by John Gardner
“Next time,” said Lars-Goren, and instantly shifted his eyes away.
“My lord, you must hurry,” said the groundsman, wringing his hands.
Lars-Goren looked sadly at his beautiful older daughter, then at Andrea, then at his sons. “Take care of things while I’m gone,” he said to Erik. “And you—” He glanced at Gunnar. “Keep your big brother out of trouble.”
Gunnar grinned, his dimple flashing into view among the freckles. “I will,” both boys said at once. “Don’t worry.”
“Bring me a reindeer-horn ring,” said Andrea. “Promise!”
“I will if I can,” Lars-Goren said and smiled. Then he bent down over the saddle and kissed his children, first Pia, then the others, finally his wife. Now all of them were weeping.
“God bless you, Bishop Brask,” said Lars-Goren’s wife to the bishop. “Take care of yourself”
“I’ll be fine,” said the bishop with a smile. “Remember me in your prayers.”
Abruptly, Lars-Goren spurred his horse. The bishop followed. Gunnar tugged at the leash, keeping Lady from following.
7.
IN NINE DAYS, MOVING FIRST through frost, then snow, they reached the border of Angermanland and Lappland. There, surrounded by blinding white, an old woman stood barring their way, her bare hands lifted in a peasant salute. Lars-Goren made a sign to Bishop Brask, who stared in amazement, and they stopped their horses, got down from them and approached the old woman on foot. Though there was wind, a steady, thin whine in their ears, her black shawl and dress, too thin for the weather, did not move. Her bare face and hands seemed indifferent to the cold, though it was fierce enough to freeze the nostrils.
Lars-Goren bowed formally and waited for her to speak. When she said nothing, he spoke himself. “I see that you have come from another world,” he said. “I am sure that you have some urgent business with us or you would never have made such a troublesome journey. My name, as perhaps you already know, is Lars-Goren Bergquist. This man beside me is Bishop Brask. If you have anything to say to us or ask of us, I hope you will say it or ask it.”
Snowdust whirled and snarled around the dead woman’s feet. The dead eyes stared as if with indifference at Lars-Goren, but seeing that she did not step aside or turn her eyes, Lars-Goren knew it was no ordinary human indifference. Perhaps, he thought, it was the indifference of a judge, or perhaps the indifference of a divine messenger, one who had no stake in this at all.
“If it seems to you proper,” he said cautiously, bowing like a servant, “may I ask your name?”
As if a feeble spark of life had come into her, the dead woman smiled. The lips moved stiffly, like old leather. After a moment, in a voice hoarse with disuse, she spoke.
“You would not remember my name, Lars-Goren, though you heard it once or twice. I was a peasant on your estate. You who should have been my protector were my murderer.”
Lars-Goren stared, a blush of anger rising into his cheeks. Even from the dead he was not a man to tolerate a slander. Yet something made him hesitate, and the dead woman spoke again.
“I was an excellent servant in my younger days,” she said. “I worked hard in my hut and in the fields, and I raised twelve children, nine strong boys and three girls. But evil times came. With your lordship’s blessing six of my sons moved south to join Sten Sture and his war, and there they lost their lives. Then the six that remained to me died one by one, four by the plague, two by accidents. My husband sickened with grief and hanged himself; you yourself signed the paper that refused him Christian burial. Suddenly I was alone in the world, avoided by all my former friends because they thought me bad luck, or possessed. Children tormented me, men and women avoided me; soon they would not let me into their fields. It was said I was a witch, and though at first it was not true, in time it became so: by curses and charms I kept myself safe from my Christian tormenters. I kept them afraid of me, and by my power to make them tremble—worse yet, by my power to do evil to and for them—I kept myself in clothing and food. No one was ever less evil at heart than I was, at least in the beginning; but I grew bitter, as one does. I learned to enjoy my malevolence, for it gave me revenge on those who tormented me, stronger than myself. But of course it could not last. They were many; I was alone. The strength was in the end all on their side. They spoke with your lordship. You ordered me burned—burned alive, the most painful and shameful of all deaths. An old woman, a faithful servant for years and years, and a miserable victim to whom a just man would have shown mercy! Did you ask me why it was that I behaved as I did? Did you think of my humanness and misery at all? No, you listened to my enemies and condemned me as you would some old dog that has turned to killing sheep. But a dog you would have killed with a gun—one flash of pain, then peace. A dog, you would have buried. Such is the justice of Lars-Goren, advisor to King Gustav, a lord with whom neither those above nor those below find fault, except for me. Lars-Goren, whose power comes from God himself, so we’re told. Vicegerent of angels! Then God damn the angels in heaven, says the witch!
