The Confusion

"Quicksilver to silver," he said, turning towards the town. "Then Jack to London."

"AS FAR AS I CAN DISCERN, all that remains here is to collect the final remnants of what was cached around Cabo Corrientes, make certain deliveries, and get the pigs down to Vera Cruz, where we'll await Minerva," said Edmund de Ath that evening, as they sat in front of the cantina availing themselves of the liquor of the maguey.

"It is not so easy as you make it sound," Jimmy growled.

"On the contrary, I think it is much too difficult for a man of my limited capacities," said de Ath. "Here, I'll be an impediment. In Vera Cruz, on the other hand, there is much I could be doing to smooth the way for us, when Minerva, God willing, arrives."

"Get thee to Vera Cruz, then," Jack suggested.

"I am interested to see the place," said de Ath. "Properly it is called New Vera Cruz. The old city was burnt to the ground, almost twenty years ago, by the notorious and terrible outlaw called El Desamparado…"

"I have already heard the story," Jack said.

WINDING UPM INERVA'S affairs in New Spain took several months. Jack, Jimmy, Da

The trip back to Zacatecas was exceptionally dangerous because no fewer than three groups of desperadoes were waiting to waylay them in the passes. But Jimmy and Da

Their trail back over the mountains was traced out by several set-piece battles in which the brigands found their ambushes ambushed, and many a desperado's head was struck off by a ringing katana. They came back to discover that they were developing a legend, which Jack had come to believe was a good thing to leave behind but a bad thing to have.

A letter was waiting in the saloon that they used as their headquarters; the i

Now their assets consisted of a ton of quicksilver (which needed to be delivered to various mine-heads and exchanged for pigs of silver) and several tons of pigs distributed among a dozen buried caches. All of it had to be moved to Vera Cruz. Yet it would be folly to concentrate it in one gigantic wagon-train, and so the caches had to be dug up and moved one at a time, leap-frogging one another as they converged on Vera Cruz. It was a complicated business that really demanded the skills of a Moseh or a Vrej Esphahnian, and it sorely taxed Jack, who preferred things simpler. More than once he woke up in the middle of the night wondering whether they'd left a cache behind in the mountains.

The one or two broad simple concerns of Jack's early life, like the light and dark portions of a wootz-ingot, had been hammered out and folded over, hammered out and folded over, so many times that they had become involved and inter-tangled into a swirl of swirls, something too intricate to follow, or to be given the name of "pattern" or "design." It registered on the mind as a blunt impression that could be talked about only by smearing it into some gray word like "complicated." But he would tell Jimmy and Da

For a month it did not seem as if the goods were making progress at all, but then Jack could no longer deny that they were spending less time in high deserts and more on roads. In moving the silver they spent part of it but lost none. This seemed implausible to Jack until he considered how wretched was their opposition. They hadn't gone most of the way around the world without acquiring a certain kind of wisdom, and if having silver made them a target, it also gave them the option to buy their way out of certain problems. Really the only persons Jack was afraid of were the Indians who controlled the river-crossings; these had a distant look in their eyes that somehow reminded Jack of Gabriel Goto when he reminisced about Japan. Their treatment by the Spaniards had left them with nothing to lose. Attempted bribery only made them angrier.

But by the end of April all of their silver was cached in eight different holes in the ground within half a day's journey of Vera Cruz, and Jack, Da

"WHERE ARE MY DAMNED BOOKS?" demanded Otto van Hoek, bending over Minerva's rail to peer down into the bark.

"They tumbled into a river only a few miles short of Vera Cruz," Jack said nonchalantly, "so I'd estimate they are bobbing in the Gulf of Mexico somewhere—didn't you spy 'em on your way in?"

These were all the words they could exchange before they were drowned out by cheering and jeering from Minerva's sailors, who had all come abovedecks to watch the bark approach and to see how many of the "dry" group had survived the year and a half in New Spain. They seemed generally happy and surprised, which Jack looked on as indicating that no one in the "wet" contingent had ever expected to see a live Shaftoe again. For his part Jack felt almost like a mother hen counting her chicks as he recognized one familiar face after another, and only a few new ones. Minerva herself had never looked better. Jack guessed from this that they'd made a good profit in Peru and that any damages suffered rounding Cape Horn had already been made good in some Caribbean port. If so, it showed excellent foresight on van Hoek's part, because Vera Cruz was both wretched and expensive, and, in sum, probably the most unfavorable place imaginable to fit out a ship for the Atlantic crossing.

"Let us load her up and be done with New Spain," Jack said when he had climbed aboard and been duly pounded on the back or embraced by every member of the complement. "Also, I would like to carry on Jeronimo's tradition, as long as we are here…"