Freddy's Book

by John Gardner

  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.”

  6.

  THERE WAS THAT NIGHT, as there was almost every night in Dalarna, an open-air meeting, with beer drinking and speeches. It was run, though crudely, with all the stiff formality of the annual Ting. To Lars Goren’s vague distress there was still not a Danish soldier in sight—at least not one in uniform—but gradually, as the reason came clear to him, his distress gave way to amusement. For all the wooden politeness of the meeting, the concern for proper order—each man rising and speaking in his turn, and speaking with as much moderation as he could manage—the miners were a fearsome company, not to be trifled with. No Dane, once the miners had found him out, would have lasted a minute in the riot the discovery would have unleashed. On the other hand—as the Danish rulers were undoubtedly aware—whatever the pent-up fury of the miners, there was not much to hear at an ordinary meeting in Dalarna. A man stood up, black-bearded, big-bellied, and harangued his fellow miners about foreigners and Lutherans. He pounded his fist on an imaginary table, his eyes bulged with anger, spittle flew glittering from his mouth past the high, smoking torches. The Germans—there were many of them here in Dalarna, most of them owners, officials, or engineers—nodded solemnly, as if in complete agreement, though in all probability every one of them was Lutheran. Another man, a Swede with long blond hair and eyes sunken in like the sockets in a skull, raised his arms for recognition, to answer the big-bellied man with the beard. “Don’t be fooled!” he cried in his thin, woeful voice. “Whatever people say, there’s a lot we can learn from the Lutherans!” The Germans, as before, nodded solemn agreement. The Swede gave the old and familiar arguments, how the peasants on Church-owned land were for the most part tax-exempt, and the Church owned a fifth of Sweden; how a churchman or even the servant of a churchman, if he committed murder, could be tried only in the churchmen’s special court; how the bishops in the Riksdag and råd had been keeping the government weak at least since 1440, though they themselves dealt in land and trade, even fought wars against their neighbors, like any other nobleman; how the bishop of Skara could produce thirty armed horsemen for knightly service, while even the richest of the lay magnates could bring out only about thirteen. “The True Church,” cried the Swede, shaking his finger at the sky and almost weeping, “is not the bishops but the whole community of the faithful! Let the True Church—the people—get the wealth of the Church, not the bishops!” The men of Dalarna applauded him and shouted encouragement, raising their steins. A bald, nervous German with a rounded back and twitching, pink eyes was granted recognition and spoke against the Lutherans and, especially, against all Germans. “I am one of them!” he cried. “I look in my own filthy soul, and let me tell you, I am horrified!” He began t
o shake all over. “A German who has got no authority outside him is worse than a filthy beast!” He shook both fists.

  Before he knew the reason—perhaps it was the smell, like the stink of a goat—Lars-Goren felt his heart turn to ice. When he swivelled his head around, he saw the Devil standing in the shape of a crow on Gustav Vasa’s shoulder, whispering in his ear. Gustav scowled, his hand on his bearded chin, then slowly raised his eyes to the platform.

  The men of Dalarna knew at once, when Gustav began to speak, that this was no ordinary ranter and raver but a man who, if he survived, might change the world.

  Lars-Goren could never remember later what it was, word for word, that his kinsman said in that famous speech. Whether it was the Devil’s inspiration or his native ability, never before tested, Gustav addressed them with force, not in grand phrases but like the commoner he was. He spoke of the bloodbath, how the axe had fallen smoothly, without clumsiness or hurry, indifferent as the knife of a Copenhagen housewife chopping mushrooms; how after each stroke, as the head fell away toward the sawdust, shooting out its spiral of blood, the headless body jerking, clutching at the air with its white, blind fingers, the axeman drew his axe back and wiped it with his cloth, looking out over the crowd as if wondering what time it was, then leaned the axe against the sawhorse beside him and crossed another name off, while his two assistants dragged the body away, pulling it by the shoes, and then led up another man, as polite and unhurried as assistants to a rich, fat Copenhagen tailor, and helped him kneel at the block; and how then the axeman dusted his hands, spit on the palms, and casually reached over for the axe.

