by Noah Gordon
They were in mountains very soon, riding between high forests of spruce and fir. Charbonneau grew ever quieter, which at first Rob attributed to the fact that he hadn’t wanted to leave his family and his home, but at length the Frenchman spat. “I do not like Germans, nor do I like to be in their land.”
“Yet you were born as near to them as a Frenchman can be.”
Charbonneau scowled. “A man can live hard by the sea and still have no love for the shark,” he said.
It appeared to Rob to be a pleasant land. The air was cold and good. They went down a long mountain and at the bottom saw men and women cutting and turning the valley hay and getting fodder in, just as farmers were doing in England. They ascended another mountain to small high pastures where children tended cows and goats brought up for summer grazing from the farms below. The track was a high trail, and presently they looked down on a great castle of dark gray stone. Mounted men jousted with padded lances in the tiltyard.
Charbonneau spat again. “It’s the keep of a terrible man, landgrave of this place. Count Sigdorff the Even-Handed.”
“The Even-Handed? It doesn’t seem the name of a man who is terrible.”
“He is old now,” Charbonneau said. “He earned the name when young, riding against Bamberg and taking two hundred prisoners. He ordered the right hands cut from one hundred and the left hands cut from the other hundred.”
They cantered their horses until the castle could no longer be seen.
Before noon they came to a sign that pointed off the Roman road to the village of Entburg and they decided to go there and put on an entertainment. They were only a few minutes along the detour when they came around a bend and saw a man blocking the middle of the track, sitting a skinny brown horse with runny eyes. He was bald, with folds of fat in his short neck. He wore rough homespun over a body that was both fleshy and hard-looking, as Barber had been when Rob first knew him. There was no room to drive the wagon around him, but his weapons were sheathed and Rob reined Horse while they inspected one another.
The bald man said something.
“He wants to know if you have liquor,” Charbonneau said.
“Tell him no.”
“The whoreson isn’t alone,” Charbonneau said without altering his tone, and Rob saw that two more men had worked their mounts out from behind the trees.
One was a youth on a mule. When he rode up to the fat man Rob saw a similarity in their features and guessed they were father and son.
The third man sat a huge, clumsy animal that looked like a workhorse. He took a position directly behind the wagon, cutting off escape to the rear. Perhaps he was thirty years old. He was small and mean-looking and was missing his left ear, like Mistress Buffington.
Both of the newcomers were holding swords. The bald man spoke loudly to Charbonneau.
“He says you’re to climb down from the wagon and remove your clothing. Know that when you do, they’ll kill you,” Charbonneau said. “Garments are expensive and they don’t want them ruined with blood.”
He didn’t observe from where Charbonneau had taken the knife. The old man threw it with a grunt of effort and a practiced flip that sent it hard and fast, and it thumped into the chest of the young man with the sword.
Shock came into the fat man’s eyes but the smile still hadn’t fully faded from his lips when Rob left the wagon seat.
He took a single step onto Horse’s broad back and launched himself, dragging the man from the saddle. They struck the ground rolling and clawing, each trying desperately for a crippling hold. Finally Rob was able to jam his left arm under the chin from behind. A meaty fist began to smash at his groin but he twisted and was able to take the hammer blows on a thigh. They were terrible punches that numbed his leg.
Always before he had fought drunk and half mad with rage. Now he was sober, fixing on one cold, clear thought.
Kill him.
Sobbing, he grabbed his left wrist with his free hand and pulled back, trying to throttle the man or crush his windpipe.
Then he moved to the forehead and attempted to pull the head back far enough to ruin the spine.
Break! he begged.
But it was a short, thick neck, padded with fat and ridged with muscle.
A hand with long, black fingernails moved up his face. He strained his head away but the hand raked his cheek, drawing blood.
They grunted and strained, banging one another like obscene lovers.
The hand came back. The man was able to reach a little higher this time, trying for the eyes.
His sharp nails gouged, making Rob scream.
Then Charbonneau was standing over them. He placed the point of his sword deliberately, finding a place between the ribs. He shoved the sword deep.
The bald man sighed, as if in satisfaction. He stopped grunting and moving, and lay heavy. Rob smelled him for the first time.
In a moment he was able to move away from the body. He sat up, nursing his ruined face.
The youth hung over the mule’s rump, dirty bare feet cruelly caught. Charbonneau salvaged the knife and wiped it. He eased the dead feet out of the rope stirrups and lowered the body to the ground.
“The third prick?” Rob gasped. He couldn’t keep his voice from quavering.
Charbonneau spat. “He ran at first indication we wouldn’t become nicely dead.”
“Perhaps to the Even-Handed, for reinforcements?”
Charbonneau shook his head. “These are dunghill cutthroats, not a landgrave’s men.” He searched the bodies, looking as if he had done it before. Around the man’s neck was a little bag containing coins. The youth carried no money but wore a tarnished crucifix. Their weapons were poor but Charbonneau threw them into the wagon.
They left the highwaymen where they lay in the dirt, the bald corpse face down in his own blood.
