justice_turtle (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
justice_turtle) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
readallthenewberys2013-03-04 07:09 pm
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2013-03-04 07:09 pm
Newbery Medal: The Trumpeter of Krakow (Eric P. Kelly), Part 1
I'd like to polish off what I can of the 1920s here (there are about half a dozen books left I'll have to interlibrary-loan), so the next book I'll tackle is Trumpeter of Krakow. ...at least we're starting to hit things that are Children's Classics rather than Did You Ever Hear Of That Me Neither. Whether the "classic" status is deserved, we'll find out.
(I've read this book before, but it's been many years, and Shen of the Sea shook me badly. ;P)
* There's an "introduction to the new edition" from 1966 which I'm going to ignore for now, as "Hey! This Is A Classic!" introductions tend to give you all the introducer's opinions on what happens in the book and then I spend the rest of the book arguing with the introducer instead of actually reading. ;-)
* Anyway, I know perfectly well that this is a work of fiction based loosely around a true historical tradition, and I'm not in the least interested in hearing how this is such a good book it has overcome the terrible handicap of featuring the *shock horror!* Weird Name "Krakow" on the cover, not to mention "a king so oddly named as Kazimir Jagiello" within... okay, I really am skipping now. That was all on the first page of the introduction. :P
* The book proper, after that, starts with the "Ancient Oath of the Krakow Trumpeter" translated into English, and as that's the heart and title-giver of the book, I will quote it here in full: "I swear on my honor as a Pole, as a servant of the King of the Polish people, that I will faithfully and unto the death, if there be need, sound upon the trumpet the Heynal in honor of Our Lady each hour in the tower of the church which bears Her Name."
* Before Chapter 1 there is a prologue, "The Broken Note", set in 1241. It tells in a Polish folk-teller's voice, full of vivid imagery, how the evil Tartars came to "Poland, our land of the fields" and destroyed the farmlands, driving before them a long procession of homeless refugees.
We are still in the 1920s, and the author first visited Poland right after World War I, so we get a nice little digression on war-refugees in general before our specific thirteenth-century refugees arrive in Krakow, which welcomes them and prepares for defence against the Tartars. Almost everyone, city and country mouse alike, goes into the Wawel Castle for the siege, since it's much more defensible than the city proper; those who remain outside the Wawel are killed as soon as the Tartars show up and sack the city...
...except for one young man, the first of this book's two eponymous trumpeters. (I told you this was a prologue.) This young man goes out onto the church's balcony to play the trumpet-call known as the Heynal of Our Lady as he has sworn to do, and after a rather long (by modern standards) dramatically atmospheric scene-setting, he begins to play. Before he finishes the trumpet-call, he is shot and dies, but plays one last "broken note".
The Wiki article about the Heynal adds the really interesting detail that this prologue right here is the first recorded version of this story in any language. Apparently the reason for the Heynal being traditionally played with a "broken note" was never recorded, and... well, let's quote Wiki. "It is possible that Kelly was simply the first to write down the full version of an existing Kraków legend that had escaped collectors of Kraków legends. It is also possible that he was the victim of a hoax or accidentally conflated two different stories." It's also, it seems, unlikely that playing the Heynal was an official thing in Krakow before the 1380s, for several different reasons.
All that said... "Se non è vero, è ben trovato" (If it's not true, it's still a good story). Krakowian tour-guide writers embraced the new legend as early as 1935, and by now it's part of the standard folklore of the city. Which is kind of adorable, really. :D
* Anyway. ON WE GO. Chapter 1 is titled "The Man Who Wouldn't Sell His Pumpkin"! THE THICK PLOTTENS. ^_^
(Sorry. I know exactly what's going on - I did read this book quite a bit as a kid - so I might get a bit hyper-dramatic about the Main Mystery as it develops. *g*)
* It is now 1461, when the remainder of this story will take place. There's a long river of people with wagons flowing into Krakow once again - this time for market-day.
