Umbras

It was the winter of 1192. Richard I and his guard had just been pursued through the woods right outside Vienna by a group of knights and their servants serving the Duke of Austria.

The Duke’s men being far more numerous, better armed, and not at all weary like the King’s retinue, who had been making their way from the Levant after the Third Crusade, Richard I was seized after a brief fight, and taken to Dürnstein Castle.

There the Duke himself would arrive shortly, taunt and mock his new prisoner, and cast him into a dark and squalid cell to bide in dreary solitude while he figured out what were best to do with him.

But we will not follow Richard I nor Leopold V, each of whom could lead a worthwhile tale. No, we will center our attention on one of the men that had, until lately, made up the former’s trusted retinue as he attempted to journey safely to Normandy.

Our individual was hardly over twenty years old, but strong and sober. He was as well the youngest brother of five, so, despite that his family belonged to the nobility in Aquitaine, he was in line to inherit little if anything.

This may have been then why he packed what he had, took their quickest steed, and accompanied his king on the next crusade, rather than to quell inner religious fervor.

Be that as it may, he had fought well, exhibiting a keen understanding of the sword and the horse even in the midst of brutal combat against the great Saladin’s armies, among the dunes and cliffs of the Levant; to the extent that the King could not fail to notice.

And when Richard the Lionheart had therefore given him responsibilities befitting more senior and seasoned men, the Aquitainian proved himself; so the King would not hesitate to assign him before long to the royal guard.

And even in this select corps, he had continued to distinguish himself.

“When we get back to my seat in Normandy,” he had told him as they set sail for Italy, in a variant of Occitan, “I must reward you. You have served your king most honorably. We can not only depend on you, but you vindicate our trust in you through your honesty and bravery every time.”

Rigobert (so was our young nobleman named) was thinking of these very words where we now find him: Alone, wandering down a muddy path through the Austrian forest in the middle of night under bright moonlight, and holding his left arm at his chest, hoping to arrive soon at the next village for rest and refreshment.

But he was miserable in mind and body: the late skirmish against the Duke’s men had knocked him unconscious, and when he awoke at some point during the night, he felt immensely bruised. His left arm throbbed with pain, as if broken, but he wasn’t sure of the exact injury.

The pain was greatest if he let his arm hang.

And sadness encumbered his heart; he believed he had failed at protecting his king. On the other hand, he worried about what predicaments his capture might throw his empire into.

If the sovereign were killed, would there be civil strife once more back home? Would the Parisian king feel emboldened to invade his family’s lands? And lastly, he had to wonder about his own fate. Would all his own struggles in the East have been for nought? Would he himself return home at all?

His mind filled with reflections on such questions, and his body sore and aching, he walked on without minding his surroundings. They were a thick part of the Austrian forest, and although he craved to be home, he was in too much pain to desire anything but a place to eat and rest.

Tall, thickly set trees enclosed him almost perfectly. But for the full moon, the night would not have allowed him to make out the path going through them. He neither knew the local geography.

Overall, he could have no idea of the series of hills rising to his right nor of the enormous structure erected atop the highest of these.

An enormous structure, an abbey or monastery perhaps, of long corridors and high arches, those so long and these so high that the moonlight could not, or would not, enter them; a structure marked in the center by an elliptical courtyard, almost in the shape of an eye, fenced by tall columns.

A structure of ancient stonemasonry, dating perhaps to the Early Christian era, half of which rested on the ground in ruins, pierced through by foilage and brush; while the other half stood defiantly, overbearingly, imposingly.

And no pests, not a spider, not an ant, not a mouse disturbed it, and all the winged creatures steered clear of it.

So that, in the depth of the night, in the middle of the woods, this striking ancient structure stood most dark and most silent.

The Aquitainian thought to have been walking hours when the mixture of pain and fatigue became insufferable. He halted to rest against a tree, and so began to muse aloud hopefully in order to rally his spirits:

“I have to continue on! There is no way I perish here, and all I endured in the East be forgotten to the sands of time. The King, being shrewd and courageous, may escape after all, and make it back, and yet remunerate and title me. I may yet become lord of great lands and master of my own castle, and marry a beautiful noble maiden, and—”

He paused his musings, hearing sticks and twigs be trodden on in the distance. His arms and armor had been either lost to damage or left behind so he would not be weighed down unnecessarily, but he retained a dagger in the event of meeting with wolves, cats or bears.

He took it out and, with his better hand, held it steady.

He said not a word, keeping still. Picking up nothing for some moments, he proceeded onward slowly, almost creepingly, trying to be as quiet as possible.

