Free Birth Of the Kingdom (2010) by Jan Guillou Page B

to lift the stone with his weak left hand over his lap and place it in his healthy right hand. Each time he failed he had to pick up the stone with his good hand, place it back in the sick one, and start over. He must not give up. With determination and prayer much could be accomplished. In a week the next exercise would begin. Most important were practice and a strong will; the restorative herbs were secondary.
    That was all. The two physicians bowed first to Arn and then to his father and left without another word.
    Arn put the stone in his father’s left hand and explained the exercise again. Herr Magnus tried but dropped the stone at once. Arn then put it back in his hand. And his father dropped it again and angrily hissed something. Arn heard only the words ‘foreign men.’
    ‘Don’t speak that way to me, Father. Say it again in clear words. I know that you can, just as I know that you understand everything I say,’ said Arn, looking him sternly in the eye.
    ‘It’s no use…listening to…foreign men,’ his father said then, with such an effort that his head trembled a bit.
    ‘You’re wrong about that, Father. You proved it yourself just now. They said that you would get your speech back. And you spoke, so now we know that they were right. In medicine these men are among the best I encountered in the Holy Land. They have both been in service with the Knights Templar, and that’s why they are here with me now.’
    Herr Magnus did not reply, but he nodded to show that he agreed that for the first time in three years he was wrong.
    Arn put the stone back in his father’s left hand and said almost as a command that now he must practice, as the physicians had told him to do. Herr Magnus made a halfhearted attempt but then grabbed the stone with his righthand, raised it straight out over the floor, and dropped it. Arn picked it up with a laugh and put it back in his father’s lap.
    ‘Tell me what you want to know about the Holy Land and I will tell you, Father.’ Arn knelt down before Herr Magnus so that their faces were close together.
    ‘Can’t sit…long…like that,’ said Herr Magnus with difficulty, though he tried to smile. His smile was crooked because one corner of his mouth drooped.
    ‘My knees are more tempered by prayer than you will ever know, Father. In the Holy Land a warrior of God also has to do a great deal of praying for help. But tell me now what you want to know about, and I will tell you.’
    ‘Why did we lose…Jerusalem?’ asked Herr Magnus, at the same time moving the stone halfway to his good hand before he dropped it.
    Arn carefully placed the stone back in his weak hand and said that he would tell him how Jerusalem was lost. But only on the condition that his father practiced with the stone while he listened.
    It was not difficult for Arn to begin his story. When it came to the Lord’s inscrutable ways there was nothing he had brooded over as much as the question of why the Christians had been punished with the loss of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre.
    It was because of their sins. That answer now seemed clear to him. And then he gave a detailed account of those sins. He told the story about a patriarch of the Holy City of Jerusalem who had poisoned two bishops to death, about a whoring queen mother who had installed first one and then the other of her newly arrived lovers from Paris as supreme commander of the Christian army, about greedy men who were said to fight for God’s cause but merely grabbed thingsfor themselves; they stole, murdered, and burned, only to return home as soon as their purses were stuffed, and with what they thought was forgiveness for their sins.
    As Arn described the Christians’ sins, citing the worst examples he could think of, he would now and then pick up the stone and put it once again in his father’s left hand.
    But when the catalogue of sins seemed to repeat itself, his father waved his good hand to put a stop to the list of miseries. Then