“Now in rage and misery I roam the world’s edges, restless and unappeasable, for I refuse to go to the place appointed to the wicked, because I hate the injustice of my damnation, and refuse too to go to the place appointed for the just, though nothing but my anger prevents it. I have deigned to offer only one small prayer to heaven, that you and I might meet somewhere on common ground, at the edge of our two worlds, that I might strike at your devilish complacence with my tongue; and today that prayer is answered. Though it may not bring me to rest, I have been given the chance to say what I have to say to you: that if I am damned, then you are ten thousand times damned, Lars-Goren. You are called a great fighter and a wise counsellor, and you are praised as a man who is afraid of nothing in the world except the Devil. But I have come to tell you you are a coward and a fool, for you shiver at a Nothing—mere stench and black air, for that is what he is your wide-winged Devil—and in the presence of the greatest evil ever dreamt of, the fact that we exist in the world at all, helpless as babes against both evil and seeming good, you do not have the wit to blanch at all.”
All this, in spite of the rage in her heart, she spoke calmly. Lars-Goren, on his side, though he now understood that the ghost was incapable of doing him harm, was like a man with the wind knocked out of him; try as he might, he could not draw breath or speak. Whether it was rage or horror he felt, it had nothing directly to do with the old woman. “So this is then devil!” he thought. “So this is existence!”
But Bishop Brask, the great cynic and disbeliever, felt nothing of the kind. He had known for many years that the world is full of sickness and evil. He was thinking of how Lars-Goren had left his family and home, riding to his almost certain death or at any rate a bitter life of exile. If he was guilty, and he was, he was guilty in the same way the angry old witch had been: a victim of chance and unreason. He acted, or at any rate he so believed, by the commandments of a god who had not spoken to anyone sane for fifteen centuries.
Bishop Brask cried out, “Old woman, what right have you to chide like this?” His voice was sharp with indignation, his face twisted by both anger and the pain shooting up in him, almost past bearing; and, not like a ghost impervious to his power but like a fearful peasant, the old woman turned her eyes to him and clasped her bony hands. He raised his arm as if to strike her. “Wretched creature,” said the bishop, his face wildly trembling, “even in death you’re an animal, not human! Here you are, free as a bird in the realm of the eternal, free to learn the secrets of everything—free by your own admission to roam heaven and hell if you please—and all you can think of is petty human spite! Have you sought out the children and husband who died before you? No! Not even that! And you ask divine wisdom and love of Lars-Goren? Admit it, walking dung-heap! You were a witch from the day you were born!”
“Stop!” Lars-Goren whispered, his face dark red. His right arm moved, wobbly, toward the bishop’s elbow. Now a frail thread of his breathing came
back. He straightened a little, making both of them wait. Even for a man whose condition was normal there was little enough air, in the sharp, icy wind, to breathe. After a full minute, when he’d filled his lungs insofar as was possible, Lars-Goren spoke again. “She’s right and you’re right,” he said. “It’s right to cry out for justice beyond anything else. If we can dream of justice, surely God can too, if he’s still conscious. No harm that she blames me for her misfortunes. We taught her the system, we aristocrats. ‘Look to us,’ we said. ‘We’ll take care of you.’ If we too were victims of a stupid idea, that’s not her fault.”
Bishop Brask stared at him with distaste, as he’d have stared at an insect, bit his lips together and kept silent.
“Old woman,” Lars-Goren said, “I accept the ten thousand damnations you put on me. I take it all in your place. Now go where you belong. I absolve you of all guilt. Go at once!”
The old woman’s eyes narrowed. They seemed to have come to life. “Are you God then?” she asked bitterly. “Are you a priest now?
