Harun slept through the entire day. This had the unexpected benefit of for once not being woken by the shrill cry of the cock. Instead, it was the cool evening air that made him open his eyes. He felt more awake and alert that he had ever done in the evening. He got up and wandered down the stairs, through the deserted castle and towards the gate, where Wenzel was waiting for him in the flickering torchlight.

“Are you really sure about this?” the guard asked, as he drew back the bolts of the side door.

“Yes.”

“You know what people think of you, of heathens in general, in these parts, especially down in the village. If anyone comes across you, alone, in the dark…”

“Is that likely?”

“No,” admitted Wenzel. “The women will be at home and most of the men will be in the tavern. But nevertheless…”

“I have to do this.”

“Why? Why is it you that has to do this? No one ordered you to get mixed up in dangerous affairs that aren't your own! Why you?”

Harun's brow creased.

“Ask me again in a week, will you?” he said, finally. “I may have thought of an answer by then. Now open the door.”

Wenzel did as asked. Harun stepped past him into the cold, dark, autumn evening. The sun was already down and stars were glinting up ahead. Doing this felt strange. Although he had lived for years in these lands now, he had never set foot beyond the castle walls, with the exception of the trips to Danzig. Never had he left by foot, and never had he visited the village, from which everything the castle required came: the milk, the bread, the honey, the meat – the last two in sadly small amounts.

It had been for a good reason that he had never left the castle when not on official business for Sir Christian: The villagers' attitude towards him was strikingly similar to that of Father Ignatius. He was not welcome in their midst.

Now he was going there, to avenge the murder of someone he had never met, but of whom he now thought every day when he sat down to supper. People like the murdered man – commoners they were called. Some people used the word as if it wore an insult, but Harun could see no insult there. In his view, commoners were called commoners because they were commonly needed. They worked hard, said little, and always made sure that there was food on the table, even if it was tasteless gruel.

Harun slowly walked down the hill. He barely could see the path to the village in front of him, but that mattered little. He was a man well versed in all of the liberal arts, including astrology. The new oxgangs, where Lukas' home was situated, lay north of the castle, past the main village. They should be easy enough to find by following the polar star. Harun walked for a bit, his eyes turned upwards. Then he found a broad strip of forest barring the direct way to the new fields.

Harun hesitated. Should he go around? It seemed an awfully long detour to make. And why should he? After all, he was a learned man. Surely he would be able to orientate himself in any conditions, if people like hunters and woodcutters managed it? The Polar Star pointed the way.

Of course he would not be able to follow the star in the forest, but there was no logical reason why he should not be able to keep going north simply by walking straight on in the same direction as before.

*~*~*~*~*

No logical reason for losing your way, no – but apparently there were a host of illogical ones. As Harun soon discovered it was difficult walking straight on in a forest where everywhere these damn trees kept getting in your way. Why hadn’t anyone gotten rid of them yet? And, to top it all off, the glimmer of the stars above was slowly disappearing. It was getting overcast. Harun stumbled over a tree root and fell forward, his head on a direct collision course with a tree which had decided to stand in this exact spot.

Something cracked in the nightly forest, and it wasn’t wood. It wasn’t a nut worked on by an industrious squirrel, either.

“Loka inferna purgamen!” Harun moaned, rubbing his forehead.

That was one of the advantages of being educated. You could curse as much as you liked, if you did it in Latin, everybody present would just think you were making terribly cultured commentaries and applaud you. This wasn’t much of an advantage in an empty forest, populated only by oaks, pines and other wild animals just waiting to pounce on innocent scribes.

“You are not finding my home very comfortable, then?” came a voice out of the dark.

Harun froze. The voice had come from right behind him. He had not heard anyone approach. A shiver ran down his spine. What sort of man would be walking through the forest at this hour of the night? Apart from a poor, lost Arabian intellectual of course.

“You do not have to stand there as though you had sprouted roots. I am no bandit or brigand, you know.”

