Freddy's Book

by John Gardner

  Lightly, so quickly that neither Gustav nor Lars-Goren saw exactly what he did, the Devil sent Gustav somersaulting backward, so that he landed, with a resounding thud, hard on his rear end.

  “Your Majesty,” said the Devil, “you’re too impetuous!” He was standing with his legs wide apart as before, but now his huge arms were folded.

  Gustav squinted through the darkness and fog, his expression incredulous and close to tears, then over at Lars-Goren to see if he too was seeing and hearing these remarkable things. As if his legs had gone weak, Lars-Goren was leaning against the farther stone wall, pressing his fingers and palms flat against it. Young Gustav Vasa frowned with such intense consternation it seemed that the heat of his brain might burn out his eyes. With one hand he reached up to his head, confirming that his hat had fallen off, then abruptly he shot his eyebeams back into the Devil’s.

  “You’ve got the wrong man,” said Gustav. “I’m nobody’s king. I’m a goat-farmer.”

  The Devil laughed. “You’re Gustav Erikson Vasa of Rydboholm, kinsman of Sten Sture.”

  Again Gustav shot a look at Lars-Goren and this time frowned so hard that his lower lip reached almost to his nose. He looked back at the Devil for an instant, then away again, turning over this thought and that thought so quickly and cunningly that the Devil began to smile. Feeling around him on the cobblestones, he found his hat and, as if paying great attention to it, like a slow-witted peasant, pulled it back over his head. Then, clearing his throat, and watching carefully lest the Devil decide to kick him or hit him again, he got up onto his feet.

  “I may or may not be this Gustav you mention,” he said at last. “But I’m certainly no king.”

  “Not yet, perhaps,” said the Devil, and gave a little bow.

  Gustav shook his head and put his fists on his hips, still scowling as if in fury, then looked up hard at the Devil’s forehead, not quite meeting his eyes.

  “Who are you?” he asked. As he spoke he noticed that the person in front of him had lumps on his forehead, like the beginnings of horns. His heart gave a very slight jump.

  “Your friend knows who I am,” said the Devil, grinning broadly.

  Lars-Goren had his eyes closed, and sweat was pouring into his moustache.

  “Hmm,” said Gustav, and raised his fingers to his wild, shaggy beard. After a moment he nodded thoughtfully, then squinted, increasingly cunning, at the Devils large nose. “I warn you,” he said, “never underestimate my friend Lars-Goren!” He spoke with great conviction, but then instandy felt a little embarrassed, for Lars-Goren was making an involuntary peeping noise, like a woman who’s been whipped; and Gustav said crossly, to hide his embarrassment, “So what have you to say to me?”

  “You’re heading for Dalarna?” the Devil asked in the tone of a man just making conversation.

  “I might be,” said Gustav.

  “Good. I’ll come along with you,” said the Devil. “I haven’t seen Dalarna in years. We can talk as we go.”

  “Very well then, whatever you say,” said Gustav. He turned to Lars-Goren, who had twisted his face away. The knight’s neck was stretched up horribly, like the neck of a man being hanged. “Come along, Lars-Goren,” said Gustav gently. “Play your cards right, I’ll make you archbishop.”

  2.

  AS THE THREE WALKED ALONG, keeping to back lanes and narrow paths through immemorially old, blue-black conifer forests, a darkness where no Danish soldier would dare venture—where for all their pride in their Viking heritage, their reputation as drinkers of human blood, no Dane would so much as move his left foot up even with his right—the Devil talked happily, with great animation, of his infinitely complicated schemes. Young Gustav listened in exactly the way the Devil liked, skipping past the trivia, seizing on those slyly planted hints here and there that the Devil’s labyrinthine plot might be of use to him, providing him with weapons that might enable him to do what he desired: avenge his kinsmen. As for the kingship, it was an interesting thought, and Gustav Vasa was by no means unambitious, but it was not at all his first thought, at least not yet. His heart was closed like a vise on anger and sorrow. Also, he knew he would do well to move cautiously. Though he was no more afraid of the Devil than he was of God or Death, he was by nature a suspicious man, wary as a wolf, a quality he knew he would need if he happened to become king.

  Lars-Goren, for his part, listened in a very different way. Every word the Devil spoke was to him like crackling fire, for he’d read a good deal about the lives of the saints and the martyrs. One had no chance against the Devil, he was convinced, but also, since the Devil had singled them out, he had no choice but to listen with all his wits, in the desperate hope of understanding the enemy and outstriding him. He studied the Devil’s limping gait, his way of throwing his arms out wide in a parody of heaven’s magnanimity, his way of laying his ears back like a horse and sometimes glancing sharply past his shoulder. As a warrior, Lars-Goren knew weakness and fear when he saw them; but he knew that the Devil was not weak in comparison to them—much less fearful—and Lars-Goren knew, too, as a horseman, that nothing is more dangerous than a powerful creature in a panic.

