This was known as a hang fire. The fire in the pan had not traveled into the barrel-perhaps the touch-hole had become blocked by a bit of dirt. Nonetheless, Jack kept the weapon aimed in the general direction of the Turk (which involved some guesswork because the Turk was hidden behind the cloud of smoke from the pan). There might still be a slow fire working its way through the touch-hole-the musket was likely to fire, without warning, at any point during the next couple of minutes.
By the time Jack could see again, the Turk had grabbed the horse’s bridle with one hand and raised the other to strike. Jack, peering out sidelong through burning eyes, wheeled his musket about to make some kind of barrier between him and the bloody saber and felt a mighty shock when the two weapons connected, instantly followed by a hot blast that knocked his hands apart and spat metal into his face. The horse reared up. Under other circumstances, Jack might’ve been ready for this. As it was, blind, shocked, and burnt, he performed a reverse-somersault down the animal’s muscular ass, plunged to the ground, and then rolled away blindly, terrified that the hind hooves might come down on top of him.
At no time during these acrobatics did Jack stop holding the stock of the musket very firmly with his right hand. He staggered up, realized his eyes were clenched shut, buried his face in the crook of his left arm, and tried to wipe away the heat and pain. The raw feel of his sleeve against his eyelids told him that he had been burnt, but not badly. He took the arm away and opened his eyes, then spun around like a drunk, trying to bring the enemy in view. He raised his musket again, to defend himself from any more sword-blows. But it moved far too easily. The weapon had been broken in half only a few inches past the flintlock-a yard of barrel was simply gone.
The female in the tent had already stepped forward and seized the horse’s reins and was now speaking to it in soothing tones. Jack couldn’t see the second Turk at all, which panicked him for a moment, until he finally saw him on the ground, arms wrapped around his face, rolling from side to side and making muffled cries. That much was good, but the situation was, in general, not satisfactory: Jack had lost his weapon to some sort of accident, and his mount to some Saracen female, and had not acquired any loot yet.
He ran forward to seize the horse’s reins, but a glitter on the ground caught his eye: the Turk’s sword. Jack snatched it up, then shouldered the woman out of the way, mounted the horse again, and got it turned around to where he could keep a good eye on matters. Where was the damned ostrich? Over there-cornered. Jack rode over to it, cutting the air a few times to learn the balance of the saber. Striking heads off, from the back of a moving horse, was normally a job for highly trained specialists, but only because the neck of a man was a small target. Decapitating an ostrich, which consisted almost entirely of neck, was almost too easy to be satisfying. Jack did the deed with one swift backhand slash. The head fell into the dirt and lay there, eyes open, making swallowing motions. The rest of the ostrich fell down, then climbed up and began to stalk around the chamber with blood spraying out of its severed neck. It fell down frequently. Jack did not especially want to get blood sprayed on him and so he guided the horse away from the bird-but the bird changed direction and came after him! Jack rode the other way and the ostrich once again changed tack and plotted an intercept course.
The woman was laughing at him. Jack glared at her. She stifled herself. Then a voice came out of that tent, saying something in a barbarian tongue. Jack circumvented another blind ostrich-charge, moving the horse around smartly.
“Sir knight, I know none of the tongues of Christendom, save French, English, Qwghlmian, and a dash of Hungarian.”
IT WAS THE FIRST TIMEthat Jack Shaftoe had been called “sir” or mistaken for a knight. He glared meanly at the ostrich, which was staggering around in circles and losing the strength to stand. The woman had meanwhile switched into yet another strange language. Jack interrupted her: “My Qwghlmian is rusty,” he announced. “Wandered up to Gttr Mnhrbgh once when I was a boy, as we’d heard a rumor that a Spanish Treasure-Galleon had been wrecked, and pieces of eight scattered up and down the shore, as thick as mussels. But all we found was a few drunken Frenchmen, stealing the chickens and burning the houses.”
He was prepared to relate many more dramatic details, but at this point he faltered because there’d been a violent shifting-around of the contents of the tent, exposing, up towards its summit, a complex arrangement of silk handkerchiefs: one tied over the bridge of the nose, hiding everything below, and another tied round the forehead, hiding everything above. Between them, a slit through which a pair of eyes was looking up at him. They were blue eyes. “You are an Englishman!” she exclaimed.
Jack noted that this one was not preceded by a “Sir knight.” To begin with, Englishmen were not accorded the respect given naturally to the men of great countries, such as France or Poland-Lithuania. Among Englishmen, Jack’s way of speaking, of course, marked him out as No Gentleman. But even if he spoke like an Archbishop, from the nature of the yarn he’d just been relating to her, concerning his scavenging-trip to Qwghlm, it was now obvious that he had been at some point an actual Vagabond. Damn it! Not for the first time, Jack imagined cutting his own tongue out. His tongue was admired by that small fraction of mankind who, owing to some want of dignity or wit, were willing to let it be known that they admired any part of Jack Shaftoe. And yet if he had merely held it back, reined it in, this blue-eyed woman might still be addressing him as Sir Knight.
That part of Jack Shaftoe that, up until this point in his life, had kept him alive, counseled him to pull sharply on one rein or the other, wheel the horse around, and gallop away from Trouble here. He looked down at his hands, holding those reins, and noted that they failed to move-evidently, the part of Jack that sought a merry and short life was once again holding sway.
Puritans came frequently to Vagabond-camps bearing the information that at the time of the creation of the Universe-thousands of years ago!-certain of those present had been predestined by God to experience salvation. The rest of them were doomed to spend eternity burning in hellfire. This intelligence was called, by the Puritans, the Good News. For days, after the Puritans had been chased away, any Vagabond boy who farted would claim that the event had been foreordained by the Almighty, and enrolled in a c?lestial Book, at the dawn of time. All in good fun. But now here Jack Shaftoe sat astride a Turkish charger, willing his hands to pull one rein or the other, willing his boot-heels to dig into the sides of the beast, so that it would carry him away from this woman, but nothing happened. It must have been the Good News at work.
The blue eyes were downcast. “I thought you were a Knight at first,” she said.
“What, in these rags?”
“But the horse is magnificent, and it blocks my view somewhat,” Trouble said. “The way you fought those Janissaries-like a Galahad.”
“Galahad-he’s the one who never got laid?” Again with the tongue. Again the sense that his movements were predestined, that his body was a locked carriage running out of control down a hill, directly towards the front entrance of Hell.
“That is one of the few things that I have in common with that legendary Knight.”
“No!”
“I was gozde, which means that the Sultan had taken note of me; but before I was made ikbal which means bedded, he gave me to the Grand Vizier.”
“Now I am not a learned fellow,” said Jack Shaftoe, “but from what little I know of the habits of Turkish Viziers, it is not usual for them to keep beautiful, saucy young blonde slaves about their camps- as virgins.”