“Was he a traitor? A Catholic spy? He was, I gather, guilty?”

“Eh?”

“I asked if he was guilty.”

“In the eschatological sense?” Flutek shot him a nasty look. “The Final Judgement and all? If so, I can only refer to the Nicene Credo: Jesus, crucified by Pontius Pilate, died, but rose and will come in glory again to judge the quick and the dead. Everyone shall be judged for their thoughts and deeds. And then it shall be established once and for all who was guilty.”

Reynevan sighed and shook his head. He only had himself to blame. He knew Flutek. He shouldn’t have asked.

“Thus, it doesn’t matter who he was,” said Flutek, nodding towards the beam and the severed rope. “What matters is that he managed to hang himself while we were breaking the door down. That I didn’t manage to force him to speak. And that you didn’t identify him. You claim it wasn’t him—not the man you allegedly eavesdropped on when he was plotting with the Bishop of Wrocław in Silesia—is that true?”

“It is.”

Flutek cast him a hideous glance. Flutek’s eyes, as black as a marten’s and which pointed down his long nose like the openings of two gun barrels, were capable of looking extremely hideous. At times, two tiny golden devils would appear in Flutek’s eyes which suddenly turned somersaults in unison. Reynevan had seen them before. And they usually heralded something very unpleasant.

“But I think it isn’t,” said Flutek. “I think you’re lying. And have been from the start, Reynevan.”

No one knew how Flutek had ended up working for Žižka. Rumours had circulated, naturally. According to some people, Bohuchval Neplach—real name Yehoram ben Yitzchak—was a Jew, a pupil of a rabbinical school, whom, on a whim, the Hussites had spared during the massacre of the ghetto in Chomutov in March 1421. According to others, he wasn’t called Bohuchval but Gottlob and was a German, a merchant from Plzeň. Still others said he was a monk, a Dominican, whom Žižka—for unknown reasons—had personally rescued from the massacre of priests and monks in Beroun. Other people claimed that Flutek had been a parish priest in Čáslav, who joined the Hussites just in time and whose neophyte zeal had helped him ingratiate himself so effectively with Žižka that he landed himself a permanent post. Reynevan was in fact inclined to believe the last rumour. Flutek must have been a priest; his outrageous hypocrisy, duplicity, dreadful egoism and almost unimaginable greed spoke in favour of it.