‘Damn the shamans,’ he whispered out loud, the thought escaping his lips. Could I have been wrong?
He slowed his pace as he neared the ladder. It was a long way down and at his age he was no longer a mountain goat.
A flurry of footsteps! Running.
He startled and spun but never made it full around.
He didn’t see the log that bashed his head, never felt himself being dragged to the edge and at the last moment, at his passage through the membrane, he never heard the urgent fluttering of a pair of black-shouldered kites taking to wing, spooked by the sound of his body crashing through the oaks.
TWELVE
Clairvaux Abbey, France, 1118
On a crystalline winter morning the great woods surrounding the new monastery were silent. The fields were calm, the flat horizon at peace.
Inside a frigid room with no more than a straw mattress, a piss pot and a basin glazed with ice, the young abbot had cast off his rough blanket because he felt his body burning, despite the cold. His skin was slick, as if freshly dunked in water. The hacking cough that had kept him up all night was quiet for now, but he knew that any minute it would return to rack his body and pound his head. He tried to breathe through his nose to prevent another spasm.
When, as a privileged youngster, Bernard became ill, a gentlewoman would attend him – an aunt or a cousin. But he had banned females from the congregation and as a consequence he was forced to rely on the not-so-tender mercies of men. His feverish lamentations turned to his beloved mother, dead so long. He still had a fading memory from early childhood, lying in bed with a raw throat, being soothed with a song, a honeyed drink and her pretty face. He was a man now, twenty-eight years old and the head of Clairvaux Abbey. For him, there was no mother and no gentle hand. He had to bear his illness stoically and trust in the benevolence of Christ for deliverance.
If his mother had survived to old age surely she would have swelled with pride at how her pious plan had unfolded. At birth she had offered each of her children – six sons and one daughter – to God, and had fully devoted herself to their Christian upbringing.
By the time Bernard had completed his education, his mother was gone. His tutors had identified him as a special talent, a young man who, in addition to noble birth and natural intellect, had a sweetness of temper, a keen wit and the kind of immense charm which blesses a man infrequently. Despite a brief flirtation with the secular seductions of literature and poetry, there was never a serious doubt that Bernard would become a minister of God.
Certainly, the path of least resistance would have taken him to the nearby Benedictine abbey in Fontaines, but he shunned that option with vehemence. He had already aligned himself philosophically with the new men of the Church – Robert of Molesme, Alberic of Citeaux, the Cistercians who felt the strict observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict of Nursia had been forsaken by corrupted abbeys and their clergy. These Cistercians were determined to strip away the excesses of flesh and spirit that had infected the Benedictines. They would reject fine linen shirts, breeches, furs, sheets and bedspreads. Their abbeys and cloisters would never be embellished by gargoyles and chimeras. They would take their bread hard, without lard or honey. They would charge no burial dues, take no tithes, they would build their communities away from cities, towns or villages and ban all women to avoid all worldly distractions. And they would interrupt their prayers and meditations only by the kind of hard physical labour necessary for subsistence.
With this spartan ideal firmly in mind, the young Bernard was praying one day in a small wayside church, asking God for his guidance, and when he arose, he had his answer. Transfixed by the clarity of his decision, he persuaded his brothers Barthomieu and Andre, his uncle, Gaudry and soon, thirty-one other Burgundian nobles, to venture with him to Citeaux, leaving the Kingdom of France for the Holy Roman Empire and leaving old lives for new. Two other brothers Gerard and Guy were away as soldiers though in time they would join him too. Only the youngest, Nivard, was left behind.
‘Farewell, Nivard,’ Bernard had called to this favourite brother the day the party rode off. ‘You will have all the lands and estates for yourself.’
The boy cried out tearfully, ‘Then you are taking Heaven and leaving me only the earth! The division is too unequal!’
These words greatly moved Bernard and there would be a pit in his stomach until the day when he and Nivard were finally reunited.
In the year 1112, Citeaux Abbey was still all wood and no stone. It had been established fifteen years earlier but the abbot, Stephen Harding, a flinty Englishman, had not received new novices for some time. He was overjoyed by this influx of humanity and he welcomed Bernard and his entourage with open arms.
That first cold night in the lay dormitory, Bernard blissfully lay awake, the crowded room resonating with the snores of exhausted men. In the days and weeks to come, the harder the travails the greater his pleasure and in the future he would tell all novices at his gate: ‘If you desire to live in this house, leave your body behind; only spirits can enter here.’
His abilities were so exceptional and his labour so vigorous that within two years, Stephen had decided Bernard was more than ready to initiate a new sister abbey. He made him abbot and sent him off with his brothers Andre and Gerard and twelve other men to a house in the diocese of Langres in Champagne.
On a flat clearing, they built a simple dwelling and embarked on a life of extreme hardship, even by their own tough standards. The land was poor, they made their bread from the coarsest barley and in the first year they had to make do with wild herbs and boiled beech leaves. But they persevered and built up their monastery. They named it Clairvaux.
Because of Bernard’s charisma, disciples flocked to Clairvaux and by the time he became ill there were over a hundred monks in residence. He missed the union of sleeping with his fellows in the long open dormitory but it was just as well he had agreed to move to a small abbot chamber adjacent to the church. His month-long coughing fits would have deprived the monks of what little sleep they had.
Gerard was always the most robust of the six brothers. Other than a sliced thigh, a proper soldier’s trophy, he had never suffered a sick day in his life. He fussed over his frail brother and tried to have him keep down soups and infusions but Bernard was slipping away, a slack bag of bones. Too listless to lead the men at prayer, he delegated the authority to his prior but still insisted on being helped to the church to attend services and observe the hours.
One day, Gerard took it upon himself to ride off to inform the powerful cleric, William of Champeaux, Bishop of Chalons-en-Champagne, about the state of Bernard’s health. William openly appreciated Bernard and acutely recognised his potential as a future church leader. On report of his illness, he obtained the permission of the Cistercian order at Citeaux to govern Bernard for a year as his superior. The decree in hand, he ordered the young abbot to be relieved of all clerical duties and freed from the harsh observances of the order until his body was healed. Bernard was taken by horse cart south, to the warmer climes of a richer and more comfortable abbey where a few years earlier his middle brother Barthomieu had been dispatched. And thus, Bernard of Clairvaux came to reside at the Abbey Ruac.
Ruac was a Benedictine community sluggishly shedding the excesses which Bernard had railed against. It was not yet fit to be part of the Cistercian order. Although new nuns were no longer admitted, the abbot, a benevolent old sort, did not have the heart to cast the old ones out. Nor did he cast away the wine cellar or the brewery or empty the plentiful larder and granary stores. Barthomieu and some other new men had been sent to Ruac as a vanguard of reform, but they began to relish the comforts they found there having endured hard years at Clairvaux. In truth, they were more changed by Ruac than Ruac changed by them.
On arrival, Bernard was too ill to notice the ecclesiastical shortcomings of his new environs, let alone protest them. He was given a one-room stone house on the outskirts of the abbey with a hearth, a comfortable bed, a reading table with horse-hair chair and an abundance of thick candles. His brother Barthomieu stoked the fire and hovered at his bedside like a worried lover, and an elderly nun, Sister Clotilde, plied him with fresh food and wholesome drink.