Charbonneau tied the mule to the back of the cart and led the bony captured horse, and they returned to the Roman road.
24
STRANGE TONGUES
When Rob asked Charbonneau where he had learned to throw a knife, the old Frenchman said he had been taught by the pirates of his youth. “It was a handy skill to have while fighting the damned Danish and seizing their ships.” He hesitated. “And while fighting the damned English and seizing their ships,” he said slyly. By that time they weren’t bothered by the old national rivalries and neither had any doubts left about his companion’s worthiness. They grinned at one another.
“Will you show me?”
“If you’ll teach me to juggle,” Charbonneau said, and Rob agreed eagerly. The bargain was one-sided, for it was too late in life for Charbonneau to master a new and difficult dexterity, and in the little time they had left together he learned only to pop two balls, although he derived much pleasure from tossing and catching them.
Rob had the advantage of youth, and years of juggling had given him strong and wiry wrists, as well as a sharp eye and balance and timing.
“It takes a special knife. Your dagger has a fine blade which would soon be snapped if you started throwing it, or the hilt would be ruined, for the hilt is the center of an ordinary dagger’s weight and balance. A throwing knife is weighted in the blade, so that a quick snap of the wrist sends it easily on its way point first.”
Rob quickly learned how to throw Charbonneau’s knife so it presented its sharp blade first. It was harder to become skilled at hitting targets where he aimed, but he was accustomed to the discipline of practice and threw the knife at a mark on a broad tree whenever he had a chance.
They kept to the Roman roads, which were crowded with a polyglot mixture of people. A French cardinal’s party once forced them off the road. The prelate rode past surrounded by two hundred mounted troops and a hundred and fifty servants, and wearing scarlet shoes and hat and a gray cope over a once-white chasuble made darker than the cope by the dust of the road. Pilgrims moved in the general direction of Jerusalem singly or in small or large groups; sometimes they were led or lectured
by palmers, religious votaries who signaled that they had accomplished sacred travel by wearing two crossed palm leaves picked in the Holy Land. Bands of armored knights galloped by with shouts and war cries, often drunk, usually pugnacious and always hungry for glory, loot, and deviltry. Some of the religious zealots wore hair shirts and crawled toward Palestine on bloody hands and knees to fulfill vows made to God or a saint. Exhausted and defenseless, they were easy prey. Criminals abounded on the highways, and law enforcement by officials was perfunctory at best; when a thief or highwayman was caught in the act he was executed on the spot by the travelers themselves, without trial.
Rob kept his weapons loose and ready, half expecting the man with the missing ear to lead a pack of riders down on them for vengeance. His size, the broken nose, and the striped facial wounds combined to make him appear formidable, but he realized with amusement that his best protection was the frail-looking old man he had hired because of his knowledge of English.
They bought provision in Augsburg, a bustling trade center founded by the Roman emperor Augustus in 12 B.C. Augsburg was a center of transactions between Germany and Italy, crowded with people and busy with its preoccupation, which was commerce. Charbonneau pointed out Italian merchants, conspicuous in shoes of expensive fabric which rose to curling points at the toes. For some time Rob had seen Jews in increasing number, but in Augsburg’s markets he noticed more of them than ever, instantly identifiable in their black caftans and narrow-brim, bell-shaped leather hats.
Rob put on an entertainment in Augsburg but didn’t sell as much Specific as he had previously, perhaps because Charbonneau translated with less zest when forced to use the guttural language of the Franks.
It didn’t matter, for his purse was fat; at any rate, ten days later when they reached Salzburg, Charbonneau told him that the entertainment in that town would be their final one together.
“In three days’ time we come to the Danube River, and there I leave you and turn back to France.”
Rob nodded.
“I’m of no further use to you. Beyond the Danube is Bohemia, where the people speak a language strange to me.”
“You’re welcome to come with me, whether or not you translate.”
But Charbonneau smiled and shook his head. “Time for me to go home, this time to stay.”
At an inn that night they bought a farewell feast of the food of the land: smoked meat stewed with lard, pickled cabbage, and flour. They didn’t like it and got mildly drunk on heavy red wine. He paid off the old man handsomely.
Charbonneau had a last, sobering piece of advice. “A dangerous countryside lies ahead of you. It’s said that in Bohemia one can’t tell the difference between wild bandits and the hirelings of the local lords. In order to pass through such a land unharmed, you must have the company of others.”
Rob promised he would seek to join a strong group.
When they saw the Danube it was a more muscular river than he had expected, fast-flowing and with the menacing oily surface that he knew denoted deep and dangerous water. Charbonneau stayed a day longer than promised, insisting on riding downstream with him to the wild and halfsettled village of Linz, where a large log-raft ferry took passengers and freight across a quiet stretch of the wide waterway.
“Well,” the Frenchman said.
“Perhaps one day we’ll see each other again.”
“I don’t think so,” Charbonneau said.
They embraced.
“Live forever, Rob J. Cole.”
“Live forever, Louis Charbonneau.”
