Gertrude and Claudius (14 page)

“The Hammer is never altogether wrong,” he said,
releasing her from his touch and dancing away in that frisky, foreign way he had. “Were I Corambis, I too would be looking to my own security. If we define ‘rascal’ thus, few can dodge the epithet. Wine by all means, though we have but one cup. Is it enough?”

“The pantry holds dozens.”

“But this one is ours. Yours, since I gave it to you, with my pledged adoration.” He ventured from their covert chamber, and in time Herda, her face composed in the mask of service, brought them not only a pottery flagon on a lindenwood tray but bread and cheese. Fengon used the dagger at his belt to make portions for them. The wine was thick and sweet, and under its influence, drinking first from opposite sides and then from the same of the heavy-stemmed cup, they could not help rubbing against each other, and fell to the bed, where, removing no clothes, they groped for sensitive flesh while exchanging reechy kisses, their mouths sour with wine, tainted with cheese, but for all that sweet, deeply so; it was as if two great angelic funnels were pouring through their joined lips the long-dammed contents of their souls, all the wounds in need of healing, all the comforts until now unbestowed. They became in their clothes sweaty and pink. His hands sought her loins, her breasts through the embroidered bliaut, with its welts of thread, that sheathed her from neck to heels. A ridge of dew appeared on Geruthe’s upper lip, which bore a transparent down he had never noticed before; her hand sought below his belted velvet tunic the baubly stalk his gift had reminded her fingers of. But for all this compulsive ardor, these swathed caresses and stifled groans, the
hissing and broken murmurs, the spiritual undertaking was too great to be consummated today. The weight of fatality was too heavy for their mere flesh.

On the morrow she accompanied the King to Skåne, that band of distant purple beyond the sullen Sund. A Danish land since the dark age when the Jutes and Angles divided the great peninsula now ruled from Elsinore, Skåne, with Halland and Blekinge, bordered the territories of the Swedish king, who coveted Skåne’s rich soil and herring harvest. Horvendile felt it politic to exhibit the royal presence there. He and his queen paid state visits to Lund, where the Archbishop mounted a three-day banquet, and to Dalby, where the Bishop organized a state procession around the city walls, led by a host of saints’ bones in individual reliquaries. Geruthe and Horvendile paid a patriotic visit to the battlefield of Fotevig, where over a century ago Erik the Memorable had decisively defeated Niels and his son Magnus, who had treacherously murdered Duke Knud the Breadgiver, conqueror of the Wends, in Haraldsted Wood. Magnus fell at Fotevig together with no fewer than five bishops. Erik’s victory had been aided by three hundred German armored knights hired for the occasion, a technological innovation which at a blow rendered popular levies upon the peasantry obsolete.

Fengon’s freelance profession, Geruthe reflected, had been born here. In Horvendile’s constant company, she found her liaison with his brother increasingly dreamlike. Horvendile was always at his best when travelling, being fêted and paraded, charming other dignitaries with his fattened Nordic handsomeness. The cheering
populace lined their routes, and threw spring flowers—daffodils, apple blossoms—under the hooves of their snorting steeds, who were spooked by the tumult.

A byproduct of his buoyant mood was a more devoted attention to his queen. Their lovemaking resumed, in the canopied beds of their ecclesiastical hosts, as if their young marriage had never grown jaded and old. Her husband was bulkier than Fengon, his body not so wiry and keen in her arms, his beard less thick and stiff, but he was
good
, a dutiful king and husband, and on both counts
hers
, her king, her husband, her conqueror. Satisfactorily he hammered her. She had only to hold still, like the faithful runestone King Gorm had erected to Tyra, Denmark’s glory, and fair fortune and renown would come to her. Her incestuous flirtation with Fengon, seen from a distance, appalled her. How perilously close she had come to falling! As soon as she returned, she would tell him, gently but unmistakably, that their meetings must come to an end. Her impatience to do so, to rid herself of imminent (how could she have come so close!) disgrace, gave her insomnia in Skåne.

But after her return to Elsinore, Fengon was rarely in attendance, and when he did come his business was with his brother and the court. Geruthe’s impulse of renunciation was replaced by a painful sensation of having been herself renounced. Her cheeks burned in shame to think back upon the avowals she had urged into his ear, and their delving kisses, and her heat within her clothes, whose embrace had alone held her from a ruinous surrender.

