With Brother Guilbert he had now become both a worker and a pupil. He was given all the heavier tasks in the smithies, and his arms grew in bulk almost as fast as his body shot up in height. He mastered most of the everyday smithing activities so that he could make good and marketable items. Only when it came to forging swords did he still lag far behind Brother Guilbert.

   The two mares, Khadiya and Aisha, had now given birth to three foals, and Khamsiin had grown into a stallion as powerful as Nasir. It was Arn's job to take care of all the horses from Outremer, to break the new foals, and make sure that Nasir and Khamsiin were each kept isolated in a fenced pasture so that they wouldn't mate with Nordic mares in an order other than what Brother Guilbert had determined after precise studies.

   Yet Brother Guilbert's great hope that these horses from Outremer would bring in much silver was fulfilled only slowly. The Danish magnates who came to visit primarily to buy new swords for themselves and herbs for their women regarded the foreign horses with suspicion. They thought that these animals were too spindly and didn't look like they could do very much. At first Brother Guilbert had a hard time taking such objections seriously and actually suspected that the Danes were joking with him. Then he realized that the barbarians were quite seri ous, sometimes even leading in their own animals to show him proudly how a real horse should look. Brother Guilbert grew dejected.

   Finally circumstances led him to devise a trick that did indeed work well, but which made him feel guilty and contrite. One of these Danes led in his chubby, unruly Nordic horse to compare its advantages to those of the "skinny" ones. The man extolled both his steed's strength and his speed, which far surpassed anything foreign. Brother Guilbert at once had a bright idea. He suggested that the honorable Danish knight should race down to the shore and back to the cloister, and that only a little cloister boy would ride one of the new horses. And if the honorable Danish gentleman won the race, he wouldn't have to pay anything for the sword he had just purchased.

   To his wide-eyed surprise Arn was told that he was to ride Khamsiin, and race a fat old man on a horse that looked very similar to the man. Arn had a hard time believing his ears, but he had to obey. When the two riders were ready outside the cloister walls, Arn asked Brother Guilbert, speaking in Latin out of sheer nervousness although the two of them always spoke French together, whether he was supposed to ride full tilt or take it easy so that the sausage-looking horse could keep up. Oddly enough, Brother Guilbert gave him strict orders to ride at full speed. He obeyed, as always.

   Arn was already back at the cloister when the Danish knight had made it only halfway and was down by the shore turning around.

   Then some rich men from Ringsted, who enjoyed racing horses and betting money on them, now found that the skinny horses from Vitskøl were at least good for one thing. The rumor then spread to Roskilde, and soon horses from Vitae Schola were commanding large sums of money. But that was not what Brother Guilbert had had in mind.

   The exercises Brother Guilbert was now asking Arn to try on horseback were no longer simply about balance and speed, but had to do with matters of considerably greater finesse. They spent about an hour each day in one of the stallion's pastures, riding around each other in specific patterns, backing, rearing and turning in the air, moving sideways or sideways and forward or back at the same time, teaching the horses which signals meant strike with the forehooves and jump forward at the same time, or backward kick with both legs followed by a jump to the side. It was an art that Arn liked when everything went as planned, but he could find it somewhat monotonous. At least during the obligatory practices. It was more exciting with the completely free exercises when they practiced with wooden swords or lances against each other.

   The practice on foot had become much more difficult, and was mainly about striking and parrying with swords; for a long time now, Arn had been using a real steel sword. He was still humbly convinced that he was a wretched swordsman. Yet he didn't give up; he persevered with this work in this Lord's vineyard as well. Lack of faith would have been a great sin.

   His work with Brother Guy down at the beach was quite another story. Brother Guy had finally given up the apparently impossible task of enticing the Danes around Limfjord to eat mussels. The mussel beds had been reduced to a fraction of their original ambitious size and now yielded only enough to meet the demand of the Provençal cooks at Vitae Schola.

   Brother Guy's task was not to bring in income to Vitae Schola but to spread the blessings of civilization, and he was going to do that by setting a good example. The intentions behind his work were much the same as those for the brothers who worked in farming: not to focus on selling the produce, primarily, but to inform. In that respect he had begun by failing miserably in introducing the populace to the blessings of mussels.

   But things went better with fishing gear and boat-building. When he saw the Limfjordings' fish-spears with straight tips, he went to Brother Guilbert and asked him to make some fishspears with barbed tips, which he later distributed to the fishermen. When he discovered that the Limfjordings fished only with stationary equipment inside the fjord, he began to make movable nets and bottom seines. The difference between his nets and the nets of the Limfjordings was primarily the suppleness that came from the larger mesh and thinner material that he used.

   It took Arn about a year to learn the art of tying nets well enough that Brother Guy pronounced his nets to be as good as those made by a boy from home. For Arn the work was not hard, but tedious.

   Soon enough everything began functioning the way Brother Guy had intended. The Limfjordings started coming from the villages around Vitae Schola to study with curiosity, and at first with some suspicion, how to use movable nets. Brother Guy, with Arn as his interpreter, naturally offered to share his knowledge in a Christian spirit.

   This meant that now and then Brother Guy would leave Arn alone at the boathouse on the shore while he took Danish fishermen out in the boats to show them how to place nets from a moving boat. But those who came to learn how to tie the new nets were all women, young and old, since net-tying was women's work around the Limfjord.

   And that was how Arn, whose only experience of women was what resembled a mirage in his evening prayers when he prayed for his mother's soul, now suddenly found himself almost daily surrounded by women. At first all the women, young and old, made merry at the expense of the gangly young man with the strong arms who, blushing and stammering, kept his eyes fixed on the ground so that he always showed his shaved pate instead of his blue eyes.

   Arn knew in theory how a teacher should behave, since he had had so many. But what he thought he knew about the art of teaching did not match what he now experienced, since his pupils did not behave with the obedience and dignity that befitted pupils. They joked and giggled, and the older women sometimes even unchastely stroked his head.