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!”