Birth Of the Kingdom (2010) (29 page)

Cecilia was thinking that the torment that had seemed so interminable, from the moment she first saw him riding to Näs and then all the hindrances that had piled up, had now vanished as quickly as the flight of a swallow. So much had happened to her because of others’ wishes and the demands of custom that she had been helplessly swept away on a fast-moving current, like that leaf in the rushing spring stream that she had pictured during the ride between Näs and Riseberga. That moment when she happened to think of the leaf now seemed so long ago, and at the same time so recent. Time raced past at a dizzying speed; she tried to catch it and hold onto it by closing her eyes and conjuring up the memory of Arn riding toward her on his black horse with the silver mane. But when she shut her eyes the whole bed began to spin like a mill-wheel, and she had to open them at once.

Arn was thinking that the love he had felt so strongly for so many years, and that he had sworn never to betray, had lately been buried under all manner of things that had nothing to do with love. A short while ago, on this very evening, he and Knut had talked about a wedding as Birger Brosa’s strongest means of preventing war, as if weddings had nothing
to do with love. And Magnus, who was Cecilia’s son and his own, had spoken of love in the same way when Arn asked him about marrying Ingrid Ylva. It was as if the constant struggle for power had dragged his love down in the dirt and sullied it.

As for the fleshly side of love, he had taught himself to push it aside through prayers, cold water, horseback rides in the night, and all sorts of other tricks. He had learned to regard it as sin and temptation, and yet it had now been blessed by God’s Holy Mother herself. An entire banquet hall of guests was expecting him to unite his flesh with Cecilia’s, for during the mass on the following day, the bride would go Forshem Church to be purified.

He tried to recall how it was between them when they were together and with such great desire devoted themselves to such pleasures, but it was as if the doors had been closed on that memory, bolted shut by too many prayers and nights spent in anguish in a little stone cell or a dormitory filled with brother knights.

He noticed that he was beginning to sweat, and he cautiously moved away the heavy bridal coverlet that the king and queen had pulled over them up to the tips of their noses.

‘Thank you, my beloved,’ she said.

That was all she said, as if the shyness they both shared prevented her from saying more. But there was a sweet freshness to her words, especially as she uttered the endearment that they were now entitled to use.

‘Imagine that we can now say those words: my beloved,’ he replied, his voice gruff. He decided at once not to let silence settle over them again. ‘Now that we have finally reached this day, shouldn’t we first of all thank Our Lady for holding her hands over us during the long road we have travelled?’

Cecilia made a move as if to throw off the covers and sink to her knees beside the bed, but he reached out his hand to stop her.

‘Take my hand, my beloved,’ he said, and for the first time he looked into her eyes as she turned toward him. ‘On this one occasion, I think that Our Lady would want to see us like this as we offer Her our thanks.’

He held Cecilia’s hand in his and recited a long prayer of thanksgiving in the language of the church, which she obediently and in a low voice repeated after him.

But after the prayer was done, it was as if their shyness returned. For a long time Arn studied Cecilia’s hand he was holding, unable to say a word. This was the same hand as before, although the veins were more visible now, the fingers thicker, and the nails rough and cracked from all the work she had done to please God in His cloister.

She saw him staring at her hand and probably understood what he was thinking. She in turn studied his hand, thinking that it was the same as before, made strong by working with hammers in the smithy and by wielding swords in war, but with many disfigured knuckles and white scars, signs of all the privations and pain that his long penance had entailed.

‘You are my Arn and I am your Cecilia,’ she said at last, since he didn’t seem able to muster the courage to speak. ‘But are you the same Arn and am I the same Cecilia who parted with such great sorrow back then outside the gates of Gudhem?’

‘Yes, we are the same,’ he replied. ‘Our souls are the same, though our bodies have aged; but the body is merely the shell of the soul. You are the Cecilia I remember, you are the Cecilia I tried to picture in so many dreams and prayers when I wanted to recall how you looked. Haven’t you thought the same of me?’

