“Who fought whom?” asked Schaff. “Are there any clues?”
“Naught but this.” Buschbach shrugged. “It was hanging on a snag. Don’t tell us much.”
“On the contrary,” said Reynevan, paling slightly as he looked at the shred of black fabric. “It does. I know who wears cloaks like that.”
“What are you waiting for?” snapped Schaff. “Speak!”
“You won’t be inclined to believe it.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
Janko Schaff listened, attentively and with a knitted brow, to the story of the Wallcreeper and the black horsemen. Although Reynevan suitably shortened and edited his account, the Lord of Chojnik had no problem with it. Reynevan saw a flash in his eye several times which might have signified that the knight had already heard this and that about black horsemen, murdered merchants, terrors by night, demons destroying at noon and other peculiarities mentioned in Psalm Ninety-One.
“The Company of Death,” he muttered. “Riders on black horses. The same ones the infernal priest was threatening me with. They fell on somebody here. I wonder who.”
“Lord Bergow has apparently sent out a party,” Reynevan casually reminded him. “Lord Biberstein, too—”
“I know.” Schaff cut him off. “You are being hunted, and Grellenort and his black horsemen are hunting the hunters to take the spoils from them. You’re their target. They want you.”
“Undoubtedly. Which is why—”
“I should set you free?” The Lord of Chojnik smiled evilly. “Out of concern for my safety? Nice try, Bielawa, nice try. You’ll have to do better than that.”
“Well, at least be on your guard—”
“Don’t instruct me.”
The entire affair had fatal consequences for Father Zwicker. Brought before Schaff and bombarded with questions, the priest gritted his teeth and didn’t utter a word, not even when his face was slapped a few times.
“Bielawa!” Schaff gestured him over. “You’ve shown me you know some magic. So tell me: is it possible that this damned priest, although in fetters, might have saddled us with that Grellenort using witchcraft?”
Reynevan spread his arms and shrugged. Which was sufficient for Schaff. A rope was tossed over a horizontal bough and before he could say the Lord’s Prayer, Chaplain Zwicker was hanging from a noose, convulsively tensing and relaxing his legs, observed by the bored looks of the entire company.
“We’ll have to come by here again,” said Gwido Buschbach. “The damned priest released his seed here, look. Mandrake will sprout here for certain.”
Schaff indeed needed no instruction on how to behave in perilous situations. They continued to ride along forest tracks, carefully avoiding the more travelled ones. They were moving slowly, with two foreriders posted ahead: Gwido Buschbach and a bowman. The Lord of Chojnik grimly ordered the rest to be quiet, alert and attentive. The detachment began to look so combative that the fear of the Wallcreeper almost left Reynevan, and he no longer cowered in the saddle whenever a bird flew over the track or squawked nearby.
It cut both ways, unfortunately. In the face of such vigilance, it was difficult even to think about escaping. In spite of that, it was constantly on Reynevan’s mind.
They stopped for the first night in an abandoned colliers’ settlement, where ore was extracted and smelted in the summer. For the second stop, soon after fording a river which Gwido Buschbach called the Mumlava, he chose for them a small, godforsaken mountain village, remote and hidden in a deep ravine, called Mumlavský Důl. Reynevan had heard and noted the settlement’s name from Schaff’s conversation with the headman, who had a shock of shaggy, grey hair, like a wolverine. He was clearly scared, in such a panic that Schaff took pity on him. Rather than yelling and punching him in the usual knightly manner, he decided to play the role of the benevolent and generous lord. Having been given a small handful of pennies, the Wolverine cheered up and an almost frightening smile split his unshaven face in half. He immediately invited the knight to his farmyard, stammering out an explanation on the way as to why he was so anxious and the whole village terrified. Some hrozne, very hrozne gentlemen had passed by that way several times, he explained, very mounted and very well armed and God-’elp-us and mercy-me. It took some time to determine when those awful cavalcades occurred, but finally it was established that it was two nights ago and the early morning after that. But describing what the horsemen looked like and what they were wearing apparently went well beyond the peasant’s abilities.
Schaff’s face clouded over and he bit his moustache, but his mood suddenly improved. And not only his. For from the Wolverine’s farmyard wafted something extraordinarily pleasant, something divine and blissfully inviting, something tenderly and lovingly home-made, something wistfully and touchingly motherly. A marvellous, familiar aroma, deeply etched in the subconscious, called forth everything that was pleasant, good and joyous, making one want to sit down and weep with contentment. To restate it more concisely: the fragrance of onions and meat fried in melted lard drifted from the cottage. Tears began flowing from the eyes of Schaff, his brawlers and Reynevan, and saliva dripped from their mouths with the force of a mountain waterfall.
“We butchered a hog,” explained Wolverine. “It being the season, see, m’lord—”
The Lord of Chojnik didn’t let him finish. And reached into his pouch. At the sight of the pennies in his fist, the fellow staggered, opened his mouth and for a moment appeared about to howl. But he quickly calmed down.
“Come in…” he panted, stowing the money into his jacket. “For a little something…”
“The men who are said to have ridden through,” said Janko Schaff, shooing a hen from the table, “might have been the Black Riders, the Company of Death. But it might also have been Biberstein’s men. Or Bergow’s from Trosky… The Devil take them! I hadn’t counted on them being so determined to get their hands on you, Bielawa.”
Werner Dorfinger, one of the Chojnik vassals, cast Reynevan a grim look. “If, God save us, they come for us… Are we going to fight over him or what?”
“What will be, will be,” Schaff interjected. “And what will be is what I decide. Clear?”
They devoured such quantities of the meat scraps fried in lard that they could barely move and felt they had no room for anything else. That state endured until the housewife began to spoon boiled jitrnice liver sausage and blood pudding stuffed with barley groats out of a cauldron. Barely had it cooled a little than they fell on it like wolves.
“Christ the Lord…” Dorfinger loosened his belt by another two holes. “It’s a long time since I tasted such jitrnice… Ha, I’ll have some more, but I must just go behind the barn.”
“Take your sheepskin,” advised Ralf Moser, the other vassal from Chojnik, as he emerged from the vestibule, shaking snow from his hat and collar. “It’s snowing out. And the wind’s howling like a damned soul.”
“Well, it’s true.” Schaff grinned. “Zwicker was hanged, after all. And the wind doesn’t know, either, that it wasn’t of his free will.”