The Heretic

by David Pilling

  “Here,” he rasped, holding out my sword, hilt-first, “fight for us. Fight for God.”

  I took it without a word, and he turned and sprinted towards the fight.“Hus!” he shouted, snatching up the heavy iron-shod mace from his belt.

  A mob of peasants streamed after him, including my guards. They brandished torches, flails, scythes and spiked clubs, and their gaunt faces shone with bloodlust and holy zeal.

  “HUS! HUS!”

  The cry rose like a storm into the night sky. I jogged cautiously after them, shading my eyes against the glow of torches. There were figures clustered at the far end of the street, men and horses silhouetted in black against the red glare of fired houses. Mounted soldiers hurled flaming brands onto the nearest roofs. Enraged villagers swarmed around them, baying like dogs.

  I shuffled crabwise to my left, back pressed against the wall. A few paces ahead, five or six horsemen were fighting for their lives against a crowd of peasants. They wheeled their mounts and stabbed at the crowd of livid faces, trying to clear a path. The Bohemians fought with a kind of wild, untrained fury, thrashing and hacking at the soldiers as though they were barley stalks, ripe for harvest.

  The nearest horseman had his back to me. I darted forward and cut at his horse, severing a hamstring. With a hideous shriek, the animal collapsed and threw her rider. He got to his knees and thrust his spear into the belly of a peasant who came charging at him, wielding a hatchet. The peasant fell, vomiting blood, the spear-head lodged in his guts. As the soldier tried to wrestle it free, I plunged my sword into his back. The blade ripped through the leather and wool of his padded jerkin and bit deep into flesh. He screamed and screamed, a dreadful animal noise, veins protruding in the side of his neck.

  I twisted the sword out of his body. Another horse pitched over to my left, her neck cleaved by a scythe. Her rider was dragged clear, pinned down and beaten to death. His killer was the ugly giant I had compared to an African ape. This was the first time I saw the damage a Hussite war-flail could do to a human body. The giant rained down blows with mad fury, wielding his flail in both hands. There was awesome strength in his thick arms and slanted shoulders, tempered from a lifetime of hard labour in the fields. Within moments the soldier’s face was reduced to bloody pulp; his helmet crumpled under the relentless pounding, skull shattered like an egg.

  Another of the soldiers had lost his horse. A skilled swordsman, he stood over her body, fighting off three villagers at once. One was a young girl, her long black hair straggling over her face, wailing “Hus! Hus!” as she jabbed at him with a crude spear, made from a hunting knife strapped to the end of a broom handle.

  I rushed at him and aimed a stroke at his head. He parried the blow deftly enough, but was forced to give ground, attacked on all sides. We pinned him against a wall, where I beat down his faltering guard and cut off three of his fingers. The girl crowed in delight as she thrust her spear into the meat of his shoulder, impaling him against the timber. Her companions hacked at him with their scythes. His face was streaked in blood, his nose hanging by a slender thread of skin. They drew their long knives and went in for the close work.

  I left them to it. His screams joined the general chorus of slaughter: bellows, war-cries, pleas for mercy, the shriek of horses, moans and wails of the dying. Torchlight cast an unearthly reddish-gold light over the scene. Bodies lay all over the muddy street, blades flashed, blood flowed.

  “Hus! Hus!”

  The soldiers had had enough. Those still mounted turned and galloped into the night, leaving their wounded comrades to die. The stranded men were quickly butchered, throats slashed with cold efficiency.

  One of the survivors was singled out for special treatment. Two men dragged him into the light, an esquire in a suit of costly silver plate, barely conscious from loss of blood. The lower half of his face under the sallet was pale and beardless. A boy, I thought. Perhaps this was his first time in action.

  “Wait,” I pleaded, “let this one live. Perhaps we can question him.”

  The men spat curses at me. One placed his big meaty hand on my chest and shoved me backwards. I would have struck him, but Tomislav intervened.

  “This is not your affair,” he said, glowering at me. “Stay out of it, Englishman. Our people want vengeance, as is their right.”

