The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 20

"Rob J. Cole."

When the apple brandy came they drank to one another's health and Charbonneau was proven right, for the spirits warmed Rob's stomach and made him one of the living again. "I believe I can eat," he said wonderingly.

Pleased, Charbonneau spoke an order and presently a serving girl brought to their table a crusty bread, a platter of small green olives, and a goat's cheese of which even Barber would have approved.

"You can see why I'm in need of someone's help," Rob said ruefully, "for I can't even ask for food."

Charbonneau smiled. "All my life I've been a sailor. I was a boy when my first ship put into London, and I well remember my longing to hear my native tongue." Half of his time ash.o.r.e had been spent on the other side of the Channel, he said, where the language was English.

"I'm a barber-surgeon, traveling to Persia to buy rare medicines and healing herbs that will be sent to England." It was what he had decided to tell people, to avoid discussing the fact that his real reason for going to Ispahan was considered a crime by the Church.

Charbonneau lifted his eyebrows. "A long way."

Rob nodded. "I need a guide, someone who can also translate for me, so that I may present entertainments and sell physick and treat the ill as we travel. I'll pay a generous wage."

Charbonneau took an olive from the plate and set it on the sun-warmed table. "France," he said. He took another. "The Saxon-ruled five duchies of Germany." Then another and another, until there were seven olives in a line. "Bohemia," he said, indicating the third olive, "where live the Slavs and the Czechs. Next is the territory of the Magyars, a Christian country but full of wild barbarian hors.e.m.e.n. Then the Balkans, a place of tall, fierce mountains and tall, fierce people. Then Thrace, about which I know little save that it marks the final limit of Europe and contains Constantinople. And finally Persia, where you want to go."

He regarded Rob contemplatively. "My native city is on the border between France and the land of the Germans, whose Teutonic languages I have spoken since childhood. Therefore, if you will hire me, I'll accompany you past-" He picked up the first two olives and popped them into his mouth. "I must leave you in time to return to Metz by next winter."

"Done," Rob said in relief.

Then, while Charbonneau grinned at him and ordered another brandy, Rob solemnly consumed the other olives in the line, eating his way through the remaining five countries, one by one.

23.

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.

France was not as determinedly green as England but there was more sun. The sky seemed higher, the color of France was deep blue. Much of the land was woods, as at home. It was a country of fiercely neat farms, with here and there a somber stone castle similar to the ones Rob was accustomed to seeing in the countryside; but some of the lords lived in great wooden manor houses such as were uncommon in England. There were cattle in the pastures and peasants sowing wheat.

Already Rob saw some wonders. "Many of your farm buildings are roofless," he observed.

"There is less rain here than in England," Charbonneau said. "Some of our farmers thresh the grain in the open barns."

Charbonneau rode a big, placid horse, light gray, almost white. His arms were used-looking and well kept. Each night he tended the mount carefully and cleaned and polished the sword and the dagger. He was good company at the campfire and on the road.

Every farm had orchards, glorious with blossom. Rob stopped at several, seeking to buy spirits; he could find no metheglin but bought a barrel of apple brandy similar to the tipple he had enjoyed in Calais, and found that it made superior Universal Specific.

The best roads here, as everywhere, had been built in earlier times by the Romans for their marching armies, broad highways, connecting and as straight as spear shafts. Charbonneau remarked on them lovingly. "They're everywhere, a network that covers the world. If you wished, you could travel on just this kind of road all the way to Rome."

Nevertheless, at a signpost pointing to a village called Caudry, Rob turned Horse off the Roman road. Charbonneau disapproved.

"Dangerous, these wooded tracks."

"I must travel them to ply my trade. They're the only way to the smaller villages. I blow my horn. It's what I've always done."

Charbonneau shrugged.

Caudry's houses were cone-shaped on top, with roofs of brush or thatched straw. Women were cooking out of doors and most houses had a plank table and benches near the fire, beneath a rude sun shelter laid on four stout poles cut from young trees. It couldn't be mistaken for an English village, but Rob went through the routine as if he were at home.

He handed Charbonneau the drum and told him to thump it. The Frenchman looked amused and then was intently interested as Horse began to prance to the sound of the drum.

"Entertainment today! Entertainment!" Rob called.

Charbonneau got the idea at once and thereafter translated everything as soon as Rob said it.

