That morning it was unusually noisy outside.
It was different in texture from the rooster's crowing that announced the start of the day as always, or from the noise of half-awake servants bustling about.
An uneasy murmur lay low and thick throughout the castle, seeping through the heavy stone walls all the way into my bedchamber.
'What's going on? Have the tenant farmers gotten into another fight over a field boundary?'
I threw off the coarse linen blanket and raised myself from the bed. The moment the cold dawn air touched my bare skin, my body shivered on its own.
"Ugh, it's cold."
A single sheet of thin sleepwear could not keep out the chill.
There should still have been time before Šárka brought the warm washing water as usual.
That was when it happened.
THUD!
Konrad, the chief attendant, who on an ordinary day would have announced his presence with a courteous knock, flung the door open without warning, hard enough to nearly break it.
"Young master! Young master, something terrible has happened!"
Konrad's voice was trembling badly. His graying hair was disheveled, and his forehead was covered in cold sweat.
"Konrad? What is it? Calm yourself and speak steadily."
Konrad barely brought his gasping breath under control and continued.
"Th-the soldiers of the house who marched out with his lordship... they have returned!"
"What did you say?"
I hurried into my clothes and headed for the inner courtyard.
Dozens of servants and soldiers had already gathered in the castle courtyard, murmuring among themselves.
And the place their grieving eyes were turned toward.
In the center of the courtyard stood some thirty armored soldiers.
A few were barely holding themselves up on a comrade's shoulder, and a few others were only just standing with broken spears or shields for crutches.
Even at a glance they were a wretched sight.
'...This is.'
Even a rough look told me they had not returned victorious. It was a wretched scene from which the word "routed" surfaced naturally.
A heavy silence settled over the courtyard.
Then my eyes met those of the one knight in the center of that ruined cluster of soldiers who had taken off his helmet.
It was an unfamiliar face, but the memories of this body's original owner, faintly remaining in my head, gave me his name.
The knight commander of the house of Šternberk and my father's oldest comrade in arms.
Kuno von Friedenberg.
The moment he found me, Sir Kuno dropped to his knees as if collapsing on the spot. His armor rang out with a clank as it struck the gravel-laid ground.
"Young master!! Ugh... his lordship! His lordship...!"
"My father? What has happened to my father!"
"At the Battle of Vyšehrad! He fell into the foul scheme of those wicked, cowardly Hussite bastards and died a glorious death!"
Killed in action.
In that moment I felt a strange sensation, as though every sound in the world had suddenly grown distant.
Eeeeee—
The voices of the servants murmuring around me, Kuno's wailing, the sound of the cold wind, all of it grew faint.
Grief? Not yet. It was closer to a blank sensation, as though an enormous shock had cut every circuit of thought.
The memories of thirty-two years lived as Park Gang-jun. The memories of only a few days since opening my eyes as Ulrich von Šternberk.
All those memories churned together in a mess inside my head and stole away my sense of reality.
'...My father is dead?'
The face of a middle-aged noble who was always strict and blunt, left dimly in this body's memory, came to mind.
To be honest, I had worried a great deal about whether I would be able to call him 'Father' when he returned home.
And yet, to think he would end his life this emptily before I could even meet him face to face.
Kuno's blood-boiling wail rang out across the courtyard.
"We were unable to recover his lordship's body! Cast aside all shame and kill this disloyal wretch who came back alive alone!"
Kuno began to slam his forehead into the bare ground like a madman.
Thud, thud.
Red blood ran down from his forehead and soaked the dirt, but I could not bring myself even to think of stopping him. I only looked down at the scene blankly.
'...Calm down. This is no time to be lost in sentiment. Coldly, coldly, I have to grasp the situation.'
Cold reason raised its head before emotion did. It was a habit ingrained in me as a researcher and engineer in my previous life.
I drew in a slow breath. Then I organized Kuno's account point by point and put my questions to him.
"Sir Kuno. So you are telling me now that the holy crusade gathered in the name of His Majesty the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was defeated by a rebel army made up of nothing but peasants and heretics?"
At my question, Kuno finally raised his face. An incomprehensible terror was mixed into his eyes.
"That is so, young master. Those wicked heretic bastards... they built a wall out of strange carts the likes of which we have never seen or heard of, and from behind it they loosed thunderbolts of fire! The mounted charge of our knights was utterly powerless before that fortress!"
Strange carts and thunderbolt weapons of fire. The moment I heard that, something came to mind.
'A fortress of carts... that's the wagenburg tactic. And with early gunpowder weapons like hand cannons on top of it. Still crude and inconvenient for now, but a powerful weapon that lets even a peasant bring down a knight with a single shot.'
A page of history I had heard from Zdeněk's own mouth had become reality right before my eyes.
I quickly counted the number of soldiers standing behind Sir Kuno and asked.
"As I understand it, our house's strength was ten knights and three hundred soldiers. And only thirty men have returned here, including yourself?"
"...I have no, no face to show you!"
Nine tenths of the house's private forces had evaporated in the war. It was annihilation in all but name.
'Just how badly did they get their asses handed to them....'
I swallowed dryly and threw out my last question. This was the most important question right now.
"...So, that rebel army that won the battle... intends to march on our domain directly now?"
At my question Kuno raised his head with a desperate look in his eyes and cried out.
"Yes! Soon those savage Hussite bastards will ride the momentum of their victory and fall upon this place! You must flee at once, young master! The line of the house of Šternberk must not be cut off like this!"
The reckoning was finished.
The head of the house, dead. The forces that ought to defend the castle, annihilated in all but name.
And the approaching enemy, a rebel army thousands strong whose morale pierced the sky.
Once I had finished grasping the situation, a single sentence surfaced in my head with dreadful clarity.
