Quicksilver (52 page)

In any case it had the desired effect, which was that Herr Augsburg, as his contribution to the Apocalypse, went with Jack to an armaments-market in the center of Linz and purchased him a musket and various other items.

Thus equipped, Jack marched off and offered his services to an Austrian regiment. The captain paid equal attention to Jack’s musket and to his boots. Both were impressive in the highest degree. When Jack demonstrated that he actually knew how to load and fire his weapon, he was offered a position. Jack thus became a musketeer.

He spent the next two weeks staring at other men’s backs through clouds of dust, and stepping on ground that had already been stepped on by thousands of other men and horses. His ears were filled with the tromping of feet, boots, and hooves; the creaking of overladen barley-carts; nonsensical teamsters’ exhortations; marching-songs in unknown languages; and the blowing of trumpets and beating of drums of regimental signal-men desperately trying to keep their throngs from getting all mixed up with alien throngs.

He had a gray-brown felt hat with a gigantic round brim that needed to be pinned up on one or both sides lest it flop down and blind him. More established musketeers had fine feathered brooches for this purpose—Jack made do with a pin. Like all English musketeers, Jack called his weapon Brown Bess. It was of the latest design—the lock contained a small clamp that gripped a shard of flint, and when Jack pulled the trigger, this would be whipped around and skidded hard against a steel plate above the powder-pan, flooding the pan with sparks and igniting it in most cases. Half of the musketeer-formations were impaired by older, flintless weapons called matchlocks. Each of these matchlock-men had to go around with a long fuzzy rope twined through his fingers,
one end of which was forever smouldering—as long as it didn’t get wet and he remembered to blow on it frequently. Clamped into the same sort of mechanism that held Jack’s flint-shard, it would ignite the powder, more often than not, by direct contact.

Jack, like all the other musketeers, had a leather belt over one shoulder whence dangled a dozen thumb-sized and -shaped wooden flasks, each sealed with its own stopper, each big enough to contain one charge of powder for the weapon. They clinked together musically when he walked. There was a powder-horn for refilling these during lulls. At the lowest point of the bandolier was a small pouch containing a dozen lead balls.

A company was a couple of hundred men like Jack walking around packed into a tight square, not because they liked crowds but because this made it harder for an opponent to ride up with an edged weapon and cut pieces off of them. The reason it was harder was because in the center of the square was a smaller square of men carrying extremely long pointed sticks called pikes. The dimensions of the squares and the length of the pikes were worked out so that when the pikes were levelled at the enemy (passing between the surrounding musketeers) their points would project some distance beyond the edge of the formation—provided the musketeers stood close together—discouraging enemy horsemen from simply galloping up and having at the musketeers as they went through their loading rituals, which, even under ideal conditions, seemed to take as long as a Mass.
^*

That was the general plan. Exactly what would happen when the Turks strung their outlandish recurved bows and began to shower iron-tipped arrows into these formations had not been specified. From Linz onwards, anyway, Jack walked in the midst of such an organization. It made many, many noises, each traceable to something like the wooden powder-flasks. Unlike a company of matchlocks, it did not smolder, nor make huffing and puffing noises.

They turned away from the Danube, leaving it off to their left, and then the formations piled into one another because they were going uphill now, assaulting the tail of that mountain range. The drums and trumpets, muffled now by trees, echoed along
river-valleys as formations split again and again, finding passes over the hills. Jack was frequently confused, but when he wasn’t, he sensed that the Poles were on his right, the Bavarians and Saxons on his left.

Compared to the hills of England, these were high, steep, and well-forested. But between them lay broad valleys that made for easy marching, and even when they had to go over hills, instead of between them, the going was easier than it looked—the trees were tall handsome ones with bare white trunks, and what little undergrowth there was had long since been trampled down by others when Jack reached it.

The only way he knew that they’d reached the environs of Vienna was that they stopped marching and began camping. They made a bivouac in a narrow steep valley where the sun rose late and set early. Some of Jack’s brothers in arms were impatient to get on with it, but he appreciated that the Army of Christendom had become an immense machine for turning barley into horseshit and that the barley would fast run out. Something had to happen soon.

