Quicksilver - Baroque Cycle 01 by NEAL STEPHENSON

Author:NEAL STEPHENSON [STEPHENSON, NEAL]
Format: epub
ISBN: 0060833165
Published: 2006-01-31T12:00:00+00:00

Two • King of the Vagabonds

straw-roofed huts crowded with misplaced country folk, burning whatever sticks and debris they could rake together to cook their food and ward off the autumn chill, and publicly suffering from various picturesque ailments. Jack didn't stop moving until he reached the perpetual pilgrim-camp around St.-Denis, where almost anyone could get away with loitering for a few hours. He bought some cheese for himself and some hay for Turk from some farmers who were on their way down to the city. Then he relaxed among the lepers, epileptics, and madmen who were hanging around the Basilica, and dozed until a couple of hours before

dawn.

When it got light enough to move about, he joined in with the thousands of farmers who came into the city, as they did every morning, bringing vegetables, milk, eggs, meat, fish, and hay into the markets. This crowd was larger than he remembered, and it took longer for them to get into the city. The gate of St.-Denis was impossibly congested, so he tried his luck at the gate of St. Martin, a musket-shot away. By the time he passed under it, dawn-light was glancing prettily off its new stone-work: King Looie as a primordial naked Hercules leaning insouciantly on a tree-sized club, naked except for a periwig the size of a cloud, and a lion skin slung over one arm so that a flapping corner just covered the royal Penis, Victory was swooping down from Heaven, one arm laden with palm-branches and the other reaching out to slap a laurel-wreath atop that wig. The King's foot rested on the mangled form of someone he'd just apparently beaten the crap out of, and, in the background, a great Tower burnt.

"God damn you, King Looie," Jack muttered, passing under the gate; because he could feel himself cringing. He'd tried to ride across France as fast as he could, specifically to prevent this: but still, it had taken several days. The sheer vastness of it compared to those tiny German principalities, and the component states of the Dutch Republic, was such that by the time you reached Paris, you'd been traveling across this King's dominions for so long that as you passed through the gate you couldn't not cringe beneath his

power.

Never mind; he was in Paris. Off to his left the sun was rising over the towers and bastions of the Temple, where those Knights of Malta had their own city within the city—though the old curtain-walls that once enclosed it had lately been torn down. But for the most part his views in all directions were sealed off by vertical walls of white stone: Paris's six- and seven-story buildings rising on either side of the street, funneling the farmers and the fishwives, and the

4-9°

Jack Enters Paris

vendors with their loads of flowers, oranges, and oysters into narrow race-ways wherein they jostled sharply for position, all trying to avoid falling into the central gutter. Not far into the city, much of this traffic angled off

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