They stopped short of the city wall, and made no effort to go in through those gates, guarded as they were by Portuguese soldiers. The Charan said his farewell and hunkered down by the side of the road to await some northbound caravan that might be in need of his protection. Jack, Padraig, Mr. Foot, Surendranath, and their small retinue began to wander through the jumbled suburbs, scattering peacocks and diverting around sacred cows, stopping frequently to ask for directions. After a while Jack caught a whiff of malt and yeast on the breeze, and from that point onwards they were able to follow their noses.
Finally they arrived at a little compound piled high with faggots of spindly wood and round baskets of grain. A giant kettle was dangling over a fire, and a short red-headed man was standing over it gazing at his own reflection: not because he was a narcissist, but because this was how brewers judged the temperature of their wort. Behind him, a couple of Hindoo workers were straining to heave a barrel of beer up into a two-wheeled cart: bound, no doubt, for a Portuguese garrison inside the walls.
"It is all as tidy and prosperous as anything in Hindoostan could be," Jack announced, riding slowly into the middle of it. "A little corner of Amsterdam here at the butt-end of Kathiawar."
The redhead's blue eyes swivelled up one notch, and gazed at Jack levelly through a rising cataract of steam.
"But it was never meant to last," Jack continued, "and you know that as well as I do, Otto van Hoek."
"It has lasted as well as anything that is of this earth."
"But when you make your delivery-rounds, to the garrisons and the wharves, you must look at those beautiful ships."
"Then of ships speak to me," said van Hoek, "or else go away."
"Tap us a keg and dump out that kettle," Jack said, "so we can put it to alchemical uses. I have just ridden down out of the Hills of Gir, and firewood is plentiful there. And as long as you keep peddling your merchandise to the good people of Diu, the other thing we need will be plentiful here."
A MONTH LATER (OCTOBER 1693)
For the works of the Egyptian sorcerers, though not so great as those of Moses, yet were great miracles.
—HOBBES, Leviathan
"LORD HELP ME," said Jack, "I have begun thinking like an Alchemist." He snapped an aloe-branch in half and dabbed its weeping stump against a crusted black patch on his forearm. He and certain others of the Cabal were reclining in the shade of some outlandish tree on the coastal plain north of Surat. Strung out along the road nearby was a caravan of bullocks and camels.
"Half of Diu believes you are one, now," said Otto van Hoek, squinting west across the fiery silver horizon of the Gulf of Cambaye. Diu lay safely on the opposite side of it. Van Hoek had been busy unwinding a long, stinking strip of linen from his left hand, but the pain of forcing out these words through his roasted voice-box forced him to stop for a few moments and prosecute a fit of coughing and nose-wiping.
"If we had stayed any longer the Inquisition would have come for us," said Monsieur Arlanc in a similarly hoarse and burnt voice.
"Yes—if for no other reason than the stench," put in Vrej Esphahnian. Of all of them, he had taken the most precautions—viz. wearing leather gloves that could be shaken off when his hands burst into flame spontaneously. So he was in a better state than the others.
"It is well that we had Mr. Foot with us," said Surendranath, "to bamboozle the Inquisitors into thinking that we pursued some sacred errand!" Surendranath had not spent all that much time among Christians, and his incredulous glee struck them all as just a bit unseemly.
"I'll take a share of the credit for that," said Padraig Tallow, who had lost his dominant eye, and all the hair on one side of his head. "For 'twas I who supplied Mr. Foot with all of his churchly clap-trap; he only spoke lines that I wrote."
"No one denies it," said Surendranath, "but even you must admit that the inexhaustible fount and ever-bubbling wellspring of nonsense, gibberish, and fraud was Ali Zaybak!"
"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.
SEPTEMBER 1693
"ROGER, YOU ARE a great man now, and worth more than the Great Mogul."
"So I have heard, Daniel—but it is perfectly all right—I do not mind hearing it again."