And in the relative silence, he thought, or dared to think, that he was hearing someone say to him, more than once: “Fili mi, umbras ne caveas.”

Occitan those words were not, nor Norman, nor Tuscan, nor the odd language spoken by the Austrians he had traded fists with. Having received a good education, one suiting the gentlemen of his time, he knew Latin, and recognized it as such in the speech carried in his direction by the night’s soft and sporadic breeze.

He translated it to himself in whispers: “My son — do not worry about the darkness.”

Suddenly, as if he had mumbled an encantation, the silhouette of a figure taller than him could then be seen further down the path. It stood calmly in one spot, and Rigobert fancied that it looked straight at him.

He did not fear it because, in a strange but not unwelcome way, as he approached it, it took the form of a Christian monk. He had met members of several different mendicant orders in the Holy Land and on his journey to it.

Some had, in fact, worn the same black woolen tunic that the figure now appeared in.

“Holy father! Oh, help me, for I’m hurt and have not eaten well in days,” the young man said immediately, stowing his weapon and throwing himself before the monk both in desperation and out of exhaustion.

The monk took a step back, unwilling to be touched. “Et noli me tangere,” he said.

“Forgive me, father—” Rigobert replied, bowing his head deferentially. Having paused to recollect himself and come up with correct expressions, he continued, closing his eyes to concentrate his memory: “Ambulo post pugnam laesus. Quiescere, dormire velam. Totam noctem ambulo. Pater, si vobis placet.”

There in the darkness the monk, whose thin, angular features peered out at Rigobert from a large hood neither fully raised nor fully lowered, listened silently.

Leaves of the trees around rustled with a rising wind, and when this had passed and the leaves moved no more, the monk entered the wood to Rigobert’s right, sternly saying to him: “Venire si placet.”

It was not questioned. The young man rose to follow him, dreading getting lost as the monk, without the slightest difficulty or delay, threaded the thick darkness and the wild, uneven woods together.

Despite the pains that often seized his injured arm or his bruised legs, he hiked close behind, going over the same mounds that his ostensible benefactor had gone over, ascending the same crags that he had ascended.

At length, Rigobert noticed that they were climbing a particular hill. It sloped only slightly, but still offered plenty of brambles, holes, and boulders, which perhaps under a clear, bright sky would not have been half as difficult to go around.

Whether out of a reluctance to vex his guide or out of a focus on managing the climb, he did not speak.

Thus they went for what to Rigobert seemed an hour, during which not a few times, losing sight of the monk, the Aquitainian had to rely on his ears to regain his track. In those instances, it struck him how clearly the owl hooted, the raven croaked and the squirrel scurried past, although he could never spot them.

And in the very last, he experienced a fit of intense fright because, by the time he had picked himself up from a sharp stumble, the monk was nowhere to be seen or heard. He spurred himself onwards, springing over branches and gamboling through brush. When his legs soon gave out, he fell to his knees, nearly brought to tears with despair.

Having composed himself, he stood up and noticed that an enormous shape blocked the moonlight some distance ahead, something that claimed the whole summit of the very hill he had been going up.

It was unclear what the function of the great shape in shadows was, but he believed the monk had been taking him there all along. The nearer he went, the better the idea of it he formed. It could be an abbey, a church, or a monastery, given that who had brought him had ostensibly come into holy orders.

And a light appeared on its surface! It was in fact a torch, and it lighted an opening into the place, one of the large wooden doors slightly ajar. Although the edifice was shrouded in pitch black but where the torch burned, he chose to slip inside.

If he had doubted that his late acquaintance did not reside there, he was corrected instantly by the unified chants occuring in a hall nearby. They were hymns in Latin, and Rigobert figured that at least a dozen men were singing.

In order to not interrupt anything and be respectful, he kept silent as he walked down a corridor, colonnaded on one side, and walled up by thick, cold stone on the other, with sharp arches lining it all the way. To his right, beyond the archway’s columns, was the oval open courtyard.

Some moonlight fell through here, and illuminated the uneven cobblestoned path the young man walked on.

The courtyard’s ground was a grass lawn overgrown with shrubs, which in the daylight perhaps appeared green or orange, and not gray or black as then, and it was dotted here and there with rubble or broken stones, as if some columns on the opposite end had fallen.

Exactly what still stood and what had come down he could not tell, the rays of moonlight few and far between which fell beyond the courtyard. He could identify, however, an arched path just like the one in which he walked, on the other end. Once he returned his attention to what was in front of him, he made out the form of the monk standing there.

