Palm Sunday—called Flower Sunday in Bohemia—had arrived. The bells summoned the faithful to a procession and then to Mass. More precisely: to two Masses.

The Mass for the Hussites was celebrated by Prokop the Great, the commander of the army fighting in the field himself. It was held under the open sky, naturally, according to Taborite liturgy, beyond the town walls, in Carp Meadow, with the Chalice on a table covered with a modest white cloth. The Mass for Catholics, mainly Poles, was being celebrated in the town, in the Church of Saint Bartholomew, at an altar, by Father Kołatka, a parish priest from Nasiedle specially captured during the attack on Opava for pastoral reasons and abducted along with his liturgical vestments and articles.

Reynevan partook in the Hussite Mass. Scharley didn’t partake in either; he had developed an aversion to religion long before—as he said—and found the rituals tedious. Samson went down to the river, had a long walk along the bank, looking at the sky, the bushes and the ducks.

Prokop the Great delivered his sermon to the crowds in Carp Meadow.

“Behold the cruel day of our Lord is nigh!” he called. “Behold a great fury and a dreadful ire in order to turn the Earth into a wasteland and wipe the sinners from it. For the star of the heavens and Orion will not shine with their light, the sun will be shadowed from the very dawn and the moon will not shine!

“And though you may multiply your entreaties, I shall not listen to them,” Father Kołatka preached from the pulpit of Saint Bartholomew’s. “Your hands drip with blood. Wash them clean, be pure! Remove the evil of your deeds from My eyes! Stop committing evil! Cloak yourselves in goodness! Care for justice, help the oppressed, do right by the orphan, stand in defence of the widow! Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall shine white as snow; though as red as crimson, they shall be as wool.”

“The Lord,” said Prokop, his deep voice rolling over Carp Meadow, “seethes with anger at all pagans and rages with indignation at their soldiers! They are doomed to destruction, given up for slaughter! Their dead lie abandoned, a stench rises from their corpses; the mountains are drenched in their blood.”

“Their designs are criminal,” Father Kołatka preached in a calm voice. “Havoc and destruction lie on their paths. They know not the way of peace. There is no righteousness in their actions. They have made their own paths crooked. Thus righteousness is far from us and justice does not reach us. We expected light, but behold the darkness; the rays shine, but yet we walk in the gloom. Like the blind we feel for the wall and grope as though eyeless. We stumble at noon as though it were night, though sound in body we are as though deceased.