The Heretic

by David Pilling

  That night, with our tired but happy army encamped on the plain, I drank a quiet toast in stolen Spanish wine to the souls of my departed friends: Hynek and Kusina and Menhard and the rest. One or two of the others may have survived the final German assault, though I never saw them again.

  Zatec was a brief respite. The darkest of winters lay ahead, lit by burning pyres.

  12.

  “Inform Lord Zizka that Sir John Page, knight of Kingshook, Baron of La Rougemont-sur-Seine and formerly Captain-General of the Company of the Wolf, presents his compliments and asks to speak with him.”

  The sentries on guard outside the general's quarters looked at me dubiously. “We know of no herald from England,” said their officer.

  “I am no herald,” I replied, impatiently tapping the gilded silver hilt of my new sabre. “I have served in the Hussite army for months, and fought at Rabi and Zatec. Must you keep me waiting?”

  I pitched it just right, projecting all the obnoxious arrogance of a nobleman forced to deal with thick-headed underlings. The officer vanished through the door to speak to his master, while his men gave me dark looks. They plainly didn't like my attitude – even the lowest Hussite regarded himself as equal to a lord - and wouldn't have taken it from a Bohemian noble. I was excused on the grounds of being not only a foreigner but an Englishman. Everyone knew the English were a little mad.

  The officer returned. “Lord Zizka will see you,” he said, “be swift. He has much business to attend to.”

  I gave him a disdainful nod and swaggered inside. Zizka's quarters, on the upper floor of the keep inside Prague Caste, were as severe and plain as their owner. A bare antechamber led into a single round chamber, starkly furnished with a window seat, a narrow bed and a battered old chest. The walls and floor were bare of hangings, rugs or anything to soften the hard whitewashed stone. There was at least a warm fire, crackling inside a hooded hearth.

  Otherwise the only furnishings were a wooden cross fixed to the wall facing the bed, a chair and a square campaign table. Zizka himself sat at the table, his hands laid flat on the board while he listened to a clerk read out correspondence. A little whey-faced confessor lurked in the background, meekly contemplating his dirty fingernails.

  Sensing my presence, the blind general raised his right hand. The clerk stopped droning and flitted out, taking a sheaf of carefully folded letters with him. The confessor also departed.

  “You are Sir John Page,” said Zizka in his slow, ponderous voice.

  “Yes, my lord,” I replied. My skin prickled with awareness of the two guards who had followed me into the chamber. The slightest hint of treachery on my part, and I would feel their knives in my back. As the mainstay of his cause, the general lived under permanent threat of assassination.

  “Why have you come?” Zizka said patiently.

  “Since joining your cause back in the spring, I have served as a private soldier,” I answered, “now I ask to be made an officer of horse.”

  “Not because I am a nobleman,” I added quickly, “or dislike serving alongside common men. I led my own company of mercenaries in Normandy. You have few cavalry, Lord Zizka, and even fewer knights. Give me the chance to prove myself.”

  Zizka said nothing for an uncomfortably long time. Seen at close quarters, he was even bigger and more imposing. And older. He was in his mid-fifties or thereabouts, but the strain of carrying the hopes of his country had aged him. The brawny shoulders were bowed, the raddled, weather-beaten face deeply scored by lines and wrinkles. There was a deep impression between his brows, like a thumb-mark, a sign of constant frowning. He occasionally plucked at the padded white bandage over his eyes, as thought it caused him some discomfort.

  At first I thought he failed to understand me. My Bohemian was still awkward, and the natives often smiled at my execrable accent, but I had become fluent enough to hold a conversation. I was about to speak again when he coughed, a gravelly, rolling noise in the back of his throat.

  “We make strange allies in war,” he rumbled, “and none stranger than a vagrant Englishman, far from home, who carries himself prouder than an earl and gives no explanation of how or why he came to be here.”

  I forced myself to swallow the insult. Zizka was testing me, just as King Harry did on the fateful night I was summoned to his pavilion at Rouen.

  “I am an outlaw in my own country,” I confessed, “and deserted the English army in Normandy to join your cause. Conscience demanded I come to Bohemia.”

