by Noah Gordon
The best roads here, as everywhere, had been built in earlier times by the Romans for their marching armies, broad highways, connecting and as straight as spear shafts. Charbonneau remarked on them lovingly. “They’re everywhere, a network that covers the world. If you wished, you could travel on just this kind of road all the way to Rome.”
Nevertheless, at a signpost pointing to a village called Caudry, Rob turned Horse off the Roman road. Charbonneau disapproved.
“Dangerous, these wooded tracks.”
“I must travel them to ply my trade. They’re the only way to the smaller villages. I blow my horn. It’s what I’ve always done.”
Charbonneau shrugged.
Caudry’s houses were cone-shaped on top, with roofs of brush or thatched straw. Women were cooking out of doors and most houses had a plank table and benches near the fire, beneath a rude sun shelter laid on four stout poles cut from young trees. It couldn’t be mistaken for an English village, but Rob went through the routine as if he were at home.
He handed Charbonneau the drum and told him to thump it. The Frenchman looked amused and then was intently interested as Horse began to prance to the sound of the drum.
“Entertainment today! Entertainment!” Rob called.
Charbonneau got the idea at once and thereafter translated everything as soon as Rob said it.
Rob found the entertainment a droll experience in France. The spectators laughed at the same stories but in different places, perhaps because they had to wait for the translation. During Rob’s juggling, Charbonneau stood transfixed, and his sputtered comments of delight seemed to infect the crowd, which applauded vigorously.
They sold a great deal of Universal Specific.
That night at their campfire Charbonneau kept urging him to juggle, but he refused. “You’ll get your fill of watching me, never fear.”
“It’s amazing. You say you’ve done this since you were a boy?”
“Yes.” He told of how Barber had taken him in after his parents had died.
Charbonneau nodded. “You were fortunate. In my twelfth year my father died and my brother Etienne and I were given to a pirate crew as ship’s boys.” He sighed. “My friend, that was a hard life.”
“I thought you said your first voyage took you to London.”
“My first voyage on a merchant ship, when I was seventeen. For five years before, I sailed with pirates.”
“My father helped defend England against three invasions. Twice when Danes invaded London. And once when pirates invaded Rochester,” Rob said slowly.
“My pirates didn’t attack London. Once we landed at Romney and burned two houses and took a cow that we killed for meat.”
They stared at one another.
“They were bad men. It was what I did to stay alive.”
Rob nodded. “And Etienne? What happened to Etienne?”
“When he was old enough he ran from them, back to our town, where he apprenticed himself to the baker. Today he’s an old man too, and makes exceptional bread.”
Rob grinned and wished him a good night.
Every few days they drove into a different village square, where it was business as usual—the dirty songs, the flattering portraits, the liquorish cures. At first Charbonneau translated Rob’s barber-surgeon enticements, but soon the Frenchman was so accustomed to them that he could assemble a crowd on his own. Rob worked hard, driven to fill his cash box because he knew money was protection in foreign places.
June was warm and dry. They bit tiny pieces out of the olive called France, traversing its northern edge, and by early summer were almost at the German border.
“We’re getting close to Strasbourg,” Charbonneau told him one morning.
“Let us go there, so you may see your people.”
“If we do, we’ll lose two days’ time,” Charbonneau said scrupulously, but Rob smiled and shrugged, for he had come to like the elderly Frenchman.
The town proved to be beautiful, abustle with craftsmen who were building a great cathedral that already showed the promise of surpassing the general grace of Strasbourg’s wide streets and handsome houses. They rode straight to the bakery, where a voluble Etienne Charbonneau clasped his brother in floury embrace.
