The walls of the fort were made of wood where the stone was gone. One stone tower was perfect. The Romans had built it with greater care and staying power, with a mosaic of a snarling dog in the center of the floor. The woodchucks came in and out under the walls of the fort just as the guards and the warden went in and out the door each day after eight in the morning. At night the door was locked. No guards were wasted with nighttime duty. Budgets were tight in the town due to flooding and plague. They set a stick with a hat in the guardhouse. It made convincing shadows. The criminals might have pushed the walls down together. They never thought of it. They played cards in the sun or snow in blankets.

Once the guard said, “Come give me your blankets,” and they all got in a line, one by one, and handed their blankets over to him, all except a man from the tree in the jail yard. They said he had once been a spy. He was young and handsome, tall, blond, and lovesick. They called him the Swede. He sat there all day on a branch, every day, and never played cards. They guessed, at first, he was blind. They admired the way he climbed the tree anyway, felt his way up the trunk and branches with his fingers. He watched the birds that sat on the wall. The other prisoners barely noticed the Swede, thought of him as they thought of the birds, as decoration. When his turn came in line, he gave the guard his blanket, but also his shirt, pants, and rotten stockings, shivered in the tree after, this being November, turned blue and nearly died. They called him the Crazy Swede after that. The guard went home at night to a warm hearth, sent his boys off to work, apprentices for the potters and barrel makers and that newfangled printer. The guard told his boys to learn to read, to keep their faces clean before the master’s wives, to stay away from his girls as long as possible, to push boys down if they were provoked in the street. “This is a bad world,” he told his sons. “Full of bad men.”