“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 f?ces 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 wellsprings in numerous high remote valleys.
Eliza was beginning to see some of the enormous trees of Mum’s f?ry-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.