PART THREE

1.

WHILE GUSTAV BEGAN THE WORK of setting up his government—a task as exciting to him as planning and carrying out the revolution, for he had high hopes: he knew himself no fool, knew to the last detail what was wrong in Sweden and what he, as king, could do about it; knew, moreover, that he had a gift for inspiring those around him, so that surely his government must prove a masterpiece of sorts—Lars-Goren, for his part, turned his mind more and more to the question of understanding and outwitting the Devil. He was not free during the first few weeks, to leave Gustav’s side, since Gustav insisted that he needed his advice; but as soon as the new king felt he could spare him, Lars-Goren bid farewell to his friends at court and started north to his home in Hälsingland, to visit his wife and children, find out how his estate was maintaining itself, and give himself the leisure to read a little, and think.

It was the middle of summer when he started on his journey. Goats stood on the roofs outside the walls of the Stockholm fortress, nibbling grass and moss and looking down with malevolent eyes at every carriage that passed. Boats filled the harbor, mainly German, Polish, and Russian, for the Swedes were at that time passive traders; they waited for the buyers to come to them. It seemed a sensible policy, though Gustav Vasa would later change it. Sweden was relatively poor and small, and shipping was expensive, not only because of the cost of boats, equipment, and sailors, but also because of the cunning and skill of the pirates who preyed on shippers. A few great rulers of that day and age—like Ivan the Terrible, Henry VIII, and the Holy Roman Emperor—could afford strong navies to defend their coasts and seaways. But for lesser mon-archs—even Fredrik of Denmark—who had to scrap with their magnates for wealth and manpower, the cost of such police work was prohibitive. For all Lars-Goren knew that morning, half a dozen of the gray, high-masted ships he looked down on now might be disguised privateers.

Imperceptibly, the city changed to farmland. No one riding Lars-Goren’s road north could have said where one left off and the other began. Even at the heart of the city there were goats and gardens; but at some point there began to be more cows than goats, and the gardens became fields. Lars-Goren, lost in thought, hardly noticed the change, merely felt a slight lifting of the heart that meant he was in a country a little more like home, though home was still provinces away. By the time he reached Uppsala, after riding for days—gangling and vague-eyed, arms and legs loose as a straw-man’s, his beard as thin and curly as brown moss—he was in the heart of the farmland, the beginning of the region that paid its taxes in butter and hides and gave the kingdom its most important exports, all that could be wrung from a cow, from the horns to the tail. Though by knightly privilege he could have slept where he pleased, he put in at a hostel in the shadow of the clumsy, towering cathedral where the archbishop Gustav Trolle had inadvertently put Sweden on the road to independence. Before dawn, he was on the road again.

He travelled through fields and forests and spent the second night in Gästrikland, bordering Dalarna. There he slept with peasants, a chicken on the bed beside him, queerly friendly though also cautious, as if the chicken possessed the soul of a cat. He had nightmares which he couldn’t quite remember in the morning. He would have thought he’d forgotten them completely except that at the mention of Dalarna, to the west of him and not on his way, he got a brief flash of imagery, possibly prophetic, he thought. Lapps with torches (somehow he saw this while lying in the snow-covered grave they attacked) were digging up his body. He saw this with his food raised halfway to his mouth, then remembered no more and finished eating.

Soon he was in the pitch-dark forests of Hälsingland, veering west of the principal city of his province, Hudiksvall, heading toward the fields and streams of his family estate. When he emerged from the darkness to the light of the fields it was like being reborn, he thought, and thought, the same instant, of Bishop Hans Brask, who would have winced at the neatness of the symbolism. The image of Bishop Brask—sitting on his horse as he’d sat that morning beside the lake in Dalarna, about to dismount and have a word with Gustav Vasa—was so sharp and real that Lars-Goren reined in his horse. It seemed to Lars-Goren that he and the bishop had made a long, hard journey. But there was no one there, just fields of new-mown hay, a small village in the distance, a crooked wooden steeple rising above the other village rooftops.

“Bishop Brask,” he said aloud, as if the man were still there.

A shudder passed through him and he tried to remember what he’d been thinking, all this way, but all that came into his mind was light and fields, a dark, dead tree somewhere in one of the forests he’d passed, beside the road, also one toothless old woman who had waved and smiled, then crushed her hat down under one hand and vanished into the weeds.

With his knees he started the horse forward again. He began to pass the huts of the people who owed their allegiance to him. Small huts, well kept, better than most, he would have said; but then, the war had never come to Hälsingland, and though the sons of these peasants had fought with Lars-Goren, they had been lucky from the beginning: all but a few hundred had come home without a scratch, as if the Devil, for some reason, had decided to leave them alone.

Toward dusk, Lars-Goren reached the village closest to his own estate, and here, unaccountably, he found himself full of dread. He tried to think of what he would say if someone hailed him, and his distress increased. But tall and erect though he was, no one noticed him. And so, long after sunset, he came to his home estate. Though summer was at its height, the air was frosty. The fields lay perfectly still, bathed in mist, nothing stirring but rabbits and a fox and what might have been a deer. On the hill overlooking the river, his castle stood unlighted, as if everyone had died. He knew, of course, that that was nonsense, an idle nightmare rising and sinking again in an instant. Nevertheless, he swallowed hard, like a man full of fear and remorse. The horse, called Drake, or Dragon, looked back at him. He patted its neck. They moved on and came to the plank road, loud under his horse’s hooves, that rose abruptly to the castle gate.

At the gate he reined up his horse and sat for a while, like a man coming back to his sanity. He knew now why the castle was dark. There were no dangers here, no passing strangers. His people had simply gone to bed. He looked at the stones of the castle wall, docile and familiar yet unearthly in the moonlight, moss-hung, mysteriously alive, as it seemed to him, not stones but something stranger, perhaps a towering stack of sleeping sheep. He looked at the planks of the huge oak lift-door, built by his grandfather, heavy not for defense against enemies but to carry the weight of carts. At last he got down from his horse to go to the door and bang the knocker.