‘I have tried,’ she said. ‘I have always remembered you from that summer when you let your hair grow long, and in the wind it flew out behind you when you went riding; that is how I have always remembered your face. But I could never picture you differently, the way you would look when you returned home, the same Arn but older.’

‘For a long time I remembered your face as it was,’ he said. ‘Your hair and your eyes and every little sun freckle on your nose. But as the years passed I tried to imagine you older, the same Cecilia but older. It wasn’t easy, and the image I had of you grew hazy. But when I saw you again for the first time outside Näs, I realized that you were much more beautiful than I had dared dream. Those tiny wrinkles at the corner of your eyes make you look both lovelier and wiser. Oh, if only I could say these things in Frankish! Forgive me if my words sound like rough wooden clogs when I speak our language that is now so unfamiliar.’

‘The words you speak are beautiful, and I understood them well, although I have never heard anyone describe words as wooden clogs before,’ she replied with a stifled laugh.

Her laugh came as a relief, and as if simultaneously, they both drew in a deep breath and slowly let it out. And with that they both ended up laughing, and Cecilia cautiously crept closer to Arn in the enormous bed.

‘So what about my face?’ said Arn with a smile. ‘Sometimes I feared that these wounds and scars would make me unrecognizable to my beloved when I finally returned home. But you didn’t mistake me for someone else, did you?’

‘I recognized you from the distance of an arrow shot, even before I could see your face close up,’ she replied eagerly. ‘Whoever has seen you on horseback will know that it is you and no one else approaching. It felt as if lightning had struck me though the sky was completely clear.
I recognized you the moment I saw you, my beloved. I will never be able to explain properly how sweet it is to say those words.’

‘But when you saw my face at close hand, didn’t I frighten you then?’ Arn persisted. He was smiling broadly, but Cecilia glimpsed the concern in his eyes.

She drew her other hand from behind her back, wiped off the sweat on the coverlet, and reached out to touch his cheek, caressing the white scars without saying a word.

Finally she spoke. ‘You said that our souls are the same. But it is also said that the eyes are the mirrors of the soul, and your gentle blue eyes are the same as I remember. The Saracens have wounded you, sliced at you with their swords and lances for many years; that much I can see, as you well know. What are the wrinkles at my eyes compared to this! What serene strength your face shows, my beloved. Your wounds speak of the eternal battle against evil and the sacrifices that only those possessing great goodness and strong faith can endure. At your side I will always carry my head high, because a more handsome man cannot be found in all this kingdom of ours.’

Arn was so overcome with embarrassment at these words that she saw he could find nothing to say. Afraid that silence would once again descend upon them, she leaned over and timidly kissed him, her dry lips touching first his forehead, then his cheek, and finally she closed her eyes and kissed his mouth.

He kissed her back, as if dreaming that they were once again seventeen and everything happened so easily. But it was not as easy as back then, and he felt a strange sense of despair growing inside him as he pressed his lips to hers and cautiously placed his calloused hand on her breast.

Cecilia tried not to tense and seem afraid, but she had kept her eyes closed so long that her head had started spinning
unbearably from all the wine. Abruptly she had to pull away and dash outside to the stairs; there she vomited loudly without being able to stop herself.

At first Arn lay in bed, paralysed with shame. But he soon realized that he couldn’t just lie there idly while his beloved was feeling sick. He tumbled out of bed and went out to the stairway, putting his arm around Cecilia’s shoulders to console her. Then he opened the door to the outer stairway and called for cold water. As he hoped, house thralls were posted outside, and they leaped up to obey at once.

A while later they were again lying in bed, both cooled by the cold water, each of them holding a big tankard.

Cecilia was deeply ashamed and didn’t dare meet her husband’s gaze. He comforted her with caresses at first, but soon with laughter. And it wasn’t long before she too was laughing.

‘We have the rest of our lives together to learn to make love as we once did,’ he said, stroking her damp forehead. ‘Such things are quickly forgotten in a cloister. The same is true for Templar knights, since we live as monks. But there is no haste to re-learn what we once did all too easily.’

‘Although not after drinking a cask of wine and eating an entire ox,’ said Cecilia.

