Birth of the Kingdom Page 5

  Eskil grew excited when he talked about his business affairs. He was used to his listeners tiring quickly, wanting to change the subject. But now that he was allowed to boast longer than usual without interruption, he was both glad and amazed that his brother seemed so interested, as if he understood all about trade. He was almost suspicious of Arn’s attentiveness, so he asked some questions to see whether his brother was really following along and not just sitting and daydreaming about something else while he expertly feigned an interest.

  But Arn remembered how one time – when they had ridden to the ting of all Goths that ended so unhappily for the champion of the Sverkers’ side but so happily for the Folkungs – they had spoken about this very idea of exporting the dried fish from the Lofoten Islands in Norway in large quantities. And now it had become a reality.

  Arn thought this was very good news. Just as he considered it very wise to take payment for the dried fish in pure silver and not in things that only had value for the vain. But he asked himself how good a trade it was to transport iron to Lübeck and steel the other direction, instead of making steel out of the iron they had in their possession.

  Eskil was pleased by his brother’s unexpected good sense, which he had not displayed back when he set off for the Holy Land, even though they both had inherited their wits from their mother Sigrid. But now Eskil’s ale was gone, and once again he went over to the arrow loop to yell for more, while behind his back Arn poured half of his own ale into the tankard of his thirstier brother.

  This time a house thrall had been waiting down by the door to the tower with fresh ale, so two new tankards arrived as swiftly as the wind.

  When they resumed their drinking, Eskil’s half-full tankard had been replaced without him noticing, and Arn felt youthfully pleased at having avoided discovery. By then they had lost the thread of everything that was left to tell. Each saw the other’s predicament and both tried to get in the first word.

  ‘Our father and Erika Joarsdotter—’ said Eskil.

  ‘You are well aware that I intend to celebrate a bridal ale with Cecilia,’ said Arn at the same time.

  ‘That’s not for you to decide!’ snapped Eskil, but regretted it at once and threw out his hand as if trying to wipe away his words.

  ‘Why not?’ Arn asked softly.

  Eskil sighed. There was no way to avoid his brother’s question, no matter how much he wanted to postpone it along with much else until the following day.

  ‘When you came home – and may God bless your homecoming which is of immeasurable joy to us all – the game board was changed completely,’ replied Eskil quickly and more gently, as if he were speaking about the trading of dried fish. ‘The clan ting will decide, but if I know our Birger Brosa rightly, he will say that you must go to the bridal bed with Ingrid Ylva. She’s the daughter of Sune Sik and so has Karl Sverkersson as her grandfather – King Karl, that is.’

  ‘Am I supposed to drink the bridal ale with a woman whose uncle I helped to murder?’ Arn exclaimed.

  ‘That is indeed a good thought. Wounds and feuds must be healed for the sake of peace, and it is better done with the bridal bed than with the sword. That is our thinking. In peacetime a man’s vow is stronger than his sword. So it must be Ingrid Ylva.’

  ‘And if in that case I should prefer a man’s sword?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone wants to exchange blows with you, and I don’t think you wish to come to blows either. Your son Magnus is also old enough to marry, just as Ingrid is. It must be one of you, but it also depends on how much silver is required. No, don’t worry about that matter, my brother; the “morning gift” will be taken care of by us from Arnäs.’

  ‘I can take care of the morning gift myself. I had not intended anything immoderate, only the Forsvik estate, as was once agreed at the betrothal feast for Cecilia and myself. One must honour one’s agreements,’ said Arn quickly and in a low voice, but without revealing what he felt, although his brother would surely understand.

  ‘If you ask me for Forsvik, I can hardly say no. On a first evening like this, I cannot say no to anything you may want from me,’ Eskil continued in the same tone of voice, as if they were two businessmen talking. ‘But I still want to ask you to wait with such a request until after our first day and evening together after so many years.’