2.

HIS WIFE, LIV, STOOD IN THE KITCHEN cooking for him—“No need to wake the servants,” she had said, but he’d known what she meant. She would rather be with him alone after all this time. Around her, except where the fireplace-glow reached, the stone walls were gloomy and dark, a world paradoxically intimate and foreign after all he’d seen in Stockholm. He sat at the heavy pine table, far away from her, where they could watch each other. The room had no windows. In winter, that region could be bitterly cold. The red light from the fireplace where she cooked flowed over her and threw a tall shadow on the wall to the left of where Lars-Goren sat. His wife’s long hair, yellow-red and translucent as cloudberries, was tied up in a bun.

At first she asked him questions, which he answered briefly and negligently, much as he’d have answered some stranger at court to whom he was obliged to be polite though neither had any great investment in the other. Then, noticing what he was doing, he tried to answer more expansively, telling her about Gustav, what life was like in Stockholm under the new regime, how the city and the people there had changed since shed seen it last. She listened as if with interest, occasionally asking about some family they knew but they both sensed that it was not yet time for details, or sensed that he couldn’t yet give her the details most important to him, above all the stories of his encounters with the Devil himself. They let the conversation die, he by pretending to sink into thought, she by working more actively at the fireplace. When the silence grew embarrassing, she took up her part.

She told him, as she worked, who had died, who had married, which children had been ill. Her words were brief and clipped, with long pauses between them. Sometimes she would turn and look at him for a moment. Occasionally she smiled, but it was not the smile he remembered. Then, gradually, as the food smells grew thicker and sweeter in the room, both of their hearts seemed to warm a little. She filled a dish from the kettle and brought it over to the table, checked the beer-pitcher to see that it was not yet empty, then sat down across from him to watch him eat. When he bowed his head to pray, she also bowed. Afterward he said, “One of these days—”

She nodded.

He regretted that she’d nodded. He would have liked to try to put it in words. But since shed given him no choice, he began to eat, shaking his head and saying nothing.

Then, forgetting that he’d decided to say no more, Lars-Goren said, blurting it out with great urgency, like a child, “I always feel guilty, coming through the villages when I’ve been away so long.” His wife was looking down at her pale, folded hands, her eyes unusually dark under the half-lowered lids. He sipped his beer, spilling a little of it down his beard and quickly wiping himself, then leaned forward on his elbows, looking at her forehead, and continued, “I feel even guiltier coming here.”

She raised her eyebrows as if questioningly, though still she kept her eyes on her hands.

He began to nod thoughtfully, his lower lip over his upper, his eyebrows low. At last he brought out, his voice oddly thin, at least in his own ears, like the bleating of a sheep, “There are evils in the world that a man can’t take the blame for, evils that nobody can do anything about—my going away, I mean. Not being here to see the children grow up.”

The softness of her voice startled and unnerved him. “I know.”

He thought of touching her hand, then thought better of it. “Surely it’s the truth—at least I think it’s the truth—that when a man in my position … having people who depend on him, the country not safe unless he goes out and does what he can to make it safe …” He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling hollowed out and helpless, like a child who’s been caught in a lie, though Lars-Goren was not lying. “If I could stay here all the time, the way a husband should,” he said, “if I could watch over the peasants, see to their welfare, settle their disputes—” His fingertips were trembling.

“Hush, Lars-Goren,” she said, “eat your supper.” She was looking at him now, her eyes a faded blue, beautiful, like ice come alive. As if shed come to some decision, she reached out and touched his left hand. “I know how it is,” she said. “You do what you have to do. I’m glad you’re home.”

Lars-Goren closed his hand tightly around his wife’s hand, small and strong, and his head swam with thoughts he had no words for. She rose, with her hand still in his, and as if at a signal, he too rose. “That’s all you want to eat?” she asked, eyes widening in surprise, as if she didn’t know—and perhaps indeed she didn’t—that it was she who had given him the signal to rise and come with her.

“No,” he said, “it’s good, but I’ve had enough.”

She led him to the beds of the children, one by one, and at each bed he stood for a long moment gazing at the face he knew as well as he knew his own heart yet at the same time seemed not to remember. It had been more than a year, and the changes in his children were so mysterious and painful—or the fact that he hadn’t been there to watch them change was so painful—that he felt again, more strongly than before, that helpless hollowness of a child in despair. Holding his wife’s hand, bending forward to see, he wore an expression of fear and foolish eagerness, a face prepared against the chance that the child should awaken and discover him standing there.

As he stood beside the bed of his elder son, Erik, what he feared came to pass. The boy frowned in his sleep—he had a long, angular face with wide, sharp lips like Lars-Goren’s—his mouth moved, almost spoke, and then all at once his eyes were wide open, staring straight into his father’s. His head raised a little from the pillow. “Pappa?” he asked. He was twelve, a large, broad-shouldered boy, his shoulders blue-white in the light from the candle in Liv’s hand.

“Erik!” Lars-Goren whispered, bending closer, smiling.

He couldn’t tell whether the expression on his son’s face was joy or panic, or so he would have said. In the dark part of his mind from which dreams come, he knew the whole truth: what he was seeing was terrible love and pain, the exact hollowness he was feeling himself, the woe of the child who has no hope of being loved, who feels deservedly betrayed and abandoned. Lars-Goren bent, thinking of seizing his son in his arms, but the boy had changed greatly, there was fuzz on his upper lip, and at the last instant Lars-Goren’s heart shied, and instead of seizing him he merely reached out clumsily and touched his shoulder. Now, in spite of the remains of his smile, the look on the boy’s face seemed almost entirely panic.

