by Jan Guillou
The two Cecilias had hung back to observe the fine clothing and the ritual. When Mother Rikissa noticed them she strode over and gave them a good dressing-down, fuming about things that were unsuitable for the eyes of Christian maidens, and she ordered them to hurry off behind the walls, and to be quick about it.
But Cecilia Blanca then answered her so gently that she surprised even herself, saying that she had seen something that might further the cause of peace and also serve Gudhem. Many of the mantles worn by the guests needed to have the traces of war removed, and that was something which would be easy to arrange inside Gudhem. Just as Mother Rikissa opened her mouth to speak more harsh words, an idea seemed to dawn on her. Instead she turned around and looked at the morose procession of guests shuffling off.
“You know, I think that maybe even a blind hen can find the grain,” she said pensively, but not at all unkindly. And then she shooed off the two Cecilias as if they were geese.
Mother Rikissa had two worries that she kept from everyone else at Gudhem. One involved a great event that would soon take place, inevitable as a new season, and for Cecilia Blanca at least it would mean a tremendous change. The second had to do with Gudhem’s business affairs and was somewhat more difficult to comprehend.
Gudhem was a rich cloister even now in its early days, although less than a lifetime had passed since the church was consecrated as a cloister church and the first sisters moved in. But riches alone could not feed mouths, since the wealth was based on the ownership of land, and this ownership had to be transformed into food and drink, clothing and the construction of buildings. And what the earth produced came to Gudhem from near and far in the form of casks of seed, bales of wool, salted fish, dried fish, flour, oil, and fruit. A portion of all these goods had to be stored for use at Gudhem; a greater portion had to be shipped to various marketplaces, mostly the one in Skara, to be sold and transformed into silver. This silver would then be spent primarily to pay all those from foreign lands who worked on the various buildings of the cloister. All too often the sale of goods took some time, so that the convent’s cache of silver ebbed away. This was a constant source of worry for Mother Rikissa. No matter how she tried to involve herself in the various details of administration, the yconomus, a canon from Skara whom Bishop Bengt viewed as useless in church work but who had a good head for business, always had a rejoinder for her suspicious questions. If the harvests had been good, then it would be difficult to sell very much grain at one time. If the harvests had been poor, then they had to wait to sell until the prices rose a bit. And it was never good to sell everything at once, but rather to spread the sale over the entire year. So in the late autumn when most of the rent payments from tenants came flowing in, all their storehouses were filled to bursting, and toward the end of each summer all these storage places stood empty. The yconomus claimed that this was the natural order of things.
Mother Rikissa had tried to discuss these problems with Father Henri, who was the abbot of Varnhem and in that capacity her superior. But Father Henri had been unable to give her any particularly good advice. There was a big difference between a cloister populated only by men and a convent with only women, as he explained with a concerned expression. At Varnhem they took in direct payments in silver for the many different sorts of work they did. They had twenty different quarries where they manufactured millstones; they had smithies that fabricated everything from farming tools to swords for noblemen; and they did all their construction work with their own labor force without spending any silver. What Gudhem needed was its own business that could bring in silver directly, Father Henri had told her. But that was easier said than done.
When Mother Rikissa heard Cecilia Blanca talking about the guests’ stained and tattered mantles it had given her an idea, and she would always remember it as being of her own devising. At Gudhem wool was spun and woven; linen was harvested, retted, dried, braked, scutched, combed, spun, and woven—the entire process from the flax plant to finished fabric. And Sister Leonore, who took care of Gudhem’s gardens, knew how to dye fabrics in many different ways. Except for black, this knowledge was never put to use because there was no need for garish worldly colors inside Gudhem.
Thought precedes action just as the dawn precedes the day, and Mother Rikissa now set the new plan in motion. When she returned from the grave-ale in the hospitium, which was as brief as it could be among the victors and the vanquished, she took with her two threadbare and sloppily mended mantles, one red and one blue. She had been careful to acquire a mantle from each side.
