The Heretic

by David Pilling

  “With every visit, they stay a little longer,” said Jana, reaching out to lay her palm flat against the glass. “They beckon to me. They want me to join them in death.”

  My despair curdled into anger. “Enough,” I shouted, “enough of this, do you hear? These ghouls that haunt you, whatever they are and wherever they come from, can climb back into their graves where they belong.”

  Ignoring her cries, I drew my dagger and smashed the hilt against the mirror. The glass splintered. I pounded at it, again and again, until the frame was empty and the floor covered in broken shards.

  Jana howled in agony, as though I had struck her instead of the damned mirror. “For God's sake be quiet,” I pleaded, “the servants will think I'm beating you.”

  She kept howling. Terrified she would miscarry, I flung the door open and yelled for Nicholas to fetch help.

  By the time the leeches arrived, I had managed to get Jana into bed. She sobbed wordlessly and clawed at me like an animal, scoring long scratches down my face with her nails. I dabbed at the blood with a handkerchief as the doctors, a pack of jabbering greybeards, clustered around her. Every man offered a different opinion. The most sensible of them suggested a sleeping draught, which I consented to.

  “She must rest,” I said, “if she loses the children, I will hold you responsible. Every one of you.”

  They gaped at me in fearful silence. The myth of Jan Englis, the English monster who slaughtered men by the dozen and made trophies of their skulls, was now firmly established in Bohemia as well as Hungary. I didn't live up to any part of the myth, thank God, but the doctors didn't know that.

  I stayed at Jana's side for two days and nights. The sleeping draught was a powerful one, and she didn't wake for over fourteen hours. When her eyelids finally opened, she seemed lucid again, and spoke only of our future together. There was no mention of spirits, and I allowed myself to hope it was a passing madness.

  “Brain fever,” one of the doctors said confidently, “pregnant women suffer from it sometimes, especially if they are of a nervous disposition.”

  The old fraud was plainly making it up just to please me, but I was too anxious for Jana's recovery to care. I dismissed him and summoned Nicholas.

  “Tomorrow I have to return to the army,” I said, “it is impossible to say when I might return. I entrust Jana, and my children, to your care. Don't let me down.”

  Nicholas, faithful soul, knelt and placed one hand flat over his breast. “Trust in me, my lord,” he said, and so I did.

  Next morning I left Prague with a heavy heart. At least Jana was eating again, and kissed me warmly before we parted. Lest her madness returned, I instructed the servants to watch over her day and night. The doctors were paid extra to take rooms in the house (there were plenty spare) in case Jana miscarried or went into labour early.

  God, who had inflicted almost very kind of horror on Bohemia, now unleashed his final torment. Soon after I rejoined the army a terrible plague swept through the land. It began in the southeast and quickly spread, like a forest fire in summer. The country districts, barely recovered from years of war, suffered most. Panicky reports reached the army, still encamped near the Moravian border, of entire villages wiped out in a matter of days. Refugees were fleeing for shelter to the towns, doubtless carrying the disease with them.

  “Our citizens must harden their hearts,” ordered Zizka, “and close their gates to the sick. Otherwise Bohemia shall not survive.”

  He raised his sightless head, now grey of pallor and practically bald, to the heavens. “Oh Lord,” I heard him mutter, “what have my people done, that you should punish them so? Let me carry the burden of their sins. Let the poor folk be, and punish me on their behalf.”

  “Perhaps we should withdraw to Prague, my lord,” I suggested, “and take refuge there until the plague has abated.”

  “Skulk behind high walls?” he snarled, “never. This pestilence is just another enemy. It must be confronted, head-on, and defeated.”

  His resolve, unlike his failing body, remained unshakeable. A fever seized him as we marched south to besiege the castle of Pribyslav, which occupied a heavily fortified position near the Moravian border. He had to be carried the last few miles in a covered litter, attended by his confessor and a leech. One prayed constantly for the old man's survival, the other poured medicines down his throat.

  Our native troops prayed non-stop for his recovery. Many offered up their own lives in exchange for his. To them Jan Zizka had become more than a man. He was a living symbol of victory, of the hopes and independence of their country. With him, the armies of Bohemia were invincible. Without him...