Quickly, his mother said, “Go to sleep, dear. Your father will be here in the morning. You can talk to him then.”

Erik’s eyes flew to his mother; then he let his head fall back on the pillow.

“Good-night, son,” Lars-Goren said. Already he was beginning to back away.

“Good-night, Pappa,” said the boy.

The rooms now seemed larger, more foreign than before. As they moved down the hall toward their bedroom, candlelight flickering on the walls, his wife said, “They talk of you all the time, Lars-Goren.” She gave his hand a squeeze.

Like a man standing back from himself, he watched how his heart gave a leap at those words. He shook his head, grieving and rejoicing, and opened the bedroom door. When they’d entered and he’d closed the door behind them, she turned to face him, smiling. He took the candle from her, seizing it awkwardly, so that he burned the palp of his thumb on hot wax and very nearly let the candle fall, then composed himself and set the candle in the holder on the table beside the bed. She waited. He returned to her and took both her hands, studying the smile. After a moment, for the first time since he’d arrived, they kissed. The feeling of strangeness and guilt fell away; he understood by sure signs that, odd as it might seem, he was the joy of her life, as she was of his. He held her in his arms bending down so awkwardly that he was tempted to laugh at the absurdity of things—this huge man, this small woman—and he pressed his cheek to hers, then bent down more and kissed her shoulder.

When his wife lay asleep in his arms, he stared at the ceiling, not thinking but floating in the sensation of being home. It seemed a long, long way from where the Devil schemed and plotted. Indeed, it was hard to believe in the Devil’s existence, here in his own long bed, with his wife. Yet the Devil was real enough, he knew, somewhere far away—or maybe not so far away. He thought of the toothless old woman who had smiled and waved, then fled, and the shadow of movement that might or might not have been a deer. As he drifted toward sleep, he thought briefly of the distance he’d felt between himself and his children, even between himself and Liv; thought of how he’d failed to take his son in his arms, and how he’d hoped no one would see him as he passed through the villages in his keeping. Not that one could call that the Devil’s work, exactly. He struggled to rise back out of sleep and think, fight off the fear surging up in him, but someone was muttering, an old Lapp with brown eyes, beating with his fingertips on a drumhead on which lay three stones.

3.

IN THE MORNING, LARS-GOREN looked through the records of his glum old groundskeeper, veteran of many wars—an exasperating man when he got off on his exploits—and reviewed the accounts of the village managers. By ten he’d talked with all his lesser officials. When he’d approved or disapproved the peasant requests that had been set down in writing to await his return, dealt with small complaints and one slightly larger one, the request of some villagers that a certain old woman be burned for witchcraft, a charge they supported with positive proof, Lars-Goren announced his intention of riding out for a first-hand look at his villages and lands. He invited his twelve-year-old, Erik, and his ten-year-old, Gunnar, to ride with him. His wife and the cook prepared a lunch for them, on the chance that they should find nothing to their liking in the peasant kitchens or the village inns; and the groom brought around three horses and gave Gunnar a leg up. “I’m all right,” the boy protested, but only for show, accepting the help. Gunnar was red-headed and freckled, still chunky and dimpled like an infant, and though his grin boasted confidence, he was secretly afraid of horses, as all of them knew. Erik sat very tall, comfortable in the saddle, and watched his younger brother’s struggles with friendly detachment and the patience of an adult. Lars-Goren, covertly watching his elder son, felt a shower of pride and felt, at the same time, even more remote than he’d felt last night in Erik’s bedroom. Somehow without Lars-Goren’s help, or so Lars-Goren imagined, the boy had become all any father could have wished. It crossed his mind that Erik would soon be old enough for war. Hastily, to distract himself, Lars-Goren glanced behind him, making sure that Lady, his spaniel, was not too close to the horses’ hooves.

Seeing him turn to look at her, Lady yapped officiously, then growled low in her throat and feinted at the fetlock of the horse’s left hind leg and yapped again, showing her master in her own way that she had everything in hand—have no fear, she was paying close attention! Lars-Goren laughed at the dog and at himself, then glanced at Erik and saw that he was smiling. “How I love that boy!” he thought; then, glancing at Gunnar, seeing how he was still smiling with pretended confidence, a dimple cut deep into his right cheek, but his pupils cocked downward, exactly like those of a colt in alarm, Lars-Goren corrected himself, “How I love all of this! Erik, Gunnar, my wife, my girls, the peasants who look to me for defense, this glorious land—!”

Now everything was ready. His wife and two daughters waved to him from the arch. Lady stood poised, looking up at him, meaning to take her first step the same instant his horse did. He made one last check glancing at the cinch-straps, his younger son’s two-handed grip of the reins—he held them high over the withers and sat unnaturally erect, like a circus performer. Then, since all was well, Lars-Goren leaned slightly forward and, as if part of one motion, quick and sure—quicker than Gunnar had expected, judging from his face—the horses and dog began to move. At a half trot Lars-Goren’s horse Drake, one ear cocked back in case Lars-Goren should whisper, led them down the hill and, at the faintest suggestion of a signal from Lars-Goren, angled through a break in the hedge, took an easy little ditch (Lars-Goren glanced back at Gunnar, whose eyes briefly widened in alarm but all was well), and headed crosslots through the fields in the direction of the nearest of the villages.

The sun was high, the day warm. In the second field they came to, peasants were cutting and shocking rye, working, as always, in their dark, heavy clothes, dark round hats or kerchieves, working quickly, as they never did at any other season, since the weather would allow them only three or four weeks to get the grain in the bins, the hay harvested, and the land reploughed. Lars-Goren rode straight to where a group of them were loading up a wagon. They stopped their work as he approached and straightened up to greet him; a few raised their arms in a two-handed wave. It was as if he hadn’t seen them in years, he thought. After months of war and weeks of Stockholm, they were like apparitions from another century, black-garbed and wrinkled, even some of the youngest of them toothless, their smiles open and innocent. Even their language was at first strange to him, though he’d heard it all his life. But almost at once, almost as soon as he’d registered it, the strangeness fell away and he was one of them.