The narratorial camera zooms in on one particular wagon, notable because it's almost empty except for the three people riding in it. It's also a bit fancier than most of the market wagons, with two horses, and "its occupants were better dressed than the peasants and seemed somehow not like actual workers of the soil." Oh dear. All the main characters in this book are going to be relatively upper-class, aren't they? Oh dear. Book, I expected better of you, for some reason.
The man, woman, and teenage boy in this wagon have been travelling for three weeks. They come from the Ukraine, though the woman is Krakowian by ancestry, and something bad happened to bring them to Krakow.
* There is a Commotion behind them. A dude on a horse is shoving his way up through the line of peasants with wagons. Eventually he reaches the wagon we're interested in.
* Pause to describe the kid, fifteen-year-old Joseph Charnetski. "He was not by any means handsome, though he could not be called ugly." -- obviously our Audience Identification Figure. I'm so tired of middle-of-the-road looks being the metric by which an Everyman is defined. Joseph is described in detail: dark hair and eyes, pleasant face, good-quality clothing of the era with each piece from boots to headgear described separately.
Horse dude orders the Charnetskis to stop and tells Joseph to come hold his horse's bridle for him. They do so. Joseph "came to the conclusion that the stranger was no friend", standard-issue Instant Dislike, but at least the author knows what he's done enough to defend himself on the grounds of writing about an era when people were awful and everybody needed to be on guard. (He puts it more poetically than that. I'm too busy loling at how the days he describes - "men of noble birth and breeding thought nothing of defrauding poor peasants, and among the poor peasants themselves were those who would commit crimes for the sake of gold" - are CLEARLY over and done with to take him seriously. At least he isn't pulling class superiority from either direction? Although I note that middle-class types like the Charnetskis are carefully excluded from the whole passage, which I didn't quote in full.)
* Oh, great. OH GREAT. We get a description of the horse dude, who is wearing light chainmail under his jacket and unusual long pants... and I'm just going to quote a few sentences in a row here.
"It was the face, however, that betrayed the soul beneath. It was a dark, oval, wicked face--the eyes were greenish and narrow and the eyebrow line above them ran straight across the bridge of the nose, giving the effect of a monkey rather than a man. One cheek was marked with a buttonlike scar, the scar of the button plague that is so common in the lands east of the Volga, or even the Dneiper, and marks the bearer as a Tartar or a Cossack or a Mongol. The ears were low set and ugly. The mouth looked like the slit that boys make in the pumpkins they carry on the eve of Allhallows." Yadda, yadda, YADDA.
*as sarcastically as possible* GOOD JOB, SIR. We have another evil dark-faced stranger, with the addition of specific ugly facial features to make him Even More Obviously Evul. Not only that, he belongs to the race of EVIL FOREIGNERS we've already met in the prologue (I didn't quote the part where all Tartars are brave but merciless atheists - seriously, "they had hearts of stone and knew not mercy, nor pity, nor tenderness, nor God"), and this is proved by a DISEASE SCAR! Because of course none of the Good people have smallpox scars like EVERYBODY ELSE in the Middle Ages... *rolls eyes nearly out of head*
Sorry. Sorry. I was going to try to be nice about this book. I'm not sure what happened to that. (Well, I am sure. I read it in temporo-cultural context, and the unfortunate bits turned into a never-ending chorus of fail. ;P)
* Anyway, our evil foreign horse-rider (I already know he's a main villain, I'm not going to cut any slack while I find that out this read-through around) is carrying a sword and a jeweled "Oriental dagger", unlike the peasantry who carry knives and quarterstaffs and axes. ;P As soon as Joseph has his horse, Evil Dude jumps straight into the wagon, on which Mr Charnetski, Joseph's dad, promptly grabs his own short sword and points it - still sheathed - at Evil Dude, telling him to stop still and name his business. Evil Dude says "I take it you are Andrew Charnetski" and Mr Charnetski retorts "To strangers I am Pan [Mr] Andrew Charnetski", and then Evil Dude apologizes and does some James Bondish nattering about how he's from Chelm and has been off in Russia on important business he can't talk about, and that he randomly heard the Charnetskis had been driven off their Ukraine farm by Tartar pillagers and so he got a description of them and hunted them down, for what purpose he doesn't say.
