“No highwayman of standing would situate himself in a waste.”

“Are all the forests of Christendom like this? From Mummy’s f?ry-tales I was expecting great majestic trees.”

“Two or three generations ago, ’twas a wheat-field,” Jack said, using the sword to harvest a sheaf of overripe stalks growing wild in a sunny break on the bank of the stream. He sheathed the sword and smelled the grain. “The good peasants would come here during the harvest with their dulled whistles slung over their tired shoulders.” Before Jack had waded in he had kicked off his boots. He waded around the swirling pool, groping at the bottom with his bare toes, and after a minute bent down, reached in, and brought up a long curved scythe-blade, notched from striking rocks-just a solid crescent of rust now, a few fingers of slimy black wood projecting from the handle-socket. “They would whet their whistles using rocks that had been worn smooth by the river.” He brought up one such rock in his other hand and scrubbed it against the blade for a moment, then tossed it up on the bank. “And while they were doing so they might not be above taking a bit of refreshment.” Still probing with his feet, he bent down again and produced an earthenware drinking-jug, turned it over, and poured out a green-brown tube of stagnated water. The jug he tossed also onto the bank. Still holding the long rusty arc of the whistle in one hand, he turned round and waded back in search of an exhibit he had detected earlier. He found it again, and nearly fell over, the stream’s current dividing round his thigh as he stood flamingo-style and passed the other foot over something down there. “And so went their simple, happy lives-until something intervened-” Jack now swung the whistle-blade slowly and (he liked to suppose) dramatically across the surface of the pool, a pantomime Grim Reaper.

“Plague? Famine?”

“Religious controversy!” Jack said, and produced from the pool a browned human skull, jaw-bone absent, an obvious sword-dent caving in one of the temples. Eliza (he thought) seemed quite struck by his presentation-not by the skull (she’d seen worse) so much as by the cleverness of the performance. He posed with whistle and skull, extending the moment. “Ever seen a morality play?”

“Mummy told me about ’em.”

“The intended audience: Vagabonds. The purpose: to impress on their feeble and degenerate minds some idiotic moral.”

“What is the moral of your play, Jack?”

“Oh, it could be a number of things: stay the hell out of Europe, for example. Or: when the men with swords come, run away! Especially if they’ve got Bibles, too.”

“Sound advice.”

“Even if it means giving up things.”

Eliza laughed like a wench. “Ah, now we are coming to a moral, I can sense it.”

“Laugh all you like at this poor fellow,” Jack said, hefting the skull. “If he’d left his wheat-harvest behind, and taken to the road, instead of clinging to his land and his hut like a miser, why he might be alive today.”

“Are there such things as fourscore-year-old Vagabonds?”

“Probably not,” Jack admitted, “they just look twice as old as they are.”

THEY WENT NORTHinto the dead country of Bohemia, following spoors and traces of old roads, and the trails of the game that had flourished here in the absence of hunters. Jack lamented the loss of Brown Bess, which would have brought down all the deer they might have wanted, or at least scared the hell out of them.

Sometimes they would come down out of the wooded hills to cross over plains-probably old pastures that had grown up into vast thickets. Jack would put Eliza up into the saddle so that thorns, nettles, and bugs wouldn’t make a mess of her-not that he cared-but her chief reason for existence was to give him something pleasant to look at. Sometimes he’d put the Damascus blade to the ignoble purpose of hacking through brush. “What do you and Turk see?” he’d say, because all he could see was useless vegetation, gone all brown in preparation for winter.

“To the right, the ground rises to a sort of shelf, high dark hills behind it-on the shelf the walls of a castle, thick and ill-made compared to Moorish ones, which are so elegant-but not thick enough to resist whatever destroying force knocked it down-”

“Artillery, lass-the doom of all ancient forts.”

“The Pope’s artillery, then, breached the walls in several places-creating spills of rock across the dry-moat. White mortar clings to the dark stones like shards of bleached bone. Then fire burnt out the insides, and took all but a few blackened rafters from the roof-all the windows and gun-ports have spreading smoke-stains above them, as if flames jetted from those openings for hours-it is like an Alchemist’s furnace in which a whole town was purified of heresy.”

“You have alchemists in Barbary?”

“You have them in Christendom?”

“It is very poetickal-as were the previous half-dozen ruined-castle-descriptions-but I was more interested in practical matters: do you see the smoke of cook-fires anywhere?”

“I’d have mentioned it. Trails in the brush, trampled down by men or horses, I’d have mentioned, too.”

“Anything else?”

“To the left a pond-rather shallow-looking.”

“Let’s go there.”

“Turk’s been taking us thither-he’s thirsty.”

They found several such ponds, and after the third or fourth (all of them near ruins) Jack understood that these ponds had been excavated, or at least enlarged and rounded out, by (safe to say) thousands of wretches with picks and shovels. It recalled to his mind some bit of zargon-lore he’d picked up from a gypsy in Paris, who’d ranted to him about lakes, far to the East, but not so far as Romania, where big fish were raised just as herdsman raised beef-cattle in pastures. From the fish skeletons scattered along the shores of these ponds, Jack could see others had been here, harvesting the vestiges of those dead Protestants’ clammy flocks. It made his mouth water.

“Why’d the Papists hate this country so much?” Eliza inquired. “Mummy told me there are many Protestant lands.”

“It is not the sort of thing I would bother to know about, as a rule,” Jack said, “but, as it happens, I’ve just come from an almost equally ruined land where every peasant knows the tale, and won’t leave off telling it. That country is called the Palatinate and its lords, for a few generations anyway, were Protestant heroes. One of those lords married an English girl, name of Elizabeth-the sister of Chuck the First.”

“Charles the First-isn’t he the one who ran afoul of Cromwell, and got his head chopped off in Charing Cross?”

“The same-and his sister fared little better, as you’ll soon see. Because right here in Bohemia, some Protestants got weary of being ruled by Papists, and threw several of ’em out a castle window into a dung-heap, and declared this country free of Popery. But unlike the Dutchmen, who have little use for royalty, these Bohemians couldn’t imagine having a country without monarchs. As Protestant monarchs were in short supply hereabouts, they invited Elizabeth and this Palatine fellow to come here and rule them. Which they did-for a single winter. Then the Pope’s legions came up here and made it what it is today.”

“What of Elizabeth and her husband?”

“The Winter Queen and the Winter King, as they were called after that, ran away. They couldn’t go to the Palatinate because that had likewise been invaded (which is why the people who live there won’t shut up about it, even today), so they roamed about like Vagabonds for a while and finally ended up at The Hague, where they sat out the war that had been started by all this.”

“Did she have children?”

“She wouldn’t stop having ’em. My god. To hear people talk, she must’ve been punching them out, nine and a half months apart, all through the war… I cannot remember how many.”