(return home) The Black Rifle is a picaresque adventure that takes place in the England you might imagine if you knew nothing but old love songs and murder ballads. Alex Matthews is an orphan and Lily Daw the girl he loves. Told when they are very young that they'll never be allowed to marry, they drink a bottle of wine they believe to be poison, make love in a cherry orchard, and fall asleep. In the morning, when Alex wakes up hungover and alone, he sets out to explore what he takes to be perdition. From The Black Rifle Brownbridge Market Alex Matthews wandered back to London, where another man was already King. Overfull to the point of nausea with murder and theft, and tired of clear-eyed pirate pragmatism, Alex looked for a quiet and lawful way to pass his time. But nothing engaged him. The river was dull, the streets were all the same, the whores were lurid, the theater was garish, the windows were cloudy, the air stank. He had enough gold in his pockets to keep him, but he preferred not to spend it; for days he wandered the city, sleeping under bridges and begging his bread, keeping his eyes open and his mouth shut. At length he came to the spice market. At the time it was held in an enormous square crossed through with a canal, itself crossed by three small bridges: the Reading, the Goldstreet, and the Brown. So the people called it the Brownbridge Market, and the spicers called it Goldstreet. Their tables were laid out in a checkerboard, all of them the same, and the buyers wandered the aisles. By Goldstreet Bridge they sold pepper and nutmegs; over Reading hung the hot stink of incense and perfume; and at Brownbridge they sold soap. Some of the savonneurs also sold oil. The merchants did not shout, here, or declaim, but whispered, or intoned, so that the noise was not the noise of a crowd, but the loud murmur of a magnified, multiplied conversation. Every merchant was more outlandishly dressed than the last; every merchant kept the same glass jars or china bottles; and every merchant told a different rich story of the fame and prominence of his own soaps or peppercorns, and of the fantastic journey that had put them into his or her grateful possession. At first this all struck Alex as only another sort of piracy. Even allowing that one peppercorn might really be finer than another, it was the origin stories and the merchants' clothes that seemed to constitute the greater part of what the buyers paid for. But as, over the course of a week, he paced the stone lanes of the market, his view changed--he came to think that it was not lying or piracy that the spicers practiced, but a form of art. In fact, it was an art more subtle than any poet's poetry, more vital than any theater's theater, because for every new, one-man audience, the spicer had to create a story that not only held the audience's interest, but affected his behavior and caused him to buy. One buyer was given the dream of living a heroic life by experiencing the world's beauty and distance; one, the dream of attaining a sensual heaven to reward his material work; one, the dream of uniqueness and self worth, of distinguishing himself from the crowd with tangible tokens of taste and expertise--and they all handed over their money. For every new audience it was a new, different story, and the peppercorns themselves--harvested in the heat of far-off countries and carried over boundless oceans--were only the markers or the medium of the game, as coins are to the gambler, or letters to the scholar. At base it was like everything else a study of human beings. Once he had realized this, Alex went down the steps to Bartleton Canal and muddied his face, and ripped his shirt, and turned his jacket inside out, to disguise himself. Then he went into the glass market on Haycroft Street and bought three pale green vials and a garish necklace of glass rubies. Then he bought the finest peppercorns in Brownbridge to fill the green vials. And then he went to a tailor. Two days later he reappeared in the market, unrecognized, splendid, in a purple gown with rubies around his neck and gold rings on his fingers, as Sulamin Hennawi, the refugee of an eastern court, escaped from certain death with nothing but the jewels he stood up in and three stolen vials of the Sultan's personal spice. One Peppercorn Of course the spicers were hardly fooled. They knew he was no Persian. But they also knew that the only question was whether the buyers would believe--and they did. A ripple of hysteria washed across the market from Reading to Brownbridge, and Alex Matthews, as Sulamin Hennawi, was mobbed. He sold one of his vials for an absurd sum of gold, and then he pled fatigue, and allowed himself to be carried by coach to the richest spicer's mansion, where he was entertained in high style, and he smiled and nodded and answered no questions. This spicer, Horace Tench, tripped and stuttered in his excitement, and