The Road To Jerusalem (15 page)

To counter that logic, however, Brother Guilbert had a simple objection. Because in that case, God must have also given everyone the ability to handle a bow or a sword equally, yet some got markedly less from the instrument and others got much more. Little Arn had been given more of such gifts than any man, young or old, that Brother Guilbert had ever encountered in his life, he claimed.

That statement made Father Henri hesitant, because hardly any living man had encountered so many other men with weapons in hand as had Brother Guilbert; that much was certain. On the other hand, Brother Guilbert could not possibly lie to his own prior.

But Father Henri had felt uncomfortable with this topic of discussion, and had come to an agreement with Brother Guilbert—that is, he had forbidden him to put any whims into the boy’s head. And that was why Arn never understood when he was doing well with the bow or sword, but only knew or was brusquely reminded of when he did something wrong.

Arn had not yet been allowed to use a real sword in any of his practice sessions. Nor was it necessary, for Brother Guilbert could see what would happen later when the boy’s arms grew stronger and he made the transition from wooden sticks to steel.

When it came to handling a sword, the quickness of the mind and the eye, the balance of the foot, and the feeling in the hand were much more important than the strength of the arm. Brother Guilbert had seen little of the way that Nordic men handled swords, yet he could tell that these barbarians’ technique was based almost entirely on strength. Their swords were short, be cause they never fought on horseback; they believed that horses were unsuited to war, oddly enough. And they stood in ranks close to each other, almost like the ancient Romans and Greeks a thousand years before, although they didn’t call their formation a phalanx but a
fylking
. This technique required them almost exclusively to hack at an angle from above, either from the left or the right. Each man, using at least a semblance of a shield and with at least a minimum of self-preservation, could parry every such blow without having to think or move. And so they would keep at it until one of the opponents tired and the other more or less by accident landed a blow on his opponent’s skull. Under these circumstances it was a matter of course that the one with the strongest arms would win in the end.

For the first three or four years Arn had been given his early training with swaddled wooden sticks, and Brother Guilbert methodically drummed into the boy’s head the three-count rhythm so that it would stick and remain there forever. High blow from the left, low blow from the right, and then a lunge straight ahead or a new blow from the side. Thousands and thousands of times.

The first thing Arn learned in this way was the rhythm and the movement. The second thing he learned was to control his anger, for Brother Guilbert always struck him with the third blow, every time during the first two years. Not until the third year had Arn learned to control his feet, his movements, and his rhythm sufficiently that he could sometimes parry the third, painful thrust.

In the fourth year Brother Guilbert made fairly heavy wooden swords, which he weighted precisely with an inserted metal rod. It was important that the wooden sword in Arn’s hand have the same weight in relation to his small arms that a real sword would have later in life, the same way that the bows gradually had to be made more difficult to draw. So Brother Guilbert had to experiment a good deal with the fabrication until it seemed right.

It was during practice with the sword that Brother Guilbert discovered that the boy, just as in the smithy, could use his left hand as well as his right. In every other context in the cloister, Arn’s teachers, just as they hounded him in the scriptorium, tried to wean him from using the unclean hand. But for Brother Guilbert the matter appeared in a different light. He consulted his conscience and he consulted God. He didn’t want to involve Father Henri in this dilemma.

Soon he realized that it wasn’t a case of normal lefthandedness, because such men did exist and on occasion in his former life Brother Guilbert had faced such a man with sword in hand. And it was not easy, he knew that. It was as if everything one had learned was suddenly backwards.

So from the beginning he had trained Arn to use both hands, to shift from day to day or from week to week. But he had never seen any appreciable difference in his technique, except that the boy’s left arm seemed to be somewhat stronger than his right. But that also meant that it was possible from the very first to build a secret skill into the boy’s technique; he could suddenly toss the sword from one hand to the other and then begin to circle clockwise instead of counterclockwise around his opponent. If the opponent was dressed in heavy gear and his fighting fundamentals were unsure, the sudden change in tactics would have a devastating effect.

