Freddy's Book

by John Gardner

  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.

  Gustav Vasa shook his head in disgust, pacing, as he seemed always to do these days, venting his anger on the huge, patient figure of Lars-Goren and across the room, Hans Brask. “The fool!” he said, shaking his fist before Lars-Goren’s face. “Does he think I don’t know what he’s been up to?” He whirled away, pointing fiercely at Bishop Brask, who sat waiting as patiently as Lars-Goren to learn why he’d been called. “God send me an enemy worth my trouble!” shouted Gustav. “Fools, maniacs. It’s like living in a house full of flies.”

  Bishop Brask sadly nodded.

  “Pah,” said Gustav, turning away from Brask as if he too were one of the flies. “Who is his houseguest there at Kalmar? Who sleeps in his fluffy German bed and eats his cabbage? Nils Sture! None other! Heir to the family’s pretensions! And by miraculous coincidence—” He turned his back on both of them and stared out the window, breathing deeply, trying without success to control his rage. “By miraculous coincidence this great patriot von Melen is also putting up, as his beloved houseguest, none other than what’s-her-name, daughter of Sören Norby. A pretty match, eh? Nils Sture and Norby’s daughter? He’s a matchmaker, von Melen. His heart rules his head. That’s it, yes of course! Behind all the schemes he’s a softy, yes that’s it!” He spat like a farmer, indifferent to the splendid furnishings. “You know what I would just once like to see in this world?” he asked furiously, stabbing the air with his finger. “I would like to see a little pure unmitigated evil! Yes! Not stupidity, not sniveling little plots and counterplots, not jockeying and jostling—pure outrageous evil.”

  He crossed quickly, stooped over, knees bent, to Brask’s chair. “I met the Devil once,” he said, pointing at the bishop’s nose. “I was interested. I was excited! ‘Ha,’ I thought, ‘by God it’s the Devil himself—no joke! Now you’re in trouble, Gustav Vasa,’ I thought. ‘Now you’d better keep a sharp eye out!’” He paused, drew his finger back. More softly, he said, “You didn’t know I’d had meetings with the Devil, eh?”

  “I thought perhaps you might,” said the bishop. He glanced at Lars-Goren, whose presence made him strangely uneasy. Lars-Goren showed nothing. If the bishop had somehow revealed himself—he had no idea whether he had or not—Lars-Goren was carefully not showing it.

  “Well, I did,” said Gustav. Again he turned away, petulant now. “All in all, he’s proved a disappointment.”

  “So we’ve all found,” said the bishop, taking, as he knew, a risk.

  But Vasa was in no mood for subtle innuendoes.

  “Very well,” he said, “I’m disappointed. Everything in life disappoints me, that’s the truth, but the Devil most of all, lording it over us, wasting our valuable time. I’m not a man to sit quietly and endure a thing like that!”

  Lars-Goren glanced at him, perhaps in alarm.

  “First I’ll
kill Norby,” Gustav Vasa said, fixing his gaze on a spot high on the wall. Abruptly, he glanced at Brask. “You’ve heard, I suppose, that he’s escaped to Denmark?” He hurried on without waiting for a response. “To Denmark—where else?—where he’s collected another fleet. God knows how he does it! Well, I’ll sink him, that’s setded. I don’t know how yet, but sure as I’m standing here I’ll sink him! And I’ll get rid of von Melen and his high-minded friends, all these plotters and meddlers, silly-brained impediments, always crossing me, always bothering me, getting in my way for no good reason—I’ll wipe them off the slate!—and then, gentle-men—” He paused significantly, looking first at Brask, then at Lars-Goren, raising his fists slowly, his eyes like two shining steel rivets: “Then we drive the Devil under the ground!”

  Lars-Goren’s hands clenched on the chair-arms, and his eyes opened wider. Bishop Brask faintly smiled, slightly blanching, and sadly shook his head.

  Gustav Vasa brought one hand to his chin and looked soberly at Bishop Brask. “Lars-Goren doesn’t worry me,” he said, after a moment. “Lars-Goren is afraid of the Devil, as is right. He’ll be excellent. I think so. But what about you?”

  Bishop Brask went on smiling, shaking his head, the spotty skin of his face sagging heavily. “Maybe you can do it,” he said at last. Just perceptibly, he sagged his narrow shoulders. “But tell me. Does it matter?”

  8.

  PLOTS, COUNTERPLOTS; THE DEVIL was so busy he could barely keep track. By means of agents, Norby’s trusted friends, he lured Sören Norby into secret alliance with the Netherlands and his former lord, Kristian, and managed to put Gotland back in Norbys hands. He persuaded the Lübeckers to try to seize Godand, since Norby had betrayed them and would certainly continue to do so, for love of King Kristian and hatred of Gustav, chief buyer of Lübecks goods. He persuaded King Fredrik to defend Norby’s stronghold and to grant him the town of Blekinge as a life-fief, a base in immediate proximity to the Swedish border and within striking-distance of Kalmar. At once, again at the Devils suggestion—and it seemed reasonable enough, for whatever the nobility of a man’s ambition, he can do nothing without wealth—Sören Norby resumed his indiscriminate attacks on shipping—German, Swedish, Russian, even Danish. Again and again, with elaborate apologies, he sent back to those he pretended were his friends, such as Fredrik and the Lübeckers, whatever booty he’d taken “by mistake”—but it was never all there. “The fools,” said the Devil gleefully, disguised as an old friend, “they’ll never know the difference—take my oath on it!” In August 1526, a combined Swedish-Danish fleet sent most of Norby’s squadron to the bottom: Norby himself escaped by the skin of his teeth to Russia, where at the Devil’s instigation he refused to take service with the tsar and was thrown into prison. There, one day when he was walking along a road in company with other prisoners, carrying his pick—for Norby’s punishment was work in the salt mines of the tsar—the Devil himself visited him in the form of a mule.

