This rich man had hired Jack and arranged for him to get something called a Plague Pass: a large document in that Gothickal German script with occasional excursions into something that looked like either Latin (when it was desirable to invoke the mercy and grace of God) or French (for sucking up to King Looie, only one rung below God at this point).*By flourishing this at the right times, Jack was able to carry out his mission, which was to go into Strasbourg; proceed to the rich man’s dwelling; wash off the red chalk crosses that marked it as a plague-house; pry off the deals he’d nailed over the doors and windows; chase out any squatters; fend off any looters; and live in it for a while. If, after a few weeks, Jack hadn’t died of the plague, he was to send word to this rich man in the country that it was safe to move back in.

Jack had accomplished the first parts of this errand in about May, but by the beginning of June had somehow forgotten about the last. In about mid-June, another Vagabond-looking fellow arrived. The rich man had hired him to go to the house and remove Jack’s body so that it wouldn’t draw vermin and then live in it for a while and, after a few weeks, if he hadn’t died of the plague, send word. Jack, who was occupying the master bedchamber, had accommodated this new fellow in one of the children’s rooms, showed him around the kitchen and wine-cellar, and invited him to make himself at home. Late in July, another Vagabond had showed up, and explained he’d been hired to cart away the bodies of the first two, et cetera, et cetera.

All spring and summer, the weather was ideal: rain and sun in proportions suitable for the growing of grain. Vagabonds roamed freely in and out of Strasbourg, giving wide berths to those mounds of decomposing plague-victims. Jack sought out the ones who’d come from the east, treated them to the rich man’s brandy, conducted broken conversations with them in the zargon, and established two important facts: one, that the weather had been just as fine, if not finer, in Austria and Poland. Two, that Grand Vizier Khan Mustapha was still besieging the city of Vienna at the head of an army of two hundred thousand Turks.

Round September, he and his fellow-squatters found it necessary to depart from that fine house. It did not make him unhappy. Pretending to be dead was not a thing that came naturally to Vagabonds. The population of the house had swollen to a dozen and a half, most of them were tedious people, and the wine-cellar was nearly empty. One night Jack caused the window-shutters to be thrown open and the candles to be lit, and played host and lord over a grand squatters’ ball. Vagabond-musicians played raucous airs on shawms and pennywhistles, Vagabond-actors performed a comedy in zargon, stray dogs copulated in the family chapel, and Jack, presiding over all at the head of the table, dressed in the rich man’s satin, almost fell asleep. But even through the commotion of the ball, his ears detected the sound of hoofbeats approaching, swords being whisked from scabbards, firelocks being cocked. He was vanishing up the stairs even as the owner and his men were smashing down the door. Sliding down an escape-rope he’d long ago fixed to a balcony’s rail, he dropped neatly into the rich man’s saddle, still warm from thrashing the master’s chubby ass. He galloped to a potter’s field on the edge of town where he had stored some provisions against this very sort of event, and took to the road well supplied with salt-cod and biscuit. He rode southwards through the night until the horse was spent, then stripped off its fine saddle and threw it into a ditch, and traded the horse itself to a delighted ferryman for passage east across the Rhine. Finding the Munich road, he struck out for the East.

The barley harvest was underway, and most of it was destined for the same place as Jack. He was able to ride along on barley-carts, and to talk his way across the Neckar and the Danube, by telling people he was off to join the legions of Christendom and beat back the Turkish menace.

This was not precisely a lie. Jack and brother Bob had come to the Netherlands more than once to soldier under John Churchill, who was in the household of the Duke of York. York spent a lot of time abroad because he was Catholic and most everyone in England hated him. But in time he had returned home anyway. John Churchill had gone with him and Bob, dutiful soldier that he was, had gone home with Churchill. Jack had stayed on the Continent, where there were more countries, more Kings, and more wars.

Great big dark mounds were visible off to his right, far away. After they continued to be there for several days in a row, he realized that they must be mountains. He’d heard of them. He had fallen in with a cart-train belonging to a barley-merchant of Augsburg, who was contemptuous of the low grain prices in Munich’s great market and had decided to take his goods closer to the place where they were needed. They rode for days through rolling green country, dotted with bent peasants bringing in the barley-harvest. The churches were all Papist, of course, and in these parts they had a queer look, with domes shaped like ripe onions perched atop slender shafts.

Over days those mountains rose up to meet them, and then they came to a river named Salz that pierced the mountain-wall. Churches and castles monitored the valley from stone cliffs. Endless wagon-trains of barley came together, and clashed and merged with the Legions of the Pope of Rome who were coming up from Italy, and Bavarians and Saxons, too: mile-long parades of gentleman volunteers, decorated like knights of old with the Crusaders’ red cross, bishops and archbishops with their jeweled shepherd’s-hooks, cavalry-regiments that beat the earth as if it were a hollow log-each horseman accompanied by his cheval de bataille, a fresh cheval de marche or two, a cheval de poursuite for hunting stags or Turks, and a cheval de parade for ceremonial occasions, and the grooms to care for them. There were armies of musketeers, and finally a vast foaming, surging rabble of barefoot pikemen, marching with their twenty-foot-long weapons angled back over their shoulders, giving those formations the look of porcupines when they are in a mellow and complacent mood and have flattened their quills.

Here the barley-merchant of Augsburg had at last found a market, and might have sold his goods at a handsome profit. But the sight of Christendom at war had inflamed both his avarice and his piety, and he was seized with a passion to ride farther and see what more wonders lay to the east. Likewise Jack, sizing up those pikemen, and comparing their rags and bare feet to his stolen traveling-togs and excellent leather boots, suspected he could strike a better deal closer to Vienna. So they joined together with the general flood and proceeded, in short confused marches, to the city of Linz, where (according to the merchant) there was a very great Messe. Jack knew that Messe was the German word for a Mass, and reckoned that Herr Augsburg meant to attend church in some great cathedral there.

At Linz they grazed the south bank of the River Danube. In the plain along the river was a fine market that had been swallowed and nearly digested by a vast military camp-but no cathedral. “Die Messe!” Herr Augsburg exclaimed, and this was when Jack understood something about the German language: having a rather small number of words, they frequently used one word to mean several different things. Messe meant not only a Mass but a trade-fair.

Another army had marched down from the north and was laboriously crossing the Danube here, trickling across Linz’s bridges and keeping Linz’s watermen busy all day and all night, poling their floats across the stream laden with artillery-pieces, powder-kegs, fodder, rations, luggage, horses, and men. Jack Shaftoe spoke a few words of German. He had picked up quite a bit of French, and of course he knew English and the zargon. These men who had ridden down out of the north did not speak any of those tongues, and he could not guess whether they might be Swedes or Russians or of some other nation. But one day cheering came up from the bridges and the ferries, mingled with the thunder of thousands of war-horses, and from the woods on the north bank emerged the mightiest cavalry that Jack, in all his travels in England, Holland, and France, had ever seen. At its head rode a man who could only be a King. Now this wasn’t Jack’s first King, as he’d seen King Looie more than once during French military parades. But King Looie was only play-acting, he was like a whoreson actor in a Southwark theatre, got up in a gaudy costume, acting the way he imagined that a warrior King might act. This fellow from the north was no play-actor, and he rode across the bridge with a solemn look on his face that spoke of bitter days ahead for Grand Vizier Khan Mustapha. Jack wanted to know who it was, and finally locating someone who spoke a bit of French he learned that what he was looking at, here, was the army of Poland-Lithuania, and their terrible King was John Sobieski, who had made an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor to drive the Turks all the way back to Asia, and his mighty, gleaming cavalry were called the Winged Hussars.