“Ulvhilde, my little friend,” Cecilia Rosa whispered hoarsely. “Keep in mind that it could have been you in this position and that neither of us is at all to blame. If I can console you then I will try. If you want me to be your friend and support, I will try that too. It’s not easy to live at Gudhem, and you should know that here we need friends more than anything else.”
The death throes of Fru Helena Stenkilsdotter took a long time. For ten days she lay dying, and during most of that time her mind was utterly clear. It made the matter that much more delicate for Mother Rikissa, who now had to send various messages far and wide.
It would not do simply to bury Fru Helena as any of Gudhem’s pensioners, because she was of royal lineage, and she had married into both the Sverker and the Erik clans. At a time when the wounds of war had been better healed, a huge retinue should have come to see her to her final rest. But as things now stood, with the fields of blood outside Bjälbo fresh in everyone’s memory, only a small but very resolute group showed up. Almost all the guests arrived several days before her death; they had to spend the time waiting in both the hospitiumand other buildings outside the cloister—Folkungs and Eriks in one group, and Sverkers in another.
Cecilia Blanca and Cecilia Rosa were the only novices who were allowed to go outside the walls to sing at the graveside in the churchyard. This was not because of their clan lineage, but because their singing voices were among the loveliest at Gudhem.
Bishop Bengt had come from Skara to pray over the grave. Standing slightly removed from everyone else he wore his light-blue, gold-embroidered bishop’s vestments, and he seemed able to remain upright only by clutching his staff. On one side stood men from the Sverker and Stenkil clans in red, black, and green mantles. On the other side stood the Eriks in gold and sky-blue, and Folkungs in the same blue but with silver. In two long rows outside the churchyard were all the shields fastened to lances stuck into the ground: the Folkung lion, the three Erik crowns, the black Sverker griffin, and the Stenkil wolf’s head. Some of the shields still bore clear marks of sword-edges and lance-points, while some of the guests’ mantles bore traces of both battle and blood. Peace had reigned for too short a time for the marks of war to have been washed away in the rain.
The two Cecilias did their utmost during the singing of the hymns, and they had not the slightest thought of attempting any mischief that might cause discord among the clans. Slight as their acquaintance with Fru Helena was before she died, it was more than sufficient for them to like her and feel great respect for her.
When the singing was over and Fru Helena had been consigned to the black earth, there was naturally no question but that the Cecilias, and any of the other sisters, would quickly disappear behind the convent walls. A grave-ale would be drunk in the hospitium, but that was something only for Bishop Bengt, Mother Rikissa, and the worldly guests. They would now have to associate more closely with one another than they had done in the churchyard, where none had shown any desire for fellowship.
When Bishop Bengt and his cathedral dean started off, as if intending to lead the procession toward the hospitiumand the waiting grave-ale, the hostility among the various group was obvious to the worldly guests. The Eriks made the first move to start walking, so they were in the front of the procession. But when the Sverkers discovered that, they hastened to ensure that they would come before the Folkungs. In stifled silence the colorful retinue headed off toward the northern end of Gudhem where the guest quarters stood.
The two Cecilias had hung back to observe the fine clothing and the ritual. When Mother Rikissa noticed them she strode over and gave them a good dressing-down, fuming about things that were unsuitable for the eyes of Christian maidens, and she ordered them to hurry off behind the walls, and to be quick about it.
But Cecilia Blanca then answered her so gently that she surprised even herself, saying that she had seen something that might further the cause of peace and also serve Gudhem. Many of the mantles worn by the guests needed to have the traces of war removed, and that was something which would be easy to arrange inside Gudhem. Just as Mother Rikissa opened her mouth to speak more harsh words, an idea seemed to dawn on her. Instead she turned around and looked at the morose procession of guests shuffling off.
“You know, I think that maybe even a blind hen can find the grain,” she said pensively, but not at all unkindly. And then she shooed off the two Cecilias as if they were geese.
Mother Rikissa had two worries that she kept from everyone else at Gudhem. One involved a great event that would soon take place, inevitable as a new season, and for Cecilia Blanca at least it would mean a tremendous change. The second had to do with Gudhem’s business affairs and was somewhat more difficult to comprehend.
Gudhem was a rich cloister even now in its early days, although less than a lifetime had passed since the church was consecrated as a cloister church and the first sisters moved in. But riches alone could not feed mouths, since the wealth was based on the ownership of land, and this ownership had to be transformed into food and drink, clothing and the construction of buildings. And what the earth produced came to Gudhem from near and far in the form of casks of seed, bales of wool, salted fish, dried fish, flour, oil, and fruit. A portion of all these goods had to be stored for use at Gudhem; a greater portion had to be shipped to various marketplaces, mostly the one in Skara, to be sold and transformed into silver. This silver would then be spent primarily to pay all those from foreign lands who worked on the various buildings of the cloister. All too often the sale of goods took some time, so that the convent’s cache of silver ebbed away. This was a constant source of worry for Mother Rikissa. No matter how she tried to involve herself in the various details of administration, the yconomus, a canon from Skara whom Bishop Bengt viewed as useless in church work but who had a good head for business, always had a rejoinder for her suspicious questions. If the harvests had been good, then it would be difficult to sell very much grain at one time. If the harvests had been poor, then they had to wait to sell until the prices rose a bit. And it was never good to sell everything at once, but rather to spread the sale over the entire year. So in the late autumn when most of the rent payments from tenants came flowing in, all their storehouses were filled to bursting, and toward the end of each summer all these storage places stood empty. The yconomusclaimed that this was the natural order of things.
Mother Rikissa had tried to discuss these problems with Father Henri, who was the abbot of Varnhem and in that capacity her superior. But Father Henri had been unable to give her any particularly good advice. There was a big difference between a cloister populated only by men and a convent with only women, as he explained with a concerned expression. At Varnhem they took in direct payments in silver for the many different sorts of work they did. They had twenty different quarries where they manufactured millstones; they had smithies that fabricated everything from farming tools to swords for noblemen; and they did all their construction work with their own labor force without spending any silver. What Gudhem needed was its own business that could bring in silver directly, Father Henri had told her. But that was easier said than done.
When Mother Rikissa heard Cecilia Blanca talking about the guests’ stained and tattered mantles it had given her an idea, and she would always remember it as being of her own devising. At Gudhem wool was spun and woven; linen was harvested, retted, dried, braked, scutched, combed, spun, and woven—the entire process from the flax plant to finished fabric. And Sister Leonore, who took care of Gudhem’s gardens, knew how to dye fabrics in many different ways. Except for black, this knowledge was never put to use because there was no need for garish worldly colors inside Gudhem.