I.
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, when Lappland was almost entirely unknown and Finland was civilization’s last outpost, there lived, in the then-insignificant country of Sweden, a knight who was afraid of nothing in the world except the Devil. The knight’s name was Lars-Goren.
This knight was not a fool or a superstitious oaf; on the contrary, he was a man of later middle-age, highly respected by everyone who knew him and a trusted advisor to his king, Gustavus I, of Sweden. He’d proved himself a brave fighter against the Muscovites and Danes, Gotlanders and Finns, and many another group about whom history has fallen silent, and he was equally well-known as a just ruler of the humble people who fell within his suzerain. If he had serious faults, neither those above him nor those below him could say what they were.
He was not a man people mocked on first acquaintance. Though everyone in Sweden was tall at that time, Lars-Goren was one of the tallest of the age. He stood eight feet high with his shoes off, and he was three feet wide at the shoulders. He had long, clumsy feet—though he was fine on a horse—and long, strong hands. He was also considered to be of great intelligence, for though he thought slowly, he thought clearly and soundly, so that again and again his opinions were found to be more valuable in the end than the opinions of men quicker and more dazzling. More than once when Lars-Goren had given his advice the king scratched his beard and said, “Why do I listen to these other fools when I could listen to my kinsman Lars-Goren?”
At that period the Devil showed himself in Sweden at least every other day. From time to time in the history of the world, there comes some great moment, sometimes a moment which will afterward be celebrated or mourned for centuries, at other times—perhaps more often—a moment that slides by unnoticed by most of humanity, like a jagged rock below the surface of the sea, unobserved by the ship that slips past it, missing it by inches. At the time of this story, the world was teetering on the rim of such a moment. Immense forces hung in almost perfect balance: the tap of a child’s finger might swing things either way. It was for this reason that the Devil made such frequent appearances. He was keeping a careful watch on how his work was progressing.
He had reason enough to be pleased with himself. Magellan had recently circled the globe, opening vast new avenues for greed and war. Europe had more mad kings than sane, and the Devil had both the One True Church and the infant Protestant Revolution in the palm of his hand. In Germany, the very ideas that had filled him with alarm, when they’d broken out in Wittenberg, were now the occasion of such dissension and slaughter that it was a mystery to the Devil that he hadn’t introduced them himself.
But the North, which was the Devil’s hereditary home, was of special concern to him. For this there were several sound reasons and one not quite so sound, though more significant to the Devil than all the others put together, and it was this: He felt, every time he went there, something or someone at his back, some threat he could never put his finger on. Sometimes, jerking around suddenly, it would seem to the Devil that he glimpsed it for an instant, but then, as he stared more fixedly, it would resolve itself into nothing of importance—some stooped, bearded peasant cutting firewood or fishing through the ice, some beggarwoman wrapped in foul animal skins and holding out an alms-pan with her ice-crusted, mittened hands. Instantly, whatever it was that he saw would dim and blur, for the Devil was old and, though still far stronger than all the armies in the world, he was sometimes troubled—if he stared at things too hard—by snow blindness.
2.
BEFORE GUSTAV’S ASCENSION, Sweden had had no king for a long time, but had been served by regents under the Union of Kalmar, which had made Sweden, Norway, and Denmark one single Scandinavian state. For the most part, this political arrangement satisfied the wealthiest of the Swedish aristocracy—the group that made up Sweden’s High Council, or råd—since their powerful families had castles and fiefs in all three places and, like medieval magnates everywhere, they swore allegiance, in effect, to no one but themselves. But to Sweden’s lesser aristocrats—men like Lars-Goren—and to her peasants and burghers—farmers, fishermen, artisans, and the miserable creatures who worked in the iron, copper, and silver mines—it seemed intolerable that the fruit of their labor should swell the treasury of a foreigner, Kristian II of Denmark. In secret they called him, not without reason, “cruel and un-Christian old King Kristian.” He was, to be fair, a just enough man in his relations with the people of Denmark; but in his relations with Sweden he was the Devil’s man completely. And what Kristian did not take from the Swedes, the Pope got. A fifth of all Sweden, including mines, farms, and forests, was in the hands of the Church. The Church, moreover, had armies larger than did the wealthiest of the noblemen. The Swedish commoners’ hatred of strangers, whether Germans, Danes, or Romans, came to be as pervasive and numbing as the leaden light.
This mood had been building for a long time. Half a century earlier the Scandinavian Union had staggered, if only momentarily, when a Swedish army made up for the most part of peasants and burghers had chopped up the army of the ruling Dane, Kristian I, at the rebellion of Haraker, and then again, five years later, at the battle of Brunkeberg—the victory celebrated by Bernt Notke’s famous carving of St. George and the Dragon, a huge wooden statue representing, respectively, Sweden and her foreign enemies—to this day Sweden’s most precious art treasure, now housed in the Great Church of Stockholm. If the wealthier Swedish aristocrats disapproved of what the statue symbolized, they held their tongues, for the regency was to a large extent financially dependent on taxes levied against the commoners—who thus became a powerful force in the Riksdag, or Parliament—and the rich had no wish to take the burden of financing the government on themselves. In any event, despite occasional Swedish victories, the Union was still intact; the rebellious were driven underground. If unrest remained, the Devil saw to it that the rich had their own affairs, all over the North, to attend to.
