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 the 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.
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.