  “Sören Norby,” the Devil whispered through the mouth of the mule, “don’t lose heart! All is well!”

  Norby’s eyes widened and his knees went weak. “God in heaven!” he whispered, “do mules now speak Swedish?” All around him, prisoners moved away from him a little, supposing the man to have gone mad.

  “I’m your faithful old helper,” said the Devil, and made the mule’s mouth smile. “I’ve been with you from the beginning, and I’m with you yet.”

  “Then you’re the Devil!” said Norby, and this time he spoke aloud, so that the prisoners around him were more frightened than before. “Get away from me! Go!” He burst into tears and, without thinking, took a swing at the mule with the flat of his pick-axe.

  “You there!” someone shouted in Russian. It was the guard, just a few feet behind him. “Leave that mule alone!” He brandished his long, narrow club as a warning.

  “You see?” said the mule pitifully, pretending to be in pain. “You see what comes of senseless violence? Now use your head, and put your pick on your shoulder, and listen like a creature of reason.”

  “Never!” whispered Sören and, balancing the pick in the bend of his arm, put one finger of each hand into his ears.

  “What kind of fool are you, trying to block out the voice of the Devil with your fingers?” the mule scoffed. “Plug your ears with pebbles if it pleases you, and sing at the top of your voice to drown me out. I’ll still be heard!”

  Norby saw it was true and only from stubbornness kept his fingers in his ears.

  “Fredrik’s brother the Holy Roman Emperor will save you,” said the mule. “He’s begun negotiations already!”

  “You’re a liar,” said Sören Norby. “What’s it to Fredrik whether I live or die?”

  “It’s not for Fredrik that the Emperor’s doing it.” said the mule slyly. “It’s to annoy the tsar, and to gain your services for his Italian war, and also to please Kristina.”

  “Kristina,” said Sören Norby, and began to weep again. “Would that I’d never laid eyes on her!”

  “Maybe you’ll change your tune one day,” said the mule with a smile. Abruptly, the mule’s whole manner changed; he was merely a mule again, walking along the road with his burden.

  “Monster! Unholy deceiver!” whispered Norby. But then he began to think that, all in all, what the mule had said was not unreasonable. He glanced around at his fellow prisoners—stupid idiots, hopeless from the day they were born, one no different from the other, none of them like himself. “The Emperor must know he could hardly find a better man,” he thought. “If I serve him well, and show the Pope I’m no Lutheran, who knows? I may one day be king of Sweden!” He walked with more spirit now, and the prisoners around him hung back farther.

  As for von Melen, after various machinations in which the Devil was always his eager advisor, he at last escaped by guile to Germany, where he at once began to work for a new alliance with his former master King Kristian. To be on the safe side—for as a general he knew the wisdom of the groundhog, who always has two or more escape routes—he made himself also a servant of the Elector of Saxony, sworn enemy of King Kristian and the Dutch. He had misgivings, of course, for if either lord should learn of his attachment to the other, von Melen would be in trouble. His misgivings grew to fears and eventually to terrors, so that wherever he went he kept his hands clasped tightly together to prevent them from shaking. One night when he was lowering his knife to cut into the trout on his plate, the trout’s eye rolled to meet his and the trout’s mouth opened.

  “Von Melen,” said the trout, “you’re a stupid man!”

  Berend von Melen stared in horror and disbelief, but his anger was even greater than his alarm. “What?” he cried. “What did you just say?”

  “You’re a stupid man,” said the trout again, as placid and indifferent as when it was swimming in the stream.

  “Stupid trout,” hissed von Melen, glancing past his shoulder to be sure no one was watching. “If you think you’re so smart, how come you to be dead and cooked?”

  “That may be,” said the trout. “I may have made one small mistake in my life, but it’s nothing like the big mistake you’ve made!”

  “Ha?” said von Melen. He drew back his knife, deciding to let the trout speak on.

  “You’re a doomed man, trying to serve two masters as a general,” said the trout. “Sooner or later their wishes will conflict. However, if you took a different road, you could please them both and be as safe as a fox in a tree.”

  Von Melen scowled. “How?” he said. “Explain.”

  “Write!” said the trout, and gave von Melen a cunning smile. “You’re a stylist as well as a famous man. You have all Europe’s respect. Turn these things to advantages, then.”

  “Write what?” von Melen asked. He bent down toward the plate. “Poetry? Autobiography?”

  “You see?” the trout said. “I told you you were stupid! Write about Gustav Vasa! Vilify his name! Both Kristian and the Elector will be delighted—you’ll be
a hero on both sides.” The trout looked pensive, then at last heaved a sigh. “But of course, if you think you’re not up to it—”

  “Not up to it!” cried von Melen, and leaped up from the table. “Not up to it, you tell me, you stupid little trout!” He was so excited by the idea—for his hatred of King Gustav was boundless—that he forgot about supper completely and started for the door. With his hand near the doorknob he abruptly paused, turned around, and went back to the table. “Stupid trout,” he said, “you shall see how I write!” And without noticing that the eye of the trout had filmed over he snatched up the plate and carried it with him to his study, where he set it on his writing desk, near enough to watch him. For the rest of his life, von Melen blackguarded Gustav Vasa throughout Europe, comforting his enemies, thwarting his policies, fomenting conspiracies, piling lie on top of lie or, when Vasa made mistakes, trumpeting the truth. He became, from all his writing, as bent-backed as the Devil. His eye took on a glitter, his mouth became parched and cracked. The fish on the plate beside him rotted away to dust.