The Road To Jerusalem (3 page)

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 Luro 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 under stood. 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 clamor 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 Arnas. 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 Arnas. But Sigrid had stood firm, explaining that there were many useful things to be learned from the Burgun dian 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 Gotaland 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 Arnas. 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.