by Jan Guillou
“He hit a silver coin with two arrows from a distance of twenty-five paces,” Cecilia Rosa replied without blinking. “At least I think it was twenty-five paces, but maybe it was twenty. The target was definitely a silver coin.”
At first young Magnus was absolutely dumbstruck. Then the tears welled up in his eyes, and he leaned over toward his mother and embraced her for a long time.
Behind his back Cecilia Blanca then asked in signs whether it was really a silver coin.
No doubt an unusually large silver coin, Cecilia Rosa signed back and then sank into the delightful warmth of her son’s embrace. The way he smelled brought back a memory, something that reminded her of youth and love.
Just before Katarinamas, when the temperature already was so cold that it presaged a hard winter, Birger Brosa arrived on a hurried visit to Riseberga. He met with the prioress Beata only long enough so as not to appear impolite at the convent, which naturally belonged to the Virgin Mary, though he probably viewed it as his own property.
Above all he wanted to meet with the yconoma. Since the early cold made it difficult to sit comfortably outside, they had to sit together in her bookkeeping chamber, which she’d had built in the same manner as the one at Gudhem.
He spoke first about business, but with his thoughts clearly on another matter, since he continually kept mentioning his upcoming crusade to the east in the spring.
Then he commenced talking about what was really on his mind. There was still no abbess at Riseberga. If Cecilia Rosa now took her vows, she would at once be promoted to the position, based on her long experience of the cloister world. He had spoken with the new archbishop about the matter and there should be no obstacles to her becoming abbess. Impatiently he seemed to be demanding an immediate answer.
Cecilia Rosa felt faint and stunned by the news. She couldn’t imagine that the jarl, who knew Queen Cecilia Blanca so well, could have the slightest belief that she would want to take the vows.
After she had collected herself and thought it over, she looked him straight in the eye and asked what was the real intention behind this question. She wasn’t stupid, and no one in the entire realm was smarter than the jarl, so there must be some reason that weighed very heavily for him to make such an unexpected demand.
Then Birger Brosa gave her his familiar broad smile. He sat down comfortably with one leg drawn up under himself, clasped his hands around his knee, and looked at Cecilia Rosa for a moment before he told her the reason, although not straight out.
“In truth you would be a jewel as one of the wives in the Folkung clan, Cecilia,” he began. “In a way you are already, and that’s why I’ve come to you with this solemn request.”
“Request?” Cecilia Rosa interrupted, terrified.
“Well, let’s call it a question. Your knowledge in the handling of accounts and silver is probably matched only by Eskil’s. Yes, Eskil is Arn’s brother, and it is he who manages the affairs of the realm. You cannot be fooled with duplicitous words, so I will speak to you bluntly. We need an abbess who can counterbalance the false witness of another abbess. That is how things stand.”
“You could have told me as much when you first arrived, my dear jarl,” Cecilia Rosa protested. “So the false witness of this liar was carried all the way to Rome?”
“Yes, it was carried all the way to Rome by hands that were all too willing,” replied Birger Brosa gloomily. “Right now we may have refractory forces in the east that have to be crushed once and for all, but farther in the future we may have a great war facing us if things go wrong.”
“A great war with the Sverkers and Danes?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Because King Knut’s son Erik might be judged a bastard?”
“Yes, you understand it all.”
“And in Rome the words of the queen and myself count for naught against a letter from a lying abbess?”
“I assume that is so.”
“If I take the vows then it’s the word of one abbess against another?”
“Yes, and you may save the country from war.”
At that Cecilia Rosa fell silent. She caught herself musing that she probably shouldn’t have such a hasty conversation with a man like Birger Brosa, because he was said to have the best mind in the country. She needed to gain time to think this over.
“It’s strange how God arranges things in this world and guides the path people take,” she began, the confidence of her words belying the confusion that she felt inside.
“Yes, it is truly strange,” Birger Brosa agreed when he could think of nothing else to say.
“Rikissa sold her soul to the Devil in order to plunge the country into war. Isn’t that strange?”
