1435 was a fertile year. Perhaps you recall? After all, it was only five years ago. The harvest was gathered in before Peter and Paul in some places, and all the crops had been brought in by the time Peter and Paul was over. Vines in vineyards bloomed before Saint Vitus’s Day, and soon after Saint Vitus’s Day the grapes were already as large as peas and in some places as large as goats’ droppings. The summer that year was extremely hot, so unbearable that people fainted in the fields.

That autumn, a bright comet appeared in the heavens with a fiery tail pointing towards the west. Astrologists pronounced it a bad sign. And they were right. A short time after, a great pox broke out in Silesia, in Bohemia, in Saxony and in other lands and many folk died of it. In Dresden, they say, they buried more than a hundred on a single day. Many, many notable people died. And Canon Gwisdendorff died in Wrocław. And it was a good thing, because he was a bloody whoreson, oret pro anima sua, quis vult. Pity that more like him didn’t die, for life in Silesia would have been better.

In 1436, two years after the massacre of the Tábor and Orphans at the Battle of Lipany, the day before Saint Bartholomew’s, Sigismund of Luxembourg, dei gracia Romanorum imperator, Ungarie, Boemie, Dalmacie et Croacie rex, rode into Golden Prague. Great crowds greeted him with cheers and cries of joy and led him to the Hrad with tears of happiness in their eyes. But there were those who didn’t recognise Sigismund as king, but called him a ginger-haired rascal and King of Babylon, and some even declared war against him. That was the preacher Ambrož, Bedřich of Strážnice, Jan Kolda of Žampach, and above all the famous hejtman, Jan Rohač of Dube. The latter was such a vexation that soon the imperial army besieged his fortress Sion. The castle fell and Rohač, Wyszek Raczyński and their comrades were taken captive and delivered to the capital. They were tormented and tortured for a long time, on the orders of Emperor Sigismund, and finally hanged on a great gallows. It happened on Monday, the day after Nativitatis beate Marie virginis Anno Domini 1437.

And the people wept long and hard. Whenever it was mentioned, people wept.

Chapter Twenty-Three

In which the end comes to everything.

“My eye grows weak from sorrow,” said Jan Bezděchovský of Bezděchov, the oldest, most experienced and most respected among the congregation of sorcerers at the Prague apothecary’s shop at the House at The Archangel.