An old man with a gray moustache and beard put his hand on the side of Drake’s neck. Lady, wagging her tail, stood close to the peasant and looked up at Lars-Goren making sure it was all right.

“Good to have you back, sir,” the peasant said.

“Good to see you well,” Lars-Goren answered.

The old man smiled and looked over at Erik, then Gunnar. “Big boys,” he said, and shook his head as if the fact saddened him.

“They’ve grown, all right,” said Lars-Goren. “And how are yours?”

The peasant’s smile came back, wide and toothless. “Six grandchildren now,” he said, “all strong as oxen, two more on the way. So far, all boys!”

“God keep them!” said Lars-Goren, with more feeling than he understood.

Tears came suddenly into the peasant’s eyes. “And the same to you and yours!” he said. He gave a pat to the horse’s neck as if to end the conversation.

Lars-Goren glanced at Gunnar. The boy was watching with great curiosity as an old woman with hands so stiff they would hardly bend stood dabbing at the corner of her mouth with the end of her black kerchief. What Gunnar was thinking Lars-Goren couldn’t tell, but he saw that the old woman’s legs were shaky; she was too old and weak to be working in the fields. Lars-Goren threw a questioning look at the peasant he’d been talking with.

“It was a hard winter,” the old man said with an evasive smile. “The Devil is always busy.” Again he gave a pat to the horse’s neck, and this time, to make sure the conversation was ended, he turned away.

“Well,” said Lars-Goren, looking from the old man to the rest of them, “God be with us all!” Without another word, he swung his horse around and started at a trot down the field in the direction of the trees and the village beyond.

When they reached the road into the village, his son Gunnar came up beside him. “Pappa, what happened to the old woman?” he called out. His chubby, freckled face hovered between expressions, as if at a signal from his father he was ready either to laugh or show concern.

“Trouble of some kind,” Lars-Goren said. “They keep these things to themselves, if they can. Maybe she had a stroke, maybe her son turned murderer. If it’s bad enough, sooner or later we’ll hear.”

“But aren’t we supposed to take care of them?” Gunnar asked. When Lars-Goren said nothing, the boy demanded, “Aren’t we supposed to be like God to them?”

Lars-Goren glanced up. Though the sky was clouded over, the light was intense.

It was Erik who spoke, riding a little behind Gunnar to his left. “Even God they’d never ask for help,” he said.

Lars-Goren glanced back at him. Erik was staring straight ahead, like a knight, or rather like some image of a knight that Lars-Goren had somewhere seen but couldn’t call to mind.

“It’s true,” Lars-Goren said, half to himself. “They’re stubborn. They serve us, they treat us with a certain respect; if war comes, or plague, they’re willing to depend on us. Otherwise, our hands are tied.”

“You mean even God’s hands are tied?” asked Gunnar. As if without knowing he was doing it, he lowered his left hand to the pommel of the saddle, making himself more secure.

Lars-Goren smiled and gave no answer. They were entering the village now, Lady trotting out ahead of them, guarding her party against ox-carts, stone fences, and cats.

4.

WHILE THEY WERE EATING their lunch in the church garden, they talked with the village priest, whose name was Karl, an officious little man with large gray eyes and a face like a woman’s, a flatterer and a liar from the day he was born—for which he despised himself, but no matter how he tried he could never improve. He sat on a headstone across from them, his plump hands folded on his knees.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “all’s well! No problems!”

Whatever the situation in the village, that was always his claim.

“We had some trouble with wild dogs; in fact a child was killed, the walleyed boy that used to tend the horses.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“It was a pity. Terrible. But the situation’s well in hand now.”

He cocked his head with the meek expression of one of those saints in old paintings. “It’s good to see you back,” he said. “You know how people talk. ‘That’s the last we’ll see of Lars-Goren,’ they say. ‘Now that he’s a friend of King Gustav, we’ll drop from his mind like last year’s toothache!’” Father Karl rolled his eyes up and smiled like a baby. “They say, ‘Lars-Goren’s become a Lutheran now.’ ‘Oh?’ I say. You can imagine how it makes me laugh—Lars-Goren a Lutheran! They say, ‘He’s become a great lover, down there in Stockholm.’ ‘A lover, you say!’ I tell them, and laugh to myself. ‘That’s not the Lars-Goren I know,’ I say to myself. I could tell them a thing or two about Lars-Goren, God be praised; but what’s the difference, it does no harm, all this chatter of empty-headed fools!” He opened his hands as if granting all gossips his mercy.

Lars-Goren’s son Erik sat staring at an arrow-shaped headstone with interlocked snakes, his face slightly pale with anger. Gunnar from time to time glanced at his brother as if trying to decide what expression he himself ought to wear.

“Ah well,” said Father Karl, “there’s always unrest, even here in Hälsingland. There’s always gossip and lying and idle speculation, especially when the lord is away, you know, and people have time on their hands. I let it go, for the most part. When the moment seems right, I put a word in.” He smiled, his eyelids lowered and glanced at Lars-Goren, too good a friend to ask for thanks.

Lars-Goren knew well enough that it was all lies and flattery, Father Karl’s childish way of showing loyalty and affection by making others seem less devoted, but he said, just to be on the safe side, “What kind of unrest do you mean, Father?”

