Duffy smiled. “You want me to be your bouncer.”
“Exactly,” agreed Aurelianus, rubbing his hands together.
“Hm.” Duffy drummed his fingers on the table top. “You know, if you’d asked me two days ago, I’d have told you to forget it. But... just in the last couple of days Venice has grown a little tiresome. I admit I’ve even found myself missing old Vienna. Just last night I had a dream—”
Aurelianus raised his eyebrows innocently. “Oh?”
“Yes, about a girl I used to know there. I wouldn’t really mind seeing her—seeing what she’s doing now. And if I hang around here those three Gritti lads will be challenging me to a real combat in the official champ clos, and I’m too old for that kind of thing.’
“They probably would,” Aurelianus agreed. “They’re hot-headed young men.”
“You know them?”
“No. I know about them.” Aurelianus picked up his half-consumed snake and re-lit it. “I know about quite a number of people,” he added, almost to himself, “without actually knowing them. I prefer it that way. You’ll take the job, then?”
Oh, what the hell, Duffy thought. I would never have fit in back in Dingle anyway, realistically speaking. He shrugged. “Yes. Why not?”
“Ah. I was hoping you would. You’re more suited for it than anyone I’ve met.”
He knotted his hands behind his back and paced about the cluttered room. “I’ve got business in the south, but I’d appreciate it if you could start for Vienna tout de suite. I’ll give you some travelling money and a letter of introduction to the Zimmermann brewmaster, an old fellow named Gambrinus. I’ll instruct him to give you another lump sum when you arrive there. How soon do you think that can be?”
Duffy scratched his gray head. “Oh, I don’t know. What’s today?”
“The twenty-fourth of February. Ash Wednesday.”
“That’s right. Monico had a gray cross on his forehead. Let’s see—I’d take a boat to Trieste, buy a horse and cross the tail end of the Alps just east of there. Then maybe I’d hitch a ride north with some Hungarian lumber merchant; there’s usually no lack of them in those parts. Cross the Sava and the Drava, and then follow the old Danube west to Vienna. Say roughly a month.”
“Before Easter, without a doubt?” Aurelianus asked anxiously.
“Oh, certainly.”
“Good. That’s when we open the casks of bock, and I don’t want a riot in the place.”
“Yes, I’ll have been there a good two weeks by then.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Aurelianus poured himself a cup of the sauternes and refilled Duffy’s. “You seem familiar with western Hungary,” he observed cautiously.
The Irishman frowned into his wine for a moment, then relaxed and nodded. “I am,” he said quietly. “I fought with King Louis and Archbishop Tomori at Mohács in August of ’twenty-six. I shouldn’t have been there; as an Austrian at the time, Hungary was nothing to me. I guess I figured Vienna was next on the Turk’s list.” No sense telling him about Epiphany, Duffy thought.
The wine was unlocking Duffy’s memories. The sky had been overcast, he recalled, and both sides had simply milled about on opposite sides of the Mohács plain until well after noon. Then the Hungarian cavalry had charged; the Turkish center gave way, and Duffy’s troop of German infantry had followed the Hungarians into the trap. That was as hellish a maelstrom as I ever hope to find myself in, he thought now, sipping his wine—when those damned Turks suddenly stopped retreating, and turned on the pursuing troops.
His mouth curled down at the corners as he remembered the sharp thudding of the Turkish guns and the hiss of grapeshot whipping across the plain to rip into the Christian ranks, the whirling scimitars of the weirdly-wailing Janissaries blocking any advance, and the despairing cry that went up from the defenders of the west when it became evident that the Turks had outflanked them.
“You obviously have luck,” Aurelianus said, after a pause. “Not many men got clear of that.”
“That’s true,” Duffy said. “I hid among the riverside thickets afterward, until John Zapolya and his troops arrived, the day after the battle. I had to explain to him that the idiot Tomori had attacked without waiting for him and Frangipani and the other reinforcements; that nearly everyone on the Hungarian side—Louis, Tomori, thousands more—was dead, and that Suleiman and his Turks had won. Zapolya cleared out then, ran west. I ran south.”
The old man stubbed his smoking snake out in an incense bowl and reluctantly exhaled the last of the smoke. “You’ve heard, I suppose, that Zapolya has gone over to the Turkish side now?”
Duffy frowned. “Yes. He just wants to be governor of Hungary, I guess, and will kiss the hand of whoever seems to own it. I can still hardly believe it, though; I’ve known him since 1515, and he was making raids against the Turks even then. Of all the things I would have sworn were impossible...”
Aurelianus nodded sympathetically. “If we could rely on impossibilities we’d all be better off.” He crossed the room and sat down at a cluttered desk. “But excuse me—I did not mean to stir up your past. Here,” he said, lifting a cloth bag from an opened drawer, “is five hundred ducats.” Duffy caught the toss and slid the bag into a pocket. “And here,” Aurelianus went on, flourishing a sheet of paper, “I will write a letter of introduction.” He dipped a pen in an inkpot and began scribbling.
Duffy had long ago found it handy to be able to read upside-down, and now casually glanced across the writing table at Aurelianus’ precise script.
“My dear Gambrinus,” Duffy read, “the bearer of this note, Brian Duffy,” (here Aurelianus paused to draw deftly a quick, accurate sketch of the Irishman), “is the man we’ve been looking for—the guardian of the house of Herzwesten. See that he is paid five hundred ducats when he arrives, and subsequently whatever monthly salary you and he shall agree upon. I will be joining you soon; mid-April, probably, certainly by Easter. I trust the beer is behaving properly, and that there is no acidity this season.—Kindest regards, AURELIANUS.”
The black-robed old man folded the letter, poured a glob of thick red wax onto it from a little candle-heated pot, and pressed a seal into it. “There you go,” he said, lifting away the seal and waving the letter in the air to cool the wax. “Just hand this to the brew-master.”
Duffy took the letter. The seal, he noticed, was a representation of two dragons locked in combat. “What are my duties to be?” he asked. “Tell me again.”
Aurelianus smiled. “Just as you said yourself: the bouncer. Keep the riffraff out. Keep the peace.”
The big Irishman nodded dubiously. “Seems odd that you’d have to come to Venice to find somebody to work in an Austrian tavern.”
“Well I didn’t come here to do that. I’m here for entirely different reasons. Entirely. But when I saw the way you dealt with those boys out front I knew you were the man this job called for.”
“Ah. Well, all right. It’s your money.” The wind must be up, Duffy thought. Listen to that window rattle!
Aurelianus stood up. “Thank you for helping me out in this matter,” he said quickly, shaking Duffy’s hand and practically pulling him to the door. “I’ll see you in a month or so.”