Brother Guilbert was well aware that such a line of thinking might possibly be sinful. He had also confessed them to Father Henri, but explained that as long as his task was merely to teach the boy, he had to do it as best he could. Since God had still not expressed His wish for the boy’s calling in life, there was probably no difference for the time being in reading Ovid in secret with red cheeks or holding the sword in his left hand, was there?

When Father Henri consulted God, he received the answer that as long as the boy showed the same zeal in his studies as in Brother Guilbert’s warlike games, then all was as it should be. But not so if he should begin to prefer arrows and sword to
Glossa Ordinaria
. Fortunately Arn showed no such tendencies in that direction.

And while Father Henri always preached diligence and discipline, cleanliness and prayer, Brother Guilbert always preached agility and agility, agility and diligence. It was important, just as in musical rhythm, to learn to feel when the arrow would fly toward a spot ahead of the moving target so that arrow and target would meet there. But it was equally important always to keep moving his feet, never to stand still waiting for the opponent’s blow; he had to be somewhere else when the blow came so that he could strike back the very next instant.

Diligence and discipline. Cleanliness and prayer. Agility and agility, agility and diligence. Arn followed all these rules with the same ease as he followed the rules about obeying and loving all the brothers, the two most important rules at the monastery, always to speak the truth, the third rule; and then all the other less important ones, which sometimes barely made sense, such as the rules about eating at the dinner table and going to bed.

But it was no trick at all for him to follow this divine order of things. On the contrary, it was a joy. Sometimes he wondered how other children behaved out there in the base world; he did have faint memories of tobogganing, rolling hoops, and other childish games. He may have missed some of that, just as every night at the last prayer hour he prayed for his mother’s soul and then missed her breath, her voice, and her hands; just as he prayed for his brother Eskil and remembered how they had been torn from each other in tears. But he understood, at any rate he felt that he understood, that the greatest happiness for a boy must be to be able to divide his time between all the wonders that books held and all the hard work in sweat and sometimes tears of pain that Brother Guilbert offered.

Magnus Folkesson had made a promise to God that he would mourn Sigrid for five years before he would remarry. Within his family this decision had aroused astonishment, since it was not usual for a man who was still fit, and who had only one legitimate son as heir, to refrain for so long from begetting new sons to strengthen the clan.

Magnus had consoled himself somewhat with a thrall, Suom, and had a love child with her. But Arnas had become a gloomy fortress where not much happened or ever changed. After Sigrid’s death Magnus had felt empty in his head and could no longer find new ideas for his trade and businesses. Everything ran in the same old ruts.

He had built some things; he had finished the walls and about six miles of road up toward Tiveden. Building a road was a deed pleasing to God, and he had promised this construction when he visited Sigrid’s grave the first time and prayed for her at Varnhem and purchased prayers of intercession for her.

It couldn’t hurt to combine what was pleasing to God with what would be good for future business. The day there was a road all the way through Tiveden wood he would be able to trade to the north with the Swedes. They were simple men who understood little, but they had good iron and offered a fine trade in pelts that could bring plenty of silver if there were passable roads.

Contributing to the gloominess at Arnas was the fact that his mother, Tora Guttormsdotter, had come from her farms in Norway to tend to everything that a wife would usually oversee, for as long as he remained unmarried. But she was hard on the thralls and wanted to run everything according to old Norwegian customs, and Magnus, like many men, had a hard time putting his own mother in her place. The fact that he ought to be a better lord of his own house was a strong reason to find a new wife soon. In Magnus’s view it would be wise to join forces with the Pal clan in Husaby, since his own lands bordered theirs. In that case any of the Pal daughters would bring to the estate a suitable dowry of oak forests covering the slopes of the mountain Kinnekulle. Of course, the unmarried daughters were still scarcely more than children, but youth was something that soon passed.

