And may God absolve their sins.

Reynevan did not witness the splendour of the triumphant parade. He rode into Prague, indeed, but lying on a wagon, unconscious, burning from fever.

He was ill for a long time.

Chapter Twenty

In which Reynevan makes his final decision. For like the Apostle Paul in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, old things had passed away and all things were become new. And lux vitae, the light of life, was waiting for those who had made the right choice.

The extremely mild winter of 1429 and 1430 passed smoothly and almost imperceptibly into a mild spring. Already in early March the sky was teeming with a great multitude of birds returning from the south. Starlings arrived earlier than usual; storks clattered on their rooftop nests earlier than usual. Wild geese gaggled, cranes squawked and all sorts of winged beasts chirped. Ponds, bogs, marshes and ditches resounded with the massed croaking of frogs. Alder buds split open, pussy willow was abundant, meadows bloomed white and yellow with windflowers and marsh marigolds.

Reynevan rode alone through the Opava lands along a highway rutted by wheels and horseshoes, trodden by soldiers’ boots. In the tracks of the twelve-thousand-strong field army of the Tábor, which had marched there barely a week earlier.

Around noon, he heard the chiming of a bell. He spurred his horse, following the sound, and soon after he saw on a rise a small wooden church with a spire, quite intact. Without a second thought he reined his horse around towards it. Much had changed in him over the previous weeks.

In that respect, too.

He dismounted, but didn’t enter the chapel, although the bell was still tolling the Angelus from the belfry. He approached the entrance and fell to his knees three paces before it. Jutta, he thought. Jutta.

Agnus Dei qui tollit peccata mundi.

Requiem aeternam dona ei, et lux perpetua luceat ei. In memoria aeterna erit iusta ab auditione mala non timebit.

O God, I fall and I cannot go on. I am paralysed and unable to rise. Heal me and lift me up in the name of Your mercy. Send me the grace of peace. And grant her eternal rest.

Agnus Dei qui tollit peccata mundi. Ad te omnis caro veniet.

“Amen,” said a voice, shaking him out of his reverie. “Amen to your prayer, wanderer. Peace be with you.”

In the entrance to the church stood a priest, short and stout, wearing a sheepskin jerkin over his cassock, with a tonsure shaved down to a narrow strip of hair above his ears. He was resting on a forked staff as though on a crutch, and his face was graced with a large bruise.

“Peace be with you,” he repeated, speaking with obvious effort and gasping for breath. “You pray in the open air. Are you a Hussite?”