  It was a dire autumn. Heavy rain churned up the already bad roads into a quagmire. Our wagons frequently got bogged down, or snapped their axles, and had to be dragged out or repaired on the spot by teams of cursing workmen, soaked to the skin.

  One miserable night, while the guns boomed outside and the incessant rain battered at my tent, I sat alone and drank a health to poor soldiers. With so many foreigners in the Hussite army, Zizka's harsh Regulations were hardly ever enforced anymore. There were no punishments for indulging in strong drink, so I gulped down health after health until three wineskins lay empty at my feet.

  I was quite drunk, and blinking away maudlin tears, when a man ducked into my tent. He was young, one of Zizka's esquires, the left side of his face horribly disfigured by a sabre-cut. His name was Albert, I dimly recalled through the fug of alcohol. The boy had taken the wound at Kutna Hora, nearly two years gone. How swiftly time passed.

  “You're wet, my lad,” I burbled, offering him my wineskin, “have a drink to warm you up.”

  “Save it for yourself, Englis,” he replied. I tried to focus on the object in his hand. A neatly folded square of parchment, water-damaged and sealed with a blob of red wax.

  Albert gently took the wineskin away and pressed the letter into my hands. “This was delivered to Zizka's pavilion,” he said, “the envoy said it was a letter from Prague. For you.”

  Blearily, I snapped the seal and unfolded the parchment. Nicholas' neat handwriting weaved crazily before my eyes.

  “Good news?” asked Albert after I had read in silence for a while.

  I lifted my head. The tears flowed freely now, and with good reason.

  “Jana was brought to bed five days ago,” I said in a hollow voice, “she gave birth to a boy and a girl. Both healthy. Alive and well at the time of writing.

  The other man smiled with pure relief, and stepped closer to shake my hand. He froze at the sight of my expression.

  “Two days ago,” I added, “the maids went into our bedchamber and found Jana dead on the floor. She had cut her wrists open with a shard of glass and bled to death in silence. They said she was smiling.”

  33.

  Two days after the news of Jana's death I was back in our bedchamber. Zizka didn't hesitate to grant me leave. The war could wait.

  I looked down at my newborn children in their their separate cots. They were fast sleep, blissfully unaware of the tragedy. Nicholas, ever practical, had hired a nurse to look after them.

  “She's a capable woman, my lord,” he told me, “and your sons are strong and healthy. They will thrive.”

  He glanced at me nervously. “I must beg your forgiveness. I failed in my promise to keep your family safe. There was nothing I could do to prevent your wife's death. She must have kept the piece of glass hidden. It was from the broken mirror.”

  I said nothing, distracted by the twins. Save for their sex, they were identical, the same size and weight and fair colouring. New to the world, and already motherless. As yet they didn't even have names.

  “God help me,” I said wearily, putting a hand to my brow, “God help us all.”

  My head throbbed. There was a persistent ache, just behind my left eye. Recently I had developed a nervous twitch in the corner of my mouth. There were pains all through my body, and I couldn't shake off a permanent exhaust
ion. Added to my fatigue were the twin burdens of guilt and grief.

  “My lord,” said Nicholas after a long moment, “forgive. I beg you.”

  “You are forgiven,” I replied irritably, “now I wish to see her body.”

  Jana was laid out in an antechamber, like a slab of meat on a wooden board. The wounds on her wrists had been washed clean and discreetly covered under the long sleeves of her favourite gown. It was of dark blue Byzantine silk, one of the few luxuries she had permitted herself. I had bought it for her shortly after our return to Prague.

  She looked peaceful in death. Her skin was alabaster, those extraordinary green eyes closed forever. The maids had bound up her hair, neatly folded her slender white hands over her stomach.

  The room was cold, with no fire in the grate. My heart beat sluggishly as I stared down at Jana's dead face. The pains in my body ebbed away, replaced by a dull indifference.

  Nicholas coughed. “My lord,” he said, his voice full of fear, “there is some difficulty in arranging a funeral. None of the priests I have spoken to will allow the lady Jana to be buried inside consecrated ground. “

  I lifted my head. “Because she destroyed herself,” I said quietly, “and suicide, according to the church, is a crime against God.”

