“Hey, you ignoramuses!” said a pilgrim from the other side of the wagon with shells sewn onto his cloak. “They know nothing!”

“And you do?” Reynevan asked.

“Aye… Jesus Christ be praised!” The pilgrim noticed Father Granciszek’s tonsure. “The heretics are called Hussites, from the name of their prophet Huss, not from horses. The Hussites say there’s no Purgatory, and they take communion sub utraque specie, which means under both kinds. So they’re also called Utraquists—”

“Don’t lecture us,” interrupted Urban Horn, “because we’ve all been educated. My companion asked you why those three are being burned at the stake.”

“That I don’t know. I’m not from around here.”

“That one there,” said a local, a brickmaker judging by his clay-spattered jacket. “That one in the cap of shame is a Czech, a Hussite envoy, an apostate priest. He travelled here from Tábor in disguise, inciting people to revolt and burn churches down. His own countrymen recognised him, the same ones who fled Prague after 1419. And the other is Antoni Nelke, a teacher at the parish school, a local accomplice of the Czech heretic. He hid him and passed around Hussite writings.”

“And the woman?”

“That’s Elżbieta Ehrlich. She’s a different kettle of fish. She and her lover poisoned her husband together. The lover fled, otherwise he’d be bound to a stake, too.”

“The cat’s out of the bag now,” interrupted a thin fellow with a felt cap clinging closely to his skull. “Because it were Ehrlich’s second husband they murdered. Probably poisoned the first, too, the hag.”

“Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t, who can say?” A fat townswoman in a short embroidered sheepskin jacket joined the discussion. “They say the first one drank himself to death. He was a shoemaker.”

“Shoemaker or not,” the thin man stated, “she poisoned him, no two ways about it. Must have dabbled in witchcraft, too, if she’s upset the Dominican court—”

“If she poisoned him, it serves her right.”

“It certainly does!”

“Quiet!” called Father Granciszek, craning his neck. “The priests are delivering the verdict and I can’t hear a thing.”

“Why bother listening,” sneered Urban Horn, “when everything’s already been decided? The people at the stake are haeretici pessimi et notorii. And the Church, which abhors bloodshed, is handing the punishment of the guilty over to the brachium saeculare, the secular arm—”

“Silence, I said!” snapped Father Granciszek.

“Ecclesia non sitit sanguinem.” A voice, fragmented by the wind and muffled by the murmur of the crowd, reached them from the stakes. “The Church does not wish for blood and shies away from it… May thus the justice and punishment of the secular arm be meted out. Requiem aeternam dona eis…”