Bohemia

AUTUMN 1683

THREE DAYS NORTH of the Danube, the road focused to a rut in a crowd of scrawny trees that were striving to rise clear from a haze of grasping weeds. The weeds seethed with bugs and stirred with small unseen beasts. Paving-blocks skewed out of pounded ground, forming a sort of shoal that unsettled Turk, who straightened, blinked suspiciously, and slowed. Jack drew the Janissary’s sword out of the rolled blanket where it had been hid since Vienna and washed the dried blood off in a creek-bend. When it was clean, he stood in a buttress of sunlight, thigh-deep in brown water, nervously wiping it and swinging it in the air.

“Something troubling you, Jack?”

“Since the Papists slew all the decent folk, this is a country of bandits, haiduks, and Vagabonds—”

“I guessed that. I meant, something about the sword?”

“Can’t seem to get it dry—that is, it’s dry to the touch, but it ripples like a brook in the sun.”

Eliza answered with a scrap of verse:

Watered steel-blade, the world perfection calls,

Drunk with the viper poison foes appals.

Cuts lively, burns the blood whene’er it falls;

And picks up gems from pave of marble halls.

“…or so says the Poet.”

“What manner of poet speaketh such barbarities?” Jack scoffed.

“One who knew more of swords than you. For that is Damascus steel, more than likely. It might be more valuable than Turk and the ostrich plumes summed.”

“Save for this defect,” Jack said, fitting the ball of his thumb into a notch in the edge, not far from the point. Around it the steel was blackened. “I wouldn’t’ve thought it could happen.”

“That’s where it cut into your musket’s soft belly?”

“Soft? You saw only the wooden stock. But concealed within was an iron ramrod, running the whole length of the weapon through a skinny hole augered into the wood, alongside the musket-barrel itself. This sword cut through the wood—no great feat—but then it must’ve sliced clean through the ramrod, and then well into the barrel—deep enough to make it weak there. When the powder finally caught, it shoved the ball up only as far as the weak place, and then the barrel burst—that was the end of the Janissary, for he had his face up practically—”

“I saw it. You’re rehearsing the story, aren’t you, to entertain your friends?”

“I have no friends. It’s to cow mine enemies.” Jack thought this sounded formidable, but Eliza stared at the horizon and heaved a sigh.

“Or,” she said, “it could entice a buyer who was in the market for a legendary blade…”

“I know it’s difficult, but put all thoughts of markets out of your mind. As the Grand Vizier recently learned, all the riches in the world are of no use if you can’t defend ’em. This is wealth, and the means to defend it, combined into one—perfection.”

“Do you suppose that a man with a sword and a horse will be defense enough, in a place like this?”

“No highwayman of standing would situate himself in a waste.”

“Are all the forests of Christendom like this? From Mummy’s færy-tales I was expecting great majestic trees.”

“Two or three generations ago, ’twas a wheat-field,” Jack said, using the sword to harvest a sheaf of overripe stalks growing wild in a sunny break on the bank of the stream. He sheathed the sword and smelled the grain. “The good peasants would come here during the harvest with their dulled whistles slung over their tired shoulders.” Before Jack had waded in he had kicked off his boots. He waded around the swirling pool, groping at the bottom with his bare toes, and after a minute bent down, reached in, and brought up a long curved scythe-blade, notched from striking rocks—just a solid crescent of rust now, a few fingers of slimy black wood projecting from the handle-socket. “They would whet their whistles using rocks that had been worn smooth by the river.” He brought up one such rock in his other hand and scrubbed it against the blade for a moment, then tossed it up on the bank. “And while they were doing so they might not be above taking a bit of refreshment.” Still probing with his feet, he bent down again and produced an earthenware drinking-jug, turned it over, and poured out a green-brown tube of stagnated water. The jug he tossed also onto the bank. Still holding the long rusty arc of the whistle in one hand, he turned round and waded back in search of an exhibit he had detected earlier. He found it again, and nearly fell over, the stream’s current dividing round his thigh as he stood flamingo-style and passed the other foot over something down there. “And so went their simple, happy lives—until something intervened—” Jack now swung the whistle-blade slowly and (he liked to suppose) dramatically across the surface of the pool, a pantomime Grim Reaper.