* Pan Andrew is Suspicious and says "The half is not yet told." Evil Dude says he'll tell the rest "behind some heavy door" in the city. He adds, "I have heard--" and then draws a circle with his hands in the air. Pan Andrew, suddenly becoming our POV character (though not enough to tell us what this last bit means), freaks out internally but keeps his poker face externally. He calmly asks Evil Dude to get back on his horse and go away because "You have heard naught that concerns me" and also we're blocking traffic.
* Evil Dude says no, he won't leave them till they have their behind-heavy-doors talk in the city, and indeed he's going to ride in the wagon the rest of the way. Pan Andrew gets really mad and orders Evil Dude again to state his business. Evil Dude, seeing a giant pumpkin under the front seat of the wagon, offers to buy the pumpkin; Charnetski refuses, even at its weight in gold; Evil Dude says "then you will fight for it!" Charnetski promptly jumps him, knocks him down, and throws him bare-handed in the ditch, while Joseph swats his horse's hindquarters and sends it running away from Krakow down the road. The Charnetskis hastily drive off toward Krakow, leaving Evil Dude behind.
* Geography, geography, gate of the city, "where they were challenged by the gatekeeper", end chapter.
* They enter the city without trouble, and the next few pages are a detailed word-painting of Krakow at this time: a great international hub of trade, the military and political capital of Poland. Goods and people and religions and money from all over Europe and western Asia mingle in the streets and markets, courtesy of the Hanseatic League and the Silk Road. After these pages, we return to the Charnetskis as, for the first time, Joseph hears the Heynal played from the tallest tower of the Church of Our Lady Mary; he asks about the "broken note" that makes the song sound unfinished, and Pan Andrew says he'll tell the story sometime later.
* Pan Andrew also remarks that the current trumpeter doesn't play very well. The narrator informs us that Pan Andrew himself is a skilled trumpeter and a music-lover. I happen to know that this is Plotty Stuff, although it might be rather obvious anyway. ;-)
* Joseph doesn't ask any more about the Heynal, because he is now POV character staring around at the markets of the city, and the next few pages are again given over to a detailed reconstruction of a Krakow market-day in the mid-fifteenth century. It's a very specific kind of historical fiction, but it's well done for what it is, so I have no criticisms of the way it slows down the pace. I'm pretty sure the plot itself, without this worldbuilding, would fit into a short-story and be much less interesting.
* They head toward the Wawel, go to a certain house outside the walls, and ask the armed guard who stops them to let them see Pan Andrew Tenczynski. The armed guard yells for his squadmates, who surround the wagon, and has somebody fetch the captain; Pan Charnetski does not take this well, yelling out that Pan Tenczynski is his first cousin and he's a landowner from the Ukraine, not a "countryman" like they called him, and they should stop treating him like an enemy. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's nice in Privilegelandia this time of year.
* Turns out Pan Andrew Tenczynski has been recently killed by the smiths' guild for refusing to pay one of their members. They killed him in the church where he sought sanctuary, and everybody is very angry and the Tenczynskis had to leave town, and the city guards are here to make sure no guilds-people burn down the house or massacre the servants who are still staying there. The squad captain advises Pan Charnetski to leave town too, or at least change his name before anybody else figures out he's related to Pan Andrew Tenczynski.
Pan Charnetski explains that he has to stay in town, because he has an important message for the king's ears only, and he was planning to stay with the Tenczynskis while he got in touch with the king. Sadly, the king is out of town indefinitely, putting down some scuffling in the north of Poland. The guard captain suggests they take a house in town and wait for the king's return.
