John Gardner - Freddy's Book

“In Denmark, King Kristian has troubles of his own,” the Devil said. He leaned forward, smiling, lowering his voice, meeting Gustav’s eyes with his own small fiery ones. “He’s at odds with his barons.” The Devil had a tendency to spit as he spoke. Gustav Vasa drew his face back. “There as in Sweden, Germany, or France,” the Devil continued, “it’s the commoners who pay for the government. For that reason Kristian has wooed his commoners, giving them all sorts of privileges and liberties — he even allows them their Lutheranism, even shows an inclination to practice it himself, to the horror of the aristocracy and the Church. He’s weaker than you think, my dear Gustav! And the commoners aren’t all. He’s grown friendly with the Dutch, hoping for more profitable trade than he can get with the Hanseatic League. The Germans don’t like that, needless to say — especially the Germans of Lübeck, since Lübeck stands to suffer most if the Dutch get their deal. You, now, have friends in Lübeck, I believe.” He raised his eyebrows.

“That may be,” Gustav said, “and again it may not be. I could say I’m no fonder than the next man of Germans.”

Suddenly the Devil’s red eyes flashed. “Don’t be coy with me, Gustav Erikson! I see everything! Everything! You were captured by the Danes in Sten Sture’s war. You escaped from prison and fled to Lübeck. You think I’m so old and blind I miss these things?”

“That may be,” Gustav said more meekly, still cautious and suspicious.

“Very well,” the Devil said, and calmed himself, glancing around the room. “The Stures can’t oppose you — at first, I predict, they’ll take you as their own, thinking they can govern you and dump you when they please — and Lübeck, your good friends in Lübeck, will finance you.”

“And where do I gather my army?” Gustav asked.

He asked it so off-handedly that Lars-Goren knew he’d been thinking about it.

The Devil raised his mug and drank, then wiped his mouth. He smiled. “You’re on your way to the mining community of Dalarna?”

Gustav thought about it, then nodded. “Dalarna,” he said. He turned to his kinsman Lars-Goren. “What do you think?” he said.

Lars-Goren closed the fingers he’d been watching through and lowered his head a little, his lips trembling, saying nothing.

“What is this dependence on cowards and fools?” the Devil asked, lightly sneering. “You can see very well he’s too frightened to add up six and seven.”

“You’re wrong,” said Gustav. “He’s a slow thinker, but very accurate.

“Pray you don’t need his opinion when your house is on fire,” said the Devil, and grinned. Then, before Gustav’s eyes, he turned into a great swirl of gnats and, little by little, dispersed and vanished. He had forgotten, apparently, that he’d promised to pay the bill.

4.

IT WAS A LONG WAY TO DALARNA, the restless, everlastingly troublesome region of the mines. Again and again they were almost caught by the prowling Danes. Twice when they walked into the houses of old friends, the Danes sat waiting, with the friends hanging dead from the beams of the room, like hams; and each time it was only by miracle that Gustav and Lars-Goren were able to escape. Indeed, the near-captures were so frequent that Lars-Goren grew suspicious. Except if the Danes had captured some Lapp and made him work for them, only one person in the world could know who they were and where they were going, and that person was the Devil. Lars-Goren scowled thoughtfully, riding in the covered cart he’d crept into with his kinsman Gustav, who was asleep. Lars-Goren turned over thought after thought, slowly and carefully, like a man sorting boulders, trying to make sense of what was happening. Lars-Goren’s fingertips no longer trembled, his heart no longer pounded, but even now, with the Devil far away, he felt a steady chill of fear. He did not like Gustav’s strange cooperation with the Devil, but he did not waste time over annoyance at what Gustav was doing. He set down in his mind, as something he must think about later, the question of why Gustav was doing what he did, that is, the whole matter of understanding Gustav, to say nothing of the somewhat larger matter of understanding all human beings who take favors from the Devil. Even Lars-Goren, slow and meticulous as he was about thought, could make out at once that the initial fact was simple: by chance he had met and befriended Gustav, and now, whatever he might think of Gustav’s ways (he had, as yet, no firm opinion), the Devil had entered the scene, and where the Devil was involved, Lars-Goren had no choice, as a knight, and a father of small children, but to involve himself also.

And so, setting aside all questions of whether or not his young kinsman was right, Lars-Goren worried questions more immediate. The main question was this: did the Devil have some plan far more devious than the plan he’d spoken of? Had he lied to them? That is, had the Devil some plot which depended on the capture or murder of Gustav and Lars-Goren, a plot which with luck Lars-Goren might help Gustav sidestep? Or was the Devil simply crazy, revelling in confusion, urging everyone around him to frenzied activity, having, himself, no idea under heaven what the outcome would be, merely hoping for the best, like an idiot chess player who occasionally wins by throwing away bishops and queens and confounding his foe?

Lars-Goren brooded on this, riding in the hide-covered peasant-cart, looking down at the pale white blur of his kinsman’s face.

At last the cart stopped, and after three or four minutes the humpbacked driver raised the edge of the hide that served as their tent-flap and peeped in. “Dalarna,” he growled in a voice oddly muffled, and he closed the flap again. Gustav opened his eyes and, gently, Lars-Goren put his hand over Gustav’s mouth, lest the young man forget and cry out, and all be lost.

5.

NOWHERE IN SWEDEN WAS LIFE more grim and unappealing than in the dale of Dalarna. The mountains, high and brooding and disfigured as the Devil himself, gazed down as if vengefully, strewn with slag heaps, pocked with holes like a carcass full of maggots, irregularly shorn as if sick with the mange, the lower slopes crawling with stooped men and animals — pit-ponies, draught-horses, oxen, dogs, and mules — not one of them, man or beast, uninjured — or at least so it seemed to Gustav Vasa, standing bent over like a peasant in line with Lars-Goren, waiting to see the German who did the hiring. There seemed to be no Danes anywhere. Here and there patches of smoke rose and flattened, black against the gray of the clouds. Workmen moved past the hiring line, endlessly laboring back and forth, pushing wheelbarrows or pulling at their sullen mules, some with heavy wooden boxes on their shoulders, some bearing crudely hacked mineshaft timbers, some rolling barrels or carrying buckets of gray water. One had no fingers, another a wooden leg; all of them had scars, barked knuckles, scabs and sores.

“Behold the army of King Gustav,” he whispered to Lars-Goren, and grimly smiled.

Lars-Goren said nothing. They came to the Germans crude table.

“Nimps?” said the German.

“Lars-Goren Bergquist,” said Lars-Goren.

“Erik Bergquist,” said Gustav with a smile.

The German smiled back. “I don’t beliff you,” he said, “but no matter, I write dem down.” He was a short, stocky man, shaved and trim as the Germans always were, even in the country of the mines. When he looked up at Gustav, something made him pause and look closely. “You come to make big revolution?” he asked, then quickly raised his hand, palm out, and smiled. “Never mind! Good luck! We hev new revolution in Dalarna every Tuesday. Tenk Gott for revolution! Otherwise we all go crezzy.”