I unfolded and read the letter stamped with the seal of the Prague city council.
The costly parchment was full of every sort of flowery phrase and embellishment, but once all of it was stripped away, the important content came down to one thing.
"What does Prague say, my liege?"
"They are not certain whether to raise me up as king, so for now they will seat me in the position of regent and put me to the test."
János tilted his head.
"Regent, you say? Will you accept that proposal?"
"Well... but I do intend to go to Prague."
I laughed lightly and tossed the letter from Prague casually onto the table.
'The card of Charles IV's bloodline is more powerful than I thought. That settles it. They can never give me up.'
I smiled with confidence.
'Prove my worth, they say? Fine. Only I will prove it my way, not the way you want.'
I called for Sir Kuno at once.
"Sir Kuno, select ten soldiers to take to Prague. Issue them the soundest armor and weapons and have them polished to a shine without a speck of dust, so that anyone would take them for an elite personal guard. Understood?"
"Understood, my lord! I shall show them the might of Šternberk!"
For this trip to Prague, of the retainers only János would accompany me. Someone had to hold the castle in my place.
A few days later.
Taking only ten cavalrymen armored in gleaming plate and János, I passed out through the gate of Šternberk Castle.
Before the gate, everyone in the domain of Šternberk had gathered.
Their faces were smudged with dirt and their clothes were worn through, but not one of them looked wretched. Rather their faces were full of energy directed toward a new future.
Silently paying their respects, they saw their lord off on the road to Prague.
***
Clop, clop—
The gate of Šternberk receded behind me. The ten cavalrymen formed a close formation around me, and the sound of hooves rang out in a steady rhythm.
János followed at my side like a shadow, but his eyes swept the surrounding woods and hills sharply. His hand hovered over the hilt at his waist so he could draw at any moment.
"My lord, will you truly be all right? An escort of only ten seems far too meager a procession. If we should run into so much as a band of brigands..."
"It is fine, János. This is actually safer."
Holding the reins, I spoke in an unwavering voice.
"If I went leading an army of hundreds, that would look not like diplomacy but like an invasion. We are not going to fight. Ten elite cavalry are enough to show our dignity, and at the same time exactly the right number not to provoke their wariness."
Half of it was truth, and half was bluff.
"...If that is my liege's will."
János wore a doubtful expression, but he pried no further.
'In truth I have no more troops to bring anyway.'
I swallowed a bitter smile inwardly. The castle's soldiers, only forty to begin with, had been killed or wounded in the last two bloody battles. The number able to take up arms and fight right now was not even twenty.
The domain's coffers had shown their bottom, and the food stores were at the point where the rats could hold a sports day. This trip to Prague was quite literally a gamble staking everything that was left. If it failed, Šternberk had no future.
Once we left the forest of Šternberk, the scars of war lay bare across the road.
Fields that had once rippled golden were roughly laid waste, and by the roadside only the blackened, burnt-out frames of farmhouses stood hideously.
The travelers we met now and then took fright at our party's gleaming swords and armor and the Šternberk banner and hurriedly stepped aside to the roadside.
Their faces held nothing but a deep-rooted fear and distrust of war.
"...János, what are the lives of the common people like these days?"
It was a question that came out without my meaning it.
"Well. They will all just be watching to see which side wins, I expect."
János answered as though indifferently.
"If Sigismund wins they will cry long live His Majesty the Emperor, and if the Hussites win they will take up the chalice. In the end whichever side gives them bread becomes their god. Most of them simply hope this wearisome war ends so they can plow their fields as before."
Within János's cynical answer lay the reality of this country. An era in which not nation or conviction but immediate survival was everything.
After riding on for several days like that, at last, far off beyond the Vltava, a landscape came into view where hundreds of Gothic spires rose as though to pierce the sky.
The capital of the Holy Roman Empire.
The heart of the Kingdom of Bohemia.
Prague.
Prague Castle, seated majestically on its hill, and the enormous wall encircling the city silently attested to its grandeur.
"...It is big, I will say that."
It was a city of overwhelming scale, beyond any comparison with Šternberk, enough to draw an exclamation even from János.