All the new work that would now have to be done brought a change for the better to Gudhem, just as Mother Rikissa had hoped. Apart from her worries about obtaining silver, she was in a race against time with another concern that she had not confided in anyone. She had to make the girls cease their hostility toward one another.
The maidens would be given the greatest responsibility for the new work, and this suited Mother Rikissa’s new hidden agenda all the better. Now, in early autumn, the lay sisters needed to devote all their attention to the harvesting work. Besides, the lay sisters all came from families that never dressed in clan colors to go to church or to market or to bridal ales. Lay sisters—lay-sisters, whom Mother Rikissa regarded with a contempt she could scarcely conceal—were women from poor families who could not afford to marry off their daughters. So the young women were sent to the convent to work for their own food instead of staying at home with poor peasant fathers and costing more than they could contribute. Lay-sisters had never in their lives been in a noble household so had never seen a Folkung mantle or a Sverker one either. So this new work had to be done entirely by the consecrated sisters and the more or less temporary guests among the novices: the two Cecilias and the Sverker daughters.
It soon turned out, however, that Gudhem had taken on no easy task. Everything had to be tested, and many trials were failures before something good finally emerged. And yet all these early difficulties merely intensified the maidens determination to succeed; they hurried to take up each job in a way that seemed almost indecorous. And when Mother Rikissa went past the weaving workshop, she heard eager words spoken in a tone that hardly seemed proper in a house dedicated to the Mother of God. But Mother Rikissa decided to bide her time, and for now the giggling was permitted. There would be time enough to restore decorum. Until the great event took place it would be unwise of her to treat the girls in a heavy-handed fashion.
Ulvhilde Emundsdotter had persuaded the others to try and weave the fabric she had spoken about, in which wool and linen were mixed. A mantle of pure linen would be too soft, and a mantle of only wool would be too thick and unwieldy and would not drape well over the shoulders and back. So the first task was to produce the cloth. But it wasn’t easy, because if the woolen threads were woven too loosely, too many strands would pull out from the cloth; if the linen thread was woven too tightly, it would bunch up the cloth too much. Through trial and error they would have to find the proper techniques.
Then there were difficulties with Sister Leonore’s various dye samples. Red proved to be the simplest to produce, though the maidens had to be careful to ensure that it was exactly the right shade of red. The red of beet juice was too vividly purple and too bright; the red that came from St. John’s wort was too light and too brown, although it could be mixed with alder to darken it. The correct red color was soon developed using dyes from Sister Leonore’s many clay pots. It proved harder to produce the right blue.
And a dyed piece of cloth had to be marked and dried, since the colors when wet did not look at all the same when dry. Many pieces of cloth, which were useless for any other purpose afterward, were given over to all this testing.
It took a lot of work to produce a single finished mantle. And as if that weren’t enough, there was the matter of how to line the mantles and where the pelts would come from. Winter squirrels, marten, and foxes didn’t grow on trees, after all. So instead of bringing in silver, the new work ended up
adding to the cloister’s expenses. The yconomus was finally ordered by a reluctant Mother Rikissa to go to Skara and buy skins, traveling all the way to Linköping if need be. He whined and complained about the expense. He thought it was risky to lay out silver for something one wasn’t certain could be sold, and in any case it would be a long time before the costs could be recouped as income. Mother Rikissa replied that silver did not multiply on its own at the bottom of a chest; something had to be done with it. But the yconomus argued that doing so could bring losses as soon as gains. At a calmer period for Gudhem Mother Rikissa might have paid more attention to the yconomus and his grumbling. But in view of its current situation, it was important that the girls had no reason to complain, or that the cloister still had silver in its coffers.
The harbinger of the great event at Gudhem was a convoy of oxcarts from Skara. It arrived on a calm, clear autumn day and was taken in hand as something that had been expected, although the cargo consisted of tents and wood, casks of ale and mead, and even some barrels of wine that had been brought up from Varnhem. There were also animal carcasses that had to be hung in cold storage, and a great number of roast-turners and laborers. They began to raise a tent city outside the walls of Gudhem, and their hammer-blows, laughter, and coarse words rang throughout the cloister.