Harun could breath again. He had been wondering whether he had stumbled on a party of bandits, approaching the village. Yet the forest was still quiet, and from what he had heard, raiding parties liked to engage in looting and pillaging – hardly activities that could be conducted in a silent, orderly manner. They also didn't tend to speak as educated and friendly as the man behind him had.

The Scribe turned around. Before him, he could just make out a black figure. But that was not very conclusive as to the man’s real appearance here in the dark forest. Here, the ground was black, the sky was black, even the needles of the pines were black, which Harun, in spite of his meager knowledge of the local flora and fauna, was pretty sure they normally shouldn’t be.

“Tell me my friend,” the man’s voice asked. It was deep and resounding. “Are you lost?”

Harun thought about his options. On the one hand, if he said no, the stranger might leave him alone to go his way freely, whereas if he said yes, the stranger might try in some way to take advantage of his problematic situation. But on the other, the stranger might try that anyway, and what good was it to be able to go your way freely if that way ran around in circles?

“Yes,” Harun said.

“Then come with me. I can shelter you for the night at my house, if that would be congenial to you. You would honor me with my presence.”

No. Definitely no bandit.

“Very congenial indeed”, Harun said. “Shukran, Sir.”

“Not at all. Ahlan, ana ismi Bertram. Ma ismuka?”

“Ahlan, ana is…” Harun had begun to reply before he realized what he had heard. “You speak my language... Bertram?”

“I speak Arabic, yes,” the black shadow said. “Not very well, but I can get by. If it is your language, then I know who you are. You must be Sir Christian of Sevenport’s Saracen scribe.”

“I did not know that I was this famous.”

“Infamous, more like.”

Harun hesitated. But the man’s words had not been spoken in anger. If anything, there was a faint trace of amusement in his voice.

“Now, my night-wandering guest, will you follow me so that I can give you what meager hospitality I have to offer? This way. And mind the roots.”

“I have already been warned,” Harun said, rubbing his forehead again.

The man laughed. “Yes, the forest can be awfully nice to a forgetful man.”

“You live here in the forest all alone?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So you….” Harun thought of some of the more obscure of Sir Christian’s Christian tales. “You are a recluse?”

“A recluse?” There was thoughtful silence for a second or two. “Yes, I suppose one could call me that. You certainly can, if you wish to.”

This lowered Harun’s expectations somewhat. He had not for one moment expected the home of a man living alone in the forest to be especially grand or comfortable, but from what he had heard about the life of a recluse, and even more from how deeply Sir Christian admired these people, he concluded that the ‘home’ would be as un-homely as it was possible to be.

He was therefore quite surprised, when the two of them stepped into a clearing, not to find a shabby little shack, but a solidly built wooden house, with a chimney and even windows, which, just like the ones of the Scriptorium in the castle, were fitted with planes of horn.

“Were did you get those?” The scribe asked, pointing at them. “And the oil, for the lamp, too,” he added, looking at a small oil lamp on the windowsill that spread a flickering light across the clearing. “I imagine you don’t make much money, living out here all alone.”

“I hunt”, the man answered. “Some animals do have horns, you know, and fat you can burn in a lamp, too, if you look in the right places. It would be a pleasure for me to show you which those are.”

“No thanks,” Harun replied. “I like my animals on dishes, cooked or fried.”

He looked sideways at his companion, and started. It had not just been the darkness of the forest that made the man seem dark – he was indeed wearing black. Long black robes with a hood that concealed all but an energetic, badly shaved chin. Harun knew something of the dress code of Christianity. He took a step backwards, just in case.

“Are you a Benedictine monk, Bertram?” he asked.

“What? Oh.” The man looked down at his garment. “No, I am not. I wear black because black is the opposite of white, and white is the color of spiritual purity.” He thought for a moment. “I do not know whether that is the reason the Benedictines wear it, too,” he added.

Harun’s lips twitched. “Knowing monks, I shouldn’t think so. Black, the opposite of white, the color of spiritual purity… does that have some symbolic meaning?”