Rob found the entertainment a droll experience in France. The spectators laughed at the same stories but in different places, perhaps because they had to wait for the translation. During Rob's juggling, Charbonneau stood transfixed, and his sputtered comments of delight seemed to infect the crowd, which applauded vigorously.

They sold a great deal of Universal Specific.

That night at their campfire Charbonneau kept urging him to juggle, but he refused. "You'll get your fill of watching me, never fear."

"It's amazing. You say you've done this since you were a boy?"

"Yes." He told of how Barber had taken him in after his parents had died.

Charbonneau nodded. "You were fortunate. In my twelfth year my father died and my brother Etienne and I were given to a pirate crew as ship's boys." He sighed. "My friend, that was a hard life."

"I thought you said your first voyage took you to London."

"My first voyage on a merchant ship, when I was seventeen. For five years before, I sailed with pirates."

"My father helped defend England against three invasions. Twice when Danes invaded London. And once when pirates invaded Rochester," Rob said slowly.

"My pirates didn't attack London. Once we landed at Romney and burned two houses and took a cow that we killed for meat."

They stared at one another.

"They were bad men. It was what I did to stay alive."

Rob nodded. "And Etienne? What happened to Etienne?"

"When he was old enough he ran from them, back to our town, where he apprenticed himself to the baker. Today he's an old man too, and makes exceptional bread."

Rob grinned and wished him a good night.

Every few days they drove into a different village square, where it was business as usual-the dirty songs, the flattering portraits, the liquorish cures. At first Charbonneau translated Rob's barber-surgeon enticements, but soon the Frenchman was so accustomed to them that he could a.s.semble a crowd on his own. Rob worked hard, driven to fill his cash box because he knew money was protection in foreign places.

June was warm and dry. They bit tiny pieces out of the olive called France, traversing its northern edge, and by early summer were almost at the German border.

"We're getting close to Strasbourg," Charbonneau told him one morning.

"Let us go there, so you may see your people."

"If we do, we'll lose two days' time," Charbonneau said scrupulously, but Rob smiled and shrugged, for he had come to like the elderly Frenchman.

The town proved to be beautiful, abustle with craftsmen who were building a great cathedral that already showed the promise of surpa.s.sing the general grace of Strasbourg's wide streets and handsome houses. They rode straight to the bakery, where a voluble Etienne Charbonneau clasped his brother in floury embrace.

Word of their arrival spread on a family intelligence system and that evening Etienne's two handsome sons and three of his dark-eyed daughters, all with children and spouses, came to celebrate; the youngest girl, Charlotte, was unmarried and still lived at home with her father. Charlotte prepared a lavish dinner, three geese stewed with carrots and dried plums. There were two kinds of fresh bread. A round loaf that Etienne called Dog Bread was delicious despite its name, being composed of alternate layers of wheat and rye. "It is inexpensive, the bread of the poor," Etienne said, and urged Rob to try a costlier long loaf baked from meslin, flour blended from many grains ground fine. Rob liked the Dog Bread best.

It was a merry evening, with both Louis and Etienne translating for Rob to the general hilarity. The children danced, the women sang, Rob juggled for his dinner, and Etienne played the pipes as well as he baked bread. When finally the family left, everyone kissed both travelers farewell. Charlotte sucked in her stomach and stuck out her newly ripened chest, and her great warm eyes invited Rob outrageously. That evening as he lay in bed he wondered what life would be like if he were to settle into the bosom of such a family, and in such pleasant surroundings.

In the middle of the night he rose.

"Something?" Etienne asked softly. The baker was sitting in the dark not far from where his daughter lay.

"I have to p.i.s.s."

"I join you," Etienne said, and the two of them walked outside together and plashed companionably against the side of the barn. When Rob returned to his bed of straw, Etienne settled into the chair and sat watching over Charlotte.

In the morning the baker showed Rob his great round ovens and gave them a sack full of Dog Bread baked twice so it was hard and unspoilable, like ship's biscuit.

Strasbourgians would have to wait for their loaves that day; Etienne shut the bakery and rode with them a little of the way. The Roman road took them to the Rhine River a short ride from Etienne's home and then turned downstream for a few miles to a ford. The brothers leaned from their saddles and kissed. "Go with G.o.d," Etienne told Rob, and turned his horse toward home while they splashed across. The swirling water was cold and still faintly brown from the earth that had been washed into it by the spring floods far upstream. The trail up the opposite bank was steep, and Horse had to labor to pull the wagon into the land of the Teutons.

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 wh.o.r.eson 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 p.r.i.c.k?" 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.