"What's amiss? Smash your finger?" Jack inquired. Meanwhile Jan Vroom came loping out of the trees, looking a bit peaked, asking in Dutch if van Hoek had discovered rot in the mast's heart.

Van Hoek was gazing incredulously at a flake of yellow metal embedded in the foot of the mainmast.

Now it was a longstanding tradition that whenever mariners stepped a mast they slipped a coin beneath it. Supposedly this was to placate sea-gods, or buy them passage to the afterlife when the ship went down to David Jones's Locker and took them with it. Normally such a coin became embedded in the bottom of the mast and could be viewed the next time it was pulled out. Masts that had been stepped several times had as many coins stuck to their bottoms. This particular mast had three of them, but they had been painted over, and so were visible only as blurred scabs. Van Hoek had just knocked a disk of paint clean off one of them with a blow of his pistol-butt. It was a French louis d'or. And that was how it came about that Jack Shaftoe, Otto van Hoek, Jan Vroom, and an ever-growing crowd of curious Nayar children found themselves staring into the face of King Louis XIV of France, stamped in fine gold, out behind the Temple of Kali in Malabar.

"Really the coiner was a flattering knave," Jack said. "In person he is not half so handsome as all that."

Van Hoek let go his pistol, yanked a dagger from his belt, and assaulted the mast. Jack guessed he was trying to get the point of the weapon beneath the coin and worry it loose; but the way he was flailing and jabbering he was unlikely to succeed. Anyway Vroom, who was two heads taller, grabbed van Hoek's arm on the backswing and stopped it. "It is bad luck! Leave the coin be!" Jack understood that much Dutch, anyway. He did not understand what van Hoek said in return—some sort of advanced calculus of luck, he gathered, in which the sacrilege of removing the coin was weighed against the ill omen of having a golden effigy of Leroy eternally planted in the heart of the ship.

Jack looked carefully left, right, and behind, in case cobras or crocodiles were creeping up on them, which in these parts was a routine precaution to take before fastening one's attention on any particular thing for more than a few moments. Then he stepped round this dangerous pair of struggling Dutchmen, drew out his own pistol, and struck one of the other coins. Paint fell away to reveal William of Orange on an English guinea. A blow to the last remaining coin produced King Carlos II on a Spanish doubloon.

"For God's sake, hasn't he died yet!?" Jack exclaimed. "Twenty years ago people were expecting him to drown in his own spit at the next moment."

Van Hoek calmed down and Vroom relaxed, but did not let go of his arms.

"As I read the signs, the Spanish made this mast in America for a treasure-galleon. English privateers then took it as a prize, or perhaps salvaged its wreck after some hurricanoe. Later those poor Englishmen ran afoul of the French Navy—courtesy of my old friend the duc d'Arcachon." Jack pointed with his pistol-barrel to each of the coins in turn as he made this all up. "That French ship later came east, escorting some merchant-vessels of the Compagnie des Indes, where God only knows what befell it. At any rate, the Wheel has now turned again—you may consult our new Pilot, Father Gabriel Goto, for more concerning the Wheel—and the mast is now ours. So let's put a fucking rupee underneath it and be on our way, shall we?"

"Still I do not like it," said van Hoek, and fired a broadside of spit at the golden Louis. He aimed high, but the tobacco-brown loogie rolled down over the coin like a cloud of battle-smoke darkening the face of the sun.

FIRST THEY BROUGHT THE CANNONS aboard, which was unspeakably tedious and toilsome, but gave them something to pass the time while Monsieur Arlanc, Vrej Esphahnian, and Moseh de la Cruz journeyed back and forth to and from the wootz-forge. Refining the terms of the deal was no less exacting than making watered steel from river-sand. Transporting gold north and wootz-eggs south across frequently hostile territory was no easier, and would have been impossible without pervasive bribery, and an escort of mounted Nayars; Jimmy and Danny came home with wild yarns of sword-and gun-play in jungle and mountain.

But the day came when the ship had been sufficiently ballasted, with cannons, cannonballs, wootz-eggs, and other heavy objects, that the masts could be stepped without risk of capsizing her. It was agreed that this would be as good a day as any to christen her. So Jack made ready a bottle of fizzing wine from the province of Champagne that he had acquired at staggering expense from a French factor in Surat. The Cabal assembled upon the shore of the river, where the three masts had been lashed together along with some lighter, more buoyant logs and made into a sort of raft. The river's current strove to push them out to sea, and this raft tugged at a line that had been tied around a tree-trunk a few yards upstream. A couple of juvenile crocodiles, no more than two yards long, had clambered up onto the mast-raft to warm themselves in the morning sun. Standing on the quay above said reptiles, Jack could gaze downstream to a flower-bedecked boat; a few hundred yards of mangrove-lined river; and finally out into the harbor where the mastless ship was riding at anchor with all of her cannons run out of her gunports in preparation to fire a salute.

The other members of the Cabal, dressed in the finest clothes they had, were already aboard the Queen's boat. Jack wasn't, because Queen Kottakkal had instructed him that "according to our traditions" he, Jack, was supposed to board last—after the Queen. And the Queen was still on the bank, talking to various Nayars who belonged to her court of pirate-captains and cavaliers. From time to time one of these Malabaris would glance interestedly at Jack. The Queen herself shot him an occasional glare. She had liked Jack's looks as much as he'd liked hers when he had made his first state visit to Malabar almost three years ago, and after a day or two of steamy flirtation Jack had leaned his Janissary-sword against the door-post of her apartments. He had been making the (in retrospect rash) assumption that the Queen would know why he was called Half-Cocked Jack, but that she would be familiar with certain Books of India—that Her Majesty would, in other words, know certain lore that would make Jack's shortcomings irrelevant.

As it had turned out—to make a long story (a story Jack wished every day he could forget) short—the tryst had gone more badly than Jack could ever have imagined. It turned out that Jack did not know the half of it where Books of India were concerned. That there existed certain advanced Books, unknown to, or at least unmentioned by, Eliza. That these Books enumerated diverse additional Sexes above and beyond the usual Male and Female, including a plethora of different categories of hermaphrodites. That each of these was not merely a Sex but a Caste unto itself, subject to diverse limits and regulations like any other caste. That, depending upon how certain ancient writings were translated into Malabari, Jack belonged to one or another of these hermaphroditic castes, and that consequently he ought to have gone about dressed in a certain type of clothing so that all and sundry would know what he was, and treat him well or poorly depending on whether they were of a lower or higher caste. That Queen Kottakkal was of a higher caste whose members were (to put it very mildly) not in the general habit of entertaining hermaphrodites in their bedchambers.

At any rate Anglo-Malabari relations had been set back centuries. Jack had barely escaped with his life. Moseh and other Cabal members who were the Queen's slaves had spent the better part of a year apologizing. Since then, Jack had had difficulty meeting the Queen's eye, and she had not spoken more than a few words to him—he had become a sort of out-caste, a sexual and social Cheruman.