John Gardner - Freddy's Book

“What do you make of it, Lars-Goren?” Gustav muttered at the door.

“I’d say he’s as good a man as any to nominate a king,” said Lars-Goren.

Gustav nodded. “And after that?”

“He’d like some high office, that’s clear,” said Lars-Goren.

Gustav waited, frowning impatiently.

“He might be a fine and Christian man,” Lars-Goren said, “if he had nothing to think about but books.”

“Appoint him to nothing whatsoever?” said Gustav.

“All I really said—” Lars-Goren began.

“Incredible suggestion!” said Gustav; suddenly smiling, he hunched forward, and lightly tapped his fingertips together near his nose.

ON THE SIXTH OF JUNE, Gustav accepted the crown. Eleven days later, the Danes in Stockholm surrendered. It turned out afterward that the messenger from the merchants of Lübeck had had the papers of surrender in his pocket when he’d come to Bishop Brask.

“Goat-farmer,” said the Devil, “you’ve done well for yourself. I’m sure Mother Sweden can look forward, now, to years and years of peace.”

“That may be,” said Gustav, and glanced at Lars-Goren, who stood gray as ashes, carefully not looking at either of them. It crossed Gustav’s mind that sooner or later, he must drive his friend the Devil out of Sweden.

1.

WHILE GUSTAV BEGAN THE WORK of setting up his government — a task as exciting to him as planning and carrying out the revolution, for he had high hopes: he knew himself no fool, knew to the last detail what was wrong in Sweden and what he, as king, could do about it; knew, moreover, that he had a gift for inspiring those around him, so that surely his government must prove a masterpiece of sorts — Lars-Goren, for his part, turned his mind more and more to the question of understanding and outwitting the Devil. He was not free during the first few weeks, to leave Gustav’s side, since Gustav insisted that he needed his advice; but as soon as the new king felt he could spare him, Lars-Goren bid farewell to his friends at court and started north to his home in Hälsingland, to visit his wife and children, find out how his estate was maintaining itself, and give himself the leisure to read a little, and think.

It was the middle of summer when he started on his journey. Goats stood on the roofs outside the walls of the Stockholm fortress, nibbling grass and moss and looking down with malevolent eyes at every carriage that passed. Boats filled the harbor, mainly German, Polish, and Russian, for the Swedes were at that time passive traders; they waited for the buyers to come to them. It seemed a sensible policy, though Gustav Vasa would later change it. Sweden was relatively poor and small, and shipping was expensive, not only because of the cost of boats, equipment, and sailors, but also because of the cunning and skill of the pirates who preyed on shippers. A few great rulers of that day and age — like Ivan the Terrible, Henry VIII, and the Holy Roman Emperor — could afford strong navies to defend their coasts and seaways. But for lesser mon-archs — even Fredrik of Denmark — who had to scrap with their magnates for wealth and manpower, the cost of such police work was prohibitive. For all Lars-Goren knew that morning, half a dozen of the gray, high-masted ships he looked down on now might be disguised privateers.

Imperceptibly, the city changed to farmland. No one riding Lars-Goren’s road north could have said where one left off and the other began. Even at the heart of the city there were goats and gardens; but at some point there began to be more cows than goats, and the gardens became fields. Lars-Goren, lost in thought, hardly noticed the change, merely felt a slight lifting of the heart that meant he was in a country a little more like home, though home was still provinces away. By the time he reached Uppsala, after riding for days — gangling and vague-eyed, arms and legs loose as a straw-man’s, his beard as thin and curly as brown moss — he was in the heart of the farmland, the beginning of the region that paid its taxes in butter and hides and gave the kingdom its most important exports, all that could be wrung from a cow, from the horns to the tail. Though by knightly privilege he could have slept where he pleased, he put in at a hostel in the shadow of the clumsy, towering cathedral where the archbishop Gustav Trolle had inadvertently put Sweden on the road to independence. Before dawn, he was on the road again.

He travelled through fields and forests and spent the second night in Gästrikland, bordering Dalarna. There he slept with peasants, a chicken on the bed beside him, queerly friendly though also cautious, as if the chicken possessed the soul of a cat. He had nightmares which he couldn’t quite remember in the morning. He would have thought he’d forgotten them completely except that at the mention of Dalarna, to the west of him and not on his way, he got a brief flash of imagery, possibly prophetic, he thought. Lapps with torches (somehow he saw this while lying in the snow-covered grave they attacked) were digging up his body. He saw this with his food raised halfway to his mouth, then remembered no more and finished eating.

Soon he was in the pitch-dark forests of Hälsingland, veering west of the principal city of his province, Hudiksvall, heading toward the fields and streams of his family estate. When he emerged from the darkness to the light of the fields it was like being reborn, he thought, and thought, the same instant, of Bishop Hans Brask, who would have winced at the neatness of the symbolism. The image of Bishop Brask — sitting on his horse as he’d sat that morning beside the lake in Dalarna, about to dismount and have a word with Gustav Vasa — was so sharp and real that Lars-Goren reined in his horse. It seemed to Lars-Goren that he and the bishop had made a long, hard journey. But there was no one there, just fields of new-mown hay, a small village in the distance, a crooked wooden steeple rising above the other village rooftops.

“Bishop Brask,” he said aloud, as if the man were still there.

A shudder passed through him and he tried to remember what he’d been thinking, all this way, but all that came into his mind was light and fields, a dark, dead tree somewhere in one of the forests he’d passed, beside the road, also one toothless old woman who had waved and smiled, then crushed her hat down under one hand and vanished into the weeds.

With his knees he started the horse forward again. He began to pass the huts of the people who owed their allegiance to him. Small huts, well kept, better than most, he would have said; but then, the war had never come to Hälsingland, and though the sons of these peasants had fought with Lars-Goren, they had been lucky from the beginning: all but a few hundred had come home without a scratch, as if the Devil, for some reason, had decided to leave them alone.

Toward dusk, Lars-Goren reached the village closest to his own estate, and here, unaccountably, he found himself full of dread. He tried to think of what he would say if someone hailed him, and his distress increased. But tall and erect though he was, no one noticed him. And so, long after sunset, he came to his home estate. Though summer was at its height, the air was frosty. The fields lay perfectly still, bathed in mist, nothing stirring but rabbits and a fox and what might have been a deer. On the hill overlooking the river, his castle stood unlighted, as if everyone had died. He knew, of course, that that was nonsense, an idle nightmare rising and sinking again in an instant. Nevertheless, he swallowed hard, like a man full of fear and remorse. The horse, called Drake, or Dragon, looked back at him. He patted its neck. They moved on and came to the plank road, loud under his horse’s hooves, that rose abruptly to the castle gate.