“Before we interrupt these gentlemen, let us conspire in the darkness here,” said Enoch.
“I’m listening.”
“Along with these very Dutchmen, you imported some scribe, skilled-or so you were told-in the cryptographickal arts. You had this scribe write me an encyphered letter saying, ‘Dear Enoch Root, I require forty-four large naval cannons, preferably of finest and most modern sort, please provide.’ And several months later I decrypted and read this document in London-though not before some spy had intercepted it, and copied it out. At any rate, I read this document and I laughed. I hope you were laughing when you dictated it.”
“A smile might have played round my lips.”
“That is good, because it was an absurd request. And if you did not have the wit to recognize it as such, it would mean you had turned into some sort of addle-pated Oriental despot.”
“Enoch. Do you, or do you not, have certain large metal items for me?”
“The items you refer to are not free for the taking. One does not acquire such goods without accepting certain obligations.”
“You’re saying you’ve found us an investor? That is acceptable. What are his terms?”
“You should rather say, her terms.”
Jack levitated. Enoch clapped a hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eye. Enoch was facing toward the fire and the light glinted weirdly in the dilated pupils of his eyes: a pair of red moons in the night. “Jack, it is not her. She has done well for herself, it’s true-but not so well that she can dispatch an arsenal halfway around the world, simply because a Vagabond writes her a letter.”
“What woman can?”
“A woman you saw once, from a steeple in Hanover.”
“Stab me!”
“And now you appreciate, I trust, how deep the matter is.”
“But I should not have addressed the letter to Enoch Root, if I did not want it to become deep. What are her terms?”
The red moons were eclipsed for a little while. Enoch sighed. His breath on Jack’s face was hot and warm like a Malabar breeze, and laced-or so Jack imagined-with queer mineral fragrances.
“Investors who dictate terms are common as the air, Jack,” Enoch said. “This is a different matter altogether. You are not borrowing capital from an investor in exchange for specific terms. You are entering into a relationship with a woman. Certain things will simply be expected of you. I cannot even begin to guess what. If you and your partners fail to act as gentlemen should, you will incur the lady’s displeasure. Is that specific enough? Is it clear?”
“It is neither.”
“Good! Then this has been a successful conversation,” Enoch said. “Now I must convey the same maddening ambiguity to your partners. That being accomplished, I must show due diligence, and-”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Certain items are conspicuously absent-such as masts and sails. Cordage. A crew. I cannot release the weapons until I have seen these. Also, her position on the beach is vulnerable.”
“We will float her soon, and complete her on the water-as is traditional. If she had a few cannons on board she would be a difficult prize to take from land.”
“Agreed. Have you made plans for her maiden voyage?”
“We were thinking perhaps of running saltpeter to Batavia, and then bringing spices back to one of the Great Mogul’s ports-for Hindoostan consumes more spices than all Europe combined, and they have no lack of silver with which to pay for it.”
“It is not a bad plan. But you may have a different plan tomorrow, Jack.”
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON FOUND THEM in dangerous territory south of the Black Vale of Vhanatiya. The Carnaya miner had given Enoch deliberately misleading directions that would have led him directly into a Maratha trap. But Enoch had anticipated this, and tracked the miner through the hills like a hunter stalking wild game.
They passed for some hours through a high terrain overgrown with vicious scrub. All of the large trees seemed to have been cut down long ago and never grown back. Just when Jack was convinced that they were utterly lost in the most God-forsaken part of the world, he smelled camels, and they stumbled upon a caravan of Persians headed the same direction. This was a bit like running into a clan of kilted Scotsmen in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
The way became broad and trampled; Enoch no longer had to use his tracking skills. Finally even the scrub and thorn plants vanished. Like a few pebbles rattling down into a stoneware bowl, they descended into a rocky crater, maculated with schlock-heaps and filled with a perpetual miasma of wood-smoke.
“Even if your taste is abominable, I must grant you credit for consistency,” Jack muttered. “How is it you always end up in the same sort of place?”
“By following the spoors of men such as the Carnaya,” said Enoch, speaking in a hush, like a Papist who’s just entered a basilica. “Now you see why I insisted that we come here alone-if we’d brought an escort of rowzinders, imagine how this place would have been upset.”
“Isn’t it already?” Jack asked. “What the hell are they up to? And why are those Persians here? And do my smoke-burnt eyes deceive me, or is that a contingent of Armenian long-range traders?”
Enoch said only: “Watch.” So Jack followed Enoch and watched Enoch watch.
Now in the beginning Jack was certain that they had come to the place where all of Europe’s teacups were manufactured, for there were clay-pits all over, and Hindoos squatted in them fashioning teacup-sized vessels. These were carried up to kilns to be fired. But if they were teacups, they were rough thick-walled ones without handles or decoration, and each came with a domed lid. And other peculiar operations were going on nearby: Canes of bamboo, and odds and ends of teak-wood, were being loaded into smoky furnaces to be turned into charcoal. Jack was certain that some of this teak was scrap left over from his ship-building project, and was peeved at first, then amused, to realize that his kolis had another operation going on the side.
Teak and bamboo were not the only vegetable matter being brought up to this stony vale. Wizened hill-people were staggering down under twig-bundles bigger than they were, and being paid in silver by important-looking characters. Jack did not recognize the twigs, but he gathered from the price paid for, and the reverence accorded, them that they were of some sort of plant sacred to the Hindoos.
All of these ingredients came together before a towering mud hearth, a sort of blazing termite-mound the size of a small church that rose from the center of the compound, looking twice as ancient as anything Jack had seen in Egypt. An old man with a priestly look about him squatted on his haunches next to a pyramid of rough teacups. He stirred his hand around in a sack of black sand just like what the Carnaya had panned out of the riverbank, and sifted it between his fingers into the crucible, seemingly feeling every single grain between his wrinkled fingertips, flicking away any that didn’t feel right. Then he chose a few shards of charcoal and distributed them around atop the black sand, crumbling them into smaller bits as necessary, and finally plucked some leaves and blossoms from a giant spraying faggot of magic twigs and arranged these on the charcoal like a French chef placing a garnish atop a cassoulet. Then his hand went back into the sack of black sand and he repeated the procedure, layer upon layer, until the tiny vessel was full. Now the lid went on, and it was passed with great care to an assistant who sealed the lid in place with wet clay.
The finished crucibles, looking like slightly flattened balls of mud, were stacked like cannonballs near the great furnace. But they did not go in just now, because a firing was in progress: Jack could look in and see a heap of similar crucibles glowing in the heat like a bunch of ripe fruit.
“I’ll be damned,” said Enoch Root, “they are only red-, not yellow-hot. That means that the iron ore is not actually being melted. Instead the charcoal is being absorbed by the iron, though the iron is yet solid.”