The Road to Jerusalem

When they had made their way to the front of the crowd, Magnus stood silent and pensive for a long time. Out of breath, Sot appeared with little Eskil in her arms; she held him up in front of her so that people could see from his clothing that she had the right to push through the crowd. Then the boy jumped down and stood in front of his mother, who gently laid her hands on his shoulders, stroked his cheek, and straightened his cap.

The players in front of them were busy building a high tower composed of nothing but people, with a little boy, perhaps only a couple of years older than Eskil, climbing alone to the very top. The people shouted in fear and amazement.

Eskil pointed eagerly and said he wanted to be a performer too, which made his father break out in surprisingly hearty laughter. Sigrid glanced at him cautiously and thought that with that laughter the danger had passed.

He noticed her sneaking a glance at him and kept laughing as he bent forward and kissed her on the cheek.

‘You are truly a remarkable woman, Sigrid,’ he whispered with no anger in his voice. ‘I’ve thought over what you said, and you’re right about everything. If we gather all our forces at Arnäs we will grow richer. How could any merchant have a better, more faithful wife than you?’

With downcast eyes she replied at once, softly, that no wife could ever have a kinder, more understanding husband than she did. But then she raised her glance, gazed at him gravely, and admitted that she’d had a vision in the church; all her ideas must have come from the Holy Spirit Himself, even the clever part that had to do with business.

Magnus looked a little cross, as if he didn’t really believe her, almost as if she were making fun of the Holy Spirit. He was much more devout than she was, and they both knew it. Her years in the convent had not softened her in the least.

When the players finished their performance they went off to the ale tent to collect their free ale and the well-turned piece of roast they had earned. Magnus picked up his son and walked with Sigrid at his side, with Sot ten respectful paces behind, and headed for the town gate; on the other side of the fence their wagons and retainers were waiting. On the way Sigrid told him about the vision that she’d had. She also offered her interpretation of the holy message.

It was well known that a difficult childbirth was often followed by another difficult one, and soon it would be time again. But by donating Varnhem she was ensured many prayers of intercession, and by men who were particularly knowledgeable about such prayers. She and the new child would be allowed to live.

More important, of course, was that their united lineages would now grow stronger as the power and wealth of the Arnäs estate increased. The only thing she was unsure of was who the young man might be on the silver horse with the thick white mane, its long white tail raised boldly in the air. Probably not the Holy Bridegroom, at any rate. He wouldn’t be likely to appear riding on a frisky stallion and carrying a shield on his arm.

Magnus was intrigued by the conundrum and pondered it a while; he began interrogating her about the size of the horses and the way they moved. Then he protested that such horses probably did not exist, and he wondered what she meant by saying that the shield had a cross of blood on it. In that case it would indeed be a red cross, but how could she know it was blood and not merely red paint?

She replied that she simply knew. The cross was red, and of blood. The shield was all white. She hadn’t seen much of the young man’s clothing because his shield concealed his breast, but he was wearing white garments. White, just like the Cistercians, but he was definitely no monk because he bore the shield of a warrior.

With interest Magnus asked about the shape and size of the shield, but when he found out it was heart-shaped and only big enough to protect the chest, he shook his head in disbelief and explained that he had never seen a shield like that. Shields were either big and round, like those once used when venturing out on Viking raids, or they were long and triangular so that warriors could move easily when gathered in a phalanx. A shield as small as the one she had seen in the vision would be more trouble than protection if anyone tried to use it in battle.

But no ordinary person could expect to understand everything in a revelation. And in the evening they would pray together, grateful that the Mother of God had showed them her kindness and wisdom.

Sigrid sighed, feeling great relief and serenity. Now the worst was over, and all that was left was to cajole the old king so that he wouldn’t pass off her gift as his own. Since the king had grown old, people had begun to worry about the number of daily prayers of intercession offered on his behalf; he had already founded two cloisters to ensure this would be done for him. Everyone knew about this, his friends as well as his enemies.