Sitting with his elbows on his knees on a mountain in Angermanland, frowning to himself, slightly puzzled by how easily things seemed to be going, the Devil moved his enormous wings and fanned the unrest. He needed no divine prescience to know that, whatever the upshot, it must come in the shape of confusion, mad greed, and bloodshed. Only the Lapplanders cowering at his back, wearing horns on their heads and dressed in reindeer skins, so that only a sharp eye could distinguish them from the reindeer that gave them their food and clothes and shelter—or rather, only the Lapps and the reindeer themselves—were aware of that huge hulk perched on the mountain, sending an evil wind across the snows of Sweden.
The unrest he was fanning burst into flame when one Gustav Trolle was elected in faraway Rome to succeed the palsied and half-senile archbishop of Uppsala, recently deceased. As a thoroughgoing Pope’s man, Trolle had never been popular with the Swedes—in fact the papal council could have found no one more offensive to them—and the regent of Sweden, Sten Sture the Younger, was filled with indignation when the news of the appointment arrived. To show his anger and scorn of Rome, and also to increase his treasury a little, Sten Sture the Younger—a handsome young man who in the opinion of commoners and lesser aristocrats was the rightful king of Sweden—made so bold as to seize by hereditary right a valuable and strategic piece of property held in fief by the Church, the castle and lands of Almare-Stäket, overlooking Lake Mälaren.
The new archbishop sent a cry for help to Kristian II, the Danish king, whose army arrived in haste and was at once repulsed—pushed, screaming and flailing its arms, into the Baltic. The Swedish regent called the Riksdag into session for advice on how to deal with Trolle, the offensive new archbishop, for, as Sten Sture said, “what concerns all should have the approval of all”—a phrase which, ironically, he had borrowed from canon law. The Riksdag voted the archbishop a traitor, and in solemn sammansvärjning—vowing as one man—they swore on pain of their lives that they would never accept Gustav Trolle as archbishop, and that the castle, with all its contents, should be razed to the ground. It was a grave move, since the razing involved the destruction of relics and the profanation of holy things, not least among them, as luck would have it, the person of Gustav Trolle, archbishop, who was beaten and raped by Swedes overzealous in their service of Truth, or, perhaps, as some said, overzealous in their service of the North’s true lord, the Devil.
From imprisonment, Trolle cried out to heaven by way of Rome for vengeance. All Sweden was placed under interdict, and Kristian’s war with Sweden received the prestige and appropriate finance of a crusade. Early in 1520 a huge army of mercenaries from Germany, France, and Scotland broke over the Halland frontier into Västergötland and, on the frozen surface of Lake Åsunden, joined battle with Sten Sture’s army of lesser knights and peasants. Congealing blood lay thick on the snow and ice; cannon smoke darkened the lead-gray sky. Before it was over, Sten Sture lay half dead, one leg smashed to splinters and pulp by a cannonball. He died two weeks later in his sledge on the way home to Stockholm.
Soon Stockholm fell. In an inquiry set up by Archbishop Trolle, nearly all who’d been involved, and many who had not, were found guilty of heresy; King Kristian took over as Scourge of God, and “the bloodbath of Stockholm” began. On November 8, 1520, between the hours of one and four o’clock, eighty-two persons were beheaded, and many more fell victims in the days that followed. Hundreds of others were publicly broken on the rack. The bodies were burned in three huge pyres on Södermalm hill, along with them the exhumed corpses of Sten Sture and his infant son.
Among those who witnessed the Stockholm massacre—including the Devil, who looked down from a chimney, where he sat disguised as a bent old man in black monk’s garb—were the knight Lars-Goren and his young kinsman, a distant cousin in his early twenties, Gustav Vasa, the future king of Sweden. They were wearing round peasant hats and shabby coats, for they were both of the Sture party; in fact Gustav was related by marriage to the Stures and lost in the massacre his father, his brother-in-law, and two uncles. His mother, his grandmother, and two of his sisters—to say nothing of Kristina Gyllenstierna herself, Sten Store’s widow, half sister to Gustav’s aunt—were locked in the dungeon at Stockholm castle, awaiting transfer to Denmark, where they could expect eventual execution.
“Surely,” said Gustav, his face wet with tears and shining in the light of the funeral pyres, “even for those of us who have escaped the axe, there can be nothing to look forward to but death!”
Lars-Goren nodded thoughtfully, not as a sign of agreement but because it was his habit to nod as if agreeing until he’d thought things through. At last he said, when he saw that there was nothing else to say, “God’s will be done,”
From somewhere high above him, laughter cracked out like thunder over ice, and he crossed himself.