The meat being tended by the roast-turners was still half- raw; the turnips were still being carried into the cookhouses, and Sigrid had scarcely managed to sweep the hall and hang the tapestries; so after a brief welcome for form’s sake, when they tested the ale and shared some of the white bread that was the pride of Arnäs, they divided up the company in the most opportune way so as to make the time pass without boredom. Magnus asked his eldest retainer to take care of his warrior brothers from Ladås, get them settled in, and assuage their thirst. Sigrid took Kristina on a tour of the house and around all the new buildings on the estate, and Magnus took Erik Jedvardsson to see the work on the fortifications.
Erik Jedvardsson was not impressed. He thought that the walls were too low and too fragile, that the double moat might be an ingenious idea, but that it didn’t do much good to have deep moats if they had to defend themselves in the winter when the water turned to ice. And he went on like that, boasting the whole time about his own structures and comparing them, especially the church building in Eriksberg, which was now nearly completed. Naturally he used English stonemasons, whom he had requisitioned from his father’s clan; these Englishmen, he proposed, might be hired out to Magnus when the spring came instead of returning home.
Magnus let him talk. If the walls at Arnäs were too low and fragile, then he meant they were too low and fragile for a king. If there were a king to capture in the fortress, then the besiegers would be both more numerous and more stubborn than if there were only a tradesman inside. It wasn’t difficult to see that Erik Jedvardsson was already dreaming of being king.
But Magnus did not feel comfortable in his company. The other man was taller and heavier, which made him speak and behave as though he were the host and not the guest.
This made the surprise so much the better for Magnus when they left the fortifications and began to inspect the stables and the longhouse. This was indeed a whole new method of building – the long pine logs stacked on top of each other – and the stonework gable of the longhouse, with its three big chimneys on the roof ridge, was also entirely new to Erik Jedvardsson. At his home they were still building with vertical logs that were sealed with straw and clay.
Magnus was immediately in a better mood as he began to describe his construction ideas. And when Erik Jedvardsson was invited into the hall and the heat from the stone gable near the high seat radiated toward him, he became voluble in his praise. He ran his hand over the logs and their sealed seams to confirm that there wasn’t the slightest cold draft. As ale was brought out for the guest, Magnus modestly told him that up here where the Sunnan Forest met the Nördan Forest there was so much good timber – tall, straight pines – that it provided completely different building possibilities than, for example, down by the Lidan River, with its mostly deciduous forest.
The ale warmed them and Magnus’s mood continued to improve.
Sigrid had not been looking forward to showing her kinswoman Kristina around the grounds. The mood between them could not be other than coldly polite, given the claim Kristina had made to the priests and the king that Varnhem was at least partially hers, and that she had no intention of giving away any of her inheritance to some monks.
But that was not a suitable topic to take up now, without the presence of their husbands. If anything was to be said on this matter, it would be best to do so when all those who had a right to discuss the problem were gathered in the same room.
Kristina couldn’t help being impressed by all the various workshops that had sprung up around the estate, however. They didn’t go all the way down to the tannery because of the smell, but they visited the cookhouses, the stonecutters’ workshops, the smithies, the cooperages, and the linen-makers before they took a turn through the storehouses and one of the thrall’s huts, where they surprised a couple fornicating, which didn’t bother the two women in the least. It did prompt Kristina to joke that at home she had at least every other male thrall gelded, because those brutes otherwise had the ability to create too many new mouths to feed.
Sigrid explained that she had given up that custom. Not for the sake of the thralls, but because one could never have too many thralls.
Kristina couldn’t understand this reasoning. More thralls meant more mouths to feed, more animals to slaughter, and more grain to the mill – wasn’t that as clear as water?
Sigrid tried to explain the method of moving them out, breaking new ground, and freeing them at the same rate as the thralls propagated, and how that in turn produced income in the form of extra barrels of grain from the new plantings each year. The thralls also ate less food if they had to pay for it themselves.
Kristina merely laughed at these foolish ideas; it was like letting the cattle out onto a green pasture to milk, slaughter, and finally roast themselves. Sigrid soon gave up all attempts to explain and at last took Kristina to the bathhouse, where a group of house thralls were busy washing up for the evening.
The steam billowed out in big clouds when they opened the door and the mid-winter cold met the moist heat inside. When they closed the door behind them and their vision cleared, Kristina was so astonished that for the first time she couldn’t hide her surprise. The room was filled with naked thralls running about with pails of hot water which they dumped into big oaken tubs, while others sat in the tubs of steaming water. Sigrid went over and grabbed a female house thrall and let Kristina feel her flesh. They certainly were healthy and well-fed, weren’t they?
Yes indeed, they looked splendid. But what was the idea of letting thralls use up wood and have their own building as if they were fine folk? She couldn’t understand it.
Sigrid explained that they were house thralls, of course. They had to turn the roasts and serve them and pour the ale and carry out the scraps all night. But wasn’t it more pleasant to have clean house thralls that didn’t stink? And they would all be dressed in clean linen after the bath; at Arnäs they produced much more linen at present than they could sell.
Kristina shook her head. She couldn’t hide how absurd she found this method for treating thralls. It might give them ideas, she said. They already had ideas, Sigrid replied, with a smile that Kristina had a hard time understanding.
But when the feast commenced that evening it was a lovely sight when all the clean-scrubbed house thralls entered the hall in procession, clad in their white linen clothing, and carrying the first round of meat, turnips, white bread, and a soup made from leeks, beans, and something that Sigrid called red roots.
In the Norwegian high seat adorned with the winding dragon arabesques sat Magnus and Erik Jedvardsson. To the left of Magnus sat his brother Birger, his sons Eskil and little Arn, and beside them Erik Jedvardsson’s son Knut, who was the same age as Eskil. To the right of the high seat sat Kristina and Sigrid. Along the walls the tar torches burned in their iron sconces. At the long table where the twenty-four retainers sat arranged by age, expensive wax candles burned as though in church, and from the stone wall behind the high seat the heat radiated, although it was less warm farther down in the hall. The youngest retainers at the end soon pulled their cloaks around them.
The spit-turners had begun to serve the tenderest morsels from the roasting house, succulent piglets to awaken the palate. After that would come heavier meats – veal, lamb, and young wild boar – and also the old-fashioned coarse rye bread for those who didn’t like the newfangled white bread. Ale was brought to the table in large quantities, either unspiced strong ale or the kind that was given to women and children, spiced with honey and juniper berries.
In the beginning everyone behaved well at the feast, conversing easily about insignificant things, and Birger, smiling as ever, had another chance to tell the story about his journey the day before when he shot a wolf.
Erik Jedvardsson and his men drank a toast to their host. Magnus and his men drank to their guests, and everyone was in a good mood and without rancorous thoughts or harsh words.
Erik Jedvardsson praised the beauty of the hall once again – the new method of building with