“I’m not sure I follow,” Lars-Goren said.
For a moment Brask said nothing, musing in private. “Just this,” he said at last, as if reluctantly, already slipping toward boredom. “If you look at it philosophically — not just at how breeding can produce a particularly meaty strain of pigs or an extra-large bull, not just at how, in the short run, a wolf can be transformed in just a few generations to a domestic hunter … if you look, instead, at the long-term implications. …” He compressed his lips and looked suddenly cross. “The Church, if it were paying attention — which it never does, of course — would be shocked to the soles of its boots by this breeding of livestock.”
They rode awhile in silence, Lars-Goren, for his part, pondering why it was that the bishop had such difficulty bringing himself to put his thoughts into words. It was not for lack of thoughts, Lars-Goren had known that since the first day he’d met him. But words seemed to come from the bishop’s heart as if weighted by field-stones. Even to say, “Good morning,” it seemed the old man had to take a deep breath, overcome inertia.
There was a whir in the grass to the right of them and a flock of partridges flew up, wings roaring. As if the noise and sight had renewed his strength, the bishop asked rhetorically, “What does it suggest, this stock-breeding? It suggests that, given enough time, we could transform the world, change every tree, every flower and insect. Mate the dogs with long noses, generation on generation, and in time you have a species of long-nosed dogs. Is it that that draws kings to the sport of breeding stock? Have they seen to the heart of the mystery? Have they noticed that they’re on to the fundamental secret of God? You look at me in alarm, Lars-Goren, as if you think I’ve gone mad. I haven’t. Nothing like that. But think: suppose it’s the same with ideas, governments, even virtues. Surely it’s that these Kings have guessed, though if you asked them they might not understand it.”
“You’ve lost me,” Lars-Goren said.
“No matter, just an old man’s nonsense,” said the bishop. After a time he said, “Put it this way: We hear the expression ‘Might makes right.’ Suppose it’s true — I mean profoundly true. Suppose there is in fact no good in the world except that which survives. We create a horse stronger than other horses, put him in a field with those lesser horses, and he kills them. They’re dead forever then, unable to throw their line. Suppose it’s the same with governments. Create a form of government more effective than all others, in due time it will destroy or at any rate outlive all the others. What more could any king ask when he dies than to be remembered as the man who created such a government as that?”
“Yes, interesting,” said Lars-Goren.
Bishop Brask nodded, his face slightly glowing, as if even he were for a moment interested. “And ideas,” he said. “What of ideas?” His face took on an apologetic look, as if not by his will but by its own accord. “I’ve been working, as you know—” He gave a little shrug, then forced himself to continue, “I’ve been working on Gustav’s translation of the Bible into Swedish. One encounters some rather peculiar problems. It’s nothing new, you understand — nothing I’m the first man in the world to discern. Alcuin, Grosseteste, Bacon — they were all on to it, though their conclusions were perhaps not exactly the same as mine. The Hebrew’s not all of a piece, that’s the heart of it. The language and ideas change not by decades but by centuries. In a single sentence the language may jump hundreds of years. You follow my drift?”
Lars-Goren considered, then shook his head.
“What I’m saying is, Holy Scripture grew. Like a plant. Like a horse. It changed, sometimes drastically. There seem to be startling cuts, shifts of opinion, as if God’s spirit, dictating, kept changing its mind.”
“Possibly you’ve made some mistake,” said Lars-Goren.
Bishop Brask looked at him. “No,” he said. “It’s no mistake.”
“And what do you make of it?” Lars-Goren asked.
Bishop Brask stared hard at his horse’s ears. “I think the whole book is a record of trials and errors,” he said.
“You sound like a Lutheran,” said Lars-Goren.
For a time Bishop Brask said nothing. Then: “No, worse.”
Darkness was falling. They were still a good twenty miles from Uppsala. Lars-Goren urged his horse to a brisker pace. As if without noticing, the bishop did the same.
2.
THEY SLEPT THAT NIGHT in one of the elegant stone houses in the garden of the cathedral, a walled-in park with trees and headstones, some of them old arrow-shaped Viking stones. The night air was heavy with the scent of horses. It crossed Lars-Goren’s mind — an idle thought, but one not a little distressing to him — that here in the walled cathedral garden they were “in sanctuary.” Theoretically at least, no sheriff or general from Gustav’s government could touch them. It wouldn’t be a bad place to live out one’s life, all things considered — heavy-beamed old trees, a creek with clean-swept bridges, statues here and there, lit by flickering torchlight, some of them finer than anything at the palace in Stockholm, if Lars-Goren was any judge.
An old serving man opened the door for them and bid them come in. Behind him in the darkness, people were moving about, lighting candles, stoking the fire, softly calling to one another. It was queer, all this fuss for two more or less unimportant travellers, Lars-Goren thought. He soon discovered they were not as unimportant as he’d imagined.
Four priests came forward and greeted Bishop Brask with great respect, almost fear, as if to the clerics of Uppsala he was of a rank with the Pope himself. Some knew him, it seemed, for the force and cunning of his political activities, some for his scholarship. The young priest who was placed in attendance on them, rousted out of bed, puffy-eyed with sleep, was, it turned out, one of those involved with the bishop on the Uppsala translation project. He could not seem to do enough for his master, and though he was solicitous, too, about the welfare of the king’s advisor Lars-Goren, one could see at a glance that in the priest’s eyes — in all the priests’ eyes — Lars-Goren was a humble commoner in comparison with the bishop.
Bishop Brask was gray with weariness and walked slightly tilted, as if his back were hurting him. He seemed to want nothing more than sleep; yet at the priests’ urging he seated himself compliantly and drank a glass of brandy, then another and another, and talked at length, mainly with the young man involved with translation, sometimes heatedly — whether from an old man’s weary exasperation or from frustration at the complexity of the problems involved — about the book of First Corinthians. Lars-Goren sat forgotten in a corner of the candlelit room, listening, with his hands on his knees. The text they were discussing was one he had never heard before and would have considered at any other time, not worth haggling over, since it was a text never used in sermons. But today’s context charged it with meaning in Lars-Goren’s mind, though the meaning was nothing he had words for. The text read, roughly, “There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord; and there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which works in all.” Like the priests, Lars-Goren sat forward, hanging on the specialists’ words, his brandy glass on the table beside him, forgotten.
His hope that their arguments would resolve his unwordable question proved vain. They spent the whole time debating the meaning of the Greek word for which Brask supplied the translation “operations.” The younger priest was urging such translations as “movements” or “events,” possibly “changes and inner principles in things.”