King Sverker had a ferocious hangover and was in a rage when Sigrid and Magnus entered the great hall of the royal palace. The king now had to settle a good day’s worth of decisions about everything, from how the thieves caught at the market the day before were to be executed – whether they should just be hanged or tortured first – to questions regarding disputes about land and inheritance that could not be resolved at a regular ting; the assembly of noblemen.

What made him more cross than the hangover was the day’s news about his next youngest son, the scoundrel, who had deceived him in a deplorable way. His son Johan had left on a plundering raid to the province of Halland in Denmark; that in itself was probably not so dangerous. Young men were liable to do such things if they wanted to gamble with their lives instead of just playing at dice. But Johan had lied about the two women he had abducted and brought home to thralldom, claiming they were foreign women he had kidnapped at random. But now a letter had arrived from the Danish king, unfortunately claiming something quite different, which no one doubted. The two women were the wife of the Danish king’s jarl in Halland and her sister. It was an affront and an outrage, and anyone who was not the son of a king would have been executed at once for such a crime. The king had reprimanded him, of course. But it wasn’t enough to send back the women as blithely as they had been stolen. It was going to cost a great deal of silver, no matter what; in the worst case they might have a war on their hands.

King Sverker and his closest advisers had become embroiled in such a quarrel that everyone in the hall was soon aware of the whole story. The only thing that was certain was that the women had to be returned. But agreement ended there. Some thought it would be a sign of weakness to make payments in silver; it might give the Danish king, Sven Grate, the incentive to invade, plunder, and seize land. Others thought that even a great deal of silver would be less costly than being invaded and plundered, no matter who the victor might be in such a war.

After a long, exhaustive argument the king suddenly gave a weary sigh and turned to Father Henri de Clairvaux, who sat waiting at the far end of the hall for the Lurö case to be presented.

The priest’s head was bowed as if in prayer, with his white cowl drawn over his face so no one could see whether he was praying or sleeping, although the latter was more likely. In any case, Father Henri hadn’t been able to follow the heated discussion, and when he replied to the king’s summons it sounded like Latin. As there was no other clergyman present, no one understood. The king looked angrily around the hall; red in the face, he roared, ‘Bring me some devil who can understand this snooty cleric language!’

Sigrid instantly saw her opportunity. She stood up and walked forward in the hall with her head bowed, curtseying deferentially first to King Sverker and then to Father Henri.

‘My king, I am at your service,’ she said and stood waiting for his decision.

‘If there is no man here who speaks that language, then so be it,’ the king sighed wearily again. ‘By the way, how is it that you speak it, Sigrid, my dear?’ he added more kindly.

‘I’m afraid I must admit that the only thing I really learned during my banishment to the cloister was Latin,’ replied Sigrid demurely. Magnus was the only man in the hall who noticed her mocking smile; she often spoke in this manner, saying one thing but meaning another.

The king promptly asked Sigrid to sit down next to Father Henri, explain the situation to him, and then ask for his view of the matter. She obeyed at once, and while she and Father Henri began a hushed conversation in the language which they alone understood among all the people in the hall, a mood of embarrassment began to spread. The men looked querulously at one another, some shrugged their shoulders, some demonstratively folded their hands and raised their eyes to heaven. A woman in the king’s court among all these good men? But so be it. What was already done could not be undone.

After a while Sigrid stood up. To quiet the muttering in the hall, she explained in a loud voice that Father Henri had considered the matter and now believed that the wisest thing to do would be to force the blackguard to marry the sister of the jarl’s wife. But the jarl’s wife must be sent home with gifts and fine clothing, with banners and fanfare. King Sverker and his scoundrel son would thus have to refuse a dowry, so the question of silver was solved. No consideration could be given to what the knave himself thought; if he and the sister of the jarl’s wife could be married, the blood bond would prevent a war. But the rascal would have to do something to pay for his roguish behavior. War would still be the most costly solution.

