Square Wave (24 page)

Mercator’s map, from decades before, was there too, up on a table opposite the main stacks of books. Next to it was a kind of update of the
mappa mundi
, Desceliers’ plane-chart of 1550, but with significant interior detail, beyond the coastal outlines and seaports. In this way it was more than a mere sea chart.

On the table near Darasa Rutland found the double-hemisphere of Jean Rotz. On one corner of it lay a small atlas with further maps: the charts, Rutland knew, of Battiste Agnese.

There were more, and it astonished him to see them all here. Beneath the Mercator was Martin Waldseemuller’s
Carta Marina: A Portuguese Navigational Sea Chart of the Known Earth and Oceans
. A true mariner’s map. Unlike the Ptolemaic map he’d made earlier, the
Universalis Cosmographia
—Rutland wondered if there was also a copy of this in the room—with its scholarly deductions, this was a deeply empirical depiction, which meant there was an unruliness to its lines. There were the tensions thrown up by conflicting records coming in from so many sailors. A priori maps elided that sort of complexity, or more likely never knew it.

Rutland recognized all but the jester map (the
Fool’s Cap
). His grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the English army, was something of an amateur mapmaker, not only collecting copies of all the watershed maps from Ptolemy onward but drafting his own. In doing so he would conjoin rational and empirical principles, thinking this was the key to definitive cartography. Most of his creations, in fact, were composites of ones in his collection. The results were as visually interesting as they were unusable, by sailor and scholar alike. The principles, it turned out, were incongruent. Still, he’d managed to pass his grasp of the history of the discipline to his grandson. It was some part of the reason Rutland had taken a sailor’s path.

Above the books, hanging from the wall, was the 1502 Cantino World Chart, an accretion of hard-won Portuguese seafaring knowledge from which the
Carta Marina
was derived. For its martial and commercial value, the Portuguese royals had carefully guarded it. The Italian spy Alberto Cantino, Rutland recalled, was sent by the Duke of Ferrara to find a copy of the map. Ultimately he did, by an unknown hand, and smuggled it out of Lisbon. The Italians’ worldview immediately grew: the Cantino map of 1502 depicted outlying areas unknown to most other Europeans, regions that might serve as trading posts to bring mineral wealth and exotic foodstuffs into Lisbon—or else be annexed outright in the name of the empire.

As the priest continued to search the stacks, Rutland examined the depiction of Ceylon on the map, the tiny teardrop, here more of a circle. The Cantino was published just three years before the Portuguese arrived on the island. It was this map that many of their sailors would have helped create, contributing fresh details, improving its fidelity bit by bit.

Later generations would have steered here with its help; hence its presence in the temple. It was fitted to a wooden board, to preserve it, Darasa would tell him. The deep yellow of the map contrasted with the stark line drawings of the shores in brown ink. Mostly seaports were noted. The interiors were largely voids. They had not been much explored at the time, as it mattered little to merchant sailors how exactly the interior was arranged. They needed only to understand the edges of continents, where exchange was conducted. They would oversee the loading and unloading of cargo, and occasionally help military personnel secure the port. But they spent their time thinking of the ocean, or of home, not of the lands they found themselves in, or the precise origins of the goods they carried. Martial sailors and the explorers too held different maps, different thoughts, ones that traced their inward steps.

Darasa set a copy of the King James Bible on top of the
Carta Marina
’s Africa. Rutland half-bowed to the monk as gratitude washed over him. The book’s burgundy covers were worn so smooth the leather appeared grainless, though the vellum stock had stood up quite well to the marine air it would have seen in transit.

He fingered the slices of calfskin inscribed with the word of God, but strangely, without quite the conviction he expected to feel, given the many months since he had last seen a Bible. Carrying the residue of vast terrestrial movements, their geometries and schemata sketching historical trajectories without meaning to, the maps gave little ground, in his mind, to the Word. Most stubborn was the
Fool’s Cap
, at once a simple guide to the world and a shaping of it, an inscrutable transfiguration of history and futurity, both, into geography.

The Bible was something different. Cartography enforced a leanness of meaning; a coastline, a bay, or a mountain range could carry only so much sense. The Book, holy poem, was a thicket of sense, making it impossible to read its implications off cleanly.

