Free Flight.
The plane reached altitude. The engine changed pitch — lower, steadier, settling into a monotonous hum that no longer pressed against me, but lulled me instead.
Karl touched my shoulder and signaled that it was time.
I stood up.
The harness tightened, the carabiners clinked — the sound seemed too sharp, almost alien in the sterile space of the cabin. Jürgen stood opposite me. He seemed like a world unto himself: his own gear, his own parachute, his own silence.
He was not attached to anyone.
His fall belonged to him alone.
Karl secured me to himself. I felt the harness tighten around my body — firm, rigid, like steel pincers squeezing the last air from my lungs. He pointed toward the open door and shouted something, but the words drowned in the roar of the wind.
I could not hear them.
But I understood.
To the edge.
I stepped forward.
Beyond the door there was nothing but sky. An immense, empty space — without a floor, without walls, without a single point for the eye to catch hold of.
The wind struck my face, and I could not breathe not because there was too little air, but because there was suddenly too much of it. It crashed over me, dense and heavy as icy water.
Jürgen stood at the other edge.
He looked at me, gave me a brief thumbs-up — and simply stepped out, as casually as stepping off a pavement into the road, letting go of everything that belonged to the earth.
I watched him disappear into the whiteness of the clouds, becoming a tiny speck.
Then I stepped.
Or rather, Karl stepped for both of us.
I had no choice. I was part of his movement, an extension of his will.
And in that instant, the world disappeared.
1307.
Friday, October
13. Dawn.
The fog reluctantly withdrew into the lowlands, and the grey sky emerged through it like an old fresco beneath a layer of plaster — hidden, but not gone.
Bernard stood on the wall of the commandery. His close-cropped hair, short beard, and sun-darkened face marked him as a knight-brother. He was finishing the night watch. His white mantle bearing the red cross caught the sparse rays of the morning sun. Over it lay a warm hooded cloak: in the foothills of Dauphiné, October nights were already cold.
He was one of those trusted with more than the Rule allowed — one of the chosen, guardians of something that had no name and was never mentioned in the records.
The ground trembled.
Not from thunder — from hooves.
A detachment was racing toward the Order’s commandery. Bernard saw them first: dark silhouettes on the ridge, torches, flashes of steel. He struck the bell once — an alarm, sharp and abrupt. Then again.
The riders dismounted at the gate, followed by soldiers carrying a battering ram. The wood groaned at the first blow. At the second, it split like dry kindling, and the king’s governor’s men poured into the courtyard.
Chainmail. Iron helmets. Spears. Torches. Ragged red shadows raced across the walls.
“In the king’s name! Surrender!”
One of the men who burst in threw a burning torch beneath the awning. The straw caught first, then the beams. Flames swept across the courtyard in an instant.
Grey, acrid smoke crawled along the ground. The commander stood in the courtyard — barefoot, wearing only a linen shirt. He held his sheathed sword in both hands, upright like a cross. When he saw Bernard on the wall, the commander gave the slightest tilt of his chin toward the passage leading to the cells.
They must not reach the commander’s cell.
Bernard threw off his heavy cloak, jumped from the wall, rolled, and disappeared into the smoke like dark water.
The courtyard boiled with movement. The king’s governor’s men drove the Order’s people toward the well with their spears — knights, squires, sergeants, chaplains, monks, and servants. They forced them into a tight mass.
Bernard was no longer hiding in the smoke.
He was working inside it.
A mailed soldier appeared ahead, spear at the ready. In an instant, Bernard slipped along the wall and came up beside him. His sword flashed. A short upward strike beneath the ribs. The blade found the gap between mail and belt, and the man folded without a sound.
Bernard seized his spear and moved on.
The smoke shifted. Wind from the burning stable swept across the courtyard. Three men stood by the hitching post — a swordsman and two spearmen.
Bernard did not approach them from the front. Keeping close to the stone wall, he circled around them, then hurled the spear at the spearman on the right. The shaft struck his shoulder. He spun, clutching the wound.
The swordsman turned toward the cry — and Bernard struck from the smoke, a short blow to the throat. The swordsman choked and collapsed.
The third spearman lunged forward, but Bernard hooked his foot behind the man’s leg and shoved him from behind. He crashed into the support of the awning, staggered, and fell into the fire.
The commander was already there.
“The book is behind the stone slab above my bed. Take it, ” he said quickly. “Run. The Holy Fields beyond Arles. Raven. At evening prayer. The bell sign.”
One look was enough.
The book could not be surrendered under any circumstances.
Bernard nodded. Then he looked at the commander one last time. He knew they would never meet again. Not because the road ahead was long, but because for the commander, that road had already ended here.
One guard remained at the entrance to the passage leading to the cells — tall, wearing chainmail and carrying a round shield. He stood across the passage, waiting.
Bernard tore a burning bundle of straw from the awning and hurled it at the shield. The soldier instinctively covered himself. Sparks scattered across his mail and face, and in the second it took him to shield his eyes from the heat, Bernard struck his wrist with the flat of his sword.
The hand opened. The shield clattered against the stone.
A second blow — to the temple, with the pommel.
The shield-bearer crumpled against the wall like a sack.
Bernard rushed down the passage without slowing, all the way to the commander’s cell. The door stood ajar.
He stepped to the wall, found the barely visible seam of a stone slab, and pressed its corner. The stone shifted quietly.