  For a moment I almost laughed – sick, mad laughter. I had come to Bohemia to fight for God and a reformed church. In return God had taken my wife from me and condemned her earthly remains to be buried in unconsecrated ground, as if she were a leper. Or a heretic.

  A heretic. Poor Jana, who secretly despised the Hussites and fought only to save her country from destruction, had paid for the sins of others. My sins.

  I couldn't bear to look at the twins again. They reminded me of their mother. Of my failure. I was too hard on myself, perhaps. Love is no proof against madness. There was nothing I could have done to expel the devils from her mind. Still the guilt weighed me down, an invisible millstone about my neck.

  “Tomorrow I go back to the army,” I told Nicholas. “I won't come back until the wars are over. Look after the children. I'll send money. Plenty of money.”

  “They shall lack for nothing, my lord,” he replied solemnly.

  We spoke briefly of Jana's funeral. I paid two grave-diggers to dispose of her remains in a patch of common ground outside Prague. I couldn't bear to watch the grim internment, her body shovelled into a hole in the ground like a dead animal, with no priest to speak the last rites.

  Little relief awaited me at the army, still bogged down outside the flinty walls of Pribyslav. The plague, which no clever battlefield strategy could hope to defeat, had stormed our fortifications and swept through the encampment with merciless ferocity. Our soldiers died in droves, their bodies racked by convulsions, covered in weeping sores and hideous black pustules.

  Nor was it any respecter of persons. Knights and nobles died just as easily as peasants. Their diseased remains met the same fate, hastily dumped into pits well beyond the camp or stacked in heaps and burned.

  Zizka, already a sick man, his iron constitution weakened by fatigue and illness, was one of the first to succumb. Sheer strength of will kept him alive long enough to say farewell.

  I was one of the last summoned to his pavilion. The interior was dark and smoky, lit by a single brazier next to the dying man's bed. I wore a scarf soaked in urine pressed over my mouth and nostrils to guard against infection. The only other soul in the pavilion was Zizka's devoted confessor. He refused to quit his master's side. I had never liked the rat-faced little man, but pitied him now. His eyes were red with tears, and his hands trembled as they held a silver crucifix over the bed.

  Stripped of his armour, eaten away by disease, the general was a shrivelled husk of his old self. I shuddered at the sight of his head, propped up on a bolster. His face was a ghastly death-mask, the skin yellow, cheeks fallen in, lips shrivelled over bad teeth. Someone, presumably on Zizka's orders, had peeled away his blindfold. Layers of skin had grown over his empty eyes. There was a livid purple scar under the rim of his left eye, where a German Templar's lance had pierced it, more than thirty years gone. His nightshirt was open at the neck, revealing a couple of glistening plague sores.

  I stopped at a prudent distance from the bed. “My lord,” I said, my voice muffled behind the scarf.

  Zizka's throat was damp with sweat as he fought for speech. “Englis,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “you, who were always first in war, are the last to say goodbye.”

  “You flatter me, my lord,” I replied. So he did. There were plenty of braver and more able captains than me in his service. I, however, was one of the few who remained loyal to the end. It is something to boast of, in a largely misspent life.

  Pain tore through Zizka's body. He didn't speak again until it had passed. I felt a pang of sorrow for him. Never before, in the time I knew him, had Jan Zizka admitted to pain.

  “Courage, my lord,” said the confessor, holding the crucifix closer to his master's sweating face, “Christ is near. Draw strength from Him.”

  “Englis,” Zizka breathed, “time grows short. I have granted all my loyal followers one final request before I depart. Name it. Land. Castles. Anything in my power.”

  “I want nothing, my lord,” I replied, “save this. Break the terms of my indenture, and allow me to leave Bohemia.”

  It shames me to admit I profited from a dying man's generosity. Yet this is a hard world. We must seize our chances when they come. Here was my chance to escape Bohemia without sacrificing honour and reputation.

  Zizka's lips moved soundlessly. Perhaps he cursed me, or prayed for my salvation. Both equally futile.

  “I hoped you would stay,” he murmured eventually, “my country will have need of able captains in the days to come. I see now your heart lies elsewhere. England, perhaps?”

  “No, my lord,” I replied, “not England. Only a hangman's rope awaits me there.”

  He nodded sorrowfully. “You are a mere sell-sword after all. Men should fight for God and country. Those are the only causes worth dying for. You shall die on a foreign battlefield, Englis, far from home and all you love.”

  I cared little for his predictions. I wanted to be off. Claim my blood money at Pilsen and take the Company of Wolves far away, to the warm and profitable land beyond the Alps.

  “Your request is granted,” he said after a long pause, “though I wish it could be otherwise. I compel no man to fight against his will.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” I replied. Not caring to touch him, I knelt beside his bed and made the sign of the cross.

  Zizka didn't seem to notice. His breathing was increasingly laboured, his callused, battle-scarred hands folded in prayer. The confessor, weeping like a baby, lowered the crucifix until the cold metal almost touched Zizka's brow. A familiar shadow crawled across the diseased flesh. Death had come to claim his own.

  I left him before the end. When it was over, and the general’s demise of was proclaimed by a single mournful horn-blast, the world felt shabbier. Meaner, and deprived of purpose. Jan Zizka was a harsh man, consumed by God, but undeniably a great one. Without him, a little more glory had faded from the earth.

  In His divine wit, God had seen fit to kill Zizka but spare me and my men. Miraculously untouched by plague, the Company of Wolves rode out the morning after Zizka's death.

  We rode west, towards Pilsen and the promise of gold.

  ***

  Phrantzes looked up from his work. “Did you find it?” he asked, “was the money at Pilsen?”

  “Yes,” said John Page, “for once, Sigismund kept his word. I followed the instructions of his agent, Hans, and the money was brought to me at Zdice. Along with the plunder taken from the Bohemian wars, I had more than enough to pay the Company of Wolves until we reached Italy.”

  As was his habit, Page sat on a bench, arms folded, looking down through the latticed window of their shared cell at the waters of the Bosphorus. Phrantzes was at his usual place behind the desk, his
face and hands spotted with ink.

  The little clerk scratched his cheek with the quill. “What of the twins?” he asked, “did you leave them behind in Prague?”

  Page nodded. “Of course. They were too young to be moved, and a military camp is no place for infants. I left money to ensure they were guarded and looked after. When they were old enough, I intended to send for them.”

  “I wasn't sorry to leave Bohemia,” he added, “the place was rotten with plague and religion. Hatreds that will last for generations. The Hussites chose their new leader from the priesthood. Prokop, his name was. A priest, in charge of an army! Even if Zizka had forbidden it, I would have quit Bohemia then. I cared not to serve under any so-called man of God.”

  “What of your other child,” said Phrantzes, “the boy in Normandy?”

  “I could do nothing for him. Normandy was English soil, where I was wanted as an outlaw and a deserter. Many years passed before I clapped eyes on the lad's face.”

  Phrantzes struggled to detect any note of regret in the old soldier's voice. Page liked to talk of his guilt. To Phrantzes these claims sounded like so much empty noise. Play-acting. Page spoke without emotion, nor shed a single tear. There was something cold about him. Remorseless.

  Phrantzes thought he detected something else. Page was hiding something. Something he preferred his biographer, and the Ottoman Sultan, not to know.

  The clerk smoothed the top leaf of the stack of vellum next to his elbow. “This will go to the Sultan,” he said, “I pray he likes it enough to grant us another stay of execution. Your adventures in the Italian city-states should be worth hearing.”

  Page's eyes flickered. “Italy,” he said, “land of blood and gold. Yes. Let us hope the Sultan is merciful.”

  END.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  The Hussite Wars, fought largely in Bohemia and Moravia (the modern-day Czech Republic), began in 1419 and officially ended in 1436. After seventeen years of war, in which the vastly outnumbered Hussite armies won a string of unlikely victories, King Sigismund finally got his hands on the Bohemian crown. So unsuccessful on the battlefield, the wily old monarch triumphed at last thanks to internal divisions between the Hussites. These culminated at the Battle of Lipany in 1434, where the Hussite factions destroyed each other and Prokop (known as Prokop the Great), Jan Zizka's successor, was killed.