Only he and Samson noticed her. She didn’t raise her head at all, however, even though the detachment had crossed a stream barely twenty paces from her. She was very slight, and the slightness of her figure was additionally accentuated by her clinging dress. Reynevan couldn’t see her face—it was completely hidden by her long, straight, dark hair, which fell right down to the water over which she knelt and was being caressed by the slow current.

She was holding a blouse or shift in her wax-white arms, arms up to the elbows in the water, rubbing and squeezing it with eerily slow movements. Small clouds of pulsating blood were drifting from the shift like smoke. The blood floated through the water, colouring it crimson, pink froth bathing the horses’ knees.

A strong wind blew; a sudden, fell wind, rattling the now green branches and tearing from the sides of the ravine clouds of last year’s dry weeds. Reynevan and Samson squinted. When they opened them, the apparition had vanished.

But blood was still flowing in the water.

They said nothing for a while.

“Are we going?” Samson finally cleared his throat. “Or turning back?”

Reynevan didn’t answer, just spurred his horse, urging it to catch up with Puchała and the Poles who were already vanishing among the greening alders.

In the next ravine, they walked into a trap.

Shots were fired and bowstrings twanged from a thicket on the far hillside as a hail of balls and bolts fell on the Poles. Men yelled, horses squealed and several of them reared up and fell to the bottom of the ravine. Among them was Samson’s.

“Find cover!” roared Puchała. “Dismount and find cover!”

The thicket sang again with the clang of bowstrings and the hiss of bolts. Reynevan felt a blow to his shoulder so hard that he fell to the ground, unluckily onto a slope covered in wet fallen leaves as slippery as soap. He slid down them to the bottom of the ravine, and only then, as he tried to stand, did he see the fletching of a bolt protruding below his clavicle. Christ, not the artery, he managed to think before weakness overcame him.

He saw Samson free himself from under his dead horse, get to his knees and then his feet. And fall with his head bloodied, even before the deafening roar of a harquebus fired from the thicket had died away.

Reynevan yelled, but his cry was drowned out by another handgonne salvo. The ravine completely filled with smoke. Belts whistled. The wounded groaned.

Although his arms and legs had turned to jelly and every movement was causing him convulsions of pain, Reynevan crawled over to Samson. A large pool of blood had already spread around the giant’s head, but Reynevan saw that the ball had only grazed his temple. The skull, he thought, the skull might be damaged. Dammit, it must be. His eyes…