Several fled wailing. Coins began to zero in on the fakir from diverse points of the compass. But after his Adam’s apple moved up and down, and he opened his mouth wide to show it empty, and curled his tongue back to show he wasn’t hiding anything, a barrage of paisas and even rupees came down on him.
“A stirring performance, Mr. Foot,” said Jack, half an hour later, as they were all riding out of town together. “Lo these many months I have been worried sick about you, wondering how you were getting along-unfoundedly, as it turns out.”
“Very considerate of you, then, to show up unasked-for to share your poverty with me,” said Mr. Foot waspishly. Jack had extracted him from the maidan suddenly and none too gently, even to the point of leaving half the kidney sitting on the plate uneaten.
“I regret I missed the show,” said Padraig.
“Nothing you haven’t seen before in a thousand pubs,” Jack answered mildly.
“E’en so,” said Padraig,” it had to’ve been better than what I’ve been doing the last hour: sneaking round peering at idolaters’ piss-pots.”
“What learned you?”
“Same as in the last village-they do it in pots. Untouchables come round once a day to empty them,” Padraig answered.
“Are the piss and shit always mixed together or-”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
“First kidney-eating and now chamber-pots!” exclaimed Surendranath from his palanquin. “Why this keen curiosity concerning all matters related to urine?”
“Maybe we will have better luck in Diu,” Jack said enigmatically.
THAT RIVER-CROSSING MARKED THE BEGINNING of a long, slow climb up into some dark hills to the south. Surendranath assured them that it was possible to circumvent the Gir Hills simply by following the coastal roads, but Jack insisted that they go right through the middle. At one point he led them off into a dense stand of trees, and spent a while tromping around in the undergrowth hefting various branches and snapping them over his knee to judge their dryness. This was the only part of the trip when they were in anything like danger, for (a) Jack surprised a cobra and (b) half a dozen bandits came out brandishing crude, but adequate, weapons. The Hindoo whom Surendranath had hired finally did something usefuclass="underline" viz. pulled a small dagger, hardly more than a paring-knife really, from his cummerbund and held it up to his own neck and then stood there adamantly threatening to cut his own throat.
The effect on the bandits was as if this fellow had summoned forth a whole artillery-regiment and surrounded them with loaded cannons. They dropped their armaments and held forth their hands beseechingly and pleaded with him in Gujarati for a while. After lengthy negotiations, fraught with unexpected twists and alarming setbacks, the Charan finally consented not to hurt himself, the bandits fled, and the party moved on.
Within the hour they had passed over the final crest of the Hills of Gir and come to a height-of-land whence they could look straight down a south-flowing river valley to the coast: the end of the Kathiawar Peninsula. At the point where the river emptied into the sea was a white speck; beyond it, the Arabian Sea stretched away forever.
As they traveled down that valley over the next day, the white speck gradually took on definition and resolved itself into a town with a European fort in the middle. Several East Indiamen, and smaller ships, sheltered beneath the fort’s guns in a little harbor. The road became broader as they neared Diu. They were jostled together with caravans bringing bolts of cloth and bundles of spices towards the waiting ships, and began to meet Portuguese traders journeying up-country to trade.
They stopped short of the city wall, and made no effort to go in through those gates, guarded as they were by Portuguese soldiers. The Charan said his farewell and hunkered down by the side of the road to await some northbound caravan that might be in need of his protection. Jack, Padraig, Mr. Foot, Surendranath, and their small retinue began to wander through the jumbled suburbs, scattering peacocks and diverting around sacred cows, stopping frequently to ask for directions. After a while Jack caught a whiff of malt and yeast on the breeze, and from that point onwards they were able to follow their noses.
Finally they arrived at a little compound piled high with faggots of spindly wood and round baskets of grain. A giant kettle was dangling over a fire, and a short red-headed man was standing over it gazing at his own reflection: not because he was a narcissist, but because this was how brewers judged the temperature of their wort. Behind him, a couple of Hindoo workers were straining to heave a barrel of beer up into a two-wheeled cart: bound, no doubt, for a Portuguese garrison inside the walls.
“It is all as tidy and prosperous as anything in Hindoostan could be,” Jack announced, riding slowly into the middle of it. “A little corner of Amsterdam here at the butt-end of Kathiawar.”
The redhead’s blue eyes swivelled up one notch, and gazed at Jack levelly through a rising cataract of steam.
“But it was never meant to last,” Jack continued, “and you know that as well as I do, Otto van Hoek.”
“It has lasted as well as anything that is of this earth.”
“But when you make your delivery-rounds, to the garrisons and the wharves, you must look at those beautiful ships.”
“Then of ships speak to me,” said van Hoek, “or else go away.”
“Tap us a keg and dump out that kettle,” Jack said, “so we can put it to alchemical uses. I have just ridden down out of the Hills of Gir, and firewood is plentiful there. And as long as you keep peddling your merchandise to the good people of Diu, the other thing we need will be plentiful here.”
The Surat-Broach Road, Hindoostan
A MONTH LATER (OCTOBER 1693)
For the works of the Egyptian sorcerers, though not so great as those of Moses, yet were great miracles.
–HOBBES,
Leviathan
“LORD HELP ME,” said Jack, “I have begun thinking like an Alchemist.” He snapped an aloe-branch in half and dabbed its weeping stump against a crusted black patch on his forearm. He and certain others of the Cabal were reclining in the shade of some outlandish tree on the coastal plain north of Surat. Strung out along the road nearby was a caravan of bullocks and camels.
“Half of Diu believes you are one, now,” said Otto van Hoek, squinting west across the fiery silver horizon of the Gulf of Cambaye. Diu lay safely on the opposite side of it. Van Hoek had been busy unwinding a long, stinking strip of linen from his left hand, but the pain of forcing out these words through his roasted voice-box forced him to stop for a few moments and prosecute a fit of coughing and nose-wiping.
“If we had stayed any longer the Inquisition would have come for us,” said Monsieur Arlanc in a similarly hoarse and burnt voice.
“Yes-if for no other reason than the stench,” put in Vrej Esphahnian. Of all of them, he had taken the most precautions-viz. wearing leather gloves that could be shaken off when his hands burst into flame spontaneously. So he was in a better state than the others.
“It is well that we had Mr. Foot with us,” said Surendranath, “to bamboozle the Inquisitors into thinking that we pursued some sacred errand!” Surendranath had not spent all that much time among Christians, and his incredulous glee struck them all as just a bit unseemly.
“I’ll take a share of the credit for that,” said Padraig Tallow, who had lost his dominant eye, and all the hair on one side of his head. “For ’twas I who supplied Mr. Foot with all of his churchly clap-trap; he only spoke lines that I wrote.”
“No one denies it,” said Surendranath, “but even you must admit that the inexhaustible fount and ever-bubbling wellspring of nonsense, gibberish, and fraud was Ali Zaybak!”