothing will, but silver in my pocket.”

“Are you worried I’m going to cheat you—being that you can’t read the numbers on these bills of exchange?”

“I’m worried something’ll happen to ’em before we can turn ’em into real money.”

“What is ‘real’ money, Jack? Answer me that.”

“You know, pieces of eight, or, how d’you say it, dollars—”

“Th—it starts with a T but it’s got a breathy sound behind it—‘thalers.’”

“D-d-d-dollars.”

“That’s a silly name for money, Jack—no one’ll ever take you seriously, talking that way.”

“Well, they shortened ‘Joachimsthaler’ to ‘thaler,’ so why not reform the word even further?”

A KIND OF STEADILY WAXING madness had beset them after a month or so at their hot-springs encampment—Jack had assumed it was the slow-burning fuse of the French Pox finally reaching significant parts of his mind, until Eliza had pointed out they’d been on bread and water and the occasional rasher of carp jerky for months. A soldier’s pay was not generous, but put together with what Jack had previously looted from the rich man’s house in Strasbourg, it would supply not only Turk with oats but also them with cabbages, potatoes, turnips, salt pork, and the occasional egg—as long as Jack didn’t mind spending all of it. As his commission-agents, he employed those two brimstone-miners, Hans and Hans. They were not free agents, but employees of one Herr Geidel of Joachimsthal, a nearby town where silver was dug out of the ground. Herr Geidel hired men like Hans and Hans to dig up the ore and refine it into irregular bars, which they took to a mint in the town to be coined into Joachimsthalers.

Herr Geidel, having learned that a strange armed man was lurking in the woods near his brimstone mine, had ridden out with a few musketeers to investigate, and discovered Eliza all alone, at her sewing. By the time Jack returned, hours later, Eliza and Herr Geidel had, if not exactly become friends, then at least recognized each other as being of the same type, and therefore as possible business partners, though it was by no means clear what kind of business. Herr Geidel had the highest opinion of Eliza and voiced confidence that she would make out handsomely at the Leipzig Fair. His immediate opinion of Jack was much lower—the only thing Jack seemed to have going for him was that Eliza was willing to partner up with him. Jack, for his part, put up with Herr Geidel because of the flabbergasting nature of what he did for a living: literally making money. The first several times this was explained to Jack, he put it down to a translation error. It couldn’t be real. “That’s all there is? Dig up some dirt, run it through a furnace, stamp a face and some words on it?”

“That’s what he seems to be saying,” Eliza had answered, puzzled for once. “In Barbary, all the coins were pieces of eight from Spain—I’ve never been anywhere near a mint. I was about to say ‘wouldn’t know a mint from a hole in the ground,’ but apparently that’s just what it is.”

When it had gotten warm enough to move, they’d gone down into Joachimsthal and confirmed that it was little more than that. In essence the mint was a brute with a great big hammer and a punch. He was supplied with blank disks of silver—these were not money—put the punch on each one and bashed it with the hammer, mashing the portrait of some important hag, and some incantations in Latin, into it—at which point it was money. Officials, supervisors, assayers, clerks, guards, and, in general, the usual crowd of parasitical gentlefolk clustered around the brute with the hammer, but like lice on an ox they could not conceal the simple nature of the beast. The simplicity of money-making had fascinated Jack into a stupor. “Why should we ever leave this place? After all my wanderings I’ve found Heaven.”

“It can’t be that easy. Herr Geidel seems depressed—he’s branching out into brimstone and other ores—says he can’t make any money making money.”

“Obvious nonsense. Just trying to scare away competition.”

“Did you see all those abandoned mines, though?”

“Ran out of ore,” Jack had attempted.

“Then why were the great mining-engines still bestriding the pit-mouths? You’d think they’d’ve moved them to shafts that were still fruitful.”

