The plot was uninteresting, though serviceable. Von Melen would come and pretend to attack Visby, put on a fine show but in the end see Sweden’s navy to the bottom of the sea. Sunnanväder and Mickilsson would strike at Gustav from within, from their base in Dalarna, with armies and leaflets. Ah, always leaflets! thought the bishop. The world would never again be the same, now that leaflets had been invented, and firing them off had been refined to a science as precise as the firing of cannonballs. “Poor Gustav,” as Sören Norby called him, had invented the weapon that would sooner or later be the death of him — no doubt also the death of distinguished prose. It was ironic; if he could work himself up to it, the bishop would even call it sad. Gustav, like the Lutherans, had thought leaflets the weaponry of Truth and noble sentiment. So Sören Norby seemed to think them, too. None of the bishops disabused him.
Very well, very well. Bishop Brask sipped his wine, then sat toying with it, watching how it caught the light, breaking it to pieces. Kristina would be released — Fredrik had as much as given Norby his word — and of course it stood to reason. Norby would be regent of Sweden until Nils reached majority, when Nils would become regent, and thus the Union of Kalmar would rise out of Södermalm’s ashes, with Denmark at its head, as in former times. To clinch the arrangement, and safeguard Nils’ position, Kristina and Norby would marry — a state both of them desired, Brask knew. He’d lived long enough to recognize a man in love when he saw one, not that it made his old heart leap. That Kristina should not feel the same was unthinkable. As flies beget flies, love begets love — the thought had no particular disrespect in it, nor did it enter Brask’s mind as an expression of distaste. All of us live on illusion, so long as we can afford it. Hans Brask, in his youth, had been an avid reader of poetry, and not a casual, indiscriminate reader. He knew the difference between Dante and Petrarch, the Song of Roland and some foolish French tale. He had wept, in his youth, at the story of the saintly Jewess Teresa of Avila; he might weep again now if he had time for books. “Faith,” he’d once written, “is creating what we cannot see.” It had a fine ring to it, and in Latin an excellent pun. But faith was for a man in his study, a dreamer, or for a man who had no other options, such as a farmer planting seeds.
Forgetting himself, Bishop Brask heaved a sudden sigh. Bishop Sunnanväder glanced at him with a look of concern. Brask knew well enough that the concern was, like everything else, policy. He waved his hand vaguely and smiled. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just thinking of the snow.” Bishop Sunnanväder glanced at the window, a great blank of white, and his expression changed to cunning. He was a fat man, professionally meek and jovial, a man who always cried at church music — cried genuinely, perhaps, as Brask cried genuinely over poetry — but he was not as good an actor as he no doubt imagined; the look of cunning was always waiting at the edges of his face, prepared to leap out and seize his features.
Norby, for his part, had no time for these delicate dramas. He said, “King Gustav counts heavily on the friendship of Lübeck, but he’s in trouble there. Fredrik of Denmark is no fool, believe me! It was Kristian’s policy to shift trade to the Dutch, but now Kristian himself is in the Netherlands — he and his supporters. Why should Fredrik serve the friends of his enemy? Everything has changed before his eyes, but poor Gustav doesn’t see it!” Norby laughed. “I rob the ships of Lübeck, but I never kill a soul. They expect me — they know when I’m coming. We have an arrangement. I take their goods, I very carefully store them, I prevent them from reaching their Swedish destinations, but when the wind changes—”
“That’s good! That’s very good!” said Mickilsson, eyes widening. Clearly it came as a complete surprise to him. Troublesome, troublesome, thought Bishop Brask. It was all very well to work with innocents like Norby, but to conspire with fools was a dangerous business. However, he let his face show nothing.
Long after all that needed saying had been said, the meeting of the conspirators dragged on. It was the weather, perhaps, the snowy day outside as bleak as their prospects if the plot should fail; here inside, the immense warm fire, comforting as victory. And so they talked and talked, repeating themselves. Gradually Bishop Brask stopped listening entirely, brooding on dangers more remote.
Gustav Vasa would of course destroy the Church; it was a foregone conclusion. He had never claimed he would do otherwise. Already he was hinting that the portion of tithe which was allotted to the running of parish churches should be diverted to the pay of his soldiers. To Bishop Brask himself he had written, “Necessity overrides the law, and not the law of man only, but sometimes the law of God.” And already his minister Lars Andreae had proclaimed, on Gustav’s instigation, the Lutheran doctrine that the Church, properly considered, was made up of the whole community of the faithful, so that the wealth of the Church was in fact the wealth of the people. Already he had turned the printing press at Uppsala to the production of a Bible in Swedish, and, adding insult to injury, had ordered Bishop Brask himself to help with the translation — an order Brask had had no choice but to obey. But what would they gain, overthrowing Gustav Vasa? Now King Fredrik too, it seemed, was warming to the merchantmen of Germany, Luther’s right arm. Bishop Brask began to see more clearly, staring down thoughtfully at his amber-red wine, the strategy of the Devil — and its futility. Keep everything in confusion, that was the Devil’s way of doing things. Baffle and madden the enemy and hope for the best. And if the Devil was as powerless to control things as he seemed, what could the best be, Brask thought, theological, but the will of God? The bishop kept himself from frowning, not wishing to draw attention. Did he believe, he wondered in “the will of God”? Like a reflex, a soul-crushing, weariness came over him. What did it matter what he thought, after all? Life would go on, or would go on until it stopped. If the will of God was inescapable, like the fall of the stones in an avalanche, then it was clearly no business of his. Let the chips, the boulders, the castles fall where they may. He closed his eyes.
He dreamed he was standing before the Pope, who was for some reason enormous, clothed in the brightest red velvet. The Holy Father was raising a silver chalice, holding it carefully between his thumb and first finger, his smallest finger affectedly extended, his face not a man’s but a woman’s, elaborately painted. When he’d sipped, he began to set the chalice down, holding it out over Bishop Brask’s head and lowering it slowly, as if he did not know that Brask was standing there, about to be crushed. “Father!” Bishop Brask squealed, his voice no louder than the hum of a mosquito. Now a great shadow had fallen in a circle around him from the base of the chalice. Just before darkness engulfed him, he saw, high above the Pope’s head, a great circle of blinding light descending like a ring of blue-white fire. The circle seemed as large as the whole world, and it was speedily growing larger, like a planet on collision course with Earth. Bishop Brask jerked suddenly awake, spilling a little flutter of wine. Otherwise, he showed no sign that he’d fallen asleep. Something had crashed, the same instant he awakened. It was a glass Sören Norby had thrown, in high spirits, into the fireplace.
7.
BY THE SPRING OF 1525 the conspiracy was all but crushed. No one in Stockholm was much surprised least of all Bishop Brask, who had read the signs well enough and soon enough to keep himself clear of suspicion. Von Melen, called home from the fiasco at Visby, prudently avoided Stockholm and went to earth in his castle of Kalmar.