by Eric Flint
“Stop ignoring me,” said the water-woman, whose bare breasts would have been hard to ignore had he been looking that way.
“I have no desire to be drowned, nor am I feeling frolicsome. The water is still too cold, and I have other things on my mind.” He wondered if she ever did.
“I’ve got another message for you. Where have you been? Have you been avoiding me?” she asked, handing him the same bottle, but resealed.
“No. I’ve been across the Po to a battle, and down to Mincio for a siege,” he said, guessing that river names might mean more to her than town names. “And don’t you have many admirers of your own kind? I’m surprised you’re interested in humans. We’re poor swimmers.”
She looked at him in surprise. “There are no males among the nyx. We look to humans to breed.”
“Oh.” Perhaps comments about mules would be less than wise, he thought. “So, um, do you have many children?” he asked out of politeness.
“No, they all die.”
She actually seemed quite upset by that, and it was hard to know what to say. So he settled for, “Well, you must have been a child and lived, or you wouldn’t be here.”
She wrinkled her forehead. “That was long, long ago. So long it has faded in my memory.”
That seemed to affront her, too, and she slipped away under the water.
Which left Francisco to take Marco Valdosta’s message back to his quarters, and later to his commander. Sforza had chosen his sickroom with some care. It was a tower and had, one hoped, no secret chambers or spying points. It also had a most ingenious conceit which worked very well—on the roof there was a large cistern, which was painstakingly filled every day by men with buckets. That provided the water for a little ornamental fountain. A strange conceit indeed, indoors. But the tinkling splash made overhearing what was said very difficult. It was a fine idea, as long as you were not one of the poor fellows carrying the buckets up the stairs.
Francisco was pleased to see Sforza looking alert and—as he always did when confined indoors too long—looking like a caged lion, considering all ways out of there.
“I have some interesting news from our spies in Venice,” said Sforza with a tigerish smile. “Two of them, separately, so I can believe it. We apparently have recruited a powerful and evil magician to our forces. Someone named Count Mindaug, originally from Lithuania. You were quite right. All we had to do was tell them we absolutely had not set out to do so.”
“It’s amazing how far the imagination can stretch,” replied Francisco, chuckling.
“In this case, it appears to be supported by a fellow showing up in Milan with a great many books. I am assured that anyone who arrives with a whole wagon load of books and two foreign servants has to be a magician.”
“Yes, I had similar conclusions jumped to about me in Venice. So who is this ‘magician’?” asked Francisco, who was naturally curious at the mention of books.
“He claims to be Freiherr Jagr, of Bohemia, who has inherited his father’s library and is a traveling bookseller. But he hasn’t sold any books. My spies are, frankly, very suspicious.”
“I would be, too. It’s a fair distance from Bohemia,” said Francisco, who had been there twice on horseback.
“But he really does have a vast number of books, according to them. I don’t trust their judgment. I want you to investigate. It’s an opportunity you are not often offered by me: go and buy a book. We’re watching him and can toss him in jail if need be, but sometimes one can find out more before one puts on the thumbscrews than after. Take a few men, in case he tries anything exciting, but don’t make him run if you can help it. He’s frightening our foes for us.”
“I suspect a vast number of books will be ten, and he will be some illiterate mountebank, but yes, I will do that. Now, I have something else that’s peculiar, that I wish to bring to your attention, m’lord.” He handed Carlo the letter from Marco Valdosta. “There are two things relevant about this. The first is the nature of young Valdosta: he simply isn’t any good at duplicity.”
“I remember that from him as a child, occasionally attempting, as children do, to deny responsibility for something. It usually wasn’t him, of course, it was Benito, and then he’d say it was him, to shelter the brat. Benito could be as clever as a fox about avoiding being caught, but not Marco.”
Francisco nodded. “That probably hasn’t changed. But the second is that he names the source of this ‘plague’ story: Thomas Lüber of Baden, who is something unusual. He’s a churchman, but he is known across the medical world for his systematic work on medical plants and his blunt outspokenness. He’s no mystic or politician dressed in Church clothes. He’s a scientist who cares for nothing but his work.”
