All his upbringing had taught him to expect a single dramatic moment of apocalypse. Instead this had been slow evolution spread all round and working silently, like manure on a field. If anything important had happened, it had done so in places where Daniel wasn’t. Buried in it somewhere was an inflection point that later they’d point to as the Moment It All Happened.
He was not such an old tired Puritan that he didn’t get joy out of it. But its very anticlimactitude, if that was a word, its diffuseness, was a sort of omen to him. It was like being an astronomer, up in that tower behind him, at the moment that the letter arrived from the Continent in which Kepler mentioned that the earth was not, in fact, at the center of the universe. Like that astronomer, Daniel had much knowledge, and only some of it was wrong-but all of it had to be gone over now, and re-understood. This realization settled him down a bit. As when a queer wind-gust comes down chimney and fills a room of merry-makers with smoke, and covers the pudding with a black taste. He was not quite ready for life in this England.
Now he understood why he’d felt so attracted to the river earlier: not because it was serene, but because it had the power to take him somewhere else.
He left the horse there, with an explanatory note for Flamsteed, who’d be apoplectic. He walked down to the Thames and woke up a waterman he knew there, a Mr. Bhnh, the patriarch of a tiny Qwghlmian settlement lodged in the south bank. Mr. Bhnh had grown so accustomed to the nocturnal crossings of Natural Philosophers that someone had nominated him, in jest, as a Fellow of the Royal Society. He agreed to convey Daniel across to the Isle of Dogs on the north bank.
Of late, reductions in the cost of window-glass, and improvements in the science of architecture, had made it possible to build whole blocks of shops with large windows facing the street, so that fine goods could be set out in view of passers-by. Shrewd builders such as Sterling (the Earl of Willesden) Waterhouse and Roger (the Marquis of Ravenscar) Comstock had built neighborhoods where courtiers went to do just that. The noun “shop” had been verbed; people went “shopping” now. Daniel of course never lowered himself to this newfangled vice-except that as he crossed the river he seemed to be doing it with ships. And he was a discriminating shopper. The watermen’s boats, the smacks and barges of the estuary were beneath his notice altogether, and the coasting vessels-anything with a fore-and-aft rig-were scarcely more than impediments. He raised his eyes up out of the clutter to scan for the great ships thrusting their yards up, like High Church priests exalting the sacraments above the rabble, into the sky where the wind blew straight and brave. The sails hung from those yards like vestments. There were not many such ships in the Pool tonight, but Daniel sought them all out and appraised each one shrewdly. He was shopping for something to take him away; he wanted to voyage out of sight of land for once in his life, to die and be buried on another continent.
One in particular caught his eye: trim, clean-lined, and sharply managed. She was taking advantage of the in-coming tide to make her way up-stream, ushered forward by a faint southerly breeze. The movement of the air was too faint for Daniel to feel it, but the crew of this ship, Hare, had seen flickers of life in the streamers dangling from her mastheads, and spread out her topsails. These stopped a bit of air. They stopped some of the fire-light from the city, too, projecting long prismatic shadows off into the void. The sails of Hare hovered above the black river, glowing like curtained windows. Mr. Bhnh tracked them for half a mile or so, taking advantage of the lead that the great ship forced among the smaller vessels. “She’s fitted out for a long voyage,” he mused, “probably sailing for America on the next tide.”
“Would I had a grapnel,” Daniel said, “I’d climb aboard like a pirate, and stow away on her.”
This startled Mr. Bhnh, who was not used to hearing such flights of fancy from his clientele. “Are you going to America, Mr. Waterhouse?”
“Someday,” Daniel allowed, “there is tidying-up to do in this country yet.”
Mr. Bhnh was loath to discharge Daniel in the fiery wilds of East London, which tonight was thronged with drunken mudlarks lighting out in torrid pursuit of real or imaginary Jesuits. Daniel gave no heed to this good man’s worries. He had made it all the way from Sheerness without any trouble. Even in the tavern there, he had been left alone. Those who took any notice of him at all, soon lost their interest, or (strange to relate) lost their nerve and looked away. For Daniel carried now the unstudied nonchalance of a man who knew he’d be dead in a year no matter what; people seemed to smell the grave about him, and were happy to leave him alone.
On the other hand, a man with little time to live, and no heirs, need not be so miserly. “I shall give you a pound if you take me direct to the Tower,” Daniel said. Then, observing a wary look on Mr. Bhnh’s face, he teased his purse open and tossed a handful of coins beside the boat’s lantern until he found one that shone a little, and was nearly round. In the center was a battered and scratched plop of silver that with careful tilting and squinting and use of the imagination could be construed as a portrait of the first King James, who had died sixty-some odd years ago, but who was held to have managed the Mint competently. The waterman’s hand closed over this artifact and almost as quickly Daniel’s eyelids came to with an almost palpable slamming noise. He was remotely aware of massive wool blankets being thrown over his body by the solicitous Mr. Bhnh, and then he was aware of nothing.
For the King of the North shal returne, and shal set forthe a greater multitude then afore, and shal come forthe (after certeine yeres) with a mightie armie, amp; great riches.
And at the same time there shal manie stand up against the King of the South: also the rebellious children of thy people shal exalte them selves to establish the vision, but they shal fall.
So the King of the North shal come, and cast up a mounte, amp; take the strong citie: and the armes of the South shal not resist, neither his chosen people, neither shal there be anie strength to withstand.
–Daniel 11:13-15
HAVING GONE TO SLEEPin that boat on that night he should on no account have been surprised to wake up in the same boat on the same night; but when it happened he was perfectly a-mazed, and had to see and understand everything afresh. His body was hot on the top and cold on the bottom, and on the whole, not happy with its management. He tried closing and opening his eyes a few times to see if he could conjure up a warm bed, but a mightier conjuration had been wrought on him, and condemned him to this place and time. To call it nightmarish was too easy, for it had all the detail, the lively perversity that nightmares wanted. London-burning, smoking, singing-was still all around. However, he was confronted by a sheer wall of stone that rose up out of the Thames, and was thickly jacketed in all of the unspeakables that flowed in it. Atop that wall was a congeries of small buildings, hoists, large guns, a few relatively small and disciplined bonfires, armed men, but snarls of running boys, too. There was the smell of coal, iron, and sulfur, reminding Daniel of Isaac’s laboratory. And because the sense of smell is plumbed into the mind down in the cellar, where dark half-formed notions lurk and breed, Daniel entertained a momentary phant’sy that Isaac had come to London and set his mind to the acquisition of temporal power, and constructed a laboratory the size of Jerusalem.
Then he perceived stone walls and towers rising up behind this wharf, and taller ones rising up behind them, and an even higher fort of pale stone above and behind those, and he understood that he lay before the Tower of London. The roar of the artificial cataracts between the starlings of London Bridge, off to his left, confirmed it.
The wharf-wall was pierced by an arch whose floor was a noisome back-water of the Thames. The boat of Mr. Bhnh was more or less keeping station before that arch, though the current was flowing one way and the tide striving against it, so they were being ill-used by marauding vortices and pounced upon by rogue waves. The waterman, in other words, was using every drowning-avoidance skill he’d practised in the rocky flows off Qwghlm, and more than earning his pound. For in addition to duelling those currents he had been prosecuting a negotiation with a figure who stood on the top of the wharf, just above the arch. That man in turn was exchanging shouts through a speaking trumpet with a periwigged gentleman up on the parapet of the wall behind: a crenellated medieval sort of affair with a modern cannon poking out through each slot, and each cannon conspicuously manned.