Jack had had no answer. When next they’d seen Herr Geidel, Eliza had subjected him to a round of brutal questioning that would’ve gotten Jack into a duel had he done it, but coming from Eliza had only given Herr Geidel a heightened opinion of her. Geidel’s French was as miserable as Jack’s and so the discussion had gone slowly enough for Jack to follow: for reasons that no one around here fathomed, the Spanish could mine and refine silver in Mexico, and ship it halfway round the world (in spite of the most strenuous efforts by English, Dutch, French, Maltese, and Barbary pirates) cheaper than Herr Geidel and his drinking buddies could produce it in Joachimsthal and ship it a few days’ journey to Leipzig. Consequently, only the very richest mines in Europe were still operating. Herr Geidel’s strategy was to put idle miners to work digging up brimstone (before the European silver mines had crashed, this never would’ve worked because they had a strong guild, but now miners were cheap), then ship the brimstone to Leipzig and sell it cheap to gunpowder-makers, in hopes of bringing the cost of gunpowder, and hence of war, down.^* Anyway, if war got cheap enough, all hell would break loose, some Spanish galleons might even get sunk, and the cost of silver would climb back to a more wholesome level.

“But won’t that also make it cheaper for highwaymen to attack you on the way to Leipzig?” Jack had asked, always working the violent crime angle.

Eliza had given him a look that promised grim penalties the next time she got her hand on the chakra. “‘What if war breaks out between here and Leipzig?’ is what Jack meant to say.”

But Herr Geidel had been completely unfazed. Wars broke out all the time, all over the place, with no effect on the Leipzig Fair. If all of this came to pass, he’d be a rich merchant again. And for five hundred years the Leipzig fairs had operated under a decree from the Holy Roman Emperor stating that as long as the merchants stuck to certain roads and paid a nominal fee to local princes whose lands they traversed, they could pass freely to and from Leipzig, and must not be molested even if they were traipsing across an active battlefield. They were above wars.

“But what if you were carrying gunpowder to sell to the enemy?” Eliza had tried, but for once Herr Geidel had looked impatient and waved her off, as if to say that wars were mere diversions for bored princes, but trade fairs were serious.

It turned out to be perfectly all right that Jack had mentioned highwaymen, because Herr Geidel had been doing a lot of thinking on that very subject. His wagon-train had been forming up in the open places of Joachimsthal. Harnessed pairs of draft-horses were being walked down streets by teamsters leaning back to put tension on the traces, talking the animals into place before wagons. Mule-drivers were pretending to be flabbergasted when their animals balked after testing the weight of their loads: the first act of a timeless play that would eventually lead to profanity and violence. Herr Geidel was not a rich merchant now, and for the first part of the journey, he would not be taking any of those roads where armed escorts were for hire anyway, and so the trip to the Easter fair in Leipzig might be exciting. Herr Geidel had a few men who could go through the motions needed to charge and discharge a musket, but he wouldn’t mind adding Jack to his escort, and of course Eliza was welcome to ride along in one of the wagons.

Jack, wotting that Eliza and his boys’ inheritance were at stake, had taken this soldiering job more seriously than most. From time to time he had sallied ahead of the cart-train to look for ambushes. Twice he’d found rabbles of unemployed miners loitering sheepishly in narrow parts of the way, armed with pikes and cudgels, and gotten them to disperse by explaining Herr Geidel’s plan to restore vigor to the silver mining business. In truth it wasn’t his oratory that moved them out of the way so much as that he and his comrades were carrying flintlocks and pistols. Jack, who knew his wretches, could tell at a glance that these men weren’t hungry enough, or persuasively led enough, to buy loot with their lives—particularly when the loot was brimstone, which, he reminded them, would be difficult to turn into silver—they’d have to lug it to a fair and sell it, unless there was an Alchemist among them. He did not mention that buried under the rubble of brimstone in one of Herr Geidel’s wagons was a chest full of freshly minted Joachimsthalers. He did think about mentioning it, and then leading an ambush himself, but he knew that in that event he’d ride away without Eliza, the one woman in the world, or at least the only one he personally knew, capable of providing him with carnal satisfaction. He understood then why Herr Geidel had observed his conversations with Eliza so intently—trying to see whether Jack could be trusted. Apparently he’d concluded Eliza had Jack well in hand. This did not sit well with Jack—but he’d be rid of Herr Geidel soon enough, though not of Eliza.

Anyway, they had ridden north out of those mountains, which Herr Geidel had referred to in his tongue simply as the Ore Range, and into Saxony, about which there was nothing to say except that it was flat. They joined up with a very great and old road that according to Herr Geidel ran from Verona all the way north to Hamburg. Jack was impressed by the mileposts: ten-foot-high stone spikes, each ornately carved with the arms of some dead King, each giving the number of miles to Leipzig. This road was congested with many other merchants’ wagon-trains.

