by John Gardner
Gustav nodded and cut him off. “Yes, yes, enough.” He scowled. “I’ll give it some thought.”
“Meanwhile,” said von Melen with an apologetic gesture, as if sorry to trouble His Majesty with more—and again he showed his peculiar, prissy smile—“if you were to ask me to visit Dalarna, with a small, discreet army, nothing of the sort that would suggest, you know, oppression—”
Gustav scowled more darkly and glanced at Lars-Goren. Lars-Goren looked at his hands, then drawing out his knife, began cleaning his fingernails. Von Melen watched in disgust.
“You must admit,” said Gustav, “it’s an interesting thought.”
“Not a very wise one, I think,” said Lars-Goren. He avoided looking up.
“Not wise?” snapped Gustav, flushing a little, as if the idea had been his own.
Lars-Goren shrugged. “Why send a foreigner to Dalarna, where foreigners are hated? Send him, say, to Gotland—to Visby, say, where the pirates hide between attacks on the merchant ships of Lübeck. Wipe out Sören Norby and his privateers, and—who knows?—perhaps Lübeck will be inclined to grant us an extension on the war-loans.”
“Ha!” said Gustav, clapping his hands and whirling around to face von Melen. “You see how ingenious we are, we Swedes? You, a German, will fight for a cause of importance both to Sweden and to Germany! You’ll win yourself great honor. I think so! Ah, what a day this is for you, von Melen!” In his delight, King Gustav seized von Melen’s arm. “Go prepare! Get whatever you need—don’t be cheap!” He added quickly, “Don’t be too cheap.”
Von Melen’s mouth worked, twisting as if by itself like a snake, hunting for objections. “As you say, Your Majesty,” he brought out. His tiny blue eyes looked hard at Lars-Goren. After a moment he “As you say.” He brought himself to attention as if at some inaudible command from Gustav, turned sharply, and marched out.
Gustav moved quickly to Lars-Goren and bent toward him, his hands on his knees. “You’re good,” he said. “I wish I had ten of you!” Then he laughed. “Poor von Melen! How can he plot against my government with Sten’s bishops when he’s sloshing around off Gotland?”
Lars-Goren laughed too. It was pleasant, this scheming and counter-scheming. Who could deny it? The sound of their laughter set off curious echoes. He glanced around the room.
4.
PLOTS AND COUNTERPLOTS, thrusts and counterthrusts—ah, what a moment it was in the life of the Devil! He was everywhere at once, passing out leaflets—attacks on both sides—in Dalarna and Småland; conspiring both for and against the Dutch with King Fredrik and the tsar; stirring conflict in Stockholm between the city authorities and the pigs and chickens that roamed freely in the streets, the wolfpacks that crept along the hedges. Above all, he paid close attention to Sören Norby and the Stures.
“My friend,” said the Devil, appearing to Sören Norby in the terrifying guise of Sten Sture’s ghost, “you are my last resort now—you and your courageous pirates!”
Sören Norby sat bolt upright, his gray eyes as wide and glittering as coins. “Who are you?” he shouted. He shot his right hand under his pillow for his knife.
“I,” intoned the Devil, “am the ghost of Sten Sture the Younger, foully murdered by King Kristian of Denmark and now betrayed on every hand by my own Swedish kinsmen!” He stretched out his arms, his charred remains still smoking in the tatters of his winding-sheet.
“The hell you are!” Sören Norby yelled, leaping up onto his feet on the bed, the knife in his right hand, his left hand stretched out, fingers splayed wide, ready to fight.