“Plague? Famine?”

“Religious controversy!” Jack said, and produced from the pool a browned human skull, jaw-bone absent, an obvious sword-dent caving in one of the temples. Eliza (he thought) seemed quite struck by his presentation—not by the skull (she’d seen worse) so much as by the cleverness of the performance. He posed with whistle and skull, extending the moment. “Ever seen a morality play?”

“Mummy told me about ’em.”

“The intended audience: Vagabonds. The purpose: to impress on their feeble and degenerate minds some idiotic moral.”

“What is the moral of your play, Jack?”

“Oh, it could be a number of things: stay the hell out of Europe, for example. Or: when the men with swords come, run away! Especially if they’ve got Bibles, too.”

“Sound advice.”

“Even if it means giving up things.”

Eliza laughed like a wench. “Ah, now we are coming to a moral, I can sense it.”

“Laugh all you like at this poor fellow,” Jack said, hefting the skull. “If he’d left his wheat-harvest behind, and taken to the road, instead of clinging to his land and his hut like a miser, why he might be alive today.”

“Are there such things as fourscore-year-old Vagabonds?”

“Probably not,” Jack admitted, “they just look twice as old as they are.”

THEY WENT NORTH into the dead country of Bohemia, following spoors and traces of old roads, and the trails of the game that had flourished here in the absence of hunters. Jack lamented the loss of Brown Bess, which would have brought down all the deer they might have wanted, or at least scared the hell out of them.

Sometimes they would come down out of the wooded hills to cross over plains—probably old pastures that had grown up into vast thickets. Jack would put Eliza up into the saddle so that thorns, nettles, and bugs wouldn’t make a mess of her—not that he cared—but her chief reason for existence was to give him something pleasant to look at. Sometimes he’d put the Damascus blade to the ignoble purpose of hacking through brush. “What do you and Turk see?” he’d say, because all he could see was useless vegetation, gone all brown in preparation for winter.

“To the right, the ground rises to a sort of shelf, high dark hills behind it—on the shelf the walls of a castle, thick and ill-made compared to Moorish ones, which are so elegant—but not thick enough to resist whatever destroying force knocked it down—”

“Artillery, lass—the doom of all ancient forts.”

“The Pope’s artillery, then, breached the walls in several places—creating spills of rock across the dry-moat. White mortar clings to the dark stones like shards of bleached bone. Then fire burnt out the insides, and took all but a few blackened rafters from the roof—all the windows and gunports have spreading smoke-stains above them, as if flames jetted from those openings for hours—it is like an Alchemist’s furnace in which a whole town was purified of heresy.”

“You have alchemists in Barbary?”

“You have them in Christendom?”

“It is very poetickal—as were the previous half-dozen ruined-castle-descriptions—but I was more interested in practical matters: do you see the smoke of cook-fires anywhere?”

“I’d have mentioned it. Trails in the brush, trampled down by men or horses, I’d have mentioned, too.”

“Anything else?”

“To the left a pond—rather shallow-looking.”

“Let’s go there.”

“Turk’s been taking us thither—he’s thirsty.”

They found several such ponds, and after the third or fourth (all of them near ruins) Jack understood that these ponds had been excavated, or at least enlarged and rounded out, by (safe to say) thousands of wretches with picks and shovels. It recalled to his mind some bit of zargon-lore he’d picked up from a gypsy in Paris, who’d ranted to him about lakes, far to the East, but not so far as Romania, where big fish were raised just as herdsman raised beef-cattle in pastures. From the fish skeletons scattered along the shores of these ponds, Jack could see others had been here, harvesting the vestiges of those dead Protestants’ clammy flocks. It made his mouth water.