“Accept it,” Lars-Goren said. He thought of saying more. He thought of reasoning with her, showing her that all human beings make mistakes, that knowledge is progressive, if it exists at all, that the justice he offered her came in fact from her own thought or dream. But he was sick with reflection and not immortal, like her; he had no time, no strength. “Go where you belong,” he said, speaking very sternly.
“Go to the place appointed.” He raised his fist as if to strike her. “Go now, this instant, or I warn you—”
Suddenly, where the woman had stood, there was only clean snow. Lars-Goren and Bishop Brask stood staring, their blue lips parted. Then, without speaking, they turned back to their horses. When they were mounted again, and moving northward into the blinding light, Bishop Brask said: “Very well, we’ve learned this much. The Devil is mere stench and black air, and the evil is life itself”
Lars-Goren said nothing, staring straight ahead into the whiteness. “Yes,” he thought, “my wife was right as usual. It was rage that made me tremble; fear that the chaos is in myself, as in everything around me.”
Abruptly, he stopped his horse and stared blankly into the light. Bishop Brask stopped a step or two later and waited. Lars-Goren said, “I ordered her to judgment—ordered her there with my ironclad fist raised, prepared to strike.”
The bishop nodded.
“The strange thing is,” Lars-Goren said, “that she vanished. Where did she go?”
“No doubt we’ll find out when we’re dead,” said Bishop Brask.
“No doubt?” Lars-Goren echoed. “No doubt, Bishop?”
“Don’t make too much of it,” said the bishop, “it was merely an expression.”
Lars-Goren said nothing, but started up again, bending his head against the wind.
“It was merely one of those things people say,” Bishop Brask insisted, “mere habitual language. That’s the chief source of our illusions, surely. Habitual language. What we have words for, we imagine exists. We walk all our lives through a mad dream constructed of language. We invent the word love, and from then on we moan and sigh over love. Who knows if it exists or has the slightest significance in nature?” He winced, a pain worse than most shooting up in him. “We invent the word pain” he said, smiling grimly. Lars-Goren rode lost in thought. The bishop grew more testy.
He shook his head, riding cocked sidewards against the pain shooting through him like needles of ice. “Ah yes,” said the bishop, as if speaking to himself or some invisible observer, “his lordship does not choose to speak with us. And why should he, of course? He knows better than his peasants and commands them, even when they’re dead, as he would order little children around—only for their good. Why not the same with a bishop? There’s no authority in the world but the wisdom of a man’s own heart—that’s the ultimate wisdom, these days. ‘I make you your own priest,’ as Virgil tells that foul, cranky Lutheran Dante. Have no fear, Hans Brask! Lars-Goren will take care of you! It is the great modern Christian mystery: each man is the ultimate judge of the world, and it’s the duty of all other men to bow humbly and accept each man’s judgment or pay through the nose. Confusing? When were the holy mysteries not confusing?”
Abruptly, severely compressing his lips, Bishop Brask reined up his horse and stopped. Lars-Goren stopped too and looked at him, grimly waiting. “As you see,” Bishop Brask said crossly, bowing to Lars-Goren, “I’ve stopped. I go no further. This is the place I choose for turning myself to an equestrian statue made of ice.” Mockingly, angrily, he struck a noble pose.
“Don’t be a fool,” Lars-Goren said. “Keep me company. We’ll ride on a ways and freeze together.”
“No,” said Bishop Brask. He knew well enough that he was behaving like a petulant child. For a man accustomed to respect it was a queer situation, and if he could have thought of a way to seize the mastery he would have done so. Then he’d have ridden on. But he could think of no way, and he was willing to put up with the indignity, since he seemed to have no choice. As a matter of fact, it was pleasant, in a way, to play a role more or less new to him. “Old peasant women dead or alive, you rule by force,” he said. “Me you try to rule by charm.” He mimicked Lars-Goren’s tone: “‘We’ll freeze together.’ Well, no, that’s my answer. I’ll freeze when and where I choose.”
“Ah, Brask, what a difficult man you are,” Lars-Goren said, softly yet bitterly. “Shall I reason with you, now that I have your attention? Is that what you want?”
In spite of himself, Hans Brask opened his mouth in mock dismay and put the spurs to his horse. Grimly, Lars-Goren laughed.
In the whiteness all around them there were now vague shapes. At first they seemed swirls of dark snow, perhaps trees. As they circled nearer, he made out that they were Lapps and reindeer.
