“You’re in favour of reform, you say? Then I’ll gladden your ears with a story of how we, the Warriors of God, put theory into practice. In May of this year—the news of this probably reached your ears—we set off under Prokop the Shaven on a plundering raid to Lusatia. We sacked and burned down quite a few places of worship, including some churches and monasteries in Hirschfeld, Ostritz and Bernstadt, and also—which might interest you—near Frydland, on the estates of Ulrik Biberstein, your beloved Katarzyna’s uncle, I believe. Although we stormed Zgorzelec, we didn’t manage to capture it, but in Lubań, taken on the Friday before Cantate Sunday, we fell upon a dozen priests and monks, including refugees from Bohemia, Dominicans who had sought refuge in Lubań. Prokop ordered them executed without mercy. So we did. The Czech priests were burned to death, the German ones clubbed to death or drowned in the Kwisa. We organised a massacre of a similar scale four days later in Złotoryja… You have a strange look on your face. Am I boring you?”

“No. But I think we’re talking about completely different things.”

“Indeed? You wish to change the Church, you say. So I’m telling you how we are changing it. You claim to want reforms, even the most radical. I remind you that several kings—such as the Polish Bolesław the Bold, the English Plantagenet Henry the Second, and Wenceslaus the Fourth here, in Prague—have already reformed unruly prelates. But what did it achieve? One rabble-rousing Stanisław of Szczepanów executed, one turbulent priest Thomas à Becket stabbed, one troublemaker John of Nepomuk drowned. A drop in the ocean! Not radical enough. Small scale instead of wholesale. For me, I prefer the methods of Žižka, Prokop and Ambrož. The results are definitely more noticeable. You said that every twentieth Praguian wore a cassock or a habit before the revolution. And how many will you encounter in the street today?”

“Not many. Beware, we’re going under the Stone Bridge, they always spit from it. And occasionally piss.”

Indeed, the bridge’s balustrades were teeming with street urchins trying to spit or piss on every boat, barge or punt passing beneath. Fortunately, too many vessels were gliding by down below for the street urchins to manage to insult more than a few. Reynevan and Scharley’s boat had luck on its side.

The current was carrying them nearer to the left bank. They sailed past the badly damaged archbishop’s palace and the ruins of the Augustinian monastery. And beyond, above the charred remains of the Lesser Quarter and the river, the rock of Hradčany rose impressively, proudly crowned by the Hrad and the soaring spires of Saint Vitus’s Cathedral.