“Hear my words, Sören Norby,” intoned the Devil, the sockets of his eyes staring emptily through the smoke. “Look down at this child beside me, this innocent torn from life!” Little by little, like the master illusionist he was, he revealed to Sören Norby’s horrified eyes the smoldering remains of the infant Sture who’d been exhumed and burned with Sten at Södermalm. The trick was so masterful, as it seemed to the Devil—and the pirate such a stupid and sentimental fool—it was all the Devil could do to keep from laughing. “Ah yes,” thought the Devil, “you swat them as a cow’s tail swats flies when they’re just a little older, but a poor dead infant—how the sight moves you!” Nonetheless he kept his face morose, his tone sepulchral. “Look on these ruins of my child and take thought on my second son Nils, who still lives! I make you his guardian and protector, Sören Norby, and in payment of your kindness I promise you this gift—”With a pass like a magician’s he showed a vision of his widow Kristina Gyllenstierna, stark naked on her pallet in her prison cell in Denmark.
“My lord,” breathed Sören, for the corpse of the infant and the nakedness of Sten Sture’s widow had persuaded him, “I am not worthy!” He sank to his knees and wiped his eyes with his forearm.
5.
FROM THAT MOMENT ON, Sören Norby was like a wildman in his support of the party of the Stures. He sent letters to Denmark, asking for an audience with King Fredrik, which he received. His plea for Kristina’s freedom was so impassioned that Kristina gave him a ring and said she hoped he would think of her as his dear, dear friend. As soon as he was back in Gotland he wrote more letters, one of them to Bishop Brask, telling him of his vision of Sten Sture’s ghost, and all that Sten Sture had said to him, and how he, Sören, had visited King Fredrik in Kristina Gyllenstierna’s behalf, and how the king had listened with interest. Now, to Sören Norby, Gustav Vasa was the Devil incarnate, renegade to the cause of Nils Sture, Sten’s son, and except for the love of Kristina Gyllenstierna, Norby desired nothing in the world with more ardor than he desired King Gustav’s fall. All this, too, he set down in his letter to Bishop Brask, with more in the same vein, and numerous expressions of his respect and good wishes for the bishop.
Bishop Brask held the letter at arm’s length, staring in disbelief.
“Bah, he’s a madman,” said the Devil, seated at the bishop’s elbow. With Brask he was by now so thoroughly comfortable that he made no effort to disguise his appearance, merely scaled it down so that it fit inside the room—hairy-rooted horns, face like an idiot’s, flesh soft and scaly as an enormous, fat snake’s. He sat with his dark, matted legs crossed, jiggling one hoof. His pitch-dark wings, when he half extended them, covered all the wall like a curtain.
“Not mad, I think,” said Bishop Brask irritably. “Misled, no doubt—no doubt by someone we know.” He said no more, at least nothing more aloud. It was true that the Devil could sometimes read one’s mind, that once he’d gotten into you there seemed to be no shaking him; but at least one could in some measure limit the monster’s conversation. That, thought Bishop Brask, was the real horror. Never mind the everlasting fire or the imps with forks. He could bore you, bore you to the ninth pit of madness, and think then of something still stupider, stupidity so deep it was unanswerable, a matter of awe, even terrible worship. Oh yes, Bishop Brask understood the Devil. Perhaps he could even outwit him, he sometimes thought, if he could summon up enough of his heart’s former warmth to make it worth it; but that was something he was in no mood to expect. It was a curious venom, the poison that flowed from the Devil. Say that all human life is idiotic, all human feeling an absurdity, effect without due cause; say that to weep at the death of one child after the deaths of a million million children—centuries of corpses, centuries of mothers gone berserk and wailing, each father turning sharply, heart leaping, at the voice he’s mistaken for his own dead child’s—say that all this is a shameful humiliation, an outrage not to be put up with; say that love and sorrow, considered from the peak of the mountain of eternity, are as paltry and insignificant as the wild, ravished hymning of blue-glinting flies on the four-day-old corpse of a mongrel. Say these things, yes, say all this once, thought Bishop Brask—say it once with conviction—and how are you to rise without revulsion to even the emotion of a heart-felt objection to the death you’ve just swallowed? Dry as a spider, the old bishop listened to the desiccate kiss of his rhetoric, the grotesquely chiming rhymes: convi
ction, revulsion, emotion, objection. How was he to feel anything worthy of even the debased coin “feeling,” he asked himself, limited forever to the predictable trapezoids of his mind’s drab spiderweb, language? Coin or coign, he thought, and furiously glanced at the Devil.
