The Road To Jerusalem (11 page)

Then the wagons came driving up and the retainers reined in the horses as they waited in the courtyard before the door to the longhouse. Sigrid came out first with her face covered and went over to the lead wagon. Then Erlend emerged, looked about shyly, and slipped into the second wagon.

Last came Magnus with the two small boys, who were holding each other and crying, clinging to each other as if the strength of their little child-arms might prevent what was going to happen. Magnus separated them gently but firmly, lifted up Arn and carried him over to Sigrid’s wagon and set him down next to his mother. Then he took a deep breath and slapped the horses so that the wagon started with an abrupt lurch while he turned around and walked back toward the door, making a vain attempt to catch Eskil, who managed to escape.

Magnus went inside and closed the door behind him without turning around. Eskil ran behind the wagons for a while, crying, until he fell and helplessly watched his brother vanish in the dust from the road.

Arn cried bitterly as he knelt in the wagon and looked back toward Arnas, which grew smaller and smaller in the distance. He understood that he would never see his home again, and it was impossible for Sigrid to console him.

Sigrid’s visit came at an inopportune time for Father Henri. His old friend and colleague from Clairvaux, Father Stephan, who was now the prior in Alvastra, was visiting so that they could discuss the difficult situation that had arisen with Queen Kristina, who was stirring up trouble and inciting the people against the monks at Varnhem. Naturally Stephan was the one with whom Father Henri most wanted to discuss complicated questions. They had been together ever since their youth, and they were part of the first group that had received the terrible orders from holy Saint Bernard himself, that they should depart for the cold, barbaric North to start a daughter cloister. It had been a long journey, horrendously cold and gloomy.

Father Stephan had already read the account of the miracle from Arnas and was familiar with Sigrid’s problem. To be sure, both at Alvastra and Varnhem, as well as in the mother cloister in Burgundy, they had stopped accepting oblates, and the thought behind the change was logical and easy to understand. The free will of a human being to choose either God’s way or the path of perdition was eliminated if they accepted small children and raised them in the cloister. Such children would already be molded into monks by the age of twelve, since they knew no other life than that of the cloister. Such an upbringing might rob the children of their free will, and therefore it was a wise decision no longer to accept oblates.

On the other hand, the miracle at Arnas could not be ignored, because it was definitely no small event. If the parents had promised their child to God at the most critical moment, and they did so clearly and openly, and God had then let the miracle happen, the parents’ promise had to be construed as so sanctified that it would be impossible to break.

But what if they, God’s servants, now made the promise impossible to fulfill by refusing to accept the boy because the custom of oblates had been abolished?

Then the parents might be released from their promise. But in that case, the monks at the same time would be placing themselves, knowingly and willingly, above the clearly manifested will of God. That could not happen. So they had to accept the boy.

And how should they respond to Fru Sigrid? It seemed that God had punished her severely for her ambivalence, and now she was here wanting to do penance. There was also the much bigger question of whether the monks might simply have to abandon Varnhem, return home to Clairvaux, and from there seek to have Kristina and even her husband excommunicated so that they could be rid of the problem and start over again. Factoring in travel time and everything else, that process might take a couple of years.

The two men sat inside in the shade of the covered arcade that connected the church to the monks’ quarters. Before them out in the sunshine, Brother Lucien’s garden was blazing with color. Father Henri had sent Brother Lucien, who had a knowledge of medicinal herbs, up to the guesthouse of the old farm, where Sigrid and her son were staying. Right now their grave and difficult conversation was interrupted as Brother Lucien returned with a worried look on his face.

“Well,” he said with a sigh, sinking down on the stone bench next to them. “I don’t know quite what to believe. I don’t think it’s leprosy; it’s much too watery and ulcerous. I think it’s some variant of swine pox, something that comes from the uncleanness of the animals. But it looks bad, I have to admit.”

“If it is only some sort of swine pox, what can you do for her, dear Brother Lucien?” asked Father Henri with interest.

“Well now . . . do you really think, Father, that I should try to do something for it?” wondered Brother Lucien dubiously.

