Quicksilver

There is also a pirate-ketch converging on them from leeward, in much the same way as the schooner is doing from windward, and Daniel is fairly certain that this ketch doesn’t suck much at all. He is certain he saw drogues trailing behind her. Minerva is lying dead upon the wind, which is to say, she’s as close-hauled as possible-she can fall off to leeward but she ca

All of which goes to explain Daniel’s second reason for having gone to this room: it’s as far from the fighting as he can get without jumping overboard. But he does not find the solace he wants, because from here he can see two additional pirate-ships gaining on them from astern, and they seem bigger and better than any of the others.

An explosion, then another, then a lot of them at once-obviously something organized. Daniel’s still alive, Minerva ’s still afloat. He flings open the door to the gundeck but it’s dark and quiet, the gu

Daniel turns round and looks out the window to see the ketch being left behind, fine on the lee quarter.*It is no longer recognizable as a ketch, though-just a hull heaped with tangled, slack rigging and freshly splintered blond wood. One of her guns sparks and something terrible comes out of it, directly towards him-big and spreading. He begins to fall down, more out of vertigo than any coherent plan. All the glass in all those windows explodes toward him, driven on a wall of buckshot. Only some of it hits him in the face, and none in the eyes-more luck than a natural philosopher can comfortably account for.

The door’s been flung open again, either by the blast of shot or by his falling back into it, so half of him is lying on the gundeck now. Suddenly, radiance warms his tightly closed eyelids. It could be a choir of angels, or a squadron of flaming devils, but he doesn’t believe in any of that stuff. Or it could be Minerva ’s powder magazine exploding-but that would involve loud noises, and the only noises he hears are the creaking and grumbling of gun-carriages being hauled forward. There’s a refreshing sea breeze in his nostrils. He takes a big risk and opens his eyes.

All of the gunports on the larboard side have been opened at once, and all of the ca

He is fairly certain that he is dead now.

Other dead men are around him.

They are lying on the upperdeck.

A couple of sailors are sitting on Daniel’s corpse, while another tortures his deceased flesh with a needle. Sewing his dismembered parts back on, closing up the breaches in his abdomen so stuff won’t leak out. So this is what it felt like to have been a stray dog in the clutches of the Royal Society!

As Daniel is lying flat on his back, his view is mostly skywards, though if he turns his head-an astonishing feat, for a dead man-he can see van Hoek up on the poop deck bellowing through his trumpet-which is aimed nearly straight down over the rail.

“What on earth can he be shouting at?” Daniel asks.

“Apologies, Doctor, didn’t know you’d come awake,” says a Looming Column of Shadow, speaking in Dappa’s voice, and stepping back to block the sun from Daniel’s face. “He’s parleying with certain pirates who rowed out from Teach’s flagship under a flag of truce.”

“What do they want?”

“They want you, Doctor.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re thinking too hard-there’s naught to understand-it is entirely simple,” Dappa says. “They rowed up and said, ‘Give us Dr. Waterhouse and all is forgotten.’”

Dr. Waterhouse now ought to spend a long time being dumbstruck. But his stupefaction lasts only a little while. The sensation of nubby silk thread being drawn briskly through fresh holes in his flesh, makes serious reflection all but impossible. “You’ll do it-of course,” is the best he can come up with.

“Any other captain would-but whoever arranged to put you aboard, must’ve known about Captain van Hoek’s feelings concerning pirates. Behold!” and Dappa steps out of the way to give Daniel an unobstructed view of a sight stranger than anything gawkers would pay to view at St. Bartholomew’s Fair: a hammer-handed man climbing up into the rigging of a ship. That is to say that one of his arms is terminated, not by a hand, and not by a hook, but by an actual hammer. Van Hoek ascends to a suitably perilous altitude, up there alongside the colors that fly from the mizzenmast: a Dutch flag, and below it, a smaller one depicting the ?gis. After getting himself securely tangled in the shrouds-weaving limbs through rope so that his body is spliced into the rigging-he begins to pluck nails out of his mouth and drive them through the hem of each flag into the wood of the mast.

It seems, now, that every sailor who’s not sitting on Daniel is up in the rigging, unfurling a ludicrously vast array of sails. Daniel notes with approval that the mainsail’s finally been hoisted-that charade is over. And now moreover Minerva ’s height is being miraculously increased as the topmasts are telescoped upwards. An asymptotic progression of smaller and smaller trapezoids spreads out upon their frail-seeming yards.

“It’s a glorious gesture for the Captain to make-now that he’s sunk half of Teach’s fleet,” Daniel says.

“Aye, Doctor-but not the better half,” Dappa says.

A fifth doctrine, that tendeth to the dissolution of a commonwealth, is, that every private man has an absolute propriety in his goods; such, as excludeth the right of the sovereign.

-HOBBES,Leviathan

DANIEL HAD NEVERbeen an actor on a stage, of course, but when he went to plays at Roger Comstock’s theatre-especially when he saw them for the fifth or sixth time-he was struck by the sheer oddity of these men (and women!) standing about on a platform prating the words of a script for the hundredth time and trying to behave as if hundreds of persons weren’t a few yards away goggling at them. It was strangely ma

As they waited, they had to content themselves with such smaller bits of news as from time to time percolated in from the sea. All London passed these rumors around and put on a great pompous show of reacting to them, as actors observe a battle or storm said to be taking place off-stage.

Queerly-or perhaps not-the only solace for most Londoners was going to the theatre, where they could sit together in darkness and watch their own behavior reflected back to them. Once More into the Breeches had become very popular since its Trinity College debut. It had to be performed in Roger Comstock’s theatre after its first and second homes were set on fire owing to lapses in judgment on the part of the pyrotechnicians. Daniel’s job was to simulate lightning-flashes, thunderbolts, and the accidental detonation of Lord Brimstone without burning down Roger’s investment. He invented a new thunder-engine, consisting of a ca