“Uh-oh.”
“Right. Nobody was watching him, so he sneaked out his knife and sawed through the rope. My father’s corpse, with all that spring-tension suddenly released, catapulted right out the window. It scared the devil out of the mourners until the knife-wielder explained what he’d done. They went outside to bring the body back in, and saw that it had landed just a few feet to one side of the grave they’d dug. So they dragged him back inside, tied him down again, moved the table a little, made a few bets, and cut him loose again. Boing. Out he went. On the fourth shot he landed in the grave, and they filled it in and went home.”
“Good holy Christ!” Duffy exclaimed. “I think your cousin was lying to you.”
“Maybe. But I want to be burned.”
“Look, just because something like that happened to your father—”
“Burned, Duff.”
“Oh, very well. I’ll see to it, if I survive you.” They shook hands on it.
Looking over the Irishman’s shoulder, Bluto remarked in a more casual tone, “Hm! The mandarino is giving one of us the fish-eye.”
Duffy shifted around in his chair, and found himself once again meeting the cold stare of Antoku Ten-no. “You’re right,” he said, repressing a shudder as he turned back to Bluto. “An unpleasant customer, beyond doubt.”
“Speaking of your customers,” said the hunchback, “at what hour will you actually broach the bock tomorrow?”
“Can’t get your mind off that, can you? Oh, tomorrow evening about five, I guess. I’ll see you then, I assume.”
“Me and everybody else in Vienna.”
In the lamplit dimness of the kitchen hall several hours later Duffy strode up and down on the creaking boards, and hefted a sword with a dissatisfied air. “Well,” he told Eilif, who sat on a barrel nearby, “I’ll be grateful for the loan of it until I can get a sword made for me, but I wouldn’t want to stay with this one.”
The Swiss mercenary scratched his gray-shot beard. “Why not?”
“Look,” said the Irishman, now rocking the rapier back and forth on his right palm, “the balance is wrong. All the weight’s in the blade. I’d need a ten-pound pommel, and then it’d be too heavy to feint with.”
“What do you want to feint for? Hit ’em hard straight off, and keep hitting ‘em hard.”
“I feel safer with the option. Also, look at that guard—it’s just a loop of steel. Do you think a man couldn’t get his point in under that, and clip off all my fingers with one poke?”
“God’s hooks, Brian, why do you worry so much about the point? It’s only effeminate Spaniards and Italians that use it—mainly because they don’t have the strength or courage for a good chop.” He swung an imaginary sword in a mighty arc. “Hah! Parry that, you Estebans and Julios!”
Duffy grinned. “For your sake, Eilif, I hope you never run into Esteban or Julio. He’ll have you looking like St. Sebastian after they pulled out all the arrows.”
“Is that so? I believe you spent too much time in Venice, Duff, that’s all.”
“No doubt. Well in any case, thank you. With this I can certainly deal with such swordsmen as are in Vienna. Uh, except, possibly, for a few of the lands-knechten,” he added, seeing Eilif’s quick frown.
“Possibly a few,” the Swiss agreed judiciously. “It sounds like the dining room’s filling up,” he observed, cocking a thumb at the double door. “Hadn’t you better be getting in there?”
“No. I’m ditching it tonight,” the Irishman told him. “Aurelianus suggested I give the innkeeper a respite from my abrasive personality for a bit—every time the man speaks to me he gets so angry he has to go unwind at that poet Kretchmer’s house, where he’s apparently something of a lapdog. Spent last night there after I allegedly tried to blow up the stables.” Duffy sheathed the new sword and strapped it to his belt. “Drink up my share, though, will you?”
“Rely on me.”
Duffy left the building through the kitchen, thrusting his hands deeply into the pockets of his cloak as the chilly wind found him. Patchy clouds hurried across the face of the just-past-full moon, and the gothic and medieval rooftops showed up dimly frosted against the sky’s deep black. Feeling like a goblin of shadows, Duffy made his way silently past several oases of warm light and music, on a course that would lead him to the wide Rotenturmstrasse and, after a left turn, to the north gate of the city. Aurelianus had paid some of the local lads to keep a watchman’s vigil on the Viking ship, and he had suggested that tonight Duffy earn his keep by checking up on them.
The west wind was sluicing down the street like water down a channel, and to stop his cloak from flapping around his ankles the Irishman turned left into an alley that would take him to the north gate by way of St. Ruprecht’s Church.
He was aware of comforting domestic smells now, seeping out from under doors and around window-shutters: hot bread, and cabbage, and wood burning in fireplaces. It was on just such a night as this, he reflected, about fifteen years ago, that I first met Epiphany Vogel. She was about twenty-five, a slim—well, skinny, to be precise—dark-haired girl who somehow managed, as some people can think in a foreign language, actually to think in whimsy and endearing nonsense; forever depressed or elated over incomprehensible trifles, and supporting her statements with misquoted snatches of poetry and Scripture.
I was sitting, Duffy recalled, for a portrait by her father, who was then still a respected painter. It was supposed to be a picture of John the Baptist or somebody, and he had accosted me in a tavern, telling me I possessed exactly the visage he required. The painting, which come to think of it was called St. Michael the Archangel, had taken several weeks to finish, and by the end of that time I was hopelessly in love with his daughter.
And here the year 1529 finds us: Vogel is a mad, blind old drunkard, Epiphany is a gray drudge with nearly all the spice pounded out of her, and I’m a scarred old tomcat with a poor attitude and no prospects, and all of us sitting dumbly in the path of the vigorous Turkish onslaught. The Irishman laughed and did a few capering jig steps; for it seemed to him that, though that was unarguably how it would look to an outsider, and even to himself, it still wasn’t quite the whole story.
He was crossing a small square that ringed a dormant fountain when a flapping from above made him glance up, and his quiet thoughts scattered like startled sparrows—for two black, man-shaped creatures were spiralling down toward him out of the sky. The moonlight gleamed on their billowing wings, curved scabbards and—a puzzling note—their high-soled clog shoes.
Horrified, Duffy reflexively snatched at his sword, but his darting left hand never reached the hilt.
He was abruptly seized, not externally but from within, as if a hitherto-unsuspected fellow-driver had shoved him away and taken the reins. In a helpless panic he watched his own left hand draw his dagger instead, and then deeply plough its razor edge across his right palm, so that blood was spilling out even before the blade was clear.