John Gardner - Freddy's Book

The Devil sat enclosed in his wings, baffled. Even with his hands over his eyes he was blinded by the brightness. “This is a very foolish thing you’re doing,” he said to himself. He spoke in a child’s voice, exactly like a child playing house. “Foolish, is it?” he said. “Yes, foolish.” He shuddered, but he could not seem to stop himself. “Why foolish?” he asked. “I’ll tell you why foolish.” “Yes, tell me.” “Very well.” “No, don’t tell me!” “No, I’d like to.” “You’re a fool! Go away!” “A fool, you think?” “A fool! A fool!” He felt forms around him. With a part of his mind he struggled to awaken, but the voices were still running, childish, idiotic, blocking out the world. “Pay attention!” cried one. “I am paying attention!” “No, fooling around! That’s all you ever do — fooling around.” He shuddered again. The line was not right. “That’s all you ever do — fool around.” But the rhythm was wrong. Now the forms were closer, minuscule disturbances around his hooves. He struggled to wake himself. “Despair, then? You, the inventor of despair, you’re caught in it?” “Nonsense!” His cheeks were freezing cold. It dawned on him that he was weeping, the tears turning to ice. “Suicide?” cried one of his voices. “Has it come to that?” With a violent effort, he opened his terrible eyes.

The magician’s fingertips drummed softly, but the sound was like thunder. The child watched in silence. The three stones moved toward the line, mighty forces in near balance.

“We call them ’six-eyes,’” a young, smiling Lapp said, his hand on the reindeer’s flank. He did not know or care that they’d been told already. He smiled as if that were enough, simply saying it; no more need be said. He too, Lars-Goren thought, was a creature of six eyes: in tune with the wind and snow, the heartbeat of the reindeer, the mind of God. It was true of course, as his son had said, it was not possible to be like the Lapps. Yet also it was true that it was good to know that Lapps existed, not dreams or illusions, real people, living at the extreme.

They had come to the foot of a great, dark mountain. The horses shook with cold as Lars-Goren and the bishop mounted. All the Lapps stood looking up. They seemed to look at nothing and everything at once, at the mountain, the blinding white sky, the reindeer, each other. It was a look he had seen before somewhere — but he had no time to think where. In the windy silence he seemed to hear his wife’s voice, distinct, right beside him: Erik, see who’s at the gate. The mountain had two foothills. Lars-Goren’s blood froze. The foothills were enormous cloven hooves.

He spurred his horse and started up. Bishop Brask was beside him, wincing with pain. “Why does he put up with it?” Lars-Goren wondered. The instant he asked it, he seemed to see deep into the bishop’s mind, as if he’d remembered the secret of the Lapps. But the insight had no words. “Very well,” he thought, “there are truths that have no words.” In his belt Lars-Goren carried a knife made of reindeer bone. Here steel was of no use. Ice would dull it, the cold make it snap on impact. He wore, today, no iron gloves, only skins; nor was he dressed in his armor. He looked like a man from the world’s first age, indistinguishable from a furry beast. In the terrible cold he found it difficult to think. He kept his mouth closed tight, lest the cold shatter his teeth. When it had begun he could not tell, but now the wind was howling. The bishop had to shout to make Lars-Goren hear “Suppose we succeed,” he yelled, “what will be changed?”

Lars-Goren could think of no answer and so rode on in silence, his head tucked down against the wind and flying ice. They were now on the flat of the Devil’s thighs, moving toward his hands, the fingers extended, huge drifts, each one higher than a horse.

“And how do we succeed?” Bishop Brask called, his voice just a whisper above the wail of the wind. “What’s our plan? What’s our strategy?” He laughed a kind of wail of despair.

Lars-Goren had no idea. He rode on, breathing shallowly. The air was like acid in his throat. When he reached the Devil’s splayed fingers he dismounted. Only when they bumped one another did he realize that Bishop Brask was right beside him.

“We’ll never make it,” Bishop Brask yelled. “The whole thing’s nonsense!”

Mother, his son’s voice called, it’s some old woman.

Without ropes, digging deep to clutch the hair of the Devil’s robe, they scaled the Devil’s silent upper arm. Hours passed. They hardly noticed, struggling for every breath. On the ice-crusted shoulder they rested.

“Lie here too long,” Lars-Goren called, “and we’ll freeze.” At once he shut his mouth again.

“You think such laws apply here?” Bishop Brask wailed back. Lars-Goren could not even see him in the swirling snow and ice, though he was six feet away.

Even to Hans Brask it was a strange business, a kind of miracle. He had meant to cry out from despair, as usual, and he had reason enough: he was beyond pain, numb to the heart; yet what he felt was the wild excitement of a child or an animal. He would not be fooled by it. He was a sick old man, and he knew there was no chance of getting back from here alive. Bishop, man-of-God, whatever, he had no faith in God. As surely as he knew he was alive he knew God was dead or had never existed. What was this euphoria but an animal pleasure in existence at the margin — the joy of the antelope when the tiger leaps? Yet the joy was real enough. Absurdly, for all his philosophy, he was glad to be alive and dying. It was this that his books had prepared him for: the candle flames guttering. He knew well enough that he wasn’t thinking clearly, that at home in his study he would scorn this emotion, but now, this instant, that was irrelevant, unspeakably trivial. “This is poetry, this is love and religion!” he thought. He crawled closer to Lars-Goren, filled with excitement, almost laughing, though no sound came out and his cheeks were all ice from his tears. With his mouth only inches from Lars-Goren’s ear he cried, “What a stupid fool you are, Lars-Goren! You know as well as I do that all this means nothing!” The words were thrilling to him, whatever their effect on Lars-Goren. “We’ve reasoned it all out: God and the Devil mean nothing whatsoever. We exist and we die — that’s the glory of our existence. All the rest is mere language!” He could feel, below him, the Lapps looking up with their animal stupidity, their thoughts indistinguishable from reindeer thoughts, one with the universe — meaninglessly, idiotically one — whereas he, Hans Brask, was a bursting star of intellectual energy, magnificently separate from everything, everyone. “Pride?” he yelled, “tell me about pride, pretty Jesus!” He laughed, clenching his half-frozen fists in his joy. Lars-Goren, he realized now, was not beside him. He had a vague memory, light as the movement of a hair on his forehead, of Lars-Goren’s having spoken, telling him, no doubt, that it was time to move on. That stood to reason. Everything stood to reason! Stood and fell! He laughed. Bishop Brask rose to his knees, then sank down again, laughing at his clumsiness, filled with numb joy. Now the three stones on the stretched skin of the drumhead were perfectly balanced, the black on one side, the white on the other, the gray stone balanced on the line. The magician grinned, lost in his trance, mindless. Abruptly, impishly, the child reached out and struck the drum. The gray stone leaped eastward, as if by will. In Dalarna, three men looked up suddenly in the darkness of the mine where they worked. It seemed to them that something had groaned, sinking toward the center of the earth. Lars-Goren, clinging to the ice that sheathed the Devil’s neck, seized his knife of bone.