The fact that Berengar Tauler and Amadej Baťa had remained with the company was somewhat astonishing, frankly; Reynevan hadn’t expected to see them after they parted. Tauler often conferred with Scharley, quietly and secretly, so Reynevan suspected that the penitent had tempted him with some fibs, the confabulated prospect of imagined loot. When asked directly, Berengar smiled mysteriously and declared that he preferred their company to Prokop’s Taborites, whom he had abandoned because war was a thing without a future, and soldiering a thing without prospects.
“To be sure,” added Amadej Baťa, “shoemaking has a real future. Everybody needs footwear, don’t they? My father-in-law is a shoemaker. I’ll just save up a few pennies, let order return to the world, then I’ll go into business and expand my father-in-law’s workshop into a manufactory. I shall manufacture poulaines. On a large scale. Soon the whole world will be wearing Baťa poulaines, you’ll see.”
It had stopped raining and begun drizzling. Reynevan stood up in the stirrups and looked back.
The Cherethites and Pelethites, wet and gloomy, were following them. They hadn’t got lost in the pouring rain and the fog.
Unfortunately.
As it turned out, Flutek had been behind the gift of that hideous company, that motley and foul-smelling rabble. Indirectly. The pleasure was directly due to Hašek Sýkora, the deputy head of the propaganda department.
“Ah, good day, good day,” Hašek Sýkora greeted them when Reynevan appeared before him with Scharley and Tauler. “Ah, I know. The expedition to Podještědí. I’ve received my instructions. Everything is prepared. First, I must finish these woodcuts… Ah! I must finish, for the emissaries are waiting—”
“May I take a look?” asked Scharley.
“Ah?” Sýkora clearly loved that interjection. “Ah! A look? By all means. Go ahead.”
The propaganda woodcut, one of many lying on the table, portrayed a monster with a horned goat’s head, a tuft of hair on its chin and a hideous, scornful goat’s face. The monster was wearing something like a dalmatic on its shoulders, a flaming tiara on its horned head and slippers with crosses on its feet. It held a pitchfork in one hand and was holding the other in a gesture of benediction. There was an inscription over the beast: EGO SUM PAPA.
“Few people can read,” said Scharley, pointing at the words. “And the picture isn’t that distinct. How are simple folk to know it’s the Pope? Perhaps it’s Huss?”
“May God forgive your blasphemy!” Sýkora choked. “Ah… Folk will know, never fear. They—I mean the papists—print pictures of Huss. They—the blasphemers—depict him in the form of a goose with teeth. It has become established. Simple folk know: Beelzebub, a horned, goat-like devil, means the Roman Pope, while a goose with teeth means Huss. Ah, and there’s your escort, reporting for duty.”
The escort had lined up on the parade ground in a somewhat ragged line. It consisted of ten thugs. Their faces were loathsome. The rest of them, too. They resembled a pack of thieves and marauders armed with whatever they could scrounge and dressed in whatever they could filch. Or find on a dust heap.
“Ah, here are your men, at your command from now on,” the deputy head of the propaganda department said, pointing at them. “From the right: Jewel, Cheapjack, Warrior, Dung, Beetle, Ostrich, Dunnock, Bag, Pea-Muncher, Mořic the Scrapper.”
“May I,” Scharley said in the baleful silence, “request a word in private?”
“Ah?”
“I won’t ask,” the penitent drawled when they were alone, “if these gentlemen’s names are their own or aliases. Although in principle I ought to look into it, since one can judge bandits by their nicknames and noms de guerre. But never mind. I wish to ask about something else: I know from Sir Reinmar Bielawa that Brother Neplach promised us a solid and reliable escort. An escort! What kind of a rabble is lined up over there? Is it the bloody Cherethites and Pelethites? Dick, Prick, Shitter and Crapper?”
Hašek Sýkora’s jaw jutted out menacingly. “Brother Neplach ordered me to give you men,” he snapped, “and what are they, eh? Birds of the sky, perhaps? Or fish of the sea? Frogs of the marsh? Not at all. They are men. The men I can spare at the moment. There aren’t any others. You don’t like them, ah? You’d prefer, ah, big-breasted women? Or Saint George on a horse? Lohengrin on a swan? I’m sorry, nothing doing. They’ve all gone.”
“But—”
“Are you taking them or not? Make your mind up.”
The following day, amazingly, it stopped raining. The horses, trudging through the mud, were walking a lot more energetically and briskly. Amadej Baťa began to whistle. Even the Cherethites and Pelethites—the squad of ten men led by Mořic the Scrapper that Scharley had christened with biblical names—had become animated. The previously gloomy, morose slovens who had appeared to be constantly at odds with the world began to converse, swap lewd jokes and chuckle. And finally, to everyone’s amazement, sing. In Czech.
The skylarks are calling me high above the moors,
Saying my true love cavorts with vulgar boors.
I should let her tarry and take my feather bed,
To lay it neath a tree and rest my tired head…
A son, thought Reynevan. I have a son. His name’s Vitus. He was born a year and four months ago on Saint Vitus’s Day. Exactly the day before the Battle of Ústí. My first great battle. A battle I might have died in if things had gone differently. If the Saxons had destroyed the wagon fort and scattered us, there would have been a massacre and I might have died. My son would have lost his father the day after his birth…
And Nicolette…
The ethereal Nicolette, Nicolette as slender as Masaccio’s Eve, as one of Parler’s Madonnas, had a swollen belly. Because of me. How can I look her in the eye? And will I even be able to look her in the eye at all?
Oh, never mind. It has to work out in the end.
It was the Thursday after Saint Ursula’s Day when they reached Krchleby and rode towards Rožďalovice on the Mrlina, a right-bank tributary of the Labe. They were still, in accordance with the earlier advice of Flutek and Sýkora, avoiding busy highways, particularly the major trade route leading from Prague to Leipzig via Jičín, Turnov and Žitava. They were only around three miles from Jičín, where they intended to conduct reconnaissance outside Trosky.
The terrain around the upper Mrlina warned them at once that they were entering a dangerous region, one of conflict, a still-burning strip of borderland separating feuding religions and nations. “Burning” was utterly appropriate, for charred remains suddenly became the defining element of the landscape, the blackened ruins of homesteads and cottages, of large and small villages. The scene was almost identical to the remnants of the village near Huncleder’s gambling den, the scene of recent fateful events. The same soot-covered stumps of chimneys, the same piles of fused ash, the same blackened skeletons of beams and roof timbers. The same acrid stench of burned-down buildings.
The Cherethites and Pelethites hadn’t sung for some time and were attending to their crossbows. Tauler and Baťa, who were leading the cavalcade, had theirs at the ready. Reynevan followed their example.