It was the killing of the reformer Jan Hus that had brought these events to pass. The abbot had once met Hus, an ordained priest at the University of Prague, where he was dean of the faculty of arts and, later, rector, and had been impressed by his zeal. Nevertheless, Hus’s reformist instincts were dangerous. The church was in crisis. Three different popes were making conflicting claims on the papacy: John XXIII of the Italians, who had been forced to flee Rome and had taken refuge in Germany; Gregory XXII, of the French; and Benedict XIII, for the Spaniards. The latter pair had already been deposed once, but refused to accept their fate. In such times Hus’s demands for a Bible in Czech, and his continued insistence on conducting the Mass in Czech rather than Latin, inevitably led to his being branded a heretic, a charge that was exacerbated by his espousal of the beliefs of the earlier heretic, John Wycliffe, and his branding of the foul John XXIII as the Antichrist, a view with which the abbot, at least in his own soul, was reluctant to take issue. It was hardly a surprise, then, when Hus was excommunicated.

Summoned to the Council of Constance in 1414 by Sigismund to air his grievances, Hus was imprisoned and tried for heresy. He refused to recant, and in 1415 was taken to “The Devil’s Place,” the site of execution in a nearby meadow. He was stripped naked, his hands and feet were tied to a stake with wet ropes, and his neck was chained to a wooden post. Oil was dumped on his head, and kindling and straw piled up to his chin. It took half an hour for the flames to catch, and Hus eventually suffocated from the thick black smoke. His body was ripped to pieces, his bones were broken, and his heart was roasted over an open fire. His remains were then cremated, the ashes shoveled into the carcass of a steer, and the whole lot cast into the Rhine.

Hus’s followers in Bohemia were outraged at his death and vowed to defend his teachings to the last drop of blood. A crusade was declared against them, and Sigismund sent an army of twenty thousand into Bohemia to quell the uprising, but the Hussites annihilated them, led by Jan Ziska, a one-eyed knight who turned carts into war chariots and called his men “warriors of God.” Now Sigismund was licking his wounds and planning his next move. A peace treaty had been agreed, sparing those who would accede to the Hussites’ Four Articles of Prague, including the clergy’s renunciation of all worldly goods and secular authority, an article to which the abbot of Sedlec was clearly unable to accede. Earlier that day the citizens of Kutná Hora had marched to the Sedlec monastery, around which were gathered the Hussite troops, to plead for mercy and forgiveness, for it was well-known that Hus’s followers in the town had been thrown alive into the mine shafts, and the citizens feared the consequences if they did not bend the knee to the attacking troops. The abbot listened while the two sides sang the Te Deum in acknowledgment of their truce, and he felt ill at the hypocrisy involved. The Hussites would not sack Kutná Hora, for its mining and minting industries were too valuable, but they wanted to secure it for themselves nonetheless. All of this was mere pretense, and the abbot knew that before long both sides would again be at each other’s throats over the great wealth of the town.

The Hussites had withdrawn some distance from the monastery, but he could still see their fires. Soon they would come, and they would spare no one found within its walls. He was consumed by anger and regret. He loved the monastery. He had been party to its most recent constructions, and the very raising of its places of worship had in itself been as much an act of contemplation and meditation as the services carried out within them, their every stone imbued with spirituality, the stern asceticism of the lines a precaution against any distraction from prayer and contemplation. Its church, the greatest of its kind in the land, was patterned on a Latin cross, achieving a harmony with the natural formation of the region’s river valley by featuring a central axis that oriented the choir down the river’s stream rather than toward the east. Yet the conventual church was also a complex variant on the original plans drawn up by the order’s chief propagator, Bernard of Clairvaux, and so it was imbued with his love of music, which manifested itself in his faith in the mysticism of numbers based on Augustine’s theory of music and its application to the proportions of buildings. Purity and balance were expressions of divine harmony, and thus the conventual Church of the Assumption of Our Lady and Saint John the Baptist was a beautiful, silent hymn to God, every column a note, every perfect arch a Te Deum.

Now this wondrous structure was at risk of total destruction, even though, in its simplicity and absence of unnecessary adornment, it symbolized the very qualities that the reformists should have prized the most. Almost without realizing he was doing so, the abbot reached into the folds of his garment and removed a small stone. Embedded in it was a tiny creature, unlike anything the abbot had ever seen walk, crawl, or swim, now turned to stone itself, petrified as though caught in a basilisk’s stare. It resembled a snail, except its shell was larger, its spirals closer together. One of the laborers had found it while quarrying by the river, and had given it to the abbot as a gift. It was said that this place had once been covered by a great sea, now long since gone, and the abbot wondered if this little animal had lived by the ocean’s gift before it found itself marooned as the sea retreated, and was slowly absorbed by the land. Perhaps it was a relic of the Great Flood; if so, then its twin must yet exist elsewhere on the earth, but secretly the abbot hoped that such a thing was not true. He prized it because it was unique, and he thought it both sad and beautiful in the transience of its nature. Its time had passed, just as the abbot’s time was now drawing to a close.

He feared the Hussites, but he knew too that there were others who threatened the survival of the monastery, and it was simply a matter of which enemy breached its gates first. Rumors had reached the abbot’s ears, stories meant for him, and him alone: tales of mercenaries marked with a twin-pronged brand, their number led by a Captain with a blemished eye, his footsteps forever shadowed by a fat imp of a man, ugly and tumerous. It was unclear to which side the Captain’s soldiers offered their allegiance, according to his sources, but the abbot supposed that it did not matter. Such men assumed flags of convenience to hide their true aims, and their loyalty was a fire that burned cold and fast, leaving only ash in its wake. He knew what they were seeking. Despite the beliefs of ignorant men, there was little true wealth left at Sedlec. The monastery’s most famed treasure, a monstrance made from gold-plated silver, had been entrusted to the Augustinians at Klosterneuburg six years earlier. Those who sacked this place would find little in the way of ecclesiastical riches to divide among themselves.

But the Captain was not interested in such trifles.

And so the abbot had set about preparing for what was to come, even as the threat of destruction drew closer. Sometimes the monks heard distant orders shouted; at other times they listened to the screaming of the injured and the dying at the gates. Still, they did not pause in their work. Horses were saddled, and a huge covered cart, one of two specially constructed for the abbot’s purposes, lay waiting by the hidden entrance to the monastery garden. Its wheels were sunk deep into the mud, driven down by the weight of the cargo that it carried. The horses were wide-eyed and foam-flecked, as though aware of the nature of the burden that was being placed upon them. It was almost time.

“A great sentence is gone forth against thee. He shall bind thee…”