In a moist flat basin scribbled all over with the courses of aimless rivers, it intersected another great road that was said to run from Frankfurt to the Orient, and Leipzig was that intersection. Jack had most of a day to ramble around and view it from its outskirts, which he did on the general principle of wanting to know where the exits were before entering any confined place. The wagon-trains were backed up for half a mile waiting to get in at the south gate. Leipzig, he found, was smaller and lower-slung than Vienna—a city of several modest spires, not one sky-raking cathedral, which Jack guessed was a sign of its being a Lutheran burg. Of course it was surrounded by the obligatory ramparts and bastions. Outside these were estates and gardens, several of ’em larger than the entire city, all of them belonging not to nobles but to merchants.^* Between these estates lay the usual embarrassing swine-crowded suburbs cowering in makeshift barricades that were more like baskets than walls. A few lazily turning mill-wheels took advantage of the nearly imperceptible stirring of the rivers, but millers scarcely ranked above peasants in a town so topheavy with merchants.

JACK AND ELIZA HAD PAID ten pfennigs each at the town gate, then had their silks weighed, and paid duty on them (Eliza had sewn the ostrich-plumes between layers of petticoats, and they were not detected). From the gate a broad street ran north to the center of the town, no more than a musket-shot away. Climbing down from the saddle, Jack was startled by the feel of cobblestones under his feet for the first time in half a year. He was treading on ground that pushed back now, and he knew that his boots needed re-soling. The street was lined with vaulted orifices spewing noise; he felt continually under ambush from left and right, and kept patting his sword-pommel, then hating himself for behaving like a stupid peasant on his first trip to Paris. But Eliza was no less amazed, and kept backing into him, liking to feel his pressure against her back. Queer signs and effigies, frequently in gold leaf, loomed on the fronts of the buildings: a golden snake, a Turk’s head, a red lion, a golden bear. So they were a bit like English taverns, which had effigies instead of names, so that people like Jack, who could not read, could know them. But they were not taverns. They were like large town-houses, with many windows, and each had this large vaulted opening giving way to a courtyard full of Bedlam.

Jack and Eliza had kept moving out of an unvoiced fear that if they stopped they’d appear just as lost and stupid as they in fact were. Within a few minutes they’d entered into the town square, and drawn up near a scaffold with the usual selection of dead men hanging from it: a place of comforting familiarity to Jack, even if Eliza did make shrewish comments about the thrumming clouds of flies. Notwithstanding the odd dangling corpse, Leipzig didn’t even smell that bad: there was the sewage and smoke of any big town, but it was amazing what a few tons of saffron, cardamom, star anise, and black pepper, distributed round in sacks and bales, would do to freshen a place up.

The town hall ran along one side of the square, and sported Dutch-looking gables above and an arcade of vaulted brown stone at ground level, where well-dressed men were working quietly and intensely. Narrow ditches were incised across the square to channel sewage, and planks had been thrown over them so carts could roll across, or ladies, and fat or lame men, pass over without having to make spectacles of themselves. Jack turned around a couple of times. It was plain that buildings were limited by law to four stories because none (save church towers) had more than that. But clearly the law said nothing about roofs and so these were all extremely high and steep—frequently as high as the four-story buildings that supported them—so seen from the street each roof looked like a mountain ridge seen from the valley: a vast terrain densely settled and built up with dormers, towers, gables, cupolas, balconies, and even miniature castles; vegetation (in window-boxes) and statues—not of Jesus or some saint but of Mercury in his winged slippers and hat. Sometimes he was paired against Minerva with her snaky shield, but most of the time Mercury appeared alone and it didn’t take a Doctor of Letters to understand that he, and not some dolorous martyr, had been chosen as Patron of Leipzig.