“Yes, it is very strange,” Birger Brosa agreed, a bit impatiently.
“And now you want me to deliver up my soul to the Virgin Mary at the prime of my earthly life so that we can counter this sin?” Cecilia Rosa went on with an innocent expression.
“Though your words are harsh, you have grasped the situation most succinctly,” replied Birger Brosa.
“People will say that the new abbess was once long ago a maiden who hated Rikissa, who refused to forgive her even on her deathbed, and therefore her words are not worth water!” Cecilia Rosa burst out in a tone that astonished herself more than the jarl.
“You’re thinking sharply but you are very stubborn, Cecilia Rosa,” he said after pondering for a moment. “But you have an opportunity to save the country from war with a sacrifice which requires that you become an abbess. Riseberga will be your realm, and here you can rule as queen; it’s not at all like being whipped by some Rikissa. What could you do with your life that would be better than to serve your kinsmen, your queen, and your king?”
“Now you’re the one who is being stubborn, Birger Brosa. Would you like to know what I’ve been praying and hoping for every night for twenty years? Do you understand in your warrior’s soul how long twenty years in a cage is? I’m speaking to you so boldly and frankly not merely because I feel despair at what you’re asking me to do, but because I know that you’re fond of me and don’t mind such blunt talk.”
“That’s true, my dear Cecilia Rosa, that’s true,” sighed the jarl, now in retreat.
Without a word Cecilia Rosa left him then and was gone for a while. When she returned she held a magnificent Folkung mantle in her hands. She turned it back and forth a few times so that the gold threads in the lion on the back flashed in the candlelight; she let him stroke the soft fur on the inside. He nodded his admiration but without saying a word.
“For two years I worked on this,” Cecilia Rosa explained. “It has been like my dream. Now we have it here at Riseberga to examine and copy, because we are still far behind Gudhem in this art.”
“It is truly very beautiful,” said Birger Brosa pensively. “I’ve never seen such a lovely blue color and such a powerful lion.” He already sensed what Cecilia Rosa was going to say next.
“Do you understand, my dear kinsman, for whom I sewed this mantle?”
“Yes, and may God grant that you may drape it over Arn Magnusson’s shoulders. I understand your dream, Cecilia Rosa. I probably understand better than you might believe what you were thinking during the years it took you to sew this mantle. But you must still listen to me and also understand. If Arn does not come soon, then I will buy this mantle from you for the day when Magnus Månesköld will drink his bridal ale, or the day when Erik Knutsson will be crowned, or whatever else may suit me. You cannot hope too long, Cecilia Rosa; you owe that much to your kinsmen.”
“Then let us now pray for Arn’s speedy return,” said Cecilia Rosa, lowering her eyes.
Faced with such an exhortation there was no choice for either man or jarl, especially not in a convent, and in a convent he happened to own. Birger Brosa nodded that they should pray.
They knelt down together among the account books and abacuses and prayed for Arn Magnusson’s salvation and swift return.
Cecilia Rosa prayed for the sake of her burning love, which had not faded in twenty years, and which she would rather die than relinquish.
The jarl prayed for a more complicated reason, but with equal sincerity. Yet he thought that if they couldn’t arrange the matter of the succession to the throne as simply as pitting one abbess’s oath against another’s, then they would probably need all the good warriors they could muster on the Folkung side.
And as he had heard recently from blessed Father Henri at Varnhem, Arn Magnusson was a warrior by God’s Grace in more than one respect. In the worst case, he would soon be needed at home.
Chapter 11
Arn was kept for two weeks at the Hamediyeh Hospital in Damascus before the doctors managed to stop the fever from his wounds. They believed it was God’s providence that he recovered, because no one could live much longer with such a fever. From earlier battles he had more scars on his body than he could count, but he assumed they might be more than a hundred. Yet he had never been wounded so badly as at the Horns of Hattin.