Word of their arrival spread on a family intelligence system and that evening Etienne’s two handsome sons and three of his dark-eyed daughters, all with children and spouses, came to celebrate; the youngest girl, Charlotte, was unmarried and still lived at home with her father. Charlotte prepared a lavish dinner, three geese stewed with carrots and dried plums. There were two kinds of fresh bread. A round loaf that Etienne called Dog Bread was delicious despite its name, being composed of alternate layers of wheat and rye. “It is inexpensive, the bread of the poor,” Etienne said, and urged Rob to try a costlier long loaf baked from meslin, flour blended from many grains ground fine. Rob liked the Dog Bread best.
It was a merry evening, with both Louis and Etienne translating for Rob to the general hilarity. The children danced, the women sang, Rob juggled for his dinner, and Etienne played the pipes as well as he baked bread. When finally the family left, everyone kissed both travelers farewell. Charlotte sucked in her stomach and stuck out her newly ripened chest, and her great warm eyes invited Rob outrageously. That evening as he lay in bed he wondered what life would be like if he were to settle into the bosom of such a family, and in such pleasant surroundings.
In the middle of the night he rose.
“Something?” Etienne asked softly. The baker was sitting in the dark not far from where his daughter lay.
“I have to piss.”
“I join you,” Etienne said, and the two of them walked outside together and plashed companionably against the side of the barn. When Rob returned to his bed of straw, Etienne settled into the chair and sat watching over Charlotte.
In the morning the baker showed Rob his great round ovens and gave them a sack full of Dog Bread baked twice so it was hard and unspoilable, like ship’s biscuit.
Strasbourgians would have to wait for their loaves that day; Etienne shut the bakery and rode with them a little of the way. The Roman road took them to the Rhine River a short ride from Etienne’s home and then turned downstream for a few miles to a ford. The brothers leaned from their saddles and kissed. “Go with God,” Etienne told Rob, and turned his horse toward home while they splashed across. The swirling water was cold and still faintly brown from the earth that had been washed into it by the spring floods far upstream. The trail up the opposite bank was steep, and Horse had to labor to pull the wagon into the land of the Teutons.
They were in mountains very soon, riding between high forests of spruce and fir. Charbonneau grew ever quieter, which at first Rob attributed to the fact that he hadn’t wanted to leave his family and his home, but at length the Frenchman spat. “I do not like Germans, nor do I like to be in their land.”
“Yet you were born as near to them as a Frenchman can be.”
Charbonneau scowled. “A man can live hard by the sea and still have no love for the shark,” he said.
It appeared to Rob to be a pleasant land. The air was cold and good. They went down a long mountain and at the bottom saw men and women cutting and turning the valley hay and getting fodder in, just as farmers were doing in England. They ascended another mountain to small high pastures where children tended cows and goats brought up for summer grazing from the farms below. The track was a high trail, and presently they looked down on a great castle of dark gray stone. Mounted men jousted with padded lances in the tiltyard.
Charbonneau spat again. “It’s the keep of a terrible man, landgrave of this place. Count Sigdorff the Even-Handed.”
“The Even-Handed? It doesn’t seem the name of a man who is terrible.”
“He is old now,” Charbonneau said. “He earned the name when young, riding against Bamberg and taking two hundred prisoners. He ordered the right hands cut from one hundred and the left hands cut from the other hundred.”
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They cantered their horses until the castle could no longer be seen.
Before noon they came to a sign that pointed off the Roman road to the village of Entburg and they decided to go there and put on an entertainment. They were only a few minutes along the detour when they came around a bend and saw a man blocking the middle of the track, sitting a skinny brown horse with runny eyes. He was bald, with folds of fat in his short neck. He wore rough homespun over a body that was both fleshy and hard-looking, as Barber had been when Rob first knew him. There was no room to drive the wagon around him, but his weapons were sheathed and Rob reined Horse while they inspected one another.
The bald man said something.
“He wants to know if you have liquor,” Charbonneau said.
“Tell him no.”
“The whoreson isn’t alone,” Charbonneau said without altering his tone, and Rob saw that two more men had worked their mounts out from behind the trees.
One was a youth on a mule. When he rode up to the fat man Rob saw a similarity in their features and guessed they were father and son.
