The Road to Jerusalem - Crusades Trilogy 01

by Jan Guillou

  Father Henri was secretly rather happy at the eagerness with which Arn came running to get his new reading instructions, or to be quizzed on the previous day's Bible text. The plan was for the boy to be trained half in physical labors and half in spiritual matters. Since God's intentions for him had not yet been revealed, this method could not be called faulty, at least.

  It was possible to imagine, and without thinking especially ill of him for that matter, that the time spent with Brother Guil-bert was more pleasant than the time spent in the scriptorium; that his time with the lay brothers who were building the walls, where Arn was asked to carry mortar to places where it was dif-ficult for a grown man to squeeze through, was more pleasant than the time he had to spend in the kitchen; that his time down at the harbor and out on the fjord with the fishermen was more pleasant than the time spent practicing a complicated vocal part for the next big mass.

  But with little Arn, Father Henri noticed nothing of the sort; it was as though Arn attended with the same eagerness to everything actually implied by the cloister's chosen name: Vitae Schola.

  This boy might become any sort of man. He might end his days as the prior of a monastery, as far as Father Henri could see. He might also become something that was the complete opposite, about which Brother Guilbert spoke in secret, and which they ought not mention aloud, according to Father Henri. With regard to God's intentions for Arn, they had no certainty as yet.

  So it was a matter of continuing as they had so far, to give both the spirit and the hand their due.

  Father Henri had moved his daily lesson books to one of the arcades leading to the garden, and it was here that he sat deeply engrossed one morning when Arn came darting in. His feet were wet because he had come directly from the lavatorium; it was against the rules to pass from work of the hands to work of the spirit without first cleaning oneself. He had spent the past two hours on the last of the masonry work up in the tower of the cloister church. There had been more to do at the end than they had thought when they finally decided on the date for the consecration. The scaffolding should really be removed before Archbishop Eskil arrived to bless the church.

  But when they began tearing down the scaffolding they also had a better view. Brother Guilbert and Brother Richard stood on the ground and discovered first one and then another crack that had to be patched, or joints that were not properly done. Arn was sent up to the top to climb about like a little marten to carry out all their demands for final improvements. Since he was so small compared to all the others, Arn was the only one who could climb without fear or difficulty after the wooden scaffolds had been removed. The height didn't bother him at all, since he was firmly convinced that God would not easily visit misfortune on someone who was just a child. Besides, he was laboring to complete a work in His honor. At least that was how Arn explained it when one of the brothers tentatively asked whether he was afraid of heights.

  His reply was perhaps not entirely true. Not that he was lying. At Vitae Schola no one lied; such behavior would be a gross breach of the rules of the monastery. But Arn also held a conviction, which he had no doubt imbibed with his mother's milk, that God had a definite plan for his life and that this plan could hardly be that Arn should lay stones for some brief years of his childhood and then lose his footing and fall to his death or knock himself senseless, as two lay brothers had done during the construction. That was why he felt no fear.

  But giving such an answer, if anyone had asked him, would have been to demonstrate pride, to express a belief that he was superior to others. And it would also have been a great sin, per-haps even greater than lying.

  Once he had fallen from a high tower. He didn't remember much about it, but he had read the account in a copy of the book of memory up at Varnhem, and Father Henri had talked with him about how he should understand it all. God had wanted to save his life for a future task, a great task. That was the most important part of the interpretation of the account, and anyone could see that.

  About a year earlier, the reading lessons had become more and more directed toward that very purpose: how one should interpret text, and above all the Holy Scriptures. It was to such a lesson that Arn had now come running, a bit late and out of breath with his feet bare but newly washed, slipping on the polished limestone tiles in the arcade where he found Father Henri.

  But Father Henri did not chide him; he seemed to be in a very good mood. He sat there with a pleased smile, as if lost in thought, and simply stroked the boy's little shaved head for a moment before he said anything.

  Arn, who had sat down next to Father Henri on the stone bench, saw that Glossa Ordinaria lay open before him. Even though the boy was sitting too far away to read the text, he could guess quite well which section of the book the monk was reading.

  "Well," said Father Henri presently, as he slowly left his world of thought. "If we begin with the text that you will sing solo toward the end of the singing mass . . . how are we to understand . . . by the way, sing me the first lines!"

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

  he leadeth me beside the still waters.

  He restoreth my soul:

  he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

  Arn sang in his clear soprano, so that the brothers in the garden stood up from their work, leaned on their tools, and lis-tened with gentle smiles. They all loved the boy's singing.

  "Excellent, excellent, we can stop there," said Father Henri. "And now we have to understand this text. Shall we interpret it morally or literally? No, of course not, but how then? "

  "It's obviously an allegorical text," said Arn, panting; he needed more air since he had sung when he was still slightly out of breath.

  "So you mean that we're not actually sheep, my son? Well, that's obvious, but why use this simile?"

  "It's clear, it's easy to understand," Arn surmised with a little frown. "Everyone has seen sheep and shepherds, and just as the sheep need their shepherd for protection and care, we need God. Even though we're human beings and not sheep, God becomes like our shepherd."

