Starling stooped over, his nose almost touching his friend’s bloody buttock, and expertly examined the wound. “Nothing’s been torn off,” he stated firmly. “Everything’s in its place. The ball’s just buried in your arse, and not even that deep. It was shot from distance, had no power…”

Parsifal howled, sobbed and burst into tears. From pain, shame, fear and relief. For he had already imagined, clearly and in detail, a truly infernal and hair-raising scene: there he was, speaking in a high falsetto, transformed into a capon like Peter Abélard, like Peter Abélard sitting and writing idiotic treatises and letters to Ofka of Baruth, and Ofka meanwhile indulging herself in the bedchamber with another full-blooded man with everything where it was meant to be. War, the boy realised in horror, was an awful thing.

“Everything’s… there?” he asked, swallowing back tears. “Starling… Take another look to be sure…”

“Everything’s there.” Starling calmed him. “And it’s almost stopped bleeding. Hold on. A monk’s hurrying here with bandages, he’ll soon pluck the ball out of your backside. Wipe away your tears, folk are watching.”

The defenders of Kłodzko weren’t watching, though, weren’t interested either in the tears or the bloody wound in the bottom of Parsifal of Rachenau. They were busy raising triumphant cheers on the walls. Sir Půta of Častolovice and Prior Vogsdorf were being carried aloft.

“But I wear a blessed gorget with Our Lady around my neck,” Parsifal suddenly groaned. “I bought it from the monks… It was meant to protect me from enemy bullets! How can that be?”

“Shut your bloody mouth—”

“It was meant to protect me!” the boy howled. “How can it be? What kind of—”

“Shut it,” Starling hissed. “Shut your yap, or woe on us.”

The quill scratched.

The witnesses of the dicebatur, like Kralowycz, capitaneus Orphanorum, enraged by the doughty resistance of the defender, ordered special criers, called Stentores, to shout loudly beneath the walls and threaten the defenders with foul torture if they didn’t surrender the town, trying to strike terror in them by that clamour. Seeing how vain were their efforts, he ordered a length of white canvas measuring a dozen cloth-yards and painted on it in great letters: SURRENDER OR DEATH and demonstrare to those defenders on that section of wall which Prior Henricus et fratres canonici regulares had defended and could read. Howbeit, Prior Henricus, the Hector of Kłodzko, being valiant of heart, felt not fear. He ordered the brothers to take a cloth of a dozen cloth-yards also and paint on it in contempt of those Wycliffites: BEATA VIRGO MARIA ASSISTE NOBIS.

“What?” growled Jan Kolda. “What have they daubed?”

Brázda of Klinštejn snorted. Jíra of Řečice chortled.

Painted in large letters on the canvas hung on the walls by the yelling and cheering defenders were the words:

DEINE MUTTER DIE HUR