* The Charnetskis go back to the market and Joseph waters the horses, while Pan Andrew talks with his wife and... pretty much freaks out a bit; most of his money was invested in the land the Tartar pillagers drove him off of and the buildings they destroyed, and he was depending on both having shelter when he got to Krakow and finding the king at home. (I don't think it's a major spoiler to say that the Reason He Wouldn't Sell His Pumpkin is the same reason he wants to talk to the king.)
Joseph wanders off to do some more sightseeing, and in a side street he finds a boy - a Tartar boy, of course (sorry, I'm snarking a little more than is necessary; Tartars don't cause ALL the trouble in this book, just like 75% of it) - beating a "large Ukrainian wolf dog" viciously with a short whip.
The Tartar boy and his dog, while crossing the road, meet a man dressed in black and a girl about Joseph's age. Joseph spends the next half a page staring at the girl, who "seemed to him like an angel taken out of a Christmas play, or a spirit from"... yadda yadda etc etc blah blah blah. She's very pretty, very dainty, dressed in red and blue. Yes, she's the love interest, although thankfully she does play some role in the Actual Plot. ;P
Anyway, the dog chooses this moment to attack the Tartar kid, who runs away, and the dog is about to pounce on the man and girl instead (because Reasons) when Joseph grabs the dog's collar and takes it down temporarily, then lets it go, on which it runs away toward the nearby Franciscan church. End chapter.
* The girl kisses Joseph's cheek in thanks, the man thanks him, they fall into conversation, and Joseph explains his family's predicament - carefully not giving away any specifics about the pumpkin and so forth. The man asks Joseph to join them at their house and rest for a little bit, which after some polite give-and-take is what they do.
* Long digression describing the Street of the Pigeons, the quarter of the students and alchemists, the scientists and charlatans, where we're heading. Random historically inaccurate remark about Copernicus's place in disproving astrology. We arrive at the particular house - three-story, each story an apartment, with a loft above. Joseph only sees the loft for a second or two, but he's Plottily Curious about it. (This isn't me knowing what's going on, this is me going off of "the loft which in some unexplainable manner had aroused his curiosity". *dry grin*)
* They eat some food, then the man goes off to see about maybe finding lodgings for the Charnetskis, and Joseph talks with the girl, whose name is Elzbietka. Thankfully she's trustworthy, because he tells her everything he knows about his family's backstory - how they were warned by a "former servant, a friendly Tartar" that their house was going to be sacked, how they fled in the night with a pumpkin, how his father won't sell the pumpkin even for its weight in gold...
...oh Joseph. Oh author. "I think he [Pan Charnetski] would not be pleased that I have told all this about it [the pumpkin], though I know that the secret is safe with you." OH AUTHOR. I can't decide whether I'm impressed with your cheek, excusing your infodumps like this, or just facepalming over the blatant way you excuse your authorial meddlings. ;-)
* Elzbietka's guardian, the man she lives with, is her uncle, who is an alchemist, surnamed Kreutz. I'm not sure if I've been missing important details among all the medieval atmosphere stuff, or if the author skipped over the bit where this information originally came from.
* Elzbietka lost both her parents when she was very young, so she's specially excited to have Mrs Charnetski going to move in, as a kind of foster-mother; so once Kreutz comes back with the news that the second-floor apartment is indeed to let, she tells Joseph to hurry go find his parents and ask if they can move in.
* So he hurries, which is good, because VOILA! What should he find but Evil Dude stirring up trouble again, with a mob of about a hundred people all convinced that Pan Charnetski's important pumpkin is the enchanted head of Evil Dude's dead brother. Joseph is seen and tossed in the wagon with his parents, but before the mob can do anything to them...
...a Franciscan priest RUNS up and is all "What persecution goes on here?" and makes the mob break up. This is "the good Jan Kanty", a scholar during his life, after his death Saint John Cantius (since the Catholic Church Romanized the names of all saints till quite recently). That's the title of the next chapter: "The Good Jan Kanty", just like that.
And I'm only up to page 48, but it's Monday, so here we are: posting time. :-)
I may not get back to this book by next Monday, as I've got an interlibrary loan in - The Dream Coach by Anne Parrish, a 1925 Honor Book - and it's extremely rare and fragile and I have to return it in two weeks. So that's priority.