The third man sat a huge, clumsy animal that looked like a workhorse. He took a position directly behind the wagon, cutting off escape to the rear. Perhaps he was thirty years old. He was small and mean-looking and was missing his left ear, like Mistress Buffington.
Both of the newcomers were holding swords. The bald man spoke loudly to Charbonneau.
“He says you’re to climb down from the wagon and remove your clothing. Know that when you do, they’ll kill you,” Charbonneau said. “Garments are expensive and they don’t want them ruined with blood.”
He didn’t observe from where Charbonneau had taken the knife. The old man threw it with a grunt of effort and a practiced flip that sent it hard and fast, and it thumped into the chest of the young man with the sword.
Shock came into the fat man’s eyes but the smile still hadn’t fully faded from his lips when Rob left the wagon seat.
He took a single step onto Horse’s broad back and launched himself, dragging the man from the saddle. They struck the ground rolling and clawing, each trying desperately for a crippling hold. Finally Rob was able to jam his left arm under the chin from behind. A meaty fist began to smash at his groin but he twisted and was able to take the hammer blows on a thigh. They were terrible punches that numbed his leg.
Always before he had fought drunk and half mad with rage. Now he was sober, fixing on one cold, clear thought.
Kill him.
Sobbing, he grabbed his left wrist with his free hand and pulled back, trying to throttle the man or crush his windpipe.
Then he moved to the forehead and attempted to pull the head back far enough to ruin the spine.
Break! he begged.
But it was a short, thick neck, padded with fat and ridged with muscle.
A hand with long, black fingernails moved up his face. He strained his head away but the hand raked his cheek, drawing blood.
They grunted and strained, banging one another like obscene lovers.
The hand came back. The man was able to reach a little higher this time, trying for the eyes.
His sharp nails gouged, making Rob scream.
Then Charbonneau was standing over them. He placed the point of his sword deliberately, finding a place between the ribs. He shoved the sword deep.
The bald man sighed, as if in satisfaction. He stopped grunting and moving, and lay heavy. Rob smelled him for the first time.
In a moment he was able to move away from the body. He sat up, nursing his ruined face.
The youth hung over the mule’s rump, dirty bare feet cruelly caught. Charbonneau salvaged the knife and wiped it. He eased the dead feet out of the rope stirrups and lowered the body to the ground.
“The third prick?” Rob gasped. He couldn’t keep his voice from quavering.
Charbonneau spat. “He ran at first indication we wouldn’t become nicely dead.”
“Perhaps to the Even-Handed, for reinforcements?”
Charbonneau shook his head. “These are dunghill cutthroats, not a landgrave’s men.” He searched the bodies, looking as if he had done it before. Around the man’s neck was a little bag containing coins. The youth carried no money but wore a tarnished crucifix. Their weapons were poor but Charbonneau threw them into the wagon.
They left the highwaymen where they lay in the dirt, the bald corpse face down in his own blood.
Charbonneau tied the mule to the back of the cart and led the bony captured horse, and they returned to the Roman road.
24
STRANGE TONGUES
When Rob asked Charbonneau where he had learned to throw a knife, the old Frenchman said he had been taught by the pirates of his youth. “It was a handy skill to have while fighting the damned Danish and seizing their ships.” He hesitated. “And while fighting the damned English and seizing their ships,” he said slyly. By that time they weren’t bothered by the old national rivalries and neither had any doubts left about his companion’s worthiness. They grinned at one another.
“Will you show me?”
“If you’ll teach me to juggle,” Charbonneau said, and Rob agreed eagerly. The bargain was one-sided, for it was too late in life for Charbonneau to master a new and difficult dexterity, and in the little time they had left together he learned only to pop two balls, although he derived much pleasure from tossing and catching them.
Rob had the advantage of youth, and years of juggling had given him strong and wiry wrists, as well as a sharp eye and balance and timing.