  Under Tomislav’s direction, the villagers heaped up bales of dry straw outside the church and planted a stake in the middle of them. Their victim, still encased in steel, was tied firmly to the stake. Barely conscious, he offered no resistance. Torches were thrust against the straw. They lit easily, bursting into flame.

  After four years of soldiering I had plenty of foul acts committed in the name of one cause or another. Yet I couldn't bear to watch the lad die. Whatever crimes he had committed in his short life, nobody deserved such a fate.

  He groaned. The fire had reached his armoured knees, and the pain jerked him out of his swoon. It would rise, and rise, until his flesh was baked inside its metal shell. If God was kind he might choke to death on the smoke first, as often happens when men are burned.

  After a time he started to scream.

  7.

  The stench of violent death and roasted human flesh lingered into the morning. I spent a sleepless night, helping to gather and lay out the dead for burial in the walled cemetery behind the church.

  Graz had suffered terrible losses in the raid. Twelve dead, including three women and four young children. One poor women had lost her husband and daughter. She knelt beside their freshly dug graves, wailing and weeping and tearing at her hair. Tomislav did his best to comfort her. She clung to him like a child, almost drawing blood from his neck with her sharp nails.

  Five of the cottages had been set on fire. Despite the best efforts of the villagers, who laboured to fetch water from the nearby river, all five were roofless husks by dawn.

  Weary and heavy-eyed, I wandered back from the cemetery to look at the remains of the German esquire. His armour, partially melted and still gently smoking, stood upright against the stake. I didn’t care to lift his sallet and see what remained inside. Much of his flesh had probably melted away, leaving a few shreds of charred meat clinging to black bones.

  The enemy had also suffered. Eight dead, and six horses. I helped to carry their bodies into a field, where they were stacked in a great heap and burned. The smell was overpowering, and I had to hurry away and find a quiet place to vomit under a hedgerow.

  When all was done, the survivors gathered in the square. They were a sorry-looking crowd, thirty or forty souls, cold and frightened and exhausted in the raw light of day. Scarcely a family in the village had not lost someone to the raid. The air was full of the sound of mourning, tears and cries of grief and fervent prayers.

  Father Tomislav stood on the step of the church to address his decimated flock. He looked as tired as the rest, his habit scorched and spattered with blood. More blood stained the dinted iron head of his mace. Below him stood the burly headman, face grey with pain, one arm in a bloodstained sling.

  Tomislav spoke to the villagers for a good half-hour. I couldn't understand any of it, of course. Judging from the reaction of his audience, the dark whispers and shaking of heads, he had some hard advice for them. He was supported by the headman, who growled and snapped at the loudest critics until they fell silent.

  After Tomislav had finished, and the villagers fallen to arguing among themselves, I pushed through the crowd and grabbed his arm.

  “Well?” I demanded, “what did you tell them?”

  He glanced down at my hand until I released him. “Let us speak in private,” he said, beckoning me into the dark coolness of the church.

  I followed him inside. “The raids will not cease,” he told me, “until Graz is destroyed, and all our people slain or taken prisoner. We are far too close to the border for safety. I have advised the villagers to abandon Graz and seek refuge elsewhere. Pilsen is the nearest large town, but we cannot go there. It is held by the enem
y. Our only choice is Prague.”

  I tried to recall my hazy knowledge of Bohemia. Prague, Schiller had told me, was the capital and the only major city in the kingdom. It lay some forty or fifty miles to the east.

  “What of me?” I asked, “am I still a prisoner, or have I earned your trust?”

  Tomislav gave me another of his shrewd looks. “I will speak to the elders,” he said, “but you are probably safe enough. They thought you were a spy for the Germans. Personally I think you are a little mad.”

  My patience, already stretched thin, threatened to snap. “I came to your country, of my own free will, to offer my sword to the Hussites. Since crossing the border I have met with nothing but insults. If I am rated so cheaply, let me go, and I will gladly ride back to the wars in Normandy.”

  The priest held up his hands. “No offence was meant,” he said soothingly, “but consider your behaviour, Englishman. You stumble into Bohemia, alone, with nothing save a few pennies in your purse. What are we supposed to make of you? Only a madman or a fool chooses to throw away his life in such a hopeless cause as ours.”