“Certainly it does. It is suppose to mean that, since I think of myself devoid of all moral virtues, I am utterly humble, the greatest moral virtue a person can ever achieve.”

Harun attempted to think this through logically and failed.

“Does this have to make any sense?” he wanted to know.

“Not to anybody but to me, my honored guest. Besides, I may have forgotten to mention that the fact that black is the only color which does not turn into brown after a few days of life in the forest may also have played a minor role in my choice of clothing.” Bertram opened the door of his house and motioned for Harun go in. “Come and enter.”

Harun ducked under the low wooden lintel. His host followed, after having fetched the lamp from outside.

“I took it outside when I heard moaning in the forest,” he explained. “Ever since the preachers started showing up in town telling people that we had to fight the Prussian heathens, there have been violent attacks all over the country. I thought perhaps there may have been raiders abroad again, who left one of their victims to bleed to death, and I would have to go and find him. I know my way around these parts well enough, yet even I may have needed a light to look for a single wounded, maybe unconscious, man in the forest at midnight. It turned out that I did not need it however. You were certainly not unconscious, and also no wounded man, though you made noise enough for twenty.”

“Shukran”, Harun muttered, again massaging his forehead, which was still throbbing with pain.

“What does ‘Loka inferna purgamen’ mean?” Bertram asked, interested.

“Something which one does not say in the house of one’s host. I am glad to know that you did not understand every word I said. I already began to believe that I had met an intellectual marvel in the forest, who had learned all the tongues of men from the trees.”

Bertram laughed. It was a deep and rustling laugh, like the autumn leaves breaking beneath the steps of a heavy bear.

“God forbid, my knowledge of languages has nothing much to do with scholarly learning, scribe. What I have learned, I have learned under the hot sun in the open field, not in the cool, refined air of the study chamber. In fact, I have lived in open fields alone for so long now, that I am forgetting my manors. What do you want to drink?”

Harun looked around the bare walls of the hut.

“What do you have?” he asked, matter-of-factly.

“Water.”

“Then water it is.”

Bertram went out and Harun heard a splash. Shortly afterwards, Bertram returned, with two cups of water in his hands, one of which he gave to the scribe. Harun drank with long, deep gulps. His excursion into the forest had lasted longer than he had thought and had made him very thirsty. This somehow made the water taste better than it had ever done at the table up in Sir Christian’s castle.

“And to eat you can offer me gruel, I suppose.”

“Is that your favorite dish?” Bertram asked, smiling.

Harun cleared his throat. “Not exactly.”

“Excellent. For I am afraid I am right out of gruel at the moment.”

The woodsman began rummaging around in a chest, one of the few pieces of furniture in the small wooden house. What he produced from there made Harun’s mouth fall open: meat of all sorts – every kind of game, desiccated, smoked… more meat that Harun had ever seen on one table.

“I am afraid that I have no dishes”, Bertram regretted, “but I hope you like your animals on the table also.”

“How did you get that?” Harun whispered. But as he remembered the horn plates on the windows, and the words of the recluse, spoken casually, as though it was of no importance at all – ‘I hunt.’ – he knew. Suddenly, cold fear crept into Harun's golden-brown eyes and he looked around him, as if he feared somebody was spying on them. “You fool! Do you not know that only noblemen are allowed to hunt for game?”

“Certainly I know”, the unconcerned answer was.

“So?”

“So what?”

Harun was taken aback. Not so much by the hanging offense against the nobility this man had committed, but by the nonchalance with which he passed over it.

“What if the lord of these lands comes across you hunting on one of his own hunting trips?”

Bertram grinned. “The lord of these lands is Sir Christian. Sir Christian out on a hunting trip, with courtiers, musicians, fair maidens and a personal falconer – do you think such an event very likely?”

Harun did not, but he would rather have eaten his way through the dung heap of the castle stables than admit to the feebleness of his own arguments.

“It is a possibility”, he maintained. “What would you do then?”

Bertram shrugged. “I suppose I would just have to talk my way out of it.”

