Scharley reached under his cloak for the treacherous hand cannon. Rixa was quicker. She took a step forwards. Her face contorted. She choked, coughed, wheezed and rasped. And then spat and sneezed, spraying blood and snot around. Straight into the face of the knight. And his men-at-arms. And the rapidly arriving halberdiers.

“Heilige Maria, Mutter Gottes!” howled one of the pfleger’s bodyguard, wiping the bloody snot from his face. “It’s the plague! The pestiiileeence!”

“Save me, Saint Roch!”

Every last one of them bolted, the bridge thudding beneath their feet.

Only Pfleger Gers of Streithagen remained, motionless and staring in disbelief. Scharley lunged forwards and kicked him below the knee. As the pfleger dropped to his knees, the penitent broke his swollen nose with a punch.

“To horse!” shouted Rixa, leaping into the saddle. “To horse, company!”

Soon they were galloping along the highway. To the west. Back the way they had come.

“There’s a crowd up ahead,” Weronika warned. “Cover your face.”

Like Jutta, she was wearing a calotte, a cap covering her hair. Now she pulled on a hood and bowed her head. Until that moment their disguise had worked, no one had seen through it, forced themselves upon them or accosted them. No one had questioned them or even taken special interest in them. They had been travelling without difficulty for several days already, even though the roads weren’t empty; on the contrary, occasionally they were simply thronged. As they were now, in the proximity of Zwickau.

A river wound through a valley and the road led to a bridge, which was blocked by a queue of wagons waiting to be inspected. For some time, the traffic on the road from east to west had far outnumbered the vehicles travelling the other way. They knew why. They had been told by a hawker from the Annaberg region, the jovial husband of a mousy wife and the father of an uncountable mass of children they had met the previous day. The camouflage hadn’t deceived the hawker, who, addressing them as “noble misses,” explained that the exodus from the west was the result of a Hussite plundering raid and the terrifying rumours of Hussite atrocities. The main Hussite forces were bearing down on Meissen and Oschatz. But beyond Freiberg, gangs were marauding, burning and destroying mines and foundries. They particularly had it in for mines and foundries, the devils. They had burned down Hermsdorf, Marienberg, Lengefeld, Glashütte and Freital…

“What’s that tent made of?” Weronika snorted. “Stuff for feather beds?”

The thick, blue and white striped fabric of the tent close by the bridge and the toll booth really did call to mind the material used for making bed linen. A banner wet from the snow hung forlornly on a pole stuck into the ground. Soldiers were bustling around and halberdiers stood like dummies.