“I shan’t endure it…” he finally gasped. “Very well, go on, let the quack do his worst. But don’t leave me alone with him, Brothers, keep an eye on his hands and his knife… So the scoundrel doesn’t slit my throat or bleed me to death… And bring me alcohol… Alcohol, quickly!”

“Vodka will indeed be required,” said Reynevan, rolling up his sleeves and checking the blade of the knife with his fingertip. “But for me. In your state, Půlpán, medicine forbids the consumption of alcohol.”

“The knitting and healing of the wound will take at least a week,” Reynevan instructed the field-surgeon and apprentice apothecary as he finished packing his satchel. “The patient should stay in bed and the wound must be tended to. Until it scars over, keep using poultices.”

The apprentice apothecary nodded eagerly. The dopey expression of awe and admiration still hadn’t left his face. The expression had adorned the young man’s face from the moment Reynevan completed the operation. And wasn’t about to leave it.

Reynevan was far from being smug, but he had every right to be proud of the operation. Even though, owing to the carbuncle’s size, the cut had to be deep and crosswise and he hadn’t dared to magically anaesthetize the patient in front of witnesses, the operation was soon over. All Smil Půlpán managed to do was to scream out and then faint, which significantly helped in the removal of the pus and the sewing up of the wound. One of the Orphan captains couldn’t bear the sight of it and threw up, but the others acknowledged the surgeon’s dexterity and skill with encouraging mutters, and at the end Jan Pluh even slapped him familiarly on the back.

And the apprentice apothecary kept sighing in admiration. Unfortunately, it turned out he wasn’t capable of contributing anything more than that.

“You said you were using poultices. Prepared by womenfolk.”

“I swear, m’lord physician. The women prepared them. And they were applied by… By Alžběta Donotková. Shall I call her?”

“Indeed.”

Alžběta Donotková, a young woman probably of less than twenty, had hair the colour of linen and eyes as blue as forget-me-nots. She would have been extremely comely, were it not for the circumstances. For she was a woman of the Hussite army, a woman of marches, retreats, victories, defeats, scorching heat, freezing cold and rainy weather. And unending hard work. And she looked like all the rest. She dressed in whatever she could find, as long as it was warm, her blonde hair was hidden under a grey kerchief of coarse linen and her hands were red from the cold and cracked from the damp. But at the same time, astonishingly, something radiated from her that might be called gravitas. Dignity. Something that brought to mind the eternal feminine.