“Your wife is lucky.”
“My wife is dead.”
“Too bad.”
“Nah, I didn’t love her,” Jack said bravely, “and after the Barber dropped the iron I’d no practical use for her. Just as I have no practical use for you, Trouble.”
“How do you suppose?”
“Well, just take a look. I can’t do it.”
“Maybe not as the English do. But certain arts have been taught to me from Books of India.”
Silence.
“I’ve never had high regard for book-learning,” Jack said, his voice sounding a bit as though a noose were drawing tight around his neck. “Give me practical experience any day.”
“I have that, too.”
“Aha, but you said you were a virgin?”
“I did my practicing on women.”
“What!?”
“You don’t think the entire harem just sits around waiting for the master to stiffen up?”
“But what’s the point-what is the very meaning -of doing it when there is no penis available?”
“It is a question you might even have asked yourself,” said Blue Eyes.
Jack had the feeling now-hardly for the first time-that a Change of Subject was urgently called for. He said, “I know that you were lying when you said that I was handsome, when really I’m quite bashed, gouged, pox-marked, rope-burned, weather-tanned, and so on.”
“Some women like it,” Blue Eyes said, and actually batted her eyelashes. Her eyes, and a few patches of skin in their vicinity, were the only parts of her that Jack could actually see, and this magnified the effect.
It was important that he put up some kind of defense. “You look very young,” he said, “and you talk like a girl who is in need of a spanking.”
“Books of India,” she said coolly, “have entire chapters about that.”
Jack began riding the horse around the chamber, inspecting its walls. Scraping away packed earth with one hand, he observed the staves of a barrel, branded with Turkish letters, and with more digging and scraping he found more barrels stacked around it-a whole cache of them, jammed into a niche in the chamber wall and mortared together with dirt.
In the center of the chamber was a pile of timbers and planks where the Turkish carpenters had built the reinforcements to prevent the chamber from caving in. Diverse tools were strewn around, wherever the Turks had dropped them when they’d decided to flee. “Here, make yourself useful, lass, and bring me that axe,” Jack said.
Blue Eyes brought him the axe, staring him coolly in the eyes as she handed it over. Jack rose in the stirrups and swung it round so it bit into one of those Turkish kegs. A stave crumpled. Another blow, and the wood gave way entirely, and black powder poured out and hissed onto the ground.
“We’re in the cellar of that Palace,” Jack said. “Directly above us is the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor, and all around us are his vaults, full of treasure. Do you know what we could get, if we touched this off?”
“Premature deafness?”
“I intend to plug my ears.”
“Tons of rock and earth collapsing atop us?”
“We can lay a powder-trail up the tunnel, put fire to it, and watch from a safe distance.”
“You don’t think that the sudden explosion and collapse of the Holy Roman Emperor’s Palace will draw some attention?”
“ ’Twas just an idea.”
“If you do that, you’re going to lose me, brother… besides, that is not how you become ennobled. Blowing a hole in the palace floor and slinking in like a rat, with smoke coming out of your clothes…”
“I’m supposed to take advice on ennoblement from a slave?”
“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?”