A week had passed after her return when Corambis
took her aside into a little recess of the long, pillared, unevenly paved corridor on the way to the chapel. “The excursion to Skåne has put a new gloss upon my queen’s mien,” he observed, but tentatively, as if willing to be contradicted. They had their secret between them, which freighted their words with danger.

“It was a relief to get away from Elsinore and its petty intrigues,” she said, rather loftily. “The King shone to glorious advantage. The people over there adored him.”

“The sun rises in the east,” Corambis said. His red-rimmed eyes, their lids yellow and loose, twinkled as if he had said something witty. She wondered how senile he was becoming: that absurd outdated sugarloaf hat, that houppelande with its trailing scalloped sleeves. She understood how Horvendile might feel: get rid of the gabby old baggage.

“The people are so trusting and loving,” she said. “One forgets, sometimes, whom one is ruling. It lifts the heart to see them.”

“Without forgetfulness, milady, life would be intolerable. All that we have ever felt or known would come crowding in upon us, like rags stuffed into a bag, as they say happens to unfortunates in the moment of drowning. It is averred that it is a painless death, but only the drowned could tell us with assurance, and they are silent, being so. That is, drowned.” He waited, head cocked and hat with it, to see what she might make of such assorted wisdom.

“I will endeavor not to drown,” she stated coolly. He was anxious, she could sense, to pick up the trail of their shared secret and bygone collusion.

“All Denmark wishes you to swim, none more fervently than I. It gladdens my cloudy old sight to see Rodericke’s daughter enjoy the love and esteem to which her proud blood entitles her. You have taken less joy in the throne, as we have previously discussed, than could be imagined by those multitudes who do not sit upon it.”

“We have had many discussions, on this matter or that, in our long acquaintance.”

“Indeed, and I beg forgiveness if I seem to thrust one more upon you. But, speaking of forgetfulness, as I believe we just were, unless I forget, a mutual friend of ours wonders whether or not he has been, in the stimuli and exaltations of your travels, forgotten.”

“He stays at Lokisheim, and seems himself forgetful.”

Corambis, last living link to her father’s dishevelled court, and safeguard of her childish identity, now seemed to be leading her astray, tugging her back to what she had resolved to put behind her. “He is far from forgetful, but respectful of your wishes.”

“My wish—” She could not quite entrust to this elderly intermediary words of severance that Fengon deserved to hear from her own lips.

Corambis’s tongue moved quickly into her pause. “He has a third gift to deliver, he bade me remind you. It is his last, and if you deign to receive it, it will spell quits to his giving, and to his heretical leanings, whatever that might mean. The phrase is his.”

“My wish, I started to say, is to avail myself no more of your quiet lodge by Gurre Sø, now that the weather is pleasant enough to offer retreat out of doors. Your queen
is most grateful for your permissive hospitality. I recovered a measure of contentment and resignation in my virtual solitude.”

Yet her heart beat at the picture of Fengon alone with her there, where the secluded lake gleamed to its far inverting shore, reflecting the sky like a great oval salver.

“He asked me to beg you to name a day,” Corambis insisted gently, with a courtier’s reluctance to disturb royal equanimity.

Haughty, wishing this pander and his pathetic daughter banished from her arrangements, Geruthe named the next day.

The woods around them were freshly but fully leafed. A steady warm drizzle further reduced visibility. The far side of the lake with its church could not be seen. The month had changed from April to May. The guards who rode with her—stolid on the way, looser and even jolly on the way back, with the ale absorbed while waiting through her rendezvous—seemed solemn and tense today, as if aware of a decisive point reached. Herda, marking this long-deferred resumption of the picnic habit, had packed an ample lunch—enough cheese and bread and salt meat and dried fruit for six—and the sight of the bright osier basket so heavily laden lightened the whole adventure somehow, making it seem less terminal than Geruthe had conceived it. We eat, we ride, we experience the days in their tones of weather, we love, we marry, we encounter life in each of its God-ordained
stages, no plague or accident cutting it short—life is part of nature, its beginning impossible to recall and its ending not to be contemplated outside of church, the home of last things.

Fengon and Sandro were late, as they had never been before, as if putting off an adverse verdict. When they came, they were soaked by the nine leagues from Lokisheim. Fengon distractedly explained, “We had to be careful, where the road was rocky, the horses didn’t slip on the wet stones.” He knew he had lost ground. Alone with her in their corner room, he twitched with nervous energy, and shivered in his soaked cloak. He smelled of wet wool, wet leather, wet horse. The fire the lame caretaker had built had nearly died in the delay; together they worked at reviving it. Fengon laid too many logs too close; Rodericke had told Geruthe as a girl, one night as she sat drowsy in his lap after dinner, that a fire was a creature that needed like all others to breathe. Their interview today would be short; there would not be time for the brazier coals to heat.