He didn’t remember much from the early stages of the battle. They had carried him away, cut off all his chain mail, and sewn up the worst of the wounds before they took him along with the wounded Syrians and Egyptians up into the hills where it was cooler. Arn and the other wounded soldiers had suffered greatly during the move, and most of them began bleeding again. But the doctors thought it would be even worse for them to remain in the heat among the flies and stench of corpses down below near Tiberias.
How Arn later came to Damascus he did not remember; by the time they moved him out of the field infirmary in the hills, a terrible fever had set in.
In Damascus the doctors had cut open some of his wounds, tried to clean them, and then sewn them back up, although this time with greater precision than what had been done at the field hospital near Tiberias.
The worst wounds were a deep gash from a sword that had sliced through his chain mail and deep into his calf, and an axe-blow that had cracked his helmet diagonally above his left eye, ripping his eyebrow and the left side of his forehead. At first he hadn’t been able to keep any food down, but vomited up everything they tried to force into him. And he suffered from a murderous headache so that the fogs of fever that began to seep into his mind actually came as a relief.
He didn’t remember any pain to speak of, not even when they cauterized his leg wound with a red-hot iron.
When the fever finally broke, the first thing he discovered was that he could again see out of both eyes, for he remembered that he had been blind in the left eye.
His bed was on the second floor of the hospital in a lovely room with blue mosaics, looking straight out into the shadow of tall palms. Now and then the wind gently rustled the palm fronds, and down in the courtyard he could hear the sound of fountains.
The doctors treated him with cool courtesy in the beginning, doing their work as well as their professional skill permitted. Above Arn’s bed hung a little picture in black and gold with Saladin’s Arabic calligram, which clearly showed that Arn was worth more to the sultan living than dead, despite the whispers that he was one of the white demons with the red cross.
When the fever subsided and Arn could begin to speak coherently, the doctors’ joy at his recovery was ever greater when they heard to their astonishment a Templar knight speaking God’s language. As doctors in Damascus they did not know what at least half the emirs in the army knew about the man who was called Al Ghouti.
The most distinguished of all the doctors was named Moses ben Maimon; he had traveled up from Cairo where he had been Saladin’s personal physician for many years. To Arn’s ears his Arabic had a foreign sound, because he had been born in far-off Andalusia. Life in that region had been hard for the Jews, he told Arn at their first meeting. Arn was not surprised that Saladin’s personal physician was a Jew, because he knew that the Caliph of Baghdad, the supreme leader of the Muslims, had many Jews in his service. And since his experience with Saracen doctors had shown him that they were all knowledgeable in the rules of both the faith and philosophy, he took care to ask about the significance of Jerusalem for the Jews. At that Moses ben Maimon raised his eyebrows in surprise and asked Arn what could make a Christian warrior take interest in such a thing. Arn told him about his meeting with the high rabbi from Baghdad and what it had led to, at least for as long as Arn held power in Jerusalem. If the Christians viewed God’s Grave as a holy place in Jerusalem, he went on, and the Muslims had Abraham’s rock where the Prophet, peace be unto him, had ascended to Heaven, then he could understand the power that these pilgrim sites had for the believers. But King David’s temple? That was merely a building constructed by human beings and torn down by human beings; why would it be considered so holy?
Then the Jewish doctor patiently explained to Arn that Jerusalem was the only holy site of the Jews, and according to prophecy the Jews would return to reclaim their kingdom and build up the Temple anew. Arn gave a deep and sorrowful sigh, not for the sake of the Jews, he quickly pointed out when he saw his newfound friend look somewhat puzzled, but for the sake of Jerusalem. Soon Jerusalem would fall into Muslim hands, if it hadn’t already happened. Then the Christians would spare no effort to take the city back. And if the Jews also got involved in the argument over Jerusalem, the war could go on for a thousand years or more.
Moses ben Maimon then went to get a little stool and sat down next to Arn’s bed in order to continue this discussion in earnest, which suddenly seemed more important to him than anything else he had to do at the hospital.
