Godke and I returned to the tavern where Hurland and Thies were waiting.
‘Martin’s dead. We need to get out of here as soon as possible,’ Godke told them. ‘Hurland, find Jacob. Thies, gather our things and saddle the horses.’
They nodded and I asked if he wanted me to find Gunnar.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said a deep voice behind me and I turned to see Gunnar. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on you.’
I smiled. Knowing that I had people who cared about me made my failure sit more comfortably in my mind. At least, it made it sit in the back of my mind rather than the front. I was doing the same thing with Martin’s death as I was doing with my father’s: pretending it hadn’t happened. Even if Martin hadn’t confessed, Godke had said he was definitely a witch so at least I didn’t have to feel guilty for his death. Just for our lost money.
In a few minutes we were set to leave Prague, and I was sad. Not only had I killed a man, but in doing so I had lost my chance of obtaining the beautiful wheellock pistol from the shady part of town.
‘Next time I promise I’ll do better,’ I said to Godke, not just in the hope that he wouldn’t lose faith in me but also because I wanted to be rewarded for my efforts.
‘I know,’ Godke said simply.
‘Why didn’t he arrest us?’
‘It would only serve to expose his hand in the murder,’ Godke said. ‘Wallenstein is an ambitious man and when we could not serve his future he had to make certain that we would not endanger it.’
I mounted Grane and the rest of the warband mounted their horses and we slowly walked to the Prague city gates. As we approached, a man ran towards the gate from inside the city and stopped before one of the guards standing at the open gate. The runner spoke briefly to the guard, who looked at us and I realised that were in trouble.
‘Ride!’ Godke shouted and all of us kicked our horses into a gallop. Most of the guards didn’t know what was happening yet and as we approached the gates I noticed two things: firstly, the guardsman who had just been speaking to the runner raised his polearm in preparation of our arrival.
Secondly, the runner was Jaromil.
The dirty Bohemian snarled in pleasure as the guardsman began to call to his fellow soldiers and two more began to lower their pikes to block our charge.
‘Gunnar!’ Godke screamed. Both of them veered away from the carriage beside which the rest of the warband, including myself, was travelling. Thies was now leading us, and as we approached the gate I saw him draw his wheellock pistol.
A pair of gunshots suddenly impacted the ground around me and I realised that several of the gunmen on the city wall had heard the call and were firing upon us.
More gunshots sounded, this time more closely, and I realised that the warband was firing back. Gunnar and Godke had peeled off to present a series of smaller targets and Gunnar had somehow loaded his long musket while still leading his horse towards the gate.
He fired and brought down one of the pikemen, and Godke followed suit with his wheellock pistol. Now only one man stood before us and, knowing he was alone, he ran aside and the carriage ploughed through the city gates under the guidance of Hurland.
I followed soon behind and Thies fired a shot up at the wall to provide cover as he passed under the gate. A few seconds later Gunnar and Godke caught up to us and we made our escape from Prague unharmed.
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Several hours later, we stopped on a forest path. It was little more than a dirt track, but Godke had led us away from the main roads in case Prague had decided to send horsemen after us. Now we dismounted briefly to catch our breath and let our horses rest.
Thies approached me and at first I didn’t know why. Then he touched my shoulder and I winced in pain and I realised that one of the gunmen’s bullets had glanced my right shoulder and cut the skin.
It was no more than a flesh wound, but it would leave a visible scar for the rest of my life. Thies bandaged the wound.
‘You’ve gotta be careful,’ he said to me, as if I’d sustained the injury through recklessness. ‘Wouldn’t want something to happen to you.’
I smiled. ‘Good thing I’ve got you to patch me up.’
It was his turn to smile. When he was done bandaging my shoulder, we grabbed some food and water to sustain us.
After only a few minutes Godke was back in the saddle and the rest of us followed suit. We stopped at some nameless village’s inn for the night and in the morning Godke asked us all where we wanted to go.
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‘Metz,’ I told him and I think he knew why. We’d stayed there for a long time and I’d begun to speak some French by the time we’d headed for Prague. It was home to me.
‘We need money,’ Godke replied, and that was true enough. Only I didn’t want money, I just wanted to feel safe and comfortable again. Metz was both of those things, even if it didn’t have witches.
‘We don’t have to stay long. Maybe we’ll hear of new witch hunts while we’re in Metz,’ I suggested.
I don’t know what the others said when he asked them; I don’t even know if he did ask them. But at the end of the the day he made the decision I’d asked him to make, to take us back to Metz.
The journey back to Metz took several weeks. We travelled slowly because we were disheartened, and I realised that it was my fault. If I had managed to extract a confession from Martin, then we would have been paid or extracted a tax for services rendered and we would be travelling in high spirits. Gunnar would probably have a new Bohemian woman to take out his frustrations on and Jacob would be less prone to self-flagellation in the knowledge that he’d done his bit to combat witchcraft.