Inside the walls rumors were buzzing like a beehive. Some simply believed that war was coming again, that an army would arrive and claim Gudhem as the enemy’s fortress. Others thought that it was merely the bishops who were holding a meeting and had selected a neutral spot where no one had to bear the entire expense. Mother Rikissa and the nuns, who knew or at least ought to know what it was all about, gave not the slightest hint of anything.
In the vestiarium, which was the new, more formal term for the weaving chamber where the Cecilias and the Sverker daughters now spent most of their time, the idea soon arose that one of them was to be fetched and married off—a thought that inspired both hope and trepidation. It even seemed most probable, since preparations were being made for a feast. They let their imaginations run wild, as if they were no longer enemies at all, picturing which of them would end up with a drooling old man from Skara. That was how the Cecilias taunted the Sverker daughters, who then retaliated with the prospect of a drooling old man from Linköping who had done the king a favor or promised loyalty in return for once again being allowed to creep into the bed-straw with an innocent maiden. The more they spoke of this possibility, the more excited they became, because it would be splendid to have a different life outside the walls, yet terrible was the thought of a drooling old man, whether from Linköping or Skara. What was perceived as both liberation and punishment could just as well befall someone on the red Sverker side as on the blue side. Half in jest each tied a piece of yarn around their right arm, a red one for the Sverker daughters and a blue one for the two Cecilias.
When talk turned to this matter it felt as though a hard hand were squeezing Cecilia Rosa’s heart. She found it hard to breathe and broke out in a cold sweat. She had to leave the room for a few moments, breathing in the chill air in the arcade and panting as if with a cramp. If they decided to marry her off, what could she do about it? She had sworn to remain faithful to her beloved Arn, as he had sworn to her. But what did such promises mean to men who were settling scores after war? Of what significance was her will or her love?
She consoled herself with the fact that she had been sentenced to many years of penance, and that it was the judgment of the Holy Roman Church. No Folkungs or Eriks or other men who had either won or lost in war could change that fact. She calmed down at once, but also found it odd that her lengthy punishment might become a consolation. At least she wouldn’t be married off.
“I will love you forever, Arn. May God’s Holy Mother always hold her protective hand over you wherever you are in the Holy Land and whatever godless enemies you may encounter,” she whispered.
Then she prayed three Ave Marias, and in her own prayers she turned to the Mother of God and begged forgiveness for having let herself be overwhelmed by her worldly love, promising that her love for the Mother of God was greatest of all. Having regained a sense of calm, she then went back inside to the others, and seemed just as usual.
After prandium and the prayers of thanksgiving the next day, when it was time for rest, a great commotion arose at Gudhem. Messengers came and knocked loudly at the gate, sisters ran back and forth, Mother Rikissa came from the church, wringing her hands in distress, and all the women were summoned to a procession. Soon they were walking slowly, in the order prescribed by the cloister rules, out of the great port underneath Adam and Eve. Singing, they then circled the walls three times before they stopped before the southeast side of Gudhem and lined up with Mother Rikissa in front, behind her the consecrated nuns, and behind them the lay-sisters. But it was strange that the maidens had to stand near the consecrated nuns in a little group by themselves.
In the tent city that had now been raised, men in ordinary brown work clothes made ready by cleaning up all that was untidy. They finished in a great hurry and then fetched poles with furled pennants. All the worldly men lined up, and soon only whispers were heard from them.
All the men and women now stood tensely, staring off to the southeast. It was a lovely day, at that time of autumn when all the colors were still bright and had not yet faded in advance of winter. There was a light breeze and only a few clouds in the sky.
The first thing that could be seen to the south was the flashing glint of lance-points in the sunshine. Soon a great host of horsemen came into view, and the colors became apparent, mostly blue. Everyone knew that the Folkungs or Eriks were approaching.
