Neal Stephenson - THE System OF THE WORLD

“It sounds as if it ought to work,” says Bob, “so long as my brother does not show up.”

“He is dead,” Marlborough avers. “But if he shows up, we’ll shoot him. And if he recovers, we’ll pack him off to Carolina, where he may work alongside his offspring. For I am told that you are not the only Shaftoe, Bob, to have turned over a new leaf, and become a tiller of the soil.”

Bob has finally reached the tent’s threshold. “It is a strange fate indeed,” he mutters, “but only fitting.”

“Why fitting?”

“Jack, Jimmy, and Danny ought by rights to become tillers of the soil,” says Bob, “because they have made so much trouble in the past, as soilers of the till.”

“If you are going to make such jests,” says Barnes, “you are welcome to stay out in the rain.”

“I SPIED ’EM AGAIN this morning, Tomba! The weather cleared, just after sunup, and I looked to the West and saw ’em, all lit up by the red sun shining in off the sea. A line of hills, or mountains if you please. Laid out, waiting for us, like baked apples in a pan.”

Tomba is lying face down on the sack of desiccated pine-branches that answers to the name of bed here, in the indentured servants’ quarters of Mr. Ickham’s Plantation. Not for the first time in his life, his back is striped with long whip-cuts. Jimmy Shaftoe hauls a sopping mass of rags out of a bucket, wrings it out, and lays it on Tomba’s raw flesh. Tomba opens his mouth to scream, but makes no sound. Danny keeps talking, trying to get Tomba to think about something else. “A week’s hard traveling,” he says, “less than that if we steal some horses. We can manage without food for that long. When we make it to those hills, there’ll be game a-plenty.”

“Game,” says Tomba, “and Indians.”

“Tomba, look at the state you’re in, and tell me Indians are worse than the Overseer.”

“Nothing’s worse than him,” Tomba admits. “But I’m in no condition to run cross-country for seven days.”

“Then we wait until those stripes are healed. Then we do it-”

“Boys, you do not understand. There will always be something. The Overseer knows how to keep men downtrodden. Especially black men. I didn’t understand that, when I came here. It’s different, the way he treats me. Look at my back, and tell me it isn’t so.”

Lines of fire run in parallel courses across the walls of the shack where the sun glares between unchinked wall-planks. A pig roots outside, undermining the corner of their dwelling, but they can’t shoo it away or eat it because it is the Overseer’s pride and joy. They can hear him now, bellowing in the distance. “Jimmy? Danny! Jimmy? Danny! Where the hell have you got to?”

“Lookin’ after our mate you just beat half to death, you bastard,” mutters Jimmy.

“I want to see red necks on the lot of you,” says Tomba, repeating the Overseer’s favorite aphorism. “Tomorrow, red necks all around, save for this Blackamoor-there’s only one way to give him a red neck and that’s with the lash.” Tomba gets his hands underneath him, and pushes himself up on to all fours, then hangs his head low and lets his dreadlocks sweep the floor, he’s so woozy.

“Jimmy? Danny! Jimmy? Danny! Are you feedin’ your pet Blackamoor?” By process of elimination, the Overseer has figured out where they are, and is drawing nigh.

“You’re right,” says Tomba, “he means to kill me today. It is time to unpack.”

“Then unpack we shall,” says Danny.

He bends down and seizes the hay-bag that served him for a bed, and rips it open from one end to the other. Out tumbles an elongated bundle. Jimmy snatches it and tears away several rope ties. The two Shaftoes work together to unroll the bundle, Danny holding his arms out like a pair of shelf-brackets while Jimmy unwinds the bolt of canvas. Tomba paws one hand up the shack’s wall until he finds a hand-hold on one of the hewn logs that make up its frame, and pulls himself to his feet. “They’re not in here, Master!” he calls, “no one in here but poor Tomba!”

“You’re a damned liar!” bellows the Overseer, and hammers the door open with the butt of his whip-handle. He stops, framed in the entrance, unable to see into the darkness of the shed. He can hear, though, the unexpected sounds of two gently curved blades-a longer one and a shorter one-being whisked from their scabbards. Perhaps he even glimpses the unaccustomed sight of Carolina sunlight gleaming from watered steel.

“Don’t tell us,” says Danny, “you want to see some red necks around this place. Is that what you were about to say?”

“What-get back to work, you lazy bastards! Or I’ll give you more of what Tomba got!” The Overseer steps into the shed, and raises his whip; but before he can bring it down, steel skirls past his ear, and the amputated lash drops to the dirt floor at his feet. Tomba staggers outside and closes the shed door behind himself. He squints about at several acres of mud, which he knows to be red in color, though it looks gray to him because his vision has gone black and white. A big white house stands at one end. Indentured servants toil with mattocks and shovels. Behind him, the Overseer has become uncharacteristically silent. Perhaps his eyes have adjusted to the point where he can see he’s locked in a confined space with a pair of enraged Samurai.

“There’s more’n one way to make a red neck,” Danny points out, “and here’s how they do it in Nagasaki!” There follows a rapid sequence of noises that Tomba has not heard in quite a while, though he recognizes them well enough. Blood rushes out from under the shed wall and puddles in the wallow rooted out by the Overseer’s pig. Drawn by its fragrance, the pig waddles over, snuffles, then begins to lap it up.

Jimmy and Danny burst out of the shed. Danny wipes his blade on his pant-leg and re-sheathes it. Jimmy hollers to the other indentured servants: “You all can take the rest of the day off! And when Mr. Ickham comes back from Charleston, and wants to know what happened, why, you just tell him that it was done by the Red-Neck Ronin, and that we went that-away!” And he thrusts his wakizashi into the un-tamed West. Then he sheathes it and turns to his companions.

“Let’s head for the hills, boys.”

WILL COMSTOCK, the Earl of Lostwithiel, has been worrying that they’ll become trapped in one of the sudden mists that wander about the moors like ghosts through a haunted house, and lose their way. And indeed such mists wash up round them on two occasions. He insists, then, that they stop right where they are, and bide their time until the air clears. Daniel frets that Minerva shall lose patience, and sail without him. But around midday the mists blow off on a stiff north wind that presses and pursues them down-valley toward the sea, now visible far off, pea-green, and pied with cloud-shadows and sun-shafts.

The land is chopped by stone walls into parcels so irregular it’s almost as if this country had to be pieced together from shreds of other worlds. In the high open country that tumbles down from the moors, the walls are lacy and irregular. Later, as the company of travelers traverse down into the valley, they pass through forests of stunted oaks, no taller than Daniel’s head, that cling to the slopes like wool to a sheep’s back and refuse to give up their leaves even at this time of year. There the walls run straight and solid, drenched with moss and saturated with life.

From such a wood, the company emerges into a smoky bottom-land, where shaggy anthracite-colored cattle engage in desultory shoving-matches. They fall in along the course of a rushing river that has vaulted down off the moor. Not far below them, it slows, flattens, and broadens to an estuary. There is the longboat waiting to take Daniel out to Minerva, which is anchored somewhere hereabouts, making ready for the run to Oporto and thence, eventually, to Boston.