‘We’ll try it with cold water instead,’ said Arn, but laughed at the same time as a fleeting thought passed through his wine-drenched mind.

Cecilia had no idea why Arn found the thought of cold water instead of wine so funny, but she laughed too, until they were both laughing hard and holding onto each other.

Late the next morning the twelve witnesses, bleary-eyed and unsteady on their feet, appeared as custom demanded. Arn had to get out of bed and accept a spear, which he was to hurl through the open window. Someone joked that the distance was so short from the bed to the window that not
even Arn Magnusson could miss, even though he was known to be so poor at the sport.

Nor did he miss. The morning gift was thereby secured. Forsvik now belonged for all eternity to Cecilia Algotsdotter and her descendants.

At Olsmas came the transition between the old and new harvests in Western Götaland. The barns normally stood empty, but the hay-making was going full speed and would be done by the feast of Saint Laurentius in twelve days’ time. But during this unusually hot summer the crops had ripened much more quickly than normal, and by now all the hay had already been taken in. A month had passed since Arn and Cecilia’s bridal ale, and it was time for the bride’s third purification. The first took place the day after the wedding night, and the second one a week later.

This bride could not be more cleansed than she was already by having some priest say a prayer over her and sprinkle her with holy water, Cecilia thought. She felt a secret shame over her involuntary chastity which she had a hard time admitting to herself even in the brief moments of solitude and contemplation that she’d had during the first month at Forsvik. It felt like a reverse sin now that she and Arn were united in the flesh, and even though Cecilia placed more of the blame on herself than on Arn, she had no idea how to improve the situation.

Arn seemed to be working like a maniac. He immersed
himself in hard labour right after matins, and she saw him only briefly at breakfast and dinner; after vespers he would go down to the shore of Bottensjön and swim to remove the sweat and grime. By the time he came to her in their bedchamber it was already dark, and he didn’t say much before he fell into a heavy slumber.

True, it was a special time, as he said, a time for harder work, since there was so much to do to get ready for winter. Many new souls had to have roofs over their heads as well as heat, especially heat, because the foreigners had never experienced a Nordic winter. Smithies and glassworks had to be ready by winter so that they could begin their real efforts then, able to work through the winter instead of merely eating, sleeping, and freezing the whole time.

Life at Forsvik was not easy, and the words between them were few, dealing mostly with necessities having to do with the day’s or the next day’s work. Cecilia sought solace in the knowledge that the need for such toil would soon pass, and the days would become calmer with the winter darkness. She was also happy about everything she saw being done, and each night when she entered their bedchamber she enjoyed breathing in the smell of fresh timber and tar.

Arn had decided that he and Cecilia would live by themselves in a smaller house that stood on stony ground a short distance away from the new longhouse, at the top of the slope leading to the shore of Bottensjön. The first day at Forsvik, before he felt compelled to spend months working every single hour between matins and vespers, he had taken her around to show her what was being built. And there was much to show, since a completely new Forsvik was rising up on either side of the old.

The greatest surprise was that he had built a separate house just for the two of them. Like her, he dreaded having to follow the old custom dictating that the master and mistress
of the estate would sleep among thralls and servants in the warmest spot of the longhouse. Naturally he was used to sleeping in communal dormitories with his knight-brothers, he told her. But he had also had his own cell for many years. He didn’t think either of them would be happy sleeping among all the others as if at a huge feast.

Their house was much smaller than a longhouse and divided into two big rooms; there was nothing like it in all of Western Götaland. It didn’t take Cecilia long to be convinced of that.

When he took her in through the smaller door to the clothing chamber of the house, she was amazed at first to hear water running as if in a stream. He had conducted water through the house, flowing in a channel made of brick. It came in through a hole in one wall and ran out through the other wall by the door. In two places there were holes in the brick wall so that they could reach their hand down into the flowing stream. Above one of these holes there was an opening with wooden shutters. Next to it on the wall hung white linen for drying their hands and faces, and on a wooden tray under the linen was something waxlike that he called
savon
, which they could use for washing themselves. At the other opening the rough brick was covered with smoothsanded wood so that one could sit down. At first Cecilia wasn’t sure that she understood correctly, but when she pointed and hesitantly asked, he laughed and nodded that it was precisely what she thought it was, a
retrit.
Waste from the body was taken away at once by the stream of water and vanished through the brick wall to end a good way from the house in a stream that ran down to Bottensjön.

