“I cede the point gladly,” said Padraig, and both men turned to see if Jack would respond to their baiting. But Jack had been distracted by an odor foul enough to register even on his raspy and inflamed olfactory. Van Hoek had got the bandage off his right hand. The tips of his three remaining fingers were swollen and weeping.
“I told you,” said Jack, “you should have used this stuff.” He gestured to the aloe-plant, or rather the stump of it, as Jack had just snapped off the last remaining branch. It was growing in a pot of damp dirt, which was carried on its own wee palanquin: a plank supported at each end by a boy. “The Portuguese brought it out of Africa,” Jack explained.
“Truly you are thinking like an Alchemist, then,” muttered van Hoek, staring morosely at his rotting digits. “Everyone knows that the only treatment for burns is butter. It is proof of how far gone you are in outlandish ways, that you would rather use some occult potion out of Africa!”
“When do you think you’ll amputate?” Jack inquired.
“This evening,” said van Hoek. “That way I shall have twenty-four hours to recuperate before the battle.” He looked to Surendranath for confirmation.
“If our objective were to make time, and to cross the Narmada by day, we could do it tomorrow,” said Surendranath. “But as our true purpose is to ‘fall behind schedule,’ and reach the crossing too late, and be trapped against the river by the fall of night, we may proceed at a leisurely pace. This evening’s camp would be a fine time and place to carry out a minor amputation. I shall make inquiries about getting you some syrup of poppies.”
“More chymistry!” van Hoek scoffed, and dipped his hand into a pot of ghee. But he did not object to Surendranath’s proposal. “I could have been a brewer,” he mused. “In fact, I was!”
VAN HOEK HAD SURRENDERED his brewing-coppers to Jack and gone down to the harbor of Diu to see about hiring a dhow or something like it. Jack, spending Surendranath’s capital, had set some local smiths to work beating the copper tuns into new shapes-shapes that Jack chalked out for them from his memories of Enoch Root’s strange works in the Harz Mountains. Surendranath had sent messengers north to the kingdom of Dispenser of Mayhem, along with money to buy the freedom of Vrej Esphahnian and Monsieur Arlanc. Then the Banyan, somewhat against his better instincts, had set about turning himself into a urine mogul.
Some simple deals struck with the caste of night-soil-collectors and chamber-pot-emptiers caused jugs, barrels, and hogsheads of piss to come trundling into van Hoek’s brewery-compound every morning. By and large these had been covered, to keep the stink down, but Jack insisted that the lids be taken off and the piss be allowed to stand open under the sun. Complaints from the neighbors-consisting largely of religious orders-had not been long in coming. And it was then that Mr. Foot had come into his own; for he’d been at work with needle and thread, converting his black Puritan get-up into a sort of Wizard’s robe. His line of patter consisted half of Alchemy-which Jack had dictated-and half of Popery, which Padraig Tallow could and did rattle off in his sleep.
What Jack knew of Alchemy-talk came partly from the mountebanks who would stand along the Pont-Neuf peddling bits of the Philosopher’s Stone; partly from Enoch Root; and partly from tales that he had been told, more recently, by Nyazi, who knew nothing of chymistry but was the last word on all matters to do with camels.