“How do you mean?” asked the other two at the same time, both equally astonished.

“I mean . . . if the Lord Himself has visited this illness upon her, who am I to revoke the Lord’s will?”

“Look here, Brother Lucien, don’t make a fool of yourself now!” snorted Father Henri in irritation. “You are the Lord’s instrument, and if you do the best you can and He finds your work good, then it will help. Otherwise nothing at all will help and nothing will make any difference. So what had you thought to do about the matter?”

The monk explained that as far as he understood it was a question of cleaning and drying out the sores. Boiled and consecrated water for washing, then clean air and sunshine, should dry out the abscesses in about a week. Her hand looked more dire, and in the worst case it might turn out to be something other than harmless swine pox.

Father Henri nodded in agreement, showing great interest. As usual when Brother Lucien described his initial medical diagnosis, he sounded quite convincing. What Father Henri especially admired was the monk’s ability to stay calm when confronting problems and not rush off at once to slap on all sorts of herbs in the hope that one of them might do some good. According to Brother Lucien, such ill-considered conduct could easily cause an illness to go from bad to worse.

When Brother Lucien had gone, Father Stephan again took up his previous train of thought and said that it was rather obvious that the Lord God wanted something special with that boy. If he was to be just one more monk among all the other monks, then it seemed a bit extreme to resort to both a miracle and a case of leprosy, didn’t it? People became monks for lesser reasons than that.

Father Henri burst out laughing at his colleague’s outrageous but humorous logic. Still, there was no real counterargument. So they should take in the boy, but treat him carefully, like one of Brother Lucien’s sensitive plants, and make sure that his free will was not broken. Some time in the future, perhaps, they would have a better idea of the Lord’s intentions for the boy. So the boy was allowed to become an oblate. And if they had to move out of Varnhem, he would have to come along with them. But that was a matter for a later time.

The question of Fru Sigrid remained. Naturally the simplest approach would be to start by letting her confess and ask for her own opinion. Father Stephan went into the scriptorium to reread, perhaps a bit more attentively than before, the account of the miracle from Arnas. With a concerned expression Father Henri walked up toward the old guesthouse outside the cloister walls to hear Sigrid’s confession.

He found mother and son in a pitiful state. There was only one bed in the room, and there lay Sigrid, panting with fever with her eyes closed. At her side sat a little fellow, his face red from crying, clutching her healthy hand. The house hadn’t been cleaned; it was filled with all sorts of rubbish and there was a cold draft. While it hadn’t been used in many years, it hadn’t been torn down because there were more pressing things to do, or possibly because the wooden walls were old and rotten and the lumber couldn’t be reused.

He draped the prayer stole over his shoulders and went over to Arn, cautiously stroking the boy’s head. But Arn seemed not to notice, or else he was pretending he didn’t.

Father Henri then gently asked the boy to leave for a moment while his mother made confession, but the boy just shook his head without looking up and squeezed his mother’s hand all the harder.

Sigrid now awoke, and Arn left the room reluctantly, slamming the drafty door behind him. Sigrid seemed indignant at his behavior, but with a smile Father Henri put his right index finger to his lips and shushed her, indicating that she shouldn’t worry. Then he asked if she was ready to confess.

“Yes, Father,” she replied, her mouth dry. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. With the help of holy Saint Bernard, my lord and husband and I, together with lay brother Erlend, managed through sincere prayers to ask the Lord to return Arn to live among us. But just before this miracle occurred I made a solemn and sacred promise to the Lord to give the boy to God’s holy work among the people here on earth if He saw fit to save my son.”

“I know all this; it’s exactly as it was written by lay brother Erlend. Your Latin is as fluid as water, by the way. Have you been practicing lately? Well, never mind that, now back to your confession, my child.”

“Well, I have studied with the boys . . .” she murmured wearily, but took a deep breath and thought intently before she went on. “I betrayed my sacred promise to the Lord God; I ignored it, and therefore He has afflicted me with leprosy as you can see. I want to do penance, if it is possible to do penance for such a grave sin. My idea is that I should live here in this house as the wife of no one and eat only scraps from the monks’ table as long as I live.”