“Ah, the usual, you know—” He threw his hands up and gave a laugh. “New governments are always a problem, of course. Where will they get the money to keep things going, you know? Where will they get leaders, with all the old ones killed off in the war or the bloodbath of Stockholm or fled away to Germany? The Lutherans are everywhere, needless to say. And who knows, some of them may even be close to the king. Will they argue that the holdings of the Church should be seized? Will they raise the peasants’ taxes, or take them from the fields for the army? Such are the questions people ask in their drunken foolishness.” He blushed slightly and threw a glance at young Erik then leaned toward Lars-Goren, confidential. “You see, it’s hard to worry about someone you never met. King Gustav’s a mystery. The villagers and peasants have never laid eyes on him. But Lars-Goren, now, there’s a face and figure they can call up in their minds, a man they can brood on and speculate on: ‘What will he do? What will he think? How might he betray us?’ That’s why they gossip, you see. Testing each other out, each man trying his fears on the others, watching for an answering spark of doubt.” He shrugged sadly and looked at his knees.

Suddenly Gunnar said, “I don’t believe you!” His eyes were large and fierce, his freckled face red.

Lars-Goren shot him a look, and Gunnar closed his lips together.

“Of course you don’t, my son! And I don’t blame you in the least!” The priest smiled with childish eagerness. “Who can believe these people we’ve known all our lives to be evil? And indeed they’re not! Just childlike that’s all! There’s no evil in their hearts! No, no, nothing like that! They babble without thinking, these poor ignorant peasants, no more evil than the flowers in this garden!” He shook his head sadly, holding out his hands, then folding them in his lap again. “That’s the Devil’s way, you know. Make use of whatever lies at hand. It’s not the people who are wicked, they’re just little children, like all of us.” He shook his head again and put his fingertips together as if praying. “God have mercy on us all!”

Lars-Goren and his sons had finished eating now. Fruitflies and garbage-bees hovered over the remains, which Lars-Goren had placed on a stone for the priest to clear away. Lars-Goren said, “Thank you for your company and advice, Father Karl. I’ll think about these things, you may be sure.” He moved, with Erik and Gunnar behind him, toward the stone archway that opened onto the street.

“The pleasure’s all mine,” said Father Karl, hurrying up beside him. “You mustn’t take these things too much to heart,” he added. “I may exaggerate the danger. Needless to say—”

“I understand,” Lars-Goren said, and nodded.

At their approach, Lady jumped up from the shade where she’d been lying, awaiting their return, and came trotting to push her head into Lars-Goren’s hand, then turned away again, wagging her tail and urging them to hurry. Villagers on the street stopped walking to look at Lars-Goren and his sons. They smiled, silent as stones, but what they were thinking not even the Devil could have said.

Behind them on the cobblestones, Father Karl said, making Lars-Goren pause, “I understand you’ve become good friends with Bishop Brask.”

Lars-Goren turned, his lips slightly puckered. “I’ve met him,” he said at last.

The priest nodded, avoiding Lars-Goren’s eyes. “It’s a dilemma,” he said, and nodded. “One would have thought he’d have gotten some high office in the government, after all his help.”

Lars-Goren waited.

“But of course he’s a difficult man, that’s true too. I met him once myself. Who can say which way he’d be more dangerous to the king—as an official or as a man embittered by the king’s ingratitude.”

Lars-Goren smiled half to himself. “You hear a good deal, here at the edge of the world,” he said.

“Well, yes. He’s a churchman, of course. We have mutual concerns, although naturally—”

Lars-Goren nodded. Erik was giving his brother a leg up, Gunnar smiling grimly, as if waiting for the horse to shy or maybe rear up and strike at him.

“Thank you again,” Lars-Goren said, dismissing Father Karl with a nod and getting up on the horse. It was mid-afternoon and he had three more villages he was hoping to visit before nightfall.

As soon as he saw that his sons were ready, he set off at a canter, his horse’s hooves striking sparks from the stones. When he looked back, Father Karl was on the steps of the church, waving after him with both arms, in the style of a peasant. A few villagers had come out into the street to watch Lars-Goren ride off. They too raised their arms. Gunnar was riding with one hand clenched tight on the pommel, his head too far forward, close to the horse’s flying mane. Erik rode beside him, watching him. Lars-Goren reined in a little, surprised at himself, trying to make sense of the anger that was flaming in his chest.

5.

IT WAS DUSK WHEN THEY CAME to where the witch had been burned. They could see the smoke and bright embers from a mile away. From a half mile away they could smell the charred flesh and bone. Neither of his sons said anything. The horses became skittish, and the dog, catching the uneasiness of the horses, kept closer to Lars-Goren’s side. In the west, the clouded sky had become brighter but no redder. It glowed like the blade of a knife in a strong, clear light. Black specks—vultures—floated around the smoke. There were no longer any people, though as Lars-Goren and his sons approached nearer they found the hoofprints and ruts left by a large crowd. He slowed his horse to a walk as they went past. Drake moved carefully, with his gray ears cocked toward the embers, his muscles tensed, prepared to shy off to the left at the first sign of life from the neighborhood of the smoke. One ember fell from the beams that supported the sagging black remains; it struck lengthwise and broke, shooting sparks, but the horses only flinched a little, waiting for worse.

When they were almost past the place, Erik reined up his horse and sat looking. Gunnar rode a few steps more, then stopped his. Lars-Goren continued—stubborn as one of his own peasants, he thought—then abruptly changed his mind and stopped. He refrained from looking back. At last he heard his sons’ horses coming up behind him, and with his knees he edged Drake forward again.

As he came even with Lars-Goren, Erik said, “When I become lord here, there’ll be no more burning of witches.”

Lars-Goren said nothing.

“Did you hear me, Father?” Erik asked.

“In that case,” said Lars-Goren, “I must see that you never become lord here.”

The rest of the way home, they rode in silence.

6.