all but went down on his knees in his eagerness to offer himself as a partner. Alex invited the spicers to a grand dinner, on which he spent all of his gold in hand, and at the end of the dinner he sold half a vial of the Sultan's Own Pepper for twice what he had gotten for a full vial. He bought himself a mansion and a horse. The next month it was not only spicers but collectors and dukes that gathered for his costume ball, and at the end of the ball, one quarter vial of pepper fetched at auction twice as much again. And so it went, over the course of a year, Alex playing his line like the subtlest of fishermen, becoming always more famous and grand, selling half as much pepper for twice as much gold, at longer and longer intervals, until finally all the kings in Europe were sending him gifts and emissaries--ambassadors, rubies, scholars, courtesans--in a mad quest to gain possession of the Sultan's Next-to-Last Peppercorn, which was rumored by this time to confer eternal life, eternal health, eternal youth, and unquenchable sexual virility. All the while he kept concealed his third green vial, sealed with an ornate seal in heavy red wax and covered in Persian writing. He cornered the market on saffron; he dominated ivory; he made incense addicts of all the King's court. He manipulated the prices of silver and of copper and he mortgaged estates for half the nobility--so that they could buy his goods. When finally he auctioned the Sultan's Next-to-Last Peppercorn, it went to a German Prince-Elector, for no less than seventeen towns, five counties, a river, two minor crowns, fifty Arabian horses, and two thousand pieces of gold. He was offered the hand of a beautiful duchess in exchange for the right merely to smell the peppercorn as it passed by. The Prince-Elector installed the pepper in his family cathedral beside a sliver of the True Cross, and the increase in pilgrimage tripled his income. Alex Matthews was the richest man in the world. But his wealth now lived and grew of itself and offered him no excitement. He began to gamble. He played tarock with princes and earls, and bet on horses, and anything else, and he found that gambling was to trading as liquor is to beer: a distillation of the same essence, purer and more powerful. None of the princes were smarter than him, but chance favored or disfavored them all with the same impartial hand, and in the long run his gambling made little difference to his wealth. But he did not admit this; he cultivated a reputation for unskilled, foolhardy luck. One night he was invited to bet with the King, and carefully, secretly, cunningly, Alex lost: one by one, he lost all the pieces of his fortune, the towns, the crowns, the pennies and horses, until he was an absolute pauper except for what he carried in his pockets, and one other thing. This was the one other thing: a small, pale green envelope sealed with a purple wax seal. The Bet "This," said Alex Matthews, taking the envelope from his pocket, "is the Sultan's Last Peppercorn. The Next-to-Last was proof against death and grew only once in every century; but this is the only one of its kind that will ever be, world without end. God alone knows its powers." "What are your stakes?" asked the King. "Never mind the stakes," said Alex Matthews. "First we must choose the game. This is too mighty and valuable a property to fight over with games of skill, as if it were left to human beings to apportion themselves good fortune, and not to the infinite and mysterious grace of almighty God. It must be a game of chance." "Agreed." "We will therefore flip a coin." "Agreed." "You provide the coin, and I will flip it." "Agreed." "The coin itself can be given to feed the hungry in any case." "Fine!" said the King, "but what are the stakes?" "Do you concede that my peppercorn is unique on all the earth?" "Yes--but so are they all. Each peppercorn is its own peppercorn and not another." "Yes, but that this peppercorn has magical powers?" "Of course." "And that no price is too much?" "Yes, yes," said the King, "but tell me what you're asking!" "I want you to wager England," said Alex Matthews. "Not only your personal crown and fortune, which would hardly be enough, but England--the trees, the cliffs, the sand; the clouds above it and the corn; the boys and the girls--England, down to every last leaf and worm." "Against this single peppercorn?" "Yes." "Agreed," said the King, and he took out of his pocket a heavy gold coin that bore his own face on one side and a cross of chains on the other. "Heads," said the King. Alex Matthews took the coin and flipped it. It rose in a flashing arc. It fell to the floor with a terrible crash. The King's face glinted up--Alex lost. The King seized the pale green envelope, and Alex was shown out of the castle, with one further insult: that the King had given him, in the pretense of consolation, a white lily to wear in his pauper mouth.