neither of us will ever win, Yussuf. The difference between us is that you Saracens can lose one battle after another. You mourn your dead and you soon have a new army on the march. We Christians can lose only a great battle, and we are not that foolish. If we have the advantage, we attack. If we are at a disadvantage, we seek refuge in our fortresses. It can go on in this fashion forever.’
‘So our war will last forever?’
‘Perhaps, perhaps not. Some of us…Do you know who Count Raymond de Tripoli is?’
‘Yes, I know…know of him. And?’
‘If Christians like him should win power in the kingdom of Jerusalem, and you have on your side a leader like Saladin, then there can be peace, a just peace, in any case something better than eternal war. Many of us Templar knights think as Count Raymond does. But to return to our previous topic concerning what is going to happen right now. The Hospitallers followed the royal army and the “prince” up to Syria. We Templar knights did not.’
‘I already know that.’
‘Yes, doubtless you know this; because your name is Yussuf ibn Ayyub Salah al-Din, the one we call Saladin in our language.’
‘May God be merciful to us, now that you know this.’
‘God is merciful to us by granting us this strange conversation during the last hours of peace between us.’
‘And we will both keep our word.’
‘You surprise me with your uneasiness about that point. You are the only one of our enemies who is known for always keeping his word. I am a Templar knight. We always keep our word. Enough said about that matter.’
‘Yes, enough about that matter. But now, my dear enemy, at this late hour before a dawn when we both have urgent errands, you with your foul-smelling corpses and I with something else that I will not discuss but which you certainly can imagine, what do we do now?’
‘We take advantage of this only opportunity that God may give us in life to speak sensibly with the worst of all enemies. There is one thing that you and I can agree on…forgive me if I address you so plainly now that I know you are the Sultan of both Cairo and Damascus.’
‘No one but God hears us, as you so wisely arranged. I wish for you to use the informal means of address on this one night.’
‘We agreed on one thing, I think. We are risking eternal war because neither side can win.’
‘True. But I will win, I have sworn to win.’
‘As have I. Eternal war then?’
‘That does not sound promising for the future.’
‘Then we will continue, even though I am merely a simple emir among the Knights Templar, and you are the only one of our foes in a long time that we have had reason to fear. Where should we begin now?’
They began with the question of the pilgrims’ safety. That was the most obvious. That was the reason they had met in the first place, if they sought a human explanation for it and did not look solely to God’s will in all things. But even though they both firmly believed, at least when they spoke aloud, that God’s will guided everything, neither of them was a stranger to the idea that man, with his free will, could also bring about great calamities as well as great happiness. This was a cornerstone in both of their faiths.
They talked for a long time that night. At dawn, when Fahkr found his older brother - the glorious prince, the light of religion, the commander of the faithful in the Holy War, the water in the desert, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, the hope of the faithful, the man whom the infidels for all time would call by the simple name Saladin - he was sitting with his chin resting on his knees, huddled under his cloak which was wrapped around him, and staring into the dying embers.
The white shield with the evil red cross was gone, as was the Templar knight. Saladin wearily looked up at his brother, almost as if he had awakened from a dream.
‘If all our foes were like Al Ghouti, we would never win,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘On the other hand, if all our foes were like him, victory would no longer be necessary.’
Fahkr did not understand what his brother and prince meant but supposed it was mostly meaningless weary mutterings, as had happened so many times before when Yussuf stayed up too long and brooded.
‘We must head out; we have a hard ride to Al Arish,’ said Saladin, getting stiffly to his feet. ‘War awaits, we will soon be victorious.’
It was true that war awaited; that was as written. But it was also written that Saladin and Arn Magnusson de Gothia would soon meet again on the battlefield, and that only one of them would come away victorious.
Jerusalem was located in the middle of a world from which even Rome seemed a distant place. Farther away was the kingdom of the Franks, and almost at the ends of the earth, in the cold, dark North, lay the land of Western Götaland which was known to very few. It was said among learned men that beyond was nothing but dark forest stretching to the edge of the earth, inhabited by monsters with two heads.
Nevertheless the true faith had reached up here to the cold and the dark, mostly thanks to Saint Bernard, who in his mercy and love of humankind had found that even the barbarians up in the dark North had a right to salvation of the soul. It was he who sent the first monks to the wild, unknown lands of the Goths. Soon the light and truth had spread from more than ten cloisters among the Northmen, who were now no longer lost.
A convent located in the southern part of Western Götaland had the loveliest of all cloister names. It was called Gudhem, God’s Home, and it was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The convent stood atop a hill, and from there could be seen the distant blue mountain Billingen, and if a person strained his eyes a bit, he might see the two towers of the cathedral in Skara. North of Gudhem glittered Hornborga Lake, where the cranes appeared in the spring before the pike began to play. Surrounding the cloister were farms and fields and small groves of oaks. It was a very peaceful and beautiful landscape and did not at all lead the mind to thoughts of darkness and barbarity. For the older woman who had made a substantial donation and travelled here to conclude her life in peace, the name of Gudhem sounded like a caress, and the region was the loveliest that an aging eye could see.
But for Cecilia Algotsdotter, who had been locked up at Gudhem at the age of seventeen because of her sins, the convent for a long time seemed a home without God, a place that was considered more of a hell on earth.
Cecilia was familiar with cloister life, and that was not what frightened her. She also knew Gudhem, because at various intervals in her life she had spent more than two years inside among the novices, young women who were sent to the convent by wealthy families to be disciplined and taught good manners before they were married off. She already knew how to read; she knew the Book of Psalms by heart and the words tumbled from her lips like running water, because she had sung every psalm more than a hundred times. So in this there was nothing new and nothing frightening.
But this time she had been consigned to convent life, and the sentence was harsh - twenty years. She had been sentenced together with her betrothed Arn Magnusson of the Folkung clan, because they had committed a grave sin when they united in carnal love before being married before God. It was Cecilia’s sister Katarina who had reported them, and the proof of their sin was such that no argument would avail. The day that the convent gate closed behind Cecilia, she was already in her third month. Her betrothed Arn had also been sentenced to twenty years, but he was to serve his time as a monk in God’s holy army in the far reaches of the Holy Land.
Over the portal of Gudhem convent there were two sandstone sculptures depicting Adam and Eve driven out of Paradise after the Fall, hiding their shame with fig leaves. The image was meant to be a warning, and it spoke directly to Cecilia as if it had been cut and chiselled and polished out of stone expressly for her sake.