Looking up at vast rooves had been Jack’s way to relieve his eyes and mind from the strain of following the action on the ground. There were Eastern men in felt hats with giant rims of rich gleaming fur, talking to long-bearded Jews about racks of animal pelts—the faces of small nasty critters gaping blankly at the sky. Chinese carrying crates of what he had to assume was China, coopers repairing busted casks, bakers hawking loaves, blonde maidens with piles of oranges, musicians everywhere, grinding hurdy-gurdys or plucking at mutant lutes with huge cantilevers projecting asymmetrically from their necks to support thumping bass halyards. Armenian coffee-sellers carrying bright steaming copper and brass tanks on their persons, bored guards with pikes or halberds, turbaned Turks attempting to buy back strange goods that (Jack realized with a shock) had also been looted from the Vienna siege-camp—he was amused but, actually, embarrassed and irritated that others had had the same idea. A hookah-smoking area where Turkish boys in pointy-toed slippers scurried from one small table to the next carrying smouldering braziers of ornately wrought silver from which they selected individual coals with silver tongs and placed them carefully atop the hookahs’ tobacco-bowls to keep them burning. Everywhere, goods: but here in the square they were in casks, or wrapped up in square bales held together by rope-nets, all marked with curious initials and monograms: trade-marks of diverse merchants.

They’d found a place to stable Turk, then gone down a street, worked up their courage, and entered into one of those broad vaulted portals—wide and high enough for three or four horsemen to ride abreast—and entered the courtyard of one of those buildings. This yard was only some ten by twenty paces, and hemmed in on all sides by the four-story-high walls of the building, which were painted a merry yellow so that what sun did enter the yard cast a symbolic golden radiance on all. The court itself was stuffed with people displaying spices, metal goods, jewels, books, fabric, wine, wax, dried fish, hats, boots, gloves, weapons, and porcelain, frequently standing cheek-to-cheek and talking directly into each other’s ears. One whole side of the courtyard, then, gave way to a line of open-sided vaults: an arcade a couple of steps above courtyard level, separated from the courtyard only by a row of stout pillars, and tucked in underneath the actual house. In each vault a grave man in good clothes sat at a mighty desk, or banca, with several immense Books, strapped, buckled, and padlocked shut when not in use; an inkwell; quills; and on the floor next to him, a black chest all wrapped about with bronze or iron straps, hinges, chains, and locks of a weight and quality normally seen on arsenal-gates. Sometimes bales and casks of goods were mounded up next to him. More often, the stuff was piled out in the courtyard. Sixty or eighty feet above, stout beams projected from the tops of dormers, thrusting pulleys out over the yard, and by means of ropes through those pulleys, laborers hoisted the goods up for storage in the cavernous attics.

“They are betting prices will rise,” Eliza said, observing this, and this was the first inkling Jack received that this was more than a country swap-meet, and that there were layers of cleverness at work here that went far beyond simply knowing how many thalers should buy a tub of butter.

Jack saw so much that was strange in Leipzig, and saw it so fast, that he had to put most of it out of his mind immediately to make room for new material, and didn’t remember it until later, when taking a piss or trying to go to sleep, and when he did remember it, it seemed so strange to him that he couldn’t be sure whether it was a dream, or something that had really happened, or proof that the mines that the French Pox had (he suspected) been patiently excavating under his brain for the last several years, had finally begun to detonate.

There had been, for example, a trip inside one of the factories^* to exchange some odd coins that Jack had picked up along his travels and been unable to spend, as no one recognized them. In this room, men sat behind desks with books in whose pages were circular cut-outs made to hold coins—two of each coin, so both heads and tails could be viewed in the same glance, and each coin labeled with various cryptic numbers and symbols in different colors of ink. The money-changer paged steadily through this book until he found a page holding coins just like Jack’s, though crisper and shinier. He took out a færy-sized scale made out of gold, whose pans, no larger than dollars, were suspended from its fragile crossbar by blue silken cords. He put Jack’s coins on one pan and then, using tweezers, piled featherweight scraps of marked gold foil on the other pan until they balanced. Then he put the scale back into its wooden carrying-case, which was smaller than Eliza’s hand; did some calculations; and offered Jack a couple of Leipziger Rats-marken (Leipzig minted its own coins). Eliza insisted they visit a couple of other money-changers and repeat the ceremony, but the results were always the same. So finally they accepted the Leipziger coins and then watched the money-changer fling Jack’s old coins into a box in the corner, half full of assorted coins and fragments of jewelry, mostly black from tarnish. “We’ll melt it down,” he explained when he saw the look on Jack’s face. Eliza, meanwhile, was staring at a wall-chart of exchange rates, reading the names of the coins that had been chalked up there: “Louis d’or, Maximilian d’or, souverain d’or, rand, ducat, Louis franc, Breslau ducat, Schildgroschen, Hohlheller, Schwertgroschen, Oberwehr groschen, Hellengroschen, pfennig, Goldgulden, hal-berspitzgroschen, Engelsgroschen, Real, Ratswertmark, ²/₃ thaler, English shilling, ruble, abassid, rupiah…”

“Just goes to prove we have to get into the money-making business,” Jack said when they left.

