The ostrich flailed, squawked, and vanished. Jack reined in his mount and proceeded carefully, and arrived at the lip of a trench. He hadn’t the faintest idea where he was, but this trench looked like a big one. He nudged the horse forward, expecting it to balk, but it cheerfully set to work, planting its hooves carefully in the loose earth of the trench’s sloping wall and picking its way down. Jack saw fresh ostrich prints in the muck on the bottom, and set the horse to trotting that direction.
Every few yards a smaller trench intersected this one at right-angles. None of these trenches had the palisades of sharpened outward-pointing sticks that the Turks would’ve installed if they’d been expecting an attack, and so Jack reckoned that these trenches did not belong to the camp’s outer works, which had been put up to defend it from encircling armies of Christians. These trenches must, instead, be part of the assault against Vienna. The smoke and dust were such that Jack could not see whether the city was ahead of, or behind, him and the ostrich. But by looking at the way that the earth had been piled up to one side of those trenches, to protect the inhabitants from musketballs, any fool could make out in which direction the city lay. The ostrich was going towards Vienna, and so was Jack.
The walls of the big trench steadily became higher and steeper, to the point where they’d had to be shored up with pilings and retaining walls of split logs. Then all of a sudden the walls curved together above him, forming an arch. Jack reined the horse in and stared forward into a dark tunnel, large enough for two or three horsemen to ride abreast. It was cut into the foundation of a steep hill that rose abruptly from generally flat land. Through a momentary parting in the drifting clouds of smoke, Jack looked up and saw the mutilated face of the great bastion looming up above him, and glimpsed the high roof of the Emperor’s Palace beyond and above that.
This must be a mine, an enormous one, that the Turks had dug beneath the bastion in the hopes of blowing it to kingdom come. The tunnel floor had been paved with logs that had been mostly driven down into the mud by the weight of oxen and wagons as they hauled dirt out, and gunpowder in. In the mud, Jack could see ostrich-prints. Why should that bird settle for merely burying its head in the sand when it could go wholly underground, and not even have to bend over? Jack did not love the idea of following it, but the die was cast; loot-wise, it was the ostrich or nothing.
As one would expect in any well-organized mining operation, torches were available near the entrance, soaking head-down in a pot of oil. Jack grabbed one, shoved it into the coals of a dying fire until flames emerged, then rode his horse forward into the tunnel.
It had been carefully timbered to keep it from collapsing. The tunnel descended gently for some distance, until it pierced the water table and became a sort of unpleasant mire, and then it began to climb again. Jack saw lights burning ahead of him. He noticed that the floor of the tunnel was striped with a bright line of steaming blood. This triggered what little Jack had in the way of prudent instincts: he threw the torch into a puddle and nudged the horse along at a slow walk.
The lights ahead of him illuminated a space larger than the tunneclass="underline" a room that had been excavated, deep underneath-where? Thinking back on the last few minutes’ ride, Jack understood that he had covered a considerable distance-he must have passed all the way beneath the bastion-at least as far as the city’s inner wall. And as he drew closer to the lights (several large torchieres), he could see that the Turks’ tunnel-work, and its supporting timbers, were all involved with things that had been planted in the earth hundreds of years ago: tarred pilings, driven in one alongside the next, and footings of mortared stone and of brick. The Turks had burrowed straight through the foundations of something enormous.
Following the rivulet of blood into the illuminated space, Jack saw a few small, bright, billowing tents that had been pitched, for some unfathomable Turkish reason, in the middle of this chamber. Some were standing, others had collapsed into the dirt. A pair of men were striking those gay tents with curt sword-blows. The ostrich stood to one side, cocking its head curiously. The tents tumbled to the floor with blood flying out of them.
There were people in those tents! They were being executed, one by one.
It would be easy to kill the ostrich here with a musket-shot, but this would certainly draw the attention of those Turkish executioners. They were formidable-looking fellows with handsome sabers, the only Turks Jack had laid eyes on today who were actually alive, and the only ones who were in any condition to conduct violence against Christians. He preferred to leave them be.
A saber struck at the top of one of those colorful tents, and a woman screamed. A second blow silenced her.
So, they were all women. Probably one of those famous harems. Jack wondered, idly, whether the mudlarks of East London would ever believe him if he went home and claimed he had seen a live ostrich, and a Turk’s harem.
But thoughts of this sort were chased away by others. One of those moments had arrived: Jack had been presented with the opportunity to be stupid in some way that was much more interesting than being shrewd would’ve been. These moments seemed to come to Jack every few days. They almost never came to Bob, and Bob marveled that two brothers, leading similar lives, could be so different that one of them had the opportunity to be reckless and foolish all the time while the other almost never did. Jack had been expecting such a moment to arrive today. He’d supposed, until moments ago, that it had already come: namely, when he decided to mount the horse and ride after the ostrich. But here was a rare opportunity for stupidity even more flagrant and glorious.
Now, Bob, who’d been observing Jack carefully for many years, had observed that when these moments arrived, Jack was almost invariably possessed by something that Bob had heard about in Church called the Imp of the Perverse. Bob was convinced that the Imp of the Perverse rode invisibly on Jack’s shoulder whispering bad ideas into his ear, and that the only counterbalance was Bob himself, standing alongside, counseling good sense, prudence, caution, and other Puritan virtues.*
But Bob was in England.
“Might as well get this over with, then,” Jack muttered, and gave his Turkish steed some vigorous heel-digs, and galloped forward. One of the Turks was just raising his saber to strike down the last of the tent-wearing women. And he would’ve done just that, except that this woman suddenly darted away (as much as a person in such a garment could dart), forcing a postponement of the attack. He shuffled forward-directly into the path of Jack and Jack’s horse. They simply rode the Turk down. It was clear that the horse was well-trained in this maneuver-Jack made a mental note to treat the animal kindly.
Then with one hand Jack gave a stiff tug on a rein while unslinging his musket from the opposite shoulder. The horse wheeled around, giving Jack a view of the ground he’d just ridden over. One of the Turks was flattened into the ground, crushed in two or three places under the horse’s hooves, and the other was actually striding towards Jack and sort of wiggling his saber in the way of a man limbering up his wrist for a display of swordsmanship. Not wanting to see any such thing, Jack aimed his musket carefully at this Turk and pulled the trigger. The Turk stared calmly into Jack’s eyes, up the barrel of the weapon. He had brown hair and green eyes and a bushy mustache flecked with gold, all of which vanished in a smoky flash when the powder in the pan ignited. But the musket did not kick. He heard the foosh of the flash in the pan, but not the boom of the barrel.