“This will all be smoking ruins by break of day,” he announced, “let us gather what we may of the kaltes Feuer and preserve it from the air, and ourselves from fiery death!”
They went about that in two ways. First, someone would from time to time dip a ladle into the top of the bubbler and scoop out portions of the water, and along with it, flecks and flakes of cold fire that swirled through it like sparks above a campfire. This they decanted through funnels into the bottles that Vrej had procured. The glowing bottles were handed down to others on the ground, who stopped them with rags to prevent air from getting in. These were then placed into a tray of simmering water that was going over a bed of coals. Gradually, over a period of hours, the level of water within these bottles declined as it escaped through the rag stoppers. But the amount of light escaping from them did not diminish, for the waxy phosphorus was trapped inside, and tended to cling to the walls, so that each bottle over time acquired a blotchy lining of weird light. When these bottles were nearly dry, they were plucked out and plunged neck-first into a tar-pot, to seal them against infiltration of air.
Second, they dumped ladles of the stuff into clay pots each of which contained a small amount of clove oil. The water fell through the oil and found the bottom of the pot, shedding some of its burden of phosphorus along the way. These pots were then subjected to a similar process of gentle heating, so that the water trapped beneath the oil was driven out as steam. When these pots stopped blurping and steaming, it meant that all the water was gone, and nothing was left but phosphorus suspended in oil. The oil coated the tiny particules of phosphorus and prevented air from touching them, which rendered the stuff safe.
This anyway was the general plan of action. For the most part it actually went this way; but what made it interesting were the mishaps. Every splash and spill remained visible as a pool, burst, or dribbling trail of cold fire. Jack got some splashed on a forearm and did not notice it until he went and stood by the bottle-simmering place for a few minutes; the warmth shining from the bed of coals dried the damp place on his arm, leaving a fine layer of phosphorus that burst into unquenchable flame. Many had similar stories. Presently most of them were naked, having frantically stripped off clothing when it was pointed out to them by excited spectators that they were glowing. Ladles were spilled on the scaffolding by burnt and nervous hands, obliging Monsieur Arlanc to stand his ground with more than human courage as he implored someone to come up and wash away the spill with buckets of fresh water before it dried out. The caulking around the windowpane weeped, then seeped, then began to dribble a steady stream of cold fire. They made shift to catch what they could of this, and confine it to bottles or oil-pots; but matters deteriorated as more and more of the scaffold, the ground beneath it, and the men working on it became tinged with the fire, which could have only one consequence when it dried. Finally Jack ordered Monsieur Arlanc to abandon ship. The Huguenot vaulted down with spryness odd in a man of his age, rending his garments even as he hit the ground; men converged on him with buckets of sea-water and sluiced him off until he was dark. Then all ran away, for the leak around the windowpane had opened wide, and the fire was raining down in a blinding cataract. The water all came out. Air found its way in through the empty bubbler to the chimney, which had become thickly lined with condensed phosphorus. White fire shrieked out of it. The sun rose. What a moment ago had been glowing pools of spilled fire on the black velvet ground, were revealed as damp patches on khaki dirt. The bubbler ripped loose, hurtled away, and impacted on the roof of a monastery half a mile downrange. The chimney and dunce-cap shot into the air, spiraling and pin-wheeling through the night sky as if the Big Dipper had scooped up a load of the sun’s own fire. It landed somewhere out to sea. Left in the vicinity of the scaffold was a metropolis of small sputtering conflagrations that erupted here and there without warning over the next several hours. Fortunately they had had the wisdom to establish the double-boilers for the bottles and the clove-oil pots at a respectful distance. So they abandoned the center and toiled at the periphery until daybreak. This was not without some dangers of its own; sometimes a bottle would crack from the heat, and then some intrepid person would have to pluck it out with tongs and fling it away, lest in burning and exploding it would detonate the others. This led to the burning-down of the house where they had all been dwelling. In other circumstances, the loss of their domicile would have been rated a grave setback; as it was, they knew they were going to be kicked out of town anyway. A formation of Portuguese pikemen came for them at daybreak. Working amid the smoldering ruins of what had, a month earlier, been a perfectly respectable brewery, Jack and the others had already loaded the bottles (packed very carefully in straw) and the pots of oil into crates, and the crates onto those wagons that remained unburnt, and harnessed these to the few domesticated beasts that had not run away or simply dropped dead of terror during the night-time. They were escorted, not to say pursued, by the pikemen down to the quay where they boarded their hired boat with the phosphorus and what few possessions they still had. Winds favored them; pirates, who had witnessed strange apparitions in the night sky above Diu, avoided them; and a day and half a later they were in Surat, taking up their position near the head of a great armed trade-caravan, and beginning the long march north and east to Shahjahanabad.
