The Road To Jerusalem (12 page)

As so often was the case, Brother Lucien was correct with his first diagnosis. The sores on Sigrid’s face had nothing to do with leprosy, and he made rapid progress with his treatment.

First he had sent some of the lay brethren up to the guesthouse to scour it clean and seal and whitewash the walls, even though Sigrid protested against the improvements, believing that in her misery she didn’t deserve either cleanliness or adornments. Brother Lucien had attempted to explain that it was not a matter of esthetics but of medicine, but they didn’t seem to really understand each other on this topic.

However, Sigrid’s face was soon restored with precisely the remedies Brother Lucien had prescribed in the beginning: clean, sanctified water, sunshine, and fresh air. On the other hand, he hadn’t any success with the sores, which spread from her hand and up her arm, causing a nasty swelling that was tinged blue. He had tried a number of preparations that were very strong, sometimes downright dangerous, but without success. In the end he realized that there could be only one cure for this toxicity in the blood. One sure sign was that he hadn’t been able to allay her fever.

But he didn’t want to tell this to Sigrid herself; instead he explained to Father Henri what had to be done. They would have to cut away all the diseased flesh—take her arm from her. Otherwise the evil from the arm would soon spread to her heart. If it had been one of the brothers themselves, all they’d have to do would be to call on Brother Guilbert with his big axe, but they undoubtedly could not act in the same way toward Fru Sigrid, their benefactor.

Father Henri agreed. He would try to present the matter as best he could to Fru Sigrid, although at the moment he had other things to tend to. Then Brother Lucien rebuked him, cautiously and probably for the first time ever. Because they did not have much time; it was a matter of life or death.

And yet Father Henri postponed the difficult matter, because Fru Kristina was on her way to the cloister along with an entire retinue of armed men.

When Kristina arrived at Varnhem she was riding at the vanguard of her retainers as if she were a male commander, and she was dressed in ceremonial garb. To display her nobility she wore a queen’s crown on her head.

Father Henri and five of his closest brothers met her outside the cloister gate, which they demonstratively had locked behind them.

Kristina did not dismount, for she preferred to talk down to the monks; she now announced that one of the buildings had to be torn down, and promptly, namely Father Henri’s scriptorium. A good portion of that particular building was apparently situated on the land that was rightfully hers.

Kristina knew quite well where to deliver the lance blow. Her intention was to make Father Henri lose his patience once and for all, and preferably his composure as well. She now found that she had succeeded with the first, at least. Father Henri spent most of his time among the books in the scriptorium; these were his brightest hours in the murky barbarity of the North. It was the part of the cloister that more than any other was his own.

He resolutely declared that he had no intention of tearing down the scriptorium.

Kristina replied that if the building was not demolished within a week, she would return, not only with her retainers, but with thralls who under the whips of the retainers would do the work rapidly. Perhaps the thralls would be less careful than the brothers would be if they saw fit to carry out her orders themselves. The choice was theirs.

Father Henri was now so angry that he could hardly control himself, and he told her that instead he intended to leave Varnhem. The journey would end with an audience with the Holy Father in Rome with the intention of excommunicating her, and her husband if he was an accomplice, if she dared to do the unthinkable and challenge God’s servants on earth and His Holy Roman Church. Didn’t she understand that she was about to bring eternal misfortune down upon both herself and Erik Jedvardsson?

What Father Henri threatened was true. But Kristina seemed not to comprehend what he said, just as she did not understand the threat she was posing to her own husband’s ambitious plans. A king who was excommunicated would have little to hope for in the Christian world.

But she merely tossed her head reproachfully, and wheeled her horse around in a wide turn, forcing the monks to dive for cover so as not to be trampled. As she rode away she called over her shoulder that in a week her thralls would arrive, her heathen thralls for that matter, to carry out their official duties.

Arn had been treated leniently and was not forced to read more than four hours of Latin grammaticus per day. The first step was to make his Latin flawless; then they could move on to the next language. First a tool for the knowledge, then the knowledge itself.

But to assuage the boy’s heavy heart, Father Henri had also seen to it that he was allowed to spend almost an equal amount of time with the mighty Brother Guilbert de Beaune, who would teach him arts altogether different from Latin and singing.

