That statement made Father Henri hesitant, because hardly any living man had encountered so many other men with weapons 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 Guilbert 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, be cause 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 landed 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.

   So from the beginning he had trained Arn to use both hands, to shift from day to day or from week to week. But he had never seen any appreciable difference in his technique, except that the boy's left arm seemed to be somewhat stronger than his right. But that also meant that it was possible from the very first to build a secret skill into the boy's technique; he could suddenly toss the sword from one hand to the other and then begin to circle clockwise instead of counterclockwise around his opponent. If the opponent was dressed in heavy gear and his fighting fundamentals were unsure, the sudden change in tactics would have a devastating effect.

   Brother Guilbert was well aware that such a line of thinking might possibly be sinful. He had also confessed them to Father Henri, but explained that as long as his task was merely to teach the boy, he had to do it as best he could. Since God had still not expressed His wish for the boy's calling in life, there was probably no difference for the time being in reading Ovid in secret with red cheeks or holding the sword in his left hand, was there?

   When Father Henri consulted God, he received the answer that as long as the boy showed the same zeal in his studies as in Brother Guilbert's warlike games, then all was as it should be. But not so if he should begin to prefer arrows and sword to Glossa Ordinaria. Fortunately Arn showed no such tendencies in that direction.

   And while Father Henri always preached diligence and discipline, cleanliness and prayer, Brother Guilbert always preached agility and agility, agility and diligence. It was important, just as in musical rhythm, to learn to feel when the arrow would fly toward a spot ahead of the moving target so that arrow and target would meet there. But it was equally important always to keep moving his feet, never to stand still waiting for the opponent's blow; he had to be somewhere else when the blow came so that he could strike back the very next instant.

   Diligence and discipline. Cleanliness and prayer. Agility and agility, agility and diligence. Arn followed all these rules with the same ease as he followed the rules about obeying and loving all the brothers, the two most important rules at the monastery, always to speak the truth, the third rule; and then all the other less important ones, which sometimes barely made sense, such as the rules about eating at the dinner table and going to bed.

   But it was no trick at all for him to follow this divine order of things. On the contrary, it was a joy. Sometimes he wondered how other children behaved out there in the base world; he did have faint memories of tobogganing, rolling hoops, and other childish games. He may have missed some of that, just as every night at the last prayer hour he prayed for his mother's soul and then missed her breath, her voice, and her hands; just as he prayed for his brother Eskil and remembered how they had been torn from each other in tears. But he understood, at any rate he felt that he understood, that the greatest happiness for a boy must be to be able to divide his time between all the wonders that books held and all the hard work in sweat and sometimes tears of pain that Brother Guilbert offered.