by Jan Guillou
As a last resort, King Sverker had prevailed upon the Pope's Cardinal Nicolaus Breakspear to pay a visit to Sven Grate on his way to Rome and speak of reason and peace.
The cardinal failed at this task, just as he had recently failed to ordain an archbishop over a unified Gotaland and Svealand.
The papal commission to name an archbishop had failed be-cause the Swedes and Goths were unable to agree on the location of the archbishop's cathedral, and thus where the archbishop should have his see. The cardinal's peace-making assignment failed for the simple reason that the Danish king was convinced of his coming victory. His newly conquered realms would then be subject to Archbishop Eskil in Lund, so Sven Grate could see no Christian reason for refraining from war.
King Sverker had made no preparations for the defense of the realm, since he was too wrapped up in mourning his queen, Ulvhild, and preparing for a wedding with yet another twice-widowed woman, Rikissa. Perhaps he also thought that all the intercessions he had secured for himself at the cloister would save both him and the country.
His oafish son Johan harbored no such belief in salvation by intercession. And if the Danes should emerge from the coming battle victorious, for his part all hope would be lost. So he, and not his father the king, called a ting at the royal manor in Vreta to decide how to plan the defense against the Danes.
He had no idea how hated he was as an outcast. If his father had not been both old and weak of flesh, he would have condemned his son to death for committing two heinous deeds as well as perjury. Everyone understood that except possibly Johan himself. No man of honor wanted to prolong the war and risk losing his life for the sake of an outcast—the worst sort of violator of women.
On the other hand, many men came to the ting at Vreta filled with anticipation, but for entirely different reasons than those Johan imagined.
They had come to kill him. And they did. His own retainers didn't lift a finger to protect him. Johan's corpse was chopped into pieces of the proper size and flung to the swine in the back yards of Skara so that no royal funeral could take place.
In the year of Grace 1154 winter came early, and when the ice had settled in, King Sven Grate led his army up from Skane and into the Finn Woods in Smaland. The army burned and pillaged wherever they went, of course, but the advance was slowed by all the snow that year. Horses and oxen had a hard time making headway.
In addition, the peasants in Varend took defensive measures. They had decided at their ting that if they had to die, it was better to die like men in accordance with their forefathers' ancient beliefs. Dying like a servant or thrall without offering resistance was to die in vain. Besides, nothing was certain when it came to war except for one thing: He who did not fight, or who stood alone against a foreign army, would surely die if the army passed his way. Everything else was in the hands of the gods.
And King Sven Grate truly had a difficult time of it. The residents of Varend defended themselves one stretch of land at a time, from behind logjams, which they dragged onto the forest roads. It took a great deal of force and time to deal with these barricades, and victory was elusive. If the momentum seemed in their favor in the evening when the battle had to be broken off for supper, prayer, and sleep, by morning the defenders of the barricade would be gone. By then they would have regrouped in a village a bit farther on, with new people who had their own homes to defend, and then it would start all over again.
At night the soldiers in the Danish army deserted in large groups and began walking home. Those who were professional fighters knew that too much of the winter had already passed. Even though they might finally manage to get through these damned peasant defenders, they would end up mired in the spring mud on the plains of Western Gotaland. Besides, the peasants of Varend had a nasty way of defending themselves. At night they would sneak up in small groups, overtake the guards, and then stab as many horses and oxen in the belly as they could before reinforcements arrived. Then they would flee into the dark forest.
A horse that has been stabbed in the belly dies quite rapidly. Oxen are a bit more resilient, but even oxen die if a pitchfork or lance point has penetrated their underbelly. Naturally, the Danish army ended up with plenty of beef to roast, but it was cold comfort, since they were forced to consume their only hope of victory.
When at last Sven Grate had to accept the fact that the war could not be won, at least not this year, he decided that the army should be divided for the retreat. He would proceed home through Skane to the islands of Denmark. His jarl would take the other half of the remaining army home with him to Halland and his own manor. Sven Grate also had messengers sent home to announce that when they returned, the war would be over.
But in Varend there was plenty to avenge. And the story was long told of the woman Blenda, who sent out messages to the other women, and together they met the jarl and his men near the Nissa River with bread and salt pork. Quite a lot of salt pork, as it turned out. They provided an extraordinary feast, and oddly enough, there was plenty of ale to go with the salt pork.
The jarl and his men finally staggered off to a barn to sleep while the soldiers, just as drunk as the noblemen, had to make do as best they could underneath ox and sheep hides out in the snow. It was then that Blenda and the other women made their preparations. They tarred big torches and summoned their men, who were hiding in the forest.
When silence had fallen over the army's encampment and only snoring could be heard, they carefully barred the door of the barn and then set fire to all four corners simultaneously. Then they attacked the sleeping soldiers.
The next morning, with joyous laughter, they drowned the last of the captives beneath the ice on the Nissa River, where they had chopped two big holes so that they could drag the prisoners down under the ice as if on a long fishing line.
King Sverker had won the war with the Danes without lifting a finger or sending out a single man.
