The Confusion

The village's approach to cutting up these great teak-logs had much in common, overall, with how freemasons chipped rough blocks of stone one tiny chisel-blow at a time. At the other end of the village, some of them were scraping away at almost-finished timbers with potshards or fragments of chipped rock. Some of these timbers were square and straight, but others had been carved into very specific curves.

"That there would be a knee brace," Da

"Do not fail to marvel at how the grain of the wood follows the bend of the knee," Jack said.

"It's as if God formed the tree for this purpose!" said Jimmy, crossing himself.

"Aye, but then the Devil planted it in the middle of a million others."

"That might've been part of God's plan," Da

"I think I have made it abundantly clear that I am no good at tests of that sort," Jack said, "but these kolis are another matter. They will wander the hills for weeks and look at every single tree. They'll send a child scampering up a promising teak to inspect the place where a bough branches off from the trunk, for that is where the grain-lines of the wood curve just so—and, too, it's where the wood is strongest and heaviest. When they've found the right tree, down it comes! And they move the whole village there until the wood has been shaped and the timbers delivered."

"I didn't think the Hindoos were seafarin' folk," Jimmy said, "other than wee fishin' boats and such."

"Most of these kolis will go to their graves, or to be precise, their funeral-pyres, without ever having laid eyes on salt water. They have been roaming the hills forever, going where they find work, supplying timbers for buildings, palanquins, and whatnot. When I became king they started coming here from all over Hindoostan."

"You must pay 'em summat. I thought you had no revenue."

"But this comes from a different purse. I am not paying these folk with tax money."

"Where is the friggin' money comin' from, then?" Jimmy demanded.

"More than one source. You'll learn in good time."

"He an' that Banyan must've made a shite-load of money when they brought that caravan home to Shahjahanabad," Da

"It wasn't just me and the Banyan, but the whole Cabal—or rather the half of it that had not fallen into the snares of Kottakkal, the Malabar pirate-queen."

"Hah! Now, there is your Oriental decadence!" Da

"You have no idea," Jack muttered.

IT TOOK THEM ALMOST TWO hours to track down Enoch and Surendranath, who had wandered quite beyond the frontier of Jack's kingdom and into a sort of lawless zone between it and a Maratha stronghold. Through the center of that no-man's-land ran a small river in a large gulley—a steep-sided cha

"I should've predicted that we would find Enoch in the Black Vale of Vhanatiya," Jack said, when he finally caught sight of the alchemist down below.

"Who's that bloke in the turban?" Jimmy demanded, peering down over the lip of the gulley. Ten fathoms below them, in the bottom of the gorge, Enoch was standing in knee-deep water, conversing with a Hindoo who squatted in the shallows nearby.

"I have seen men like him once or twice before," Jack said. "He is a Carnaya, which I realize means nothing to you."

"Obviously he is a gold-miner," Da

"If this were Christendom, where everything is obvious, he would be a gold-miner," Jack said. "But there is no gold, and naught is simple, in these parts."

"He must be pa

"An excellent guess. But there are no agates here." Jack cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered: "Enoch! It is a long ride to Dalicot, and we do not want to be caught in this country after dark!"

Enoch paid him only the slightest notice. Jimmy and Da

In time the whole caravan got re-assembled up above, and made ready for a forced march to Dalicot. "Be sure to check your pocket-compass," Enoch suggested before they set out.

"I know where we are," Jack said. But Enoch prevailed on him to check the compass anyway. Jack got it out and removed the cover: It was just a magnetized needle coated with wax and set afloat in a dish of water, and to get a reading, it was necessary to set it down on something solid and wait for a minute or two. Jack put it on a rock at the lip of the Black Vale of Vhanatiya, and waited for two minutes, then five. But the needle pointed in a direction that obviously was not north. And when Jack moved it to another rock, it pointed in a different direction that was not north.

"If you are trying to spook me, it has worked. Let's get the hell out of here," Jack said.

Their inspection of the Carnaya's equipment had left Da

"Certain gemstones look thus, before they have been cut and polished," Jack said.

"It was all sand and grit, nothing bigger'n a pin-head," Jimmy said. "But Jayzus! Those sacks were heavy."

Enoch was as close to being excited as Jack had ever seen him. "All right, Enoch—let's have it!" Jack demanded. "I'm king in these parts—stand and deliver!"

"You are not king there," Enoch said, nodding in the direction of the Black Vale, "nor in the place we will visit tomorrow."

Jimmy and Da

JACK WAS STANDING ON A beach, letting warm surf surge and foam around his sore feet, and watching a couple of Hindoo men working with a fragile-looking bow-drill, using it as a sort of lathe to shape a round peg of wood from the purple heartwood of some outlandish tree. "Peg-makers are a wholly different caste from plank-whittlers, and will on no account intermarry with them, though on certain days of the year they will share food," he remarked.

No one answered him; no one even heard.

Enoch, Jimmy, Da

They were beholding a vast Lady that lay on the beach. She was the color of teak. The light of the sun made her flesh glow like iron in a forge. She was far larger than the largest tree that had ever been, and so must have been pieced together from many individual bits of wood, such as this peg that the peg-maker was shaping next to Jack, or that plank that the plank-maker over there was assiduously sculpting out of a giant rough timber. Indeed, if they had come a year ago they might have seen her ribs jutting into the air, and courses of hull-planks still being cut to length, and it would have been evident that she had after all been pieced together. But in her current state it seemed as if she had just grown on the beach, and the way that the grain-lines of the teak followed her every curve did everything to enhance that illusion.