“Why’d the Papists hate this country so much?” Eliza inquired. “Mummy told me there are many Protestant lands.”

“It is not the sort of thing I would bother to know about, as a rule,” Jack said, “but, as it happens, I’ve just come from an almost equally ruined land where every peasant knows the tale, and won’t leave off telling it. That country is called the Palatinate and its lords, for a few generations anyway, were Protestant heroes. One of those lords married an English girl, name of Elizabeth—the sister of Chuck the First.”

“Charles the First—isn’t he the one who ran afoul of Cromwell, and got his head chopped off in Charing Cross?”

“The same—and his sister fared little better, as you’ll soon see. Because right here in Bohemia, some Protestants got weary of being ruled by Papists, and threw several of ’em out a castle window into a dung-heap, and declared this country free of Popery. But unlike the Dutchmen, who have little use for royalty, these Bohemians couldn’t imagine having a country without monarchs. As Protestant monarchs were in short supply hereabouts, they invited Elizabeth and this Palatine fellow to come here and rule them. Which they did—for a single winter. Then the Pope’s legions came up here and made it what it is today.”

“What of Elizabeth and her husband?”

“The Winter Queen and the Winter King, as they were called after that, ran away. They couldn’t go to the Palatinate because that had likewise been invaded (which is why the people who live there won’t shut up about it, even today), so they roamed about like Vagabonds for a while and finally ended up at The Hague, where they sat out the war that had been started by all this.”

“Did she have children?”

“She wouldn’t stop having ’em. My god. To hear people talk, she must’ve been punching them out, nine and a half months apart, all through the war…I cannot remember how many.”

“You cannot remember? How long was this war?”

“Thirty years.”

“Oh.”

“She had at least a dozen. The eldest became Elector Palatinate after the war, and the others scattered to the four winds, as far as I know.”

“You speak very callously of them,” Eliza sniffed, “but I am certain that each bears in his or her heart the memory of what was done to the parents.”

“Forgive me, lass, but now I’m confused: are you talking about those Palatine whelps, or yourself?”

“Both,” Eliza admitted.

He and Eliza had hit on a new way of subsisting, mostly on wheat. As Jack liked to remind Eliza several times a day, he was not the sort who accumulated possessions. But he had a sharp eye for what might be useful in a pinch, and so had filched a hand-mill from a military baggage-train when the cooks had gone off to loot. Wheat poured into the top would become flour if one only turned the crank a few thousand times. All they needed, then, was an oven. Or so Jack had supposed until one evening between Vienna and Linz when Eliza had thrust a couple of sticks into the ashes of their fire and pulled out a flat blackened disk. Brushed off, it proved to be brown and tan underneath—torn apart, it steamed and smelled more or less like bread. It was, Eliza said, a Mohametan style of bread, requiring no oven, and reasonably good to eat if you didn’t mind grinding a few cinders between your teeth. They’d now been eating it for upwards of a month. Compared to real viands it was miserable, compared to starvation it was extremely palatable. “Bread and water, bread and water—it’s like being in the brig again. I’m for some fish!” Jack said.

“When were you in a brig?”

“It’s just like you to ask. Er, I believe it was after we sailed from Jamaica, but before the pirate attack.”

“What were you doing in Jamaica?” Eliza asked suspiciously.

“Worked my extensive military connections to stow away on a ship bringing balls and powder to His Majesty’s fortifications there.”

“Why?”

“Port Royal. I wanted to see Port Royal, which is to pirates as Amsterdam is to Jews.”

“You wanted to become a pirate?”

“I wanted freedom. As a Vagabond, I have it—so long as I keep my wits about me. But a pirate is (or so I thought) like a Vagabond of the seas. They say that all of the seas, put together, are larger than all of the dry land, put together, and I supposed that pirates must be that much freer than Vagabonds. Not to mention a good deal richer—everyone knows that the streets of Port Royal are paved with Spanish silver.”

