Bishop Brask sadly shook his head and rubbed his hands together. “Come, come,” he said, a kind of whine in his voice “you’re too hard on me! It’s quite true that you wouldn’t be my first choice as king, but you are my choice. Why be difficult? I’ll tell you what it is that I mind most about seeing you chosen. Shall I?” He looked over at Lars-Goren as if asking for his permission too. “What I mind most — on your account as much as mine — is that it will change you from an animal to a man.”
“The day that happens, the Devil will convert to Christianity,” said Gustav.
Abruptly, loudly, the monk in the corner of the room began to laugh. They all knew the voice; it was the Devil. Lars-Goren felt a weakness coming over him.
“I’ve gone about this very badly,” said Bishop Brask, wincing and looking hard at Gustav. His voice, to Lars-Goren’s surprise, became a pitiful old man’s. “I’ve been a good ally to you, Gustav, surely you’ll agree. I’d hoped that if I spoke with you frankly, laid my cards on the table — no tricks, no cunning manipulation — we might become friends.”
“We’ll see,” said Gustav.
“Yes, we’ll see, of course.”
As Gustav moved toward the door, the bishop caught his arm and leaned close, timid and confidential. “Make no mistake, your troubles are just beginning!” he said. “You’ll need every friend you can get! Surround yourself with men who have proved you can trust them! Remember your own!”
Gustav seemed to think about it. “I’ll do that,” he said. “Goodnight.”
“Good-night,” said the bishop, his fragile old fingers snatching at Gustav’s hand to shake it. As Lars-Goren followed, the bishop caught his hand too and shook it heartily. “Good-night, my friend,” he said to Lars-Goren, eagerly fixing him with his eyes. “Good-night and God bless you!” As they walked down the stairs he called from the landing, “Well, good-night then!”
“What do you make of it, Lars-Goren?” Gustav muttered at the door.
“I’d say he’s as good a man as any to nominate a king,” said Lars-Goren.
Gustav nodded. “And after that?”
“He’d like some high office, that’s clear,” said Lars-Goren.
Gustav waited, frowning impatiently.
“He might be a fine and Christian man,” Lars-Goren said, “if he had nothing to think about but books.”
“Appoint him to nothing whatsoever?” said Gustav.
“All I really said—” Lars-Goren began.
“Incredible suggestion!” said Gustav; suddenly smiling, he hunched forward, and lightly tapped his fingertips together near his nose.
ON THE SIXTH OF JUNE, Gustav accepted the crown. Eleven days later, the Danes in Stockholm surrendered. It turned out afterward that the messenger from the merchants of Lübeck had had the papers of surrender in his pocket when he’d come to Bishop Brask.
“Goat-farmer,” said the Devil, “you’ve done well for yourself. I’m sure Mother Sweden can look forward, now, to years and years of peace.”
“That may be,” said Gustav, and glanced at Lars-Goren, who stood gray as ashes, carefully not looking at either of them. It crossed Gustav’s mind that sooner or later, he must drive his friend the Devil out of Sweden.
PART THREE
1.
WHILE GUSTAV BEGAN THE WORK of setting up his government — a task as exciting to him as planning and carrying out the revolution, for he had high hopes: he knew himself no fool, knew to the last detail what was wrong in Sweden and what he, as king, could do about it; knew, moreover, that he had a gift for inspiring those around him, so that surely his government must prove a masterpiece of sorts — Lars-Goren, for his part, turned his mind more and more to the question of understanding and outwitting the Devil. He was not free during the first few weeks, to leave Gustav’s side, since Gustav insisted that he needed his advice; but as soon as the new king felt he could spare him, Lars-Goren bid farewell to his friends at court and started north to his home in Hälsingland, to visit his wife and children, find out how his estate was maintaining itself, and give himself the leisure to read a little, and think.
It was the middle of summer when he started on his journey. Goats stood on the roofs outside the walls of the Stockholm fortress, nibbling grass and moss and looking down with malevolent eyes at every carriage that passed. Boats filled the harbor, mainly German, Polish, and Russian, for the Swedes were at that time passive traders; they waited for the buyers to come to them. It seemed a sensible policy, though Gustav Vasa would later change it. Sweden was relatively poor and small, and shipping was expensive, not only because of the cost of boats, equipment, and sailors, but also because of the cunning and skill of the pirates who preyed on shippers. A few great rulers of that day and age — like Ivan the Terrible, Henry VIII, and the Holy Roman Emperor — could afford strong navies to defend their coasts and seaways. But for lesser mon-archs — even Fredrik of Denmark — who had to scrap with their magnates for wealth and manpower, the cost of such police work was prohibitive. For all Lars-Goren knew that morning, half a dozen of the gray, high-masted ships he looked down on now might be disguised privateers.
Imperceptibly, the city changed to farmland. No one riding Lars-Goren’s road north could have said where one left off and the other began. Even at the heart of the city there were goats and gardens; but at some point there began to be more cows than goats, and the gardens became fields. Lars-Goren, lost in thought, hardly noticed the change, merely felt a slight lifting of the heart that meant he was in a country a little more like home, though home was still provinces away. By the time he reached Uppsala, after riding for days — gangling and vague-eyed, arms and legs loose as a straw-man’s, his beard as thin and curly as brown moss — he was in the heart of the farmland, the beginning of the region that paid its taxes in butter and hides and gave the kingdom its most important exports, all that could be wrung from a cow, from the horns to the tail. Though by knightly privilege he could have slept where he pleased, he put in at a hostel in the shadow of the clumsy, towering cathedral where the archbishop Gustav Trolle had inadvertently put Sweden on the road to independence. Before dawn, he was on the road again.
He travelled through fields and forests and spent the second night in Gästrikland, bordering Dalarna. There he slept with peasants, a chicken on the bed beside him, queerly friendly though also cautious, as if the chicken possessed the soul of a cat. He had nightmares which he couldn’t quite remember in the morning. He would have thought he’d forgotten them completely except that at the mention of Dalarna, to the west of him and not on his way, he got a brief flash of imagery, possibly prophetic, he thought. Lapps with torches (somehow he saw this while lying in the snow-covered grave they attacked) were digging up his body. He saw this with his food raised halfway to his mouth, then remembered no more and finished eating.
Soon he was in the pitch-dark forests of Hälsingland, veering west of the principal city of his province, Hudiksvall, heading toward the fields and streams of his family estate. When he emerged from the darkness to the light of the fields it was like being reborn, he thought, and thought, the same instant, of Bishop Hans Brask, who would have winced at the neatness of the symbolism. The image of Bishop Brask — sitting on his horse as he’d sat that morning beside the lake in Dalarna, about to dismount and have a word with Gustav Vasa — was so sharp and real that Lars-Goren reined in his horse. It seemed to Lars-Goren that he and the bishop had made a long, hard journey. But there was no one there, just fields of new-mown hay, a small village in the distance, a crooked wooden steeple rising above the other village rooftops.