How many human beings must be jostling and living inside that wall?
Of course, to my eyes, which knew modern skyscrapers, it gave no impression but that of a well-preserved medieval theme park.
The moment we passed inside the gate, even the density of the air was different. The heat given off by a vast crowd and noise that battered the ears.
...And the stench of every sort of filth, which went beyond stabbing at the nose to making my head throb, came over us.
'This is fucking...'
Šternberk Castle had been no small matter either, but the filth of a great city was on another order.
Human excrement and animal dung, rotting food waste, the revolting chemical smell flowing out of the workshops where leather was tanned, and beneath all of it the sweat of countless unwashed people.
People opened their windows and dumped the contents of their chamber pots onto the roadway without a second thought, and that filth mixed together on the unpaved dirt streets. It was a perfect breeding ground for epidemic.
It was fortunate at least that it was winter now; had it been summer the stench would have been twice as bad as this.
In the middle of that stench, János spoke to me with a perfectly untroubled face.
"The air of Prague is certainly quite different from Šternberk's. It is brimming with energy."
Energy?
This is not energy; it is the air of decay.
"So, how do you intend to cook this enormous city? Will you go to the city council first and take the regent's seat?"
At János's question, I gave up breathing through my nose and answered while dragging my breath in through my mouth.
"No— ahem! No."
My voice came out nasal for a moment. I quickly cleared my throat.
"We are going to the square of Prague."
"The square, you say? Not the city council? Should we not flatten the noses of those arrogant old men?"
"Is there any need to walk into the viper's den myself?"
I smiled faintly.
"I should make them come scrambling out."
The nobles and high clergy of Prague.
By now they would be inside the council building with their heads together, working out how to coax me, how to make me their puppet.
I had no intention of begging a crown from those cunning nobles and theologians.
A crown, after all, can only be borne by one who seizes it himself.
Our party left the main road toward the city council and rode for the Old Town Square, the heart of the city.
Our procession was a conspicuously alien presence in the crowded streets of Prague.
Well-polished steel armor, stately horses, and the two banners fluttering at the head.
The eight-pointed star of Šternberk and the two-tailed lion of Bohemia.
Passersby who spotted the banners opened a path and whispered in voices mixing awe and suspicion.
"Who are they? Knights of which house?"
"That banner... is that not Šternberk's crest? That very house that is said to have burned the Hussites not long ago."
"But why the king's banner...?"
Curiosity became an enormous wave in an instant. The crowd swelled like iron filings drawn to a magnet, and before long formed a vast throng following behind our procession.
At last the Old Town Square of Prague appeared before us. The twin spires of the great Týn Church and the Old Town Hall building with its astronomical clock.
The square was alive and breathing like an enormous living creature, the calls of countless stallholders, the ceaseless hammering from the smithies, and the laughter of children running through the alleys all tangled together.
"My liege, we have come to the square as you said, but... what on earth do you intend to do here?"
Impatience colored János's voice. The gazes pouring in from every side seemed to weigh on him as well.
"Well, just watch for now."
I rode without hesitation toward the center of all that noise.
A path opened among the thousands of people filling the square. I could feel their gazes flying at me like blades and lodging all over my body.
Outwardly I kept up a pretense of composure, holding an arrogant expression as though I were master of this world, but in truth my heart was pounding like mad.
Cold sweat ran down inside my armor, and my palms were so damp with sweat that the reins were slippery.
That crowd was no different from an enormous beast that could push me up onto a throne in an instant, and at the same time could drag me off my horse and tear me to pieces.
A situation in which one misstep, one badly chosen word, and everything would be finished.
'Calm down. This is the most important presentation of my life. The audience is several thousand. The subject is the future of a nation. Failure means death.'
I halted my horse at the very center of the square, at the very spot where in later days a statue of Jan Hus would stand. When I stopped, the ten cavalrymen following me halted their horses as one.
When the clanking noise ceased, every sound in the square began to die away, as though it were all a lie.
The merchants stopped their calls, and the children shut their mouths. The murmuring swept away like a receding wave, and a heavy stillness settled in its place.
The gaze of thousands.
The silence of thousands.
