“But the world didn’t end, as we know, Christ didn’t descend to Earth, people came to their senses and chiliasm and Adventism began to lose their followers. The dreams of equality were shattered, like the fantasies about the elimination of all power and all obligation. The revolutionary Tábor restored state structures and by the autumn of 1420 began to gather duties and taxes. Obligatory ones, naturally.

“The structures of church authority were also reconstructed, as were those of the Taborites. The leader of the Hussites, Bishop Mikuláš of Pelhřimov, proclaimed from the pulpit the canon of true faith and accused anyone who didn’t respect it of being an apostate and a heretic. And thus the Hussites, the greatest heretics in Europe, found their own heretics, their own dissidents. Their own Picards.”

“The name, I believe, is a corruption of ‘Beghard’?” Reynevan interjected.

“Some would say so,” Tauler replied, nodding, “but it’s more likely from Picardy and the Waldensians, who came here in 1418, finding in Bohemia sanctuary and an astonishing number of adherents. The movement grew in strength and followers, led by the Moravian Martin Húska, called ‘Loquis’ for his eloquence. To call them radicals would be quite an understatement. They exhorted people to demolish churches, since the true church of God, they claimed, is a pilgrim church. They utterly rejected the Eucharist. They renounced the significance of all the objects of religion, destroyed every monstrance and every Host they got their hands on. Everything that exists is God, they proclaimed, ergo, man is also God. Holy Communion can be given by anyone, they claimed, and it can be received under any kind. That claim particularly annoyed the Calixtines. ‘What do you mean?’ the latter howled. ‘Master Huss was burned and we spill blood for Holy Communion sub utraque specie, in bread and wine, and here some Martin Loquis gives it under the kind of kasha, peas and sour milk?’”

Samson diligently whittled away in his corner. Beautiful, coiled shavings curled over the blade of his pocketknife.

“By February 1421, they’d had enough of the sectarians. They were expelled from the Tábor and sent away. Around four hundred Picards left the mountain and founded their own fortified camp in nearby Příběnice—”

“What are you talking about?” Amadej Baťa asked curiously, returning from the card table with the forced cheerfulness of a fellow who has lost all his money.

“The Picards.”

“Aah? The nudes? Ho-ho… I understand…”