  Arn did not answer, but seemed to be pondering the matter. Then he got up and took out three keys which he carried on a leather thong around his neck. He went over to the three very heavy chests that were the first to be carried into the tower from his caravan. When he unlocked them one by one, a bright golden glow spread through the room, although the rays of the sun were visible only at the bottom of the western arrow loop.

  Eskil stood up slowly and went around the table with his ale tankard in his hand. To Arn’s pleasure and surprise he did not look covetous when he gazed at the gold.

  ‘Do you know how much there is?’ asked Eskil, as if he were still talking about dried fish.

  ‘No, not in our mode of reckoning,’ said Arn. ‘It’s about thirty thousand besants, or gold dinars, calculated in the Frankish manner. It might be three thousand marks in our currency.’

  ‘And it was not ill-gotten?’

  ‘No, it was not.’

  ‘You could buy all of Denmark.’

  ‘That’s not my intention. I have better things to buy.’

  Arn slowly closed the three chests, locked them, and tossed the three keys across the table so that they slid to a stop just in front of Eskil’s place. Then he went slowly back to his stool and gestured for his brother to sit down again. Eskil did so in meditative silence.

  ‘I have three chests and three thoughts,’ said Arn when they had raised their tankards high. ‘My three thoughts are simple. As with everything else, I will tell you more about it when we have more time. But first I want to build a church of stone in Forshem, and with the most beautiful images that can be worked in stone in all of Western Götaland. Then, or rather at the same time, since all the stone must come from the same place, I want to build Arnäs so strong that no one here in the North can vanquish it. To fortify it in such a manner is something that I and the men who came here with me know how to do. We know much about building methods not yet known this far north. And the remaining third chest I will gladly share with my brother…after having purchased Forsvik, of course.’

  ‘For such a rich man Cecilia Algotsdotter’s kinsmen will have a hard time offering a proper dowry. Her father is dead, by the way, he ate himself lame and blind at last year’s Christmas ale.’

  ‘Peace be unto his soul. But all Cecilia needs is a dowry that is equal in value to Forsvik.’

  ‘She cannot afford even that,’ replied Eskil, but now with a little smile, which showed that he had not yet weighed every coin in this bargain.

  ‘I’m quite certain that she can. For Forsvik she need not pay more than four or five marks in gold, and I know as well as you do where she can get such a small sum,’ Arn shot back.

  Now Eskil could restrain himself no longer; he bellowed with laughter so the ale splashed out of his tankard.

  ‘My brother! My brother, in truth you are my brother!’ he snorted, and downed more of his ale before he went on. ‘I thought that a warrior had come to Arnäs, but you are a man of affairs who is my equal. We must drink to that!’

  ‘I am your equal, since I am your brother,’ said Arn when he lowered his tankard after only pretending to drink. ‘But I am also a Templar knight. We Knights Templar conduct many trades in which the most peculiar goods change hands, and we can strike these bargains with the Devil himself and even with Norwegians!’

  Laughing, Eskil agreed to everything. It seemed that he needed more ale, but he changed his mind when he looked out through the arrow loop to the west and saw the fading light.

  ‘It probably wouldn’t be much of a banquet without us,’ he muttered.

  Arn nodded and said that he would like some time in the bath-house first, and that
he ought to fetch one of his men who was best at handling a razor. A man who wore a Folkung mantle was not allowed to stink as he might in the garb of a Templar knight. Because now a new life had begun, and it had certainly not begun badly.

  For the brothers Marcus and Jacob Wachtian the arrival at Arnäs was distressing. A more wretched fortress they had never seen. Marcus, who was the more jovial of the two, said that a man like Count Raymond of Tripoli would have taken a fortress like that in less time than it took to rest soldiers and horses during a hard march. Without a smile Jacob said that a man like Saladin would probably have ridden straight past it, since he wouldn’t even have noticed that it was a fortress. If the big, important task Sir Arn had talked about was to make a decent fortress out of this nest for crows, it would surely be harder work for the body than for the mind.

