Her uncle, when she sees him next, is flushed and pink, his own hair tousled, which would confirm her theory of what he has been up to. He says, “Your head looks like a caltrop, Joan, those spiked balls one throws on the battlefield, to make horses and charging men go lame.”

“You can do that?” she asks him.

“In a battle, you can do anything” is his reply.

VI

Whenever there is a fair, people will comment, as though they were alive then to see it, “If you had only been to the fairs of times past—now, those were real occasions, worthy of being remembered. This is nothing compared to what they used to be.” And they will count the deficiencies: How there were formerly jongleurs singing in every street and dancing bears. How there was a lion—a real lion—at the Fair of Saint Jean in Troyes. And today, we have no lions anymore, not even among our own princes and lords. Ha-ha!

These same people will talk about the famous cloth markets, where merchants from Lucca and Bruges greeted each other as old friends or old enemies in the common tongue of the fairs, which was of course French, and where there was cloth for purchase of every weave and color imaginable. Of reds alone, there numbered several shades, and the best, the most blinding vermilions, hailed from the guilds of Italy, particularly Florence. As long as you had money, there was nothing you could not get your hands on: a cotton or linen in a particular shade of green, a citrine yellow finished with gold brocade, the wool of Cambrai or the wool of Ypres. Expert fingers unfurled their bolts and showed you your every desire, as if it were a map only they possessed.

And the spices…If you couldn’t afford saffron—and if we are honest, how many of us can—you could at least see it, the small clump of crimson threads, as untidy as a bird’s nest, resting in a merchant’s palm, that is worth more than four healthy sheep combined.

But these people, these lovers of the past, forget what happens between two points, from the Byzantine city of Constantinople to the French city of Provins: the pack trains of braying, tired mules, the creaking wheels of caravans, the horses gone lame three-quarters of the way through a journey of craggy trails and nonexistent roads. They forget the challenges of driving a cart through mud to a destination one mile away, to say nothing of a few hundred. And all for what: to transport a sack of peppercorns, an iron case of ivory, a barrel of Auxerre wine. They forget that in between this fair and the Fair of Saint Jean two centuries ago, the Black Death happened, and millions perished.