After that's done, though, it's Trumpeter of Krakow and then (except for the seven interlibrary loans not yet gotten) we'll wind up the Roaring Twenties in grand style with Millions of Cats. XD
(I've read this book before, but it's been many years, and Shen of the Sea shook me badly. ;P)
* There's an "introduction to the new edition" from 1966 which I'm going to ignore for now, as "Hey! This Is A Classic!" introductions tend to give you all the introducer's opinions on what happens in the book and then I spend the rest of the book arguing with the introducer instead of actually reading. ;-)
* Anyway, I know perfectly well that this is a work of fiction based loosely around a true historical tradition, and I'm not in the least interested in hearing how this is such a good book it has overcome the terrible handicap of featuring the *shock horror!* Weird Name "Krakow" on the cover, not to mention "a king so oddly named as Kazimir Jagiello" within... okay, I really am skipping now. That was all on the first page of the introduction. :P
* The book proper, after that, starts with the "Ancient Oath of the Krakow Trumpeter" translated into English, and as that's the heart and title-giver of the book, I will quote it here in full: "I swear on my honor as a Pole, as a servant of the King of the Polish people, that I will faithfully and unto the death, if there be need, sound upon the trumpet the Heynal in honor of Our Lady each hour in the tower of the church which bears Her Name."
* Before Chapter 1 there is a prologue, "The Broken Note", set in 1241. It tells in a Polish folk-teller's voice, full of vivid imagery, how the evil Tartars came to "Poland, our land of the fields" and destroyed the farmlands, driving before them a long procession of homeless refugees.
We are still in the 1920s, and the author first visited Poland right after World War I, so we get a nice little digression on war-refugees in general before our specific thirteenth-century refugees arrive in Krakow, which welcomes them and prepares for defence against the Tartars. Almost everyone, city and country mouse alike, goes into the Wawel Castle for the siege, since it's much more defensible than the city proper; those who remain outside the Wawel are killed as soon as the Tartars show up and sack the city...
...except for one young man, the first of this book's two eponymous trumpeters. (I told you this was a prologue.) This young man goes out onto the church's balcony to play the trumpet-call known as the Heynal of Our Lady as he has sworn to do, and after a rather long (by modern standards) dramatically atmospheric scene-setting, he begins to play. Before he finishes the trumpet-call, he is shot and dies, but plays one last "broken note".
The Wiki article about the Heynal adds the really interesting detail that this prologue right here is the first recorded version of this story in any language. Apparently the reason for the Heynal being traditionally played with a "broken note" was never recorded, and... well, let's quote Wiki. "It is possible that Kelly was simply the first to write down the full version of an existing Kraków legend that had escaped collectors of Kraków legends. It is also possible that he was the victim of a hoax or accidentally conflated two different stories." It's also, it seems, unlikely that playing the Heynal was an official thing in Krakow before the 1380s, for several different reasons.
All that said... "Se non è vero, è ben trovato" (If it's not true, it's still a good story). Krakowian tour-guide writers embraced the new legend as early as 1935, and by now it's part of the standard folklore of the city. Which is kind of adorable, really. :D
* Anyway. ON WE GO. Chapter 1 is titled "The Man Who Wouldn't Sell His Pumpkin"! THE THICK PLOTTENS. ^_^
(Sorry. I know exactly what's going on - I did read this book quite a bit as a kid - so I might get a bit hyper-dramatic about the Main Mystery as it develops. *g*)
* It is now 1461, when the remainder of this story will take place. There's a long river of people with wagons flowing into Krakow once again - this time for market-day.
The narratorial camera zooms in on one particular wagon, notable because it's almost empty except for the three people riding in it. It's also a bit fancier than most of the market wagons, with two horses, and "its occupants were better dressed than the peasants and seemed somehow not like actual workers of the soil." Oh dear. All the main characters in this book are going to be relatively upper-class, aren't they? Oh dear. Book, I expected better of you, for some reason.
