The Confusion

It felt now as if Sophie and the Doctor ought to say something concerning George Louis, but Sophie very deliberately didn’t and Leibniz easily decided to follow her lead. There was a brief upwelling of chaos and hilarity as Sophie was brought down to floor level again (she threatened to jump, and probably could have), but word had reached them that the Tsar of All the Russias had entered the building, preceded by Sophie Charlotte, who was essentially dragging him in by the ear. If this had been an official state visit they’d have had plenty of time to get ready. As matters stood, Peter was traveling incognito and so they were going to behave more or less as if he were a country cousin who had decided to drop by for dinner.

Clanking noises and guttural accents approached, and the avian trilling of Sophie Charlotte’s laughter! A couple of ladies-in-waiting darted in on Sophie to tuck in loose hair-strands and yank down on her bodice; she counted to ten and slapped them away. Behind her one servant, moving in a posture of awful dignity, bore the bat-plate out of the room while another replaced it with a clean one. Still others made frenetic repairs to the candelabra and the centerpiece. “Doctor! Your sword!” Sophie exclaimed. She snatched the moist weapon up off the table and, in an absent-minded way, made for Leibniz as if to impale him. Leibniz side-stepped politely, took the weapon by its hilt, and then embarked upon the project of trying to get it back into its scabbard. The tip had to be introduced into an opening that was too small for Leibniz to even see, inasmuch as he had pocketed his spectacles, and he was loath to touch the bat-smeared metal with the fingers of his other hand. So when the Tsar’s advance-guard rounded the corner into the room, he was still standing directly before the entrance holding it up in a posture that was ambiguous. The guards, who were not paid to be meditative, could not really discern, at a moment’s glance, whether he was yanking the blade out, or shoving it in.

Three swords screamed out of their scabbards as one, and Leibniz glanced up to discover the blades-quite a bit shinier than his-triangulated on the base of his neck. In the same instant-possibly because he had gone slack with terror-the tip of his blade happened to blunder into his scabbard, and down it slid, until rust-blockages froze it about halfway in. Leibniz’s arms had dropped to his sides like damp hawsers. The heavy guard of his rapier reciprocated back and forth on its springy blade going wuv, wuv, wuv. Twenty-five-year-old Peter Romanov entered the room on the arm of twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Charlotte. Or Leibniz (who was standing motionless, with his chin high in the air to keep it from being shaved) assumed this fellow must be the Tsar, from the fact that he was the tallest human being that Leibniz had set eyes on in his whole life. For all his immensity, he had a gracefully drawn-out frame, and his face-clean-shaven except for a dark moustache-still had a boyish softness about it. When he tore his dark, quasi-Mongol eyes away from Sophie Charlotte (not easy in that she was very likely the most lovely and interesting female he had ever seen) and got a load of the tableau in the dining room, he came to a stop. His left eye twitched shut as if he were winking, then struggled open, then did it again. Then the whole left side of his face contorted as if an invisible hand had gripped his cheek and twisted it. He pulled free of Sophie Charlotte’s arm and clapped both hands over his face for a few moments, possibly from embarrassment and possibly to hide this twitching. Then both hands lunged out as he strode forward. He was so shockingly colossal that it seemed as if he were diving forward, launching himself towards his three guards like an immense bat. But he remained on his feet. He grabbed the two guards on the flanks by the scruffs of their necks and drew them together so that they collided with the one in the middle; and holding them all together in a bear-hug he screamed at them for a while in what Leibniz took to be the tongue of Muscovy. Leibniz stepped backwards until he was behind and beside Sophie, then got both hands together on his sword-pommel and rammed it all the way home in a series of sharp yanking gestures. By that time, Peter had switched over to whorehouse German. “I would borrow three large wheels!”

“What for?” Sophie Charlotte inquired, as if she and everyone else in the room did not already know.

“Merely breaking all of the bones in their bodies does not cause sufficient pain to punish them for this crime. But if they are first tied to a wheel, which is continually rotated, the shifting of their weight causes the broken bone-ends to jar and grind against each other-”