  "Hmm," said Father Henri. "So far it's not difficult. But what does 'He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness' mean? Do sheep have souls?"

  "No," said Arn thoughtfully. He sensed one of Father Henri's traps of logic, but he had already declared that the text should be interpreted allegorically. "Since the allegory from the beginning is obvious . . . that of the sheep representing us, so . . . the text following it should be interpreted literally. The Lord really does restore our souls."

  "Yes, that's probably true," muttered Father Henri with a sly little smile. "But what about what follows: 'he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness'? What paths are we talking about? Literal meaning or allegorical?"

  "I don't know," said Arn. "Can't it be both?"

  "Can that be so? A text that should be read both literally and allegorically? Now you're going to have to explain yourself, my

  son."

  "In the line before it says that God restores our souls, so it's literally about us and not about some sheep," Arn began, to win a little time while he thought as incisively as he could. "But of course God can lead us on the right paths in the literal sense; paths on the ground, visible paths, the sort of paths that horses and oxcarts and people walk on. If He wants to, He can lead us on the path to Rome, for example, don't you think?"

  "Hmm," said Father Henri, looking a little stern. "It probably hasn't escaped you that this part about paths here and there is one of the most common metaphors in the Holy Scriptures. If the Lord's ways are inscrutable, then we're not talking about any livestock paths, are we?"

  "No, that's obvious, the paths of righteousness refer to things like the path away from sin, the path to salvation, and so on. Allegorical, that is."

  "Good. Where were we? How does the next verse go? No, don't sing it, or the brothers in the garden will just idle
about.

  Well?"

  "'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me,'" Arn rattled off. "The meaning must be general, I think. If I find myself in great difficulties, if I'm in the presence of death, such as climbing high up in the tower carrying mortar, for example, then I need fear nothing because God is with me. The phrase 'shadow of death' must be allegorical; death doesn't literally cast its shadow any-

  where, and there is no special valley where I could walk beneath that shadow. And even if there were . . . purely theoretically, then it would not be the only place where I would feel solace. Not even in the darkest valley, that is, in dark moments, in sorrow or in danger, do I need to despair. Is that about right?"

  On the day that Arn outgrew his old bow and arrow, that small pleasure came to an end for the time being. He had his practice area just outside the smithy and could run out now and then during the natural pauses in the work to shoot while the iron cooled down or new forges were fired up. But one day Brother Guilbert came out and saw how the boy, without hesitation but also without seeming especially interested in the task, shot twelve arrows in a row into the moving target, a wad of linen rags tied up with thongs and dangling back and forth on a thin rope.

  It was time once again to start on something new. For even though Brother Guilbert thought it important that the instruments he put into Arn's hands be adapted to his size and strength, it was equally important that the boy always practice with full concentration. If it became too easy, the practice would be blunted and have a negative effect. Brother Guilbert found this difficult to explain, even to grown men. To Arn he did not explain much, nor was it necessary, since obedience was one of the most important rules at the monastery.

  They found yew trees as material for the new bow and ash for the arrows. Because when the bow was changed, new arrows were also needed, since everything had to be in the right proportion to function together, just as the movement of the hand and the power of thought must be in balance.

  It took a long time, from the cold springtime when only the snowdrops ventured forth until the early summer when the tulips stretched in long red rows along the arcades, to fabricate the new bow and its arrows. Arn had to be present to learn from every task, how the wood was supposed to dry in a dark and sufficiently cool place, how to cut laminates from various parts of the wood and polish them to an even shape, how to join them together with fish glue and lay them in a press, and then polish them anew. With the arrows it was simpler, of course. Arrow points belonged to the simple forging tasks that Arn could manage entirely on his own.

  When it was finally time to begin testing the new working instruments, Brother Guilbert also changed the distance to the target from eighteen long paces to twenty-five. It was hard and strenuous to draw the new bow, and the effort affected the aim of the arrows so that sometimes Arn missed completely. When he then showed annoyance, Brother Guilbert was upon him at once, scolding him for indolence and insufficient confidence, the one sin as serious as the other. And Arn had to pray a number of Pater Nosters on his knees before the bow and arrows as punish-ment before he was called back to practice.

  At such moments Brother Guilbert was tempted to explain to the boy how well he shot, without a doubt better than most of the adult, well-trained archers. But Arn had never been able to compare himself with anyone but Brother Guilbert himself. Brother Guilbert had always kept quiet about his earlier life and what it was that had made him renounce that life for constant penance at a Cistercian monastery. Father Henri had forbidden him from telling his story to Arn.

  One day a group of soldiers on their way home from the Danish island of Fyn, all of them in good humor because some war was over and they would soon see their loved ones, stopped outside the cloister at the very place where Arn was practicing.