“To me it proves that the business is crowded and hard-fought,” Eliza said. “Better to get into silver-mining. All the coiners must buy from miners.”

“But Herr Geidel would rather have burning splints under his nails than own another silver mine,” Jack reminded her.

“It would seem to me better to buy into something when it is cheap, and wait for it to become dear,” Eliza said. “Think of those trading-houses with their attics.”

“We don’t have an attic.”

“I meant it as a figure of speech.”

“So did I. We have no way to purchase a silver mine and sew it into your skirts and carry it round until the price goes up.” This sounded to Jack like a sure-fire conversation ender but only produced a thoughtful expression on Eliza’s face.

Consequently they found themselves at the Bourse, a small tidy rectangular building of white stone packed with well-dressed men screaming at each other in all the languages of Christendom but bound together by some Pentecostal faith in the Holy Spirit of the Messe that made all tongues one. There were no goods in evidence, only bits of paper, which was so odd that Jack would’ve stayed up all night wondering over it if he hadn’t forgotten immediately in light of later developments. After a brief conversation with a trader who was taking a breather on the edge of the floor, smoking a clay-pipe and quaffing some of that fine golden beer from Pilsen, Eliza returned to Jack with a triumphant and determined look about her that boded ill. “The word is Kuxen,” she said, “we wish to buy Kuxen in a silver mine.”

“We do?”

“Isn’t that what we just decided?” She was joking, perhaps.

“First tell me what Kuxen are.”

“Shares. The mine is divided in half. Each half into quarters. Each quarter into eighths, and so on—until the number of shares is something like sixty-four or one twenty-eight—that number of shares is then sold. Each share is called a kux.”

“And by share, I suppose you mean—?”

“Same as when thieves divvy up their swag.”

“I was going to liken it to how sailors partake of a voyage’s proceeds, but you stooped lower, faster.”

“That man nearly shot beer from his nostrils when I said I wished to invest in a silver mine,” Eliza said proudly.

“Always a positive omen.”

“He said only one man’s even trying to sell them at this fair—the Doctor. We need to talk to the Doctor.”

Through involved and tedious investigations that little improved the balance of Jack’s humours, they tracked the Doctor down in the general quarter of the Jahrmarkt, which (never mind what the German words literally meant) was a fun fair—a sideshow to the Messe. “Eeeyuh, I hate these things—loathsome people exhibiting all manner of freakish behaviors—like a morality play depicting my own life.”

“The Doctor is in there,” Eliza said grimly.

“Why not let’s wait until we actually have money to buy kuxen with?” Jack pleaded.

“Jack, it is all the same—if we want kuxen, why pass through the intermediate step of exchanging silk or ostrich-plumes for coin, and then coin for kuxen, when we could simply exchange silk or plumes for kuxen?”

“Ow, that one was like a stave to the bridge of the nose. You’re saying—”

“I’m saying that at Leipzig all goods—silk, coins, shares in mines—lose their hard dull gross forms and liquefy, and give up their true nature, as ores in an alchemist’s furnace sweat mercury—and all mercury is mercury and can be freely swapped for mercury of like weight—indeed cannot be distinguished from it.”

“That’s lovely, but DO WE REALLY WANT TO OWN SHARES IN A MINE?”

“Oh, who knows?” Eliza said with an airy tossing movement of the hand. “I just like to shop for things.”

“And I’m doomed to follow you, carrying your purse,” Jack muttered, shifting the burden of silk-bolts from one shoulder to the other.

