JACK ANDELIZA HAD PAIDten pfennigs each at the town gate, then had their silks weighed, and paid duty on them (Eliza had sewn the ostrich-plumes between layers of petticoats, and they were not detected). From the gate a broad street ran north to the center of the town, no more than a musket-shot away. Climbing down from the saddle, Jack was startled by the feel of cobblestones under his feet for the first time in half a year. He was treading on ground that pushed back now, and he knew that his boots needed re-soling. The street was lined with vaulted orifices spewing noise; he felt continually under ambush from left and right, and kept patting his sword-pommel, then hating himself for behaving like a stupid peasant on his first trip to Paris. But Eliza was no less amazed, and kept backing into him, liking to feel his pressure against her back. Queer signs and effigies, frequently in gold leaf, loomed on the fronts of the buildings: a golden snake, a Turk’s head, a red lion, a golden bear. So they were a bit like English taverns, which had effigies instead of names, so that people like Jack, who could not read, could know them. But they were not taverns. They were like large town-houses, with many windows, and each had this large vaulted opening giving way to a courtyard full of Bedlam.
Jack and Eliza had kept moving out of an unvoiced fear that if they stopped they’d appear just as lost and stupid as they in fact were. Within a few minutes they’d entered into the town square, and drawn up near a scaffold with the usual selection of dead men hanging from it: a place of comforting familiarity to Jack, even if Eliza did make shrewish comments about the thrumming clouds of flies. Notwithstanding the odd dangling corpse, Leipzig didn’t even smell that bad: there was the sewage and smoke of any big town, but it was amazing what a few tons of saffron, cardamom, star anise, and black pepper, distributed round in sacks and bales, would do to freshen a place up.
The town hall ran along one side of the square, and sported Dutch-looking gables above and an arcade of vaulted brown stone at ground level, where well-dressed men were working quietly and intensely. Narrow ditches were incised across the square to channel sewage, and planks had been thrown over them so carts could roll across, or ladies, and fat or lame men, pass over without having to make spectacles of themselves. Jack turned around a couple of times. It was plain that buildings were limited by law to four stories because none (save church towers) had more than that. But clearly the law said nothing about roofs and so these were all extremely high and steep-frequently as high as the four-story buildings that supported them-so seen from the street each roof looked like a mountain ridge seen from the valley: a vast terrain densely settled and built up with dormers, towers, gables, cupolas, balconies, and even miniature castles; vegetation (in window-boxes) and statues-not of Jesus or some saint but of Mercury in his winged slippers and hat. Sometimes he was paired against Minerva with her snaky shield, but most of the time Mercury appeared alone and it didn’t take a Doctor of Letters to understand that he, and not some dolorous martyr, had been chosen as Patron of Leipzig.
Looking up at vast rooves had been Jack’s way to relieve his eyes and mind from the strain of following the action on the ground. There were Eastern men in felt hats with giant rims of rich gleaming fur, talking to long-bearded Jews about racks of animal pelts-the faces of small nasty critters gaping blankly at the sky. Chinese carrying crates of what he had to assume was China, coopers repairing busted casks, bakers hawking loaves, blonde maidens with piles of oranges, musicians everywhere, grinding hurdy-gurdys or plucking at mutant lutes with huge cantilevers projecting asymmetrically from their necks to support thumping bass halyards. Armenian coffee-sellers carrying bright steaming copper and brass tanks on their persons, bored guards with pikes or halberds, turbaned Turks attempting to buy back strange goods that (Jack realized with a shock) had also been looted from the Vienna siege-camp-he was amused but, actually, embarrassed and irritated that others had had the same idea. A hookah-smoking area where Turkish boys in pointy-toed slippers scurried from one small table to the next carrying smouldering braziers of ornately wrought silver from which they selected individual coals with silver tongs and placed them carefully atop the hookahs’ tobacco-bowls to keep them burning. Everywhere, goods: but here in the square they were in casks, or wrapped up in square bales held together by rope-nets, all marked with curious initials and monograms: trade-marks of diverse merchants.
