“But won’t that also make it cheaper for highwaymen to attack you on the way to Leipzig?” Jack had asked, always working the violent crime angle.

Eliza had given him a look that promised grim penalties the next time she got her hand on the chakra. “ ‘What if war breaks out between here and Leipzig?’ is what Jack meant to say.”

But Herr Geidel had been completely unfazed. Wars broke out all the time, all over the place, with no effect on the Leipzig Fair. If all of this came to pass, he’d be a rich merchant again. And for five hundred years the Leipzig fairs had operated under a decree from the Holy Roman Emperor stating that as long as the merchants stuck to certain roads and paid a nominal fee to local princes whose lands they traversed, they could pass freely to and from Leipzig, and must not be molested even if they were traipsing across an active battlefield. They were above wars.

“But what if you were carrying gunpowder to sell to the enemy?” Eliza had tried, but for once Herr Geidel had looked impatient and waved her off, as if to say that wars were mere diversions for bored princes, but trade fairs were serious.

It turned out to be perfectly all right that Jack had mentioned highwaymen, because Herr Geidel had been doing a lot of thinking on that very subject. His wagon-train had been forming up in the open places of Joachimsthal. Harnessed pairs of draft-horses were being walked down streets by teamsters leaning back to put tension on the traces, talking the animals into place before wagons. Mule-drivers were pretending to be flabbergasted when their animals balked after testing the weight of their loads: the first act of a timeless play that would eventually lead to profanity and violence. Herr Geidel was not a rich merchant now, and for the first part of the journey, he would not be taking any of those roads where armed escorts were for hire anyway, and so the trip to the Easter fair in Leipzig might be exciting. Herr Geidel had a few men who could go through the motions needed to charge and discharge a musket, but he wouldn’t mind adding Jack to his escort, and of course Eliza was welcome to ride along in one of the wagons.

Jack, wotting that Eliza and his boys’ inheritance were at stake, had taken this soldiering job more seriously than most. From time to time he had sallied ahead of the cart-train to look for ambushes. Twice he’d found rabbles of unemployed miners loitering sheepishly in narrow parts of the way, armed with pikes and cudgels, and gotten them to disperse by explaining Herr Geidel’s plan to restore vigor to the silver mining business. In truth it wasn’t his oratory that moved them out of the way so much as that he and his comrades were carrying flintlocks and pistols. Jack, who knew his wretches, could tell at a glance that these men weren’t hungry enough, or persuasively led enough, to buy loot with their lives-particularly when the loot was brimstone, which, he reminded them, would be difficult to turn into silver-they’d have to lug it to a fair and sell it, unless there was an Alchemist among them. He did not mention that buried under the rubble of brimstone in one of Herr Geidel’s wagons was a chest full of freshly minted Joachimsthalers. He did think about mentioning it, and then leading an ambush himself, but he knew that in that event he’d ride away without Eliza, the one woman in the world, or at least the only one he personally knew, capable of providing him with carnal satisfaction. He understood then why Herr Geidel had observed his conversations with Eliza so intently-trying to see whether Jack could be trusted. Apparently he’d concluded Eliza had Jack well in hand. This did not sit well with Jack-but he’d be rid of Herr Geidel soon enough, though not of Eliza.

Anyway, they had ridden north out of those mountains, which Herr Geidel had referred to in his tongue simply as the Ore Range, and into Saxony, about which there was nothing to say except that it was flat. They joined up with a very great and old road that according to Herr Geidel ran from Verona all the way north to Hamburg. Jack was impressed by the mileposts: ten-foot-high stone spikes, each ornately carved with the arms of some dead King, each giving the number of miles to Leipzig. This road was congested with many other merchants’ wagon-trains.

In a moist flat basin scribbled all over with the courses of aimless rivers, it intersected another great road that was said to run from Frankfurt to the Orient, and Leipzig was that intersection. Jack had most of a day to ramble around and view it from its outskirts, which he did on the general principle of wanting to know where the exits were before entering any confined place. The wagon-trains were backed up for half a mile waiting to get in at the south gate. Leipzig, he found, was smaller and lower-slung than Vienna-a city of several modest spires, not one sky-raking cathedral, which Jack guessed was a sign of its being a Lutheran burg. Of course it was surrounded by the obligatory ramparts and bastions. Outside these were estates and gardens, several of ’em larger than the entire city, all of them belonging not to nobles but to merchants.*Between these estates lay the usual embarrassing swine-crowded suburbs cowering in makeshift barricades that were more like baskets than walls. A few lazily turning mill-wheels took advantage of the nearly imperceptible stirring of the rivers, but millers scarcely ranked above peasants in a town so topheavy with merchants.

JACK ANDELIZA HAD PAIDten pfennigs each at the town gate, then had their silks weighed, and paid duty on them (Eliza had sewn the ostrich-plumes between layers of petticoats, and they were not detected). From the gate a broad street ran north to the center of the town, no more than a musket-shot away. Climbing down from the saddle, Jack was startled by the feel of cobblestones under his feet for the first time in half a year. He was treading on ground that pushed back now, and he knew that his boots needed re-soling. The street was lined with vaulted orifices spewing noise; he felt continually under ambush from left and right, and kept patting his sword-pommel, then hating himself for behaving like a stupid peasant on his first trip to Paris. But Eliza was no less amazed, and kept backing into him, liking to feel his pressure against her back. Queer signs and effigies, frequently in gold leaf, loomed on the fronts of the buildings: a golden snake, a Turk’s head, a red lion, a golden bear. So they were a bit like English taverns, which had effigies instead of names, so that people like Jack, who could not read, could know them. But they were not taverns. They were like large town-houses, with many windows, and each had this large vaulted opening giving way to a courtyard full of Bedlam.

Jack and Eliza had kept moving out of an unvoiced fear that if they stopped they’d appear just as lost and stupid as they in fact were. Within a few minutes they’d entered into the town square, and drawn up near a scaffold with the usual selection of dead men hanging from it: a place of comforting familiarity to Jack, even if Eliza did make shrewish comments about the thrumming clouds of flies. Notwithstanding the odd dangling corpse, Leipzig didn’t even smell that bad: there was the sewage and smoke of any big town, but it was amazing what a few tons of saffron, cardamom, star anise, and black pepper, distributed round in sacks and bales, would do to freshen a place up.

The town hall ran along one side of the square, and sported Dutch-looking gables above and an arcade of vaulted brown stone at ground level, where well-dressed men were working quietly and intensely. Narrow ditches were incised across the square to channel sewage, and planks had been thrown over them so carts could roll across, or ladies, and fat or lame men, pass over without having to make spectacles of themselves. Jack turned around a couple of times. It was plain that buildings were limited by law to four stories because none (save church towers) had more than that. But clearly the law said nothing about roofs and so these were all extremely high and steep-frequently as high as the four-story buildings that supported them-so seen from the street each roof looked like a mountain ridge seen from the valley: a vast terrain densely settled and built up with dormers, towers, gables, cupolas, balconies, and even miniature castles; vegetation (in window-boxes) and statues-not of Jesus or some saint but of Mercury in his winged slippers and hat. Sometimes he was paired against Minerva with her snaky shield, but most of the time Mercury appeared alone and it didn’t take a Doctor of Letters to understand that he, and not some dolorous martyr, had been chosen as Patron of Leipzig.