He got down from the wagon and went to arrange his passage as the old man rode away, leading the bony brown horse. The ferryman was a sullen hulk with a bad cold who kept removing the snot from his upper lip with his tongue. The matter of the fare was difficult because Rob didn’t have the Bohemian language, and in the end he felt he had been overcharged. When he returned to the wagon after hard sign-language bargaining, Charbonneau had already ridden out of sight.
On his third day of moving into Bohemia he met up with five fat and ruddy Germans and tried to convey the idea that he wanted to travel with them. His manner was polite; he offered gold and indicated he’d be willing to cook and do other camp chores, but there wasn’t a smile from any of them, only hands on the hilts of five swords.
“Fucks,” he said finally, and turned away. But he couldn’t blame them, for their party already had some strength and he was unknown, a danger.
Horse drew him from the mountains into a great saucer-shaped plateau ringed by green hills. There were cultivated fields of gray earth in which men and women toiled over wheat, barley, rye, and beets, but most of it was mixed forest. In the night, not far away, he heard the howling of wolves. He kept a fire burning although it wasn’t cold, and Mistress Buffington mewed at the wild animal sounds, sleeping with the spiny ridge of her back hard against him.
He had depended on Charbonneau for many things, but he found that not the least of these had been companionship. Now he drove down the Roman road and knew the meaning of the word alone, for he couldn’t speak to any of the people he met.
A week after he and Charbonneau had parted, one morning he came upon the stripped and mutilated body of a man hanging from a tree by the side of the road. The hanged man was slight and ferret-faced and was missing his left ear.
Rob regretted that he wasn’t able to inform Charbonneau that others had caught up with their third highwayman.
25
THE JOINING
Rob crossed the wide plateau and reentered mountains. They weren’t as high as those he had already crossed but they were rugged enough to slow his progress. Twice more he approached groups of travelers on the road and attempted to join with them, but each time he was refused permission to do so. One morning a group of horsemen dressed in rags rode past him and shouted something at him in their strange language, but he nodded a greeting and looked away, for he could see they were wild and desperate. He felt if he were to travel with them he would soon be dead.
Arriving at a large town, he went into the tavern and was overjoyed to find that the publican knew a few words of English. From this man he learned that the town was called Brünn. The people through whose territory he traveled were mostly members of a tribe called the Czechs. He could learn little else, not even where the man had gotten his tiny store of English words, for the simple exchange had overtaxed the publican’s linguistic ability. When Rob left the tavern he found a man in the back of his wagon, going through his belongings.
“Get out,” he said softly. He pulled his sword but the fellow had leaped from the cart and was off before he could stop him. Rob’s money purse was still nailed safely beneath the floor of the wagon, and the only thing missing was a cloth bag full of the paraphernalia used in tricks of magic. It gave him no small comfort to think of the thief’s face when he opened the bag.
After that he polished his weapons daily, keeping a thin coat of grease on his blades so they slipped from the scabbards at the slightest pull. At night he slept lightly or not at all, listening for any sound that would indicate someone creeping up on him. He knew he would have little hope if he were attacked by a pack such as the horsemen in rags. He remained alone and vulnerable for nine more long days, until one morning the road emerged from the woods and, to his wonder and delight and burgeoning hope, he saw before him a tiny town that had been engulfed by a large caravan.
The sixteen houses of the village were surrounded by several hundred animals. Rob saw horses and mules of every size and description, saddled or harnessed to wagons, carts, and vans of wide variety. He tethered Horse to a tree. People were everywhere, and as he pushed among them his ears were assaulted by a babble of incomprehensible tongues.
“Please,” he said to a man engaged in the arduous task of changing a wheel. “Where is the caravan master?” He helped lift the wheel to the hub but won only a grateful smile and a blank headshake.
“The caravan master?” he asked the next traveler, wh
o was in the process of feeding two span of great oxen with wooden balls fixed to the points of their long horns.
“Ah, der Meister? Kerl Fritta,” the man said, and gestured down the line.
After that it was easy, for the name Kerl Fritta seemed to be known by all. Whenever Rob uttered it he received a nod and a pointing finger, until finally he came to a place where a table had been set in a field next to a large wagon hitched to six of the largest matched chestnut draft horses he had ever seen. On the table was a naked sword and behind it sat a personage who wore his long brown hair in two thick plaits and was engrossed in conversation with the first of a long line of travelers waiting to speak with him.
Rob stood at the end of the line. “That is Kerl Fritta?” he asked.
“Yes, that is he,” answered one of the men.
They stared at one another in delight.
“You’re English!”
“Scotch,” said the man, with only slight disappointment. “Well met! Well met!” he murmured, grasping both of Rob’s hands. He was tall and spare, with long gray hair, and clean-shaven in the Britons’ style. He wore a traveling suit of rough black stuff but it was good cloth, and well cut.
“James Geikie Cullen,” he said. “Sheep breeder and wool factor, journeying to Anatolia with my daughter in search of better varieties of rams and ewes.”
“Rob J. Cole, barber-surgeon. Bound for Persia to buy precious medicinals.”
Cullen gazed at him almost fondly. The line moved, but they had enough time to exchange information, and English words never had sounded more euphonious.