“And to add a third, you and I were both sure this was a rumor set by the Church intent on bringing Milan down,” mused Sforza. “There is a faction in Rome that would like to see that happen. But none of my spies have reported it to me. None. That says for a deliberately spread rumor it’s being kept very secret. We’ve had it from precisely two people, and while Cosimo can be as sneaky as a Sicilian”—Carlo Sforza had never forgiven the entire population of Sicily for the fact that one of them had stolen his pilgrim medal—“he appears to only have told you, and only once he knew that he could trust you.”
“Which brings us a problem. I don’t think it’s in our best interests to alienate young Marco. Besides, it would be like kicking a puppy. But there is no real treatment known for the Plague of Justinian. It killed vast numbers across Europe, and then came back more or less every generation. It did seem to get less intense in the numbers killed, but stories of the blue-black buboes are enough to frighten peasants witless centuries later.”
“What happened to it?”
Francisco shrugged. “It would run its course, and stop when it ran out of new places to spread. Quarantine did contain it…for a while. And then it just didn’t happen anymore. We’ve had a few centuries since the last outbreak.”
“Like fire, it needs to keep spreading. And if you thin the fuel out enough, it’ll stop. Well, I agree with you. Let’s do our best to keep young Marco sweet. Did you get this message in the same bizarre way?”
Francisco nodded.
“Always good to have…shall we say, alternative channels of communication. Give him some advice on quarantine, and give him an opening which will allow him a chance to tell you how that won’t work,” said Sforza.
“I’ll have to give it some thought, but I will do my best. Now, how are you feeling today?”
After examining his patient, Francisco picked a couple of men—a tough sergeant, and the sort of trooper who would have been a sergeant if he gave up getting drunk and fighting with the sergeants. Both were in Milan because they’d been injured, but both were due to rejoin their troops soon, and anyway, reflected Francisco, half-dead they were still tougher than any so-called magician, or most other forms of life. In that, they were like Sforza, but not as intelligent, or quite as tough.
“Where are we going, Captain?”
“A bookseller. Or so he claims. It should be a new experience for both of you, unless it turns out that he is being a front for a brothel or tavern, and I can’t see any sign of anyone keeping those secret,” said Francisco.
“He’s a spy or up to something,” said the trooper.
“Possibly. But you’re to behave unless he shows signs of trouble or flight.”
Because Francisco was a soldier first and an investigator of dubious booksellers somewhere far below that, they checked the flanks and rear first. Francisco left the sergeant to watch the rear and told him to come running if there was a shout.
He and the trooper knocked at the front door of the unpretentious little house. It was opened almost immediately by a pretty young woman, who was plainly pregnant.
She smiled at them, “Good morning, úr,” she said, in heavily accented Frankish—and not with the Italian accent, either. Hungarian, by the honorific. Francisco was dress
ed well enough for the woman to grant him that, and a small bow. She did keep one hand tucked in her apron, and there was a bucket and mop just behind her. A smell of new-baked bread, and…gunpowder tickled Francisco’s nose.
He bowed politely. “Jó napot kívánok,” he said cautiously, expending his entire supply of polite Hungarian.
He was given a huge smile and a positive gale of what was presumably her native language, and a far bigger curtsey—enough to see a glimpse of the hand-cannon she had tucked under her apron.
He held up his hand and shook his head. “I am sorry. That is all I can understand or can say in your language. I am the Caviliero Francisco Turner. I am a collector of books and I have heard you have some for sale.”
She frowned. Realizing she had not understood him, Francisco repeated himself, slowly.
“Ah. Books. So many, so much to dust. I am not to touch some, the master says. I call him. Wait. I call.”
As she turned, there was an explosion. Not huge, to a man who had known cannon fire, but still loud. The young woman turned and ran. Francisco and his man ran after her, down a short passage lined with shelves of books, into the kitchen and down a stairs.
