"God will reward you!"
Sometimes, however, notwithstanding all this consolation he was seized with a feeling of dreadful loneliness; therefore, another time when Macko came to see him, as soon as he had welcomed him, he asked him, looking through the grate in the wall:
"How is it outside?"
"Beautiful weather, like gold, and the sun warms so that all the world is pleased."
Hearing this, Zbyszko put both his hands on his neck, and raising his head, said:
"Hej, Mighty God! To have a horse and to ride on fields, on large ones!
It is dreadful for a young man to perish! It is dreadful!"
"People perish on horseback!" answered Macko.
"Bah! But how many they kill before!"
And he began to ask about the knights whom he had seen at the king's court; about Zawisza, Farurej, Powala of Taczew, about Lis of Targowisko and about all the others; what they were doing; how they amused themselves; in what honest exercises they passed the time? And he listened with avidity to Macko who told him that in the morning, the knights dressed in their armor, jumped over horses, broke ropes, tried one another's skill with swords and with axes having sharp ends made of lead; finally, he told how they feasted and what songs they sang. Zbyszko longed with heart and soul to be with them, and when he learned that Zawisza, immediately after the christening, intended to go somewhere beyond Hungary, against the Turks, he could not refrain from exclaiming:
"If they would only let me go! It would be better to perish among the pagans!"