But Arn gritted his teeth, because he had a task to carry out responsibly. After a while he dared raised his eyes somewhat. And then he raised his eyes unavoidably to their breasts under thin summer shifts and their happy, coquettish smiles and their curious eyes.

   Her name was Birgite and she had thick copper-red hair gathered in a single braid down her back; she was the same age as he was, and she often wanted him to show her something over again even though he was sure she had already learned it. When he sat down next to her he could feel the warmth of her thigh, and when she pretended to fumble he took her hands to show her one more time how to knot and crochet the net.

   He didn't know that now he was a sinner, so it took a while before Father Henri realized what was happening. But by then it was too late.

   She was the most beautiful creature Arn had ever seen in his life, with the possible exception of Khamsiin. And he began dreaming of her at night, so that he awoke self-defiled without having consciously done it. He began dreaming of her in the daytime too, when he was supposed to be busy with other things. When Brother Guilbert once gave him a box on the ear because he wasn't paying attention during practice, he hardly knew what had happened.

   When Birgite shyly asked him to bring some of the herbs that they had in the cloister, the ones that smelled like a dream, he assumed that she must mean lemon balm or lavender. A brief furtive question to Brother Lucien quickly decided the choice; all women were crazy about lavender, muttered Brother Lucien absentmindedly, having no idea what a fire he had just ignited.

   At first Arn smuggled out a twig or two now and then. But when she kissed him on the forehead, quickly so that no one would see, he lost his wits completely. The next time he brought her a whole armful, which Birgite, chirping with glee, at once carried off home. He watched her nimble bare feet moving so swiftly that the sand sprayed around them.

   It was in that state, pining with an absent look and gaping mouth, that Brother Guy found his young apprentice. And with that there was a brusque stop to the infatuation, because at the same time Brother Lucien, to his perplexity, had found big, mysterious holes in his supply of lavender.

   Arn was punished with two weeks on bread and water and isolation for meditation and prayer during the first week. Since he didn't have his own cell but shared one with several lay brothers, he now had to do his penance in a free cell inside the closed section of the monastery. With him he took the Holy Scriptures, the oldest and most worn-out copy, and nothing else.

   Of his two great sins he could understand one of them, but the other one he could not. No matter how much he honestly tried, no matter how much he prayed for the Holy Virgin's forgiveness.

   He had stolen lavender; that was something concrete and understandable. Lavender was a desirable product outside the cloister, and Brother Lucien sold it with much success. Arn had simply mistaken something that was gratia, such as teaching the method for knotting nets, with something that existed for income, such as Brother Guilbert's sword-forging or Brother Lucien's plants—although not all the plants, by any means. Some of them, like chamomile, were gratia as well.

   Father Henri had also noticed this. Even though theft was theft, and thus an abominable breach of the cloister's rules, this was something that, to say the least, had occurred out of youthful ignorance. Father Henri had carefully listened to Brother Guy's view of what had happened. Yet this led to Brother Guy also receiving a reprimand since he had not taken Arn's errors very seriously, and had even slipped in an explanation that if Father Henri had seen the girl himself then the whole matter would not have seemed so mysterious.

   Arn's second and worse sin was that he had felt lust. Had he been a brother admitted to the order, he would have been punished with half a year of bread and water, and he would have been allowed to work only with the kitchen garbage and the latrines.

   In his isolation Arn now had to repent for his sin of stealing the lavender, a sin that he easily could regret sincerely. But it was impossible for him to understand why it was worse than theft to long for and dream about Birgite. He couldn't stop himself. His hair shirt didn't help, the cold of night in his cell didn't help, nor did the hard wooden bed without a lambskin or blanket. When he lay awake he saw her before him. If he managed to fall asleep he dreamed about her freckled face and brown eyes or her naked feet running quick as little kid-goats through the sand. And his body behaved shamefully as soon as he fell asleep. In the morning one of the brothers, without saying a word, would put a bucket of ice-cold water in Arn's cell. The first thing he did was to shove his shameful member into the water to cool off the all-too-obvious sin.

   And when he had to compose himself so he could devote himself to the Holy Scriptures, it was as if the Devil himself were leading him to the very passages that he shouldn't read. He could find his way around in the Holy Scriptures so well that he tried looking up verses at random with his eyes closed. And yet he found verses such as:

Love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehe ment flame.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

   No matter how Arn tried to use his knowledge of how God's word should be read and interpreted, he could not view love as a sin. This power, which God the Father called a blessing to humanity, which was so strong that an ocean could not drown it, and no man, no matter how rich, could buy it for himself for coins of silver, this power that was as impossible to subdue as death itself, how could that be a sin?

   During Arn's second week of penance on bread and water, when he was allowed to speak, Father Henri sternly brought up the subject, since they had soon agreed about the theft of the lavender. He wanted to try to get the overheated young man to understand what love was. Hadn't Saint Bernard himself described it all as clearly as water?

   A human being begins by loving himself for his own sake. The next stage in development is that humans learn to love God, but still for their own sake and not for God's sake. Then humanity does learn to love God, and no longer for their own sake but for God's sake. Finally, humanity learns to love humanity, but only for God's sake.

   What happened in that process of development was that cupiditas, or desire, which lies at the heart of all human appetite, ended up in control and was converted into caritas, so that all base desire was cleansed away and love became pure. All this was elementary, wasn't it?

   Arn reluctantly agreed that it was indeed elementary; like almost everyone else at Vitae Schola he was quite familiar with all the texts of Bernard de Clairvaux. But as Arn understood it, there must be two types of love. It was true that he loved Father Henri, Brother Guilbert, Brother Lucien, Brother Guy, Brother Ludwig, and all the other monks. Without hesitation he could fix his blue eyes on Father Henri's brown eyes and confirm this, and he knew that Father Henri could see straight into his soul.