The air had gone blue-black outside. Rutland insisted he would make his way back alone, and asked only if he might have use of a lantern, which he would return the next day. Darasa pulled a sheet of paper from the shelf. It was decorated with the emblem common to the temples, which resembled those of the kingdom: the seal of the lion, descending from the ancient north-Indian kingdom of Kalinga, where the Sinhalese, it was held, originated.

He inscribed a few lines, signed and folded it, and held it out to Rutland. He was to present it to anyone in the village, especially the village councilors, who might be suspicious of the evening excursion. He walked Rutland back down to the vehar’s side entrance and took up an unlit lantern, its twine wick poking out of yellow goat fat.

Rutland took the ball of twine from his pocket and dipped the end of it in the flame coming off the hanging temple lantern. He lit the one Darasa held with it and left through the tall grass, the letter tucked in the book.

When he reached the clearing with the abandoned fire—he’d never asked the monk why he’d made it, or why he put it out, or even if it was in fact his—he set the lamp down and opened the Bible to the page of the letter. It had settled in Leviticus. He opened the letter, and though he could read bits of Sinhalese now, he found the characters strange.

Later he would learn the letters were Pali. Understood only by the Buddhist monks, the characters would be recognized by the town’s officers as Pali, but they, like Rutland, would have no sense of its meaning except for the numerals indicating time and date. Its meaning, then, was effectively just its form. If he presented a letter in Pali with the right date and time, and with his name on it—he could see that much, as it was written in English—on temple paper with a senior priest’s signature, the officer would not bother to have another priest decipher it, and Rutland would be left alone.

But what did it mean, in Pali? Was it nonsense? Perhaps the priest had a sense of humor. Or maybe it was meant to be deciphered someday, when his descendants found it among his papers, in England, God willing.

Rutland tucked the letter back into the book and held it with the lantern in one hand. He picked up the bundle of sticks and headed home.

■   ■   ■

Stagg closed the laptop and drank deeply from a coffee mug full of flat champagne so cheap that it was hardly worse for having lost its life. He shut his eyes and blotted out the light of afternoon.

Rutland would truly head home, Stagg thought, only many years later, in 1680. But the London he fled to would be two-thirds the size by then, hollowed out by the bubonic plague, and with a king, not Rajasingha II but Charles II, the Stuart, restored. The Lord Protector and master Roundhead Oliver Cromwell had lost the confidence of his people and left them longing for the comforts of monarchy.

Rutland’s father, Harold, a prominent Royalist, had relished the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, though Stephen himself was always more cavalier than Cavalier. Certainly he was at the time he’d left London, in 1658, after a military training, for a life at sea, ostensibly in the name of the commercial interests of the East India Company but really more for the adventuring. The conflicts he’d been enmeshed in on the island had altered his politics, his sense of justice, though he couldn’t say just how, except to say he could be neither Royalist nor Roundhead now.

Stagg’s own predicament, the inchoate strife that surrounded him, how different was it, finally, from what Rutland had experienced abroad? It must be making his politics mutate too in unknown ways. Officially he stood with Penerin and the ruling order. But if the elections, or else a less peaceful force, were to undo it, there was no saying in advance which of the competing actors might earn his sympathy, or what new attachments he might form. This mercenary instinct seemed to be growing in Stagg, and he had to consider whether, beyond the turmoil all around him, his research too might be a catalyst, just as its object, a long-lost Sri Lanka, had been for Rutland.

A century and a half later, as if to revenge his captivity, the Rutland line would return to the island. Lt. General Andrew Philip Bartley Rutland led the final thrust into Kandy and was a leading signatory, in 1815, to the Kandyan Convention, that British treaty of annexation.

In the Uva rebellion that followed, he brought an end to several leading Sinhalese bloodlines, ones very much like his own back in England. He was always of the view that Bulwer-Lytton would articulate years later, and Disraeli would endorse: an “aristocracy of shopkeepers” was not to be preferred to an oligarchy of nobles. Abroad, of course, these English shopkeepers were out of sight, so A. P. B. Rutland was less dispirited by them than by the killing of nobles here in Ceylon, swiftly, brutally, knowing it could only speed the conquest of the commercial classes, however exactly they chose to dispose of the island.