Eskil was both a joy and a secret sorrow to Magnus. Eskil was like himself, and also much like his mother Sigrid, whose intelligence he seemed to have inherited. Eskil wanted most of all to take part in trading expeditions, to meet foreign merchants and learn from their wares and prices how best to calculate the value of two casks of bacon in terms of wheat or hides and how to trade raw iron for silver. In this Eskil was indeed his father’s son.

Yet as an almost full-grown man he was still unable to throw a lance or handle a sword the way a man of a clan with a coat of arms should be able to do. But it was true that Magnus himself resembled his eldest son in this.

Only once had Magnus as the lord of Arnas been forced to set out for war. That was when Henriksen the Dane proclaimed himself king over the Swedes after he had ignominiously hacked off the head of Erik Jedvardsson up in Ostra Aros. There were two versions of the event: some held that it occurred just after the high mass in the Trinity Church, and that Erik Jedvardsson died courageously facing great odds, and a spring emerged from the spot where his head struck the ground.

According to Erik Jedvardsson’s enemies, and to King Karl Sverkersson, Erik Jedvardsson died unnecessarily because he had been too full of ale to defend himself like a man.

And yet it made little difference how King Erik had been murdered; there would have to be war in any case. The fact that the Swedes felt indignant that a Dane had come and murdered their king was easy to understand. At once they sent off a message all the way to Helsingland and the darkest forests of Svealand, and soon had gathered a great army heading for Ostra Aros. But the question was how people would react in Western Gotaland and in Eastern Gotaland. Should they let the Swedes settle accounts with the Danish slayer of their king on their own, or should they take part in the war?

For King Karl Sverkersson and his men in Linkoping, this was not a difficult decision. He had to choose between going off to war against the Danish king-slayer with as many forces as he could muster, and thus winning the crown of the Swedes for himself, or allowing them to win on their own and then elect a new king, who could be anyone at all among the Swedish chieftains or lawspeakers. For King Karl Sverkersson the choice was simple.

When the Folkungs gathered for the clan
ting
in Bjalbo in Eastern Gotaland, they soon found that there wasn’t much choice. Magnus’s own brother Birger, who was now called Brosa, the Smiling One, had quickly convinced the clan
ting
. One war was unavoidable for all in Eastern Gotaland, Birger Brosa had declared, and that was the war against the Danish murderer of the king. For the Eastern Goths the only right thing was to support King Karl in this matter. But after the victory he would probably become king of Svealand as well. Because victorious they would be; the army raised in Sweden was itself large enough to win the victory on its own. The days of the Dane, Magnus Henriksen, on earth were numbered. Now they had to look beyond his death.

For the Folkungs it was crucial that they not be split apart and end up on different sides in a war. If King Karl now won the royal crown in Svealand, he would soon demand recognition in Western Gotaland as well—then all the Folkungs would be set against one another, the east against the west.

Better then to combine all the problems into a single war, so that both Western Goths and Eastern Goths would rally around King Karl in his war. If they did not do so, the same thing would happen later anyway, but at the cost of much spilled blood and in the worst case with brother set against brother.

No one at the clan meeting could contradict Birger Brosa on this. And from then on Birger Brosa usually got what he wanted.

Magnus took part in the war with his retainers in the way he found best. He and his men did not enter into the dispute until it was already won, which then mostly involved executing the last of the Danes and taking captive those who could pay ransom. He was able to return to Arnas as a victor who had not lost a single man in the conflict but became 50 marks richer in silver, and for this he was popular with the women, though the men did not think highly of him.

He had left Eskil at Arnas when he went off to war, despite the boy’s nagging and whining. Eskil was not yet a man; besides, as the eldest son and heir, he could not be replaced like some fallen retainer.

Magnus had tried to forget his second son whom God had taken alive from him. But since he knew that Arn was the son that Sigrid had loved best, he could not forget as easily as he should for the peace of his soul. Nor could he forget Sigrid during the five years of mourning he had assigned himself. In secret he told himself that she was still the one person above all others whom he valued most highly, more than any man, even a man such as his brother Birger Brosa.