All of it was concentrated entirely on one man.
Gripping my pounding chest, I slowly opened my mouth.
***
Vojtěch, an ordinary citizen of Prague, coughed up a cough that boiled from deep in his lungs.
"Cough, cough...."
In this damnable age, to say "ordinary citizen" was the same as saying "a sinner living in hell."
War. All of it was because of that damned war.
Emperor Sigismund and the Hussite heretics. Under their sword dance the price of rye and oats had shot through the roof.
Vojtěch, who had sold pretzels in the market, could not endure the soaring prices, the city council's taxes, and the Church's tithe, and had finally had to close up his stall.
The men were conscripted and did not return, and the taxes grew heavier with each passing year.
Vojtěch's only son, Josef, had been taken away like that too.
'His Majesty the Emperor's glorious holy war', or so they called it.
His son did not return even after the emperor fled. All that was left was a single notice, its ink barely dry, saying he had fallen at the Battle of Vyšehrad.
After that day Vojtěch grew silent, and his wife prayed in tears before the statue of the Virgin every night.
The priest prattled that he had died for the glory of God and so must have gone to heaven, but Vojtěch snorted.
'Great martyrdom, my foot... it was just a dog's death.'
His son would have been made a shield for some noble lord whose name he did not even know, and died in the mud without a chance to scream.
Now what was left to him was only his sick daughter, Anna.
The small wheezing breath that rasped through the night in her fever pressed heavily on his heart.
The physician had said medicine must be used, but in Vojtěch's pocket there was not even money for a piece of bread that evening, let alone for medicine.
'Damn it all....'
Clutching his empty stomach, he wandered through the crowd. He needed work as a porter, or if not, work shoveling horse dung.
If he came away empty-handed today, his wife and daughter would go hungry with no way out.
The square was noisy as always, but a precarious tension hovered within that liveliness. There was more worry than laughter on people's faces.
That was when it happened.
Clop, clop, clop.
The rhythmic, arrogant sound of hooves cutting through the noise of the square.
Knights in gleaming plate armor appeared, parting the crowd.
'A procession of noble lords, then.'
Vojtěch spat on the ground and hurriedly stepped aside to the roadside. Block the road and a whip would come flying.
In his eyes there was only contempt and indifference, and a dreadful exhaustion.
At the head of the knights two banners fluttered. An eight-pointed star on a blue field and the lion of Bohemia.
'Šternberk?'
He had heard the name. The young lord said to have smashed a Hussite army in the south.
But what did that have to do with him? It was only a knife fight among noble bastards.
Clop, clop—
And yet that young lord did not so much as glance at the city council building and rode straight into the middle of the square.
At his bold conduct the people murmured and opened a path, and Vojtěch too was swept along by the crowd and came to see him up close.
'He is a greenhorn....'
He was far too young for a hero out of rumor. But the look in his eyes alone was deep and cold beyond guessing at his age.
At last he opened his mouth.
"Hear me! Citizens of Prague!"
At the ringing shout Vojtěch's shoulders flinched without his meaning them to.
"I am Ulrich von Šternberk! Son of Princess Eliška, the youngest daughter of the great Emperor Charles IV! Today I stand in this place to demand the crown of Bohemia, which is mine by right!"
Vojtěch let out a snort of a laugh.
'Right, come to boast about his bloodline. Very grand indeed.'
Here we go again. The power games that belong only to them.
How great I am. So follow me.
It was a world apart from us, worrying about the price of bread tomorrow.
That noble was either mad or thoroughly drunk. Demanding a crown in the middle of a marketplace, of all things.
Judging it not worth hearing any more, Vojtěch turned to go.
The face of his sick daughter flickered before his eyes.
"...But! I have not come here merely to put forward my bloodline! I wish now to speak of one plague that is sickening this Europe... and its name is Roman Catholicism."
In that instant, Vojtěch's feet froze to the ground.
He doubted his own ears.
What did that noble just say?
A plague? Roman Catholicism, a plague?
That was... blasphemy that must not so much as pass one's lips, blasphemy deserving of the stake.