When Sigrid fell silent and sat down, it was quiet at first while those assembled considered the implications of the monk’s proposal. But gradually a murmur of approval spread. Someone unsheathed his sword and slammed the broadside hard on the heavy tabletop that ran along both sides of the hall. Others followed his example and soon the hall was booming with the clamour of weapons. And so the matter was decided for the time being.

King Sverker now decided to deal with the question of Varnhem at once. He waved over a scribe, who began to read aloud the document the king had ordered drawn up to confirm the matter before the law. According to the text, however, it sounded as if the gift came from the king alone.

Sigrid asked to see the document so that she could translate it for Father Henri, but she also suggested cautiously that perhaps Herr Magnus should take part in the ensuing discussion. ‘Certainly, certainly,’ said the king with a wave of dismissal, and he gestured to Magnus to step forward in the hall and take a seat next to his wife.

Sigrid quickly translated the document for Father Henri, who leaned his head back and tried to follow along in the text as Sigrid pointed. When she was ready she added hastily, so it looked as if she were still translating, that the gift was from her and not from the king, but that according to the law she needed the king’s approval. Father Henri gave her a brief glance and a smile resembling her own, then nodded pensively.

‘Well,’ said the king impatiently, as if he wanted to dispose of the matter quickly, ‘does the Reverend Father Henri have anything to say or suggest in this matter?’

Sigrid translated the question, looking the monk straight in the eye, and he had no trouble understanding her intentions.

‘Hmm,’ he began cautiously, ‘it is a blessed deed to give to the most assiduous workers in His garden. But before God as before the law, a gift may be accepted only when one is quite certain who is the donor and who is the recipient. Is this His Majesty’s own property which we will now so generously share?’

He waved his hand in a little circle as a sign to Sigrid to translate. She reeled off the translation in a monotone.

The king was clearly embarrassed and gave Father Henri a dark look, while Father Henri gazed at the king in a friendly manner, as if he assumed everything was in order. Sigrid said not a word, waiting.

‘Yes, perhaps… perhaps,’ muttered the king self-consciously. ‘One might say that for the sake of the law the gift must come from the king, so that no one will be able to complain about the matter. But the gift also comes from Fru Sigrid who is here among us.’

While the king hesitated, Sigrid translated what he had just said, in the same formal, monotonous voice as before. Father Henri’s face brightened as if in friendly surprise when he now heard what he already knew. Then he shook his head slowly with a smile and explained, in quite simple words but with all the serpentine courtliness required when admonishing a king, that before God it would probably be more suitable to cleave to the whole truth even in formal documents. So if this letter were now drawn up again with the name of the actual donor, and with His Majesty’s approval and confirmation of the gift, then the matter would be settled and prayers of intercession could be duly vouchsafed to His Majesty as well as to the donor herself.

And so the matter was decided in just this way, precisely as Sigrid had wished. Nothing else was possible for King Sverker; he quickly made the decision, adding that the letter should be drafted in both the vernacular and Latin; he would affix his seal to it that very day. And perhaps now they could cheer themselves up a bit by returning to the question of how and when the executions were to take place.

In Father Henri and Fru Sigrid, two souls had found each other. Or two human beings on earth with quite similar outlooks and intelligence.

The question of Varnhem was thus decided, at least for now.

Around the Feast of Filippus and Jakob, the day when the grass should be green and lush enough to let out the livestock to graze and when the fences had to be inspected, Sigrid was gripped by fright as if a cold hand had seized her heart.

She felt that her time had come. But the pain vanished so quickly that it must have been her imagination.

She had been walking with little Eskil, holding his hand, heading down to the stream where the monks and their lay brothers were busy raising a huge mill-wheel into position, using block and tackle and many draft animals.

Sigrid had spent a great deal of time at the building sites. Father Henri had patiently walked her through all of the plans. And she had taken two of her best thralls with her, Svarte, who was Sot’s fecundator, and Gur, who had left his wife and brood up in Arnäs. Sigrid carefully translated into their language what Father Henri had described.