“Are they?”

“Very near, lass. All of the world’s silver comes from Peru and Mexico—”

“I know it. We used pieces of eight in Constantinople.”

“—and all of it must pass by Jamaica in order to reach Spain. Those Port Royal pirates siphoned off a goodly fraction of it. I reached the place in seventy-six—only a few years since Captain Morgan had personally sacked Portobelo and Panama, and brought all the proceeds back to Port Royal. It was a rich place.”

“I’m pleased that you wanted to be a buccaneer…I was afraid you had ambitions of being a sugar planter.”

“Then, lass, you are the only person in the world who esteems pirates above planters.”

“I know that in the Cape Verde Islands and Madeira, all sugar is cultivated by slaves—the same is true in Jamaica?”

“Of course! The Indians all died, or ran away.”

“Then better to be a pirate.”

“Never mind. A month aboard ship taught me that there’s no freedom at all to be had on the high seas. Oh, the ship might be moving. But all water looks the same, and while you wait for land to crawl over the horizon, you’re locked up in a box with a lot of insufferable fools. And pirate-ships are no different. There is no end of rules as to how booty and swag are to be collected, valued, and divided among the numerous different classes and ranks of pirates. So after a bad month in Port Royal, trying to keep my arsehole away from randy buccaneers, I sailed for home on a sugar-ship.”

Eliza smiled. She did not do this frequently. Jack did not like the effect it had on him when she did. “You have seen much,” she said.

“I’m more than twenty years old, lass. An old gaffer like me, in the twilight of his years, has had plenty of time to live a full life, and to see Port Royal and other wonders—you’re only a child, you’ve a good ten or, God willing, twenty years left.”

“It was on the sugar-ship that you were thrown into the brig?”

“Yes, for some imagined offense. Then pirates attacked. We were holed by a cannonball. The ship’s master saw his profits dissolving. All hands were called on deck, all sins pardoned.”

ELIZA WENT ON WITH FURTHER interrogations. Jack heard not a word of it, as he was making observations of this pond, and of the mostly abandoned village that crowded along one shore of it. He paid particular attention to a gossamer-thread of smoke that rose and piled up against some invisible barrier in the atmosphere above. It was coming from a lean-to thrown up against the wall of an old collapsed house. A dog whined somewhere. The scrub between the pond and a nearby forest was scored with various trails cutting purposefully toward water’s edge, and the forest itself trapped in a miasma of smoke and vapors.

Jack followed the pond-shore, fish-bones crackling beneath the soles of his boots, until he’d come to the village. A man was dragging a faggot as big as himself down a road toward the lean-to. “No axes—they therefore must burn twigs, instead of cordwood, all winter,” Jack said to Eliza, significantly patting the axe that they’d taken from the chamber beneath Vienna.

The man was wearing wooden shoes, and was dressed in rags that had gone the color of ash, and he shimmered in an oily cloud of flies. He was staring lustfully at Jack’s boots, with an occasional, sad glance at the sword and the horse, which told him he would never get the boots.

“J’ai besoin d’une cruche,” Jack offered.

Eliza was amused. “Jack, we’re in Bohemia! Why are you speaking French?”

“Il y a quelques dans la cave de ça—là-bas, monsieur,” said the peasant.

“Merci.”

“De rien, monsieur.”

“You have to look at the shoes,” Jack explained airily, after allowing a minute for Eliza’s embarrassment to ripen. “No one but a Frenchman wears those sabots.”

“But how…?”

“France is a worse than normal place to be a peasant. Some pays especially. They know perfectly well there’s empty land to the east. As do our dinner guests.”

“Guests?”