The log fire poked into a reluctant revival, Fengon stood and said accusingly, “You enjoyed Skåne.”

“Women enjoy travel. It is a pity, since we are rarely invited.”

“Horvendile was a satisfying companion.”

“Yes, Fengon. Pomp is his element, and his happiness overflowed onto me.”

“I fear that those of us you left behind gave you little reason to return.”

She had to smile, for all her grim resolve, at this
bearded man’s boyish sulk. “I had, for reason, the third gift you promised me. From your temper, you would as soon save it for another, who gratifies you more.”

“You gratify me all too well, as I believe I have persuaded you. But my inkling today is that it would be presenting a vain bribe to my executioner.”

Outside the lancet window the soft rain pattered from shelf to shelf of fresh greenery. Never had they felt so sealed in. Fengon was unexpectedly vivid to her—his soaked odor, his clever face tanned with spring’s windy sun, his nervous, offended warmth. Horvendile and the ecclesiastical pageants of Skåne seemed far at her back. Geruthe had noticed before how hard it was to hold one man in mind while confronting another.

She told him, lightly, “All mortals are mounting the gallows steps, but how near to the top we have come only God knows. Your inkling characterizes me unkindly. As soon call me your rescuer. We know equally well the height of the fall we might take. To banish you from these private audiences would be but to reinforce your own wise action when you last banished yourself from Denmark, a dozen years ago.”

“I was well short of fifty then, and am now nearing sixty. I thought to shake your spell, but instead it strengthened and I have weakened. My life runs low on chances. But have no mercy on me. The Queen must save herself; her whim is justice, her word is my law.”

Geruthe laughed, at her fickle, fluttering feelings as much as at Fengon’s chastising gravity. He looked monkish in his soggy hood. “Take off your stinking cloak, at
least,” she commanded him. “Did you bring my final present in it?”

“Bundled dry against my breast,” he said. Removing his cloak, he spread out for her on the bed a long woman’s tunic woven of interlocking and wavering peacock colors, green and blue and yellow spiced with black and red specks, the fabric more flexible than skin itself, though stiffened at the collar and sleeve-ends and hem with rows of tiny sewn pearls. Its threads caught the light as if faceted. “This kind of cloth is novel in Denmark,” Fengon explained. “Silk. The thread is secreted by horned green worms fed only on mulberry leaves. The eggs and seeds, the legend goes, were once smuggled out of China by Persian friars in their hollow staffs, and thus to Byzantium. The cocoons the worms spin, for a blind moth that lives but a few days, are boiled and picked apart by children’s fingers, and then old women braid the filaments into yarn, woven in turn into patterns as miraculous as that which you see, to image forth the bejewelled glory of Heaven.”

Geruthe touched the shimmering cloth, and in that touch was her undoing. “I should put it on,” she said.

“Not so your husband will see it, for he would know it is no item of northern manufacture.”

“I should put it on now, for its giver to appraise. Stand there.” She wondered at her tone of command. She had mounted to an eminence of abandon. The rain thickened to a torrent outside and the room dimmed, but for the shuddering glow of the revived fire. Its heat coated Geruthe’s skin as she shed her own damp cloak, and the sleeveless surcoat, and her long plain tunic with its flowing
sleeves, and the white cotte beneath that, leaving only a linen chemise, in which she shivered. Fine drops ricocheting from the stone sill of the window behind her, its casement left ajar, pricked her bared skin. The fire’s heat on her arms and shoulders felt like an angelically thin armor. Again she was reminded of something from a far corner of her life—a wifely memory faintly tasting of humiliation. The Byzantine tunic, stiff where those bands were knobbed with pearls, shrouded her head for a rustling instant, in which the sound of the rain overhead on the slates merged with the amplified rush of blood in her ears. Then, her head restored to air and light, she posed in the splendid sheath of silk, so stiff and pliable at once, so crystalline and fluid. The peacock colors changed from green to blue and back again as she moved: the silk shifted tint somehow as feathers will. She lifted her arms so the ample sleeves fell free, wide wings, and then continued the motion to remove from her coiled braids the bronze pins, skewers long enough to reach a man’s heart through his ribs. The rain outside, the heat at her back, the silk on her skin immersed her in nature, where there was no sin, no turning back. “Do I look as you imagined?”