“It’s our men, our colors,” Cecilia Blanca whispered excitedly to Cecilia Rosa standing beside her. Mother Rikissa turned at once and shot her a stern look, raising her finger to her lips to shush her.
The mighty host came ever closer, and now they could see the shields. Those in the vanguard all bore three crowns on a blue field, or Folkung lions against the same background, and all their mantles were blue.
When the retinue came closer they could see that there were red mantles farther back, as well as green and black with gold and other colors that did not belong to any of the more powerful clans.
Now they could see that one of the horsemen in front wore flashing gold around his brow instead of a helmet. No, two of them in front were wearing crowns.
When the column was less than an arrow-shot away it was easy to make out the three riding in front. First came Archbishop Stéphan on a plodding chestnut mare with a large belly. Behind the archbishop to his right rode Knut Eriksson himself on a lively black stallion. His crown was that of a king. And next to him rode Birger Brosa, the jarl, wearing a smaller crown.
Mother Rikissa stood with her back straight, almost defiant. Now the procession was so close that those waiting outside the cloister could speak with the horsemen. Then Mother Rikissa sank to her knees, as she was compelled to do before both the secular and ecclesiastical power. Behind her knelt all the sisters, all the lay-sisters, and finally all the worldly maidens. When all the women were in this position with their eyes on the ground before them, all the men knelt down too. King Knut Eriksson had come to Gudhem on his royal tour of the realm.
The three riders in front stopped only a few paces from Mother Rikissa, who had not yet raised her glance from the ground. Archbishop Stéphan managed to dismount from his horse, muttering in a foreign language about the difficulty of doing so. He straightened his clothing, and stepped up to Mother Rikissa to offer her his right hand. She took it and kissed it humbly, and he gave her leave to rise. Then all were allowed to rise and stood silent.
King Knut now dismounted, though with the ease of a victorious young warrior, raised his right hand, and waited without looking around as a rider from the rear ranks quickly galloped up and handed him a blue mantle with three Erik crowns of gold and a lining of ermine. It was the mantle of a king or queen, like the one he
wore himself.
He took the mantle over his left arm and walked slowly, as all the others at Gudhem stood motionless, over to the worldly maidens. He stood behind Cecilia Blanca without a word, raising the mantle high so that all could see it. Then he hung his queen’s mantle over her shoulders and took her by the hand to lead her to the royal tent, where four banners with the three Erik crowns waved. Cecilia Rosa realized that she hadn’t even noticed when these banners were raised.
The two Cecilias were still holding hands, which they had been doing ever since they recognized Knut Eriksson. But as the king began to lead his Cecilia away, their fingers released their grip. Cecilia Blanca, soon to be the new queen of the Swedes and Goths, quickly turned and gave her friend for life a kiss on both cheeks.
The king frowned at this, but his face instantly brightened as he led his betrothed Cecilia to the royal tent. All the others stood still or remained on their horses until the king and his betrothed had entered the tent.
Then a great rattling and din arose as the whole company dismounted and all began leading their horses toward the oat pastures and haycocks the workers had arranged. The archbishop turned to Mother Rikissa, blessed her, and gave her a dismissive sign as if shooing away a fly before he headed for the royal tent.
Mother Rikissa clapped her hands as a sign for all the women under her supervision to return inside the walls without delay. Inside the cloister there was now much talking and commotion, which not even the strictest rules in this world could have prevented. The holy sisters of the Virgin Mary were jabbering away at each other almost as loudly as the worldly maidens.
It was time for singing, and Mother Rikissa sternly tried to restore order and get them all into the church, forcing upon them the dignity and silence required for the singing hour and the prayers. During the hymns she noticed that Cecilia Rosa sang with a rare power. Tears flowed down the cheeks of this young and now dangerous woman. Everything had gone as badly as Mother Rikissa had feared.