THEY FINISHED THE TRANSFER OF goods with plenty of daylight left. The Samurai in charge of the barge bid them farewell with a perfunctory bow and then turned his attention to getting his hoard of exotic goods in to shore. Van Hoek ordered preparations made for sailing, but they were of a highly elaborate nature, and took much longer than they might have. Belowdecks he had pulled one man off of each gun crew and put as many as he could muster to work unstoppering the quicksilver-flasks and decanting the mercury from one to the next, until each one was brim-full. Aboard ship there was never a shortage of pitch and black stuff used for caulking seams, and so each one of the flasks was sealed shut in that way. Half an hour before sunset van Hoek ordered the anchors weighed, a procedure that lasted until twilight had fallen over the harbor.
From that point onwards it was mad, black toil for many hours. There was a full moon (they'd planned it that way long in advance, so that they'd have better light during the tricky parts of the journey) and it shone very bright in the cold sky. As they traversed the harbor entrance, all of the ship's officers gathered in Enoch's cabin to watch the one quicksilver flask that had not been changed; it seemed to come alive at a certain point, when the rhythmic waves struck the hull, and thrashed around as if some djinn were trapped inside trying to fight its way out.
This was the point when the Japanese must have realized that their trap had been foiled, and out they came in longboats that were all ablaze with many points of fire from burning arrows. But van Hoek was ready. Abovedecks, the riggers had quietly readied all the courses of sail that Minerva had to offer, and they spread it all before the wind as soon as they heard the war-drums booming from the shore. Belowdecks, every cannon had been loaded with grape-shot. The Japanese boats could not hope to match Minerva's speed once she got under way, and the few that came close were driven back by her cannons. All of about half a dozen burning arrows lodged in her teak-wood and were quickly snuffed out by officers with buckets of sand and water. They were able to get well clear of the shore, and of their pursuers, by the moon's light.
When the sun rose over Japan the next morning, a soldier's wind came up out of the west—which meant it blew perpendicular to their southerly heading, and was therefore so easy to manage that even soldiers could have trimmed the sails. Nevertheless van Hoek kept her speed low at first, because he was concerned that the flasks would shift about in their straw packing as they entered into heavier seas. As Minerva worked through various types of waves, van Hoek prowled around her decks sensing the movements of the cargo like a clairvoyant, and frequently communing with the spirit of Jan Vroom (who had died of malaria a year ago). His verdict, of course, was that they'd done a miserable job of packing the flasks, and that it would all have to be re-done when they got to Manila, but that, given the hazards of pirates and typhoons, they had no choice but to raise more sail anyway. So that is what they did.
They added one or two more knots to their speed thereby, and after three days, ran the Straits of Tsushima: a procedure that might have been devised by some fiendish engineer specifically to drive van Hoek mad with anxiety, as it involved running down a complex and current-ridden, yet poorly charted chute hemmed in on one side by pirate-islands of Korea and on the other by a country (Japan) where it was death for a foreigner to set foot. The paintings of Gabriel Goto's father were of very little use because that ronin had been piloting a boat of much shallower draft than Minerva and invariably chose to hug shorelines and squirt through gaps between islands where Minerva could not go.
At any rate they made it through, and putting the mountains of Japan on their larboard quarter they ventured into the East China Sea. Immediately the lookout identified sails to larboard: a ship emerging through a spacious gap between certain outlying Japanese islands, and coming about into a course roughly parallel with their own. This was curious, because the charts showed nothing but Japanese land in the direction from which the ship had come—beyond that, it was the Pacific Ocean for one hundred degrees, and then vague sketches of a supposed American coastline. And yet this ship was unmistakably European. More to the point, as van Hoek announced after peering at it for a while through his spyglass, it was Dutch. And that settled the mystery. This was one of those Dutch vessels that was allowed to sail into the harbor of Nagasaki and anchor before Deshima—a walled and guarded island-compound near that city, where a handful of Europeans were suffered to dwell for brief periods as they traded with the representatives of the Shogun.
Now van Hoek ordered that the Dutch flag be run up on the mizzenmast, and had them fire a salute from the ship's cannons. The Dutch ship responded in kind, and so after exchanging various signals with flags and mirrors, the two vessels fell in alongside each other, and gradually drew close enough that words could be hollered back and forth through speaking-trumpets. Every man on board who knew how to write was busy writing letters for himself, or on behalf of those who couldn't, because it was obvious that this Dutch ship was headed for Batavia, and thence west-bound. Within a few months she would be dropping anchor in Rotterdam.
This was when they lost their Alchemist.
When it came clear that they were about to lose their Adult Supervision, Jack felt panic under his feet like a swell pressing up on the ship's hull. But he did not suppose that it would instill confidence, among the crew, for him to break down and blubber. So he acted as if this had been expected all along. Indeed, in a way it had. Enoch Root had shown inhuman patience during the last couple of years, as the transaction of the quicksilver had been slowly teased together, and there had been plenty of interesting diversions for him in the Chinese and Japanese barangays of Manila, the countless strange islands of the Philippines, and in helping to establish Mr. Foot as the White Sultan of Queena-Kootah. But it was long since time for him to move on.
He had taken up an interest in the vast territories limned on Dutch charts to the South and East of the Philippines: New Guinea; the supposed Australasian Continent; Van Diemen's Land; and a chain of islands sprawling off into the uncharted heart of the South Pacific, called the Islands of Solomon.
Enoch stood on the upperdeck, waiting for his chests and bags to be lowered into the longboat. As he often did in idle moments, he reached into the pocket of his traveling-cloak and took out a contraption that looked a bit like a spool. But a poorly made one, for the ends of the spool were bulky, and the slot in between them, where the cord was wound, was narrow. He unwound a couple of inches of cord and slipped his finger through a loop that had been tied in its end. Then he allowed the spool to fall from his hand. It dropped slowly at first, as the spool's inertia resisted its tendency to unwind, but then it picked up speed and plunged smoothly toward the deck. Just shy of hitting the planks it stopped abruptly, having unwound its meager supply of cord. At the same moment Enoch gave a little twitch of the hand, and the spool reversed its direction and began to climb up the string.
Jack glanced across several fathoms of open water toward the Dutch ship. A dozen or so sailors were watching this miracle with their mouths open.
"They cannot see the string at this distance," Jack commented, "and suppose you are doing some sort of magick."
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo," Enoch said.