And so, in secret, in company with the Devil, he sailed to Visby, on the island of Gotland, stronghold of Norby and his pirates.
6.
SNOW FELL SOFTLY OVER THE SHIP and into the water. Sheets of ice, heavy with snow, lay all around him, and more snow lay heavily on the yardarms, the poop and the forecastle, the decks themselves. The sky was brilliant, so charged with light that only with one’s eyes closed to slits could one see anything at all. Bishop Brask, in a fur coat white with sticky snow, and a wide fur cap even whiter than his coat, stood gazing morosely toward the faint shadow he knew to be Gotland, in the distance. They seemed to be making no headway at all. For all he knew, they might the here, not that he cared. The Devil lay below, fuming and restless, eager that the ship get moving again. Bishop Brask, just now, had no time to think about the Devil. He was pondering a curious impulse that had come over him, an impulse so strong and so remarkable in its way that it seemed to him astonishing that nothing had come of it. In his cabin, an hour ago he had thought of writing a long letter to Lars-Goren Bergquist, a letter which would explain to the knight exactly what Bishop Brask thought of life and how it was that he had come to his opinions. He had written, with great firmness and elegance: To Lars-Goren Bergquist, Knight. Dear sir. Then he’d stared at the paper, as white and empty as the world around him now, and had struggled desperately to overcome his sense of the absurdity of the gesture, break past the thousands of reasons for saying nothing—the futility of expression, even will, the certainty that his words would be misunderstood or, if somehow understood, used against him, the firm knowledge that words, however elegant and true (if such things were possible), could hardly undo the past, that in any case Lars-Goren was his enemy, not his friend, and would have no choice, as servant of King Gustav, but to twist the words the instant he read them, lest his strength as an enemy be weakened.
The attempt to write had come to nothing, of course. It was not that fact that he brooded on now, but the odd fact that somehow, below reason and contrary to it, the childish impulse to tell the truth was still alive in him, that indeed he still believed, in some back part of his brain, that there existed some truth to tell.
“I was out of my mind,” he said, too softly for anyone to hear. He shuddered, thinking of the dangers he’d have opened himself up to if he’d written that letter. It was the Devil’s work, he thought; but at once his heart jerked back from that idea, though he could not, when he tried to think it through, make out why. Was it the miserable cold that had sent him this lunatic impulse, he wondered, or the universal whiteness that made nothing more important than anything else?
He was so deep in thought that he at first hardly noticed when one sailor, then another—darting white shadows in the general whiteness—began to shout and point to starboard. As more and more of them came out on deck, some of them pushing roughly past him where he stood, unable to distinguish him from less important white shadows, Bishop Brask rose sufficiently from his half-dream to realize that something was afoot. He moved toward the rail where the others were, and at last he saw what the shouting was about. A great fleet of rowboats was coming toward them, making its tortuous way through the breaks between ice-sheets.
“It’s Norby and his pirates!” someone shouted, seizing the bishop’s arm. “We’re rescued!”
Baffled, Bishop Brask stared hard in the direction in which the man at his side was pointing. He understood only now—and even now without particular emotion—that they had in fact been in serious danger. It was obvious of course, once one bothered to think about it. The huge, clumsy ship was ice-locked. It hadn’t moved all day.
All around him sailors and passengers were shouting, “God bless Sören Norby!”
Considering the conditions, the boats were approaching with remarkable speed, he saw now. When they reached the ice in which the ship was wedged, Norby’s men climbed out of their rowboats and came precariously on foot. Sören Norby was at the head of the party, shouting and waving, grinning like a fool. The ship’s captain ordered ropes thrown over the side, and in no time Norby’s pirates were aboard the ship, holding out fur-mittened hands to the fur-mittened hands of the sailors and passengers, joking in loud voices, and at last helping the ship’s people down onto the ice and guiding them over to the rowboats that would take them to shore. The snow fell still more heavily. Bishop Brask could no longer see even the rowboats, much less Godand. Two pirates helped him down to the ice, careful and respectful young men of maybe twenty. Holding him by the armpits, they led him in, he hoped, the right direction, all three of them taking small steps, shielding their eyes against the light.
