Arn began counting the days and the hours till he would be able to return to Forsvik. He couldn’t leave until Brother Guilbert arrived, and he came a day later than they had agreed, a very long day for Arn. But he heard that everything was well with Cecilia, and nothing untoward had happened at Forsvik while he was away. The day she would give birth was approaching, but according to the womenfolk who knew about such matters, he should have no trouble getting there in time.

He took a hasty farewell from both his kinsmen and the builders. Never had he thought that a boat could move so slowly as it did on that day, and as he stopped for the night at Askeberga, he considered borrowing a horse to continue on through the light spring night at once. But he changed his mind when he saw only dray animals and slow Gothic steeds in the stable.

After the feasts of Filippus and Jacob, when the livestock was turned out to pasture and the fences mended in Western Götaland, Cecilia Algotsdotter gave birth to a healthy little girl at Forsvik. Afterwards a celebration was held for three days, and no one did any work, not even in the smithies. All free men and women at Forsvik took part with equal joy, since this blessing upon the house was now important to them all.

Arn decided that the child should be named Alde, a foreign name from one of his sagas, but also a beautiful name, Cecilia thought when she tried it out for herself as she lulled the little one to sleep at her breast. Alde Arnsdotter, she whispered.

Now the happiest time began for Arn and Cecilia since the day they were married. That was how they would always remember it. During that summer Arn, looking like a boyishly proud father, rode with his daughter in his arms nearly as often as he rode with those who were to become knights. And at that time there was no hint of the dark clouds gathering far in the distance, where the heavens and the earth met in the southwest.

TEN

There was nothing about death that frightened Arn; he seemed to be out of the habit of even thinking about it. Or perhaps he had seen too much during his twenty years on the battlefield in the Holy Land, where he had certainly killed more than a thousand men with his own hands and had seen many thousands of others die close at hand. A bad or arrogant commander could raise his arm and in the next instant send off a squadron of sixteen brothers against a superior force pursuing them. They would ride off without hesitation with their white mantles fluttering behind them, never to be seen again. Yet there was consolation in the knowledge that they would meet these brothers in Paradise. A Templar knight never needed to fear death, because victory and Paradise were his only choices.

But it was a different matter when death came to a man as a slow, withering and stinking torment in slime and his own shit. For three long years Arn’s friend Knut had dragged himself through life, growing steadily skinnier until finally he looked like a skeleton. When Yussuf and Ibrahim looked at him they could only shake their heads and say that the tumour eating at the king’s body from inside his stomach would keep growing until it devoured his life.

Now Knut lay stretched out in his bed in his childhood home of Eriksberg, and his arms and legs were as thin as hazel twigs. Under the covers the tumour was visible as a bulge in the middle of his stomach, which in an odd way was reminiscent of a pregnant woman. He had lost all his hair, even his eyebrows and eyelashes, and in his mouth could be seen big black holes where his teeth had fallen out. The stench of him filled the entire room.

Arn had come alone to Eriksberg. Unlike all others who travelled to the king’s deathbed, he could sit there for hours without minding the stench or even noticing it.

The king was still quite lucid. The tumour was eating his body but not his mind. It wasn’t hard for Arn to understand that he was the person the king preferred to talk to during his last days, but it probably surprised many others waiting at Eriksberg. With Arn the king could talk about the Inscrutable One and the Vengeful One as well as he could with Archbishop Petrus; the difference was that Arn didn’t look both expectant and impatient at the same time. For the archbishop it was a divine blessing that Knut was finally going to die; his death was a premonition of the new order about which the archbishop had said so many sincere prayers. According to King Knut, Sverker Karlsson in Denmark had already begun packing up for the journey, so it was really not much use to lie here and resist.

For large parts of his life Knut had lived out at Näs in the middle of Lake Vättern, constantly surrounded by stone walls and guards so that he wouldn’t die the same way so many other kings had done, including the one he had killed himself. Now that death sat in the waiting room with his hourglass in which the sand would soon run out, there were almost no armed men offering protection. The estate at Eriksberg was like any other normal large estate, without any walls or even a stockade of sharpened stakes, and the church that Saint Erik once had begun to build provided little defence. Nor was it necessary, for who would come to kill a man who already had one foot in the grave?

‘It’s still not fair,’ said King Knut in a weak voice and for at least the seventh time as Arn sat by his bedside on the second day. ‘I could have lived another twenty years, and now I have to go to my ancestors having suffered an ignominious death. Why does God want to punish me so? Am I a greater wretch than all the others? Just think of Karl Sverkersson, whom that archbishop Petter claims is the reason for my suffering. But why him? He was the one who had my father Saint Erik murdered! Isn’t the murder of a saint the worst possible sin?’

‘Yes, indeed it is a grave sin,’ said Arn with an almost impudent smile. ‘But if you think about it a bit, then you’ll probably understand that you’re grumbling about the wrong thing. How long had Karl Sverkersson been king when we killed him? Six or seven years? I don’t recall, but he was young, and you’ve been king five times as long as he was. Your life could have been more miserable and much shorter. You have to accept that. You have to be reconciled with your death and thank God for the grace He has shown you.’

‘I should thank God? Now? Here I lie in my own shit, suffering worse than a dog? How can you, who are my only true friend…just look around you, there’s nobody else here. But where was I? Oh yes, how can you say that I should thank God?’

‘At this hour it would at least be wiser than to blaspheme,’ replied Arn dryly. ‘But if you really want an answer, I’ll give you one. You shall soon die, that is true. I am your friend, that is also true, and our friendship goes far back in time—’

‘But you!’ the king interrupted him, pointing with a finger so emaciated that it looked like a bird’s claw. ‘How can you sit here healthy and feeling fine? Isn’t your sin just as great as mine when it comes to the killing of my father’s murderer?’

‘That’s possible,’ said Arn. ‘When I travelled to the Holy Land I had two sins with me in my saddlebag, heavy sins for my young age. Without the blessing of marriage I had joined together in the flesh with my beloved, and before that I had lain with her sister Katarina. And I had participated in killing a king. But these sins were atoned for over twenty years wearing the white mantle. You may think it’s unfair, but that’s how it is.’

‘How gladly I would have changed places with you in that case!’ the king snarled.

‘It’s a little late to think of that now,’ said Arn, shaking his head with a smile. ‘But if you keep your mouth shut for a moment I’ll try to tell you what I think. The sin that Karl Sverkersson committed when he caused the death of your father, Saint Erik, was something he had to atone for immediately. Now we come to you. You killed and partially atoned for the sin, but not wholly. Yet you have maintained a longer peace in the realm than any king I have heard of, and that will be reckoned in your favour in Heaven. You have five sons and a daughter, a charming wife in Cecilia Blanca, more than that, for in her you won a true queen who has been a great honour to you. You strengthened the power of the Church in the kingdom, something I don’t think you are entirely happy with just now, but that too will be reckoned in your favour. If you look at all this together, you have not lived a bad life and have not been ill rewarded. However, a debt remains to be paid for your sins, and better now than in Purgatory. So don’t complain, but die like a man, dear friend!’