Quicksilver

Mammonled them on,

Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell

From heav’n, for ev’n in heav’n his looks and

thoughts

Were always downward bent, admiring more

The riches of Heav’ns pavement, trod’n Gold,

Then aught divine or holy else enjoy’d

In vision beatific; by him first

Men also, and by his suggestion taught,

Ransack’d the Center, and with impious hands

Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth

For Treasures better hid.

-MILTON,Paradise Lost

THE ENTIRE TRAIN,amounting to some two dozen wagons, proceeded west through Halle and other cities in the Saxon plain. Giant stone towers with dunce-cap rooves had been raised over city gates so that the burghers could see armies or Vagabond-hordes approaching in time to do something about it. A few days past Halle, the ground finally started to rise up out of that plain and (like one of the Doctor’s philosophical books) to cha

Eliza and the Doctor mostly shared the coach, she amending her dresses according to what he claimed was now in fashion, and he writing letters or reading picaroon-novels. It seemed that Sophie’s daughter, Sophie Charlotte, was fixing to marry the Elector of Brandenburg later this year, and the trousseau was being imported direct from Paris, and this gave occasion for them to talk about clothing for days. Sometimes Eliza would ride in the seat atop the carriage if the weather was fine, giving the teamsters reason to live another day. Sometimes Jack would give Turk a rest by walking alongside, or riding on, or in, the coach.

The Doctor was always doing something- sketching fantastic machines, writing letters, scratching out pyramids of ones and zeroes and rearranging them according to some set of contrived rules.

“What’re you doing there, Doc?” Jack asked one time, just trying to be sociable.

“Making some improvements to my Theory of Matter,” the Doctor said distantly, and then said no more for three hours, at which time he a

Jack tried to talk to Eliza instead. She’d been rather sulky since the conversation at the I

“I’m losing blood-the humour of passion- what do you expect?”

“Do you mean that in the normal monthly sense, or-”

“More than usual this month-besides I only kiss people who care about me.”

“Aw, whatever made you think otherwise?”

“You know almost nothing about me. So any fond emotions you might have, proceed from lust alone.”

“Well, whose fault is that, then? I asked you, months ago, to tell me how you got from Barbary to Vie

“You did? I remember no such thing.”

“Well, p’r’aps it’s just the French Pox going to my brain, lass, but I clearly remember-you gave it a few days’ profound thought, hardly speaking, and then said, ‘I don’t wish to reveal that.’ “

“You haven’t asked me recently. ”

“Eliza, how’d you get from Barbary to Vie

“Some parts of the story are too sad for me to tell, others too tedious to hear-suffice it to say, that when I reached an age that a horny Moor construes as adulthood, I came, in their minds, to bear the same relationship to my mother as a dividend does to a joint stock corporation-viz. a new piece of wealth created out of the normal functioning of the old. I was liquidated.”

“What?”

“Tendered to a Vizier in Constantinople as part of a trade, no different from the trades that sustain the City of Leipzig-you see, a person can also be rendered into a few drops of mercury, and combine with the mysterious international flow of that substance.”

“What’d that Vizier have to pay for you? Just curious.”

“As of two years ago the price of one me, in the Mediterranean market, was a single horse, a bit slimmer and faster than the one you’ve been riding around on.”

“Seems, er… well, any price would seem too low, of course-but even so-for Christ’s sake…”

“But you’re forgetting that Turk’s an uncommon steed-a bit past his prime, to be sure, and worn round the edges-but, what matters, capable of fathering others.”

“Ah… so the horse that paid for you was a thoroughbred stallion.”

“A strange-looking Arab. I saw it on the docks. It was perfectly white, except for the hooves of course, and its eyes were pink.”

“The Berbers are breeders of racehorses?”

“Through the network of the Society of Brita

Jack counted silently to ten, then said: “Oh, hell, I’ll do it. I’m going to die of the French Pox anyway.”

“First you have to explain to him why you’re doing it.”

“Fine, I’ll try to plan in an extra few hours-”

“It shouldn’t take that long.”

“No?”

“Why would you kill him, Jack?”

“Well, there was your abduction from Qwghlm-perverse goings-on in the ship-years of slavery-forcible separation from an ailing-”

“No, no! That’s why I want to kill him. Why do you?”

“Same reason.”

“But many are involved in the slave trade-will you kill all of them?”

“No, just-oh, I get it-I want to kill this evil man, whoever he is, because of my fierce eternal pure love for you, my own Eliza.”

She did not swoon, but she did get a look on her face that said This conversation is over, which Jack took as a sign he was going in the right direction.

Finally, after a couple of days of skirting and dodging, the Doctor gave the word and they turned north and began straightforwardly ascending into what had plainly become a mountain range. At first this was a grassy rampart. Then strange dark hummocks began to pock the fields. At the same time, they began frequently to see pairs of men turning windlasses, like the ones mounted above wells, but this equipment was stouter and grimier, and it brought up not buckets of water but iron baskets filled with black rock. Jack and Eliza had seen it before at Joachimsthal and knew that the dark mounds were the f?ces left behind when the metal (copper here) had been smelted out of the ore. Germans called it schlock. When they were wet with rain (which was frequently, now), the schlock-heaps glistened and gave back light tinged blue or purple. Men collected the ore from the hand-haspels (as the winches were called) into wheelbarrows and staggered behind them, among schlock-piles, to smoking furnaces tended and stirred by coal-smeared men.