How they reached the rowboat Bishop Brask was unable to remember later; all his mind retained was the cold and the whiteness and the blur of fur-wrapped oarsmen as white as the rest. A kind of thudding broke through his gloomy thoughts, a thudding different from that which had risen from the sides of the rowboat as it labored through the ice, and looking up he was dimly aware of pilings and a dock, mittened hands reaching down to him, and high above the shadows of people the shadows of towers, walls, and trees, the white-masked face of Visby.
Then he was seated in the great roaring hall of Sören Norby, every wall piled high with plunder, not treasure-chests and ingots but bedsteads, ornamental chairs, fine tables, sacks of grain, machinery, bundles of clothes, iron weapons, great cylinders of rope. Such was the booty Norby’s pirates had taken from the ships of the Dutch and Germans, Poles and Russians.
“Magnificent, hey?” a voice boomed in his ear.
When the bishop turned, half in a daze, glancing first at the hand on his shoulder, then up at the face, he saw that the man who’d addressed him was none other than Norby. He’d thrown off his coat and stood, wide-shouldered and jubilant, in a short-sleeved burgher’s shirt, grinning like a boy. Bishop Brask smiled faintly. “Magnificent, yes,” he said.
“Come,” said the pirate, “first a bit of food and wine, then talk.’” He lowered his hand to the bishop’s elbow, as if he thought him a feeble old woman, and helped him to his feet. “I have with me other friends from Sweden,” he said, “gentlemen with whom you’re acquainted, I think.” He led the bishop into a high, narrow corridor and down it to a smaller chamber where in the fireplace flames licked eagerly at a great stack of logs. Three men were waiting there, two in humble monks’ garb, though they did not carry themselves like monks, and a third man the bishop knew at once that he’d seen somewhere before, perhaps often, though at first he couldn’t place him. This third man stood staring out the window, dressed in fine clothes and a long, dark blue cape. None of them turned as Sören Norby led Brask to a chair and brought him wine. When the man in the cape finally did turn, he did so with the cool, mechanical elegance of a figure in a masque—the figure of Death, perhaps, or the Devil in one of his more flattering representations.
“Berend von Melen!” Bishop Brask exclaimed, then instantly calmed himself, for it was a matter of policy with him that he never show interest or surprise. Though he had indeed been considerably surprised—not at von Melen’s duplicity, of course, but at the speed with which Norby had arranged all this—Bishop Brask was sure that he’d shown very little, no more than what they’d surely interpret as a flicker of interest.
“Bishop Brask,” said von Melen, and slightly bowed. Now Hans Brask recognized the two dressed as monks—two of the most important members of the party of Sture, Bishop Peder Jakobssen Sunnanväder and Master Knute Mickilsson, both of them passed over, like Brask himself, when Gustav had chosen his ministers. They all shook hands.
Sören Norby was beaming. “Poor Gustav!” he said.
Beware of underestimating Gustav, thought the bishop, but he merely let out a little smile and said not
hing. Sunnanväder and Mickilsson were careful not even to smile.
Sören Norby closed the doors to the room, and the talk began. Bishop Brask registered it without interest. All conspiracies were curiously similar, he’d observed long since. Always a few foxes, always a few geese. Now Norby was in the role played once by young Gustav—the man of feeling, radiant with self-confidence and unthinking love of justice. He was a handsome young man, far more handsome than Gustav, with a better sense of humor (insofar as the young can ever have a true sense of humor, he thought), and a far more ingratiating smile. At the biceps his arms were as thick as a normal man’s thighs. Muscle-bound. Not a good quality in a sword fight. But Norby was no duke, no aristocratic duelist, but a pistol man, knife fighter, boxer. He would do.
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.