“Amon, or Amon-Ra, was the great god of the ancient peoples of al-Khem.* And just as al-Khem gave its name to Alchemy, so did the god Amon serve as namesake of a magickal substance well known to practitioners of that Art. For behold, when the Romans made al-Khem a part of their empire, they perceived in this Amon a manifestation of Jupiter, and dubbed him Jupiter-Ammon, and made idols depicting him as a mighty King with ram’s horns sprouting from his temples. To him they raised up a great temple at the Oasis of Siwa, which lies in the desert far to the west of Alexandria. As well as being a great caravanserai, long has that place been a center of mystickal powers and emanations; lo, an oracle of Amon was there from the time of the Pharaohs, and the Roman temple of Jupiter-Ammon was erected upon the same site. It was, and is, a very hotbed of Alchemy, and has become renowned for the production of a pungent salt, which is prepared from the dung of the thousands of camels that pass through the place. The secret of its preparation is known to but a few; but the Salt of Ammon, or sal ammoniac, is taken by the caravans to Alexandria and the other trading-centers of North Africa, whence it is distributed the world over by the infinitely various channels of Commerce. Thus have its extraordinary, and some would say magical, powers become known throughout the world. Now, if ignorant pagans could make so much out of what was literally a heap of shit, consider how much more Christians, who know the Bible, and who have access to the writings of Paracelsus, amp;c., might accomplish! What is present in camel shit, may also be found in the urine of humans, for Aristotle would say that both of these substances are of the same essential nature. Though Plato would observe that the latter is as much more refined and closer to the Ideal as human beings are compared to camels…”
All of this was, of course, a long-winded way of letting the neighbors know that Jack and company were about to stink the place up to a degree that no one who had not been near a mountain of fermenting camel shit could even imagine; but Mr. Foot delivered the terrible news at such numbing length and so laden down with homiletical baggage as to beat his auditors into submission before the essential point of what he was saying had even penetrated their minds.
As was ever true of any work that entailed the bending and beating of metal, the conversion of the tuns took longer than anticipated. What Jack was after was a single great round-bottomed wide-mouthed boiler, and a means to suspend it over a “bloody enormous” fire. This was simple enough. But at a later, critical stage of the operation he needed to clamp a sort of hat down over the maw of the kettle, and channel the vapors along a tube to another, smaller vessel where they could be bubbled through water. For the most practical of reasons, it was preferable that this latter vessel be made of glass. But it had proved difficult to get a glass container so large, and so they made do with copper. This explained what happened to Padraig; for against Jack’s express instructions, he had, while they were making a trial batch, lifted the lid to peer inside, and been greeted by a jet of white flame.
Around the time of this mishap, managerial acumen arrived in the person of Monsieur Arlanc, and, in Vrej Esphahnian, entrepreneurial legerdemain. Arlanc pointed out that it would be difficult to hire good people, or to maintain their reputation as proficient Alchemists, if the principals were forever torching off body parts, and making the Kathiawar Peninsula ring with screams of agony. Vrej, for his part, had proffered the observation that they would soon need to procure a large number of glass vessels anyway, and so it was high time to begin investigating the local market in such wares.
The results were none too encouraging. In Diu there was no Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers, as in London. Indeed, it seemed that glass-making was one of the few arts and crafts that Christians did better than anyone else. There had, according to Vrej, been many brilliant glassworkers in Damascus three hundred years ago, but then Tamerlane had sacked the place and carried them all off to Samarkand, and they had not been heard from since. There was no time just now to send a delegation to Samarkand and make inquiries. So they had to make do with what glass could be collected from the diverse Portuguese chapter-houses, factories, and fortifications around Diu. For the bubbling-vessel, Vrej procured a single windowpane about a hand-span on a side. Jack put his coppersmiths to work letting a hole into the side of the vessel, and van Hoek used his caulking acumen to seal the pane into place so that not too much water would leak out around the edges. All of which took a while. But it required upwards of a fortnight for a given bucket of piss to reach the point where it was ready to be used, and so the hurry was not great. And Arlanc had been kept busy for some while procuring charcoal from the wooded hills in the north. This had to be prepared by locals making countless small batches in countless tan-doors, then collected and gathered and shipped. Capital ran low. Vessels came across from Surat bearing news, or at least rumors, that this or that Banyan was readying a caravan and a puissant force of mercenaries to punch through the Maratha blockade along the Narmada; and each such message sent Surendranath into an ecstasy of rage, and caused him to run about the compound (weaving carefully between urine-receptacles) flinging his turban on the ground and then picking it up so that he could fling it down again, while wondering aloud to the gods why he had ever chosen to take up with all of these crazy ferangs. For a week, it seemed that all they had to show for their efforts was a sea of putrescent urine; a lot of copper, beaten to outlandish shapes and stuck together with solder and with tar; and a few patches of dirt where dusk seemed to linger even after black night had covered the rest of Hindoostan.