The Ballad Of Sigurd Jorsalfare

Danny Maseng
Jul 10, 2017 · 8 min read

Chapter 40

Outremer; late summer 1108

“Unaware of the carnage in Ulai, bored with warfare in general and far too obsessed with Rosa Batalyon to slow down and smell the sewage, Sigurd ran through the dark alleys of Jerusalem to The Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

“Aha,” said Sigurd.”

Not the cry of exaltation Sigurd expected to have escaped his lips, but lips can sometimes get away from you, especially if you don’t exercise them enough.

Caliph Al Hakim had razed the holy site to the ground precisely ninety-nine years earlier, after it had survived almost seven hundred years of conquest and strife.

In the intervening years, the Eastern Church had worked hard to rebuild it, but it still lay, mostly, in ruins, its great Basilica gone.

Sigurd strolled through the rubble, looking for beauty, hoping for an epiphany, yearning to be overwhelmed by holiness. Sunburned and dehydrated, Sigurd abandoned his quest after four hours of spiritual emptiness.

Tracing the footsteps of the Lord, that is to say, walking in circles up and down the punishing alleys of Jerusalem for the rest of the day, Sigurd had decided he preferred Palermo: less holiness, better seascapes, more Sicilians.

One might feel compelled to point out to Sigurd that Jerusalem was never famous for its Sicilians, but one would be wasting their time. Pointing anything out about Jerusalem is a waste of time, especially while in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is above pointing.

One often arrives at a pilgrimage site expecting revelation, praying for transformation. If neither occurs, one hopes for, at least, an instant, a glimpse of inner peace, a sense of completion, a crumb of wisdom. When these fail to materialize, the pilgrim can experience a dull pain, the sound of faith tumbling heavy to earth, the acrid taste of doubt.

Walk through Jerusalem, whatever century you happen to be reading this, assuming Jerusalem still stands, and you will see the ghosts, the shadows, the charred footprints of dashed hopes and disillusionment imprinted in Jerusalem’s stones.

Jerusalem is built upon the crushed bones of disappointed dreams, stacked high upon each other like the sacred skulls of Santa Katerina, monk upon dead monk, like Jacob’s ladder, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of mountain climbers.

If Sigurd had a Tel-Aviv to run to he would have sprinted like a mountain goat down the arid hills of Jerusalem, Eternal City, towards the flat, ambivalent, sinful, mixed up Bauhaus Mecca of noise and creativity, but it would take a different breed of crusaders altogether to build that pilgrimage site.

Here was Sigurd wandering on a rocky slope outside the wall of the city and here was Jerusalem behind him and Rosa was nowhere to be found.

“Which way the River Jordan?”

The little boy looked up at the tan, beautiful warrior. His goats also looked up searching for leaves to eat off the trunks of this tan, beautiful tree. Goats are materialists and fail to see the symbolic in life.

“Franj,” cackled the xenophobic goats.

“That’s Malik al Franj, to you,” answered Sigurd, picking up on the fact that very few natives were happy to see a Norwegian bastard king in their holy land.

“You should teach your goats some respect,” said the King to the shepherd boy, towering over him like a Norwegian spruce.

The boy took something out of his pouch and offered it to Sigurd.

“T’fadal” — “please,” said the boy, rising to the tips of his toes, pushing the smelly packet closer to Sigurd.

Whatever it was, Sigurd was sure he was looking at goat droppings. Green goat droppings.

“Zaitun” — “Olives,” said the imp and put an oil-cured crushed olive in his mouth to show Sigurd it was safe to eat. He chewed on the olive, smiled as though he were filming a commercial for the launch of a new product line of Middle Eastern delicacies, and spat out the pit with pizzazz, with spunk.

“Tayeb” — “good,” the boy beamed with pride.

Sigurd took an oily olive from the boy, smelled it and put it in his mouth in spite of the smell.

Eggplant it wasn’t, but it also wasn’t half as bad as it smelled. It tasted healthy, somehow, and bitter. Also salty. And spicy. And then meaty and a bit tart, just a bit. The little devil food was layered, complex, unfolding new secrets as it worked its way through Sigurd’s suspicious mouth.

“Tayeb,” said Sigurd and smiled down at the boy, placing his hand to his heart.

“Shukran” — “Thank you,” said the boy.

“Franj,” cried the goats in gratitude and nibbled on Sigurd’s leggings.

“Why is it,” asked Sigurd in a perfectly clear Norwegian, “that you people are always feeding me whenever I run into you?”

The boy stared at Sigurd and smiled even wider: “Shukran.”

It is a sad world when people don’t understand perfectly clear Norwegian and Sigurd was learning the world was sadder even than he had imagined.

“Jordan?” asked Sigurd again, this time letting his hand trace the winding path of a river.

No response.

Sigurd mimed a swimming fish.

The boy’s eyes lit up: “Al Urdun,” he cried out, “hada” — “there,” and he pointed east.

Looking east Sigurd saw many, many hills and much desert, not the terrain a seafaring Norwegian should traverse on his own.

What to do? Turn back to the city and chance running in to the Frankish crusaders and have to explain why the King of Norway came dancing into Jerusalem

without his army? Why he’d left his weapons by the trunk of an olive tree at the foothills of Jerusalem with an apologetic note and a wilted rose?

Sigurd wasn’t even sure where his men were at the moment, though he had every confidence Halvar Night Hawk was in total command of his countrymen.

He had to find a guide, that much he knew.