SO TO THE FUN FAIR—indistinguishable (to Jack) from a hospital for the possessed and deformed and profoundly lost: contortionists, rope-walkers, fire-eaters, foreigners, and mystical personalities, a few of whom Jack recognized from Vagabond-camps here and there. They knew the Doctor from his clothing and his wig, about which they’d been warned. He was trying to initiate a philosophickal dispute with a Chinese fortune-teller, the subject of the debate being a diagram on a book-page consisting of a stack of six short horizontal lines, some of which were continuous (—) and others interrupted (– –) The Doctor was trying various languages out on the Chinese man, who only looked more aggrieved and dignified by the moment. Dignity was a clever weapon to use against the Doctor, who did not have very much of it at the moment. On his head was the largest wig Jack had ever seen, a thunderhead of black curls enveloping and dwarfing his head and making him look, from behind, as if a yearling bear-cub had dropped from a tree onto his shoulders and was trying to wrench his head off. His attire was no less formidable. Now, during the long winter, Jack had learned that a dress had more parts, technical zargon, and operating procedures associated with it than a flintlock. The Doctor’s outfit mocked any dress: between Leipzig and his skin there had to be two dozen layers of fabric belonging to Christ knew how many separate garments: shirts, waistcoats, vests, and things of which Jack did not know the names. Rank upon rank of heavy, close-spaced buttons, containing, in the aggregate, enough brass to cast a swivel-gun. Straps and draw-strings, lace gushing from the openings around throat and wrists. But the lace needed washing, the wig needed professional maintenance, and the Doctor himself was not, at root, a good-looking man. And despite the attire, Jack ended up suspecting he was not a vain one; he was dressed that way to a purpose. In particular, perhaps, to make himself seem older—when he turned around at the sound of Eliza’s voice, it was evident he was no more than about forty years old.

He was up on his three-inch platform heels right away, favoring Eliza with a deep, courtly bow and shortly moving on to hand-kissing. For a minute all was in French that Jack couldn’t quite follow, and so he went by appearances: Eliza looked uncharacteristically nervous (though she was trying to be plucky), and the Doctor, a lively and quick sort, was observing with polite curiosity. But there was no drooling or leering. Jack reckoned him for a eunuch or sodomite.

Suddenly the Doctor broke into English—making him the first person, other than Eliza, whom Jack had heard speaking in the tongue of that remote Isle in a couple of years. “I assumed, from your attire, that you were a fashionable Parisian lady. But I judged too hastily, for I perceive, on closer enjoyment, that you have something that such women typically lack: genuine taste.”

Eliza was speechless—flattered by the words, but flustered by the choice of language. The Doctor splayed a hand across his breast and looked apologetic. “Have I made the wrong guess? I thought I detected that the lady’s superb French was enlivened and invigorated by the firm sure tread of an Anglo-Saxon cadence.”

“Bullseye,” Jack said, drawing a raised eyebrow from the Doctor and a glare from Eliza. Now that he knew the Doctor spoke English, it was all Jack could do to limit himself to that one word—he wanted to talk, talk, talk—to make jests^* and to voice his opinions on diverse subjects, relate certain anecdotes, et cetera. He said “Bullseye” because he was afraid Eliza might try to brazen it out by claiming to be from some odd corner of France, and Jack, who had much experience in brazening, and attempting to sustain elaborate lies, sensed that this would be a losing bet with the annoyingly perceptive Doctor.

“When you have resolved your differences with the Oriental gentleman, I should like to take you up on the subject of Kuxen,” said Eliza.

A double eye-brow raise greeted this news, causing the topheavy wig to pitch alarmingly. “Oh, I’m free immediately,” he said, “this Mandarin seems to have no desire to refine his philosophickal position—to disentangle the worthy science of number theory from the base superstition of numerology—most unfortunate for him and the rest of his race.”

“I am not well versed in any of those subjects,” Eliza began, obviously (to Jack) making an heroic bid to change the subject, and obviously (to the Doctor) begging to be given an advanced course of instruction.

“Fortune-tellers frequently make use of a random element, such as cards or tea-leaves,” the Doctor began. “This fellow tosses sticks on the ground and reads them, never mind exactly how—all I’m interested in is the end result—a set of half a dozen lines, each of which is either solid or broken. We could do the same thing by flipping six coins—videlicet…” and here he went into a performance of slapping himself all over, like a man who has a mouse in his clothing, and whenever he detected a coin in one of the manifold pockets of his many garments, he scooped it out and flipped it into the air, letting it clang like a Chinese gong (for the coins tended to be big ones—many of them gold) on the paving-stones. “He’s rich,” Jack muttered to Eliza, “or connected with rich persons.”