Jack found a great earthenware jug in a cellar and set Eliza to work dropping pebbles into its open neck until it was so weighed down as to sink. Meanwhile he was working with the contents of his powder-horn, which had been useless weight to him since the destruction of Brown Bess. He tore a long thin strip of linen from a shirt and rolled it in powder until it was nearly black, then sparked one end of it with flint and steel and observed a steady and satisfactory progress of sputtering and smoky flame. The Frenchman’s children had come over to watch. They were so infested with fleas that they rustled. Jack made them stay well back. The fuse demonstration was the most wondrous event of their lives.

Eliza was finished with the pebble work. The rest was simple enough. All the remaining supply of gunpowder, plus a piece of new fuse, went into the jug. Jack lit the fuse, dropped it in, jammed a warm candle-stub into the neck to keep water out, and hurled the apparatus as far as he could into the pond, which swallowed it. A few moments later it belched—the water swelled, foamed, and produced a cloud of dry smoke, like a miracle. A minute later the water became lumpy and thick with dead or unconscious fish.

“Dinner is served!” Jack hollered. But the murky forest had already come alive—queues of people were moving down the paths like flame down the fuse. “Up on the horse, lass,” Jack suggested.

“Are they dangerous?”

“Depends on what’s catching. I have the good fortune to’ve been born immune and impervious to plague, leprosy, impetigo…” but Eliza was up on the horse already, in a performance of a scampering nature that no man alive (excepting sodomites) would not have enjoyed watching. Jack, for lack of other occupations, had taught her what he knew of riding, and she backed Turk off expertly and rode him up onto a little mossy hummock, gaining as much altitude as possible.

“ ’Twas the Year of our Lord sixteen hundred and sixty-five,” Jack said. “I was coming up in the world—having established a thriving business of sorts with brother Bob, providing specialized services to the condemned. My first clew was the scent of brimstone—then heavy yellow smoke of it hanging in the streets, thicker and fouler than the normal fogs of London. People burnt it to purify the air.”

“Of what?”

“Then it was wains trundling down streets piled with corpses of rats, then cats, then dogs, then people. Red chalk crosses would appear on certain houses—armed watchmen stood before them to prevent any of the miserable residents from breaking out of those nailed-shut doors. Now, I couldn’t’ve been more than seven. The sight of all those blokes planted in the brimstone-fog, like hero-statues, with pikes and muskets at the ready—churches’ bells sounding death-knells all round—why, Bob and I had voyaged to another world without leaving London! Public entertainments were outlawed. Irish even stopped having their Popish feasts, and many absconded. The great hangings at Tyburn stopped. Theatres: shut down for the first time since Cromwell. Bob and I had lost both income and the entertainment to spend it on. We left London. We went to the forest. Everyone did. They were infested. The highwaymen had to pack up and move away. Before we—the Londoners fleeing the Plague—even came into those woods, there had been towns of lean-tos and tree-houses there: widows, orphans, cripples, idiots, madmen, journeymen who’d thought better of their contracts, fugitives, homeless reverends, victims of fire and flood, deserters, discharged soldiers, actors, girls who’d gotten pregnant out of wedlock, tinkers, pedlars, gypsies, runaway slaves, musicians, sailors between sailings, smugglers, confused Irishmen, Ranters, Diggers, Levellers, Quakers, feminists, midwives. The normal Vagabond population, in other words. To this was added, now, any Londoner fleet enough to outrun the Black Death. Now, a year later London burnt to the ground—there was yet another exodus. Same year, the Naval Pay Office went into default—thousands of unpaid sailors joined us. We moved around the South of England like Christmas Carolers from Hell. More’n half of us expected the Apocalypse within a few weeks, so we didn’t trouble with planning. We broke down walls and fences, undoing Enclosure, poached game in forests of some extremely worshipful lords and bishops. They weren’t happy.”

