Baroque Cycle - 01 - Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Author:Neal Stephenson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9780060593087
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-09-09T02:49:32+00:00

The Dutch Republic

1684

JACK RODE WEST OUT OF Amsterdam, through Haarlem, and then found himself suddenly alone, and perilously close to being under water: autumn rains had submerged the pastures, leaving the walled towns as islands. Soon he reached the line of dunes that fenced the country off from the North Sea. Not even Dutchmen could find a use for this much sand. Turk was unsettled by the change in the ground, but then he seemed to remember how to go on it—perhaps his Turkish master had used to take him for gallops in some Mohametan desert. With a plodding and swimming kind of gait he took Jack up to the crest of a dune. Below them, a mile away, Alp-sized green waves were hurling themselves up onto the sand with monstrous roaring and hissing. Jack sat there and stared until Turk grew annoyed. To the horse it was cold and foreign, to Jack it was just this side of cozy. He was trying to count the years since he’d seen open salt water.

There had been the voyage to Jamaica—but after that, his life (he began to think) had been impossibly confusing. Either that, or else the French Pox had amazed and riddled his memories. He had to count on his fingers. Nay, he had to dismount and use his crutch-tip to draw family trees and maps on the sand.

His return from Jamaica was a good place to start: 1678. He had bedded the fair Mary Dolores, six feet of Irish vigor, and then fled to Dunkirk to avoid a warrant, and then there’d been the penis incident. While he’d been recovering from that, Bob had showed up with news: Mary Dolores was pregnant. Also, that John Churchill fellow, improbably, was married, and had been made a Colonel—no, wait, a Brigadier—and had any number of regiments under him now. He was avidly recruiting, and still remembered the Shaftoes—did Jack want a steady job, perhaps, so that he could wed Mary Dolores and raise his offspring?

“Just the sort of tidy plan that Bob would come up with,” Jack shouted at the waves, still annoyed, six or seven years later. Turk was becoming edgy. Jack decided to talk to him, as long as he was speaking out loud anyway. Did horses understand what was going on, when you spoke to people who weren’t there? “So far, simple enough—but here it becomes very deep,” he began. “John Churchill was in the Hague—then he was in Brussels—why? Even a horse can see the contradiction in that—but I forget you’re an Ottoman horse. All right, then: all of this land—” (stomping the dune for emphasis) “was part of Spain—you heard me—Spain! Then these fucking Dutchmen turned Calvinist and revolted, and drove the Spanish away, down south of the Maas and a bunch of other rivers with hard-to-remember names—past Zeeland, anyway—we’ll be seeing more than we want to of those rivers soon. Leaving only a wedge of Papist Spain trapped between the Dutch Republic on its north, and France on its south.

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