No doubt he believed that this was due both to his prayers of intercession and to God's providence. Yet he was man enough to have Blenda and her kinsmen brought before him. And he proclaimed that the women of Varend, who had shown themselves so manly in the defense of the country, should henceforth inherit just as men did. And as an eternal emblem of war they would wear a red sash with an embroidered cross of gold, an insignia that would be granted to them alone.
If King Sverker had lived longer, his decrees would surely have had greater legal effect than they did. But King Sverker's days were numbered. He would soon be murdered.
No fortress can be built to be impregnable. If strong enough motivation exists, any man's home can be pillaged and burned. But the question then is whether it is worth the price. How many besiegers had been shot to death with arrows, how many had been crushed by stones, how many had lost their will and health during the siege?
Herr Magnus knew all this, and he was greatly troubled as the construction progressed. Because what he couldn't know, what no one at that time could know, was what would happen after the death of old King Sverker. And that time was fast approaching.
Anything was possible. Sverker's eldest son Karl might win the king's power, and then nothing in particular would change. If nothing else, Sigrid had seen to improving her husband's relationship to King Sverker by donating Varnhem almost as if in his name.
But it was difficult to know much about what was happening up in Svealand, and which of the Swedes was now preparing for the battle to become king. Perhaps it was some Western Goth? Perhaps someone in their own lineage or in a friendly clan or in a hostile clan. As they waited for the decision to be made, there was nothing to do but keep building.
Arnas was located at the tip of a peninsula that jutted out into Lake Vanern, and so had a natural water defense on three sides. Next to the old longhouse a stone tower was now being erected that was as tall as seven men. The walls around the tower were still not finished, but the area was mainly protected by palisades of tightly packed, pointed oak logs. Here there was still plenty to do.
Magnus stood for a long time up in the tower on his property, trying out shots with a longbow, aiming at a bale of hay on the other side of the two wall moats. It was truly remarkable how far an arrow from a longbow could reach if he fired down from an elevated position. And after very little practice he was learning to calculate the angle so that he hit the target almost perfectly, at most an arm's length to one side or the other. Even in its present unfinished state, Arnas would be difficult to take, at least for a group of soldiers returning from some war or other who might need provisions on the way home. And eventually it would become even more fortified, although everything had its season, and Sigrid mostly wanted something different from Magnus.
He was well aware that she often got her way when they dis-agreed. By now he was even aware of how she behaved to make it look as if she weren't actually driving him before her, but rather was obediently following the will of her husband and lord—as she had done with the matter of the high seat of his Norwegian forefathers.
In the old longhouse the high seat and the walls around the end of the hall had been decorated with oak carvings from Norway, in which the dragon ship plowed through the sea, and a great serpent whose name he had forgotten encircled the entire scene. The runic inscription was ancient and difficult to decipher.
Sigrid had first proposed that they burn all these old ungodly images now that they were building afresh. The walls should be covered instead with the tapestries of the new era, in which Christian men defended the Holy City of Jerusalem, where churches were erected and heathens baptized.
Magnus had had a hard time agreeing to the idea of burning all his forefathers' skillfully made carvings. Such things were no longer created nowadays; in any case their like could not be found anywhere in Western Gotaland. But he'd also had diffi-culty arguing with her words about ungodliness and heathen art. In that sense she was right. And yet the forefathers who had carved those writhing dragons and runes had known no other way of carving; now the lovely work of their hands was all that remained of them.
At the same time as they were quarreling about the dragon patterns and the runes, they were also addressing the question of who knew how to build walls. Should the stonemasons' talents be used first for the outer defenses, or should they build the gable of the new longhouse first?
In the old longhouse, the fireplace had stretched the whole length of the building, down the middle of the floor, so that the heat was distributed more or less evenly. In the far end of the long-house were kept the thralls and the animals, while the master of the estate and his people and their guests lived in the part where the high seat was placed. During hard winters, heat was best con-served in this manner.
But now Sigrid had come up with new ideas, which of course she had learned from the monks down in Varnhem. Magnus still remembered his amazement and his skepticism when she drew it all in the sand before him. Everything was new, nothing was as before.
Her longhouse was divided into two halves, with a big door in the middle that led into an anteroom, and from there you entered either the master's half or the half with the thralls and animals. In addition, the half with the thralls and animals was divided into two floors. The upper floor served as a barn for fodder, and the lower floor as stall for the livestock. In this half of the house there was no fireplace; on the contrary, fire was something that would be forbidden on pain of severe punishment.
In the other half of the longhouse, which would be their own, with a high seat as before, the far gable would be built entirely of stone. In front of it large, flat slabs would be mortared to a fire-place almost as wide as the house, and above the fireplace a huge chimney to conduct the smoke would be built into the stone.
He'd offered many objections, and she had answers to all of them. The lack of fire along the floor was not a problem; the stone walls at the end would hold the heat inside the building, keeping it warm even through the night. No, the old vents were not necessary, as the smoke would go straight up the stone chimney above the hearth. And there was no need to worry about winds blowing through the stacked logs, as the cracks would be sealed with flax and tar.
