“What’s it good for?”
“It grows all over Hind, I said. Think about what that means.”
“What’s it mean? Just give it to us straight, Dad. We’re no good at riddles,” Jimmy said; at which Danny took offense.
“Speak for yourself, ninny-hammer. He’s tryin’ to tell us that nothin’ succeeds in eatin’ this type o’ wood.”
“Danny’s got it,” Jack said. “None of the diverse worms, ants, moths, beetles, and grubs that, sooner or later, eat everything here, can make any headway against teak-wood.”
SEVERAL TALL TEAKS HAD BEEN felled in the clearing, but even so, Danny and Jimmy had to peer around for a quarter of an hour to realize what the place was. In Christendom there would have been a pit full of wood-shavings, and a couple of sawyers playing tug-of-war with a saw-frame the size of a bed-stead, slicing the logs into squarish beams, and looking forward to the end of the day when they could go home to a village some distance down the road. But here, a whole town had sprung up around these fallen trees. It had been a wild place before, and would be wild again in a year, but today, hundreds dwelt here. Most of them were gathering food, cooking, or tending children. Perhaps two score adult males were actually cutting wood, and the largest tool that any of them had was a sort of hand-adze. This trophy was being wielded by an impressive man of perhaps forty, who was being closely supervised—some would say nagged—by a pair of village elders who had an opinion to offer about every stroke of the blade.
The village’s approach to cutting up these great teak-logs had much in common, overall, with how freemasons chipped rough blocks of stone one tiny chisel-blow at a time. At the other end of the village, some of them were scraping away at almost-finished timbers with potshards or fragments of chipped rock. Some of these timbers were square and straight, but others had been carved into very specific curves.
“That there would be a knee brace,” Danny said, looking at a five-hundred-pound V of solid teak.
“Do not fail to marvel at how the grain of the wood follows the bend of the knee,” Jack said.
“It’s as if God formed the tree for this purpose!” said Jimmy, crossing himself.
“Aye, but then the Devil planted it in the middle of a million others.”
“That might’ve been part of God’s plan,” Danny demurred, “as a trial and a test for the faithful.”
“I think I have made it abundantly clear that I am no good at tests of that sort,” Jack said, “but these kolis are another matter. They will wander the hills for weeks and look at every single tree. They’ll send a child scampering up a promising teak to inspect the place where a bough branches off from the trunk, for that is where the grain-lines of the wood curve just so—and, too, it’s where the wood is strongest and heaviest. When they’ve found the right tree, down it comes! And they move the whole village there until the wood has been shaped and the timbers delivered.”
“I didn’t think the Hindoos were seafarin’ folk,” Jimmy said, “other than wee fishin’ boats and such.”
“Most of these kolis will go to their graves, or to be precise, their funeral-pyres, without ever having laid eyes on salt water. They have been roaming the hills forever, going where they find work, supplying timbers for buildings, palanquins, and whatnot. When I became king they started coming here from all over Hindoostan.”
“You must pay ’em summat. I thought you had no revenue.”
“But this comes from a different purse. I am not paying these folk with tax money.”
“Where is the friggin’ money comin’ from, then?” Jimmy demanded.
“More than one source. You’ll learn in good time.”
“He an’ that Banyan must’ve made a shite-load of money when they brought that caravan home to Shahjahanabad,” Danny observed.
“It wasn’t just me and the Banyan, but the whole Cabal—or rather the half of it that had not fallen into the snares of Kottakkal, the Malabar pirate-queen.”
“Hah! Now, there is your Oriental decadence!” Danny exclaimed to Jimmy, who was momentarily speechless.
“You have no idea,” Jack muttered.
IT TOOK THEM ALMOST TWO hours to track down Enoch and Surendranath, who had wandered quite beyond the frontier of Jack’s kingdom and into a sort of lawless zone between it and a Maratha stronghold. Through the center of that no-man’s-land ran a small river in a large gulley—a steep-sided channel that the water had cut down through black earth every bit as slowly and patiently as the kolis whittling their beams.
“I should’ve predicted that we would find Enoch in the Black Vale of Vhanatiya,” Jack said, when he finally caught sight of the alchemist down below.