“Your appearance is indeed breathtaking,” interrupted Scharley, “but it’s not quite enough. The mission needs someone with skill in the fields of fraud, deceit, leading people by the nose and pulling the wool over their eyes. No offence, but there’s only one of us here who deserves to be called a specialist.”
“The idea was mine,” Reynevan calmly replied, “and I won’t give it up. It’s rightfully mine and I’m setting off alone. And I’m certain I’m the most suitable of us for this enterprise.”
“Not at all,” Scharley objected. “You’re the least suitable. It was you and not us whom the augury told to beware of the Old Woman and the Maiden. But you, of course, don’t believe in auguries. When it suits you—”
“I’ve learned that from you.” Reynevan cut him off. “Enough talking, I’m leaving. Alone. You’re staying. For if—”
“Yes. If what?”
“If something goes wrong… If I were to be… I’d like to be able to count on having you both at the ready. And that you’d come to my aid and get me out of trouble.”
Scharley said nothing for a long time.
“I’m tormented by the thought,” he finally said, “that if I were to wallop you on the head, Reinmar of Champagne, then tie you up and lock you in a cellar for a while, you’d thank me for it one day. So I wonder why I don’t do it.”
“Because you know I wouldn’t thank you.”
The execution of the plan went smoothly. Hejtman Vojta Jelínek, who was still residing at Michalovice, when informed about the venture in general terms, offered his help eagerly and at once. Intending to set off towards Roimund with a small reconnaissance party, he declared his readiness to take a more roundabout route and escort Reynevan to the Jičín highway, where he could easily join a merchant caravan.
They set off later that very day. Around noon.
Berengar Tauler awoke and came to sometime in the afternoon. He had stopped vomiting and could stand fairly straight and even walk. He went to the latrine by himself and returned without anyone’s help, so it appeared that he had recovered. Enough for Scharley and Jan Čapek to nail him down regarding the secret underground passage leading to Trosky. Assuming the stern faces of Inquisitors, they showered the now healthy man with questions intended to corner him and catch him out.
“What passage?” The pale Tauler paled even more and blinked but was by no means frightened. “What underground corridor? What are you talking about?”
“How did you plan to get us into Trosky? Using a secret passage, wasn’t it?”
“No, damn it! I don’t know anything about a passage! I have—or rather had—a comrade at Trosky, the head groom… I counted on his helping us… He owed me a favour… He’d have got us into the castle or found out what we’d need to do… What the bloody hell is this?”
Scharley and Čapek didn’t answer. They rushed out of the room and ran downstairs, issuing orders as they ran.
They nearly exhausted their mounts trying to get there before sundown. They covered practically the entire Jičín highway, almost reaching Kost Castle. They encountered two merchant caravans, a coppersmith with a wagon containing copper products and a troupe of wandering acrobats, a beggar and an old woman with a basket of penny buns.
But none of them had seen a poet from Champagne. Or anyone answering the description. Not that day, not any day.
Reynevan had vanished. As though the ground had swallowed him up.
Scharley insisted they follow Vojta Jelínek and his troop and catch up with them to find out what had happened and where they had left Reynevan. Jan Čapek firmly refused. There was no chance of catching up with Jelínek’s troop, which had several hours’ start on them. Night was falling and the area was dangerous. Too close to Catholic castles. Too close for a detachment numbering only twenty horse.
They retraced their steps along the same road, looking around attentively. Searching for a lone rider. And when it grew dark, the glow of a campfire.
They saw nobody.
There was no sign of Reynevan.
The first sensation he felt after waking was biting cold, all the more acute since he couldn’t move at all, couldn’t curl up to protect what remained of the warmth in his body. It was as though he were paralysed.
Then, in turn, his other senses awoke and he realised the position he was in. His open eyes showed above him stars against a black October sky: Polaris, the Greater and Lesser Bears, Arcturus in the Herdsman, Vega, Castor and Pollux and Auriga. His sense of smell was assaulted by a stench, vile and overpowering in spite of the cold and the obvious fact of lying under the open sky, on hard, bare, frozen ground. His sense of hearing registered desperate screams coming from somewhere nearby. And guffawing.
His neck was terribly sore, regardless of which he wriggled and struggled—he had worked out that he could not adjust his position because he was being immobilised by several bodies pressed hard against him, and that it was those bodies that were giving off the noisome odour. The bodies reacted to his movements by pressing even closer and tighter. One voice moaned, another groaned, a third called on God. A fourth cursed.
On his left—meaning towards Vega and the constellation Lyra—flickering flashes of fire lit up the black of the night. The smell of smoke finally overcame the stench of human bodies. It was from the campfire that the desperate cries—which had now become groans and sobbing—were coming. He thrashed around again and with great effort freed a hand, forcibly pushing one of the bodies—clearly a woman’s and by no means a skinny one—away from him. He swore and drew up a knee.
“Leave it, m’lord,” somebody just alongside whispered. “Don’t do anything, sir. Woe on us if they hear—”
“Where am I?”
“Quiet. If they hear they’ll thrash us—”
“Who?”
“Them. The martahuzes… For God’s sake, be quiet…”
Footsteps, the creaking of wood. The flare of a brand. A cackle.
He turned his head and looked.
The face of the man holding the torch was thickly covered in pimples. He had almost no forehead. His stiff, black hair appeared to grow straight from his eyebrows and the bridge of his nose. Reynevan had seen him before.
There were three more. One was carrying a lantern and holding something in his other hand. Two of them were frogmarching a teenage boy. He was sobbing.
They pushed him down brutally onto the ground, bent over and shone the torch on the people lying down—now Reynevan saw that they were crowded inside an enclosure ringed by a sparse palisade. They selected somebody. A voice screamed in desperation, another howled, another appealed once again to God and the saints. A whip whistled and the disjointed screams were drowned by the sounds of blows. The boy dragged from the enclosure—who was even younger than the previous one—was weeping and begging for mercy. From beyond the palisade soon resounded his piercing cries. And the cackling of the martahuzes.
Reynevan swore and clenched his fists helplessly. I’m in it, he thought. I really am.
Memories began to return.
He had a premonition when the pimply-faced man with hair growing from his eyebrows rode out of the forest at the crossroads on a shaggy piebald. When he smiled, revealing blackened stumps of teeth. When another four men emerged after him from the trees, just as repugnant-looking and smiling.