Gertrude and Claudius (15 page)

“A thousand times I believed I had imagined it, but I had failed. There are realities we cannot conceive.”

“Do I overfill it at my matronly age, so it hangs less pleasingly than upon one of your bony Byzantine whores?”

He did not answer the taunt; really the sight of her seemed to have made Fengon stupid.

“Why are you standing so far away?”

He jumped a step, startled from his enchanted contemplation. “You commanded me to. You were severe with me.”

“That was before you robed me in the costume of a Mediterranean jade. See, I have black hair. I have olive skin.” Her face was hot; his stupefied gaze was a fire. His body, shorter and tenser than her husband’s, radiated a rapt helplessness, his arms out from his body and curved as if carrying a great weight. “Come, my brother,” she said. “What you robed, you may disrobe.”

With those curving arms he lifted up the clinging tunic, and the chemise, its ties undone, came off with it. Geruthe pressed her rosy ripeness into the abrasions of Fengon’s rough clothes. His riding shirt had leather shoulders to cushion mail. She inhaled the rain-drenched dead-animal smell. “Protect me,” she whispered, adhering tight against him as if for concealment, her lips seeking the gap in his bristling wet beard.

Afterwards, she toyed with the long bronze pins, skewers for her hair, and held one to his naked chest as he lay beside her in the bed. With the point of the other she dimpled the white skin between her heavy breasts. “We could make an end now,” she suggested, her eyes, widened and softened by love, sly with the possibility.

Fengon in his limp state considered her offer. Such a further and ultimate relaxation would conveniently crown his triumph. Gently he lifted the skewers from her grip, pinched the flesh beneath her chin, and weighed a warm breast in his palm. “I fear we have too much of our fathers in our natures,” he said, “to give the world so easy a victory.”

•  •  •

She felt this would happen but once, this unfolding of herself, and so she was luxuriously attentive to it, as if she were both storyteller and heroine, physician and invalid. In their hours of stolen intimacy, Fengon disclosed to her in the white mirror of his own body, furred and pronged, a self laid up within her inner crevices and for forty-seven years merely latent, asleep. All her unclean places came alive, and came clean. Did she not carry in her veins the warrior blood of Rodericke and of his father, Hother, the vanquisher of Guimon, who had betrayed Gevare and whose live body Hother burned in revenge? Protest had been lurking in her, and recklessness, and treachery, and these emerged in the sweat and contention of adulterous coupling.

She and Fengon seized what mattresses there were, at times too impatient for the convenience of the mock court they had established in Corambis’s lodge: a grassy bramble not a league beyond Elsinore’s moat, or a stone niche in a little-used gallery where hiked skirts and lowered breeches created sufficient access for their souls’ emissaries, those lower parts so rich in angelic sensation. She would have lain down in warm mud for him, even the mud of the pigsty, to enter the exaltation she found in his brute love. He was not always gentle nor always rough; he maintained the small surprises of the seducer’s art, which yet she had to feel arose involuntarily in him, to impart movement to the great element of herself beyond the control of her will.

Unlike Horvendile, Fengon was at home in the pit
of the flesh. His soul did not dart looks about for an exit to some safer, more public chamber, lit by social chatter and churchly candles. When done, the King was anxious to skulk off to his own closet; a nature-hating piety learned in Jutland unmanned him. Love’s gratifications, violent and uncaring when part of his pirate raids, bordered in his mind on the Devil’s domains. Whereas Fengon was content to loiter in a twinned concupiscence, telling Geruthe over and over, with his tongue and eyes and rethickened horn, all the truth about herself that she could hold. He uncovered in her not just the warrior but the slave. Had he bid her lie down in pigshit she would have squeezed her buttocks together in the clench and rejoiced to be thus befouled. At night, reliving the afternoon’s embraces, she would lick her pillow in hunger to be with her lover again—her redeemer from lawful life’s deadening emptiness, her own self turned inside out and given a man’s bearish, boyish form. Her father’s court had held no more eager slut than she.

Geruthe found she relished even the deception, the rank duplicity of having two men. Horvendile was pleased by how quickly he aroused her now. She tried to hold back caresses and tricks learned from his brother. Over the years her husband had turned to her ever more rarely, as little as once each waxing and waning of the moon, but now, roused by he knew not what disturbances below his horizon, he more often answered her body’s silent call. Fengon sensed when she had been with her husband, though Geruthe would deny it. “You have the Hammer’s smell,” he accused. “You come to me already satisfied.”

