The Confusion

George Louis had returned from his errand and had been skirting the back of the crowd trying to find a way in without getting into a shoving-match with any Cossacks. The crowd parted to admit one of Sophie Charlotte’s footmen, who glided in carrying a tray with a velvet pillow on it, and on the pillow, a rock still nestled in torn-up wrapping paper. George Louis followed the lead and took up an appropriate position next to his mother, and got an expression on his face that said, I am ready to be introduced and to have a jolly good time playing along with this incognito business, but everyone else—especially Peter—was gazing at the rock instead. It was pinkish-brown, and about the size of a melon, but sort of Gibraltar-shaped, with a flat, angled grinding-surface on the top and a system of rootlike legs below. There was a lot of rude behavior going on in the outer fringes of Peter’s retinue, as diverse furry muscular steppe-dwellers jostled for position. They seemed to have convinced themselves that “Tooth of the Leviathan” was a flowery monicker for some very large diamond. Men who were eager to lay eyes on the treasure collided with others who already had, and were recoiling in dismay. Meanwhile Leibniz had been nudged up to the front by Sophie, who did not believe in breaking her minions on the wheel, but was not above delivering swift jabs to the arse and kidney with her bejewelled knuckles. Leibniz bellied up to the tooth and caught the edge of the underlying tray, which was almost too heavy for the servant to hold up. Sophie Charlotte’s heavenly face was beaming at him. Next to it was the Tsar’s watch-chain. Leibniz began to tilt his head back, and did not stop until he was gazing at the undersurface of Peter’s chin. His wig slipped and Sophie cuffed him in the back of the head to set it aright, and said: “The Doctor is hard at work on a wonderful project in Natural Philosophy, which my son does not understand, but which should produce miraculous results, provided some wise monarch can only supply him with an infinite amount of money.”

 

 

At this Leibniz naturally winced, and George Louis chuckled. But Tsar Peter thought about it very gravely, as if an infinite amount of money was a routine sum for him to bandy about in his budget-meetings.*

 

“Could it make ships better?”

 

“Ships and many other things, Mr. Romanov.”

 

That did it; Peter hurled a frightfully significant glare at some advisor, who cringed back half a step and then fastened a raptor-like gaze upon Leibniz’s face. The Tsar, having settled that much, brushed past the Doctor on his way to greet George Louis.

 

 

 

*Maybe it was a translation problem; the German word for infinite is unendlich, or, roughly, unendly, without an end, and perhaps it came through to the Tsar as “a certain amount every year.”

 

 

 

 

 

Book 4

 

 

Bonanza

 

 

 

 

 

Japan

 

 

MAY 1700

 

 

 

 

DAPPA EXCHANGED MALABAR-WORDS with three black sailors who had just hauled in the sounding-lead, then turned toward the poop deck and gave van Hoek a certain look. The captain stretched out a mangled hand towards the bow, then let it fall. A pair of Filipino sailors swung mauls, dislodging a pair of chocks, and the head of the ship pitched upward slightly as it was relieved of the weight of the anchors. Their chains rumbled through hawse-holes for a moment, making a sound like Leviathan clearing its throat. Then chains gave way to soft cables of manila that slithered and hissed across the deck for quite a few moments, gathering force, until everyone abovedecks began to doubt if the Malabari sailors with the sounding-lead had really gotten it right. But then the life seemed to go out of those cables. They coasted to a stop, and the Filipinos went to work recovering the slack. The sails had all been struck, but the wind that they had ridden in from the Sea of Japan found purchase on Minerva‘s hull and nudged her forward into the long shadow of a snow-topped mountain, creating the curious impression that the sun was setting in the east.

 

Jack, Vrej Esphahnian, and Padraig Tallow were up around the foremast, stowing the few paltry sails that van Hoek had used to bring Minerva into this cove. Jack and Vrej were up in the ratlines while Padraig, who had lost his left leg during a corsair-attack around Hainan Island, was stomping around on a hand-carved peg-leg of jacaranda wood, humming to himself and pulling on ropes as necessary. These men were all shareholders in the enterprise, and normally did not do sailors’ work. But today most of the ship’s complement was down on the gundeck. The ship had developed a ponderous side-to-side roll that was obvious to Jack, high up in the ratlines. This told him, without looking, that all of the cannons had been run out as far as they could go, and were protruding from their gunports, giving Minerva the appearance of a hedgehog. The Japanese lurking in the forests that lined this cove would not have to consult their books of rangaku, Dutch Learning, to understand the message.

 

Gabriel Goto was standing at the bow in a bright kimono. Gazing down on him from above, Jack saw his shoulders soften and his head bow. The ronin had shaved, cut, greased, and knotted his grizzled hair into a configuration so peculiar that it would have gotten him burnt at the stake, or at best beaten to a pulp, in most jurisdictions; but here it was apparently as de rigueur as wigs at Versailles. Gabriel Goto did not have to worry about looking strange in Western eyes ever again, once he set foot on yonder shore. Because either the whole Transaction was a trap, and he would be crucified on the spot (the customary greeting for Portuguese missionaries), or else it was on the up-and-up, and he would become a Japanese in good standing once again—a Samurai looking after some scrap of mining country in the north, and keeping his religious opinions—if he still had any—to himself.

 

“His journey is over,” Enoch Root observed, when Jack descended to the upperdeck. “Yours is about halfway along, I should say.”

 

“Would that it were,” Jack said. “Van Hoek tells me that we have another forty degrees to travel eastwards, before we reach the Antipode of London. After all these years I am not even close to halfway.”

 

“That is only one way to measure it,” Enoch said. He had been crouched on the deck, arranging some mysterious instruments and substances in a black chest. Now he stood up and nodded at some particular feature that his eyes had marked on the shore. “You might instead say that no place is less accessible from London, than this.”

 

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