They’d found a place to stable Turk, then gone down a street, worked up their courage, and entered into one of those broad vaulted portals-wide and high enough for three or four horsemen to ride abreast-and entered the courtyard of one of those buildings. This yard was only some ten by twenty paces, and hemmed in on all sides by the four-story-high walls of the building, which were painted a merry yellow so that what sun did enter the yard cast a symbolic golden radiance on all. The court itself was stuffed with people displaying spices, metal goods, jewels, books, fabric, wine, wax, dried fish, hats, boots, gloves, weapons, and porcelain, frequently standing cheek-to-cheek and talking directly into each other’s ears. One whole side of the courtyard, then, gave way to a line of open-sided vaults: an arcade a couple of steps above courtyard level, separated from the courtyard only by a row of stout pillars, and tucked in underneath the actual house. In each vault a grave man in good clothes sat at a mighty desk, or banca, with several immense Books, strapped, buckled, and padlocked shut when not in use; an inkwell; quills; and on the floor next to him, a black chest all wrapped about with bronze or iron straps, hinges, chains, and locks of a weight and quality normally seen on arsenal-gates. Sometimes bales and casks of goods were mounded up next to him. More often, the stuff was piled out in the courtyard. Sixty or eighty feet above, stout beams projected from the tops of dormers, thrusting pulleys out over the yard, and by means of ropes through those pulleys, laborers hoisted the goods up for storage in the cavernous attics.
“They are betting prices will rise,” Eliza said, observing this, and this was the first inkling Jack received that this was more than a country swap-meet, and that there were layers of cleverness at work here that went far beyond simply knowing how many thalers should buy a tub of butter.
Jack saw so much that was strange in Leipzig, and saw it so fast, that he had to put most of it out of his mind immediately to make room for new material, and didn’t remember it until later, when taking a piss or trying to go to sleep, and when he did remember it, it seemed so strange to him that he couldn’t be sure whether it was a dream, or something that had really happened, or proof that the mines that the French Pox had (he suspected) been patiently excavating under his brain for the last several years, had finally begun to detonate.
There had been, for example, a trip inside one of the factories*to exchange some odd coins that Jack had picked up along his travels and been unable to spend, as no one recognized them. In this room, men sat behind desks with books in whose pages were circular cut-outs made to hold coins-two of each coin, so both heads and tails could be viewed in the same glance, and each coin labeled with various cryptic numbers and symbols in different colors of ink. The money-changer paged steadily through this book until he found a page holding coins just like Jack’s, though crisper and shinier. He took out a f?ry-sized scale made out of gold, whose pans, no larger than dollars, were suspended from its fragile cross-bar by blue silken cords. He put Jack’s coins on one pan and then, using tweezers, piled featherweight scraps of marked gold foil on the other pan until they balanced. Then he put the scale back into its wooden carrying-case, which was smaller than Eliza’s hand; did some calculations; and offered Jack a couple of Leipziger Ratsmarken (Leipzig minted its own coins). Eliza insisted they visit a couple of other money-changers and repeat the ceremony, but the results were always the same. So finally they accepted the Leipziger coins and then watched the money-changer fling Jack’s old coins into a box in the corner, half full of assorted coins and fragments of jewelry, mostly black from tarnish. “We’ll melt it down,” he explained when he saw the look on Jack’s face. Eliza, meanwhile, was staring at a wall-chart of exchange rates, reading the names of the coins that had been chalked up there: “Louis d’or, Maximilian d’or, souverain d’or, rand, ducat, Louis franc, Breslau ducat, Schildgroschen, Hohlheller, Schwertgroschen, Oberwehr groschen, Hellengroschen, pfennig, Goldgulden, halberspitzgroschen, Engelsgroschen, Real, Ratswertmark, 2Z3 thaler, English shilling, ruble, abassid, rupiah…”