Brother Guilbert’s main occupation at Varnhem was in the smithies, particularly the weapons smithy, which was the largest and best equipped of them all. The weapons smithy was run as a business and nothing else, because the swords that Brother Guilbert forged were so clearly superior to any others made in this barbaric part of the world. The fame of the monk’s swords had spread rapidly and brought in goodly sums of silver to the convent.

Precisely according to intention, Arn was cajoled by watching and even occasionally helping Brother Guilbert, who took the boy in with the same gravity and precision as if he had been assigned to teach him to be a smith, showing him everything from the simple basics to the finer arts.

But when Arn after a time became less sulky and more openminded, he also grew bolder when it came to asking about matters other than those pertaining to the work itself. Such as whether Brother Guilbert had ever shot a bow and arrow, and if so, whether he would like to have a contest.

To Arn’s dismay, Brother Guilbert found this so amusing that he burst out laughing. He laughed so hard that he lost track of what he was working on and tossed a glowing piece of metal into a bucket of water. Then he sat down to finish laughing, his eyes wet with tears.

Finally, after he had composed himself and cheerfully wiped his eyes, he admitted that he may indeed have handled a bow and arrow, and that the two of them might soon make time for such games. Then he added that of course he feared meeting a young warrior as bold as Arn de Gothia. And then he broke out laughing anew.

It would be a long time before Arn was made aware of what was so funny. Right now he merely felt indignant. He snorted that perhaps Brother Guilbert was afraid. And provoked another salvo of laughter from Guilbert de Beaune.

Faced with the decision between death or having her arm cut off and perhaps being able to cope with life as a cripple, Sigrid chose death. She felt that she could not understand the Lord’s will in any other way. With sorrow in her heart she allowed Father Henri to hear her confession one last time, forgive her all her sins, and give her Holy Communion and extreme unction.

At Persmas, when the summer reached its apex and the time for hay-making had arrived, Sigrid died quietly up in the guesthouse.

It was also time for the departure of Father Henri and the seven brothers who would accompany him on his journey to the south. Sigrid was buried inside the cloister church, beneath the floor close to the altar, and the place was marked with only tiny secret signs, for Father Henri was very distrustful of Fru Kristina and her husband. Two brothers were sent to Arnas with the news of her death, and the invitation to visit Sigrid’s grave at any time.

During the four-hour-long funeral mass, Arn stood straight and still, the lone boy among all the monks. It was only the heavenly singing that now and then made his heart break so that he could no longer hold back the tears. But he was not ashamed of this, because he had noticed that he was not the only one weeping.

The next day the long journey to the south began, heading first for Denmark. Arn was now certain that his life belonged to God and that no human being, good or evil, strong or weak, would be able to do a thing to alter that fact.

He never looked back.

So often things turn out much differently than people had imagined. What the poor in spirit call small coincidences, what the faithful call God’s will, can sometimes alter an event to such an extent that no one could have predicted the result. That applies to powerful men who are convinced that they are the instigators of their own fortune, men like Erik Jedvardsson. But it also applies to such men who stand much closer to God than others and should be better able to understand His ways, men such as Henri of Clairvaux. For both these men the ways of the Lord had truly seemed inscrutable in recent years.

When Father Henri and his seven companions and a boy arrived in Roskilde on their way south through Denmark, he was firmly resolved to continue all the way to the general capital of the Cistercian order in Citeaux in order to present his case for the excommunication of Erik Jedvardsson and his wife Kristina. It was an extremely grave matter of principle. For the first time the Cistercians had been forced to close down a monastery be cause of the whim of some king or king’s wife. It was a question that was of crucial significance to the whole Christian world: Who controlled the Church? The Church itself or the sovereign power of the king? The strife over this had raged for a long time, but it took a Nordic barbarian queen such as Kristina to be ignorant of the matter.

Varnhem had to be regained at all costs. No compromise was acceptable in this matter.

And had Father Henri and his company come to Roskilde several years earlier, or several years later, everything would have gone as planned. There is no doubt about that.