After they’d bivouacked for two nights, Jack slipped away one morning before dawn and clambered uphill until the ground became level under his feet. He did this partly to get away from the stink of the camp and partly because he wanted to get a look at the city from a high place. Red sunlight was weaving among white tree-trunks as he wandered to a high bluff from which he had a clear view several miles down into the city.

Vienna was a small town dwarfed by its own defenses, in turn engulfed by a larger Turkish city only a few months old. The town itself was, then, the smallest part of what he saw, but it was to the rest as a chalice was to a cathedral. Even from miles off he could see it was a miserable place—actual streets were visible nowhere, just the red tile roofs of long skinny buildings heaped up six and seven stories, wending black crevices between them indicating streets, which he could tell would be sunless trenches, thick with hurtling shit and echoing voices. He could see the foaming stain of the city spreading across the adjacent canal and, farther downstream, into the Danube itself, and from its color he could almost guess that there was a major flux epidemic underway—as indeed there was in the Turkish camp.

Just off-center in the heart of Vienna stood the tallest building Jack had ever seen—a cathedral with a dunce-cap tower topped by a curious symbol, a star wedged in the craw of a crescent moon, like a stick jammed into a shark’s mouth. It seemed a prophetic
map of the entire scene. Vienna was protected on the north by a canal that split away from the Danube, moated the city on that side, and later rejoined it. The bridges had been wrecked so no one could enter or leave that way. The entire remainder of the city was enveloped by the Turkish camp, narrowest at the two points where it touched the river, and, in the middle, as fat as Vienna itself—therefore, a crescent with the city trapped between its horns. It was a fluttering world of heathenishly colored tents and flags and streamers, with the ruins of Vienna’s burnt suburbs poking out here and there like ribs of wrecked ships from a foaming sea.

Between Turkish camp and Christian city was a belt of what a naïve person would identify as empty (albeit curiously sculpted and chiseled) terrain. Jack, a trained professional, by squinting and tilting his head this way and that, could imagine that it was as densely crisscrossed with sight-lines and cannonball-arcs and other geometrickal phant’sies of engineers as the space above a ship’s deck was with ropes and rigging. For this corridor between camp and fort had been claimed by the engineers—as anyone who stepped into it would learn in as little time as it took a musket-ball to cover the distance. The Engineer-Empire, Jack’d been noticing, waxed as older ones waned. Just as Turks and Franks had their own styles of building, so did Engineers rehearse, again and again, the same shapes: sloping walls, backed up by earth (to deflect and absorb cannonballs) laid out in nested zig-zags, a bastion at each corner from which to shoot at anyone who tried to climb the neighboring stretches of wall. Oh, Vienna had a traditional pre-Engineer wall: a thin curtain of masonry, crenellated on top. But that was nothing but an antiquarian curiosity now, enveloped and shamed by the new works.

Besides that cathedral, there was only one building in Vienna worth a second look, and that was a great big cream-colored, many-windowed building, five stories high and a crossbow-shot in length, constructed right on the edge of the city and rising high above the wall, with wings behind it enclosing courtyards he’d never see. It was obviously the Palace of the Holy Roman Emperor. It had a steep high roof—plenty of attic space—with a row of tiny dormers surmounted by funny copper domes like spiked helmets. Each dormer had a little window, and through one of them (though the distance was very great) Jack convinced himself he could see a figure dressed in white peering out. He wanted to arrange something involving a trapped princess, a dashing rescue, and a reward;
however, in between him and whomever was peering out that window were certain complications, viz. directly below the Palace, a huge bastion was thrust out into the glacis, like a giant’s plowshare parting an empty field, and against this very stronghold the Grand Vizier had chosen to mount his attack.