  His voice rose. “Bohemia is surrounded. Outnumbered. Condemned. Against the power of the Pope, and the mightiest realms in Christendom, we can muster only a few thousand soldiers. Yes, we have held them off so far, thanks to the favour of God and the victories of Jan Zizka. But for how much longer? Zizka grows old. Our enemies are legion.”

  “They come,” he murmured softly, gazing at the plain wooden cross on the altar, “they and all their armies with them, as many people as the sand that is on the seashore, with a great many horses and chariots...”

  “Let them come,” I said, “all the hosts of Midian, chariots and all.”

  The name of Jan Zizka was familiar to me. His fame had reached Normandy, where the news of his endless military victories was greeted with sceptism bordering on disbelief. It seemed impossible that one ageing general and his little peasant army could hold off the imperial might of Germany and Hungary. Yet Bohemia was still independent, largely thanks to his genius. Tomislav plainly adored him.

  In spite of my angry words, there was no turning back. In England I was an outlaw, in France a deserter, in Germany a heretic. Bohemia was my only refuge, and it trembled on the verge of destruction.

  Many of the villagers were reluctant to leave. Graz was their whole world: they had probably never ventured more than a few miles beyond it in their lives. Tomislav, however, was supported by the elders, who saw the sense of his argument. With enemy troops gathering on the German border, and raids and invasions becoming ever more frequent, an ill-defended place like Graz could not hope to survive for much longer.

  The villagers destroyed their home before leaving it. Every house was emptied of goods and furniture, and then burned. Grim necessity. Nothing was left for the enemy to scavenge. I helped to fetch teams of oxen from the byres and yoke the beasts to four large wagons.

  These wagons were no ordinary farm carts. They were exceptionally sturdy, with thick planking on the sides and an extra panel of roped-together planks on the inside. Tomislav was busy elsewhere, and none of the men I worked with spoke German, so I could ask no questions. I guessed that the panel was supposed to be dropped over the side, to act as another layer of defence. There was a row of holes bored into the top half of it. Weapon ports, through which a man might shoot a bow or crossbow.

  I didn’t know it then, but these carts were simple versions of the armoured war-wagons used by the Hussites. They were Zizka’s invention. In a country of vast plains and little natural cover, he used converted farm carts as mobile fortifications. In battle he drew them up on a hill, stuffed with crossbowmen and handgunners and defended by artillery. Time and again, invading hosts of crusaders broke their teeth on the wagon-squares, shot to pieces as they struggled to break through the chain of timber and steel. Once their strength was exhausted, Zizka would unleash his ragged infantry to drive the enemy from the field.

  Some echo of the strategy, and of Zizka’s victories, must have reached the villagers. Loaded with goods and supplies, the wagons formed the core of the sad procession that struck out east, leaving behind the smoking ruins of Graz.

  The able-bodied men went first, tramping along with grim determination, led by Father Tomislav. He walked with a long-legged stride, aided by a staff. Behind the men came the women and young children. The older children drove the beasts at the rear of the column, a straggling herd of cows, goats and a pig or two. Baskets full of squawking poultry balanced precariously on top of the wagons, already stuffed to overflowing.

  My horse, which had spent a comfortable few days in a byre, was returned to me. “Ride on ahead,” said Tomislav, “you are the only soldier among us. Behave like one. It may give our people confidence to know we have a veteran of the French wars among us.”

  He also returned my helm and dagger. I nodded my thanks and followed his suggestion, galloping ahead of the villagers to spy out the land.

  It was the cusp of summer. Before me lay a flat landscape and an open road, twisting like a ribbon over the fields and little patches of forest before vanishing into a blue haze. The land was eerily silent. There was no birdsong, not a sign or sound of wildlife. Most of the fields were uncultivated, their crops left to rot over the winter.

  I recognised the signs. This was a country at war. The normal rhythm of the year was disturbed, harvests neglected or destroyed, the people driven away. Graz was not the only village to have suffered. All over Bohemia, invading armies and the bands of cruel robbers that inevitably sprang up in their wake, like pestilence after a famine, had left their mark.