The man, woman, and teenage boy in this wagon have been travelling for three weeks. They come from the Ukraine, though the woman is Krakowian by ancestry, and something bad happened to bring them to Krakow.
* There is a Commotion behind them. A dude on a horse is shoving his way up through the line of peasants with wagons. Eventually he reaches the wagon we're interested in.
* Pause to describe the kid, fifteen-year-old Joseph Charnetski. "He was not by any means handsome, though he could not be called ugly." -- obviously our Audience Identification Figure. I'm so tired of middle-of-the-road looks being the metric by which an Everyman is defined. Joseph is described in detail: dark hair and eyes, pleasant face, good-quality clothing of the era with each piece from boots to headgear described separately.
Horse dude orders the Charnetskis to stop and tells Joseph to come hold his horse's bridle for him. They do so. Joseph "came to the conclusion that the stranger was no friend", standard-issue Instant Dislike, but at least the author knows what he's done enough to defend himself on the grounds of writing about an era when people were awful and everybody needed to be on guard. (He puts it more poetically than that. I'm too busy loling at how the days he describes - "men of noble birth and breeding thought nothing of defrauding poor peasants, and among the poor peasants themselves were those who would commit crimes for the sake of gold" - are CLEARLY over and done with to take him seriously. At least he isn't pulling class superiority from either direction? Although I note that middle-class types like the Charnetskis are carefully excluded from the whole passage, which I didn't quote in full.)
* Oh, great. OH GREAT. We get a description of the horse dude, who is wearing light chainmail under his jacket and unusual long pants... and I'm just going to quote a few sentences in a row here.
"It was the face, however, that betrayed the soul beneath. It was a dark, oval, wicked face--the eyes were greenish and narrow and the eyebrow line above them ran straight across the bridge of the nose, giving the effect of a monkey rather than a man. One cheek was marked with a buttonlike scar, the scar of the button plague that is so common in the lands east of the Volga, or even the Dneiper, and marks the bearer as a Tartar or a Cossack or a Mongol. The ears were low set and ugly. The mouth looked like the slit that boys make in the pumpkins they carry on the eve of Allhallows." Yadda, yadda, YADDA.
*as sarcastically as possible* GOOD JOB, SIR. We have another evil dark-faced stranger, with the addition of specific ugly facial features to make him Even More Obviously Evul. Not only that, he belongs to the race of EVIL FOREIGNERS we've already met in the prologue (I didn't quote the part where all Tartars are brave but merciless atheists - seriously, "they had hearts of stone and knew not mercy, nor pity, nor tenderness, nor God"), and this is proved by a DISEASE SCAR! Because of course none of the Good people have smallpox scars like EVERYBODY ELSE in the Middle Ages... *rolls eyes nearly out of head*
Sorry. Sorry. I was going to try to be nice about this book. I'm not sure what happened to that. (Well, I am sure. I read it in temporo-cultural context, and the unfortunate bits turned into a never-ending chorus of fail. ;P)
* Anyway, our evil foreign horse-rider (I already know he's a main villain, I'm not going to cut any slack while I find that out this read-through around) is carrying a sword and a jeweled "Oriental dagger", unlike the peasantry who carry knives and quarterstaffs and axes. ;P As soon as Joseph has his horse, Evil Dude jumps straight into the wagon, on which Mr Charnetski, Joseph's dad, promptly grabs his own short sword and points it - still sheathed - at Evil Dude, telling him to stop still and name his business. Evil Dude says "I take it you are Andrew Charnetski" and Mr Charnetski retorts "To strangers I am Pan [Mr] Andrew Charnetski", and then Evil Dude apologizes and does some James Bondish nattering about how he's from Chelm and has been off in Russia on important business he can't talk about, and that he randomly heard the Charnetskis had been driven off their Ukraine farm by Tartar pillagers and so he got a description of them and hunted them down, for what purpose he doesn't say.
