“Tomorrow. It will be the last time. Cheb is the last town I will enter with you. I would leave today, but something holds me back. Tomorrow, however, I shall finish with this once and for all. I’m leaving. Returning to Rapotín. To her. Come with me.”

“Why?” Reynevan asked bitterly and with effort. “Why would I go back there? What or who is there for me? Jutta is dead. I loved her and she has departed. What is left? I have also read Dante Alighieri. Amor condusse noi ad una morte, love led us to one death. I await nothing else. So I can just as easily await it here, in this army. In the midst of this slaughter.”

Samson was silent for a long time.

“You are in darkness, friend,” he finally said. “In a darkness worse than the one the real Samson passed into. It has befallen both of us. We wait for light, but behold obscurity. We wait for brightness, but we walk in darkness. Like the blind, we feel for the wall and grope as if sightless. We stumble at noon as though it were night; though sound in body, it is as if we were deceased. And we long for the light. For luminosity. You chose the wrong quotation from Alighieri. I’ll tell you the right one. Sta come torre ferma…

Be as strong as an unbending tower,

Though winds do pound against its peak.

“No more strength is left in me. Where there is no hope, there is no strength.”

“Hope always lives. Hope is light eternal. Lux perpetua. La luce etterna.

O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,

sola t’intendi, e da te intelletta

e intendente te ami e arridi!

“I am too weary to muster any optimism.”

“Goodnight, Reinmar.”

“Goodnight, Samson.”

It began at dawn. Bombards roared, foglers and cannons boomed, mortars thundered, the arms of trebuchets creaked and a hail of missiles fell on Cheb. The entire foreground was covered in a dense veil of white smoke.

Protected by pavises and barricades, the Taborites approached the walls in a tight array, but Prokop hadn’t given the order for the storm. It was known that the hejtman wanted to avoid losses and preferred the town to surrender and pay a ransom; the heavy bombardment was meant only to soften up the defenders. Hence neither black powder nor balls were spared.

But Mikuláš Sokol, emboldened by the sluggish resistance from the south side, attacked on his own initiative. A barrel of powder was placed at the gate, and when it exploded a storm unit charged in.