  I explained my hatred of the church, of how it should be deprived of all its wealth, and returned to the humble poverty of its original state. Zizka listened in grave silence.

  “Our cause, as you call it, has its roots in England,” he said when I had finished. “Jan Hus drew much inspiration from the Lollard preacher, Wycliffe. Are you a Lollard, Sir John?”

  It was tempting to lie and pretend so, but I feared a trap: had I claimed to follow Wycliffe's teachings, the clever old rogue would have probably bombarded me with questions on Lollard doctrine, of which I was almost entirely ignorant.

  “No,” I answered simply, “yet I have taken the communion in two kinds, and signed a formal indenture of service in Prague. I am your man unto death, Lord Zizka.”

  Another infernally long silence followed. “Well done,” he said at last, “you have told me the truth, or enough of it. Now I should return the compliment. I already knew of your existence. An English knight in Bohemia, and an English Hussite at that, cannot hope to escape notice. The commander of the garrison told me you had signed the indenture.”

  “You fought at Rabi,” he added, tapping his bandage, “where I lost my other eye. My confessor insists that the Devil directed the hand of the crossbowman who shot me. I disagree. It was God's doing. He deprived me of earthly sight, so I might not be distracted by vanities. I am His tool, Sir John. As are we all.”

  I listened politely, wondering if the old hound was tipsy. It was still mid-morning, which seemed a little early, particularly for a man who flogged and beheaded his soldiers for drunkenness.

  “You fought at Zatec,” he said, “where most of your company was destroyed. Yet you survived without a scratch. Again, I sense God's handiwork.”

  He laced his powerful, sausage-like fingers together. “In a few days I go south, to put down the Catholic nobles still in arms in those districts. Some of them, base traitors, have already gone to join Sigismund in Moravia.”

  I knew something of this. After gathering a colossal horde of Italian mercenaries, Austrians, Hungarians, Croats and Transylvanians, Sigismund had marched into Moravia, the country south of Bohemia, and summoned the Moravian nobles to an assembly. There he ordered them to renounce the Four Articles of Prague. Since the council chamber was packed with his soldiers, all armed to the teeth, the Moravians hastily submitted and begged for absolution from the Pope.

  With Moravia reduced, it was clear Sigismund would soon once again invade Bohemian soil. Before his enemy moved, Zizka wanted to stamp out the last embers of Catholic resistance. If the country was united, there might be some hope of withstanding the wrath of the Dragon.

  Zizka was in dire need of all the loyal soldiers he could find, especially horsemen. I counted on this to earn myself a quick promotion. Few of the Bohemian nobles had joined him, and those who did were mostly lesser men, country knights and barons who brought few lances with them. The poorest gentry brought none at all, only themselves and their esquires. The wealthier nobles either held aloof from the conflict, hoping in vain to broker peace, or ran away to join Sigismund.

  “You will accompany me,” said Zizka, “as part of my household. There will be plenty of fighting. Plenty of chances for you to prove your worth.”

  I couldn't ask for better. Two days later the army marched south from Prague, a moving fortress of war-wagons, with a host of foot following on behind and a small reserve of cavalry in the rear.

  Zizka rode in the vanguard, surrounded by his retinue of esquires, no
bles, priests and mounted guards. As a knight, I was allowed to ride among the Bohemian nobles. They were wary of me, and the lack of conversation gave me time to observe the Hussites on the march.

  For strict order and discipline, I have seldom seen the like. Zizka had everything planned out to the last detail. Our three hundred wagons were divided into units of fifty, each commanded by an officer called a linesman. The largest armoured wagons were arranged in column on the flanks, with the baggage in the centre. If attacked, the drivers were trained to quickly steer the wagons into a defensive square. The missile troops inside were able to shoot out in any direction, while our infantry and cavalry were kept inside the square, waiting to be unleashed.

  To my eyes, the Hussite infantry still looked like a rabble of ill-trained peasants, with a disgraceful number of women among them. They were neatly divided into companies of a hundred, each with an experienced officer in command, and a captain over all. The companies themselves were divided into regular numbers of crossbowmen, pipe-gunners, flailmen, pikemen, halberdiers and pavisiers.

