“It’s almost over.” Rohač hawked, spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “There were some thirteen thousand of them. According to initial estimates, we’ve dealt with about three and a half thousand so far, but the work’s not over yet. The Saxons’ horses are weary, so they won’t get away—we’ll add some more to the reckoning. I’d say we’ll be putting up to four thousand to the sword.”

“It may not be Grunwald,” said Dobko Puchała with an unpleasant grin. The Wieniawa crest on his shield was almost indiscernible under a layer of bloody mud. “It may not be Grunwald, but it’s still beautiful. What, Your Grace?”

“M’Lord Prokop.” Sigismund Korybut appeared not to have heard him. “Isn’t it time to remember Christian mercy?”

Prokop the Shaven didn’t answer. He rode downhill, to the Zdižnice. Among the bodies.

“Mercy’s one thing,” said Jakubek of Vřesovic, Hejtman of Bilina, angrily, riding a little to the rear, “but money’s another! Why, it’s simply a waste! Look at that one without a head—the crossed gold pitchforks on his shield mean he’s a Kalkreuth. A ransom of at least six thousand pre-revolutionary groschen. That one with his guts hanging out, with a pruning knife in a field divided diagonally on his shield, is a Dietrichstein. An eminent family, at least eighteen thousand…”

Right by the river, the Orphans stripping the corpses pulled a still-living youngster in armour and a tunic with a coat of arms from under a pile of bodies. The youngster dropped to his knees, put his hands together and begged. Then began to scream, was hit with a battleaxe and stopped.

“Sable, a fess bretessé argent,” Jakubek of Vřesovic observed unemotionally, an expert in heraldry and economics both, apparently. “So he’s a Nesselrode. Of the Nesselrode counts. About thirty thousand for the whippersnapper. We’re wasting money here, Brother Prokop.”

Prokop the Shaven turned his peasant’s face towards him.

“God is our judge,” he said hoarsely. “The men lying here didn’t have His seal on their brows. Their names weren’t in the Book of the Living.”

After a pregnant silence, he added, “In any case, no one asked them to come here.”

“Neplach?”

“What?”

“You keep ordering me to spy, yet your thugs are still following me. Will you continue to have me spied on?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I can’t see the point—”

“Reynevan. Do I teach you how to apply leeches?”

They said nothing for a while. Flutek kept looking back at the severed rope hanging from the beam.