Jack set out on foot, as Turk had been favoring one leg the last day or so, and followed an overgrown path that wound among old schlock-heaps and abandoned furnaces down towards Bockboden. As he went, the idea came to him that if he kept a sharp eye out, he might learn a few more things about the money-making trade, perhaps to include: how to profit therefrom without going through the tedious steps of investing one’s own money and waiting decades for the payoff. But the only novel thing he saw on his way into Bockboden was some kind of improvised works, situated well away from dwellings, where foul-smelling steam was gushing from the mouths of iron tubs with Faulbaum-bonfires raging beneath them. It smelled like urine, and so Jack assumed it was a cloth-fulling mill. Indeed, he spied a couple of disgusted workmen pouring something yellow from a cask into one of the boiling-tubs. But there was no cloth in sight. It seemed they were boiling all of this perfectly good urine away to no purpose.
As Jack entered the town, shrewdness came to him belatedly, and he perceived it had not been a good idea-not because anything in particular happened but because of the old terror of arrest, torture, and execution that frequently came upon him in settled places. He reminded himself that he was wearing new clothes. As long as he kept a glove on his hand, where a letter V had been branded years ago, in the Old Bailey, he bore no visible marks of being a Vagabond. Moreover, he was a guest of the Doctor, who must be an important personage hereabouts. So he kept walking. The town gradually embraced and ensnared him. It was all built half-timbered, like most German towns and many English ones-meaning that they began by raising a frame of heavy struts, and then filled in the open spaces between them with whatever they could get. Around here, it looked like they’d woven mats of sticks into the gaps and then slathered them with mud that stiffened as it dried. Each new building borrowed strength, at first, from an older one, i.e., there was hardly an isolated freestanding house in the whole town; Bockboden was a single building of many bodies and tentacles. The frames of the houses-nay, the single frame of the entire town-had probably been level, plumb, and regular at one point, but over centuries it had sagged, warped, and tottered in different ways. The earthen walls had been patched to follow these evolutions. The town no longer looked like something men had built. It looked like the root-ball of a tree, with dirt-colored stuff packed between the roots, and hollowed out to provide a living-place.
Even here there were little schlock-heaps, and dribbles of ore up and down the streets. Jack heard the unsteady ticking of a hand-haspel behind a door. Suddenly the door was rammed open by a wheelbarrow full of rocks, pushed by a man. The man was astonished to find a stranger there staring at him. Jack however did not even have time to become edgy and to adopt an expression of false nonchalance before the miner got an aghast look and made a pitifully abject bowing maneuver, as best he could without letting go the wheelbarrow and precipitating a merry sequence of downhill mishaps. “Apothecary?” Jack said. The man answered in a strangely familiar-sounding kind of German, using his head to point. Behind the door, the hand-haspel stopped ticking for about six heartbeats, then started again.
Jack followed the wheelbarrow-man to the next cross-street, the latter trying to scurry away from him but impeded by his own weight in rocks. Jack wondered whether all of the mines beneath this country might be interconnected so that they all benefited from the Doctor’s project of pumping away the ground-water without having to share in the costs. Perhaps that explained why strangers, coming from the direction of the tower, made them so nervous. Not that one really needed a reason.
The apothecary shop, at least, stood alone, on the edge of a grassy, schlock-mottled yard, cater-corner from a blackened church. The roof was high and steep as a hatchet-blade, the walls armored in overlapping plates of charcoal-colored slate. Each of its stories was somewhat larger than the one below, and sheltered ‘neath the overhangs were rows of carved wooden faces: some faithful depictions of nuns, kings, helmeted knights, hairy wild-men, and beady-eyed Turks, but also angels, demons, lycanthropes, and a goatlike Devil.
Jack entered the place and found no one minding the dispensary window. He began to whistle, but it sounded plaintive and feeble, so he stopped. The ceiling was covered with huge grotesque forms molded in plaster-mostly persons changing into other beings. Some of them he recognized, dimly, from hearing the tales referred to in plays-there was for example the poor sap of a hunter who chanced upon the naked hunt-goddess while she was bathing, and was turned to a stag and torn apart by his own hounds. That wretch, caught in mid-metamorphosis, was attached to the ceiling of the dispensary room in life-size.
Perhaps the apothecary was hard of hearing. Jack began to wander about in a loud, obvious, banging way. He entered a big room filled with things he knew it would be a bad idea to touch: glowing tabletop furnaces, murky fluids bubbling in retorts above the flames of spirit-burners, flames as blue as Eliza’s eyes. He tried another door and found the apothecary’s office-jumping a little when he caught sight of a dangling skeleton. He looked up at the ceiling and found more heavy plaster-works, all of female goddesses: the goddess of dawn, the spring-goddess riding a flowery chariot up out of Hell, the one Europe was named after, the goddess of Love preening in a hand-mirror, and in the center, helmeted Minerva (he knew some names at least) with a cold and steady look about her, one arm holding her shield, decorated with the head of a monster whose snaky hair descended almost into the middle of the room.
A big dead fish, all sucked into itself and desiccated, was suspended from a string. The walls were lined with shelves and cabinets dense with professional clutter: diverse tongs, in disturbingly specific shapes; a large collection of mortars and pestles with words on them; various animal skulls; capped cylinders made of glass or stone, again with words on them; a huge Gothickal clock out of whose doors grotesque creatures sallied when Jack least expected it, then retreated before he could turn and really see them; green glass retorts in beautifully rounded shapes that reminded him of female body parts; scales with vast arrays of weights, from cannonballs down to scraps of foil that could be propelled into the next country by a sigh; gleaming silver rods, which on closer inspection turned out to be glass tubes filled, for some reason, with mercury; some kind of tall, heavy, columnar object, shrouded in heavy fabric and producing internal warmth, and expanding and contracting slowly like a bellows-
“ Guten Tag,or should I say, good afternoon,” it said.
Jack fell back on his ass and looked up at a man, wrapped in a sort of traveling-cloak or monk’s robe, standing next to the skeleton. Jack was too surprised to cry out-not least because the man had spoken English.
“How’d you know…?” was all Jack could get out. The man in the robe had a silver robe and a look of restrained amusement nestled in his red beard, which suggested that Jack should wait a minute before leaping up, drawing his sword, and running him through.
“… that you were an Englishman?”
“Yes.”
“You may not know this, but you have a way of talking to yourself as you go about-telling yourself a story about what’s happening, or what you suppose is happening-for this reason I already know you are Jack. I’m Enoch. Also, there is something peculiarly English in the way you go about investigating, and amusing yourself with, things that a German or Frenchman would know to be none of his business.”
“There’s much to think about in that speech,” Jack said, “but I don’t suppose it’s too offensive.”
“It’s not meant to be offensive at all,” Enoch said. “How may I help you?”
“I am here on behalf of a Lady who has gone pale and unsteady from too much feminine, er…”