“As you will.” Huncleder shrugged. “But for us, m’lords, here is the plan: we’ll first play dice. Then, when there are fewer of us, we shall play piquet or another ludus cartularum. And during it we’ll have the spectacle. I mean the artistic interlude. And now, come on, m’lords! Glückhaus! Place your bets. Fortune, smile on us!”
For some time, all that could be heard were curses, the chink of coins thrown onto the fields, the rattle of acozzamento and the sound of the dice rolling on the table.
“Something tells me,” said Berengar Tauler, taking a sip from his beaker, “that Amadej will lose his shirt in a trice and return here. So if you have anything to say in confidence, do it now.”
“And why do you suppose I do?”
“Intuition.”
“Ha. Very well. Trosky Castle, in the Jičín hills, near Turnov—”
“I know where Trosky Castle is.”
“Have you been there? Do you know it well?”
“I’ve been there many times; I know it very well. Why do you ask?”
“We want to gain access.”
Berengar Tauler took a sip. “What for?” he asked, seemingly carelessly.
“Oh, you know, for amusement,” Reynevan answered, his tone similarly careless. “It’s our caprice and favourite pastime: finding our way into Catholic castles.”
“Understood. No further questions. So Scharley is subtly reminding me of the debt I owe him. Am I to pay off my debt like that? Very well, I’ll think it over.”
“Is that a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’?”
“It means I’ll think it over. Hey, Marketa! Wine, if you please!”
The ginger-haired, freckled girl with the lifeless face and empty eyes filled his cup. Her figure more than made up for her lack of good looks, and as the girl moved away from the table, Reynevan couldn’t restrain himself from looking at her waist and hips, rocking in a gentle, swaying and quite hypnotic walk.
“I see that your eye is pleased by our Marketa,” observed Tauler with a smile. “Our tableau vivant. Our Adamite.”
“Adamite?”
“You mean you don’t know anything? Scharley didn’t say? Or perhaps you’ve never heard of the Adamites?”
“It rings some sort of bell. But I’m a Silesian, I’ve been in Bohemia but two years…”
“Order something to drink. And make yourself comfortable.”
Once Reynevan had been served, Berengar Tauler began his tale. “When the Czech revolution occurred, a considerable number of cranks and crazies emerged from the shadows. In 1419, a wave of religious hysteria, lunacy and mysticism passed through the country. Fanatical prophets were everywhere, warning of the end of the world. People abandoned everything and went into the mountains in large numbers, to wait for the second coming of Christ. All this was grist to the mill to old, forgotten sects. Various fucked-up chiliasts, Adventists, Nicolaites, Paternians, spiritualists, Waldensians, Beghards and the Devil knows who else—it was impossible to count them—crawled out of their burrows…”
A heated exchange had begun at the dice table, various words were used, some of them coarse. Manfred of Salm was fulminating the loudest.
“And then sermons, prophecies, predictions, omens and apocalypses began,” continued Tauler. “Some proclaimed the coming of the Third Age, but that the old world had first to be consumed by fire. And then Christ would return in glory, the Divine Kingdom would come, the saints would be resurrected, evil men would inevitably suffer eternal damnation and the good would live in heavenly bliss. Everything would be shared; all personal property would disappear. There would be no rich or poor, no poverty or oppression. A state of universal perfection, happiness and peace would reign. There would be no more misfortune, wars or persecution. Nobody would ever attack another or lead him into sin. Nor covet his wife. Because wives would also be for common use.
“But the world didn’t end, as we know, Christ didn’t descend to Earth, people came to their senses and chiliasm and Adventism began to lose their followers. The dreams of equality were shattered, like the fantasies about the elimination of all power and all obligation. The revolutionary Tábor restored state structures and by the autumn of 1420 began to gather duties and taxes. Obligatory ones, naturally.
“The structures of church authority were also reconstructed, as were those of the Taborites. The leader of the Hussites, Bishop Mikuláš of Pelhřimov, proclaimed from the pulpit the canon of true faith and accused anyone who didn’t respect it of being an apostate and a heretic. And thus the Hussites, the greatest heretics in Europe, found their own heretics, their own dissidents. Their own Picards.”
“The name, I believe, is a corruption of ‘Beghard’?” Reynevan interjected.
“Some would say so,” Tauler replied, nodding, “but it’s more likely from Picardy and the Waldensians, who came here in 1418, finding in Bohemia sanctuary and an astonishing number of adherents. The movement grew in strength and followers, led by the Moravian Martin Húska, called ‘Loquis’ for his eloquence. To call them radicals would be quite an understatement. They exhorted people to demolish churches, since the true church of God, they claimed, is a pilgrim church. They utterly rejected the Eucharist. They renounced the significance of all the objects of religion, destroyed every monstrance and every Host they got their hands on. Everything that exists is God, they proclaimed, ergo, man is also God. Holy Communion can be given by anyone, they claimed, and it can be received under any kind. That claim particularly annoyed the Calixtines. ‘What do you mean?’ the latter howled. ‘Master Huss was burned and we spill blood for Holy Communion sub utraque specie, in bread and wine, and here some Martin Loquis gives it under the kind of kasha, peas and sour milk?’”
Samson diligently whittled away in his corner. Beautiful, coiled shavings curled over the blade of his pocketknife.
“By February 1421, they’d had enough of the sectarians. They were expelled from the Tábor and sent away. Around four hundred Picards left the mountain and founded their own fortified camp in nearby Příběnice—”
“What are you talking about?” Amadej Baťa asked curiously, returning from the card table with the forced cheerfulness of a fellow who has lost all his money.
“The Picards.”
“Aah? The nudes? Ho-ho… I understand…”
Tauler took up his tale again. “Húska Loquis was no longer among the Příběnice outcasts—they were now led by the preacher Petr Kániš and his cronies Jan Bydlín, Mikuláš Slepý, Trsáček and Burján. They announced the abolishment of all family ties and invalidated marriage. They proclaimed brotherly equality and absolute sexual freedom. They claimed that they were pure, like Adam and Eve, and among the pure there was no room for sin. They cast off their robes and paraded naked, like Adam’s state before the fall, and soon acquired the popular nickname of ‘Adamites.’ They began to indulge enthusiastically in mass orgies. However, internal squabbles and differences soon emerged among their ringleader priests—it seems the conflict was less about religious questions and more about the division of their harems. Several ringleaders left, taking with them small gaggles of followers and flocks of young women. As a matter of fact, most of the women were happy in the Picardian communes, where the idea of complete sexual equality was promoted. It was presented, nota bene, in such a way that any woman could sleep with and fuck whoever she wanted to. That freedom was actually sham, for Kániš and the other priests played the role of cockerels in those henhouses. But the women were so captivated, so full of promiscuous mysticism, that they vied with each other to serve some ‘holy man,’ viewed spreading their legs as a privilege, a religious service, and literally regarded it as grace if in his goodness a ‘holy man’ deigned to sanctify their readily proffered arses—”