“Yes—the clothes, the coins…”

“All fakeable.”

“How do you know him to be rich, then?”

“In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games.”

“Very well, then,” said the Doctor, bending to peer at the fallen coins. “We have heads, tails, tails, tails, heads, and tails.” He straightened up. “To the Chinese mystic this pattern has some great significance which he will, for a small fee, look up in a book, jammed with heathen claptrap, and read to you.” The Doctor had forgotten about the coins, and about the circle of fun-fair habitués closing in on it like a noose, each making his best guess (as they lacked scales and books) as to which of them was most valuable. Jack stepped in, using his thumb to nudge his sword a hand’s breadth out of its scabbard. Their reaction made it plain they were all keeping one eye on him. He picked up the coins, which he would return to the Doctor in a tremendously impressive display of honesty and sound moral character whenever he snapped out of his rant. “To me, on the other hand, this pattern means: seventeen.”

“Seventeen?” Jack and Eliza said in unison—both of them had to step lively, now, to keep pace with the Doctor as he stomped out of the Jahrmarkt making good time on those high heels. He wasn’t a big man but he had a fine set of calves on him, which his stockings showed off nicely.

“Dyadic, or binary numbers—old news,” the Doctor said, waving a hand in the air so that the lace cuff flopped around. “My late friend and colleague Mr. John Wilkins published a cryptographic system based on this more than forty years ago in his great Crypto-nomicon—unauthorized Dutch editions of it are still available over yonder in the Booksellers’ Quarter should you desire. But what I take away from the Chinese method of fortune-telling is the notion of producing random numbers by the dyadic technique, and by this Wilkins’s system could be incomparably strengthened.” All of which was like the baying of hounds to Jack.

“Crypto, graphy…writing of secrets?” Eliza guessed.

“Yes—an unfortunate necessity in these times,” the Doctor said.

About now, they escaped the closeness of the Fun Fair and stopped in an open square near a church. “Nicolaikirche—I was baptized there,” the Doctor said. “Kuxen! A topic strangely related to dyadic numbers in that the number of Kuxen in a particular mine is always a power of two, videlicet: one, two, four, eight, sixteen…But that is a mathematical curiosity in which you’ll have little interest. I am selling them. Should you buy them? Formerly a prosperous industry, upon which the fortunes of great families such as the Fuggers and Hacklhebers were founded, silver mining was laid low by the Thirty Years’ War and the discovery, by the Spaniards, of very rich deposits at Potosí in Peru and Guanajuato in Mexico. Buying Kuxen in a European mine that is run along traditional lines, as is done in the Ore Range, would be a waste of the lady’s money. But my mines or I should say the mines of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, which I have been given the responsibility to manage, will be, I think, a better investment.”

“Why?” Eliza asked.

“It is extremely difficult to explain.”

“Oh, but you’re so good at explaining things…”

“You really must leave the flattery to me, milady, as you are more deserving of it. No, it has to do with certain new sorts of engines, of my own design, and new techniques for extracting metal from ore, devised by a very wise and, as alchemists go, non-fraudulent alchemist of my acquaintance. But a woman of your conspicuous acumen would never exchange her coins—”

“Silk, actually,” Jack inserted, turning half round to flash the goods.

“Er…lovely silks, then, for Kuxen in my mine, just because I said these things in a market.”

“Probably true,” Eliza admitted.

“You would have to inspect the works first. Which I invite you to do…we leave tomorrow…but if you could exchange your goods for coin first it would be—”

“Wait!” Jack said, it being his personal duty to play the role of coarse, armed bumpkin. Giving Eliza the opportunity to say: “Good Doctor, my interest in the subject was just a womanish velleity—forgive me for wasting your time—”

“But why bother talking to me at all then? You must’ve had some reason. Come on, it’ll be fun.”

“Where is it?” Jack asked.

“The lovely Harz Mountains—a few days’ journey west of here.”

“That’d be in the general direction of Amsterdam, then?”

“Young sir, when I spied your Turkish sword, I took you for some sort of Janissary, but your knowledge of the lands to the West proves otherwise—even if your East London accent hadn’t already given you away.”