As to his concern that the thralls and animals would have no fire in their part of the house, she patiently explained that by dividing their living quarters into two floors, the heat from the animals would remain downstairs, while upstairs the thralls (and the men) could make comfortable beds of hay.
But then, in response to one of his questions, Sigrid happened to invoke the Norwegian stave churches, which certainly had no lack of dragon patterns, and she seemed to reconsider. On closer reflection she thought she could yield on the matter of the ancestral high seats and their less than Christian ornamentation. And then, quite exhilarated and relieved, Magnus agreed at once that first they had to finish the masonry work on the new longhouse. Since now he had indeed achieved what he wanted.
Of course he had seen through her, and he understood how she managed to push through her will on almost every matter. Sometimes he felt a brief wave of anger flow through his limbs and head at the thought that his wife was acting as though she and not he was the master of Arnas.
But now, as he unstrung his longbow and shouted at one of the thralls down in the moat to gather up the arrows and return them to their place in the armory, what he saw was not merely a beautiful sight. It was a very convincing sight.
Below him in the stronghold area, the new longhouse stood with its tarred walls gleaming and its turf roof a luxuriant green. They had converted all the thatched roofs on the buildings to turf roofs with grass, even though reeds could be easily har-vested nearby. This was not only for the sake of warmth, but also because a single flaming arrow could transform thatched roofs into huge torches.
At the other end of the courtyard in the stronghold area, under protection of the high section of wall that had been completed, stood a long livestock house. Below him in the tower were stored grain and weapons. Even in its present state, he would now be able to organize the defense of Arnas in half a day.
If he looked inland, a whole village was cropping up on the other side of the moat. There stood the tannery, stinking along the lakefront beyond the other buildings where ox-hides and skins of marten and ermine were prepared, which brought in so many silver coins in Lodose. Up toward the fortress the other buildings stood in two rows, livestock stalls and thrall dwellings, stonecutter workshops and smithies, food storehouses, cookhouses, cooperages, and flax-houses. Now there were twice as many thralls and animals as there were only a few years ago.
The latter turn of events was like a miracle and just as hard to understand. He had learned from his father, who had learned from his forefathers as far back as anyone could remember, exactly how many thralls and animals a field could support in relation to its size, so that the estate owner would not be eaten out of house and home.
Now there was a whole swarm down there, twice as many as he should have had by his own reckoning, and yet Arnas had grown richer and bigger with each month that passed. The forest that had once come right up to the northern moat had now been cut as far away as ten shots with the longbow, which was as far as the eye could clearly see. The forest had become timber, which had been used to construct all the new buildings down there. New fields and pastures now covered the land that had once been forest.
And no matter how many silver coins he had spent on things that could not be made at Arnas, or those that could only be purchased for silver, such as salt or the services of the wood-carver from Bjalbo who was working on the gates, the quantity of his silver coins still kept growing, as if the coins were able to propagate like animals and thralls inside their oaken chests in the vaults and chambers of the tower.
When King Sverker had started minting coins down in Lodose two winters ago, he was the only king who had endorsed coinage as legal tender since farther back than anyone could remember, ever since the heathen time. Most tradesmen had been skeptical of the newfangled money and preferred to stay with the ol
d ways, bartering for salt and iron, hides, butter, and furs measured in bushels.
But Sigrid had urged Magnus to adopt the new method right from the start, and to be the first to accept silver for everything. She had argued that in this way he would be helping King Sverker establish a difficult new custom that others were reluctant to accept, and thus the king would remain favorably disposed toward Arnas.
So at first he had received ten times as much silver for an item as he could get now that everyone else had begun to follow the new ways. By being the first, Magnus had doubled his fortune in a few short years.
When he realized this for the first time, what power now re-sided in his money cached in the tower—without understanding why—he had felt an urge to chastise her, let her feel the rod, make her know her place as wife. But his anger had quickly abated. Instead, when he saw a whole district teeming with all the life that had been created around Arnas, he turned to God with a prayer of thanksgiving that God had granted him the wisest wife in the entire land of the Goths. Sigrid was a gift from God, that much was certain and true. And when he was alone under the roof of heaven where only God could hear his thoughts, Magnus acknowledged this without bitterness. After all, it was just he and God—yes, and Sigrid herself, of course—who knew. No man knew of this. They all thought that the flourishing region around Arnas and the two villages that belonged to Arnas down toward Forshem were his work and none other's. They all believed that he was a great man, a man to reckon with, a man who knew how to create wealth.
Presumably, although he wasn't sure, Sigrid too believed that he was floating along on that conceited delusion. He resolved never to let her see that he understood quite well that she was behind it all.
And besides, he consoled himself, he and Sigrid were as one, since whatsoever God has joined together, no man can put asunder. Everything that thrived around Arnas was the result of their common efforts, in the same way that their sons Eskil and Arn were half himself and half Sigrid.