Looking up at vast rooves had been Jack's way to relieve his eyes and mind from the strain of following the action on the ground. There were Eastern men in felt hats with giant rims of rich gleaming fur, talking to long-bearded Jews about racks of animal pelts – the faces of small nasty critters gaping blankly at the sky. Chinese carrying crates of what he had to assume was China, coopers repairing busted casks, bakers hawking loaves, blonde maidens with piles of oranges, musicians everywhere, grinding hurdy-gurdys or plucking at mutant lutes with huge cantilevers projecting asymmetrically from their necks to support thumping bass halyards. Armenian coffee-sellers carrying bright steaming copper and brass tanks on their persons, bored guards with pikes or halberds, turbaned Turks attempting to buy back strange goods that (Jack realized with a shock) had also been looted from the Vienna siege-camp – he was amused but, actually, embarrassed and irritated that others had had the same idea. A hookah-smoking area where Turkish boys in pointy-toed slippers scurried from one small table to the next carrying smouldering braziers of ornately wrought silver from which they selected individual coals with silver tongs and placed them carefully atop the hookahs' tobacco-bowls to keep them burning. Everywhere, goods: but here in the square they were in casks, or wrapped up in square bales held together by rope-nets, all marked with curious initials and monograms: trade-marks of diverse merchants.