Sigurd won
at Sidon, men remember this.
Weapons were wielded fiercely
in the heated battle.
With might the warriors crushed
the stubborn army's fortress.
Beautiful swords were colored with
blood when the prince prevailed.
The applause from the hall went on and on, followed by the buzz of voices as everyone began talking at once, about the great deeds in olden times, and the kings of their own time who were like Sverker Limp-Cock and not Sigurd Jorsalafar. Magnus attempted a witty joke that it was different with Norsemen, since he himself was of Norwegian lineage. But nobody thought it was a good joke, least of all Erik Jedvardsson, who now stood up holding the old drinking horn they had placed before him—a Norwegian drinking horn at that, although he was probably unaware of it. And he drank with manly vigor, draining it to the bottom without taking the horn from his lips. Then he ex plained that he had just seen before him, as if in a vision, the new coat of arms that would be his and that of the whole realm. There would be three golden crowns: one crown for Svealand, one for Eastern Götaland, and one for Western Götaland. The three crowns would be set against a field the color of the sky. This, he now swore, would become in the future the new coat of arms for him and the entire kingdom.
The hall seethed with excited applause. But Erik Jedvardsson wanted to say more. At the same time he had to piss, and since he wanted to do both equally urgently, he announced in a loud, slurred voice on the way out the door that each and every one who followed him in the future would be assured of reaping honor during the crusade. Perhaps going only so far as to the Finns on the other side of the Eastern Sea on the first venture, but then, after the Finns were converted, perhaps our men needed to gain a foothold in the Holy Land as well.
When he reached the door he didn't bother to go outside across the high threshold; staggering, he leaned against the doorjamb for support and relieved himself right where he stood.
He never noticed that he was pissing on Arn and his own son Knut. And they in turn could do nothing but huddle together and suffer in silence. Neither of the boys would ever forget it.
Especially since they had now been pissed on by a man who would become a saint as well as king.
Chapter 3
The winter held Arnäs in an iron grip. All roads to the south had been impassable since the eighth day of Christmas, and even though the ice on Lake Vänern was thick enough to cross, at least with wide-runnered sleighs, right now there was no great reason to take the trouble. What Magnus wanted to sell over there, toward Lödöse, would bring double the price toward the end of winter when supplies began running low in many storehouses. At Arnäs the work went on as usual in the cooperages, the slaughterhouses, and the salting houses, as it did in the women's workshops where they prepared wool and linen and wove both thick cloth and tapestries to the delight of both man and God.
For the boys Eskil and Arn, the hard winter was a wonderful time. Their teacher and lay brother Erlend from Varnhem had returned to the monastery just before Christmastime, and although Paulsmas was rapidly approaching on January 25th, he had still not been able to make his way back through the snow to Arnäs. The days that the boys should have spent sitting with their noses in the Latin text about the philosopher Saint Bernard had now become free, and they spent the time in lively winter games and boys' mischief. What was most fun was to catch mice down in the grain stores and then release them among the thrall women in the cookhouses. Shrieking with laughter, the boys would run off as shrill screams and loud banging and clattering spoke of what was happening to the mice.
Once they sneaked into the armory and took two old-fashioned round shields out to the long slope in front of the barn near the longhouse where the hay was brought in late in the summer. They sat down on the shields and slid like small otters down the whole slope. Their loud, happy laughter attracted attention, and when their father came and saw what they were doing with the equipment of grown men, he flew into a rage and gave them a thrashing that made them run wailing to their mother in the weaving house. But that little trouble soon passed. The thrall Svarte, who had seen the boys' inventiveness, went to the carpenters' workshop, found some suitable boards, and fashioned them with dowels into a toboggan. Then he steamed one end of the board and bent it slowly upward like the front end of sleigh runners, and ran a leather cord through it as reins for the toboggan, and soon the boys were sliding full speed down the snowy slopes with shrieks and laughter once more.
At first Magnus was out of sorts at seeing his sons tumbling about in the snow in happy games with the thralls' children. He didn't think it was seemly. Eskil and Arn were going to grow up to be the owners of thralls, not their playmates. In Sigrid's opinion, however, children were children, and the vagaries of adult life probably wouldn't elude any of them when they got a little older, be they thrall or son of the lord. Besides, now the boys got out of studying Latin.
She smiled in her ambiguous way as she said that. The fact that the boys had to learn Latin was just as obvious to her as it was incomprehensible to Magnus. She believed that it was the language of the future. He thought that only monks and priests needed such knowledge; in Lödöse he could trade with people from afar in everyday language, even if he had to muddle through and repeat things sometimes. Anyway, as soon as the lay brother managed to get through the snow from Varnhem to resume studying with the boys, the games with the thralls would be over.
But the winter refused to release its grip on Arnäs, and Eskil and Arn had never spent a winter that was more fun, since they were able to play even more games with the thrall children. They built a fort in the snow, and took turns defending it while the others attempted to take the fort, each side with the same number of thrall children. Eskil and Arn had little wooden swords in their hands, while the others had to make do with snowballs, since they were thralls and not allowed to bear arms. The result was a few tears and some black-and-blue marks.
They also helped Kol, Svarte's boy who was their own age, to catch live mice for Svarte to use as bait in his ermine traps. Ermine pelts were very valuable; four of them would buy a thrall. When the wolves began to come near Arnäs, Svarte put scraps from the slaughterhouses by an opening in one of the most distant hay-barns, to keep watch for the wolves when the night was moonlit, calm, and quiet.