“To Kolín!” yelled Jan Čapek. “To Kolín! Let’s hope the horses hold up! Reynevan! What the bloody hell are you doing?”

Reynevan had dismounted. Fallen to his knees. Bowed his forehead to the very earth. And started sobbing.

“The purpose of my life…” he sobbed, choking. “Ideals… Lux perpetua… And I’m fleeing from the battle… Like a coward… I couldn’t even… even fall in battle!”

Čapek wiped blood, sweat and soot from his face. Shook his head and spat.

“It’s not the end yet!” he called. “We’ll show them still! What? Should we have let them kill us? Like fools? He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day! Stand up, Silesian, stand up! Do you see? We’ve reached the Kolín road! We riding to Kolín, they won’t catch us there! Get up and ride! Do you hear?”

“Go on by yourself.”

“What?”

“Go by yourself. There’s nothing for me in Kolín.”

The warm May rain was falling and rustling the leaves.

Yes, yes, noble knights, yes, god-fearing monks, believe me, gentlemen merchants, that the Lipany conflictus was harsh, the battle on the slopes of Lipská Mountain was fierce.

Men fought to their deaths until the late evening. Until the late evening, almost until it got dark, the brothers of the Tábor and the Orphans were dying in battle. Some were killed on the field, some in the wagon fort, some in flight. In total, they say that almost two thousand Warriors of God fell, among them Prokop the Shaven, called the Great. Many brothers were taken captive. The lives of the more notable were spared. But more than seven hundred captives were driven by the Rožmberk men to barns near Český Brod and burned alive there.

And it was a great victory for the Calixtines and the Catholics. And it was the end of the Taborite-Orphan field armies.

On the day after Lipany, however, the first day of June 1434, Władysław II, King of Poland, died in the arms of priests in the eighty-fifth year of his life, in Hrádek, on his way to Halič, where he was meant to receive homage from the new Voivode of Moldavia, Stefan. That year, on the day of Saint James the Apostle, Jagiełło’s son, Władysław of Warna, ascended the throne in the Wawel at the age of ten.

There was a revolt in Lithuania. The rabble-rouser Svidrigiello, the uncle of the new king, supported by the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, the Ruthenians and Sigismund Korybut, the would-be ruler of Bohemia and Upper Silesia, took up arms against the union with Poland and everything Polish. In 1435, on the day dedicated to Saint Giles, on dies Jovis, fourteen days before the equinoctium autumnale, Sigismund Korybut fell, fighting the Poles. In a battle fought at Wiłkomierz, beside the Sacred River.