“And you think you would be able to do that?”

“Yes. You see, I would use good arguments.”

Harun sighed. It would have to be the dung heap. Or maybe not, because at this exact moment Bertram placed several delicacies on his rough wooden table. The smell wafting towards Harun made his mouth water.

“What are you worrying about, anyway?” Bertram asked. “These animals, as should be quite obvious, are already dead. They are not going to spring back to life, because you refuse to eat them. If any crime has been committed, it is mine, not yours, so eat.”

The man’s arguments were getting better and better with every passing moment, one had to admit that. Harun tucked in. Bertram followed suit. There was an interlude of some silent yet excessively enjoyable time in the little wooden house. By the end of the meal, Harun had decided not to argue anymore about the origins of the delicacies. Apart from the fact that this would be rather hypocritical after having eaten a good deal of them, he appreciated Bertram's sign of trust in inviting him to partake in his meal. To show such forbidden treasures to a stranger, who at any time could give one away to the nobility, was a rare deed indeed.

Also, Harun had found a much more interesting subject for conversation.

“Bertram, there is something I would like to ask you about.”

The recluse through a gnawed off bone into the corner of the room.

“Please do.”

“Earlier, you spoke of raiders abroad again. Have they already been in these parts before? If so, I have not heard of it.”

“Well, you wouldn’t would you?” Bertram grunted. “You live in the castle.”

“What is that supposed to mean, pray?”

“That a 50 feet high stone wall is somewhat more difficult to take than a peasants’ village with no walls round it at all.”

“But Sir Christian…”

“Oh, I did not mean to imply that the Lord of Sevenport in any way neglected his duties. If a host of armed men came up to his gates, I am sure he would defend his people. Unfortunately, raiders are seldom that obliging. They pick on the weak and leave the strong in the dark. They come, kill at night and are gone again before the lord of the lands is any the wiser.”

“They are not the only ones who do so,” Harun stated gravely.

“Kill at night, you mean?” Bertram through him a look. “You are talking of the murder, are you not? Yes, it would surprise me very much if that were bandits. To kill a penniless peasant in front of the castle gates does not seem like their handiwork. But much else around here very definitely is. I see the smoke rising and here the screams even. As yet, it is some distance off, but drawing ever closer.”

“And you are not afraid to live out in the forest, alone, even separated from the comparative safety of the village? You came out looking for me, because you thought I was one of the marauder’s victims. What if I had been, and they themselves had still been there?”

A glint appeared in Bertram’s eyes. As Harun noticed with a shiver, it was the glint of steel.

“As I said”, the recluse replied, “I hunt.”

The meaning of the words weighed on the scribe.

“Ehm… and…if you do not, what do you do here?” he asked in as bright a voice as possible, trying desperately to change the subject.

Bertram shrugged. “Nothing much. I live my life as best I may and watch the world around me. I am not that interesting. No, what Is far more curious than I is you, in fact.”

“Me?”

“But yes. I do not have contact much with the world outside the forest nowadays, but I suppose it still has not become customary for scribes to wander through deserted dark forests at midnight to search for lost quills or ink bottles?”

Harun hesitated.

“Why do you not just tell me your story?” his host said, smiling. “It would be so much simpler than to try and think of some convincing lie.”

The man was right. And anyway, he deserved to have his curiosity satisfied. Harun’s stomach told his owner so.

“I am looking for something”, Harun said. “But it is not an ink bottle.”

He began to tell.

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Another chapter :) What do you think of it? Personally, I never got lost in the forest, but I'm no Arabian scribe :D

Via the external link on the right you'll reach my twitter account, where you get all the news about my stories, if you always want to be up to date.

And now the only thing I have to do is think about what I'm going to write in the next chapter. One thing is certain: I will have to make sure that Harun is out of the forest. Next week is Christmas! If He's still in the forest, I would have to describe how there are Christmas bulbs hanging from all the trees, and that would totally ruin the historical atmosphere :D :D

Kind Regards

Robert