Magnus had complained that she still didn’t have any employment for the best thralls, at least not the male ones, down at Varnhem. They should have been busy on the construction work up at Arnäs. But Sigrid had stood firm, explaining that there were many useful things to be learned from the Burgundian lay brothers and the English stonemasons Father Henri had engaged. As so often before, she had pushed her will through, although it was difficult to explain to a man from Western Götaland that the foreigners were much better builders than local workers.

In only a few months Varnhem had been transformed into a huge construction site, with the echo of hammer blows, the noise of saws, and the creaking and rattling of the big sandstone grinding wheels. There was life and movement everywhere. At first glance it might look frenzied and chaotic, like looking down into an anthill in the spring, when the ants seem to be running amok. But there were precise plans behind everything that was being done. The steward was an enormous monk named Guilbert de Beaune. He was the only monk who joined in the work himself; otherwise the brown- robed lay brothers took care of all the manual labor. It might be said that Brother Lucien de Clairvaux also broke this rule. He was the cloister’s head gardener, and he refused to entrust the sensitive planting to anyone else. It was a bit late in the year to be planting and difficult to do it successfully without the right touch or the right eye for the task.

The other monks, who had taken over the longhouse for the time being as both residence and chapel, busied themselves primarily with spiritual matters or with writing.

After some time Sigrid had volunteered both Svarte and Gur to help the lay brothers; her thought was that the two should initially become apprentices rather than offer any particular help. Some of the lay brothers had come to Father Henri and complained that the boorish and untrained thralls were too clumsy at their tasks. But Father Henri waved aside such complaints because he understood full well Sigrid’s intentions for these apprentices. In fact, he had spoken in private with Brother Guilbert about the matter. To the vexation of many lay brothers, just as Svarte and Gur began to learn enough to be helpful at one work site, they would be sent on to the next, where the fumbling and foolish incompetence would begin anew. Cutting and polishing stone, shaping red-hot iron, fashioning waterwheels from oak pieces, lining a well or canal with stone, weeding garden plots, chopping down oak and beech trees and shaping the logs for various purposes: soon the two burly thralls had learned the basics of most tasks. Sigrid queried them about their progress and made plans for how they might be used in the future. She envisioned that they would both be able to work their way to freedom; only someone who knew how to do something of value could support himself as a freedman. Their faith and salvation interested her less, in fact. She had not coerced any of her thralls except Sot to be baptized, and that was only because of her special need for support on the church floor when the cathedral was being consecrated.

It had been a peaceful time. As mistress of a household Sigrid hadn’t had as much to do as she would have had as Varnhem’s owner, or if she had to be responsible for all the farm work up at Arnäs. She tried to think as little as possible about the inevitable, what would come to her as surely as death came to everyone, thralls and people alike. Since the longhouse was not consecrated as a cloister, she could participate whenever she liked in any of the five daily prayers held by the monks. The more time passed, the more assiduously she had taken part in the prayer hours. She always prayed for the same things: her life and that of her child, and that she might receive strength and courage from the Holy Virgin and be spared the pain she had endured the last time.

Now she walked with cold sweat on her brow, softly and gingerly as if she might call forth the pain with movements that were too strenuous. She was headed away from the construction noise, up toward the manor. She called Sot over to her and did not have to tell her what was wrong. Sot nodded, grunting in her laconic language, and hurried off toward the cookhouse where she and the other thrall women began preparing for dinner. They quickly carried out everything that had to do with baking bread and cooking meat, swept and mopped the floor clean, and then brought in straw beds and fur rugs from the little house where Sigrid stored all her own supplies. When all was ready and Sigrid was about to lie down inside, she felt a second wave of pain, which was so much worse than the first that she went white in the face and collapsed. She had to be led to the bed in the middle of the floor. The thrall women had blown more life into the flames, and in great haste they cleaned tripod kettles, which they filled with water and set over the fire.