Sigurd crouched and walked the fingers of his right hand on the ground, pointing with his left towards the east: ”Al Urdun?” he asked in a lovely Arabic, pronouncing the name as though it were the reviled fashion-conscious crime-lord of Trondheim, a man he secretly admired.

The boy whistled at the goats and turned east. He waved to Sigurd with his stick, urging him to follow.

Down the slope walked the boy, the goats and the King of Norway, bells clanging, dust billowing and a flute crying its way home towards the village on the other side of the hill.

Sigurd looked back at Jerusalem who had wrapped herself behind veils of stone, pretending to be modest, safe even. Suddenly she seemed beautiful to him. Jerusalem always looks beautiful as one is leaving her.”

*

“The boy’s home was on the outskirts of Ein Wrd, a small village of blue-eyed stone houses, surrounded by lilacs and lilies. Modest dirt walkways, hedged by mint and wild thyme led to blue doors, the color of good luck. Ancient olive trees eyed visitors warily, having seen it all before. Here and there some grape vines clung to trellises, a lemon tree waited for pickers, a persimmon tree for lovers.

The Arab residents of Ein Wrd had stayed out of the battles over Jerusalem, avoiding holiness and righteous indignation at all costs. The Arab residents of Ein Wrd were, therefore, still alive.

This was important to the villagers for two reasons: first, they enjoyed being alive and, second, they had a great man to protect, a man who was the heart of the village.

Sheik Fadlallah was a shoemaker. Sheik Fadlallah loved to sit under the Persimmon tree and make shoes: one shoe at a time, a time being ten years.

The people of the village knew better than to order any shoes from the venerable shoemaker. Rather, they’d watch and wait for strangers to pass through the village and be stricken by the sight of Sheik Fadlallah’s handiwork.

Once seen, no one could resist the shoes. No one.

But Sigurd wasn’t just any passer by.

One look at the young king and Sheik Fadlallah knew he had found a true student.

He held his best pair of shoes up to the sun, dazzling the onlookers. He turned them this way and that, humming a quiet melody. Sigurd stared at Sheik Fadlallah, not even seeing the shoes.

“What fool can see no shoes, young man?” asked the Sheik in Arabic.

Sigurd heard Norwegian. Loud and clear.

“What need has the heart for shoes, old man?”

The Sheik tossed his shoes over the tree. The crowd went silent.

The Sheik smiled.

The Sheik tilted his head slightly and the shepherd boy ran to a nearby house, returning with an Ud, which he handed to the old man with a bow of the head, hand to the heart.

The Sheik looked at Sigurd as one preparing to slaughter an enemy.

The Sheik took a feather from his woolen garment, closed his eyes, plucked the strings of the Ud and opened his mouth wide.

The shoes came flying by overhead, pursued by a crow that had never heard of Sheik Fadlallah, always too busy looking for bargains.

The sound that came out of the Sheik’s mouth ripped the wings off the crow. Down to earth it plunged, a glistening black bundle pursued by its orphaned wings, cawing, rolling down the hill into the valley and out of sight.

The shoes stayed put, ten feet above Sigurd’s head.

The song, if you could call the slashing of the heart a song, ran through Sigurd, breaking every idol on his soul’s mantle, scattering memories, crushing his pristine hatreds and meticulously kept annoyances.

Resentments he had polished, buffed and dusted daily, were shattered, sending shards and jagged granules through his blood, scratching, scraping, etching his walls with the murderous love song of Fadlallah.

Slashed king. Scarred king.

Barely three minutes was all it took to bring down the house of Sigurd Jorsalfare; Norwegian rubble on holy soil.

The crowd watched the young man, the former king of Norway, unscathed, unblemished and totally unrecognizable.

Sigurd sat still like a lotus flower in a pond.

A pond, we say, because a pond is what formed rapidly around Sigurd, reaching out its pure arms towards the crowd until they were all seated on the shores of a lake, watching an old shoe maker and a fallen king float, circling each other like driftwood.

“Al Urdun,” whispered the Sheik to Sigurd and the two blue herons they were, rose from the pond, wings billowing at their sides like sheets of smoke in the wind, feet lifting from the pond, dripping tear drops of blue honey, eyes cast eastward, necks stretched forward and up.

“Al Hayu al Kayum, a Sadiq a Kabir, a Rachmanir Rachim, Al Muchyee al Mumit” chanted the crowd.

Flying over the river Jordan, Sigurd Jorsalfare, who had wanted nothing more than to come to Jerusalem, to walk in the footsteps of the Lord, to eat a silky plate of humus, to kill Saracens and stomp on their livers, to defile their mosques and ravage their women, was now a blue heron, airborne by the grace of a Moslem Sheik.

The river Jordan flowed brown beneath the lover and his guide, meandering ignorantly towards the Dead Sea. Were the River Jordan to know where it was headed, perhaps it would have reconsidered and stayed up north, by the sweet mouth of Kineret, the Sea of David’s Harp, the pool of tears Jesus wept and walked upon when first descending into the Valley of Ginnosar.

By the time the murky tears of Jesus reach the Dead Sea, they have aged; they have become laden with regret and sorrow; they have gathered the deaths of generations, the sunken prayers and discarded souls of martyrs and sinners.

A thousand years in the future, aspiring liberators would swim the muddy waters in the darkest hours of the night in order to return to their homes on the hills of Judea and Samaria, only to be ambushed by trembling young Jewish soldiers who had swum the Mediterranean in the darkest hours of the night in order to return to their homes in Judea and Samaria.

Ironic place, the Middle East.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade