So, Reynevan made merry, but sparingly, and didn’t drink too much, although the magical decocts he had taken in Soukenická Street made him resistant to all kinds of toxins, including alcohol. Finally, however, he decided to leave the party. The merrymaking at Mejzlik’s was beginning to enter the stage that Scharley called: “Wine, vomit and song.” “Women” had intentionally been left out of the set.
Reynevan went out into the street and took a deep breath. Prague was quietening down. The sounds of the noisy revelling were slowly being drowned out by the choirs of frogs along the Vltava and the crickets in monastery gardens.
He walked towards the Horse Gate. As he passed taverns and beer cellars, his senses were assaulted by sour smells and the clinking of dishes, girlish squeals, shouts now a little drowsy and increasingly listless singing.
I’m a butcher, you’re a butcher, we’re both butchers
We’ll go off looking for heifers
I’ll be buying, you’ll be haggling
We’ll court pretty maidens
A breeze was blowing, bearing the scent of flowers, leaves, sludge, smoke and God knows what else.
And blood.
Prague still reeked of blood. Reynevan was still being tormented by that stench, still had it in his nostrils. He felt the anxiety it triggered in him. There were fewer and fewer passers-by and no sight or sound of Flutek’s spies, but the anxiety didn’t diminish.
He turned into Stará Pasířská Street, then into a lane called V Jámě. As he walked, he was thinking about Nicolette, Katarzyna Biberstein. He thought about her incessantly and quickly experienced the effects of that thinking. The images appeared before his eyes so vividly and realistically, in such detail, that at a certain moment it all became unbearable—Reynevan stopped involuntarily and looked back. Involuntarily, because he knew there was nowhere to go anyway. Back in August 1419, barely twenty days after the Defenestration, every last brothel in Prague had been torn down and every last woman of easy virtue driven from the city. The Hussites were very strict regarding the observation of morality.
The realistic and detailed images of Katarzyna also triggered other associations. The rooms in the house at the corner of Saint Stephen’s Street and Na Rybníčku Street that Reynevan shared with Samson Honeypot had a landlady, Mistress Blažena Pospíchalová, a widow rich in womanly charms with kind, blue eyes. Those eyes had come to rest on Reynevan in such an eloquent way that he suspected in Mistress Blažena desires that Scharley usually described punctiliously as a “union based only on lust and not the result of a Church-sanctioned alliance.” The rest of the world defined the activity much more concisely and bluntly. And the Hussites treated such bluntly defined activity with great severity. They usually did it for effect, admittedly, but no one ever knew who or what they might make an example of. So even though Reynevan understood Mistress Blažena’s glances, he pretended he didn’t. Partly out of fear of getting into hot water and partly—and even more so—out of a desire to remain faithful to his beloved Nicolette.
A furious caterwauling shook him out of his reverie as a large ginger cat dashed out of the dark alley on his right and ran off down the street. Reynevan immediately speeded up. It might have been Flutek’s spies who had scared the cat. But it might also have been common cutpurses lying in wait for a lonely passer-by. Dusk was falling, there was almost no one around, and when the backstreets of the New Town were dark and deserted, they stopped being safe. Particularly now, when most of the castle guard had joined Prokop’s army, it wasn’t advisable to roam around the New Town alone.
So Reynevan decided not to be alone. Two locals were walking about a dozen paces ahead of him. He had to make quite an effort to catch them up as they were walking fast and on hearing his footsteps had clearly speeded up. And suddenly turned into a backstreet. He followed them.
“I say, brothers! Fear not! I only wanted to—”
The men turned around. One had a suppurating chancre just beside his nose and a butcher’s knife in his hand. The other—shorter and thickset—was armed with a cleaver with a curved cross guard. Neither of them was Flutek’s spy.
The third one, who’d been following him and had scared the cat, had greyish hair and wasn’t the spy, either. He was carrying a dagger, slender and razor-sharp.
Reynevan stepped back, pressing himself against the wall. He held out his doctor’s bag towards the thugs.
“Gentlemen…” he gibbered, teeth chattering. “Brothers… Take it… It’s all I have… I… I beg… I beg you… Don’t kill me…”
The thugs’ faces, at first hard and set, relaxed and melted into contemptuous grimaces. Scornful cruelty appeared in their previously cold and vigilant eyes. They advanced, raising their weapons, towards an easy and abject victim.
And Reynevan moved to the next phase. After the psychological ruse à la Scharley, it was time to use other methods learned from other teachers.
The first character wasn’t expecting either an attack or that the medical satchel would be slammed straight into his festering nose. A kick to the shins made the second one stagger. The third, the thickset one, was astonished to find his cleaver slicing air and he himself tumbling onto a pile of rubbish, having tripped over a dexterously positioned foot. Seeing the others coming for him, Reynevan dropped the satchel and swiftly drew a dagger from his belt. He ducked under a knife-thrust and twisted the knifeman’s wrist and elbow, exactly as explained in Hans Talhoffer’s Das Fechtbuch. He shoved one opponent into another, dodged and attacked from the side using a feint recommended for such situations in Chapter One of the volume devoted to knife fighting in Fiore of Cividale’s Flos Duellatorum. When the thug instinctively parried high, Reynevan stabbed him in the thigh, as instructed in the second chapter of the same manual. The thug howled and dropped to his knee. Reynevan dodged, kicked the assailant getting up from the rubbish heap as he passed, side-stepped another thrust and pretended to stumble and lose his balance. The grey-haired thug with the dagger had clearly not read the classics or heard of feints, because he made a sudden, uncontrolled lunge, thrusting at Reynevan like a heron jabbing with its beak. Reynevan calmly knocked his arm up, twisted his wrist, caught him by the shoulder as recommended in Das Fechtbuch and shoved him against the wall. The thug, trying to free himself, swung a violent left hook—which landed straight on the point of the dagger, positioned according to the instructions in Flos Duellatorum. The slender blade penetrated deep and Reynevan heard the crunch of severed metacarpals. The thug gave a piercing scream and dropped to his knees, pressing his hand, squirting blood, to his belly.
The third assailant, the thickset one, was on him quickly and slashed diagonally with the cleaver from left to right, very menacingly. Reynevan jumped back, parrying and dodging, expecting a textbook stance or position. But neither Meister Talhoffer nor messer Cividale were much use to him that day. Suddenly, something very grey, dressed in a grey hood, grey jerkin and grey hose, appeared behind the thug with the cleaver. A truncheon turned from pale wood whistled and a dull thud announced its powerful contact with the back of his head. The grey man was extremely fast. He managed to land another blow before the thug fell.
Flutek and several agents entered the backstreet.