Read The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World for Free Online Page B

tree and was shinnying out onto the limb in question. It was too slender to bear his weight, but he phant’sied he could bend it low enough to bring it within the tallest boy’s jumping-range.
    The little fair-haired boy adored the tall boy’s fruitless jumping. But he was working on his own project, the same one Enoch had glimpsed through the window: a stone on the end of a string. Not an easy thing to make. He whirled the stone around and flung it upwards. It whipped around the end of the tree-branch. By pulling it down he was able to bring the apple within easy reach. The tall boy stood aside grudgingly, but the fair boy kept both hands on that string, and insisted that the tall one have it as a present. Enoch almost groaned aloud when he saw the infatuation on the little boy’s face.
    The tall boy’s face was less pleasant to look at. He hungered for the apple but suspected a trick. Finally he lashed out and snatched it. Finding the prize in his hand, he looked searchingly at the fair boy, trying to understand his motives, and became unsettled and sullen. He took a bite of the apple as the other watched with almost physical satisfaction. The boy who’d shinnied out onto the tree-limb had come down, and now managed to tease the string off the branch. He examined the way it was tied to the stone and decided that suspicion was the safest course. “A pretty lace-maker you are!” he piped. But the fair-haired boy had eyes only for his beloved.
    Then the tall boy spat onto the ground, and tossed the rest of the apple over a fence into a yard where a couple of pigs fought over it.
    Now it became unbearable for a while, and made Enoch wish he had never followed them.
    The two stupid boys dogged the other one down the road, wide eyes traveling up and down his body, seeing him now for the first time—seeing a little of what Enoch saw. Enoch heard snatches of their taunts—“What’s on your hands? What’d you say? Paint!? For what? Pretty pictures? What’d you say? For furniture? I haven’t seen any furniture. Oh, doll furniture!?”
    Being a sooty empiric, what was important to Enoch was notthese tedious details of specifically how the boy’s heart got broken. He went to the apple tree to have a look at the boy’s handiwork.
    The boy had imprisoned the stone in a twine net: two sets of helices, one climbing clockwise, the other anti-clockwise, intersecting each other in a pattern of diamonds, just like the lead net that held Clarke’s window together. Enoch didn’t suppose that this was a coincidence. The work was irregular at the start, but by the time he’d completed the first row of knots the boy had learned to take into account the length of twine spent in making the knots themselves, and by the time he reached the end, it was as regular as the precession of the zodiac.
    Enoch then walked briskly to the school and arrived in time to watch the inevitable fight. The fair boy was red-eyed and had porridge-vomit on his chin—it was safe to assume he’d been punched in the stomach. Another schoolboy—there was one in every school—seemed to have appointed himself master of ceremonies, and was goading them to action, paying most attention to the smaller boy, the injured party and presumed loser-to-be of the fight. To the surprise and delight of the community of young scholars, the smaller boy stepped forward and raised his fists.
    Enoch approved, so far. Some pugnacity in the lad would be useful. Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.
    Then combat was joined. Not many punches were thrown. The small boy did something clever, down around the tall boy’s knees, that knocked him back on his arse. Almost immediately the little boy’s knee was in the other’s groin, then in the pit of his stomach, and then on his throat. And then, suddenly, the tall boy was struggling to get up—but only because the fair-haired boy was trying to rip both of his ears off. Like a farmer dragging an ox by his