When it had gotten warm enough to move, they’d gone down into Joachimsthal and confirmed that it was little more than that. In essence the mint was a brute with a great big hammer and a punch. He was supplied with blank disks of silver-these were not money-put the punch on each one and bashed it with the hammer, mashing the portrait of some important hag, and some incantations in Latin, into it-at which point it was money. Officials, supervisors, assayers, clerks, guards, and, in general, the usual crowd of parasitical gentlefolk clustered around the brute with the hammer, but like lice on an ox they could not conceal the simple nature of the beast. The simplicity of money-making had fascinated Jack into a stupor. “Why should we ever leave this place? After all my wanderings I’ve found Heaven.”
“It can’t be that easy. Herr Geidel seems depressed-he’s branching out into brimstone and other ores-says he can’t make any money making money.”
“Obvious nonsense. Just trying to scare away competition.”
“Did you see all those abandoned mines, though?”
“Ran out of ore,” Jack had attempted.
“Then why were the great mining-engines still bestriding the pit-mouths? You’d think they’d’ve moved them to shafts that were still fruitful.”
Jack had had no answer. When next they’d seen Herr Geidel, Eliza had subjected him to a round of brutal questioning that would’ve gotten Jack into a duel had he done it, but coming from Eliza had only given Herr Geidel a heightened opinion of her. Geidel’s French was as miserable as Jack’s and so the discussion had gone slowly enough for Jack to follow: for reasons that no one around here fathomed, the Spanish could mine and refine silver in Mexico, and ship it halfway round the world (in spite of the most strenuous efforts by English, Dutch, French, Maltese, and Barbary pirates) cheaper than Herr Geidel and his drinking buddies could produce it in Joachimsthal and ship it a few days’ journey to Leipzig. Consequently, only the very richest mines in Europe were still operating. Herr Geidel’s strategy was to put idle miners to work digging up brimstone (before the European silver mines had crashed, this never would’ve worked because they had a strong guild, but now miners were cheap), then ship the brimstone to Leipzig and sell it cheap to gunpowder-makers, in hopes of bringing the cost of gunpowder, and hence of war, down.*Anyway, if war got cheap enough, all hell would break loose, some Spanish galleons might even get sunk, and the cost of silver would climb back to a more wholesome level.
“But won’t that also make it cheaper for highwaymen to attack you on the way to Leipzig?” Jack had asked, always working the violent crime angle.
Eliza had given him a look that promised grim penalties the next time she got her hand on the chakra. “ ‘What if war breaks out between here and Leipzig?’ is what Jack meant to say.”
But Herr Geidel had been completely unfazed. Wars broke out all the time, all over the place, with no effect on the Leipzig Fair. If all of this came to pass, he’d be a rich merchant again. And for five hundred years the Leipzig fairs had operated under a decree from the Holy Roman Emperor stating that as long as the merchants stuck to certain roads and paid a nominal fee to local princes whose lands they traversed, they could pass freely to and from Leipzig, and must not be molested even if they were traipsing across an active battlefield. They were above wars.
“But what if you were carrying gunpowder to sell to the enemy?” Eliza had tried, but for once Herr Geidel had looked impatient and waved her off, as if to say that wars were mere diversions for bored princes, but trade fairs were serious.
It turned out to be perfectly all right that Jack had mentioned highwaymen, because Herr Geidel had been doing a lot of thinking on that very subject. His wagon-train had been forming up in the open places of Joachimsthal. Harnessed pairs of draft-horses were being walked down streets by teamsters leaning back to put tension on the traces, talking the animals into place before wagons. Mule-drivers were pretending to be flabbergasted when their animals balked after testing the weight of their loads: the first act of a timeless play that would eventually lead to profanity and violence. Herr Geidel was not a rich merchant now, and for the first part of the journey, he would not be taking any of those roads where armed escorts were for hire anyway, and so the trip to the Easter fair in Leipzig might be exciting. Herr Geidel had a few men who could go through the motions needed to charge and discharge a musket, but he wouldn’t mind adding Jack to his escort, and of course Eliza was welcome to ride along in one of the wagons.
Jack, wotting that Eliza and his boys’ inheritance were at stake, had taken this soldiering job more seriously than most. From time to time he had sallied ahead of the cart-train to look for ambushes. Twice he’d found rabbles of unemployed miners loitering sheepishly in narrow parts of the way, armed with pikes and cudgels, and gotten them to disperse by explaining Herr Geidel’s plan to restore vigor to the silver mining business. In truth it wasn’t his oratory that moved them out of the way so much as that he and his comrades were carrying flintlocks and pistols. Jack, who knew his wretches, could tell at a glance that these men weren’t hungry enough, or persuasively led enough, to buy loot with their lives-particularly when the loot was brimstone, which, he reminded them, would be difficult to turn into silver-they’d have to lug it to a fair and sell it, unless there was an Alchemist among them. He did not mention that buried under the rubble of brimstone in one of Herr Geidel’s wagons was a chest full of freshly minted Joachimsthalers. He did think about mentioning it, and then leading an ambush himself, but he knew that in that event he’d ride away without Eliza, the one woman in the world, or at least the only one he personally knew, capable of providing him with carnal satisfaction. He understood then why Herr Geidel had observed his conversations with Eliza so intently-trying to see whether Jack could be trusted. Apparently he’d concluded Eliza had Jack well in hand. This did not sit well with Jack-but he’d be rid of Herr Geidel soon enough, though not of Eliza.
Anyway, they had ridden north out of those mountains, which Herr Geidel had referred to in his tongue simply as the Ore Range, and into Saxony, about which there was nothing to say except that it was flat. They joined up with a very great and old road that according to Herr Geidel ran from Verona all the way north to Hamburg. Jack was impressed by the mileposts: ten-foot-high stone spikes, each ornately carved with the arms of some dead King, each giving the number of miles to Leipzig. This road was congested with many other merchants’ wagon-trains.
In a moist flat basin scribbled all over with the courses of aimless rivers, it intersected another great road that was said to run from Frankfurt to the Orient, and Leipzig was that intersection. Jack had most of a day to ramble around and view it from its outskirts, which he did on the general principle of wanting to know where the exits were before entering any confined place. The wagon-trains were backed up for half a mile waiting to get in at the south gate. Leipzig, he found, was smaller and lower-slung than Vienna-a city of several modest spires, not one sky-raking cathedral, which Jack guessed was a sign of its being a Lutheran burg. Of course it was surrounded by the obligatory ramparts and bastions. Outside these were estates and gardens, several of ’em larger than the entire city, all of them belonging not to nobles but to merchants.*Between these estates lay the usual embarrassing swine-crowded suburbs cowering in makeshift barricades that were more like baskets than walls. A few lazily turning mill-wheels took advantage of the nearly imperceptible stirring of the rivers, but millers scarcely ranked above peasants in a town so topheavy with merchants.