They made ready. For whole days and nights, they pored over maps and planned. Bisclavret and Rzehors left with packhorses, returning after two days with a large, clinking load. They must have brought several dozen grzywna.

Reynevan once again set out for White Church, but Jutta wasn’t in the convent that time, either. The winter, it turned out, had separated the only recently united lovers a second time.

It was Lent. The Feast of Saint Maciej who breaks the ice passed. The saying didn’t lie. The ice was broken and winter no longer had the strength to resist. Caressed by a warm southern wind, the snows melted and snowdrops showed through them. The heady fragrance of spring was in the air.

Tybald Raabe returned with the wind and the fragrance. When they saw him riding up, they knew: it had begun.

“It has begun,” confirmed the goliard with burning eyes. “It has begun, gentlemen. Prokop has struck. He crossed the boundary of the Duchy of Opava on Shrovetide. We are at war.”

“War,” Urban Horn echoed. “Deus pro nobis! ”

“And if God is with us,” added Drosselbart dully, “who can stand against us?”

The wind blew from the south.

Chapter Seventeen

In which the Tábor marches into Silesia, Reynevan begins sabotage activities and Duke Bolko Wołoszek happens fortunately upon the chariot of history.

Reynevan, Urban Horn and Rzehors set off to meet the Tábor. Bisclavret and Drosselbart went to Głuchołazy and Nysa, to spread black propaganda and sow panic. Scharley and Samson remained in Gdziemierz, intending to join them later.

In the beginning, the former group took the Krakow road to Racibórz. Soon, however, just beyond Prudnik, problems began—the road was congested with refugees, mainly from Osoblaha and Głubczyce, where, the refugees claimed, horrified, that the Hussites could already be seen. The confused, fragmented accounts spoke of the burning of Ostrava and the plunder and destruction of Hukvaldy. Of the siege of Opava. The Hussites, the fugitives gabbled in trembling voices, were marching in great force, in an unimaginable horde. Hearing it, Rzehors smiled wolfishly. His time had come. A time for solo acts of black propaganda.

“The Hussites are coming!” he cried to the passing fugitives, feigning a panicked tone of voice. “A terrible host! Twenty thousand armed men! They’re coming—burning and murdering! Flee, people! Death is upon us! They are close at hand! They’re in sight! Forty thousand Hussites! None can stand up to them!”

Soldiers appeared on the road behind the fugitives and their wagons laden with whatever they had taken with them. Also clearly fleeing, groups of quite miserable-looking knights, lancers and bowmen listened to the accounts of the approaching fifty thousand Hussites, to stories told in a feigned panic-stricken voice and liberally peppered with mispresented or simply invented quotations from the Apocalypse and the Prophetic Books.

“The Hussites are coming! A hundred thousand! Woe unto us, woe unto us!”