By this time, the Vagabonds had mostly come out into the open. Jack didn’t look at them—he knew what they’d be—but rather at Eliza, who’d become anxious. Turk the Horse sensed this and looked askance at Jack, showing a white Mohametan crescent-moon in the eye. Jack knew, then, that, as it was with Turk, so it’d be with every person and beast they met along their way: they’d gladly suffer Eliza to climb on their backs and ride them, they’d feel her feelings as if she were an actress on a Southwark stage, and they’d shoot dirty looks at Jack. He’d only have to find a way to use it.

Eliza breathed easier when she saw that the Vagabonds were just people. If anything they were cleaner and less brutish than those peasants who’d settled in the village, especially after they swam out into the pond to retrieve fish. A couple of Gypsy boys drew a crowd as they struggled to wrestle a prodigious carp, the size of a blacksmith, up onto the shore. “Some of these fish must remember the war,” Jack mused.

Several people came near, but not too near, to pay their respects to Jack and (more so) Eliza. One was a stringy fellow with pale green eyes staring out of an anatomical complex that looked like anything but a face—his nose was gone, leaving twin vertical air-holes, and his upper lip was missing, and his ears were perforated baby’s fists stuck to the sides of this head, and angry words were burnt into his forehead. He came toward them, stopped, and bowed deeply. He had an entourage of more complete persons who obviously loved him, and they all grinned at Eliza, encouraging her not to throw up or gallop away screaming.

She was politely aghast. “A leper?” she asked. “But then he wouldn’t be so popular.”

“A recidivist,” Jack said. “When Polish serfs run away, their lords hunt ’em down and brand ’em, or cut off this or that piece—saving the pieces that can do useful work, needless to say—so if they’re seen out on the roads again they’ll be known as runners. That, lass, is what I mean by the Devil’s Poor—one who keeps at it regardless—who won’t be mastered by any man, nor reformed by any church. As you can see, his perseverance has won him a whole Court of admirers.”

Jack’s gaze had drifted to the lakeshore, where Vagabonds were now scooping guts out of carp-bellies by the double handful, exerting a hypnotic power over various mangy dogs. He looked up at Eliza and caught her in the act of examining him. “Trying to picture me without a nose?”

Eliza looked down. He’d never seen her eyes downcast before. It affected him, and made him angry to be affected. “Don’t look at me—I’ll not be the subject of such investigation. The last person who peered at me that way, from the back of a fine horse, was Sir Winston Churchill.”

“Who’s that? Some Englishman?”

“A gentleman of Dorsetshire. Royalist. Cromwell’s men burnt down his ancestral estate and he squatted in the cinders for ten or fifteen years, siring children and fighting off Vagabonds and waiting for the King to come back—that accomplished, he became a man about town in London.”

“Then whyever was he peering at you from horseback?”

“In those days of Plague and Fire, Sir Winston Churchill had the good sense to get himself posted to Dublin on the King’s business. He’d come back from time to time, suck up to the Royals, and inspect what was left of his country estates. On one of those occasions, he and his son came back to Dorset for a visit and rallied the local militia.”

“And you happened to be there?”

“I did.”

“No coincidence, I presume.”

“Bob and I and certain others had come to partake of a charming local custom.”

“Clog-dancing?”

“Clubmen—armies of peasants who’d once roamed that part of the country with cudgels. Cromwell had massacred them, but they were still about—we hoped for a revival of the tradition, as Vagabondage of the meek school had become overly competitive in those dark years.”

“What did Sir Winston Churchill think of your idea?”

“Didn’t want his home burnt again—he’d just gotten a roof on it, finally, after twenty years. He was Lord Lieutenant thereabouts—that’s a job that the King gives to the gents with the brownest noses of all—entitled him to command the local militia. Most Lord Lieutenants sit in London all the time, but after the Plague and the Fire, the countryside was in an uproar because of people like me, as I’ve been explaining, and so they were given the power to search for arms, imprison disorderly persons, and so on.”

“Were you imprisoned, then?”