  “How can one reasonably hate such people?” Gustav Vasa asked. He held his arms out, innocent as morning. He was indeed, there on the platform—still and calm in the churning torchlight—the kind of man one could easily imagine one’s king. “Nothing,” he said, “could have been more logical, impersonal, and efficient than the Stockholm bloodbath. Supremely efficient! No question about it, they were much to be admired, these Danes! All their enemies in the party of the Stures they’d removed at one fell swoop, and without a trace of risk! No new leader in the party of the Stures could arise now to trouble them, because no Sture kinsman who’d ever shown the slightest sign of talent had been left among the living. Though the widow of Sten Sture had been spared, she would prove no exception: she would certainly be executed, quietly, in Denmark, for as everyone knows, and as history has shown repeatedly, no tyrant is safe until the last pretender to the throne he has stolen has been slaughtered. No Sture money could be turned to financing revenge for the bloodbath and the horror that attended it, because the estates of the dead—all the wealth of the Stures—had reverted to the Union crown, that is, to Kristian of Denmark. And the wealth of Kristian and his friends would increase. All bureaucratic positions once managed by Stures here in Sweden, from Kalmar to the Pole, would be managed, henceforth, by loyal Danes. Perhaps,” Gustav said—showing his large and perfect teeth in a smile—“perhaps some members of his audience might be imagining they could still look for help from the democratic Lutherans, especially those of the German port of Lübeck, Sweden’s main contact with the League. Alas, an empty dream! Though a Lutheran himself, for all practical purposes, Kristian of Denmark was switching his trade from the Hanseatic League to the Netherlands. Ask any merchant from Muscovy to Spain! Lübeck, for all her wealth and beauty—for all her seeming power—would soon be no better than a ghost town.” Gustav’s voice began to tremble with emotion. “Lübecks halls would soon be empty, her spires stripped of bells. For the overworked, overtaxed miners of Dalarna and for their German owners, officials, and engineers, the last reasonable hope lay in three great piles of blowing ashes on Södermalm hill. The victory of the Danes was complete and elegant. How,” he asked again—his voice trembling more—“could anyone reasonably hate a race of men so efficient?”

  The men of Dalarna stared, hardly knowing what to think, stunned by his carefully marshalled, gloomy arguments. The rounded German with the twitching eyes sought recognition, but they ignored him. The Devil, now disguised as a half-wit peasant to Lars-Goren’s left, stood grinning, his bleary eyes glittering. He seemed to have forgotten his position in all this. He rubbed his hands, his head thrown forward, enjoying the suspense and the victory sure to come, grinning and eager as the humblest of mortal partisans. Lars-Goren’s wits reeled, and sweat ran down his face, but it struck him that, if only he could make himself think clearly, he had, there beside him, a clue to how the Devil might be beaten—possibly forever! He knew, even as the notion came to him, that of course it was absurd; yet the strange conviction persisted, scorn it as he might.

  The crowd began to whisper, its anger building, and at the last possible moment Gustav Vasa broke his silence. “Men of Dalarna,” he said, “I have told you no reasonable man can hate the Danes, much less dream of beating them. But I do not come before you as a reasonable man. I come as the last, wild hope of the Stures, a Sture myself and a man with powerful acquaintances in Lübeck, men who owe me favors and have even more need of me than you have—more need, as they know themselves, than has all of Sweden!” The shock his words gave them seemed to pass through the crowd in waves, like wind over wheat. “Is it possible?” they said to one another. “Is he mad?”