"Look at the world around you! The Pope, who calls himself God's proxy, sends anyone who questions the Church to the pyre! And the man who calls himself emperor raises a crusade for the sake of one crown and massacres his own people!"
Massacre.
That word lodged in Vojtěch's heart like a dagger.
The face of his dead son Josef rose before him. They had said he died fighting for the emperor.
But that emperor was now said to be summoning yet another crusade in order to kill Bohemians.
Then what on earth had his son died for?
"And is that all? The nobles are frenzied only with wringing out taxes soaked in your blood and sweat! The priests wallow drunk on wine bought with the money from selling indulgences! Is this God's will?! Is this the world the Lord desires?!"
Into Vojtěch's head came the parish priest of his home village.
The man who patted his fat belly as he came and went from the widow's house.
His parents had offered that man the money they had saved their whole lives, saying they would buy a ticket to heaven.
Had his parents gone to heaven? There was no knowing. What was certain was that what remained to Vojtěch was only dire poverty.
He had turned his back on his home village and come to Prague because he did not want to live bound in poverty like that, yet the life that met him here too was nothing but a continuation of the same wearisome poverty.
And now that young noble was, before his very eyes, spitting out on his behalf the words Vojtěch had never once dared utter in all his life, not even drunk.
"Our great teacher, Jan Hus, spoke the truth! He cried out that the Church was rotten to the bone! And the emperor and the Pope branded him a heretic and burned him alive! Precisely because they feared the voice of truth!"
Stifled weeping broke out all over the square.
Jan Hus. He was the only man who had stood on the side of the poor and the powerless.
Vojtěch too had a memory of secretly hearing his sermon in his youth and feeling his chest grow hot.
"He is right!"
"The emperor is a traitor!"
The shouts grew steadily louder, and the people of the square were becoming one.
Vojtěch realized he was not alone. That his rage was the same as the rage of everyone filling this square.
"And today! I have come here to carry on the cause of Jan Hus! I will make the Four Articles of Prague my law! I will be a king not for the Holy Roman Empire nor for Roman Catholicism, but solely for the Bohemian people!"
Vojtěch forgot even to breathe. His heart began to pound like mad.
A king had always been a disaster up on high who collected taxes and started wars.
And yet, a king for us?
A king solely for the Bohemian people.
That was... a thing he had never once imagined.
"In the nation I build, salvation will no longer be sold for money! A noble's crime will be judged by the same weight as a commoner's! Every tithe will be used not to fill a priest's belly but to feed and protect the starving people! This is my promise!"
That a noble's crime and a commoner's would be treated with the same weight.
It was a heaven-and-earth-overturning thing to say. It was madness.
But... what if it were real?
If such a world could truly come?
SHING!
The young noble drew the sword at his waist and raised it high.
The sun of Prague reflected off the keen blade and shone dazzlingly.
"So answer me, citizens of Prague! Will you accept me as your king!!"
A brief stillness, as though the world had stopped.
Vojtěch clenched his fist. His nails dug into his flesh.
A world where working hard would let him buy medicine for his daughter.
A world where no one need die a dog's death for no reason, like his son Josef.
If such a world could come.
No, if that man would make such a world.
Vojtěch had to answer. If he did not answer now, it felt as though a chance like this would never come again.
For the son he had lost, for his starving wife, and for the daughter lying ill now.
Gathering up a lifetime of resentment clotted deep in his lungs, he shouted.
"Our... king!!"
The badly cracked voice was the signal flare announcing the explosion of the square.
"Whoaaaaah!!!"
"Our king!"
"A new Charles!!"
As though an enormous dam had burst, a shout erupted from every mouth in the square.
Vojtěch shouted until his throat tore. Tears ran down his cheeks and mixed with the dust.
The sorrow and rage that had crushed him all his life and the grief of losing his son burst out along with hot tears.
A king.
Our king.
Not the incompetent Wenceslas, nor the liar Sigismund.
A king of Bohemia, solely for us.
He threw his arms around the shoulders of a man he had never seen before in his life and wailed.
"Long live King Ulrich!!"
There was no coronation, no splendid ceremony.
But in this very moment.
Ulrich von Šternberk became, in name and in fact, the true master of Bohemia.