  At first they had found it comical to see a little lay brother with a shaved head, brown monk's cowl, and fluttering locks around his ears holding a bow and arrow in his hands. The image seemed entirely implausible. They uttered some coarse humor but then stopped to watch the little boy, expecting to fling about some more jokes. Brother Guilbert, who was standing next to Arn and instructing him, pretended not to understand the Nordic lan-guage or at least not to hear the remarks.

  But the soldiers soon fell silent, because they could not believe their eyes. The little lay brother stood at eighteen paces and put one arrow after another into the target in the space of half a palm's breadth. When he missed by a thumb's breadth he seemed annoyed and apologized to his teacher, sharpening his concentration for the next shot. The soldiers moved off in silence. A short distance away they began arguing about something.

  Brother Guilbert understood quite well the soldiers' embarrassment. None of them, any more than Brother Guilbert himself, had ever seen a boy with such talent. But neither then nor later did Arn comprehend this, because for him there were only two archers: himself and Brother Guilbert, and compared with the smith he was the worst archer in the world.

  Father Henri had often shown himself unwilling to discuss the topic. He thought that Arn was diligent in reading and as intelligent as one could expect of a boy whose voice had not yet begun to break—woe the day that happened—but neither more nor less. Father Henri didn't consider himself to have been particularly bright as a child, yet he was reminded of himself when he looked at Arn. The most important thing was the zeal with which both he and now Arn studied. He also recalled with a smile how as a very young boy he had also discovered books that were not intended for small boys; he had been caught in the act, and was punished in much the same way he now punished Arn for the same thing. But most important was the inspiration to read, the diligence to learn, and perseverance. God gave everyone nearly equal intelligence, and it was the responsibility of each and every one to fill his mind with content, to make the most of one's talents.

  To counter that logic, however, Brother Guilbert had a simple objection. Because in that case, God must have also given every-one the ability to handle a bow or a sword equally, yet some got markedly less from the instrument and others got much more. Little Arn had been given more of such gifts than any man, young or old, that Brother Guilbert had ever encountered in his life, he claimed.

  That statement made Father Henri hesitant, because hardly any living man had encountered so many other men with weap-ons in hand as had Brother Guilbert; that much was certain. On the other hand, Brother Guilbert could not possibly lie to his own prior.

  But Father Henri had felt uncomfortable with this topic of discussion, and had come to an agreement with Brother Guilbert—that is, he had forbidden him to put any whims into the boy's head. And that was why Arn never understood when he was doing well with the bow or sword, but only knew or was brusquely reminded of when he did something wrong.

  Arn had not yet been allowed to use a real sword in any of his practice sessions. Nor was it necessary, for Brother Guil-bert could see what would happen later when the boy's arms grew stronger and he made the transition from wooden sticks to steel.

  When it came to handling a sword, the quickness of the mind and the eye, the balance of the foot, and the feeling in the hand were much more important than the strength of the arm. Brother Guilbert had seen little of the way that Nordic men handled swords, yet he could tell that these barbarians' technique was based almost entirely on strength. Their swords were short, because they never fought on horseback; they believed that horses were unsuited to war, oddly enough. And they stood in ranks close to each other, almost like the ancient Romans and Greeks a thousand years before, although they didn't call their formation a phalanx but a fylking. This technique required them almost exclusively to hack at an angle from above, either from the left or the right. Each man, using at least a semblance of a shield and with at least a minimum of self-preservation, could parry every such blow without having to think or move. And so they would keep at it until one of the opponents tired and the other more or less by accident l
anded a blow on his opponent's skull. Under these circumstances it was a matter of course that the one with the strongest arms would win in the end.

  For the first three or four years Arn had been given his early training with swaddled wooden sticks, and Brother Guilbert methodically drummed into the boy's head the three-count rhythm so that it would stick and remain there forever. High blow from the left, low blow from the right, and then a lunge straight ahead or a new blow from the side. Thousands and thousands of times.

  The first thing Arn learned in this way was the rhythm and the movement. The second thing he learned was to control his anger, for Brother Guilbert always struck him with the third blow, every time during the first two years. Not until the third year had Arn learned to control his feet, his movements, and his rhythm sufficiently that he could sometimes parry the third, painful thrust.

  In the fourth year Brother Guilbert made fairly heavy wooden swords, which he weighted precisely with an inserted metal rod. It was important that the wooden sword in Arn's hand have the same weight in relation to his small arms that a real sword would have later in life, the same way that the bows gradually had to be made more difficult to draw. So Brother Guilbert had to experiment a good deal with the fabrication until it seemed right.

  It was during practice with the sword that Brother Guilbert discovered that the boy, just as in the smithy, could use his left hand as well as his right. In every other context in the cloister, Arn's teachers, just as they hounded him in the scriptorium, tried to wean him from using the unclean hand. But for Brother Guilbert the matter appeared in a different light. He consulted his conscience and he consulted God. He didn't want to involve Father Henri in this dilemma.

  Soon he realized that it wasn't a case of normal lefthandedness, because such men did exist and on occasion in his former life Brother Guilbert had faced such a man with sword in hand. And it was not easy, he knew that. It was as if everything one had learned was suddenly backwards.