* Pan Andrew is Suspicious and says "The half is not yet told." Evil Dude says he'll tell the rest "behind some heavy door" in the city. He adds, "I have heard--" and then draws a circle with his hands in the air. Pan Andrew, suddenly becoming our POV character (though not enough to tell us what this last bit means), freaks out internally but keeps his poker face externally. He calmly asks Evil Dude to get back on his horse and go away because "You have heard naught that concerns me" and also we're blocking traffic.
* Evil Dude says no, he won't leave them till they have their behind-heavy-doors talk in the city, and indeed he's going to ride in the wagon the rest of the way. Pan Andrew gets really mad and orders Evil Dude again to state his business. Evil Dude, seeing a giant pumpkin under the front seat of the wagon, offers to buy the pumpkin; Charnetski refuses, even at its weight in gold; Evil Dude says "then you will fight for it!" Charnetski promptly jumps him, knocks him down, and throws him bare-handed in the ditch, while Joseph swats his horse's hindquarters and sends it running away from Krakow down the road. The Charnetskis hastily drive off toward Krakow, leaving Evil Dude behind.
* Geography, geography, gate of the city, "where they were challenged by the gatekeeper", end chapter.
* They enter the city without trouble, and the next few pages are a detailed word-painting of Krakow at this time: a great international hub of trade, the military and political capital of Poland. Goods and people and religions and money from all over Europe and western Asia mingle in the streets and markets, courtesy of the Hanseatic League and the Silk Road. After these pages, we return to the Charnetskis as, for the first time, Joseph hears the Heynal played from the tallest tower of the Church of Our Lady Mary; he asks about the "broken note" that makes the song sound unfinished, and Pan Andrew says he'll tell the story sometime later.
* Pan Andrew also remarks that the current trumpeter doesn't play very well. The narrator informs us that Pan Andrew himself is a skilled trumpeter and a music-lover. I happen to know that this is Plotty Stuff, although it might be rather obvious anyway. ;-)
* Joseph doesn't ask any more about the Heynal, because he is now POV character staring around at the markets of the city, and the next few pages are again given over to a detailed reconstruction of a Krakow market-day in the mid-fifteenth century. It's a very specific kind of historical fiction, but it's well done for what it is, so I have no criticisms of the way it slows down the pace. I'm pretty sure the plot itself, without this worldbuilding, would fit into a short-story and be much less interesting.
* They head toward the Wawel, go to a certain house outside the walls, and ask the armed guard who stops them to let them see Pan Andrew Tenczynski. The armed guard yells for his squadmates, who surround the wagon, and has somebody fetch the captain; Pan Charnetski does not take this well, yelling out that Pan Tenczynski is his first cousin and he's a landowner from the Ukraine, not a "countryman" like they called him, and they should stop treating him like an enemy. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's nice in Privilegelandia this time of year.
* Turns out Pan Andrew Tenczynski has been recently killed by the smiths' guild for refusing to pay one of their members. They killed him in the church where he sought sanctuary, and everybody is very angry and the Tenczynskis had to leave town, and the city guards are here to make sure no guilds-people burn down the house or massacre the servants who are still staying there. The squad captain advises Pan Charnetski to leave town too, or at least change his name before anybody else figures out he's related to Pan Andrew Tenczynski.
Pan Charnetski explains that he has to stay in town, because he has an important message for the king's ears only, and he was planning to stay with the Tenczynskis while he got in touch with the king. Sadly, the king is out of town indefinitely, putting down some scuffling in the north of Poland. The guard captain suggests they take a house in town and wait for the king's return.
* The Charnetskis go back to the market and Joseph waters the horses, while Pan Andrew talks with his wife and... pretty much freaks out a bit; most of his money was invested in the land the Tartar pillagers drove him off of and the buildings they destroyed, and he was depending on both having shelter when he got to Krakow and finding the king at home. (I don't think it's a major spoiler to say that the Reason He Wouldn't Sell His Pumpkin is the same reason he wants to talk to the king.)
