“A slave who has lived in palaces.”
“How would you propose to do it, then? If you’re so clever-let’s hear your plan.”
The blue eyes rolled. “Who is noble?”
Jack shrugged. “Noblemen.”
“How do most of them get that way?”
“By having noble parents.”
“Oh. Really.”
“Of course. Is it different in Turkish courts?”
“No different. But from the way you were talking, I thought that, in the courts of Christendom, it had something to do with being clever.”
“I don’t believe it has any connection at all to cleverness,” Jack said, and prepared to relate a story about Charles the Elector Palatine. But before he could do this, Blue Eyes asked:
“Then we don’t need a clever plan at all, do we?”
“This is an idle conversation, lass, but I am an idle man, and so I don’t mind it. You say we do not need any clever plan to become ennobled. But we lack noble birth-so how do you propose to become noble?”
“It’s easy. You buy your way in.”
“That requires money.”
“Let’s get out of this hole and get us some money, then.”
“How do you propose to do that?”
“I’ll need an escort,” the slave-girl said. “You have a horse and a sword.”
“Blue Eyes, this is a battlefield. Many do. Find a knight.”
“I’m a slave,” she said. “A knight will take what he wants and then leave me.”
“So it’s matrimony you’re after?”
“Some kind of partnership. Needn’t be matrimonial.”
“I’m to ride in front, slaying Janissaries, dragons, knights, and you’ll tag behind and do-what, exactly? And don’t speak to me about Books of India any more.”
“I’ll handle the money.”
“But we have no money.”
“That is why you need someone to handle it.”
Jack didn’t follow, but it sounded clever, and so he nodded sagely, as if he’d taken her meaning very clearly. “What’s your name?”
“Eliza.”
Rising in his stirrups, doffing his hat, and bowing slightly at the waist. “And I am Half-Cocked Jack at the lady’s service.”
“Find me a Christian man’s clothes. The bloodier the better. I’ll pluck the bird.”
“AND ANOTHER THING-”JACK SAID.
“What, yet another!?” said Eliza, in an officer’s bloody coat, her head swaddled in ripped shirts, slumped over in the saddle so that her head wasn’t far from that of Jack, who was directing the horse.
“If we make it as far as Paris-and that’s by no means easily done-and if you’ve given me so much as a blink of trouble-one cross look, one wifely crossing of the arms-cutting thespian-like asides, delivered to an imaginary audience-”
“Have you had many women, Jack?”
“-pretending to be shocked by what’s perfectly normal-calculated moods-slowness to get underway-murky complaints about female trouble-”
“Now that you mention it, Jack, this is my time of the month and I need you to stop right here in the middle of the battlefield for, oh, half an hour should suffice-”
“Not funny at all. Do I look amused?”
“You look like the inside of a handkerchief.”
“Then I’ll inform you that I don’t look amused. We are skirting what’s left of Khan Mustapha’s camp. Over to the right, captive Turks stand in file in a trench, crossing themselves-that’s odd-”
“I can hear them, uttering Christian prayers in a Slavic tongue-those are Janissaries, most likely Serbs. Like the ones you saved me from.”
“Can you hear the cavalry-sabers whipping into their necks?”
“Is that what that is?”
“Why d’you think they’re praying? Those Janissaries are being put to the sword by Polish hussars.”
“But why?”
“Ever stumble into a very old family dispute? It wears that face. Some kind of ancient grievance. Some Janissaries must’ve done something upsetting to some Poles a hundred years ago.”
Echelons of cavalry traversed the ruins of the Grand Vizier’s camp like ripples snapped across a bedsheet. Though ‘twere best not to begin thinking of bedsheets. “What was I just saying?”
“Oh, you were adding another codicil to our partnership agreement. Just like some Vagabond-lawyer.”
“That’s another thing-”
“ Yet stillanother?”
“Don’t call me a Vagabond. I may call myself one, from time to time, as a little joke-to break the ice, charm the ladies, or whatnot. All in good fun. But you must never direct that notorious epithet my way.” Jack noticed that with one hand he was rubbing the base of the other hand’s thumb, where a red-hot iron, shaped like a letter V, had once been pressed against his flesh, and held down for a while, leaving a mark that itched sometimes. “But to return to what I was trying to say, before all of your uncouth interruptions-the slightest trouble from you, lass, and I’ll abandon you in Paris.”
“Oh, horror! Anything but that, cruel man!”
“You’re as naive as a rich girl. Don’t you know that in Paris, any woman found on her own will be arrested, cropped, whipped, et cetera, by that Lieutenant of Police-King Looie’s puissant man, who has an exorbitant scope of powers-a most cruel oppressor of beggars and Vagabonds.”
“But you’d know nothing of Vagabonds, O lordly gentleman.”
“Better, but still not good.”
“Where do you get this stuff like ‘notorious epithet’ and ‘exorbitant scope’ and ‘puissant’?”
“The thyuhtuh, my dyuh.”
“You’re an actor?”
“An actor? An actor!?” A promise to spank her later was balanced on the tip of his tongue like a ball on a seal’s nose, but he swallowed it for fear she’d come back at him with some flummoxing utterance. “Learn manners, child. Sometimes Vagabonds might, if in a generous Christian humour, allow actors to follow them around at a respectful distance.”
“Forgive me.”
“Are you rolling your eyes, under those bandages? I can tell, you know-but soft! An officer is nearby. Judging from heraldry, a Neapolitan count with at least three instances of bastardy in his ancestral line.”
Following the cue, Eliza, who fortunately had a deep, unsettlingly hoarse alto, commenced moaning.
“Monsieur, monsieur,” Jack said to her, in attempted French, “I know the saddle must pain those enormous black swellings that have suddenly appeared in your groin the last day or two, since you bedded that pair of rather ill-seeming Gypsy girls against my advice-but we must get you to a Surgeon-Barber, or, failing that, a Barber-Surgeon, so that the Turkish ball can be dug out of your brains before there are any more of those shuddering and twitching fits…” and so on until the Neapolitan count had retreated.
This led to a long pause during which Jack’s mind wandered-though, in retrospect, Eliza’s apparently didn’t.
“Jack, is it safe to talk?”
“For a man, talking to a woman is never precisely safe. But we are out of the camp now, I no longer have to step over occasional strewn body-parts, the Danube is off to the right, Vienna rises beyond that. Men are spreading out to set up camp, queuing before heavily guarded wagons to receive their pay for the day’s work-yes, safe as it’ll ever be.”
“Wait! When will you get paid, Jack?”
“Before the battle we were issued rations of brandy, and worthless little scraps of paper with what I take to’ve been letters inscribed on them, to be redeemed (or so the Captain claimed) in silver at the end of the day. They did not fool Jack Shaftoe. I sold mine to an industrious Jew.”
“How much did you get for it?”
“I drove an excellent bargain. A bird in the hand is worth two in the-”
“You got only fifty percent!?”