Well…partway down the stairs. Smoke and a smallish man with a vast white mustache and rather disheveled hair was coming up it, coughing. Francisco would guess that what she was frantically asking was if he was all right. From a scullery door came another young man, limping and with a bandage still around his head—obviously equally concerned.
“Let me guess,” said Francisco. “You’re an alchemist.”
The fellow with a mustache waved off his servants and stepped forward to meet him. He bowed. “Alas, no, just a man seeking knowledge, and occasionally making some error of judgment.”
He looked at the two of them, in an assessing fashion. “What is it that you gentlemen seek in my house?”
His Frankish was impeccable, as if spoken by a gentleman of Mainz. That in itself was a bit odd, combined with the Hungarian servants. Francisco introduced himself and repeated his story about wishing to buy books.
“Ah. The Caviliero Francisco Turner. I had heard you might be my only customer in Milan,” said the man. “May I introduce myself? I am Kazimierz Jagr of Bohemia, a visitor to your fair city. What manner of books are you interested in, m’lord? I am afraid I only have a small number of volumes for sale. The rest are for my work.”
His eyes were as sharp as gimlets and very alert and, despite the fact that he was not very large, Francisco, who had spent much of his life summing up enemies, had a feeling this man could be dangerous if he chose to be. Still, at the moment he seemed polite and wary. Well, that was wise for a foreigner in any place. “Medical texts, particularly,” answered Francisco.
“Aha. You are a physician? I have some texts…and I would like your services.”
“I’m a soldier, not a physician for hire.”
“A pity. Come with me, good sir. Emma, bring wine”—he sniffed—“and maybe some of the new bread.”
He led Francisco and his man to a second room. The furnishing was, at this stage, Spartan: a table and shelving which the fellow with the bandage on his head had perhaps been constructing more of; there were planks and tools, and a pile of oilskin-wrapped bundles. The shelves were in the throes of having books unpacked onto them. Not as many books as Cosimo de’ Medici had in his public library—but this was one room. And these books were different. They were old. “I try to collect the original texts. With hand-copying, they become much altered. But the inks do not last forever,” said the man. “You are, I gather, a reading man. Are you familiar with the Persian physician and philosopher Avicenna? I have a very early translation, a copy in Cremona’s own hand. I have it in Arabic too, but…”
“I do read and speak that.”
The look he got from the supposed bookseller said he had gone up in the fellow’s estimation. “Then I do have something which will interest you. I do not have the complete work, but I have some of Al-Nafis’s writings. Some of the originals.”
Francisco’s mouth fell open. “Interested! I should say I am. I thought they had all been destroyed. I must…um, I would like to see those.”
“It will be my pleasure to allow you to read them. I don’t think they have been unpacked yet. Tamas, poor fellow, is suffering quite badly from the effects of an assault we suffered in Scaliger lands just east of Verona. He has been struggling to put up the shelves.”
Francisco knew when he’d been outmaneuvered, and it was not unpleasant in discovering one of the rarest and most anatomically accurate of texts. “Let me have a look at him,” he said. He dug in his pouch and took out a coin. “Gilotti, go tell Marona I said for you both to go and have a mug of wine. And I mean a mug. One mug. Come back here when you’re done. I see that I shall be a while.”
The trooper grinned, took the money, saluted and left.
By now, Francisco was sure of three things: the man was not illiterate, he was not a mountebank, and he did have a large number of books.
He just wasn’t sure quite what he actually was. He was too well read, too knowledgeable. He was decidedly experimenting with something in his cellar. Did magic involve black powder? Alchemy seemed most likely. On the other hand, his servants plainly worshipped the ground he walked on, and yet there was a peculiar attitude to both of them, as if they were looking after a beloved but slightly abnormal child. The man was investing a level of care in his servant not common among the nobility. That, no matter where he was now, was what this fellow had been raised to be, and amongst.