  Lars-Goren began to feel troubled. It was not so much that Gustav was lying a little, though he was, of course—he was not quite as close to the Stures as he pretended, nor did anyone in Lübeck owe him favors. Neither was it, exactly, that for a man in such a passion, Gustav Vasa spoke remarkably well-turned sentences. One fights as one can, Lars-Goren told himself. A man in a fury makes use of his fists in the best way his training makes available to him, so why should Lars-Goren object if his kinsman Gustav used careful rhetoric? Nevertheless, Lars-Goren felt distressed, looking up at the platform from his place beside the Devil. Like torches at a stage play, flickering on the sweatbeads of an actor playing Christ, throwing up a shadow on the wall behind him, so the torches around the platform gleamed and danced and raised shadows over Gustav. Like an actor’s lines, not like real, direct feeling, the well-turned cries of Gustav’s anger rang out over the crowd and rebounded from the mountains. Even the answers of the crowd sounded staged: Is it possible? Is he mad? The smudged faces, swellings, and wounds of the Dalesmen—real as he knew them to be—looked like putty and paint in the torches’ red glimmer, and even the Devil, with spittle on his lip, seemed all at once, to Lars-Goren, like a child in a costume. All the world had gone unreal, mere foolish play—a shoddy carnival, a magic show; and remembering those who had died in Stockholm, those real severed heads, mouths working in the dirt, those real bodies stretched and torn apart on the rack, Lars-Goren began to be filled with frustration and anger that it should all come to this.

  “My name,” Gustav Vasa was saying on the platform, “is Gustav Vasa! After my old friend and wealthy, staunch supporter Bishop Brask, who was spared because of his clerical status and his pretended friendship with that filthy pig Gustav Trolle, archbishop, I am the last close relation of Sweden’s fallen hero, the man who should have been our king, Sten Sture the Younger!” He lowered his eyebrows, smiling like a demon, and ground his right fist into his left palm, waiting while they roared their pleasure; then he spoke again. This time Gustav made no secret of his strong emotion. He told them of the death of his father and uncles, the imprisonment of his two lovely sisters; told them—almost gently, though his voice clanged out like a Swedish iron bell and tears streamed down his cheeks—that he, for one, could still unreasonably find it in his heart to hate the efficient and elegant Danes. He, for one, could dream of overthrowing them, dream of sending those noble old sea-kings out to sea for the rest of their days—let them settle in China! He said: “‘And where will this Gustav get his army?’ you ask.” He raised both hands, pointing. “You,” he screamed, “will be my army!”

  The Devil, in his excitement, was sobbing and, at the same time, dancing. From every quarter of the c
rowd rose a roar of approval. Everywhere, miners were kissing each other.

  At just that moment a man came running up the hill from the village. He pushed into the crowd, trying to reach the platform shouting something to everyone who would listen. When news of what the man was saying reached the Devil, his hair stood on end and his eyes rolled in fury and confusion. Then, collecting his wits, the Devil made a rush—roaring and swinging his fists to make a path—pressing to the platform, where he whispered in Gustav Vasa’s ear. Together, they melted at once into the crowd and hurried to the darkness beyond the farthest reach of the torches. As well as he could, Lars-Goren followed. He caught up with them at the nearest of the pit-barns, climbing onto horses.

  “What is it? What’s happened?” Lars-Goren called out, keeping clear of the Devil, trying to look only at his kinsman.

  “It’s Brask!” Gustav answered. “Bishop Brask and his men! Somehow or another they’ve got on to us! Grab a horse, Lars-Goren! If they’ve heard about me and what I’ve claimed for them, they’ve probably heard that you’ve been with me!” He shouted to his horse, wheeled, then galloped off, the Devil galloping right behind him, his black cape flying. As quickly as he could, Lars-Goren caught a horse for himself and set out after them, but as luck would have it, he was too far behind and got lost in the woods. When he found them—or, rather, found Gustav Vasa but not the Devil, sitting at his campfire beside a high mountain lake—Bishop Brask and the noblemen of his party had already caught up with him. Their horses were coming from the woods toward Gustav just as Lars-Goren came toward him from the opposite direction. When Gustav saw them he leaped up in a fury, then at once sat down again and began to bang the earth with his fist, crying without shame, like a schoolboy, swearing his heart out.