LARS-GOREN KNEW IT WAS his imagination—there had been nothing visibly human in the black remains—but he carried with him all that night, both awake and asleep, an unsettling image of the witch’s face, for some reason the face of the old peasant woman he’d seen that morning in the field of rye, though he knew it had not been the same old woman. She stared straight ahead of her, with an expression he could not fathom, as if she were looking at something no one else could see, perhaps a steel-bright light like the light he’d seen in the clouds as he rode home, but a light that came not from the clouds but from everywhere at once, as if the whole physical world had vanished, consumed by that terrible brightness. In his dreams he saw the burning they’d been too late to witness, saw how the long gray hair sparked and smoked and ignited, how the heavy black peasant clothes smoldered, then flamed like burning leaves. Sweat broke out on the face, and the flesh became puffy and dark, then burst open, dripping blood and fat. Even as he dreamed, he understood why it was that her expression never changed—showed no pain, no rage, no fear of the Lord, only that terrible, mystical blankness like indifference: he was seeing not the burning of a living witch but his memory of those burning corpses on Södermalm hill.

When he awakened in the morning he was weak and heavy-limbed, as if he hadn’t slept at all. The bed beside him was empty, and he somehow knew at once that Liv had risen hours ago and gone down to help with breakfast and start her day. From somewhere outside, beyond the windowless stone walls, came the sharp sound of iron striking iron—someone shoeing a horse, perhaps, or clumsily hammering the iron band on a cartwheel. He sat up and put his legs over the side of the bed, his flesh still numb, shivers running up and down his back as if he’d caught an ague. For a long time he sat staring at the wall, hardly knowing what he was thinking, rubbing his hands and his arms against the cold all around him, though his breath sent out no steam; then, awakening again, he got up and began to get dressed.

Downstairs only his daughters were still indoors. His elder daughter, Pia, just turned seven, fixed him breakfast, while the younger, four, sat at the table beside him, watching him with tightly folded hands.

“You slept late,” Pia said, bringing him eggs and bread, buttermilk and honey. She had her mother’s face except that her hair was dark brown and her smile was more furtive. She walked already like the over-tall girl she was becoming, her head slightly ducked, eyelids lowered, apologetic.

“Your mother should have gotten me up,” he said.

Pia nodded, nervously smiling. “She said you had bad dreams.”

Little Andrea’s eyes winced narrower, shooting him a look. Lars-Goren turned to study her. More than the others she was a stranger to him, self-sufficient and mysterious, watching like an enemy spy. He smiled as if hoping to soften her judgment of him. Her expression did not change.

Lars-Goren looked back at Pia and said, “I hope my tossing and turning didn’t keep her awake?”

Pia shrugged, drew back the chair across from him and sat down. Like Andrea, she folded her hands.

Abruptly, Andrea asked, “Are you going to take us to see the dragon?”

Chewing, Lars-Goren looked at Pia for an explanation.

“King Gustav’s sent the statue of St. George to Hudiksvall,” she said. She glanced at him, then down again, and busied herself tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “He’s sending it to every great city in the kingdom, so they say. It’s to celebrate our victory and independence.”

Lars-Goren considered. “Do you know what that means—‘independence’?” he asked.

Again she shrugged, ducking her head. There were moments when, at seven, she seemed as wise as a woman, but just now she looked embarrassed and frightened, like the child she was. “It means everyone’s happy,” she said.

Lars-Goren nodded. “So we hope,” he said. He remembered his son Erik sullenly riding from the place where they’d burned the witch.

“Will you take us?” Andrea asked again. She tipped her head to one side, not so much pleading as scrutinizing, reserved.

“Whatever your mother says,” he said, and raised the bread to his mouth.

“That’s what she said you’d say,” said Andrea whether with scorn or satisfaction he couldn’t make out.

“Tell her we’ll go then,” said Lars-Goren, “if she hasn’t changed her mind.”

Outside someone was again banging metal against metal. The sound was too irregular to be the work of a hammer, and the sound was sometimes loud sometimes lighter, a mere clink. Abruptly, it broke off. He scowled, still trying to guess what it was, but no answer would come to him, and at last he put it from his mind and finished eating. Then, just as he was rising from the table, it began again. He hurried to the door and down the hallway, Andrea coming after him, keeping her distance.

When he emerged into the castle yard he discovered that the day was bright and hot, the sky so blue one could hardly have believed that yesterday there had been heavy leaden clouds. Chickens scattered in front of him, cackling in indignation, startled by the suddenness of his coming through the door. Lady leaped up from her nap in the sunlight and trotted over to him, looking up at him for instructions. A bent old man looked up from the corner of the bailey where he was working, poking mortar into the stones, and he smiled, slightly raising both arms, like a fighting-cock proffering for attack. Again the sound that had been puzzling Lars-Goren stopped. He looked around. Andrea stood a few yards behind him, on the castle steps, the thumbs of both hands in her mouth. He held out his hand to her, inviting her to walk with him. Solemnly, she shook her head. He smiled and shrugged, then turned away, casting in his mind for the direction from which the sound had come. Now the sound began again, and Lars-Goren, with the dog at his heel, went striding toward the castles northwest corner. As soon as he’d rounded the corner he stopped and stood motionless, instinctively raising one hand to Andrea behind him, commanding her to silence.

Two men, helmeted and muffled from head to foot in protective ropecloth, stood slashing at one another with blunted two-hand swords. They struck with such ferocity, such murderous solemnity, without yells or grunts, it seemed that even muffled as they were they must certainly kill one another with their unwieldy, archaic swords. Now Lars-Goren saw what he had missed at first: his son Gunnar crouched just out of range of the flying swords, watching with eyes full of fury and fear. “To the leg!” Gunnar screamed, and the smaller of the swordsmen, seeing the opening at the same instant, came down with so violent a flat-sided blow to the flank of his opponent that the leg went flying out from under the man, turned in grotesquely, as if broken at the knee. “Break!” screamed Gunnar.

