He nearly tripped over a severed arm, and saw that it was clad in a curious Oriental fabric. After limbs came bodies-mostly Turkish ones, some clad in vests of fine mail studded with jeweled badges and gold stars. The men around him saw the same thing, and a cheer went up. They were all running now, and they kept getting farther and farther apart, dispersing into some place that, in the dust and smoke, Jack knew as a city, maybe not so great as London, but much bigger, say, than Strasbourg or Munich. It was a city of tents: huge cones supported by central poles and guyed off to the sides with many radiating lines, and curtains hanging down from the rims of the cones to form the walls. The tents were not of rude canvas but of embroidered stuff, all decorated with crescents and stars and spidery words.
Jack ran into a tent and found thick carpet under his feet, a pattern like twining flowers woven into the pile, and then discovered a cat the size of a wolf, with spotted golden fur, chained to a post, a jewelled collar round its neck. He had never seen a cat large enough to eat him before and so he backed out of that tent and continued to wander. At an intersection of great ways, he discovered a tiled fountain with huge golden fish swimming in it. The overflow spilled into a ditch that led to a garden planted with sweet white flowers.
A tree grew in a pot on wheels, its branches burdened with strange fruit and inhabited by emerald-green and ruby-red birds with hooked beaks, which screamed sophisticated curses at him in some tongue he had never heard. A dead Turk with an enormous waxed mustache and a turban of apricot silk lay in a marble bath full of blood. Other pikemen and musketeers wandered about, too flabbergasted to loot.
Jack tripped and landed face-first on red cloth, then stood up to find that he had stepped on a scarlet flag twenty feet on a side, embroidered with swords and heathen letters in gold thread. This was too big to carry away and so he let it lie, and wandered down tent-streets and tent-avenues scattered with collapsible lanterns; wrought-silver incense burners; muskets with stocks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, lapis, and gold; grapefruit-sized hand grenades; turbans clasped with jeweled badges; hand-drums; and vatlike siege mortars, their bombs nearby, half-covered by spiderwebs of fuse. Standards with long horsehair tassels topped by copper crescent moons gaping like dead men at the sky. Embroidered quivers and discarded ramrods, both wooden and iron. Stray Bavarian matchlock men ran to and fro, smouldering ropes still tangled in their fingers, glowing red from the wind of their movement so that they appeared as bobbing red sparks in the smoke and dust, trailing long wavy tendrils of finer smoke behind them.
Then there was the sound of hooves nearby, coming closer, and Jack spun around and stared into face of a horse, in glowing armor. Above it an armed man in a winged helmet, shouting at him in what he now recognized as Polish, holding up some reins. The reins belonged to a second horse, a cheval de bataille, also richly armored and saddled, but in a wholly different style, adorned with crescents rather than crosses, and boxlike metal stirrups. It must be the war-horse of some Turkish lord. The Winged Hussar was thrusting its reins toward Jack and bellowing orders in his thick, sneering language. Jack reached out and accepted a fistful of reins.
Now what? Did this Polish lord want Jack to mount the other horse and ride with him through the camp? Not likely! He was pointing at the ground, repeating the same words over and over until Jack nodded, pretending to understand. Finally he drew his sword and pointed it at Jack’s chest and said something very impolite and galloped away.
Jack now understood: this Winged Hussar had very grand ambitions for the day’s looting. He had found this horse early in the day. It was a prize worth keeping, but it would only hinder him if he tried to lead it around. If he tied it to a tree it would be looted by someone else. So he had looked for an armed peasant (to him, anyone on foot would be a peasant) and enlisted him as a sort of flesh-and-blood hitching-post. Jack’s job was to stand still holding these reins until the Winged Hussar came back-all day if need be.
Jack had scarcely had time to reflect on the fundamental unsoundness of this plan when a beast darted out of the smoke, headed right for him, then changed direction and ran past. It was the strangest thing Jack had ever seen, certainly one for the Book of Revelation: two-legged, feathered, therefore, arguably, a bird. But taller than a man, and apparently not capable of flight. It ran in the gait of a chicken, pecking the air with each stride to keep its balance. Its neck was as long and bare as Jack’s arm and as wrinkled as his Jolly Roger.
A small mob of infantrymen came running after it.
Now, Jack did not have the faintest idea what the giant trotting bird (supposing it was a bird) was. It hadn’t occurred to him to chase it, except perhaps out of curiosity. And yet the sight of other men chasing it, working so hard, with such desperate looks on their faces, gave him a powerful urge to do the same. They must be chasing it for a reason. It must be worth something, or else good to eat.
The bird had gone by very fast, easily out-loping the scrambling, miserably shod pursuers. They’d never catch it. On the other hand, Jack was holding the reins of a horse, and (he began to notice) a magnificent horse it was, with a saddle the likes he’d never seen, decorated in golden thread.
It probably had not even occurred to that Winged Hussar that Jack would know how to ride. In his part of the world, a serf could no more ride on horseback than he could speak Latin or dance a minuet. And disobeying the command of an armed lord was even less likely than riding around on a horse.
But Jack was not Polish scum of the earth, barefoot and chained to the land, or even French scum of the earth, in wooden clogs and in thrall to the priest and the tax-farmer, but English scum of the earth in good boots, equipped with certain God-given rights that were (as rumor had it) written down in a Charter somewhere, and armed with a loaded gun. He mounted the horse like a lord, spun it round smartly, reached back and slapped it on the ass, and he was off. In a few moments he had ridden through the middle of that knot of men who were hoping to catch the giant bird. Their only hope had been that their prey would forget that it was being chased, and stop running. Jack had no intention of letting that happen and so he jabbed his boot-heels into his mount’s sides and lit out after the bird in a way that was calculated to make it run like hell. Which it did, and Jack galloped after it, far outdistancing his competition. But the bird was astoundingly swift. As it ran, its wings splayed this way and that like an acrobat’s balancing-pole. Seeing into those wings from behind, Jack was reminded of decorations he’d seen in the hats of fine French gentlemen, and their mistresses, during military parades: those were the plumes of the, what’s it called the, the… the ostrich.
The reason for this merry chase was plain now: the ostrich, if caught, could be plucked, and its plumes taken to markets where fine things from exotic lands were sold, and exchanged for silver.
Now, Jack calculated. If he scoured the entire Turkish camp, he might find finer things to loot-but the legions of Christendom were all running wild through this place and others were likely to have found them first. The finest things of all would be taken by lords on horseback, and the musketeers and pikemen would be left to brawl over trifles. The plumes of this ostrich were not the finest prize to be had in this camp, but a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, and this one was almost in his hand. Ostrich-plumes were small and light, easy to conceal from the prying fingers and eyes of customs men, no burden to carry all the way across Europe if need be. And as the chase continued, his odds only improved, because this ostrich was speeding away from all noise and commotion, tending toward parts of the Grand Turk’s camp where nothing was going on. If only it would hold still long enough for him to bring it down with a musket-shot.