TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Milovan Radojević

Rascian and a child, and there we also came across a woman of Bar lamenting her brother. Orna is her name. We snatched both of you from certain death.” Then Paul and Jacob came up, and the flame of the tallow candle trembled:

“Welcome back to the world of the living. Your wounds do you honor, knight of Dioclea!” Brother Paul spoke solemnly.

I raised myself up a little, every move ached, and in the dark of the space below the archbishop’s court I could make out more people. They were sitting motionless, with their bundles. “We’re waiting for night to go down into the fields,” Marko explained. The brothers tied me to the stretcher and carried me down the steep stairway, which led out of the captured city, to join the refugees. At the height of the battle, when defeat became certain, Great Princess Desislava had gone down through the same passageway, accompanied by the courtiers and faithful lords, as well as Archbishop Gregory and the bishops. Concealed by the first dark and the olive groves, they evaded the Rascian sentries and so came to the shore, at the place where a galley was hidden. The princess and archbishop quietly sailed away to Ragusa on a calm sea; it was only a fewdays before the Feast of the Assumption, and they hoped they would soon return. With themwent the prefects Černeha and Crepun, and the tax collector Grdomil, and all the

24