  It was true, of course, that they hadn’t had many choices when Sir Arn rescued them from trouble after the fall of Jerusalem. A wave of euphoria following the victory had swept over Damascus, but it had soon made the city intolerable for Christians, no matter how skilled they were as craftsmen or businessmen. And during the flight towards Saint Jean d’Acre the brothers had too often encountered Christians who knew that they had been in the service of the unbelievers. Marcus and Jacob had also been robbed of all the belongings they carried with them. Even if they had managed to reach the last Christian city in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, it would not have been long before someone recognized them again. In the worst case they might have ended up on the gallows or burned at the stake. And in those days their homeland of Armenia had been laid waste by savage Turks, so that the journey there would have been even riskier than the one to Saint Jean d’Acre.

  When they had stopped in despair by the wayside to say their last prayers to the Mother of God and Saint Sebastian, begging for a miraculous salvation, they had sincerely believed that none would come.

  In their hour of despair Sir Arn had found them. He came riding with a small band from Damascus, strangely unafraid despite the fact that the region was teeming with Saracen brigands, as if the white mantle of the Knights Templar would guard against any sort of evil. Sir Arn had instantly recognized them from their businesses and workshops in Damascus. At the time it seemed beyond belief, since no Templar knight should have escaped Damascus alive. But he had at once offered the brothers his protection if they would enter his service for a period of no less than five years and would also accompany him to his homeland in the North.

  The brothers hadn’t had much choice. And Sir Arn had promised nothing more than a hard and dangerous journey, and hard work upon their arrival – in the beginning, even filthy work. And yet what they had now managed to see of the misery in this godforsaken land in the North was worse than they could have imagined even in their darkest and most seasick hour.

  At the moment, however, they had no possibility of breaking their agreement. A hard, dark, and filthy four years awaited them, if the year the journey had already taken was to be subtracted. In that respect their contract was unclear.

  They had put things somewhat in order in their tent encampment outside the low, crumbling wall. To make things simpler, the camp had been divided into two parts so that the Muslims had one section to themselves and the Christians the other. Naturally they had all managed to get along on a cramped ship for more than a year, but since their hours of prayer were different there had been much stumbling about at night when the Muslims had to get up to pray and the Christians were sleeping, and vice versa.

  From the fortress young girls had come down carrying huge piles of sheepskins, which the foreign guests at first received with great joy, since they had already learned that in the North the nights were cold. But some of them soon discovered that the warm, inviting sheepskins were infested with lice. Laughing at one another’s ungodly language and ungrateful jokes, both believers and infidels had stood for a long time side by side, beating the lice out of the skin rugs.

  It was strange how the young women, some of whom were quite pretty, thought nothing of approaching strange men unabashed, with their hair uncovered and their arms bare. One of the English archers had half in jest pinched the bottom of a young woman with red hair, and she was not frightened at all. She merely turned and nimbly as a gazelle darted away from the rough hands that were again reaching for her.

  After that the two infidel physicians had scolded the archer in a language that he did not understand. The Wachtian brothers gladly translated and concurred with what was said, and everyone in the camp soon agreed that in such a foreign and peculiar land they ought to proceed cautiously at first, especially with womenfolk, until they learned what was good and bad or lawful and unlawful. If there actually were any laws here among these savage folk.

  In the evening just before prayer hour Sir Arn came alone to the tent camp. At first no one recognized him, since he seemed so much smaller. He had taken off his Templar mantle and surcoat and now wore instead some faded blue garments that hung loosely around his body. He had also shaved off his beard so that his face was now leather-brown in the middle and pale around the edges. He looked like both a man and a boy, although the scars of war on his face could now be seen more distinctly than when he wore a beard.

  But Sir Arn gathered all the men with the same self-confidence he had displayed during the entire journey, and they soon stood in silence around him. As usual he spoke first in the language of the Saracens, and most of the Christians understood very little.