He said he wasn’t sure that the water would flow all winter long, even though the channel had been well buried along most of its length. But at the point where the water entered the house it had to be conducted up onto a hollow wall
which Arn had no Nordic word for, so he called it by its Latin name of
aqueduct.
The difficulty was to ensure that the winter cold did not reach the stream of water when it came up from the ground. How well this system would work they would learn in midwinter, and if it didn’t work on the first try they would have to redo it.

Cecilia was so excited by all these new things she saw in her new house that she forgot to go into their bedchamber and instead ran outside to see how the water stream was built. Arn followed her, shaking his head happily, and explained it to her.

It was like at Varnhem or Gudhem, the same idea of making use of running water and gravity. Here at Forsvik the water in Bottensjön was at a lower level than in Lake Viken, and every channel they dug from one to the other would create new streams of water.

Cecilia had many questions about this miraculous water system, but then she realized that she’d completely forgotten about the rest of the house. She ran back in with a laugh to look at the sleeping chamber.

This room had a gable built entirely of stone, and in the middle of the gable was a large open fireplace with two chimneys and a rounded vault of spiral wrought iron that held up the whole hood to catch the smoke. The floor was made of timber sealed with pitch and resin, flax and moss, just as the walls were. Although not much of the floor was visible because it was covered by large red and black rugs of tightly woven wool with foreign patterns.

Arn told her that he had brought a good many of these carpets home with him on the ship, not only for his own use but also so that his men from the Holy Land would be pleased on cold Nordic winter nights to have the floor covered as it was back home.

For the time being the space in front of the open fireplace
was merely a depression cut into the timbers. Arn explained that the limestone to cover this portion of the room had not yet arrived. But they would be burning a lot of wood in the winter, and for several reasons it was best that all the flooring near the fireplace be covered with stone.

In the room stood a large bed like the bridal bed at Arnäs, as if Arn had ordered it built to match. The walls were bare except for the wall facing the east to Bottensjön. There she saw a large oblong window with shutters that could be closed from both inside and out. Arn explained that this would be improved as soon as they got their glassworks going. The advantage of having such a big window was that it let light into the room with the morning sun that would call him to his day’s work; the disadvantage was easy to see, considering the cold and draftiness in winter. But with glass panes and secure seals around the window it would be much better.

The whole house smelled strongly of fresh timber, resin, and pitch. Outside the smell of pitch was even stronger, since all the new houses were covered with a thick layer. The intention wasn’t merely to prevent rot, or to build for eternity the way the Norsemen built their churches, said Arn. It was important to stop up every little chink between the horizontal logs of the walls. They had to be especially careful when building with fresh timber, which wasn’t the smartest thing to do because the wood would shrink as it dried. But they hadn’t had much choice; it was either houses built of fresh wood or no houses at all. The thick layers of pitch would help to ensure that the walls were airtight.

They walked past the next house, which was for some of the foreigners, but the third house was surprisingly not for people, but for livestock. There more than thirty horses would spend the winter, and it seemed that each horse had its own chamber. The far end of the building was for the cows, and the entire upper floor above the low ceiling was to be used
for storing winter fodder. For now the building had an earthen floor that eventually would be replaced with stone slabs since they were easier to keep clean.

All three of these new houses stood next to the grey houses arranged in a square with an inner courtyard. That was the old Forsvik. He took her into the barnyard and explained that the old longhouse would now be winter quarters for the thralls and farm hands, but that there was as yet no house to use for feasts or guests.

In one of the new houses, he had planned for Forsvik’s yconoma to have her accounting chamber. Unless she would rather keep all such things in their own house, he quickly added to show that she was indeed the mistress of the estate and would decide for herself. Cecilia threw out both hands in dismay at the thought of doing work where they slept, so it was with relief that Arn took her around to see the growing row of smaller houses where the clang of work could already be heard in the various workshops.

