“He’s accomplishing nothing-that’s very different from doing nothing,” Enoch said gravely.
“What’s he trying to accomplish?”
“He’d persuade the masters of the Duke’s mines not to abandon all of his innovations, now that his latest attempt to sell Kuxen has gone the way of all the others.”
“Well, why should they listen to him?”
“We are going where the Doctor went yesterday,” Enoch said, “and heard what he wanted to from the master of a mine.”
“Beggin’ yer pardon, guv’nor, but that striketh me not as an answer to my question.”
“This entire day will be your answer,” Enoch said, and then looked back, significantly, at a heavy cart following behind them, which was laden with quicksilver flasks packed in wooden crates.
They came to a mine like all the others: schlock-heaps, hand-haspels, furnaces, wheelbarrows. Jack had seen it in the Ore Range and he’d seen it in the Harz, but today (perhaps because Enoch had suggested that there was something to be learned) he saw a new thing.
The shards of ore harvested from the veins growing in the earth, were brought together and dumped out in a pile on the ground, then raked out and beaten up with hammers. The fragments were inspected in the light of day by miners too old, young, or damaged to go down into the tunnels, and sorted into three piles. The first was stone with no silver in it, which was discarded. The second was ore rich in silver, which went straight to the furnaces to be (if what Jack had seen in the Ore Range was any guide) crushed between millstones, mixed with burning-lead, shoveled into a chimney-like furnace blown by great mule-powered bellows, and melted down into pigs of crude silver. The third, which Jack had not seen at Herr Geidel’s mine, was ore that contained silver, but was not as rich as the other. Geidel would have discarded this as not worth the trouble to refine it.
Jack followed a wagon-load of this down the hill to a flat meadow decorated by curious mounds hidden under oiled canvas tarps. Here, men and women were pounding this low-grade ore in big iron mortars and turning the proceeds out into clattering sieves. Boys shook these to sift out powdered ore, then mixed it with water, salt, and the dross from copper-making to produce a sticky clay. This they emptied into large wooden tubs. Then along came an elder, trailed by a couple of stout boys sweating under heavy backloads that looked familiar: they were the quicksilver-flasks that the Doctor had bought in Leipzig, and that Enoch had delivered to them this very morning. The elder stirred through the mud with his hand, checking its quality and consistency, and, if it was right, he’d hug a flask and draw out the wooden bung and tip it, making a bolt of quicksilver strike into the mud like argent lightning. Barefoot boys went to work stomping the mercury into the mud.
Several such vats were being worked at any one time. Enoch explained to Jack that the amalgam had to be mixed for twenty-four hours. Then the vat was upended to make a heap of the stuff on the ground. At this particular mine, there were dozens of such heaps arrayed across the meadow, each one protected from the rain by a canopy of rugged cloth, and each stuck with a little sign scrawled with information about how long it had been sitting there. “This one was last worked ten days ago-it is due,” Enoch told him, reading one of the signs. Indeed, later some of the workers rolled an empty tub up to that pile, shoveled the amalgam into it, added water, and began to work it with their feet again.
Enoch continued to wander about, peeling back canvas to inspect the heaps, and offering suggestions to the elders. Locals had begun filtering out of the woods as soon as visitors had arrived, and were now following him around-greed for knowledge drawing them closer, and fear pushing them back. “This one’s got too much quicksilver,” he said of one, “that’s why it’s black.” But another was the color of bran. More quicksilver was wanted. Most of them were shades of gray, which was apparently desirable-but Enoch thrust his hand into these to check their warmth. Cold ones needed to have more copper dross added, and overly hot ones needed water. Enoch was carrying a basin, which he used to wash samples of the heaps in water until little pools of silver formed in the bottom. One of the heaps, all of a uniform ash color, was deemed ready. Workers shoveled it into wheelbarrows and took it down to a creek, where a cascade had been set up to wash it. The water carried the ashy stuff away as swirling clouds, and left silvery residue. This they packed into conical bags, like the ones used to make sugar-loaves, and hung them up over pots, rows of them dangling like the tits on a sow, except that instead of producing milk they dripped quicksilver, leaving a gleaming semi-solid mass inside the bags. This they formed into balls, like boys making snowballs, and put them, a few at a time, into crucibles. Over the top of each crucible they put an iron screen, then flipped the whole thing upside-down and placed it over a like crucible, half-buried in the ground, with water in the bottom, so that the two were fitted rim-to-rim, making a capsule divided in half by the iron screen. Then they buried the whole thing in coal and burned it until it was all red-hot. After it cooled, they raked off the ash and took it all apart to reveal that the quicksilver had been liberated from the balls of amalgam and escaped through the screen, to puddle below, leaving above a cluster of porous balls of pure silver metal all stuck together, and ready to be minted into thalers.
Jack spent most of the ride home pondering what he’d seen. He noticed after a while that Enoch Root had been humming in a satisfied way, evidently pleased with himself for having been able to so thoroughly shut Jack up.
“So Alchemy has its uses,” Enoch said, noting that Jack was coming out of his reverie.
“You invented this?”
“I improved it. In the old days they used only quicksilver and salt. The piles were cold, and they had to sit for a year. But when dross of copper is added, they become warm, and complete the change in three or four weeks.”
“The cost of quicksilver is-?”
Enoch chuckled. “You sound like your lady friend.”
“That’s the first question she’s going to ask.”
“It varies. A good price for a hundredweight would be eighty.”
“Eighty of what?”
“Pieces of eight,” Enoch said.
“It’s important to specify.”
“Christendom’s but a corner of the world, Jack,” Enoch said. “Outside of it, pieces of eight are the universal currency.”
“All right-with a hundredweight of quicksilver, you can make how much silver?”
“Depending on the quality of the ore, about a hundred Spanish marks-and in answer to your next question, a Spanish mark of silver, at the standard level of fineness, is worth eight pieces of eight and six Royals…”
“APIECE OF EIGHT HAS eight reals- ” Eliza said, later, having spent the last two hours sitting perfectly motionless while Jack paced, leaped, and cavorted about her bedchamber relating all of these events with only modest improvements.
“I know that-that’s why it’s called a piece of eight,” Jack said testily, standing barefoot on the sack of straw that was Eliza’s bed, where he had been demonstrating the way the workers mixed the amalgam with their feet.
“Eight pieces of eight plus six royals, makes seventy royals. A hundred marks of silver, then, is worth seven thousand royals… or… eight hundred seventy-five pieces of eight. And the price of the quicksilver needed is-again?”
“Eighty pieces of eight, or thereabouts, would be a good price.”
“So-those who’d make money need silver, and those who’d make silver need quicksilver-and a piece of eight’s worth of quicksilver, put to the right uses, produces enough silver to mint ten pieces of eight.”
“And you can re-use it, as they are careful to do,” Jack said. “You have forgotten a few other necessaries, by the way-such as a silver mine. Mountains of coal and salt. Armies of workers.”