  ‘In the name of the Merciful One, dear brothers,’ he began, ‘you are all my guests, both believer and infidel, and you have travelled a long way with me to build peace and happiness, that which did not exist in Outremer. You are now in a foreign land with many customs that might offend your honour. For this reason we will have this evening after the hour of prayer two welcome feasts, one here among the tents and one up at the house. Up there many things will be served of which the Prophet, peace be unto him, expressed his condemnation. Down here in the tents you have my word as an emir that nothing unclean will be placed on a plate. When the food is brought out to you, you must bless it in His name Who sees all and hears all, and you shall enjoy it in good faith.’

  As he was wont to do, Sir Arn repeated almost the same thing in Frankish, but with the proper words for God and without naming any prophet. Marcus and Jacob, who spoke Arabic as well as four or five other languages, exchanged meaningful smiles when they heard a somewhat different version, as usual, in Frankish.

  Then Sir Arn asked to have a wine cask rolled out. He called over the Christians, and then everyone bowed to one another before they separated, and each and every one went to the proper feast.

  The Christian guests walked in procession up toward the big longhouse. Halfway there they were met by a group of six armed men who closed ranks in an honour guard around them.

  By the portal of the dark, imposing blockhouse with the grass-covered roof waited a woman in a shiny red dress who could easily have come from Outremer. She wore a thick gold sash adorned with blue stones and a blue cloak over her shoulders of the same type that Arn had now draped around himself. On her head she wore a small cap, but it in no way hid her long hair, which hung in a heavy braid down her back.

  Now she raised a loaf of bread in her hands and called forth a serving woman with a bowl, the contents of which no one could see. Then she pronounced a blessing.

  Sir Arn turned around and translated that they were all welcome in God’s name, and that anyone entering had to touch the bread first with his right hand and then dip a right-hand finger into the bowl of salt.

  For Harald Øysteinsson, who went first among the Christian guests, still wearing his Templar surcoat and black sergeant’s mantle, this custom was not foreign. Marcus and Jacob followed their friend ‘Aral d’Austin,’ or so they pronounced his name in jest in Frankish and he did not take offence. They obeyed the same ritual but they turned to whisper in feigned seriousness toward the back of the queue that the salt burned like fire a
nd was perhaps bewitched. So those who followed dipped one finger very quickly and cautiously into the salt.

  But when they entered the long hall the Wachtian brothers were indeed struck by a feeling that they were in the presence of sorcery. There were hardly any windows, and it would have been completely dark if not for the huge log fire at the far end of the room, the tar torches burning in iron sconces along the walls, and the wax candles on the longtable against one wall. Their nostrils were filled with the odours of smoke and tar, and the strong smell of roasting meat.

  Sir Arn placed his Christian guests in the middle of the longtable and then went around to the other side and sat down far to the right in what looked like a heathen throne with dragons’ heads and weird curling patterns that resembled snakes. The woman who had offered the welcome salt now sat down next to him, and on her other side was the man who looked like a barrel who was Sir Arn’s older brother; he was a man with whom they should never trifle nor make their enemy.

  When the Christian guests and their hosts were seated, twelve men wearing the same blue surcoats as Sir Arn and his brother came in. They sat down on either side of the longtable below the high seat and guests. The upper half of the table was left empty; it was obvious that more than twice as many guests could be accommodated.

  Sir Arn said grace in Latin so that only the corpulent old monk could mutter along, while all the others sat with chastely bowed heads and folded hands. Then Sir Arn and the monk sang a brief two-part blessing from the Psalter, and the woman between the two brothers stood up and clapped her hands loudly three times.

  Now the double doors at the end of the hall were opened and a strange procession entered. First came a column of maidens with flowing hair and white linen shifts that showed rather than hid their charms, and all carried burning tapers in their hands. Then men and women mixed together came in; they too wore white clothing, and they carried heavy burdens of ale and big steaming pots of meat, fish, and vegetables, many of which the guests could recognize but also some they did not know.