“Never satisfied but by you, Fengon. Only you know me. Only you know the way to my heart’s heart, my inmost seat of passion. The other is but a duty, a duty of submission laid upon the wife by the stiff-mouthed priests, to whom we are sinful poor animals.”

“But you
do
submit. Like the lowest trull, you spread your legs for a repulsive customer. I should beat you. I should pound the pale slime of that spouting cock from your gut.”

“You may hurt me with words and looks,” she warned, “but leave no marks.”

His eyes flashed, reading her meaning. “So your dim and pompous husband, revelling in his liberties with you, may observe no traces of his maddened rival, no blue-black bruises left by a devil’s hand.”

His upper lip lifted in a snarl; she wanted to kiss him, for taking so serious a wound. Instead, she applied balm:

“He does not revel, Fengon. He exploits his rights, if he does, matter-of-factly, his purpose too blunt and damp to strike any spark.” This was not quite the truth, not in her quickened duplicitous state; she felt the thrill of deception between her legs, where two men contended, one the world’s anointed and the other her own anointed. She knew them, and neither wholly knew her. “Ardor is a matter of spirit,” she continued in a reassuring vein, “more than of the body, for a woman. Many a wife perforce opens her arms to a man she hates.”

“Do you hate him? Tell me you do.”

Now that he begged her to lie, she could not. His doleful look was so earnest, she must try to be honest. “Near it, sometimes, but not quite. Horvendile’s sins
against me have been those of omission, whose pain is low and dull but unremitting. He saw me first as desirable property, and of his property he is a considerate enough caretaker. But, yes, in that he has taken from me the days of my life, and encouraged in me a mummifying royal propriety, I do hate him. You, by daring me to love, have led me to see how badly tended I have been. But the world is such. He is my master. Outside of Elsinore, I am nothing—less than a female serf, who has at least her native sturdiness, her hungry sprats, her beanpatch, her straw bed.”

If Geruthe had hoped that Fengon would dispute her nothingness outside of Elsinore, she was disappointed. She felt the ratchet of desire in him slip, displaced by other, more thoughtful machinations. His brown eyes darkened—his black pupils expanded—looking into the future’s cave. “What do we do,” he asked, the grains in his soft voice each distinct, “if he discovers us?”

They were secluded in the round tower room of Corambis’s lodge. They had removed their clothes and lay on the canopied bed as on a raft in a warm sea. A high-summer day flooded the air with the hum of insects and the humidity of growth pressing and snaking into every niche; the vine at the window sought to thrust its heart-shaped leaves inside. The trees all about and the surface of the lake glittered with a million shifting details, a sea of organic incidents in which the lovers’ own incident drifted. But a cool shadow of forethought had fallen across their bodies; their rapture was chilled.

“How could we be discovered?” she asked.

“How could we be not, some day or other?” he asked. “The four around us know, and Corambis our absent host, and those at Elsinore who see you ride forth so faithfully, and those country folk who hail your passing, and the old couple who keep the cottage that guards our haven. All hold our truth hostage.”

She closed her eyes. He was tipping her, sliding her off their raft, making her think toward their fathomless doom. “Why would any of them tell Horvendile?”

“Personal advantage, or interrogation under torture, or the innocent pleasure each soul takes in the mishaps of others. A righteous anger, perhaps, that the commandments which restrain the world’s poor are disregarded by the mighty.”

“I have been heedless,” the Queen admitted, trying to consider herself. She sensed her body floating naked away from her thinking head—her breasts blown roses pink and white, her sex swollen and tender beneath its matted bush, her bare feet forming a distant audience of toes. “I was more indignant than I knew. Thirty years of lofty restriction gave intensity to my appetites and released them without a proper thought of consequences. Or if there was a thought, it paled before a queen’s habituated belief in her entitlements. I was idly impulsive and selfish when you and I began, and now it would be death to let you go.”

“Enamorata, it may be death to keep me,” Fengon warned. “
Amor, mors.
” He stroked her tingling hair and tugged a strand in illustration. “Fate cuts the sailor some slack, but then the line pulls taut. The creditor allows
some grace, but then the debt is pressed. We have been wallowing, these summer months, in the blithe interim. However, just as some are invisible by being small, our very size and nearness to the King may make us hard to see. His will to see is not keen, I believe, for once he does see he has an obligation to act. An obligation, if I know my brother, he will move circumspectly to discharge. The disruption to Denmark might dislodge him as well. The populace is not prudish in its sympathies. You are the throne to many, and I have my loyalists in Jutland and some well-placed friends abroad.”

