Lars-Goren could think of no answer and so rode on in silence, his head tucked down against the wind and flying ice. They were now on the flat of the Devil’s thighs, moving toward his hands, the fingers extended, huge drifts, each one higher than a horse.
“And how do we succeed?” Bishop Brask called, his voice just a whisper above the wail of the wind. “What’s our plan? What’s our strategy?” He laughed a kind of wail of despair.
Lars-Goren had no idea. He rode on, breathing shallowly. The air was like acid in his throat. When he reached the Devil’s splayed fingers he dismounted. Only when they bumped one another did he realize that Bishop Brask was right beside him.
“We’ll never make it,” Bishop Brask yelled. “The whole thing’s nonsense!”
Mother, his son’s voice called, it’s some old woman.
Without ropes, digging deep to clutch the hair of the Devil’s robe, they scaled the Devil’s silent upper arm. Hours passed. They hardly noticed, struggling for every breath. On the ice-crusted shoulder they rested.
“Lie here too long,” Lars-Goren called, “and we’ll freeze.” At once he shut his mouth again.
“You think such laws apply here?” Bishop Brask wailed back. Lars-Goren could not even see him in the swirling snow and ice, though he was six feet away.
Even to Hans Brask it was a strange business, a kind of miracle. He had meant to cry out from despair, as usual, and he had reason enough: he was beyond pain, numb to the heart; yet what he felt was the wild excitement of a child or an animal. He would not be fooled by it. He was a sick old man, and he knew there was no chance of getting back from here alive. Bishop, man-of-God, whatever, he had no faith in God. As surely as he knew he was alive he knew God was dead or had never existed. What was this euphoria but an animal pleasure in existence at the margin — the joy of the antelope when the tiger leaps? Yet the joy was real enough. Absurdly, for all his philosophy, he was glad to be alive and dying. It was this that his books had prepared him for: the candle flames guttering. He knew well enough that he wasn’t thinking clearly, that at home in his study he would scorn this emotion, but now, this instant, that was irrelevant, unspeakably trivial. “This is poetry, this is love and religion!” he thought. He crawled closer to Lars-Goren, filled with excitement, almost laughing, though no sound came out and his cheeks were all ice from his tears. With his mouth only inches from Lars-Goren’s ear he cried, “What a stupid fool you are, Lars-Goren! You know as well as I do that all this means nothing!” The words were thrilling to him, whatever their effect on Lars-Goren. “We’ve reasoned it all out: God and the Devil mean nothing whatsoever. We exist and we die — that’s the glory of our existence. All the rest is mere language!” He could feel, below him, the Lapps looking up with their animal stupidity, their thoughts indistinguishable from reindeer thoughts, one with the universe — meaninglessly, idiotically one — whereas he, Hans Brask, was a bursting star of intellectual energy, magnificently separate from everything, everyone. “Pride?” he yelled, “tell me about pride, pretty Jesus!” He laughed, clenching his half-frozen fists in his joy. Lars-Goren, he realized now, was not beside him. He had a vague memory, light as the movement of a hair on his forehead, of Lars-Goren’s having spoken, telling him, no doubt, that it was time to move on. That stood to reason. Everything stood to reason! Stood and fell! He laughed. Bishop Brask rose to his knees, then sank down again, laughing at his clumsiness, filled with numb joy. Now the three stones on the stretched skin of the drumhead were perfectly balanced, the black on one side, the white on the other, the gray stone balanced on the line. The magician grinned, lost in his trance, mindless. Abruptly, impishly, the child reached out and struck the drum. The gray stone leaped eastward, as if by will. In Dalarna, three men looked up suddenly in the darkness of the mine where they worked. It seemed to them that something had groaned, sinking toward the center of the earth. Lars-Goren, clinging to the ice that sheathed the Devil’s neck, seized his knife of bone.
Suddenly the Devil was filled with terror. He shaded his eyes with both hands, bending his head forward, trying to make out what it was that was wheeling around him. The Lapps! he thought. It was the Lapps from the beginning! But he could make out neither the Lapps nor their reindeer in the blinding whiteness. It was as if, for an instant, all existence had become one same thing, at the center of it a will, a blind force more selfish than the Devil himself, indomitable, too primitive for language, a creature of awesome stupidity, wild with ambition. And now all at once came a smell of Sweden into his nostrils. The Swedes! he thought, and the truth of it almost made him laugh. Of course, of course! he thought, raging. He had always known, he knew now, that it had to be the crafty Swedes.
What a fool, what a poor, stupid fool, thought the Devil, smiling in his despair. First Sweden, then the world! For it was now all perfectly clear to him: after the bloodbath of Stockholm, there were only the people — no kings, no lords, only fools like Gustav Vasa and a few threadbare bishops. There he lost his train of thought. That’s my problem, he thought. I lose my train of thought. What wonder, though, he thought, in this utterly senseless … Again he could not remember what he’d been thinking.
Something tickled his neck, a colder place on the coldness of his skin, and he raised his hand to swat at the annoyance, but then a voice came to his ears, and he hesitated. It was the voice of Bishop Brask. “Dreams, illusions,” the bishop was shouting. “It’s for yourself you do this, my dear Lars-Goren! No one but yourself! What’s your love for your children and wife but greed? What’s your love of justice, your love for all so-called humanity, but a maniac’s greed? Do you think they’ve elected you God, Lars-Goren? You’re a tyrant! Mad as Tiberius! You’d kill them all as readily as you’d save them, you know it! And if killing proves fittest, then it’s killing that will survive! How can you act, then, confronted by such knowledge? Maniac! Animal!” The voice was full of joy and rage, a kind of cackling, crackling glee. It was as if the man’s mind had gone as blank as the face of Bernt Notke’s carved statue, decadent art in all its curls and swirls — ten thousand careful knife-cuts and a face more empty of emotion than the face of the world’s first carved-stone god. I repent me that I ever made man, thought the Devil. His ice-crusted eyebrows jittered upward.
Slowly, thoughtfully, he felt along his shoulder until he came to the bishop’s little body, perched like a cockroach at the end of his collarbone. Almost gently, respectfully, he crushed it. Then he frowned. Had the bishops loud crying, right there in his ear, been a trick of some kind? When he shook his head and tried to speak to himself, he understood that his throat had been cut.
“Whatever it may mean,” said the old woman at the gate, “the Devil has been killed.”
“And my husband?” said Lars-Goren’s wife.
“In fourteen days he’ll be home,” said the old woman. “Tell him I came.” She spoke proudly, as if what she had done was a wonderful thing, a feat no one, living or dead, could conceivably rival. No one’s eyes, even the Devil’s, ever shone with more pride. Liv Bergquist winced at the sight of such terrible arrogance. Then the old woman vanished.