Eskil had been less of two minds about all of this than his father, saying that knowledge must never be disdained. And the manual skills, which his brother Arn had learned so well from the monks, were something that could be taught to others. If Arn taught the thralls, they would eventually be able to take over the work themselves. But first they would have to be properly trained, and the only one who could do that was Arn. It was wrong to scorn such work if it moved the estate forward. Advances were to the advantage of everyone.

   Perhaps it was so, Magnus consoled himself, that Arn had brought so many new techniques from the monks that Arnäs would be made stronger and richer. Although it was crucial to ensure that the thralls were taught quickly, so that Arn wouldn't have to go about disgracing his clan by continuing to sweat like a thrall.

   Something even better, thought Magnus, now that the ale had made him sentimental, was that Arn had become reconciled with his stepmother Erika Joarsdotter. Magnus didn't know exactly what Arn and his wife Erika did out in the cookhouses, since he never set foot inside, but Erika seemed very pleased and happy about what had evidently taken place. Besides, it was good for Erika that someone in the family treated her well. Eskil had always had a hard time enduring his stepmother, and although Magnus had got her with child several times, since such was expected of him, it was not until the third pregnancy that she had given birth to a son. That son was not going to end up with any monks, by God. He would be taught by the retainers from childhood on, Magnus had decided.

   Erika had a deformity that everyone noticed. She was lovely to look at, but as soon as she opened her mouth anyone could hear that she spoke with a cleft palate, and the sound of her words came more from her nose than her mouth. Less polite people might then burst out laughing, which had caused Erika never to speak when strange men were present. She was equally timid whenever there was a feast and she had to ensure that the guests' women enjoyed the celebration. Magnus had a hard time talking to his wife, and he often thought back to Sigrid, who was the person he had felt closest to of anyone. But he could say this only to himself or to God.

   However, it was not to be ignored that Erika was the niece of a king, that she had royal blood, and that the two daughters and one son to whom she had given birth also had royal blood, and from two separate lineages at that.

An angel had come to Arnäs. Everything he touched instantly became better or more beautiful, and he was the only man Erika Joarsdotter had ever met who spoke to her as if she had the wit of everyone else. He never let on that he found her speech muddled; instead he excused his confusion by saying that he had not yet regained his childhood language, since he had spoken mostly with Danes when he was growing up. And unlike his older brother Eskil, he never gave any sign that Erika was like a stranger who had replaced the boys' mother.

   Quite early, right after dawn when all the other men were still asleep after the welcome feast held in his honor, Arn had come out, sober and freshly washed, to the cookhouses where Erika had just begun the day's long work with her house thralls. He had politely and with kind and considerate words asked her to show him the domains for which she was responsible as mistress of the manor, and they had taken a tour of the storehouses and cookhouses. From all the questions he asked, Erika soon grasped that he knew more than most men about the way meat had to be hung, smoked, and stored and how fish should be cooked. And he seemed not in the least embarrassed by his knowledge.

   It did not take long before he began to change everything, although he was careful to let her accompany him and help make the decisions. He took her by the arm and walked around with her, explaining what could be done at once and what would take more time.

   Arnäs was a village flanked by water on two sides. At the far end of the village close to Lake Vänern stood the castle and the defensive walls where the two arms of the water narrowed and formed a moat. But the drainage from the tanneries and latrines, from the slaughterhouse and brewery, went into both bodies of water, and according to Arn that uncleanliness was the reason that many of the thralls' children had red eyes and pustular lips as well as nasty rashes on their skin. Many of the youngest also died even after surviving the most dangerous period after birth.

   The great transformation would be that in the future they would dump waste only in the eastern arm of water around Arnäs, while the western one would be kept free of refuse. By drawing pictures in the sand, pointing out and describing the whole process, Arn had shown her how they would be able to direct a water flow from the clean side in through the cookhouses and then discharge it into the unclean water. With a constant flow of water through the cookhouses they would save much time in their work, and the cookhouses could be kept clean so that all the food was more palatable. The cookhouses would also be improved by laying brick over the packed dirt floors, at a slight slope so that water would run off into the new drains.

   The most difficult thing to change was the disposal of human waste. According to Arn it was fertilizer as good as livestock manure if it was used for that purpose, although it was a worse pollutant than livestock manure if it got into the food or water. Instead of letting each thrall follow the call of nature wherever it seemed suitable, now they would all be forced to use special latrine pits with crossbars, and anyone caught shitting anywhere else would be sharply reprimanded.

   There was some grumbling among the thralls at these changes, but Erika Joarsdotter showed herself to be a stern mistress, be cause she soon came to trust Arn more than she did anyone else.

   Since she had spent five years as a novice in a convent before she was suddenly fetched by her father to be married off, she was actually familiar with much of what Arn described to her. Perhaps she had thought that God had arranged things differently inside the cloister walls, that this better ordering of things belonged to the higher world, that everything intra muros was supposed to be much cleaner than on the outside, as though cleanliness had a spiritual significance. That was why, before Arn arrived and opened her eyes, she had not even imagined that they might have the same orderliness in ordinary life as they did inside the cloister.

   With Arn's arrival Erika Joarsdotter's days at Arnäs had brightened, and her own responsibility as mistress of the manor had become easier to bear. She got up before dawn happier than she ever could have imagined. And when the men in the longhouse soon discovered that some of the food put on the table was different and better than before, they began to give her words of praise, which they had never done before. They especially liked the wonderful smoked ham.

   Arn had brought along some sausages and smoked ham when he came from Varnhem. Even though most of it was consumed during the welcome feast and no one remembered much about the monk food, Erika had asked him how such things were made. Arn was soon busy building a smokehouse out of tarred lumber. When the building was finished he tested it on some pieces of pork; then he showed her the whole process, and soon she and her house thralls could smoke ham so that it seemed to have come straight from a monastery.