“It takes a special knife. Your dagger has a fine blade which would soon be snapped if you started throwing it, or the hilt would be ruined, for the hilt is the center of an ordinary dagger’s weight and balance. A throwing knife is weighted in the blade, so that a quick snap of the wrist sends it easily on its way point first.”
Rob quickly learned how to throw Charbonneau’s knife so it presented its sharp blade first. It was harder to become skilled at hitting targets where he aimed, but he was accustomed to the discipline of practice and threw the knife at a mark on a broad tree whenever he had a chance.
They kept to the Roman roads, which were crowded with a polyglot mixture of people. A French cardinal’s party once forced them off the road. The prelate rode past surrounded by two hundred mounted troops and a hundred and fifty servants, and wearing scarlet shoes and hat and a gray cope over a once-white chasuble made darker than the cope by the dust of the road. Pilgrims moved in the general direction of Jerusalem singly or in small or large groups; sometimes they were led or lectured by palmers, religious votaries who signaled that they had accomplished sacred travel by wearing two crossed palm leaves picked in the Holy Land. Bands of armored knights galloped by with shouts and war cries, often drunk, usually pugnacious and always hungry for glory, loot, and deviltry. Some of the religious zealots wore hair shirts and crawled toward Palestine on bloody hands and knees to fulfill vows made to God or a saint. Exhausted and defenseless, they were easy prey. Criminals abounded on the highways, and law enforcement by officials was perfunctory at best; when a thief or highwayman was caught in the act he was executed on the spot by the travelers themselves, without trial.
Rob kept his weapons loose and ready, half expecting the man with the missing ear to lead a pack of riders down on them for vengeance. His size, the broken nose, and the striped facial wounds combined to make him appear formidable, but he realized with amusement that his best protection was the frail-looking old man he had hired because of his knowledge of English.
They bought provision in Augsburg, a bustling trade center founded by the Roman emperor Augustus in 12 B.C. Augsburg was a center of transactions between Germany and Italy, crowded with people and busy with its preoccupation, which was commerce. Charbonneau pointed out Italian merchants, conspicuous in shoes of expensive fabric which rose to curling points at the toes. For some time Rob had seen Jews in increasing number, but in Augsburg’s markets he noticed more
of them than ever, instantly identifiable in their black caftans and narrow-brim, bell-shaped leather hats.
Rob put on an entertainment in Augsburg but didn’t sell as much Specific as he had previously, perhaps because Charbonneau translated with less zest when forced to use the guttural language of the Franks.
It didn’t matter, for his purse was fat; at any rate, ten days later when they reached Salzburg, Charbonneau told him that the entertainment in that town would be their final one together.
“In three days’ time we come to the Danube River, and there I leave you and turn back to France.”
Rob nodded.
“I’m of no further use to you. Beyond the Danube is Bohemia, where the people speak a language strange to me.”
“You’re welcome to come with me, whether or not you translate.”
But Charbonneau smiled and shook his head. “Time for me to go home, this time to stay.”
At an inn that night they bought a farewell feast of the food of the land: smoked meat stewed with lard, pickled cabbage, and flour. They didn’t like it and got mildly drunk on heavy red wine. He paid off the old man handsomely.
Charbonneau had a last, sobering piece of advice. “A dangerous countryside lies ahead of you. It’s said that in Bohemia one can’t tell the difference between wild bandits and the hirelings of the local lords. In order to pass through such a land unharmed, you must have the company of others.”
Rob promised he would seek to join a strong group.
When they saw the Danube it was a more muscular river than he had expected, fast-flowing and with the menacing oily surface that he knew denoted deep and dangerous water. Charbonneau stayed a day longer than promised, insisting on riding downstream with him to the wild and halfsettled village of Linz, where a large log-raft ferry took passengers and freight across a quiet stretch of the wide waterway.
“Well,” the Frenchman said.
“Perhaps one day we’ll see each other again.”
“I don’t think so,” Charbonneau said.