  “They may look rough,” Zizka said to me, “but I have drilled them as well as any soldiers in Christendom. Every man knows his duty, and how to perform it.”

  “And every woman,” I remarked sourly, at which he gave one of his rare husky laughs and clapped me on the shoulder.

  “I take all the soldiers I can get,” he boomed, “and the women of Bohemia are no delicate flowers. They fight like she-wolves in defence of hearth and home, family and faith. A mace is a mace, whoever wields it.”

  The first part of the campaign was straightforward enough. We laid siege to two small castles, held by Catholic nobles, and spent a few days at each knocking down the walls with our cannon. The nobles duly surrendered, and were forgiven on condition they handed over their wealth and arms to Zizka.

  Then we arrived at Caslav, a little way south of Kutna Hora. The Hussites had set up a big military camp there, defended by earthworks. Here, after some discussion with his generals, Zizka announced the next stage of the campaign.

  “The bulk of the army will rest in camp for a few days,” he told us in his pavilion, “meanwhile I shall take four hundred men south. To here.”

  I craned my neck over the nobles in front of me to see the location. His finger tapped a certain point on the River Nezarka, three or four miles from Caslav. It seemed an odd choice, since there were no towns or castles marked that I could see.

  “There are enemies within and without, my lords,” said Zizka, “God has granted us a respite from our external foes. We must now use it to root out and destroy another kind of threat.”

  I noticed he was breathing heavily, like an old mastiff, and his heavy cheeks were mottled with angry blood.

  “The Adamites,” muttered a stocky knight with black whiskers.

  “I will not suffer that name to be spoken in my presence,” rumbled Zizka, “nor will I suffer the presence of these godless perverts in Bohemia a moment longer than necessary. For too long have they remained a blight on our land, poisoning the air with every breath. The blight shall be cleansed with fire.”

  I had never heard of the Adamites before. Afterwards I approached one of Zizka's tame priests and asked him who they were.

  The priest, a tall, stringy fellow with mean eyes and a mean mouth, looked me up and down with obvious disapproval before answering. “The Adamites, as they call themselves,” he said, pronouncing the word with distaste, “are a sect of madmen and blasphemers. They wander the land, pretending to be in a state of innocence. The same innocence Adam knew before the Fall. A group of them have holed up on an island near Caslav. They must be exterminated, lest their heresy spreads.”

  “Heresy?” I said, “what heresy do they commit?”

  The priest's little mouth twisted in a sneer. “You are shamefully ignorant, Englis. The Adamites reject all church doctrine. All of it. They reject the Sacrament, the rite of Communion, even the form of marriage. They live in a state of absolute lawlessness they call bliss. Quite apart from these evils, they acknowledge no moral law, and perform the most wicked and unnatural acts. Carnal acts, obscenities beyond description.”

  His teeth were gritted as he spoke. I wondered if the thought of these carnal obscenities held some secret appeal for him. From the little he told me, the Adamites sounded like another Hussite splinter group, rejected and forced to live in the wild due to their extreme beliefs.

  A handful of addle-brained dissidents wandering the countryside didn't sound like much of a threat. Zizka, however, took them every bit as seriously as the armies of foreign crusaders hovering on his borders.

  As a member of his household, I accompanied him on the short march south from Caslav. He took four hundred horse and foot, including the small number of armoured knights who had thrown in their lot with the Hussites. I thought the Adamites must be capable fighters, and expected a tough battle ahead.

  The small island they had taken for their home lay squarely in the middle of a wide stretch of river. It was heavily wooded, with a hill in the middle rising from the trees, like the crown of a bald man's head. I rode to the edge of the riverbank and looked for any sign of fortifications, but saw none.

  “According to my scouts, they have their dwelling somewhere inside the woods,” said Zizka when I reported back to him, “a filthy, flea-infested village of sorts. Otherwise they live in brakes and caves dotted about the island.”