He asked Arn to explain what he meant more clearly, and then recounted conversations he’d had with both Saladin and Count Raymond of Tripoli. Both of them—despite the fact that one was Muslim and the other Christian, each other’s most dangerous foes on the battlefield—still seemed to reason the same way on this matter. The only way to bring an end to the eternal war would be to give equal rights to all pilgrims, no matter where their pilgrimage to the holy city was headed and regardless of whether they called it Al Quds or Jerusalem.
Or Yerushalayim, Moses ben Maimon added with a smile.
I agree, Arn said at once. These were the sorts of thoughts he had touched upon when he had given the rabbi from Baghdad permission for Jews to pray at the western wall. But back then he hadn’t known the full extent of how sacred this wall was for Jews. The two men soon agreed that they ought to seek an occasion to speak with Saladin about this matter before he took the city.
Their friendship grew during the following weeks as Moses began to urge Arn to stand up and try to walk. The doctor’s opinion was that he shouldn’t wait either too short or too long a time to get back on his feet. In the first instance he risked tearing open the wound in his leg again, but if he delayed too long the leg might stiffen and grow weak.
At first they walked only a few turns around the garden among the palms and fountains and pools. It was easy to walk there, because the whole garden up to the roots of the palm trees was covered with mosaics. Soon Arn was allowed to borrow some clothes, and they could venture out on cautious promenades in the city. Since the great mosque stood only a stone’s throw or two from the hospital, that was one of their first destinations. As infidels they were not allowed to enter the mosque itself, but they could go into the surrounding courtyard, where Moses showed him all the wonderful gold mosaics in the covered arcades. They clearly stemmed from the Christian era, while the Muslim patterns in black, white, and red in the marble floor were from the time of the Umayyads. Arn was astonished that all the Christian Byzantine art was allowed to remain untouched, since it depicted both people and saints, an art that most Muslims would regard as ungodly. And the great mosque was quite clearly a church, even though a minaret had been built beside it.
Moses ben Maimon pointed out that as far as he knew, it was the opposite in Jerusalem, where the two great mosques had now been churches for some time. It was practical, after all, he said with a hint of irony, to keep all such holy sites in
tact. Because as soon as somebody new conquered the structures, all they had to do was tear down the cross from the cupola and put up a crescent moon, or vice versa, depending on who won and who lost. It would be worse if they had to tear down the old holy sites every time and build new ones.
Because Arn knew nothing about the Jewish faith, this was one of their first major topics of discussion, and since he could read Arabic, Moses ben Maimon loaned him a book he had written himself entitled Guide for the Perplexed. Once Arn started to read the book, their conversations became endlessly long, for what Moses ben Maimon worked on most in his philosophy was to find the correct juncture between reason and faith, between the teachings of Aristotle and the pure faith, which many people believed to be free of reason and a revelation from God. Making these alleged opposites mesh together seamlessly was the greatest task of philosophy, in his view.
With some difficulty Arn followed along in these lengthy arguments, for as he said, his mind had gone through a drought since the time in his youth when at least the ideas of Aristotle were with him every day. But he did agree that nothing could be more important than making faith reasonable. For the war in the Holy Land had shown with the power of an earthquake what blind, unreasoning faith would lead to. That so many men could walk across the trembling ground and say that they saw nothing and heard nothing was one of the great mysteries of the intellectual world.
Arn’s scabs began to fall off, leaving angry red but healing scars; at the same time his friendship with the doctor and philosopher Moses ben Maimon grew, along with his ability to think of other things besides rules and obedience. He felt as though his body was not the only part of him undergoing the process of healing.
He may have cast himself with such hypnotic zeal into the world of the higher intellect because he wanted to push aside the gnawing knowledge of what was now happening outside in the rest of the world. But his unconscious effort to keep this knowledge at bay met with difficulties whenever others who were being cared for at the Hamediyeh Hospital had visitors. With jubilation they would announce that now Acre and Nablus had fallen, now Beirut or Jebail, now this or that fortress had been seized. It was not easy to be the only Christian when everyone around him reacted with such strong and boisterous joy at the influx of such news.