Her left hand returned from an idle investigation. “Ah, love, look—your little delegate to the lower parts has quite lost desire for your willing trull.”

Fengon looked down to where his breeches had been removed. “Thoughts of being beheaded do have a retractive effect.” He chucked her ruefully in the soft double plumpness beneath her chin. “I fear I am a fisherman who has lost his hook,” he said, “and you will glide away, back to familiar waters.”

“No, my lord, I am part of you now. We must glide on together.” And indeed like a big fish she slithered down in the bed, to revive his manhood with a Byzantine technique he had taught her. She liked it, this blind suckling, this grubbing at nature’s root. She fought gagging, and tugged at his balls. There was no need to think. Let be. His responsive needy swelling ousted every scruple from her head. Like maggots they would fatten, then fly.

“
Il tempo fa tardi
,” Fengon said to Sandro upon at last emerging. “
Andiamo presto
!”

“
Il giorno va bene per Lei
?” The servant had sensed trouble coming.

“
Sì, sì. Era un giorno perfetto. E per te
?”

Herda, though sitting composed by the clean-swept cold fireplace, had a flushed, smoothed face, and there was something awry where her wimple was pinned to her chin band. Her lips looked rubbed, her eyes watery.

“
Molto bene, grazie, signore. Crepi il lupo
!” May the wolf burst!

That summer’s warmth stretched into fall. October’s days, golden with the turning of the beech and chestnut forests, had sun-warmed centers, though the dawns showed frost on the orchard grass and ice on the courtyard puddles. Each evening nipped some minutes from the day’s length, and a crackling cold descended by midnight, revealing the first northern lights. They existed out of scale, in a star-strewn heaven cut to no measure but its own—waving tall curtains hung from nothing, disclosing nothing when they parted, unless it was dimmer folds of themselves, their evasive faint peacock colors, violet and turquoise, a far-off music of phosphorescence. They undulated along their vertical folds with a kind of beckoning motion, fading and returning.

The King was held to Elsinore more than in the summer, when he set forth for weeks at a time to survey his domains and call upon his provincial governors, themselves held in place by the need to supervise—or to keep watch upon those who did supervise—the burgeoning crops, the grazing herds, the game-ridden forests, the laborious harvests and the rightful taxes thereon, which
the villeins and fiefholders tirelessly schemed to avoid. In their shortness of sight they did not comprehend that without the royal taxes there would be no royal armies and hired companies to defend them against the Norwegians and the Pomeranians and those many others who wished to conquer the land and make all Danes slaves. There would be no castles to give them shelter in an invasion, or bridges to carry them across rivers on the way to market and to the fairs and carnivals—carnivals where, it seemed to the King, men and women who should be working wasted days and health in gawking at freaks and frauds, in promiscuous mingling and in drunkenness and gluttony that made the clever stupid and the stupid stupider. The Church was short-sighted in multiplying saints and with them saints’ days and excuses for fairs and folly. Soon there would be no workdays and purposes in common. Without a funded central authority, every hamlet would remain an island, and there would be no Crusades, or nobly sponsored tourneys, or unifying wars.

While King Horvendile was away ensuring that the land’s riches provided the mite that was due the royal coffers, Geruthe and Fengon felt free to spend long hours together, sating not only their lust—which grew more rather than less, as practice and familiarity widened their liberties—but satisfying the innocent curiosity whereby those steeped in love feed upon the most trivial of the details that compose, particle by particle, the other’s being. Fengon especially wished to possess her girlhood, to penetrate to the image of his full-fleshed mistress as a sturdy female child making her benign,
broad-browed, solemn way through the confusions of Rodericke’s court in the bereft years after her mother’s death. He doted upon this little girl with her unblaming green-gray eyes and sweet small dark space between her front teeth—this rosy child in a brocaded cap that covered her ears and half of her cascading hair—a child neglected yet coddled, passed from the lap of one favorite lady to that of another and then impatiently returned to the care of her nurse, ancient gnarled Marlgar, who would take her to the high safe solar above the adult din, to her little sidewalled bed and rag dolls whose three names she still remembered after forty years, reciting them so fondly their clay-bead eyes and bunched noses and stitched smiles rose before her, as she told him all this, more than once.