Me miserable! which way shall I flie

Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?

Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;

And in the lowest deep a lower deep

Still threatning to devour me opens wide,

To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.

-MILTON,Paradise Lost

JACK SAT ON A DEADtree in the woods for a time, feeling hungry, and, what was worse, feeling stupid. There was little daylight left and he thought he should use it wisely (he was not above being wise as long as there was no preacher or gentleman demanding that he do so). He walked through the trees over a little rise and down into a shallow basin between hills where he was fairly certain he could light a fire without announcing himself to the citizenry of Bockboden. He spent the remainder of the daylight gathering fallen branches and, just as the sun was setting, lit a fire-having learned that the tedious and exacting work of flint, steel, and tinder could be expedited if you simply used a bit of gunpowder in lieu of the tinder. With some pyrotechnics and a cloud of smoke, he had a fire. Now he need only throw sticks on it from time to time and sit there like the lost fool he was until sleep finally caught him unawares. He did not want to think about the witch he’d seen burnt, but it was hard not to. Instead he tried to make himself think about brother Bob, and his two boys, the twins Jimmy and Danny, and his long- and oft-delayed plan to find them a legacy.

He was startled to find three women and a man, their faces all lit up by firelight, standing nearby. They looked as if they had ventured into the woods in the middle of the night expecting to find some other vagrant sitting by a fire sleeping.*Jack’s first thought might’ve been Witch-hunters! if not for that they’d had longer to react to him than he to them, and they looked worried (they’d noticed the sword)-besides, they were mostly females and they were unarmed, unless the fresh-cut tree-branches that they used as leafy walking-sticks were meant as weapons. At any rate, they turned and hustled off, their sticks giving them the look of a group of stout chamber-maids going off to sweep the forest with makeshift brooms.

After that Jack could not sleep. Another group much like the first came by a few minutes later. This forest was damnably crowded. Jack picked up his few belongings and withdrew into the shadows to observe what other moths were attracted to the flame. Within a few minutes, a squadron of mostly women, ranging from girls to hags, had taken over the fire, and stoked it up to a blaze. They’d brought along a black iron kettle that they filled with buckets of water from a nearby creek and set up on the fire to boil. As steam began to rise from the pot-illuminated by firelight down below, vanishing into the cold sky as it ascended-they began to throw in the ingredients of some kind of stew: sacks of some type of fat dark-blue cherries, red mushrooms with white speckles, sprigs of herbs. No meat, or recognizable vegetables, to the disappointment of Jack. But he was hungry enough to eat German food now. The question was: how to secure an invitation to the feast?

In the end, he just went down and got some, which was what everyone else seemed to be doing. Traffic through this part of the woods had become so heavy that he could not rely on going unnoticed anyway. First he used his sword to cut a leafy branch like everyone else’s. None of these persons was armed, and so he stuck the sword and scabbard down his trouser-leg and then, to conceal it better, fashioned a false splint of sticks, and rags torn from his shirt, around the leg so that he would look like a man with a frozen knee, hobbling round with the aid of the staff. Thus disguised, he limped into the firelight and was politely, not to say warmly, greeted by the stew-cookers. One of them offered him a ladle full of the stuff and he swallowed it down fast enough to burn his insides all the way down to his stomach. Probably just as well-it was foul-tasting. On the principle that you never know when you’ll find food again, he gestured for more, and they somewhat reluctantly handed him a second ladle, and uneasily watched him drink it. It was as bad as the first, though it had chunks of mushrooms or something on the bottom that might give some nourishment.

He must have looked lost, then, because after he’d stood near the fire for a few minutes warming himself the stew-makers began helpfully pointing in the direction that all the other people were migrating. This happened to be generally uphill, which was the way Jack planned to travel anyhow (either it would take him to the Doctor’s tower, or to a height-of-land whence he could see the tower come morning) and so off he hobbled.

The next time he was really aware of anything (he seemed to be walking and sleeping at the same time, though everything had a dreamlike quality now, so the whole thing might be a dream) he had evidently covered a couple of miles uphill, judging from that it was much colder and the wind was blowing so hard that he could hear trees being struck down all over, like reports of guns in a battle. Clouds stampeded across the face of a full moon. Occasionally something would rip through the branches overhead and shower him with twigs and brush. Looking up, he saw it was broken-off tree branches, or maybe even small uprooted trees, propelled through the air by the hurricanoe. He was working his way uphill, though not sure why anymore. Others were all around him. The forest was very tall skinny black trees closely packed together like the massed pikes of a military formation, the eruptions of moonlight between fleeing clouds like the bursting of bombs, and Jack heard, or dreamed, the tramping of feet and blowing of trumpets. Forgetting why his leg was splinted, he supposed he must have been wounded in action (possibly in the head as well as the leg) and the wound dressed by a barber. For a while he was almost certain he was still fighting Turks in Vienna and all of the Eliza stuff just a long, elaborate, cruel dream.

But then he was back in the woods above Bockboden. Branches and heavier things were still ripping through space above his head like cannonballs. He looked up at the moon trying to see them, and with the torn clouds streaming by, it was difficult to make out their shapes, but he was fairly certain now that people were riding on those branches, as Winged Hussars rode on chargers. They were charging the hilltop! Jack finally stumbled out onto a path that wound up the mountain, and was nearly run over by the infantry part of the charge: a river of people with cut branches, and other ornaments, such as the forks farmers used to shovel manure. Forgetting about the splinted leg, Jack wheeled and tried to run with them, but fell, and took a while getting up.

He reached the collection of outcroppings that was the mountain-top somewhat after the main group, but in time to see them chasing away half a dozen musketeers who had apparently been posted there, and who were not welcome. None of them fired his weapon, as they had no desire to kill a few people only to be surrounded by hundreds of their stick-brandishing friends. As this occurred, people farther from the action were shouting threats and offering sour comments in much the same vein as the spectators at the witch-burning had earlier, except that they were using the word Wacher, which (Jack’s murderously overtaxed mind guessing wildly here) perhaps meant “Watchers.”

Battle won, the Hexen (no point in denying it any more) quickly lit up the whole mountain-top with fires (many people had carried faggots on their backs), which burnt with white heat in the continuing wind-blast. Jack hobbled around and looked. He could see that many ages ago a tall stone column had risen from the top of the mountain, bifurcated at the top into what might have been shaped like a pair of goat’s horns. It might’ve looked something like a crossbow standing up on end. But it had been toppled so long ago that it was now covered in moss and dirt. A couple of dozen standing-stones had ringed it; most of them had been toppled as well. The Hexen had led a black goat up onto the ruin of the high column and leashed him there to look out over the whole fiery prospect.