Inside the narrow niche lay a book wrapped in leather.
He tucked it beneath his tunic and pressed it against his chest, needing to feel that it was there, that it would not fall into their hands.
Outside came the roar of battle, the heavy tread of boots, the clash of steel. The western stable was already burning. Horses were panicking. One had become tangled in the reins among the broken remains of a partition.
Bernard cut the straps, freed the horse, swung into the saddle, and raced for the exit.
A rider emerged from the smoke straight toward him.
Bernard ducked beneath the raised spear and burst through the gate.
The trail led downhill. Branches lashed his face, tearing the skin until it bled. Behind him came the pounding of hooves: four riders had taken up the chase.
They were close.
The heavy, sucking rhythm of the hooves drew nearer.
At a fork in the trail, Bernard turned onto a rocky path. The trail disappeared among the scree, and the pursuers fell behind.
Night fell.
Ahead, the path came to an end.
Far below, in the black chasm, the Durance roared — turbulent, swift. It was not a sheer precipice, but a rocky ledge above black water.
He looked back.
Behind him, the riders’ torches were already flickering through the darkness.
Ahead was black water.
Bernard understood: there was no way back. Forward — there was only one way.
The book struck against his chest beneath the leather wrapping.
He drove his spurs into the horse’s sides.
A leap into the void.
The air struck my face.
For one instant, there was a dead vacuum: no roar, no earth, no sky.
Only ringing emptiness.
At first, I was not falling — I had simply been thrown out of the plane. The air rushed toward me, my body turned over, my arms flung helplessly outward. The ground vanished from view, then suddenly appeared above my head.
And I understood, all at once:
my life truly no longer depended on me.
It depended on someone else’s hands, on the lines and the air — on everything that, only a second before, had seemed like emptiness.
Karl turned us and spread himself into the airflow, drawing me with him. The air struck from below, catching my chest and shoulders.
The tumbling slowed.
My body stopped spinning.
One more second — and my body caught the current.
The ground stopped spinning before my eyes. The fall acquired direction and rhythm.
I was still moving, but I no longer felt as though I were falling through something.
The fear did not disappear.
It changed.
At first it had been terror at the loss of support. Now it was a sharp, lucid tension.
I felt the wind with every cell of my skin, heard the dull roar of air, and watched the earth turning slowly far below.
It turned out that free fall was not the absence of movement, but movement that could be learned, felt, and guided.
Something shifted — not in my mind, but deeper, in my bones, where words had not yet had time to appear.
The silence after the fire was not a metaphor, nor an image from the chapel.
It was physical reality.
Relax — and catch the feeling, I remembered Jürgen saying.
I heard my own breathing — steady, hoarse, too loud in that emptiness.
We were not falling.
We had settled onto the sky, and it held us like an invisible fabric.
Time stopped hurrying. Every second became heavy, as though it had weight of its own.
I was suspended in the air, attached to the instructor, looking down at the earth.
The houses seemed tiny, like those in the fresco.
The forest was a dark stain.
The mountains were sharp ridges, one after another, stretching away into the distance.
And I was between sky and earth, like the saint painted on the wall.
Like Giuseppe.
The face in the fresco — I saw it before me.
Now I was on the other side of the image: my body already belonged to the heights, while my mind had not yet caught up.
I descend from the stars, I thought.
I heard no music, but I heard a slow, deep rhythm — the hiss of air passing my ears, the distant hum of the aircraft, almost dissolved by the altitude.
And something else — a barely perceptible, almost unreal sound, as though the clouds were rustling, running their fingers through the thin threads of the sky.
Quiet.
Soothing.
Like the breathing of something immense.
And in that silence, I thought I heard a low voice somewhere.
It drew out the vowels slowly, like a taut string.
Not a song.
Not a prayer.
Something between the two: an ancient, calm sound.
I could not tell where it came from — from the wind or from within me.
But it was there.
And fear receded before it, as noise recedes before silence.
Then — a jerk.
The canopy opened.
Not softly. Not smoothly.
Abruptly, as though someone had grabbed me by the straps and yanked me upward with all their strength.
My chest tightened.
My legs swung.
The wind disappeared — it did not fade, it did not weaken.
It simply vanished, as though someone had switched it off.
Free fall was over.
I hung beneath the canopy, strapped to a man I could not see.
Above my head, the fabric crackled as air passed through it, and the sound was almost tender — like the whisper of altitude.
Karl touched my shoulder and pointed toward the landing area.
The ground approached slowly, almost reluctantly.
I did not want it to end.
But the earth was coming toward me, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Jürgen was waiting below.
He sat in the grass, his parachute beside him, his jacket unzipped.
He had watched us land.
He had seen my face — I did not know what it looked like, but apparently he had seen exactly what he had been waiting for.
“Well?” he asked.
I took off my helmet.
My hands were trembling slightly — almost imperceptibly, but I felt every tremor.
I opened my mouth and found no word.
The word was there.
It was simply too heavy to lift at once.
“I heard it, ” I finally said.
He nodded.
He did not smile.
He simply nodded, as though I had passed an examination.
“In Elijah’s life, there was fire and the whirlwind first, ” Jürgen said.
“And then silence.”
I stood there as though I were still listening to the silence of free fall.
And suddenly I understood:
already within that silence was something that had yet to take shape and become music.
(from
the notes of Viktor Stahl)