They were beholding a vast Lady that lay on the beach. She was the color of teak. The light of the sun made her flesh glow like iron in a forge. She was far larger than the largest tree that had ever been, and so must have been pieced together from many individual bits of wood, such as this peg that the peg-maker was shaping next to Jack, or that plank that the plank-maker over there was assiduously sculpting out of a giant rough timber. Indeed, if they had come a year ago they might have seen her ribs jutting into the air, and courses of hull-planks still being cut to length, and it would have been evident that she had after all been pieced together. But in her current state it seemed as if she had just grown on the beach, and the way that the grain-lines of the teak followed her every curve did everything to enhance that illusion.
“Aye,” Jack said, after he had allowed a proper silence to go by, “sometimes I think her curves are too perfect to’ve been shaped by man.”
“They were not shaped, but only discovered, by man,” said Enoch Root, and risked a single step towards her. Then he fell into silence again.
Jack busied himself inspecting various works higher up the beach. For the most part these were makers of planks and pegs. But in one place a shed of woven canes had been erected, and thatched with palm-fronds. Inside it, a woodcarver of higher caste was at work with his chisels and mallets; wood-chips covered the sandy floor and spilled out onto the beach. Jack went in there, bringing Surendranath as his interpreter.
“For Christ’s sake! Look at her! Will you just look at her!? Look at her!” Then a pause while Jack drew breath and Surendranath translated this into Marathi, a couple of octaves lower, and the sculptor muttered something back.
“Yes, I see quite plainly that you were so good as to remove the elephant-trunk, and that the lady has a proper nose now, and for that you have my undying gratitude,” Jack hollered sarcastically, “and as long as I am helping you with your self-esteem, sirrah, allow me to thank you for scraping off the blue paint. But! For! Christ’s! Sake! Do you know, sirrah, how to count? You do!? Oh, excellent! Then will you be so good, sirrah, as to count the number of arms possessed by this Lady? I will patiently stand here while you take a full inventory-it may take a little while…oh, very good! That is the same reckoning that I have arrived at! Now, sirrah, if you will be so kind, how many arms do you observe on my body? Very good! Once again, we agree. How about Surendranath-how many arms has he? Ahh, the same figure has come up once again. And you, sirrah, when you carve your idols, you hold the hammer in one, and the chisel in another, hand-how many makes that? Remarkable! Yet again we have arrived at the same figure! Then will you please explain to me how come it is that This! Lady! is formed as you have formed her? Why the numerical discrepancy? Do I need to import a Doctor of al-jebr to explain this?”
Jack stormed out of the shed, followed closely by Surendranath, who was saying, “You told the poor fellow she was supposed to represent a goddess-what on earth were you expecting?”
“I was being poetickal.”
Jimmy and Danny had long since clambered aboard, and were running from stem to stern and back again, hooting like schoolboys. Enoch had been walking about her, tracing short segments of arcs on the wet sand, and was now standing in violet light with the water up around his knees.
“My first thought was that she couldn’t have been wrought by a Dutchman, on account of her marked dead-rise,* which will make her fast but will bar her from most Dutch harbors.”
“There are no Dutch harbors around here, you’ll notice,” Jack observed.
“Her stem is strongly raked, more like a jacht than a typical East Indiaman. It looks as if two and maybe three exceptionally noble teaks were sacrificed to fashion that curve. There are no such trees in Europe any more, and so stems are pieced together, and rarely have such a rake. How did you find trees that were curved just so?”
“In this country, as you have seen, there is a whole sub-civilization of woodcutters who carry in their heads an inventory of every tree that grows between the Roof of the World in the north, and the Isle of Serendib in the south,” Jack said. “We stole those trees from other jagirs. It took six months and was complicated.”
“And yet her keel is no shorter, for all her stem-rake. So yet again, the builder seems to have valued speed above other desirables. Being so long and so rakish, she had to be narrow-quite a bit of volume has been sacrificed to that. And even more has been given up to riders and other reinforcements-you’ve put two ships’ worth of teak into her. Expecting her to carry a lot of guns, are you?” Enoch asked.
“Assuming you’ve held up your end of the transaction.”
“She should last thirty or forty years,” Enoch said.
“Longer than most of us will,” Jack answered, “present company excepted, that is-if the rumors about you are true.”
“Anyone who looks at her will know she is hauling valuable cargo,” said Enoch. “If ship-building is the art of compromise, then your builder has everywhere chosen speed and armament at the expense of volume. Such a ship can only pay for her upkeep if she is hauling items of small bulk and great value. She is pirate-bait.”
“If there is anything we have learned in our wanderings, it is that every ship on the sea, even one as humble as God’s Wounds, is pirate-bait,” said Jack. “And so we have built a pirate-slayer. There is a reason why the Dutch make their merchantmen almost indistinguishable from their Ships of Force. Why should we go to the expense of fashioning a teak-built ship, only to lose her to some boca-neers six months after she is launched?”
Enoch nodded. Jack had become a bit furious.
“So let me hear your guess, Enoch. You said that she didn’t look like a ship built by a Dutchman. Who was the shipwright, then?”
“A Dutchman, of course! For only they are so free in adopting outlandish notions-only they have the confidence. Everyone else only parrots them.”
“You are both right and wrong,” Jack said after a moment’s pause, and then turned away and began slogging down the beach in the direction of a fire that had been kindled in the last few minutes, as the sun had finally disappeared and stars came out overhead. “Our shipwright is one Jan Vroom of Rotterdam. Van Hoek recruited him.”
“His name is well-known. What on earth is he doing here?”
“It seems that in the days of Vroom’s apprenticeship, shipwrights were held in high esteem by the V.O.C. and the Admiralty, and given a free hand. Each ship was built a little differently, according to the wisdom-or as some would say, the whim-of the shipwright. But recently the V.O.C. have become prideful, thinking that they know everything that will ever be known about how to build ships, and they have begun specifying sizes and measurements down to a quarter of an inch-they want every ship the same. And if a shipwright dares to show any artistry, why, then, some rival shipwright will be brought in to take measurements and write up a report, laying out how these rules and regulations have been violated, and causing no end of trouble. What it comes down to is that Jan Vroom did not feel appreciated. And when a worm-gnawed and weatherbeaten letter arrived in his hands, a couple of years ago, from an old acquaintance of his named Otto van Hoek, he dropped what he was doing and took passage on the next ship out of Rotterdam.”
“Looks as if more followed,” said Enoch, for they were now close enough that they could see a whole semicircle of muttering Dutchmen around the fire, lighting up their clay pipes with flaming twigs. In the middle were the red-headed captain, and a tall man with a blond-going-gray beard who was obviously Vroom. But four younger men were around them, listening and nodding.