Joseph wanders off to do some more sightseeing, and in a side street he finds a boy - a Tartar boy, of course (sorry, I'm snarking a little more than is necessary; Tartars don't cause ALL the trouble in this book, just like 75% of it) - beating a "large Ukrainian wolf dog" viciously with a short whip.
The Tartar boy and his dog, while crossing the road, meet a man dressed in black and a girl about Joseph's age. Joseph spends the next half a page staring at the girl, who "seemed to him like an angel taken out of a Christmas play, or a spirit from"... yadda yadda etc etc blah blah blah. She's very pretty, very dainty, dressed in red and blue. Yes, she's the love interest, although thankfully she does play some role in the Actual Plot. ;P
Anyway, the dog chooses this moment to attack the Tartar kid, who runs away, and the dog is about to pounce on the man and girl instead (because Reasons) when Joseph grabs the dog's collar and takes it down temporarily, then lets it go, on which it runs away toward the nearby Franciscan church. End chapter.
* The girl kisses Joseph's cheek in thanks, the man thanks him, they fall into conversation, and Joseph explains his family's predicament - carefully not giving away any specifics about the pumpkin and so forth. The man asks Joseph to join them at their house and rest for a little bit, which after some polite give-and-take is what they do.
* Long digression describing the Street of the Pigeons, the quarter of the students and alchemists, the scientists and charlatans, where we're heading. Random historically inaccurate remark about Copernicus's place in disproving astrology. We arrive at the particular house - three-story, each story an apartment, with a loft above. Joseph only sees the loft for a second or two, but he's Plottily Curious about it. (This isn't me knowing what's going on, this is me going off of "the loft which in some unexplainable manner had aroused his curiosity". *dry grin*)
* They eat some food, then the man goes off to see about maybe finding lodgings for the Charnetskis, and Joseph talks with the girl, whose name is Elzbietka. Thankfully she's trustworthy, because he tells her everything he knows about his family's backstory - how they were warned by a "former servant, a friendly Tartar" that their house was going to be sacked, how they fled in the night with a pumpkin, how his father won't sell the pumpkin even for its weight in gold...
...oh Joseph. Oh author. "I think he [Pan Charnetski] would not be pleased that I have told all this about it [the pumpkin], though I know that the secret is safe with you." OH AUTHOR. I can't decide whether I'm impressed with your cheek, excusing your infodumps like this, or just facepalming over the blatant way you excuse your authorial meddlings. ;-)
* Elzbietka's guardian, the man she lives with, is her uncle, who is an alchemist, surnamed Kreutz. I'm not sure if I've been missing important details among all the medieval atmosphere stuff, or if the author skipped over the bit where this information originally came from.
* Elzbietka lost both her parents when she was very young, so she's specially excited to have Mrs Charnetski going to move in, as a kind of foster-mother; so once Kreutz comes back with the news that the second-floor apartment is indeed to let, she tells Joseph to hurry go find his parents and ask if they can move in.
* So he hurries, which is good, because VOILA! What should he find but Evil Dude stirring up trouble again, with a mob of about a hundred people all convinced that Pan Charnetski's important pumpkin is the enchanted head of Evil Dude's dead brother. Joseph is seen and tossed in the wagon with his parents, but before the mob can do anything to them...
...a Franciscan priest RUNS up and is all "What persecution goes on here?" and makes the mob break up. This is "the good Jan Kanty", a scholar during his life, after his death Saint John Cantius (since the Catholic Church Romanized the names of all saints till quite recently). That's the title of the next chapter: "The Good Jan Kanty", just like that.
And I'm only up to page 48, but it's Monday, so here we are: posting time. :-)
I may not get back to this book by next Monday, as I've got an interlibrary loan in - The Dream Coach by Anne Parrish, a 1925 Honor Book - and it's extremely rare and fragile and I have to return it in two weeks. So that's priority.
After that's done, though, it's Trumpeter of Krakow and then (except for the seven interlibrary loans not yet gotten) we'll wind up the Roaring Twenties in grand style with Millions of Cats. XD