The latter no sooner captured Rigobert’s sight than he said once more, slowly, in something scarce louder than a whisper: “Venire si placet.”

He then walked through a doorway to Rigobert’s left.

Startled with the monk’s sudden entrance, he nevertheless followed. They entered a narrow passageway, windowless, almost perfectly dark, at the end of which a curved stairwell took them down a story, and it led into a small closed hall.

A torch at the back end lighted it, so Rigobert could see that two doors stood on each side, but only one of these four doors was open. The monk merely stood across that open, faced the young man, and pointed in with a raised arm. His tunic’s sleeves were too long to allow his hands to be seen.

Rigobert stepped into what was a diminutive chamber, practically a cell, furnished only with a straw bed. The straw was fortunately thick and dry, he remarked, as he sat down. When he turned to his benefactor to ask for food or refreshment, there was no one there.

He had questions, no doubt, about where he found himself and who his helper was, and he was so hungry that he felt a hole in his stomach, and so thirsty that his throat itched with every gulp; but such was his exhaustion, both physical and mental, that lying down a little sounded best to him before anything else.

His eyes had hardly closed when he fell into a deep slumber.

Images of the distant and recent past raced through his mind: Him as a child learning to swing a sword properly in combat. The sword was heavy. Him stabbing a Saracen whose swings with a hammer he had swiftly dodged. The Saracen spit out blood. Him having a cheerful conversation with Richard the Lionheart as they paced through a Sicilian village. Him helping man the ship he was on as a massive thunderstorm threatened to wreck it off the coast of Cyprus. The waves were immense, towering over them.

“Fili mi, umbras ne caveas,” he heard successive whispers, male and female, say.

Him eying an Arab woman in a crowded bazaar. Her beauty was enchanting; she smiled when their eyes met. Him falling into a puddle after being pushed by one of his older brothers. The eldest of them saw and laughed aloud. Him being shot in the shoulder with an arrow during a battle. His coat of mail had prevented it from piercing his skin but he still fell down in great pain.

“Fili mi, umbras ne caveas,” he heard successive whispers say more loudly than before.

Him weeping bitterly over the death of his horse wounded fatally in combat, the steed he had brought with him from Aquitaine. He was a child when it was a child, a colt, that is; they had braved many misadventures together in their journey to the Levant. He kissed his head, stroked his ears one last time, and said a prayer.

“Fili mi, umbras ne caveas,” he heard successive voices say, so loudly they awoke him!

He immediately rose up. It appeared to be morning because he could make out the chirping of birds outside and daylight leaked into the room through several crevices in the stonemasonry.

Wiping off the tears he felt on his cheeks, he stepped out. Feeling incredibly sore all over, he moved quite slowly at first, and as the drowsiness of a sudden rousing left him, he moved more easily.

The torch lighting the hall without had long ago lost its flame.

He went back up the stairwell and through the narrow passageway. Once he reached the corridor he had come in through, he was seriously astonished at the structure that the daylight revealed. It was certainly an abbey or a monastery, he deduced from the architecture, quite in line with the Christian edifices that he has visited either in the West or the East.

What struck him with a mixture of surprize, curiosity, and even some fear was that the place he was stepping through was perfectly in ruins. There was no sign of its currently being inhabited. It had long ago been taken over by verdure, foilage, and trees, or thrown down by neglect into random heaps of stone or debris. Rigobert looked around in great confusion.

What could not be denied was its immense size. The columns and spots of ceiling that still stood towered over him. Rigobert found the open gate through which he had entered and slipped out. Once he was stood far enough to the side, his view could comprehend much of the structure. He could not believe it had not been abandoned already hundreds of years.

He would have continued to take in the view, had he not caught a glimpse, through the corner of his eye, on one side of the abandoned building, a figure, somehow shadowed over, seeming to be a monk.

It standing upright and staring at him, Rigobert felt a terrible chill at his neck, and a sharp sense of dread overcame him. It was not questioned.

Despite whatever injuries his body was certainly affected with, he dashed away in the opposite direction, heading down the hill he had hiked up the previous night. At some point in his downhill run, he tripped and rolled down several fight, crushing into brush, and ramming his flying limbs against branches.

At last, at the bottom of the hill, he lay unconscious, having struck his head hard against the ground. He had not lain there a minute, however, when a shepherd leading a handful of his sheep nearby spotted Rigobert lying there. Having gotten closer and seeing his chest rise and fall with life, the shepherd hurried into the village to get help and a wagon on which to carry Rigobert in.