When the pain subsided, Sigrid asked Sot to fetch Father Henri and then see to it that Eskil was kept with the other children a good distance away, so that he would not have to hear his mother’s screams, if it should come to that. But someone would also have to watch the children so they wouldn’t come too close to the perilous mill-wheel, which more than anything else seemed to arouse their curiosity. The children should not be left unattended.

She lay alone for a while and looked out through the smoke vent in the roof and the large open window in one wall. Outside the birds were singing – the finches that sang in the daytime before the thrushes took over and made all the other birds fall silent in shame.

Her brow was sweating, but she was shivering with cold. One of her thrall women shyly approached and stroked her forehead with a moist linen cloth but didn’t dare look her in the eye.

Magnus had admonished her to send for good women from Skara when her time was nearing, and not to give birth among thrall women. But he was just a man, after all. He wouldn’t understand that the thrall women, who were accustomed to breeding more often than others, had a good knowledge of what needed to be done. They didn’t have white skin, elegant speech, or courtly manners, like the women Magnus would have preferred, who would have filled the room with their chatter and flighty bustling. The thrall women were knowledgeable enough to suffice, if indeed mortal help alone would be enough. The Holy Virgin Mary would either help or not help, regardless of the souls that were in the room.

The thrall women did have souls like other people; Father Henri had told her as much in strong and convincing terms. And in the Kingdom of Heaven there were no freedmen or slaves, wealthy or low-born, only the souls who had proved themselves worthy through acts of goodness. Sigrid thought that this might well be true.

When Father Henri came into the room she saw that he had his prayer vestments with him. He had understood what kind of help she now sought. But at first he didn’t let on, nor did he bother to chase out the thrall women who were rushing around sweeping, or who came running in with fresh buckets of water, and linen and swaddling clothes.

‘Greetings, honorable Mistress Sigrid, I understand that now we are nearing an hour of joy here at Varnhem,’ said Father Henri, his expression calmer and more kindly than his voice.

‘Or an hour of woe, Father, we won’t know until it’s over,’ whimpered Sigrid, staring at him with eyes full of terror as she felt more pain on its way. But she was just imagining it; none came.

Father Henri pulled over a little three-legged stool to her bedside and reached out a hand to her. He held her hand and stroked it.

‘You’re a clever woman,’ he said, ‘the only one I’ve met in this temporal world who has the wit to speak Latin, and you also understand many other things, like teaching the thralls what we know how to do. So tell me, why should what awaits you be so unusual, when all other women go through it? High-born women like yourself, thralls and wretched women, thousands upon thousands of others. Just think, at this very moment you are not alone on this earth. As we speak, at this moment, you are together with ten thousand women the world over. So tell me, why should you have anything to fear, more than all the others?’

He had spoken well, using a sermon-like tone, and Sigrid thought he had probably been thinking about this for days – the first words he would say to her when the hour of dread approached. She couldn’t help smiling when she looked at him, and he saw by her smile that she had seen through him.

‘You speak well, Father Henri,’ she said in a weak voice. ‘But of those ten thousand women you speak of, almost half will be dead tomorrow, and I could be one of them.’

‘Then I would have a hard time understanding Our Saviour,’ said Father Henri calmly, still smiling with his eyes, which remained fixed on hers.

‘There is something Our Saviour does that you still don’t understand, Father?’ she whispered as she braced herself in anticipation of the next contraction.

‘That’s true, of course,’ nodded Father Henri. ‘There are even things that our founder, Holy Saint Bernard de Clairvaux, doesn’t understand. Such as the terrible defeats our knights are now suffering in the Holy Land. He wants more than anyone for us to send more men; he wants nothing more than victory for our righteous cause against the infidels. And yet we were beaten badly, despite our strong faith, despite our good cause, despite the fact that we are fighting against evil. So of course it’s true that we human beings cannot always understand Our Saviour.’