Francisco examined the servant. “You should have stitched that up,” he said of the long, shallow slash down his chest and abdomen. “You have some infection down there. It needs to be kept as clean and dry as possible. You have some spirits of wine in your experimental equipment? Clean it with that. I hold with boiled cloth for dressings myself; there seems some virtue in it from the heat. Clean the wound drawing the swabs away from the wound, like this. You won’t believe how many healthy wounds can have the evil humors spread by cleaning up and down them.”
Then he examined the patient’s head, tapping his teeth, feeling very carefully. “I’ll need a razor,” he said.
“Er, it requires surgery?”
“No, I just wish to shave a piece of his head. I believe he has a fractured skull, but it is necessary to see if there is any depression of the bone. I don’t think so.”
A razor was hastily brought. And Francisco noted the bookseller knew very little of medicine, but a great deal about anatomy. The girl was quietly crying and praying. But the bookseller was two things: curious and worried. He did his best not to let either show, but Francisco had dealt with too many men in too many battles.
He examined the shaved skull carefully, gently. “It’s unlikely there is large damage. He’d have had worse than headaches. But my experience says as little activity as possible, as little bouncing about as possible—I’ve lost count as to how many patients got worse after riding. Give it a few weeks. He is to sleep as much as he can, and from my experience keeping troopers from doing stupid things, you should keep him busy doing nonphysical activity when he isn’t sleeping. There’s no guarantee, but there is a good chance of recovery. It’s my finding that narcotics or wine don’t help much, and tend to have worse effects later, for all the relief they give now. Sleep is best.”
The bookseller translated. The girl let loose with a burst of what Francisco would bet was a severe lecture directed at the poor young man. She was a pretty young thing now, but she’d make a dragon of an older woman one day, he judged. Then she kissed Francisco’s hand and, from what he understood, thanked him and the saints and God profusely.
“Take him upstairs and put him to bed, Emma,” said the bookseller, putting an end to her recital.
When they’d left, the man said: “And now, Caviliero, maybe you will actually tell me what you want?”
He sounded faintly amused. “I know you are one of the officers o
f the Protector, Sforza. I have seen you are a well-read man and plainly an experienced physician. You did not come here—accompanied by a soldier, with another outside—merely by chance. I would guess that you want to know who I am and what I am here for. I would guess you act directly for your commander. Am I correct?”
The fellow was all too astute. “You could be. But I want to know what you were doing in that cellar?” asked Francisco.
The bookseller scowled. “Following instructions in a book precisely—and getting an unexpected and very dangerous result. I can only conclude the quantities were willfully recorded wrongly to cause that result. I had used only a tenth part of the recipe, too.”
“What book?”
“Your knowledge of Arabic script may be of some value here, Caviliero. Perhaps I made a mistake. It is a Persian translation of a book from China, the Wujing Zongyao, a text largely on the construction and use of Chinese imperial weapons. I had thought the weapons described in it might make me of some value to the Protector. If he does not want magical support, that is. I have already had a number of others making enquiries for suitable spells.”
“And can you provide those?” asked Francisco, who had reached his own conclusions.
The bookseller looked at him from under heavy-lidded eyes. “Can I make gold from base metal? What do you think, Caviliero? If I could transport magically, would I travel by wagon? If I could conjure ever-filled purses or demons to transport the treasures of the earth to me, would I be down in the cellar grinding charcoal and saltpeter crystals, and adding various other substances to achieve suitable smoke? Would I not have foretold your coming and magically cured my man?”
“A point. As it happens, my master might have employment for someone who was believed a great magician,” said Francisco. The man was as sharp as a razor and had successfully pointed out the flaws in many a mountebank’s tale…while enhancing his reputation.
“People will believe anything, especially aided with a suitable trick or two,” said the bookseller, cheerfully admitting he was a fraud. “I was experimenting partly for that reason, too. I have a marvelous list of pyrotechnic effects in a treatise by Hakawai, in one of the languages of Hind, which did not agree with those in Wujing—which was what I was experimenting with. And, of course,” he added sarcastically, “I can write you suitable protective cantrips against diseases of the genitals and for creating lust or fidelity.”