“I can see, my dear Sigrid, that you who have done so much for those of us who toil here in the garden of the Lord at Varnhem, to you it may seem that the Lord has been harsh toward you,” said Father Henri pensively. “But one cannot ignore the fact that it is a grave sin to break a sacred promise to the Lord God, even if one makes this promise in a difficult moment. For is it not in our greatest difficulties that we give the Lord our greatest promises? We shall take good care of your son as both the Lord and you yourself, although in different ways, have asked us to do. The boy’s name is Arn, is it not? I should know, since I was the one who baptized him. And we will also tend to your affliction and you may stay here to eat, ahem, well, as you say, the scraps from our table. But I can’t give you absolution for your sins just now, and I beg you not to be unduly frightened because of this. I don’t yet know what the Lord will tell us. Perhaps He merely wanted to give you a little reminder. You must say twenty Pater Nosters and twenty Ave Marias, then go to sleep and know that you are in safe and tender hands. I’ll send Brother Lucien to you to take care of your sores with the utmost care, and if it then turns out, as I sense but do not know, that the Lord will make you whole again, then you will soon be without sin. Rest now. I’ll take the boy with me down to the cloister.”

Father Henri got up slowly and studied Sigrid’s deformed face. One eye was so sealed shut by pus that it couldn’t be seen: the other eye was only half open. He leaned forward and sniffed cautiously at the sores, then nodded thoughtfully and left the room as he stuffed the prayer stole in his pocket.

Outside the boy sat on a rock looking at the ground and didn’t even turn around when Father Henri came out.

He stood for a moment looking at Arn, until the boy couldn’t help glancing up at him. Then Father Henri gave him a kindly smile, but received only a sob in response before the boy again looked away.

“Look here,
mon fils
, come along with me like a good boy,” said Father Henri as gently as he could, and accustomed as he was to always being obeyed, he stepped forward to pull on Arn’s arm.

“Can’t you even speak Swedish, you old devil?” Arn spat, kicking and struggling as Father Henri, who was quite a big and heavy man, dragged him along toward the cloister with the same ease as if he were carrying a basket of herbs from Brother Lucien’s gardens.

When they reached the arcade by the cloister garden, Father Henri found his colleague from Alvastra sitting in the same place where they had held their discussion earlier.

Father Stephan’s face lit up at once when he caught sight of the unruly and sullen little Arn.

“Aha!” he exclaimed. “Here we have . . . er, our
jeune oblat
.
Enfin
. . . not particularly filled with gratitude
de Dieu
at the moment, eh?”

Father Henri shook his head in agreement with a smile and promptly lifted Arn onto the lap of his colleague, who easily warded off a bold fist from the little boy.

“Hold him as long as you can, dear brother. I must have a little chat with Brother Lucien first,” said Father Henri and left the garden to find his fellow monk in charge of medicinal matters.

“There there, don’t
strug-gel,
” Father Stephan hushed Arn in amusement.

“It’s
struggle
, not
strug-gel!
” Arn fumed, trying to get loose, but he soon discovered that he was trapped by strong arms and gave up.

“So, if you think that my Nordic language sounds bad to your little ears, maybe we should speak something that suits me better,” whispered Father Stephan to him in Latin, without actually expecting an answer.

“It probably suits both of us better since you can’t speak our language, you old monk,” replied Arn in the same language.

Father Stephan beamed, happily surprised.

“In truth I believe that we’re going to get along just fine, you and I and Father Henri, much better and faster than you think, young man,” the monk whispered in Arn’s ear as if conveying a great secret to him.

“I don’t want to sit like a slave poring over all those tedious old books all day long,” Arn muttered, although less angry than a moment earlier.

“And what would you rather do?” asked Father Stephan.

“I want to go home. I don’t want to be your captive and slave,” said Arn, no longer able to keep up his impudent front. He burst into tears again, but leaned against Father Stephan’s chest as the monk quietly stroked and patted his slender young back.