“YOU WILL BE AMUSED to know that where I come from, swords are straight,” Jack said. “Some are broader, and indeed, being a plain-spoken people, we call those broadswords. Some are of intermediate size, as rapiers, others whisker-thin, as the small-swords that are lately in vogue. Oh, admittedly one sees a few blades with a bit of a curve to them, as in your cutlass or saber. But compared to these, they’re all straight as a line, as are the style and tactics of their usage. Compared to which…” Jack extended a hand towards a Mobb of warriors that they had picked up in Surat. There were Yavanas-which was to say, Muslims-who had come across the water from the lands to the west, or down out of Afghanistan, Balochistan, or this or that Khanate. And there were Hindoos of diverse martial castes who for whatever reason had elected to throw in their lot with the Moguls. But even within the smallest discernible sub-sub-subtribe each warrior had a weapon-or at least, a dangerous-looking object-completely different from the next bloke’s.
Among the personal effects of the Doctor, Jack had once seen books, filled not with letters but with depictions of curves. These he had leafed through in times of boredom; for though he could not read, he could stare at a strange curve as well as any other man. Eliza had sat next to him and pronounced their names: the Limacon of Pascal, the Kampyle of Eudoxus, the Conchoid of de Sluze, the Quadratrix of Hippias, the Epitrochoid, Tractrix, and the Cassinian Ovals. At the onset of the recitation Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of curves. Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true miracle was that poets, or writers, or whoever it was that was in charge of devising new words, could keep pace with those hectic geometers, and slap names on all the whorls and snarls in the pages of the Doctor’s geometry-books. Now, though, he understood that geometers and word-wrights alike were nothing more than degraded and by-passed off-shoots of the South Asian weapons industry. There was not a straight blade in all of Hindoostan. Some weapons had grips at one end and were sharpened elsewhere; these might be classed as swords. Others consisted mostly of handle, with a dangerous bit at one end; these Jack conceived of as axes or spears, depending on whether they looked like they were meant to be swung, or shoved. Still others had strings, and seemed capable of projecting arrows. Jack put these down as bows. But of the sword-like ones, some were bent all the way round to form hooks; some curved first one way, then thought better of it and veered back the other; some had a different curve on either edge, so that they became broad as shovels in parts; some quivered back and forth like wriggling snakes; some forked, or spun off hooks, beaks, barbs, lobes, prongs, or even spirals. There were swords shaped like feathers, horseshoes, goat-horns, estuaries, penises, fish-hooks, eyebrows, hair-combs, Signs of the Zodiac, half-moons, elm-leaves, dinner-forks, Persian slippers, baker’s paddles, pelican’s beaks, dog’s legs, and Corinthian columns. This did not take into account the truly outlandish contraptions that seemed to have been made by piling two or more such weapons atop each other, heating, and beating. Of long-handled swinging-weapons (axes, maces, hammers, halberds, and weaponized farm-implements, viz. war-sickles, combat-flails, assault-shovels, and tactical adzes) there was a similar variety. Most troublesome to Jack’s mind, for some reason, were the bows which instead of the good old crescent of English yew, here seemed to’ve been made from the legs of giant spiders; they were black, sinewy, glossy, spindly things that curved this way and that, and were sometimes longer on one end than the other, so that Jack could not even make out which end was up; which part was the handle; or which side was supposed to face the enemy. For each of these weapon-styles, he knew, there must be a six-thousand-year-old martial art with its own set of unfathomable rites, lingo, exercises, and secrets that could only be mastered through a lifetime of miserable study.