"Ha, I'm fucked."
Crash.
That was the sound of a peaceful and comfortable retirement shattering to pieces.
***
Flee? Of course that was the first option that came to mind.
But I erased the thought from my head immediately. Reason was colder and crueler than instinct.
'To where? In the middle of this chaos, is there anywhere safe at all?'
At present the whole Kingdom of Bohemia was no different from a boiling cauldron.
The imperial faction supporting Sigismund, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Bohemia.
And the Hussites, who followed the ideas of the religious reformer Jan Hus.
The whole country split into two factions, the very heart of a horrific civil war in which they killed and plundered one another.
In a situation like this, a wandering noble with no domain, no soldiers, and no money was no different from a plump sheep thrown to starving wolves.
On top of that, my father, the previous head of the house, had literally scraped out the family's wealth to the last coin in order to answer the king's call for the crusade.
The house of Šternberk was an old and storied house that had offered its loyalty to the emperor for generations, and answering the emperor's call for a crusade was a natural and sacred duty for a noble.
To refuse it was to betray the emperor and to soil the honor of the house.
The problem was that the house's finances had not been at all comfortable of late. My father had fulfilled his duty as a loyal retainer, but the price was that the family coffers had been emptied.
All that remained to us now was this old, worn stone castle, a barren domain, and starving subjects.
If I threw away even this and fled, I would truly have nothing left.
Even if I were fortunate enough to place myself under the protection of another imperial-faction lord, in the end I would sink to the position of a dependent with no power of my own and spend my whole life eating at another man's sufferance.
'There is only one conclusion. Either I fight here and die, or I survive somehow.'
The choice was clear. The problem was the method.
Hold off thousands of enemies with some thirty routed soldiers? That was striking a rock with an egg.
Just then, one hope surfaced in my head.
The only being from whom I could ask help, and the root cause of this entire disaster.
"János, bring parchment and ink."
"You mean to send a letter?"
I nodded.
"I must inform His Majesty Sigismund of the situation and request support."
King of Germany and Hungary.
Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
The rightful successor to the throne of the Kingdom of Bohemia.
Sigismund von Luxembourg.
By now he would be reorganizing his scattered army in the mining town of Kutná Hora in order to make up for the humiliating defeat suffered at Vyšehrad. That was the historical fact.
If that fellow had even a minimum of conscience left in him, he would not be able to simply pretend not to see the son of a loyal retainer who had given up his very life for him.
No, this was not a matter of conscience. It was an intensely political and practical matter.
If Sigismund abandoned the house of Šternberk here, he would set the bad precedent that devoting yourself to the king only gets you cast aside in the end.
He would never make such a foolish choice. He had to not.
Repeating that to myself, I spread the parchment out on the cold stone table.
And I began to weave sentence after sentence, character by character, with care, mobilizing every flowery phrase I knew.
_________
To His Majesty Sigismund, honored King of the Romans, sovereign of Germany and Hungary, and rightful ruler of Bohemia.
Your Majesty's most loyal servant, Ulrich von Šternberk, son of Petr von Šternberk, who not long ago at Vyšehrad was martyred fighting for the will of the Lord and the glory of Your Majesty, takes up his pen with a grieving heart.
My father devoted his whole life to loyalty to Your Majesty in keeping with the oath of the house of Šternberk, and even in his final moment he did not let go of Your Majesty's banner before the blades of the heretics.
My father's death is a sorrow our house can never wash away, yet because it was a holy sacrifice for Your Majesty's great cause, I regard it as the greatest glory of our house.
Yet, Your Majesty,
with my father's death the shield of our house was likewise broken.
The elite soldiers of the house fell on the battlefield together with my father, and our empty coffers cannot so much as polish the boots of the men who remain.
Moreover, seizing this opportunity, the wicked Hussite heretics seek to cut off the weakened breath of our house.
Merciful Majesty!
We are now like a lonely castle besieged within and without.
Look down upon the unbroken loyalty of the house of Šternberk and grant us, we beg, a single thread of salvation.
A single company of knights, no, even a single knight bearing Your Majesty's banner would suffice.
If Your Majesty will only show us a token that You stand with us, we shall shed our blood to the last drop to hold this castle, and shall prepare a bridgehead for the day Your Majesty's army reclaims Bohemia.
Remember, we beseech You, the blood and loyalty our house has offered to Your Majesty.
Your Majesty's eternal servant,
Ulrich von Šternberk, respectfully submitted.
_________
Wearing a satisfied smile, I slowly ran my eyes over the letter I had written one more time.
It was perfect. At least within this Šternberk Castle, there could be no one but me capable of writing something more likely to move the king's heart.
'The language section of the college entrance exam, university papers, and the report-writing ability I honed at the company are finally shining here.'
János, who had checked the contents of the letter over my shoulder, opened his eyes wide in admiration.
"Young master, that is truly remarkable. When did you learn to write like this...?"
"Never mind the pointless chatter. Pick out the fastest and most trustworthy messenger in the castle right now and have this letter delivered to His Majesty at Kutná Hora."
I pressed my signet ring, engraved with the family crest, firmly into wax to seal the rolled-up parchment. Then I handed it to János.
János nodded.
"Understood. But young master... if you write it like this and His Majesty really does send only one knight, what will you do then?"
I let out a hollow laugh.
"Are you mad? For the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire to answer a plea for aid from the son of a loyal retainer by sending a single knight would be an idiotic act that eats away at his own face and authority. Do you think he'll actually take me at my word and send exactly one knight?"
...Unless he sends no support at all.
I forced that ominous imagining, creeping up on me, out of my head.
Nothing would change no matter how anxious I got. For now I had no choice but to stake every hope on this one letter.
The king's reply arrived exactly three days later.