“Break! Break!” The smaller of the swordsmen broke and stepped back, dropped the sword, threw off the helmet, and ran to the man who lay rolling on the ground and moaning. Lars-Goren’s dog rushed in, barking officiously. When the victor pulled down his mask, Lars-Goren saw what he’d by now suspected: it was Erik.

Erik reached down to help the man on the ground, who seized the muffled arm and clung to it, wailing “Good hit! Never mind!” then at once went back to moaning and clutching at his leg.

Lars-Goren moved closer, Andrea beside him, taking his hand as if unaware that she was doing it. “Hush, Lady!” he said. The dog barked once more, then controlled herself. When Erik looked up, his face showed nothing, no shame, no pride, no fear—nothing whatsoever. Gunnar moved back a little, as if expecting a blow. The man on the ground was tearing at his mask now, no longer moaning. “It was the boy’s idea, sir,” he said, eyes bulging, full of tears. Lars-Goren recognized his groundskeeper.

Lars-Goren nodded. “Let me help you inside,” he said. He let go of his daughter’s hand and bent down to his groundskeeper, feeling for the break in the bone. So far as he could tell, there was none, but he’d be able to tell for certain when he got him stretched out inside. He put his hands inside the groundskeeper’s armpits, helping him to his feet.

“I told him nobody fights with these old-fashioned swords anymore,” said the groundskeeper. He bit his lips and winced. “But you know these boys!” he said. “Violent! Violent!”

Lars-Goren put his arm around the man’s thick waist and steadied him as he hopped on one leg toward the door, the dog coming carefully beside them, eager to be of use. The groundskeeper’s face was ashen.

Erik hung back, picking up the groundskeeper’s sword, then his own. Gunnar and Andrea came a little behind Lars-Goren, watching him and staying out of reach.

At the steps, Lars-Goren half turned and looked back at his children. Erik, loaded down with the two swords and helmets, met his eyes, as expressionless as before. “Get cleaned up,” said Lars-Goren coldly, as if wearily. “This afternoon we start for Hudiksvall, to see the dragon.” He gazed a moment longer at his son Erik, then turned his attention once more to the wounded groundskeeper.

“They have their own ideas, these young lords,” said the man. His smile was half fearful, half cunning. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “They’re the Devil’s own henchmen—no lie, sir!” Quickly, as if afraid he’d offended, he added, “But he’s brave as the day is long, that Erik! Brave and good-hearted as a saint, sir, that’s no lie!”

7.

AT NOON ON THE FOLLOWING DAY they arrived at Hudiksvall. There was no stable anywhere, as they learned from visitors pushing back from the heart of the city, and at last, full of misgivings, Lars-Goren left his animals with a rabbit-toothed old peasant who’d roped off a field at the outskirts of the city, a field so crowded there seemed no room for the horses to lie down. The city too was crowded, so packed with visitors there was hardly a place to stand, and the crowd was so noisy Lars-Goren and his family had to shout into one another’s ears to be heard. Andrea rode on Lars-Goren’s shoulders, solemn as a viking on watch. Lars-Goren’s wife came just behind, pressing close to Lars-Goren, her hands clamped tightly around the hands of Pia, on her right, and, on her left side, Erik, who held tightly to Gunnar’s right arm. “Do you see it?” yelled Gunnar, as if furiously angry, “do you see it?”

Then at last Andrea cried out, “There it is!” and a moment later Lars-Goren saw it too, a huge, shabby canopy that bore the arms of King Gustav.

“We’re almost there!” he called out and twisted around to make sure that his wife was still behind him.

The closer they came to the statue, the quieter the crowd became, as if somewhere in the vicinity of the dragon and saint some accident had happened, some trampling or stabbing so terrible that a hush of dismay went out around it. But as they pressed still nearer, they discovered that the cause of the silence was not what they’d imagined; it was the statue itself that made the crowd forget its voice.

Lars-Goren for one had seen the statue before, but never with people all around it like this, looking up as if entranced. It was as if, without the people, the statue was incomplete, unreal as a miracle in a grotto where there is no human eye to witness it. Gustav’s soldiers stood every six feet around the statue, but no one gave them reason to raise a finger. For all the pressure of the crowd farther back, it was as still and calm here by the statue as the eye of a tornado. Peasants, burghers, knights in fine dress stood motionless gazing up, some of them weeping, hardly bothering to dab away the tears. Lars-Goren looked at them and felt a ringing in his heart that he could hardly put a name to, whether pain or awe or love or something else—though certainly part of it was love, he knew, love for Sweden and all her bright, wind-bitten faces long or short, fat or thin, light or dark—and love for faces he would never see again, the faces of those who’d died in Sten Sture’s rebellion, on frozen Lake Åsunden, in Execution Square in Stockholm, and later, in Gustav’s revolution. Lars-Goren too was now weeping, hardly noticing, unashamed.

For a long time he hardly glanced at the statue itself, but looked instead at the people—first at strangers, then at his wife, then at his children. When he did turn at last to the statue, the sight struck him like a fist. Where Bernt Notke got the massive blocks of wood—to say nothing of the skill at carving, to say nothing of the vision—God only knew. Every notch and curl sang and glowed. The dragon impaled on St. George’s lance seemed to writhe in agony, eyes violently rolling, tail slashing, gleaming talons slicing at the belly of the trembling horse. But none of these did Lars-Goren see that instant.

What he saw was the blank, staring face of the knight, gazing straight forward, motionless, as if indifferent to the monster gazing as if mad or entranced or blind, infinitely gentle, infinitely sorrowful, beyond all human pain. I am Sweden, he seemed to say—or something more than Sweden. I am humanity, living and dead. For it did not seem to Lars-Goren that the monster below the belly of the violently trembling horse could be described as, simply, “foreigners,” as the common interpretation maintained. It was evil itself; death, oblivion, every conceivable form of human loss. The knight, killing the dragon, showed no faintest trace of pleasure, much less pride—not even interest.

