It was important that he put up some kind of defense. “You look very young,” he said, “and you talk like a girl who is in need of a spanking.”

“Books of India,” she said coolly, “have entire chapters about that.”

Jack began riding the horse around the chamber, inspecting its walls. Scraping away packed earth with one hand, he observed the staves of a barrel, branded with Turkish letters, and with more digging and scraping he found more barrels stacked around it-a whole cache of them, jammed into a niche in the chamber wall and mortared together with dirt.

In the center of the chamber was a pile of timbers and planks where the Turkish carpenters had built the reinforcements to prevent the chamber from caving in. Diverse tools were strewn around, wherever the Turks had dropped them when they’d decided to flee. “Here, make yourself useful, lass, and bring me that axe,” Jack said.

Blue Eyes brought him the axe, staring him coolly in the eyes as she handed it over. Jack rose in the stirrups and swung it round so it bit into one of those Turkish kegs. A stave crumpled. Another blow, and the wood gave way entirely, and black powder poured out and hissed onto the ground.

“We’re in the cellar of that Palace,” Jack said. “Directly above us is the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor, and all around us are his vaults, full of treasure. Do you know what we could get, if we touched this off?”

“Premature deafness?”

“I intend to plug my ears.”

“Tons of rock and earth collapsing atop us?”

“We can lay a powder-trail up the tunnel, put fire to it, and watch from a safe distance.”

“You don’t think that the sudden explosion and collapse of the Holy Roman Emperor’s Palace will draw some attention?”

“ ’Twas just an idea.”

“If you do that, you’re going to lose me, brother… besides, that is not how you become ennobled. Blowing a hole in the palace floor and slinking in like a rat, with smoke coming out of your clothes…”

“I’m supposed to take advice on ennoblement from a slave?”

“A slave who has lived in palaces.”

“How would you propose to do it, then? If you’re so clever-let’s hear your plan.”

The blue eyes rolled. “Who is noble?”

Jack shrugged. “Noblemen.”

“How do most of them get that way?”

“By having noble parents.”

“Oh. Really.”

“Of course. Is it different in Turkish courts?”

“No different. But from the way you were talking, I thought that, in the courts of Christendom, it had something to do with being clever.”

“I don’t believe it has any connection at all to cleverness,” Jack said, and prepared to relate a story about Charles the Elector Palatine. But before he could do this, Blue Eyes asked:

“Then we don’t need a clever plan at all, do we?”

“This is an idle conversation, lass, but I am an idle man, and so I don’t mind it. You say we do not need any clever plan to become ennobled. But we lack noble birth-so how do you propose to become noble?”

“It’s easy. You buy your way in.”

“That requires money.”

“Let’s get out of this hole and get us some money, then.”

“How do you propose to do that?”

“I’ll need an escort,” the slave-girl said. “You have a horse and a sword.”

“Blue Eyes, this is a battlefield. Many do. Find a knight.”

“I’m a slave,” she said. “A knight will take what he wants and then leave me.”

“So it’s matrimony you’re after?”

“Some kind of partnership. Needn’t be matrimonial.”

“I’m to ride in front, slaying Janissaries, dragons, knights, and you’ll tag behind and do-what, exactly? And don’t speak to me about Books of India any more.”

“I’ll handle the money.”

“But we have no money.”

“That is why you need someone to handle it.”

Jack didn’t follow, but it sounded clever, and so he nodded sagely, as if he’d taken her meaning very clearly. “What’s your name?”

“Eliza.”

Rising in his stirrups, doffing his hat, and bowing slightly at the waist. “And I am Half-Cocked Jack at the lady’s service.”

“Find me a Christian man’s clothes. The bloodier the better. I’ll pluck the bird.”

“AND ANOTHER THING-”JACK SAID.

“What, yet another!?” said Eliza, in an officer’s bloody coat, her head swaddled in ripped shirts, slumped over in the saddle so that her head wasn’t far from that of Jack, who was directing the horse.

“If we make it as far as Paris-and that’s by no means easily done-and if you’ve given me so much as a blink of trouble-one cross look, one wifely crossing of the arms-cutting thespian-like asides, delivered to an imaginary audience-”

“Have you had many women, Jack?”

“-pretending to be shocked by what’s perfectly normal-calculated moods-slowness to get underway-murky complaints about female trouble-”

“Now that you mention it, Jack, this is my time of the month and I need you to stop right here in the middle of the battlefield for, oh, half an hour should suffice-”

“Not funny at all. Do I look amused?”

“You look like the inside of a handkerchief.”

“Then I’ll inform you that I don’t look amused. We are skirting what’s left of Khan Mustapha’s camp. Over to the right, captive Turks stand in file in a trench, crossing themselves-that’s odd-”

“I can hear them, uttering Christian prayers in a Slavic tongue-those are Janissaries, most likely Serbs. Like the ones you saved me from.”

“Can you hear the cavalry-sabers whipping into their necks?”

“Is that what that is?”

“Why d’you think they’re praying? Those Janissaries are being put to the sword by Polish hussars.”

“But why?”

“Ever stumble into a very old family dispute? It wears that face. Some kind of ancient grievance. Some Janissaries must’ve done something upsetting to some Poles a hundred years ago.”

Echelons of cavalry traversed the ruins of the Grand Vizier’s camp like ripples snapped across a bedsheet. Though ‘twere best not to begin thinking of bedsheets. “What was I just saying?”

“Oh, you were adding another codicil to our partnership agreement. Just like some Vagabond-lawyer.”

“That’s another thing-”

“ Yet stillanother?”

“Don’t call me a Vagabond. I may call myself one, from time to time, as a little joke-to break the ice, charm the ladies, or whatnot. All in good fun. But you must never direct that notorious epithet my way.” Jack noticed that with one hand he was rubbing the base of the other hand’s thumb, where a red-hot iron, shaped like a letter V, had once been pressed against his flesh, and held down for a while, leaving a mark that itched sometimes. “But to return to what I was trying to say, before all of your uncouth interruptions-the slightest trouble from you, lass, and I’ll abandon you in Paris.”

“Oh, horror! Anything but that, cruel man!”

“You’re as naive as a rich girl. Don’t you know that in Paris, any woman found on her own will be arrested, cropped, whipped, et cetera, by that Lieutenant of Police-King Looie’s puissant man, who has an exorbitant scope of powers-a most cruel oppressor of beggars and Vagabonds.”

“But you’d know nothing of Vagabonds, O lordly gentleman.”

“Better, but still not good.”

“Where do you get this stuff like ‘notorious epithet’ and ‘exorbitant scope’ and ‘puissant’?”

“The thyuhtuh, my dyuh.”

“You’re an actor?”

“An actor? An actor!?” A promise to spank her later was balanced on the tip of his tongue like a ball on a seal’s nose, but he swallowed it for fear she’d come back at him with some flummoxing utterance. “Learn manners, child. Sometimes Vagabonds might, if in a generous Christian humour, allow actors to follow them around at a respectful distance.”