On the other hand, he oughtn’t to delay or stand passively by, either. He still took the Green Lady’s words to heart. In Silesia, he was an exile, a wanted outlaw, a Hussite, an enemy, a spy and a saboteur. What he was, what he believed in and how he lived his life exposed Jutta to danger and harm. The Green Lady, Agnes of Apolda, Jutta’s mother, was right—if he had even a little decency, he wouldn’t put the girl at risk, wouldn’t allow her to suffer because of him.
The conversation with the abbess had changed everything, or at least plenty. The monastery in White Church, the very fact of being there, was actually much more dangerous to Jutta than her relationship with Reynevan. The theses of Joachim and the Spiritualists, the heresy (somehow he still couldn’t think about it otherwise, or find another word for it)—the Builders of the Third Church, the cult of Guglielma and Maifreda—all were considered by Rome and the Inquisition to be just as serious an apostasy as Hussitism. In any case, Rome made no distinctions between heresies and apostasies. Every heretic was the Devil’s lackey. It also applied—which was downright ridiculous—to the cult of the Great Mother, which was after all older than humanity. And the Devil, which Rome had only just invented.
But the fact remained: the cult of the Triple Goddess, the worship of Guglielma, the errors of Joachim, the Sisterhood of the Free Spirit, the Third Church—each of those things was enough to send her to prison, to the stake or to penitential imprisonment for life in the Dominican dungeons. Jutta should not remain in the convent.
Something had to be done.
Reynevan knew what. Or at least felt it instinctively.
“You asked me in the wintertime.” He turned over on his side and looked her in the eyes. “You asked if I was ready to abandon everything. If I was ready simply to flee, go with you to the end of the world. I answer ‘yes’ to that. I love you, Jutta, and want to join with you until death do us part. The world, it appears, is doing what it can to thwart us in that. So let’s drop everything and flee. If necessary, to Constantinople.”
She said nothing, stroking him pensively for a long time.
“And your mission?” she finally asked, weighing her words slowly. “You have a mission, don’t you? You have convictions. You have a genuinely urgent and sacred duty. You want to change the face of the world, improve it, make it better. What then? Will you abandon your mission? Give it up? Forget about the Grail?”
Danger, he thought. Caution. Danger.
“A mission,” she continued, speaking even slower. “Convictions. A vocation. Sacrifice. Ideals. The Kingdom of God and the desire for it to come about. A dream for it to come about. A fight for it to come about. Are they things that can be given up, Reinmar?”
“Jutta.” He decided to speak, raising himself up on an elbow. “I can’t bear to see you putting yourself at risk. Rumours about what you believe here are circulating—many people know what happens in this convent. I found out about it myself last winter, at the end of last year, so it’s no secret. Denunciations may already have reached the relevant people. You’re living in great danger. Maifreda of Pirovano was burned at the stake in Milan. Fifteen years later, in 1315, two and a half score Beguines were burned to death in Świdnica…”
And the Adamites in Bohemia, he suddenly thought. And the Picards, tortured and burned at the stake. The cause I’ve dedicated myself to persecutes dissidents no less cruelly than Rome…
“Every day,” he said, driving away the thought, “may be the day of your doom, Jutta. You could die—”
“You could, too,” she said, interrupting. “You could have fallen in battle. You’ve also taken risks.”
“Yes, but not for—”
“Chimeras, yes? Go on, say it out loud. Chimeras. Women’s fancies?”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Yes, you did.”
They fell silent. Outside was the August night. And crickets.
“Jutta.”
“Yes, Reinmar.”
“Let’s go away. I love you. We love one another, and love… Let’s find the Kingdom of God within us. Inside us.”
“Should I believe you? That you’ll give up—”
“Believe me.”
“You are sacrificing much for me,” she said after a longer pause. “I value that. And love you all the more for it. But if we abandon our ideals… If you give up yours, and I mine… I can’t help thinking it would be like—”
“Like what?”
“Like endura. Without hope for consolamentum.”
“You sound like a Cathar.”
“Montségur lives on,” she whispered with her mouth right by his ear. “The Holy Grail hasn’t been found yet.”
She touched him, touched and stunned him with a gentle but thrilling caress. When she got up onto her knees, her eyes were burning in the darkness. When she leaned over him, she was slowly gentle, like a wave stroking the sand of a beach. Her breath was hot, hotter than her lips. Samson was right, came a thought, before the bliss snatched away his ability to think. Samson was right. This place is my Ogygia. And she is my Calypso.
“Montségur lives on.” A few moments passed before he heard her loud whisper. “And will endure. It won’t surrender and will never be taken.”
August 1428 was hot, a simply insufferable heatwave that lasted until the middle of the month, until the Assumption of Mary, called by the people the Feast of Our Lady of Herbs. September was also very warm. The weather only began to get slightly cooler after Saint Matthew’s Day. Rains fell on the twenty-third of September.
And old friends returned on the twenty-fourth.
The first signal of the return of the old friends was supplied—with the mediation of the dependable convent gardener—by rumours, at first vague and not very precise, and gradually increasingly detailed. Somebody had been distributing pamphlets in the town square of Brzeg, portraying a goat-headed monster with a papal tiara on its horned head. A few days later, pictures of a similar kind appeared in Wiązów and Strzelin—on them was a pig dressed in a mitre, with wording that left no doubt: Conradus episcopus sum.
A few weeks later, things became a little more serious. Some unknown perpetrators—the rumour multiplied their number to twenty—had attacked and stabbed to death on the Wrocław road Sir Rypert of Seidlitz, the deputy chief of the Świdnica counter-intelligence service, known for his cruel persecution of people suspected of pro-Hussite sympathies. A Grodków town hall scribe who had bragged of denouncing more than a hundred people was stabbed to death. In Sobótka, a crossbow bolt hit the parish priest from Saint Anne’s—who was particularly fierce towards his more free-thinking parishioners—as he was giving the sermon.
On the Friday after Saint Matthew’s Day, the twenty-fourth of September—before even the rumour about the village headman being stabbed to death in nearby Przeworno had reached the convent—Bisclavret and Rzehors appeared in White Church. They weren’t allowed through the gate, naturally, but had to wait for Reynevan in the grange outside the convent by the well. When he arrived, Rzehors was washing the blood off the sleeve of his jerkin in the trough and Bisclavret was perfunctorily cleaning his navaja which was sticky with blood.