  For the ordinary people, the peasants who tilled the land and the citizens of the scattered towns, there was little refuge. Forced to take up arms, they fought back with a ferocity that stunned Christendom.

  I had seen a glimpse of the fighting qualities of Bohemian peasants. Perhaps the tales of the stubborn defenders of Graz had spread, for we were unmolested on the journey to Prague. Occasionally I saw horsemen on the horizon, singly or in small groups, but they quickly vanished again. Some may have been scouts, members of robber bands, hunting for easy prey. Our ramshackle convoy looked vulnerable enough to me, yet the jackals let us alone.

  On the way I asked Father Tomislav to teach me Bohemian. He was happy to agree, and every evening he played schoolmaster, drilling the basics of his language into my head while we sat and ate our bread and beans by the campfire.

  At dusk, when the convoy stopped for the night, the wagons were unloaded and arranged in a defensive square. The best archers among us were placed inside, to take turns keeping watch during the long hours of darkness.

  “Your people have started to think like soldiers,” I remarked to Tomislav one night. We spoke German. I learned the Bohemian tongue swiftly enough – I have some talent for languages, which is just as well, considering the wandering vagabond life I have led - but months would pass before I had the confidence to use it.

  “They have to,” he replied shortly, “it is that, or perish. You have seen the fate of those who fail to learn.”

  I nodded. Along the route we passed many destroyed villages and small farms. The buildings razed to their post-holes, the people massacred or fled, beasts stolen, crops burned in the fields. I had seen it all before in Normandy.

  Occasionally we passed a castle. Small, grimly functional places compared to some of the magnificent schlosser I saw in Germany, usually perched on some high crag over a road or river crossing. Nobody hailed us. The gates were always closed, towers and battlements crammed with soldiers.

  In those days it seemed the whole of Christendom, not just Bohemia, was sliding into war. I wondered if the dire predictions of Robert Stafford, the outlawed chaplain of Sussex, were coming true after all. Perhaps the end of days was nigh, and the advent of Antichrist.

  Tomislav, like many Hussites, was convinced Antichrist had arrived already in the person of King Sigismund. “Sigismund is the Dragon spoken o
f in Revelation,” he said, “the signs are clear. He lured Jan Hus to his death at Constance. He seeks to destroy our holy kingdom. He upholds the false doctrine of the Pope.”

  As well as language, Tomislav taught me some recent history, of how the entire country had risen in arms when the news of Hus’ death reached Bohemia. One Jan Zelivsky, a priest, had denounced Sigismund as the Dragon of Revelation. Zelivisky led an armed mob to attack the burghers of Prague, invading their council chamber and hurling many to their deaths from the windows. This incident was the spark that ignited the Hussite revolt.

  The nights passed without incident. Outside, beyond the wagon-square, the dreary howling of wolves echoed across the waste. The villagers huddled around their fires, cradling their children and talking in low voices.

  One always sat apart from the rest. This was the young woman who had lost her husband and daughter in the raid. Her name was Jana. Since her initial outburst of grief, she had refused to speak to anyone save Tomislav.

  “The others respect her silence,” the priest told me, “she is in mourning.”

  He gave me one of his sly looks. “I ask you to respect her as well. For your own sake as much as hers. Our people would not take kindly to a foreigner interfering with one of their own.”

  “It hadn't crossed my mind,” I said indignantly. In truth, I had barely spared Jana a glance. I did now and was intrigued to find she was pretty enough, under the grime and greasy locks.

  “You are a soldier,” said Tomislav, “the nature of soldiers does not change, wherever they are from. Be wise. Leave her be.”

  His warnings were quite unnecessary. True, I had not lain with a woman for months, but I was not fool enough to try and seduce a young widow. Even if I had rated my manly charms so high, there was the appalling risk to consider. She had kin among the villagers, and they would not hesitate to tear me to pieces if I offered her any insult. Killing a few Germans was not enough to earn their trust. I slept light, with one hand on my dagger.