The bishop looked older and wearier by the minute. His left cheek trembled, and his mouth made a tight, thin line. “My young friend,” he said, “it’s not our business to write the Bible, just to translate.”
“But it means the same thing,” the young man insisted, smiling falsely, eagerly, as if in hopes of deflecting the bishops wrath. “Operations — changes in things—surely there’s no real difference!”
“If that were true, you wouldn’t be fighting me so heatedly,” said the bishop.
The young man held out his hands, palms up. “It’s a question of making ourselves clear to the people who read,” he said. “Changes in things they’ll understand — spring, summer …”
“You fool yourself,” snapped the bishop, and let his eyes fall shut. “You want to make God say not what in fact he says but what the people will understand. What the people believe — what you believe — you want him to believe. The Greek is more vague than you like it — less, so to speak, sophisticated. You want him to compare the behavior of water in a river to the behavior of mayflies, or husbands and wives — make God some kind of universal alchemy. Perhaps up in heaven, listening to what you say, God is pulling at his beard nodding heartily in agreement. But at the time he, so to speak, spoke with Paul, he was talking about talents and governments, and somehow or another he forgot to say what, listening to you, he may be wishing now that he’d thought to bring to Paul’s attention.”
The young priest was checked in his opinion for only an instant. He drew his plump hand back to his mouth and said tentatively, not meeting the bishop’s eyes, his whole body expressing his refusal to be beaten by the bishops rhetoric, “It all depends what he meant, exactly, by ‘administrations.’ Perhaps he wasn’t thinking exclusively of churches or political systems. Systems of philosophy, as Aquinas tells us, have their necessary logical ‘government.’ Trees, the arrangement of veins in mammals, the habits of badgers, as opposed to those of bees …”
“You know you’re talking nonsense,” the bishop said crossly. “Human pride! Beware of it! What a pleasure it would be”—he smiled slightly, his eyes narrow slits—“to impose one’s opinions on the world through the mouth of God himself!”
“If I’ve correctly followed the arguments of your books, they’re as much your opinions as mine, my lord,” said the priest, but feebly, looking at his knees, as if he knew the ploy would never work.
“True enough, they are my opinions,” said the bishop. “Who knows, if the Lutherans win, they may someday be all men’s opinions and taken for gospel. Give every man a Bible and let him read it as he likes, sooner or later what the Bible says will be what the news-crier says in the street. Truth will be whatever survives generation on generation.” He closed his eyes again, and for a moment it seemed to Lars-Goren that he’d fallen asleep. Then, without opening his eyes, he said, “It may all come to pass. No need to rush it.”
With an effort, the old man raised his eyelids, then set down his glass. “I must sleep,” he said. “Translate it any way you please. Whatever we do is presumably God’s will.” He pressed down on the chair-arms and rose.
The young man looked at him, distressed, his head full of arguments, but in the end, with the other priests gathering around him, he said nothing, but officiously rose to help the bishop to his room.
In the morning none of them referred to the midnight discussion. Perhaps, on reflection, the young priest had decided to take advantage of the old man’s irritable concession and do exactly as Brask had ironically advised — translate any way he pleased. After matins and breakfast, as they were mounting their horses — the bishop stiffly, as if the pain he had still not mentioned were much greater now — the young priest asked, “Will you be passing through Dalarna?”
Glancing at the bishop, who showed nothing, Lars-Goren answered, “No, that’s out of our way. We’ll be heading straight north.”
“Ah,” said the priest, and nodded.
Bishop Brask studied him with drawn lips. His old horse stamped irritably, but the bishop held him in a moment longer. He asked sternly, “Why?”
The priest shrugged. “There are always rumors of trouble in Dalarna,” he said, and gave a laugh.
“What this time?” Lars-Goren asked.
With studied off-handedness, to show that he himself was in no way involved, he told them of the Daljunker — the young gentleman of the Dales — who claimed he was Nils Sture, that young Nils was, after all, not dead but had escaped Gustav’s wrath.
“That’s absurd,” Lars-Goren said, flashing anger. “What wrath? Who ever said Nils Sture was dead?”
“He’s not?” asked the priest.
Bishop Brask, heavy on his horse, flicked his reins slightly, moving without a word of farewell down the path toward the road. Lars-Goren looked after him, then nodded to the priest and started out behind him, trotting to catch up. The road was lightly speckled, like an eel’s back, with light and shadows. “More work of the Devil?” said Lars-Goren.
“Everything’s the work of the Devil,” said the bishop.
“Everything?” Lars-Goren asked, ironic.
“Nothing then; whatever you like,” said the bishop, and said no more.
3.
THEY RODE THAT DAY only as far as Lake Daläven. As on the previous day, the bishop sometimes rode for miles without a word, other times spoke freely. Once Lars-Goren said, riding through a forest as dark as a cave except for a few threads of sunlight — a forest so thick there was no underbrush, only a carpet of pine needles—“It puzzles me, Bishop, that you decided to come north with me. Surely you had friends you could have turned to for protection. It hasn’t escaped me that you ride like a man in some discomfort; back trouble, perhaps, or possibly something worse, though I hope not.
“Yes,” Bishop Brask said, a sullen, disembodied voice in the darkness to Lars-Goren’s right, “I’m old for a trip like this, that’s true.”
Lars-Goren waited, listening to the footfalls of the horses, and when the bishop said no more, he said, “Yet you’ve come. It does seem strange.”
“Strange,” the bishop agreed, and then, with a sigh, as if only to avoid further hounding on the question, “I hardly know myself why I decided to come. Perhaps just exhaustion. No doubt that sounds strange — to take a long, arduous trip out of exhaustion — but when a man reaches my age, or my mental state, call it what you like, it can sometimes seem easier to walk on foot to China than to wrestle over trivial decisions.” He rode awhile in silence, then spoke again. “That was mere rhetoric, I’m sure you noticed. ‘Walk on foot to China.’ I live on rhetoric, like a spider on its threads. Perhaps I imagined I could outride the edge of my rhetoric. More rhetoric, you’ll notice.”
Lars-Goren said nothing.
“I remember when I imagined some connection existed between rhetoric and the world. I remember the feeling. Very pleasant, like the feeling of union between man and a woman when they couple. A curious illusion, when you stop to give it thought. I doubt that would have quite that feeling if one did it with a sheep or, say, a unicorn. But one never stops to think about such things when one’s young. ‘I love thee, Kristina!’ cries Sören; ‘Sören, I love thee!’ cries Kristina — and the world pops open like a flag. Oh yes, ah yes.” He heaved a sigh. “I’ve watched it, de temps à temps. I remember young Gustav. How I envied him there beside Lake Mora, full of faith in himself! Then Norby. Poor gudgeon, he had it too.That’s one of the Devil’s main tricks, of course. Fill a man with faith. What evils, what absolute horrors the noble sword of faith sends pouring into the world!”