Once there was a monk who had fled through the forests of the north down to the southern towns.
He knocked on a door and was accepted inside. The family was delighted that one of the mystics, the magicians, the masters, could be sitting in their home. Nobody would believe this!
“How many did you slay before you had to run?” asked the father, who seated himself at a wooden table across from the monk, a glass of ale dancing in his fingers.
“No. I ran with all my might and never looked back. I just ran as fast I could.” This was not a pleasant answer at all and dimmed the room of all merryment.
“Children, off to bed now. Go!” said the father, and away they went.
This really was not the way of a true monk. Everyone knew the stories of the Oslo monks. They were no ordinary men of the cloth, or mere supplicants in the woods, offering prayers to some unseen God and little to the visible world. Unlike most, the men of Oslo were fighters, or so the tales had often been told.
There was one, Ben, dark of skin, who had come from the countries below. He fell in with the men of Oslo and learned their ways and lived as one of them. In the white of winter, where the day was nearly dark, Ben was caught in the forest by a regional lord and his armed band. Some say he slew two hundred men, but others pegged the number at a more realistic hundred, with the end result being the death of the lord from fear.
The lord-that goliath- sat fixated with fright-and dead- atop his upright horse, which was alive, but oddly rooted in place.
If the monks wanted to, they could, and did fight, and the father knew this man in his home was no true monk. Or not a monk of the Oslo Order. He had no weapons, no beads or crystals or talismans. All he had was bare and bloodied feet; a true sign of a coward fleeing some just dessert.
“Get out of my home,” said the father, before returning to the back room where, in a fit of anger, he beat his wife for wasting good food and drink on such an impostor.