  Lars-Goren, needless to say, was in a panic himself. Stumbling along the path, numbed and blinded by his fear, nearly falling from time to time, clutching his chest with his large right hand to make the hammering of his heart less painful, he tried to think out, slowly and reasonably, what it was that so frightened him. His young kinsman Gustav seemed all but indifferent to the threat of the huge, humpbacked monster lunging through the darkness beside him, occasionally throwing one arm across his shoulders, laughing and ranting like a man who hasn’t spoken in years and now suddenly has found his tongue.

  “Surely it’s not Death I’m afraid of,” thought Lars-Goren, rolling his eyes upward toward heaven. A hundred times he’d faced death in battle and once he had very nearly died of a mysterious disease. He’d felt no such fear as this on any one of those occasions. Indeed, lying in his infirmary bed, sick people breathing out their last all around him, more corpses every day, the building full of flies, what he’d chiefly felt was a kind of philosophical curiosity and perhaps a touch of pleasure in finding himself so calm. In the heat of battle, he’d had no time for even that. The horse charging him must be swerved around in time, the sword rightly planted in his antagonists belly or chest. He had been aware, each time, that this thrust, this leap, this dive into the weeds might be the last he ever made; but his mind was on the thrust, the leap, the dive: the idea that he might die, insofar as it was there at all, trailed behind him forgotten, like the faded red streamer on his helmet. Nor had he thought about death at night when he returned to his tent—except once. Once in the middle of the night a cannonball had crashed through his tent and knocked his cot out from under him—it seemed the same instant, though it couldn’t have been, that he had heard the muffled thud of the cannons exploding black powder. Alarm like a rabbit’s had burst in his chest. But even that he had not registered as fear. It had been, he would say, an extreme of startledness, a slam of heart that had nothing to do with his mind, his beliefs and convictions. Afterward—lying on the tent’s earthen floor, his two companions bolt upright in their cots, their faces white as moons, their voices booming, blaming it all on Lars-Goren—he had felt his body shaking like a sail in a storm, all feeling gone out of his hands and feet, his heart still thudding hard, only gradually slowing itself. Not even that was, in Lars-Goren’s opinion, fear. He experienced the violence in his body as not strictly part of himself, no more essential to his mind or soul than the terror of a horse underneath him or a tremor in the earth. No, in plain truth he was not afraid of death. There were in this world, he knew, men who did fear death—men who froze in the face of it, bending to a crouch, muscles locking, hard as steel, men who belched repeatedly and could not speak—but he, Lars-Goren, was not one of them. If he congratulated himself for this lack of fear, and scorned all people more cowardly, he also knew, in secret, that it w
as all chiefly luck, some accident of upbringing or blood—his father and grandfather had been the same. Should someone have asked him for the formula for bringing up children just like him, he’d have had to admit he didn’t know it.

  Neither did it seem to him that his fear was of eternal damnation—hellfire, instruments of torture, and the rest—the things one saw in holy pictures or heard about in stories. Like all Swedes then and now, he was inclined to take the threats of priests with a grain of salt. If hell was as ferocious as the priests maintained, then the justice of God and God himself were in doubt. He had no real question that a god of some kind did indeed exist. His grandmother had been a Lapp, and in his childhood he had visited that queer nomadic people. Second sight was as normal with the Lapps as the ice on their lashes. If a child wandered off and died, they knew where to find it. They saw things thousands of miles away as clearly as an ordinary man sees his fingernails and shoes. Those who had never been acquainted with the Lapps might hotly deny that this was possible, making their faces red, their angry throats swelling up like frogs’ throats; and Lars-Goren could not blame them, nor would he labor to argue the unarguable; but the Lapplanders’ visions were as much a matter of fact to him as the harsh solidity of their reindeer-horn graveyards. What God had to do with those visions he could not say—nothing perhaps—but whatever reservations his reason might cling to, he accepted, below reason, their premise, a world of spirit—vaguely, God. The Lapps’ idea of God or rather of the gods, might seem peculiar to a Christian; their spirit world was neither benign nor malevolent, at least in the Christian way. It was simply there, beneficial or harmful in about the way wolves or reindeer are, a parallel existence neither loving nor malicious, not even consciously indifferent; a force to be reckoned with, avoided or made use of, like the ghosts in one’s hut of stretched hides. Having grown up with the Christian God and stories of His saints, having heard talk of the aloof but concerned everlasting Father from the time he had first learned the difference between Swedish and the various other kinds of noises people made, Lars-Goren had accepted without special thought the Christian opinion that the spirit world was largely paternal and benevolent and because his father had been the kind of man he was, stern, even fierce, but invariably well-meaning, at least when he was sober, Lars-Goren had glided accidentally but firmly to the persuasion that if hell existed, it could only exist because God had gone insane. God might be baffling to a human mind—as mysterious as the beaver-faced Lapps of Lars-Goren’s childhood, those midget relatives whose puffy-lidded, smoky black eyes had nothing recognizably human in them, or nothing except affection—but God, if he was sane, was not ultimately dangerous. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I will fear no evil,” as the Psalms put it. What in all the earth, or even under the earth, should a just man be afraid of?