But Father Henri and his company arrived just at the moment when a violent, ten-year-long civil war had ended and a new mighty lineage had ascended to power. The new king was named Valdemar, and he would be known in due course as Valdemar the Great.

He had finally succeeded in killing both his rivals, Knut and Svend, and before the decisive battle he had vowed that if God granted him victory he would establish a Cistercian monastery. Archbishop Eskil in Lund was well aware of this promise, having been forced to bless the war before the decisive battle. Archbishop Eskil was an old personal friend of no less than Holy Saint Bernard himself. It was when visiting Saint Bernard in Clairvaux that he had also become friends with Father Henri.

When the two now met in Roskilde, just as the Danish church convened for a synod, they were overjoyed to see each other again. But beyond that they were also taken by how wisely God could steer people’s paths down to the smallest detail.

All the pieces fit together with miraculous precision. Here came a Cistercian prior just at the moment when the new king was about to honor, or forget, his promise to God to build a new monastery. Instead of entering into a correspondence for many years with Citeaux, everything could be arranged at once, since both an archbishop and a prior were present.

King Valdemar himself could also clearly feel the power of God’s will when his archbishop informed him that his sacred vow to God could actually be fulfilled immediately, since God had arranged it so.

King Valdemar set aside a portion of his inherited property, a peninsula named Vitskol on the shores of the Limfjord in Jutland, as the site of the new monastery. The synod, which handily enough had already been convened at Roskilde, blessed the matter, and Father Henri could then resume his journey at once, as if he had merely stopped to rest in Roskilde. But he was now heading toward a completely different destination from his two home monasteries of Clairvaux and Citeaux.

With regard to the question of Varnhem and the excommunication of Kristina and Erik Jedvardsson, what had occurred did not involve any change of principle, of course. Rather, it entailed a practical change, since the matter now had to be handled by correspondence and would therefore require somewhat more time. This meant that Father Henri had a number of important letters to write before setting off on the journey to Vitskol, but it was quickly done. He wrote to Varnhem and instructed twenty-two of his monks to pack up plenty of the monastery’s possessions, in particular all the books, and take them along to the new monastery in Vitskol. However, five men should stay behind in Varnhem with the ominous task of trying to protect the buildings against pillaging and destruction. At the same time they were to tell one and all about the coming excommunication of Fru Kristina and Erik Jedvardsson, to whatever effect that might have.

Next, Father Henri addressed two letters to the general chapter of the Cistercians and to the Holy Father Hadrianus IV, in which he described the immoral and drunken Erik Jedvardsson, who wanted to call himself king despite the fact that he had allowed his wife to desecrate a monastery. Then he was ready to leave for Vitskol, which was where the Lord without a doubt was now leading his steps.

And where the Lord led Father Henri, there too he led Arn.

Erik Jedvardsson was soon to feel the power of the church. Now that he had captured one of the three royal crowns he had been striving for, he sent negotiators to the lawspeakers in both Western and Eastern Gotaland. But the replies he received were disheartening. In those regions Varnhem had functioned as a smoldering and smoking pit of rumors, and the smoke had spread over both landscapes: Erik Jedvardsson and his wife Kristina were going to be excommunicated. Nobody wanted an excommunicated king.

Fortunately the Swedes didn’t know what was being said, or else they didn’t understand what excommunication meant. Erik was still sitting securely as the king of the Swedes.

Two things had to be done, one easy and one difficult. The easy task was to send a group of negotiators to that French monk who was now staying somewhere in Denmark. The king would have to humble himself in writing, rescind his demands, and beg the monks to come back to Varnhem, assuring them of the king’s support. He would ask to be allowed to have Varnhem as the burial place for his lineage, and vouchsafe that the monks would be given more land for Varnhem, and whatever else he could think of to offer. His bishop Henrik, who was a practical man of God, assured him that the alternative would be far worse. For then it would become necessary to walk on foot to Rome, dressed in sackcloth and ashes for the last bit of the journey. Barefoot, he would have to prostrate himself at the feet of the Holy Father. This would not only be difficult and time-consuming; there was no guarantee that such tactics would placate the Pope. And wouldn’t it be exceedingly vexing to have made all those efforts in vain?