“Uh, okay, so that’s a yes, then,” Jack mumbled, leading Eliza a few paces away. “A free ride in the Doctor’s train—can’t be too much wrong with that.”

“He’s up to something,” Eliza protested.

“So are we, lass—it’s not a crime.”

Eventually she wafted back over to the Doctor and allowed as how she’d be willing to “leave my entourage behind” for a few days, with the exception of “my faithful manservant and bodyguard,” and “detour to the Harz Mountains” to inspect the works. They talked, for a while, in French.

“He says a lot in a hurry sometimes,” Eliza told Jack as they followed the Doctor, at a distance, down a street of great trading-houses. “I tried to find out approximately what a kux would cost—he said not to worry.”

“Funny, from a man who claims he’s trying to raise money…”

“He said that the reason he first took me for Parisian was that ostrich plumes, like the sample in my hat, are in high fashion there just now.”

“More flattery.”

“No—his way of telling me that we should ask a high price.”

“Where’s he taking us?”

“The House of the Golden Mercury, which is the factory of the von Hacklheber family.”

“We’ve already been kicked out of there.”

“He’s going to get us in.”

AND THAT HE DID, by means of a mysterious conversation that took place inside the factory, out of their view. This was the biggest courtyard they’d seen in Leipzig: narrow but long, lined with vaulted arcades on both sides, a dozen cranes active at once elevating goods that the von Hacklhebers expected to rise in price, and letting down ones they thought had reached their peak. At the end nearest the street, mounted to the wall above the entry arch, was a skinny three-story-high structure cantilevered outwards over the yard, like balconies on three consecutive floors all merged into one tower. It was enclosed with windows all round except on the top floor, where a golden roof sheltered an open platform and supported a pair of obscenely long-necked gargoyles poised to vomit rain (should it rain) out onto the traders below. “Reminds me of the castle on the butt-end of a galleon,” was Eliza’s comment, and it wasn’t for a few minutes that Jack understood that this was a reminder of the naughty business off Qwghlm years ago, and (therefore) her oblique female way of saying she didn’t like it. This despite the gold-plated Mercury, the size of a man, bracketed to it, which seemed to be springing into flight above their heads, holding out a golden stick twined about with snakes and surmounted by a pair of wings. “No, it’s a Cathedral of Mercury,” Jack decided, trying to get her mind off the galleon. “Your Cathedral of Jesus is cross-shaped. This one takes its plan from that stick in his hand—long and slender—the vaults on the sides like the snakes’ loops. The wings of the factory spreading out from the head of it, where is mounted the bishop’s pulpit, and all of us believers crowded in below to celebrate the Messe.”

Eliza sold the stuff. Jack assumed she sold it well. He knew they were soon to leave Leipzig and so amused himself by looking around. Watching the bales and casks ascend and descend on their ropes, his eye was drawn to a detail: from many of the countless windows that lined the courtyard, short rods projected horizontally into the air, and mounted to their ends, on ball-joints like the one where the thigh-bone meets the pelvis, were mirrors about a foot square, canted at diverse angles. When he first noticed them Jack supposed that they were a clever trick for reflecting sunlight into those many dim offices. But looking again he saw that they shifted frequently, and that their silvered faces were always aimed down toward the courtyard. There were scores of them. Jack never glimpsed the watchers who lurked in the dark rooms.

Later he chanced to look up at the highest balcony, and discovered a new gargoyle looking back at him: this was made of flesh and blood, a stout man who hadn’t bothered to cover his partly bald, partly grizzled head. He had battled smallpox and won at the cost of whatever good or even bad looks he might ever have had. Quite a few decades of good living had put a lot of weight into his face and drawn the pocked flesh downwards into jowls and wattles and chins, lumpy as cargo nets. He was giving Eliza a look that Jack did not find suitable. Up there on that balcony he was such an arresting presence that Jack did not notice, for a few minutes, that another man, much more finely turned out, was up there, too: the Doctor, talking in the relentless way of one who’s requesting a favor, and gesturing so that those white lace cuffs seemed to flit around him like a pair of doves.

Like a couple of peasants huddled together in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Jack and Eliza performed their role in the Mass and then departed, leaving no sign that they’d ever been there, save perhaps for a evanescent ripple in the coursing tide of quicksilver.