  “How many are they, my lord?” I asked.

  Zizka shrugged his armoured shoulders. “A few score. Half our number, perhaps. No more.”

  Thank God the old man was blind, otherwise he might have taken offence at the amazement on my face. I wondered if he had taken leave of his senses. Four hundred horse and foot, mounted knights and pikemen and crossbowmen, to deal with half that many sad, deluded clowns, living in poverty on an island? It seemed incredible.

  Yet Zizka was frightened. Breakaway sects like the Adamites threatened to undermine everything he believed in: an independent, self-governing Bohemia at peace with itself, united under a church of holy simplicity, stripped of all its undeserved wealth and worldly corruption. To his way of thinking, the Adamites had taken these good and honest principles and purposely twisted them, used them as justification for their own vile way of life. Agents of the Devil, working to destroy Bohemia from within. Zizka had a short way with such folk.

  I could see a massacre looming, and felt bound to prevent it. “Let me go to the island and treat with them, my lord,” I pleaded, “perhaps I can persuade them to surrender without bloodshed. To recant.”

  Zizka frowned, and the mean-mouthed priest I had spoken to earlier snorted down his long nose. “Recant?” he jeered, “one may as well ask Satan to accept communion. The people on the island have long since traded their souls. It only remains to destroy their bodies.”

  “A few might yet be saved,” I said, “the younger ones, perhaps. Anyone can be led into temptation.”

  The priest and his acolytes eyed me darkly, but my plea made some impression on Zizka. “To go to that island, alone, is to walk into a valley of death,” he said, “they might kill you, Englis, and think no more of it than swatting a fly.”

  “At least let me try, my lord,” I replied.

  After some hesitation, he gave me leave to act as his envoy. Two young esquires volunteered to go as well, but Zizka would not hear of it. I could guess his thoughts. If the mad Englishman wanted to throw away his life, so be it. Good Bohemians should not be allowed to follow suit.

  I goaded my horse into the river. The water was only fetlock-deep, and I crossed with no challenge or sign of life from the island. Once I reached the other side, I looked back over my shoulder to take a last look at Zizka's army. His troops were drawn up in silent lines, every pair of eyes fixed on me. Somewhere a lone drum beat, and the red and gold banners of the chalice fluttered in a gentle wind.

  Heart sinking, I turned and spurred onward into the shadowy trees.

&nbs
p; 13.

  Soon after plunging into the woods I found a track of sorts, the long grass beaten down by the passage of many feet. I decided to follow the track, hoping it might lead to the Adamite settlement.

  Other than the slow clop of my horse's hoofs, and the occasional rustle of some wild thing in the bushes, all was quiet. I peered anxiously through the tangled wilderness ahead, fingers tightly clenched around the grip of my sword.

  Only now did I curse my folly. What in God's name was I thinking, to volunteer for such a pointless and dangerous mission? The Adamites were doomed, whether or not I persuaded a few of them to recant. Zizka had only sent me to ease his conscience.

  A darker thought slithered into my mind. What if Zizka secretly wanted to be rid of me, and seized on this as an ideal opportunity? I knew suspicions over my presence in Bohemia still lingered. Zizka himself, in the short time I had known him, showed no sign of distrust. Still, he was both politician and soldier, and knew how to cloak his true thoughts.

  I was in a sweat by the time two figures stepped out of the woods in front of me. My sword was halfway out of the scabbard before one of them lifted a hand.

  “Welcome, stranger,” he called out, “put away your sword. There is no need of weapons here.”

  His voice was friendly enough. I warily slid my sword home and shaded my eyes to get a better look at them.

  They were both stark naked. A man and a woman, quite young, holding hands and grinning at me like a couple of deranged children. The man had dark hair and a scrubby, overgrown beard, while his companion was strawberry blonde, without so much as a loincloth to cover her modesty. They made a handsome pair, or would have done if they weren't both gaunt with hunger, ribs protruding against their pale skin.

  “I am Martin,” said the young man, still in the same mild, friendly tone, “and this is Elisabeth. Please don't look so suspicious. You have nothing to fear from us.”