  On the other hand, it was undeniably a fact that, moving through the darkness with Gustav Vasa and the Devil, Lars-Goren was afraid, as frightened as he’d ever been by nightmares, and his fear baffled him. He clenched his fists and sucked in deep breaths, but the fear would not abate. “Ridiculous!” he muttered through his clenched and grinding teeth. But Lars-Goren’s heart went on pounding, pounding, white-hot at the notch of his collarbone. The sound of his heartbeat seemed to thud from the darkness all around him.

  3.

  “THINGS ARE in confusion,” the Devil’s voice boomed out, “and believe me, the confusion will get worse! That’s the kind of time when a man of cool wits can make his fortune!”

  “I have no interest in fortunes,” Gustav said, then compressed his lips. Perhaps he protested too heartily.

  “Yes, of course,” the Devil said, throwing his arms out left and right, not in a mood to haggle phrasings. “But I’ll tell you this: it’s a wonderful moment for somebody. If not you, then somebody else.” He laughed.

  They were out of the woods now. Ahead of them lay a village. If there were Danish soldiers there, they were not in the streets. The Devil limped boldly toward the lighted windows, and Gustav followed, too interested in what the Devil was saying to think about his safety. Lars-Goren came twenty feet behind them, trembling and watching like a hawk.

  “First of all,” said the Devil, his hand on Gustav’s arm, his face pressed close to Gustav’s ear—though he did not for that reason lower his voice—“you see only the evil, not the good in the bloodbath of Stockholm!”

  “Good!” exclaimed Gustav, jerking back his head for a look into the Devil’s eyes.

  “By all means good!” said the Devil with a roaring laugh. “Think about this, my hot-headed little friend: no one in Sweden will be fooled any longer about the character of the Danes! It’s not new, this murdering way they have, but people will turn their heads—I’ve watched it for centuries.” He shot a look over his shoulder at Lars-Goren, as if measuring the distance between them, and Lars-Goren held back a little. Now the Devil had all his wits on Gustav again. “A hundred times Sten Sture could have seized the advantage and made himself king, but no, he held back, the fool!—contented himself and his thousands of supporters with a miserable regency, played footsie with the Danes, kept his tail between his legs for the highfalutin super-magnates like Ture Jönsson and Bishop Brask. And all for what? For what, my young friend? To be killed and buried and dug up and burned like a dog on a garbage dump—with all his friends!”

  Gustav stopped walking and turned to the Devil, angry enough, by the look of his expression, to try one more time to knock him down.

  “Now now!” said the Devil quickly, raising his hands in surrender. “No offense! Mere facts! He acted in good faith—he took his little share and left the Danes and super-magnates their big one. I admire him for it, to a certain extent. All the same, the Danes showed their colors—you can’t deny that! We all deplore the bloodbath, that goes without saying. But now that it’s happened it’s no use whimpering and turning our faces to the wall. We have to look at where it leaves us.”

  Gustav grunted, carefully noncommittal. His cheeks twitched, and it was clear that he kept his temper only by strong self-discipline.

  They were passing a small inn, and when the Devil noticed, happening to glance in the window, he said, “Ha! Here’s an inn, and not a Dane in sight!” In fact there were Danes in sight, Lars-Goren would have sworn, but the instant the Devil spoke, they vanished. The Devil proposed that they stop and have a tankard at his expense, and he would tell young Gustav his mind.

  When they were seated and served—the Devil so large, hunched over the table, that his stiff gray cowlick brushed the beams of the ceiling—the Devil continued: “Where it leaves us is this: King Kristian’s whole effort in the Stockholm bloodbath was to make certain nobody was left to oppose him. All the best men of your beloved Sture party he murdered by the axe and the rack. We can grieve that fact—that’s only right and human—but also, if I may say so, we can use it.”

  Gustav studied Lars-Goren, who sat in the corner, his hands over his face, his eyes peeking through the cracks between his trembling fingers. At last, looking back at the Devil, Gustav said, “Speak on.”

  “Gustav, my friend,” the Devil said, interlacing his fingers and smiling kindly, “the Stures have no one left but you, if you reveal yourself to be willing—though they hardly know your name as yet. And they have no one strong enough to oppose you in the unhappy event that Stures widow should escape execution and try to claim the leadership.”

  Gustav thought about it, then warily nodded. In the shadowy corners of the room where the people of the inn cowered, keeping as far as they could from the Devil, a few began to whisper. “Speak on,” Gustav said again.

  “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 th
e 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.