In any case it had the desired effect, which was that Herr Augsburg, as his contribution to the Apocalypse, went with Jack to an armaments-market in the center of Linz and purchased him a musket and various other items.
Thus equipped, Jack marched off and offered his services to an Austrian regiment. The captain paid equal attention to Jack’s musket and to his boots. Both were impressive in the highest degree. When Jack demonstrated that he actually knew how to load and fire his weapon, he was offered a position. Jack thus became a musketeer.
He spent the next two weeks staring at other men’s backs through clouds of dust, and stepping on ground that had already been stepped on by thousands of other men and horses. His ears were filled with the tromping of feet, boots, and hooves; the creaking of overladen barley-carts; nonsensical teamsters’ exhortations; marching-songs in unknown languages; and the blowing of trumpets and beating of drums of regimental signal-men desperately trying to keep their throngs from getting all mixed up with alien throngs.
He had a gray-brown felt hat with a gigantic round brim that needed to be pinned up on one or both sides lest it flop down and blind him. More established musketeers had fine feathered brooches for this purpose-Jack made do with a pin. Like all English musketeers, Jack called his weapon Brown Bess. It was of the latest design-the lock contained a small clamp that gripped a shard of flint, and when Jack pulled the trigger, this would be whipped around and skidded hard against a steel plate above the powder-pan, flooding the pan with sparks and igniting it in most cases. Half of the musketeer-formations were impaired by older, flintless weapons called matchlocks. Each of these matchlock-men had to go around with a long fuzzy rope twined through his fingers, one end of which was forever smouldering-as long as it didn’t get wet and he remembered to blow on it frequently. Clamped into the same sort of mechanism that held Jack’s flint-shard, it would ignite the powder, more often than not, by direct contact.
Jack, like all the other musketeers, had a leather belt over one shoulder whence dangled a dozen thumb-sized and -shaped wooden flasks, each sealed with its own stopper, each big enough to contain one charge of powder for the weapon. They clinked together musically when he walked. There was a powder-horn for refilling these during lulls. At the lowest point of the bandolier was a small pouch containing a dozen lead balls.
A company was a couple of hundred men like Jack walking around packed into a tight square, not because they liked crowds but because this made it harder for an opponent to ride up with an edged weapon and cut pieces off of them. The reason it was harder was because in the center of the square was a smaller square of men carrying extremely long pointed sticks called pikes. The dimensions of the squares and the length of the pikes were worked out so that when the pikes were levelled at the enemy (passing between the surrounding musketeers) their points would project some distance beyond the edge of the formation-provided the musketeers stood close together-discouraging enemy horsemen from simply galloping up and having at the musketeers as they went through their loading rituals, which, even under ideal conditions, seemed to take as long as a Mass.*
That was the general plan. Exactly what would happen when the Turks strung their outlandish recurved bows and began to shower iron-tipped arrows into these formations had not been specified. From Linz onwards, anyway, Jack walked in the midst of such an organization. It made many, many noises, each traceable to something like the wooden powder-flasks. Unlike a company of matchlocks, it did not smolder, nor make huffing and puffing noises.
They turned away from the Danube, leaving it off to their left, and then the formations piled into one another because they were going uphill now, assaulting the tail of that mountain range. The drums and trumpets, muffled now by trees, echoed along river-valleys as formations split again and again, finding passes over the hills. Jack was frequently confused, but when he wasn’t, he sensed that the Poles were on his right, the Bavarians and Saxons on his left.
Compared to the hills of England, these were high, steep, and well-forested. But between them lay broad valleys that made for easy marching, and even when they had to go over hills, instead of between them, the going was easier than it looked-the trees were tall handsome ones with bare white trunks, and what little undergrowth there was had long since been trampled down by others when Jack reached it.
The only way he knew that they’d reached the environs of Vienna was that they stopped marching and began camping. They made a bivouac in a narrow steep valley where the sun rose late and set early. Some of Jack’s brothers in arms were impatient to get on with it, but he appreciated that the Army of Christendom had become an immense machine for turning barley into horseshit and that the barley would fast run out. Something had to happen soon.
After they’d bivouacked for two nights, Jack slipped away one morning before dawn and clambered uphill until the ground became level under his feet. He did this partly to get away from the stink of the camp and partly because he wanted to get a look at the city from a high place. Red sunlight was weaving among white tree-trunks as he wandered to a high bluff from which he had a clear view several miles down into the city.
Vienna was a small town dwarfed by its own defenses, in turn engulfed by a larger Turkish city only a few months old. The town itself was, then, the smallest part of what he saw, but it was to the rest as a chalice was to a cathedral. Even from miles off he could see it was a miserable place-actual streets were visible nowhere, just the red tile roofs of long skinny buildings heaped up six and seven stories, wending black crevices between them indicating streets, which he could tell would be sunless trenches, thick with hurtling shit and echoing voices. He could see the foaming stain of the city spreading across the adjacent canal and, farther downstream, into the Danube itself, and from its color he could almost guess that there was a major flux epidemic underway-as indeed there was in the Turkish camp.
Just off-center in the heart of Vienna stood the tallest building Jack had ever seen-a cathedral with a dunce-cap tower topped by a curious symbol, a star wedged in the craw of a crescent moon, like a stick jammed into a shark’s mouth. It seemed a prophetic map of the entire scene. Vienna was protected on the north by a canal that split away from the Danube, moated the city on that side, and later rejoined it. The bridges had been wrecked so no one could enter or leave that way. The entire remainder of the city was enveloped by the Turkish camp, narrowest at the two points where it touched the river, and, in the middle, as fat as Vienna itself-therefore, a crescent with the city trapped between its horns. It was a fluttering world of heathenishly colored tents and flags and streamers, with the ruins of Vienna’s burnt suburbs poking out here and there like ribs of wrecked ships from a foaming sea.