Later, around 1900, Andrew’s grandnephew Gareth Robbins Rutland would serve as deputy governor of Ceylon. He had been an Apostle at Cambridge, at Peterhouse, in fact, where Stagg had been a doctoral student. Gareth’s ascendancy was swift. His family name virtually assured this.

Stagg himself was nearly tapped to be an Apostle, before he told the would-be tapper, in the sincerest tones, how important it was to follow your dreams. His friend readily agreed to the platitude. Then Stagg told him he’d dreamed the night before he’d pushed a child down a flight of stairs. What to do then? Baffled laughter came back. It was a fine joke, but Stagg had to pursue it. Would he help him memorialize the realization of his dreams, by filming it? he asked. And where would they find the right child? After a surreal debate over the meaning of the platitude, whether dreams in the clinical sense could possibly count, Stagg held firm to his position, his tone never straying from earnest. It froze his friend’s face in the end, stunned him into silence. At that point Stagg patted him on the shoulder and laughed, left him to watch Arsenal F.C. finish off Chelsea in the middle common room of Jesus College. There would be no tap. The friendship was finished too.

Where to trace this taste for terror? Probably the question itself was a dodge. Yet he liked to think he was finding the form of an answer in Haas, a commander who seemed as much at war with his own squad as with the enemy, who seemed to need to visit arbitrary cruelties on those around him to keep his mind level. In a diluted way Stagg’s father seemed to share in this unknowable need, at least when Stagg had been younger and more fully part of his squad. The family had disbanded now, or retired maybe, on neutral terms. The old wars had been too much. The mother remained in California, the father in Vienna. The child was still finding a territory of his own.

Gareth Robbins Rutland came to Ceylon with a fellow Apostle, Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s future husband. Soon after, though, Woolf returned to London, and Bloomsbury, troubled by the mechanics of colonial administration. He wrote a novel about it:
The Village in the Jungle
.

It was a bad novel, narratively clumsy and evincing nearly as much contempt for the Ceylonese as for the British administration. Still, like the best undistinguished novels, it remained useful to the historian mapping the shape of an era.

Robert Knox, who escaped to England with Rutland on a Dutch military vessel, composed a chronicle of his experience in the mode of the traveler’s tale:
An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East Indies
. It was published in 1681, sold very well, and unlike Woolf’s book centuries later, managed to have some literary merit as well. Though roughly formed in places, there were affinities with
Gargantua and Pantagruel
and
Moby Dick
. It’s said to have exerted a direct influence on the writing of
Robinson Crusoe
and
Gulliver’s Travels
.

But for Stagg there was much more to admire in it. It
can
be called a traveler’s tale, but the records from other merchants and soldiers, and from the monks and statesmen of the island, corroborate large portions of it: the native habits and customs, the horticultural explanations, the translations of pregnant Sinhalese phrases. It was closer to a travel memoir, really, than a tale.

Detailed records of daily life in the 1600s are few on the subcontinent generally. It forced you to rely on imperfect foreign reports like Knox’s. Of course, there were the clerical records, the Great and Lesser Chronicles. They did offer a continuous history of Sri Lanka
of a sort
, from the time of its settlement in 543 B.C.E., when Prince Vijaya, it attests, sailed to the island from Kalinga, in the north of India, with seven hundred men and women, through to 1815, when Kandy finally fell. But, being composed and maintained solely by the priesthood, the account was profoundly incomplete.

For one, the customs and practices of ordinary people go almost entirely unrecorded, as do any matters of neither practical nor metaphysical interest to the monks. Instead, the Chronicles give you the evolution of successive royal orders, the unfurling of aristocratic lines, in tandem with a history of the priesthood, its influential scholar-monks—the
tirinanxes
, as Knox and Rutland called them—and how they related to the successive regimes. Their record of the royal court, though, was of less value, as it was known, from other surviving documents, especially those of dissident priests, to be written in a manner unduly favorable to kings who were concessive to the priesthood.