“What? No, we were mere boys, and we looked younger than we were because of not eating enough. Sir Winston decided to carry out a few exemplary hangings, which was the normal means of persuading Vagabonds to move to the next county. He picked out three men and hanged them from a tree-limb, and as a last favor to them, Bob and I hung from their legs to make ’em perish faster. And in so doing we caught Sir Winston’s eye. Bob and I looked similar, though for all we know we’ve different fathers. The sight of these two matched urchins plying their trade, with coolness born of experience, was amusing to Sir Winston. He called us over and that was when he (and his son John, only ten years older than meself) gave us that look you were giving me just now.”

“And what conclusion did he arrive at?”

“I didn’t wait for him to arrive at conclusions. I said something like, ‘Are you the responsible official here?’ Bob’d already made himself scarce. Sir Winston laughed a little too heartily and allowed as how he was. ‘Well, I’d like to register a complaint,’ I said. ‘You said you were going to carry out one or two exemplary hangings. But is this your notion of exemplary? The rope is too thin, the noose is ill-made, the tree-limb is barely adequate to support the burden, and the proceedings were, if I may say so, carried out with a want of pomp and showmanship that’d have the crowd at Tyburn baying for Jack Ketch’s blood if he ever staged one so shabbily.’”

“But Jack, didn’t you understand that ‘exemplary’ meant that Sir Winston Churchill was making an example of them?”

“Naturally. And just as naturally, Sir Winston began to give me the same tedious explanation I’ve just now had from you, albeit I interrupted with many more foolish jests—and in the middle of it, young John Churchill happened to glance away and said, ‘I say, look, Father, the other chap’s going through our baggage.’”

“What—Bob?”

“My performance was a diversion, girl, to keep them looking at me whilst Bob pilfered their baggage-train. Only John Churchill had a lively enough mind to understand what we were doing.”

“So…what did Sir Winston think of you, then?”

“He had his horsewhip out. But John spoke with him sotto voce, and, as I believe, changed his mind—Sir Winston claimed, then, that he’d seen qualities in us Shaftoe boys that would make us useful in a regimental setting. From that moment on we were boot-polishers, musket-cleaners, beer-fetchers, and general errand-boys for Sir Winston Churchill’s local regiment. We’d been given the opportunity to prove we were God’s, and not the Devil’s, Poor.”

“So that’s where you got your knowledge of matters military.”

“Where I began to get it. This was a good sixteen years ago.”

“And also, I suppose, it’s how you became so sympathetic to the likes of these,” Eliza said, flicking her blue eyes once toward the Vagabonds.

“Oh. You suppose I arranged this carp-feast out of charity?”

“Come to think of it—”

“I—we—need information.”

“From these people?”

“I have heard that in some cities they have buildings called libraries, and the libraries are full of books, and each book contains a story. Well, I can tell you that there never was a library that had as many stories as a Vagabond-camp. Just as a Doctor of Letters might go to a library to read one of those stories, I need to get a certain tale from one of these people—I’m not sure which one, yet—so I drew ’em all out.”

“What sort of tale?”

“It’s about a wooded, hilly country, not far north of here, where hot water spills out of the ground year-round and keeps homeless wanderers from freezing to death. You see, lass, if we wanted to survive a northern winter, we should’ve begun laying in firewood months ago.”

Jack then went among the Vagabonds and, speaking in a none too euphonious stew of zargon, French, and sign language, soon got the information he needed. There were many haiduks—runaway serfs who’d made a living preying on the Turks farther east. They understood the tale told by Jack’s horse and sword, and wanted Jack to join them. Jack thought it wise to slip away before their friendly invitations hardened into demands. Besides which, the entire scene of motley Vagabonds gutting and mutilating these immense fifty-year-old carp had become almost as strange and apocalyptic as anything they’d seen in the Turk’s camp, and they just wanted to put it behind them. Before dark, Jack and Eliza were northbound. That night, for the first time, it got so chilly that they were obliged to sleep curled up next to the fire under the same blanket, which meant Eliza slept soundly and Jack hardly at all.