8.
IN HIS TENT OF SKINS, the magician sat tapping on the drum with the tips of his fingers. There was no one else in the tent except the child, kneeling beside the drum, black-eyed and beaver-faced, like the magician, watching intently as the three stones danced on the drumhead. One stone was black, the second stone was white, the third was gray. All three had been formed in a reindeer’s stomach. Lokk, lokk, lokk, sang the magician. His voice made hardly any sound. On the drumhead there were lines, most noticeably one running from east to west, painted in reindeer blood. Two stones, the black and the gray, were on the west side; the white was on the east. In the silence of Lappland, far north of Jokkmokk, the gentle tapping of the magician’s fingers was like thunder.
In Stockholm, King Gustav sat writing at his desk. He was ordering the execution of his enemies, real and imagined. He wrote with his tongue between his teeth, his eyes full of light. Whereas I, King Gustav, took this throne to make peace and bring harmony to my people …
Lars-Goren and Hans Brask lay asleep in a house made of reindeer skin and bone. There were shelves, chairs, tables, all of reindeer parts. Sometimes one of the Lapps came in, moving in perfect silence, with black, wide eyes. Sometimes a reindeer paused outside the door, listening with lifted ears, dark eyes empty. Lars-Goren, sleeping, dreamed that the Devil came and seized his shoulder, shaking him awake.
“Lars-Goren,” the Devil said, “I know what your mission is, and I’ve come to reason with you.” The Devil’s eyes were wide with alarm.
“Very well,” Lars-Goren said, holding his breath.
The Devil opened his hands like a man pleading innocence. “You want to kill me,” he said. “I ask you, what justice is there in that? What harm do I do? Do I exist at all, in fact? The old woman you killed: was that my doing? She was a witch, people say, and so she herself admits. Did I make her a witch? Did I make the people turn against her? Perhaps you will say, ‘Ah ha! Not directly! But you murdered her children!’ Come, come, I answer. Is the Devil bad luck then? Is that what you think? Have you come to destroy bad luck? What makes people strong? What makes horses strong, or trees? Destroy bad luck and you’ll turn the whole world
to fat! Oh, it’s true, it’s true, we’d all like bad luck in gentle measure—just enough bad luck to make children brave and strong, never enough to kill them. But what nonsense, my lord! Imagine a world without death in it, without serious pain. A world of mild toothaches. Who’d need a castle in a world like that? Or a church or a museum—even a family. What’s good, with no evil to judge it against? What’s order without chaos? What’s the beauty of a rose in a field of bright red? Bad luck and good, that’s the principle of life itself! I exist insofar as life exists. Rid the world of me and the world will be a barren stone rumbling without purpose through space. It’s the mission of an idiot, this mission you’re on. Not that I blame you. It was Gustav’s idea. He’s a madman, as surely you understand. He began with the best of intentions, of course; but bad luck has overwhelmed him. It’s the usual situation: he failed to get his way—as we all do, we all do! So now he turns on the dearest of his friends like a maniac. Kill him, that’s my advice. You could do it, you know. You could be king yourself. Dalarna will support you. I don’t say it to tempt you—nothing of the kind. I’m slandered on every side: it’s life itself that does the tempting—life and reason. What good is Sweden in the hands of a maniac? I don’t say kill him to advance yourself. Kill him for the sake of justice, and pray for the best—for yourself, I mean: pray that you prove luckier than he was. It’s only a suggestion, you understand. To me it’s a matter of complete indifference, I assure you. The fit will survive; that’s the world’s only law. The fit—” He broke off, his eyes grown suddenly vague, as if he’d lost his train of thought. Lars-Goren raised his head from the pillow of skins, struggling to see deeper into the Devil’s mind, and by moving wakened himself. The Devil disappeared. The house was cold and silent.
“Is that it?” Lars-Goren thought. But the thought was half sleeping, half waking, and now when he tried to think what it was that had dawned on him, the thought would not come clear. “I must make the world safe for Erik,” he thought. He grimaced. “Now there’s an illusion for you,” he thought bitterly. “How can anyone make the world safe for his son?” Nevertheless, he was seeing his family in his mind’s eye, and rational or not, he was thinking he must make the world safe for them.