Apparently the Turks had been in too much of a hurry to trundle siege artillery all the way across Hungary and so they were undoing the work of the Engineers one shovel-load at a time. Vienna’s walls and bastions had been smooth regular shapes, so the Turks’ handiwork was as obvious as a mole-hill in a Duke’s bowling-green. They had dug a metropolis of trenches in what had been a perfectly flat glacis. Each trench was surrounded by the dirt that had been flung out of it, giving it the swollen look of an infected wound. A few of these trenches led straight from the heart of the Turkish camp toward the Emperor’s Palace, but these were just the great avenue-trenches from which countless street-trenches branched off left and right, running generally parallel to the city’s walls, and spaced as closely together as they could be without collapsing. These trenches were as rungs in a horizontal ladder by which the Turks had advanced until they’d reached the foot of the first ravelins: outlying, arrowhead-shaped earthworks between bastions. Here they had gone underground and undermined the ravelins, packed the mines with black powder, and blown them up, creating avalanches where walls had stood—as when molten wax spills from the top of a candle and mars its regular shape with a lumpy cataract. Fresh trenches, then, had been cut across those irregular debris-piles, bringing the Turks into a position whence they could bring musketry to bear on the city walls, to protect their sappers and miners as they advanced, ditch by ditch, across the dry moat. Now they were attacking the great bastion directly before the Palace in the same way. But it was a gradual sort of war, like watching a tree absorb a stone fence, and nothing was happening at the moment.

All well and good; but the question on Jack’s mind was: where was the best looting to be found? He chose some likely targets, both in the Turk’s camp and in the city of Vienna itself, and committed to memory a few landmarks, so that he could find what he desired when things were smoky and confused.

When he turned to go back to the camp, he discovered that there was another man up on this hill, a stone’s throw away: some kind of monk or holy man, perhaps, as he was dressed in a rough sackcloth robe, with no finery. But then the bloke whipped out a sword. It was not one of your needle-thin rapiers, such as fops
pushed at each other in the streets of London and Paris, but some kind of relic of the Crusades, a two-handed production with a single crossbar instead of a proper guard—the sort of thing Richard the Lionhearted might’ve used to slay camels in the streets of Jerusalem. This man went down on one knee in the dirt, and he did it with verve and enthusiasm. You see your rich man kneeling in church and it takes him two or three minutes, you can hear his knees popping and sinews creaking, he totters this way and that, creating small alarums amongst the servants who are gripping his elbows. But this brute knelt easily, even
lustily
if such a thing were possible, and facing toward the city of Vienna, he planted his sword in the ground so that it became a steel cross. The morning light was shining directly into his grizzled face and glinting from the steel of the blade and glowing in some indifferent colored jewels set into the weapon’s hilt and crossbar. The man bowed his head and took to mumbling in Latin. The hand that wasn’t holding the sword was thumbing through a rosary—Jack’s cue to exit stage right. But as he was leaving he recognized the man with the broadsword as King John Sobieski.

L
ATER IN THE MORNING
, a ration of brandy was issued to each man—it being a military axiom that a drunk soldier was an effective soldier. The brandy gave the men, at last, something to gamble with, and so dice and cards came out of pockets. This led to Jack having half a dozen brandy-rations in his belly, and his comrades-in-arms glaring at him suspiciously and muttering foul accusations in barbarous tongues. But then there was more trumpet-blowing and drum-beating and they were up on their feet (Jack barely so), and now another few hours of tromping around staring at the backs of the men in front of them, the horizon in all directions a fur of bayonets and pikes.

Like a storm that has fallen upon the mountains, the companies and regiments drained through trees into ravines and down ravines into valleys, coming together into black thundering floods that foamed out across the plain, finally, and rushed toward Vienna.

The artillery began to fire, first on one side, then the other. But if men were being cut down in swathes by Turkish grape-shot, it was not happening anywhere near Jack. They were moving double-time. They marched from hot, clear air into dust-clouds, then from dust-clouds into permanent banks of gunpowder-smoke.

Then the earth seemed to quail beneath their feet and their entire formation shied back, men piling into one another’s backs,
and the smoke roiled and parted. Glints of gold and polished brass bobbed through it, and Jack understood that right along their flank, King John Sobieski was charging into the Turks at the head of the Winged Hussars.