He saw again the face of the witch above the churning flames in his dream, the dead swelling faces on the pyres of Stockholm, his son’s cold stare. “When I become lord here, there’ll be no more burning of witches.”

Though it seemed to make no sense, Lars-Goren heard himself saying—his hand on his son Erik’s shoulder—“Very well, you shall be lord here.”

He looked down at Erik’s face, to see if he’d spoken it aloud, as he imagined. His son, in alarm, looked up at him, as if he thought his father had gone mad.

“Very well,” Lars-Goren said, and nodded.

His son met his eyes, but his face now showed nothing, as blank as the face of the knight staring straight into the sun.

8.

ON THE NIGHT BEFORE THE DAY he was scheduled to leave, Lars-Goren sat at the fireplace with his family, Andrea on his knee, Gunnar on the bench beside him. Pia sat across from him, on the bench beside her mother. Erik moved restlessly in the shadows behind them, as if the room were too small to contain his ambition and desire. Lars-Goren was talking of his visits, as a child, to Lappland.

“Strange people,” he said, “if one can really call them people.” He felt embarrassed and disloyal and quickly made an effort to explain. “They’re people, of course,” he said, “as human as any of us. They love their children, love their incredible white country and their reindeer. The Lapps work and play like the rest of us, and they’re religious, just as we are. That’s not what I meant.”

He explained, as well as he could, what he meant. His wife gazed into the fire, half smiling, her hand on Pia’s arm. Perhaps the reindeer were the secret, he said. The reindeer gave the Lapplanders everything they had—food, clothes, shelter, love-tokens, even the devices of their religion. In Lappland nothing grew but what was food for reindeer, so the Lapps ate virtually nothing but the reindeer themselves, blood and meat and the marrow of their bones. For houses and sleds they used reindeer bones, horns, and hides. Perhaps for that reason after all these years the minds of the Lapps had come to be partly reindeer minds, preternaturally alert to every change in the wind, alert to mysteries no ordinary human being could grasp.

But that too, he realized, was not exactly what he meant.

“It’s something about the simplicity,” he said, “the absolute simplicity of the landscape, the light, the inescapable concern with necessities, nothing more.”

Lars-Goren fell silent, staring into the fire. Here too, in Hälsingland, life was simple, he thought; or simple enough. His daughters would grow up and marry neighboring lords, his sons would take care of his villages and lands, oversee the planting and harvesting, building and razing.

Now his son Erik came to the glow of the fireplace and, after a moment, sat down on the floor beside Gunnar.

Pia said, “I wish you could stay with us, Pappa.”

Lars-Goren looked at her, then at his wife. “I wish I could too,” he said. “Soon, perhaps.”

Now he was thinking again of the Devil, how on the night he’d sought them out he’d told Gustav his infinitely complicated schemes, and how Gustav had listened in secret fascination, fitting his plans into the Devil’s complexity. He saw the jumble of bodies on Sodermalm’s pyres, the clutter of leaflets blown like leaves through Stockholm’s streets, after Gustav seized the Lutherans’ printing press and made it his voice.

“Are you all right, Lars-Goren?” his wife asked.

Only now did he realize that he’d covered his eyes with his hand. “I’m fine,” he said.

“We should all go to bed,” she said, but without full conviction.

“Not yet,” he said.

For another half-hour they sat staring into the fire, six glowing shapes like one. At last his wife rose and came to touch his shoulder. He nodded, took her hand, and stood up, lifting Andrea and carrying her, asleep, on one arm.

When Lars-Goren looked in on him, saying goodnight, his son Erik said, “Father?”

Lars-Goren waited, standing beside the bed.

After a moment, Erik said, “The trouble is, it’s not possible to be like the Lapps.” His head was raised slightly from the pillow.

Lars-Goren put his hand on the boy’s white shoulder. “No, I know,” he said. He leaned down and kissed the boy’s forehead. Then he went to his wife.

“I must think about this queer streak of fear,” he thought, for it was creeping up on him again, he found, now that he was going back. “If I’m not afraid of death and I’m not afraid of hell—” But he could push the thought no further. To the marrow of his bones he was a reasonable man, yet here, real as life in his mind’s eye, was this saurian being with the goatish smell, this idiot god, by all evidence, who could make him tremble where he lay.

“Suppose the world makes no sense,” he thought, “no sense whatsoever. Suppose good is evil and evil is good, or that nothing is either good or evil.” It was a thought that should have alarmed him, he told himself, but though he played with the idea, trying to feel alarm, he saw that the more he played with it, the more he felt nothing whatsoever. “Perhaps it’s this that makes a monster like Bishop Brask,” he thought. He concentrated on the idea of Bishop Brask, cut off from heaven by boredom and despair, a man who no longer had feeling for anything except, perhaps, style. He, Lars-Goren, could become a man like that. Surely, that was evil, that should make him tremble! But he felt no slightest tingle of alarm.

Beside him, lying on her back, his wife asked softly, “Lars-Goren, what are you thinking?”

“Shall I tell you the truth?” he asked.

When she said nothing, he said, “I’m afraid of the Devil.” He told her what had happened, and how he’d felt an overwhelming, senseless terror.

She rolled over in the darkness and put her bare, soft arms around him. “Perhaps it’s only rage,” she said, and kissed his cheek.

“Rage at what?” he asked, drawing back a little. “Do I seem to you a man of senseless rages? Rage at what?”

“Just rage,” she said. “Is it so terrible to feel rage for no reason?”

The thought was comforting. Instantly, he began to think of reasons for his senseless rage.