Instead, we were fleeing Prague and we were poverty-stricken. We had enough to get by for a few weeks, months if we were frugal, but the warband was used to a certain type of lifestyle. When a witch hunt was unsuccessful, tension began to mount.
We arrived in Metz to find that our old haunt had burnt to the ground in our short absence. Though we no longer had any claim to the building, this only served to sour the mood further.
Hurland found us all new places to stay – this time separately; I lived on my own for the first time in my life – and we settled in, but things were not all well. There were no indications of any witches in need of hunting. True, the warband was capable of doing its own searching, but it had been some years since they had been forced to work in self-employment rather than at the request of a burgher or a city.
Worse, Metz was not the stable metropolis I remembered it to be. The Protestant Huguenots had rebelled in the south of France and the entire Kingdom of France was feeling the strain. In the nearby Low Countries, the twelve year truce between the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands and the Spanish Empire had come to a bloody end and much of the fighting was spilling over the border into France.
Thankfully, not all were perturbed as I was. Where I saw misery and despair, Godke saw opportunity.
He began a variety of small-scale witch hunts in the Three Bishoprics of the region: Metz, Verdun and Toul, to extend the length of time upon which we could rely on our supplies from months to years. I was not invited to directly participate in most of them, however I did watch and learn different aspects of the witch hunt. I learnt that sometimes cities simply suffered ill fortune and had no one to blame it on, and that was when we would have to find the sorceror or sorceress who had cursed the city on their behalf.
Hurland confided in me that Godke felt that he had rushed my initiation as an acolyte too quickly and that I had not been ready to interrogate Martin. At first I was incensed, but then I realised that this was an opportunity. Godke had not lost faith in me, but in himself. The best thing I could do would be to do what he asked and bide my time until I was strong enough to exact vengeance for my murdered father.
I had not forgotten my blood-oath to kill Godke one day, and as nearly two full years passed in Metz I reached the age of the warrior and the prospect of single combat became real. At sixteen years of age I was raring for blood, having been patient while the rest of the warband travelled around Lorraine killing witches.
At least, that was what they declared to be doing. However, by the winter of 1622 I was canny enough to know that times were hard. People were at each other’s throats, and the seemingly peaceful metropolis of Germans and Frenchmen and Protestant Huguenots and Catholics had been replaced by a fortified city with a permanent military garrison. The previously elected ruling aldermen were now chosen by the King. I resided in a town with an atmosphere of limitless paranoia and suspicion, and Godke expertly took advantage of this state of affairs. People weren’t always capable of thinking that their neighbours could have succumbed to the Devil’s temptations until Godke suggested it, but such a submission served a double benefit as the warband was able to rid communities of dark influences while being compensated for their troubles.
Over the course of 1621-1622 the warband executed and appropriated the possessions of over twenty witches. I was invited to a handful of these as Godke was not eager for me to leave Metz. This served to frustrate me, though I never spoke of it to Godke. Melchior was still the captain of the town guard and his order still stood – a fact I learned after trying Konrad's generosity at the main entrance – so I was all but trapped inside the walls of Metz.
Thankfully my cattle gate remained undisturbed. One day after more reading with Hurland and more shooting practice – this time with Gunnar – I made my way back to it. I noticed some bootprints in the dirt that I had previously shovelled, but whoever had passed by the gate had clearly not noticed or not cared about the makeshift exit. I swept the dirt aside with both hands and crawled out to leave the city. The grass on my knoll was greener now it was summer, and I lay in it, soaking up the sun's rejuvenating rays. After a few minutes of embracing the free air, I heard the sound of conversation from the city entrance. I sat up, and watched a family of Dutch refugees trying to seek refuge by entering the city. The guard did not seem inclined to let them enter, but they were talking to them nonetheless. It was sad to look at their meagre possessions and torn clothing. There was a young girl who carried her arm with a bend away from her body, as if she were used to holding something close to her. No doubt a toy or stuffed animal, probably left behind during their evacuation from the Netherlands.
I found my eyes succumbing to tears and I frowned and looked away. This was not the same knoll upon which I had watched the comers and goers prior to Prague. Its dimensions might have been the same, but its pleasures were not, much like a woman soured by age. I turned away from it and walked back to the cattle gate. The piled bricks disrupted my view of the city's interior, but I crawled through the passageway to the other side.
As I reached the end of the short tunnel, I raised my head to look around me. A small crowd of people stood gathered around the cattle gate. I slowly took to my feet and saw that they were led by Melchior. I gulped. Several of the men were soldiers, including Konrad, and Hurland was with them also. He stood beside Melchior with an unpleasant look upon his face, and he sighed when I caught his gaze. A pit welled in my stomach. What sort of trouble had I gotten myself into?