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 in tra muroswas 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.

   But by then Arn was already working on a brickworks. There was clay suitable for the task on the riverbank above the tannery on the eastern arm of the water, and it took Arn about a week to make his team of thralls understand how they were to shape the clay in wooden forms so that each piece was exactly the same size. He showed them how to bake the clay just as they baked bread, but for a longer time and at a higher heat using a bellows. Soon a new storehouse of brick began to rise next to the cookhouses. Arn took Erika on many tours around the building and up in the scaffolding to describe how they would be able to store ice from Lake Vänern to cool the brick chamber even during the hottest days of summer.

   In her evening prayers Erika constantly thanked God that He had sent them this prodigal son. Although he was not her son, he treated her like his mother, giving her days at Arnäs a light and a meaning that they had not had before. But to God she did not dare say what she thought every day, that Arn had come like an angel to Arnäs.

Eskil was ambivalent about Arn. He didn't really know what to make of this younger brother who suddenly rode into the castle courtyard one day on an ugly horse as if he had returned from the living dead, as miraculously as he had once been sent away, because of some alleged miracle.

   His first feeling had been strong brotherly love, for what Eskil remembered better than anything else in his life was the day when he and his younger brother were torn from each other outside the door of the longhouse. How he had run after the wagon in which Arn was taken away, and how at last he had collapsed sobbing in the wagon tracks, watching Arn in a haze of tears and road dust disappear forever, abducted on the orders of an incomprehensible God.

   When Eskil embraced Arn upon his return to the very place where they once had parted, his first impression was of a skinny, almost undernourished young man, until he felt the bearlike strength in Arn's arms when they were flung around his waist. Arn hugged Eskil so hard that he almost lost his breath. That had certainly been a moment of almost incomprehensible joy.

   But during the big welcome ale on that first evening, Eskil had already begun to feel uncomfortable for his younger brother. Arn didn't seem able to join in the celebration; he almost rudely shoved away his food, he drank ale like a woman, and in other ways he seemed to be a bit slow.

   An uneasiness seemed to settle in the air as father and elder brother drew back from Arn, and he in turn sensed their displeasure and sought instead the company of the thralls and the mistress of the estate. The retainers were the first to make faces, roll their eyes, and mockingly clasp their hands behind Arn's back. It made Eskil want to reprimand them, but he couldn't because he himself shared the feelings that the retainers displayed with their scorn.