“Surely,” said Gustav, his face wet with tears and shining in the light of the funeral pyres, “even for those of us who have escaped the axe, there can be nothing to look forward to but death!”
Lars-Goren nodded thoughtfully, not as a sign of agreement but because it was his habit to nod as if agreeing until he’d thought things through. At last he said, when he saw that there was nothing else to say, “God’s will be done,”
From somewhere high above him, laughter cracked out like thunder over ice, and he crossed himself.
PART TWO
I.
THAT NIGHT AS LARS-GOREN and Gustav were fleeing the city, still disguised as peasants, the Devil stepped out of the narrow alleyway along which they were hurrying and stood with his crooked legs wide apart, his arms reaching out like an ape’s to the walls on either side, and refused to let them pass. Gustav was instantly thrown into a rage. He was a quick-tempered man on the best of days, famous for a farmerish sort of arrogance, and tonight, considering all he’d been through, it was not surprising that the slightest provocation should turn him to a madman. Though he was seven feet tall, he could hardly have believed, if he had stopped to think, that he was a match for the person who stood blocking his way, for the Devil, in the shape he had taken on, was taller even than Lars-Goren. Nevertheless, Gustav put his head down like a bull, raised his fists in front of him, and charged with all his might.
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 was 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.