And here they came to the greatest change at Forsvik, he announced proudly. Next to the new row of workshops was Forsvik’s garden, which included apple trees and all sort of vegetables. Unfortunately all this would have to be dug up. The question was how someone knowledgeable about cultivation, which he understood she was, might save as many of the plants as possible and move them to another location in the spring.

Cecilia thought that now he’d gone too far in his eagerness. Whatever was to be built here would have to be built somewhere else, she insisted.

Arn sighed and said that what was to be built here could not be built anywhere else. Here they were to build a new stone-lined water canal.

Cecilia wanted to save her garden, but she was unsure whether to insist or not because she didn’t understand the
importance of this canal. She asked Arn to explain in more detail.

It was going to be a stone-lined canal in which the water would always flow with the same force in the spring, summer, autumn, and large parts of the winter. The power from the water would drive bellows and hammers in many of the workshops. His men from the Holy Land possessed all sorts of skills, he went on. They could work wonders if they had access to more power, and this was where it was, unfortunately, in the middle of the garden and orchard. But the canal would be the future of Forsvik; it would bring wealth and prosperity; it was the great endeavour that would lead to peace.

Cecilia tried to resist being swept along by Arn’s eager enthusiasm. She asked him to sit down next to her on an old stone bench next to the garden to explain everything one more time, but more slowly and in detail. Because if she didn’t understand what he was saying, she wouldn’t be able to offer any help.

Her words stopped him, and he sat down obediently next to her, caressed her hand, and shook his head with a smile as if asking her forgiveness.

‘So, let’s begin again,’ she said. ‘Tell me what will be coming in to Forsvik on Eskil’s ships. Let’s start with that. What will we have to purchase?’

‘Iron bars, wool, salt, livestock fodder, grain, skins, the type of sand we need to make glass, and various types of stone,’ he said.

‘And all this we have to pay for?’ she asked sternly.

‘Yes, but it doesn’t always mean we have to pay in silver.’

‘I know that!’ she snapped. ‘One can pay in many ways, but that’s a question for later. Now tell me instead what we will be producing at Forsvik.’

‘All the things that can be made from iron and steel,’ he
replied. ‘All sorts of weapons that we can certainly make better than anyone in the kingdom, but also ploughshares and steel-clad wheels. We can mill flour at any time, night or day all year round, and so much grain will be coming with Eskil’s ships that we need never lack for it. We will make anything that has to do with leather and saddle-making. If we solve the problem with the clay, which now comes from too far away, the potters can work as steadily as the millers. But it’s glass that will give us the best income.’

‘All those things together don’t sound like income at all,’ Cecilia remarked with a frown. ‘It sounds like a loss. Because we also have big expenses maintaining the estate; there are many souls living here already, and there will be more this winter if I understand your plans correctly. And we have as many horses here as there are at the king’s Näs, and we don’t have enough winter fodder from our own fields. Are you quite sure, my love, that you haven’t been overcome by pride?’

At first he was completely silenced by her words; he took her hand in both of his and raised it to his lips, kissing it many times. She grew warm inside, but was not in the least soothed when it came to their business affairs.

‘In some respects you aren’t the same woman I left outside Gudhem, my love,’ he said. ‘You are much wiser now than you were then. You see things instantly that none of your kinsmen would ever comprehend. There is certainly no better wife than you in our kingdom.’

‘And that is exactly what I would like to be, your good wife,’ she replied. ‘But then I must also try to keep track of all your ambitious plans, because you seem to be building more than you’re thinking at the moment.’

‘That’s probably true,’ he admitted without looking in the least worried. ‘I had probably thought to leave debt and loss, profit and expenses to be figured out later, even though I know it has to be done.’

‘That’s a foolish way of thinking that could cost us a great deal, and many of us may pay for your recklessness with grumbling stomachs this winter,’ she said calmly. ‘Shouldn’t you stop and think about everything a bit more?’