“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Certain items are conspicuously absent—such as masts and sails. Cordage. A crew. I cannot release the weapons until I have seen these. Also, her position on the beach is vulnerable.”
“We will float her soon, and complete her on the water—as is traditional. If she had a few cannons on board she would be a difficult prize to take from land.”
“Agreed. Have you made plans for her maiden voyage?”
“We were thinking perhaps of running saltpeter to Batavia, and then bringing spices back to one of the Great Mogul’s ports—for Hindoostan consumes more spices than all Europe combined, and they have no lack of silver with which to pay for it.”
“It is not a bad plan. But you may have a different plan tomorrow, Jack.”
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON FOUND THEM in dangerous territory south of the Black Vale of Vhanatiya. The Carnaya miner had given Enoch deliberately misleading directions that would have led him directly into a Maratha trap. But Enoch had anticipated this, and tracked the miner through the hills like a hunter stalking wild game.
They passed for some hours through a high terrain overgrown with vicious scrub. All of the large trees seemed to have been cut down long ago and never grown back. Just when Jack was convinced that they were utterly lost in the most God-forsaken part of the world, he smelled camels, and they stumbled upon a caravan of Persians headed the same direction. This was a bit like running into a clan of kilted Scotsmen in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
The way became broad and trampled; Enoch no longer had to use his tracking skills. Finally even the scrub and thorn plants vanished. Like a few pebbles rattling down into a stoneware bowl, they descended into a rocky crater, maculated with schlock-heaps and filled with a perpetual miasma of wood-smoke.
“Even if your taste is abominable, I must grant you credit for consistency,” Jack muttered. “How is it you always end up in the same sort of place?”
“By following the spoors of men such as the Carnaya,” said Enoch, speaking in a hush, like a Papist who’s just entered a basilica. “Now you see why I insisted that we come here alone—if we’d brought an escort of rowzinders, imagine how this place would have been upset.”
“Isn’t it already?” Jack asked. “What the hell are they up to? And why are those Persians here? And do my smoke-burnt eyes deceive me, or is that a contingent of Armenian long-range traders?”
Enoch said only: “Watch.” So Jack followed Enoch and watched Enoch watch.
Now in the beginning Jack was certain that they had come to the place where all of Europe’s teacups were manufactured, for there were clay-pits all over, and Hindoos squatted in them fashioning teacup-sized vessels. These were carried up to kilns to be fired. But if they were teacups, they were rough thick-walled ones without handles or decoration, and each came with a domed lid. And other peculiar operations were going on nearby: Canes of bamboo, and odds and ends of teak-wood, were being loaded into smoky furnaces to be turned into charcoal. Jack was certain that some of this teak was scrap left over from his ship-building project, and was peeved at first, then amused, to realize that his kolis had another operation going on the side.
Teak and bamboo were not the only vegetable matter being brought up to this stony vale. Wizened hill-people were staggering down under twig-bundles bigger than they were, and being paid in silver by important-looking characters. Jack did not recognize the twigs, but he gathered from the price paid for, and the reverence accorded, them that they were of some sort of plant sacred to the Hindoos.