“So you bought a boat.” Scharley nodded with poorly feigned seriousness. “I see physicians are prospering here. They dress elegantly, live in luxury and breakfast in style, served by attractive little widows. Each of them, like Venetian patricians, has his own gondola. Let’s go, let’s go, I’m dying to see it.”

The broad-bottomed boat moored to the bank in no way resembled a Venetian gondola, perhaps because it served to ship vegetables. Scharley didn’t show his disappointment, but hopped nimbly aboard and sat back comfortably among the baskets. Reynevan greeted the boatman. Six months before, he had treated his leg, which had been horrifically crushed between two barges. In return, the boatman, who rowed every day between Psáry and Bubny, repaid him with free transport. Well, let’s say almost free transport—during the last half-year, Reynevan had also managed to treat the boatman’s wife and two of his six children.

A moment later, the old tub, weighed down by carrots, turnips and cabbages and sitting low in the water, cast off from the bank and sailed down the Vltava.

The water, apart from wood shavings and dead trees, was bearing masses of colourful leaves. It was already September, Reynevan thought, although it was unusually warm.

They moved away from the bank, then sailed across a weir and some faster-flowing water, around which perch were chasing shoals of bleaks.

“Among the numerous virtues of this kind of river navigation,” Scharley observed keenly, “not least important is the chance to talk with no fear of being eavesdropped. So we can resume our chat from yesterday evening.”

The chat from the day before—beginning in the evening and continuing deep into the night—naturally mainly concerned the events of the previous months, from the Battle of Tachov to the recent coup attempt by Hynek of Kolštejn and its consequences. Reynevan repeated to Scharley everything he had learned from Jan of Smiřice a week earlier and told him of the plans that had been adopted. Predictably, Scharley didn’t approve of them at all.