Gertrude and Claudius (16 page)

“Were you lonely?” he asked.

“I think not,” she answered, gravely thinking back, like looking for her reflection at the bottom of a well. “I had no brother or sister, but there were children my age in Elsinore, the children of inferiors. We played Saracens and knights, and dangled grasshoppers at the golden carp in the moat. Marlgar followed me everywhere but rarely denied me a game or a pleasure. She came from one of the small islands north of Lolland, where the children run free. My father could be gruff, and his friends in their drunkenness unseemly, but I knew I would come to no harm. I was a princess, I early knew, and wondered what prince I would love and marry; the thought of him was often with me. And now he is here, beside me.”

“Oh, dear heart, I am not the perfect prince a child
imagines. I am a king’s dark and disreputable shadow. Your little princess—she knew she would be always taken care of, without her willing it?”

“Yes. I could will little, but to be good and not complain.”

“And you are like that still, passive and pleasant.”

“I suppose so. Does it irk you?”

“It enchants me, and frightens me a little.”

“Don’t be frightened, my love. All that lives must die. To waste this life in fretful care for the next, or for a future calamity—that, too, is a sin. Birth lays upon us the natural commandment to love each day and what it brings.”

“Geruthe,” he exclaimed, taking pleasure as always in the rueful three syllables of her name, that spelled out her flesh in his mind. “Your wise sweetness, or sweet wisdom—how unreal our perils appear to you.”

“No, they appear real enough, but then I made the decision to risk them. A woman as well as a man must keep her own accounts.” She stroked his bare shoulders, smooth as armor but for a violet welt left by a Turkish scimitar. She trailed a fingertip down the scar, to where his bearish chest-hair began. “My agony in the travail of Hamblet’s birth put life and royalty in my debt. I decided, it may be, at last to collect. My father and future husband together bargained me away, and you have given me back my essential value, the value of that little girl you so belatedly dote upon.”

Fengon groaned. “Your trust sometimes crushes me. The world would say I have been base, as base as any squealing stoat who rushes where his lust points him.”

She smiled. “You were discreet, and let all possible time go by. I was ready to receive you at my wedding. You sent an empty platter instead. As to the world, there is the truth from without, and the truth from within. The truth within is ours. I have found you trustworthy, and faithful to me. We cannot be destroyed, but by one letting the other go.”

He kissed her hands, naked whenever she met him, though heavily ringed when she sat on the throne beside Horvendile.

In Elsinore, then, as winter approached through the golden days of harvest, the King could turn his attention to domestic matters. One fatal day, that day of bare slant light called All Saints’, he summoned his brother to a private audience.

“Rumors reach me,” the King began, “that you come to Elsinore more often than we meet, as brothers and comrades.” He had taken on ballast since Fengon had last observed him, and held his head and torso as if the muscles of his thick neck ached.

“You have the kingdom to supervise, and I but my lagging estates, here and in our homeland. But for when the
råd
gathers, or the
thing
is called to convene, I would not obtrude my counsel.”

“Your counsel and visible support mean much to the throne. After the Prince, none stands closer to it than you.”

“But the Prince, from all accounts, is healthy, and, beyond his whimsical disposition, able.”

“Able, but scandalously absent.”

“Hamblet improves his mind in the realms of our
august ally the Emperor, to fit himself better to rule, when the time comes. But you are not old, and of our father’s tough stock.”

“Alas, not every noble Dane lives to die of decrepitude. Some are hurried along. I feel stiff and languid, often, but never mind. Who tells you the Prince is able?”

Fengon hesitated but a blink, before seeing no harm in an honest answer. “His mother and your Lord Chamberlain—both give a loving report of his manly abilities.”

“Natural affection and politic courtesy shape their impressions. My son is a mystery to me.”

“Though I have no claimed children, I believe it is ever thus, brother, with father and sons. The son’s world differs from the father’s if only by the dominating presence of the father in it. The same might be said of younger brothers and elder. You see clear to your objectives; I see always you ahead of me, intervening.”

Horvendile’s broad face, with its prim small mouth, sought briefly to encompass these geometries, sifting them for impudence. But he had some center of concern, and would not be dragged from it. “The Queen—you hold discourse with her frequently.”

Alerted, Fengon became more deliberately urbane. He felt oddly weightless, all his senses on tiptoe. “My tales of exotic travel give some relief to her monotonous days. She has an adventurous mind, but is much pent-up in royal routine.”

“This summer she went with me to Skåne.”

“And enjoyed herself royally. She said you were admired and admirable.”

“She talks much of me?”

“Of little else.”

“And what is her tenor?”

“Dear old
frater
, you press me as if I were a partner in your marriage. She spoke adoringly, last spring on her return, of your exemplary goodness, your hard-won power, your love of your people, which they of course reciprocate.”

“She thinks I am foolish, to love Denmark so possessively. She thinks I take too much to heart the old notion that if goodness does not flow from God through the King then the people will suffer and sink, all mutual obligations cancelled, and only an animal selfishness left, and savage anarchy. The King is the sun which warms the land. If something is amiss with him, his beams are bent. Crops fail, and rot infects the grain that is gathered and stored.”

Images so grandiose tempted Fengon to raise a smile against them, saving his own sanity, fending off a vocabulary bloated by self-glorifying superstition. Kingship had driven Horvendile mad. The Hammer struck another blow: “I often wonder, brother, why you do not marry.”

“Marry, I? Marriage seems to be the theme of this conference.”

“We are not yet to the bottom of our themes. But bear with me, and ration your smiles. Lena of Orkney, whom you took to bride when my own wedding had shown the way, and whom I met and thought a suitable match for your dreaming, romantic nature, died untimely. You have been vital these decades since, traversing a continent of possible brides, and have shunned your clear duty
to our family and to Denmark. You have not played your part in the enlargement of our interests. Even now, the daughter of the King of Scotland, ambassadors inform me, is sound and intelligent, and appetizingly young: a strong link between our courts would put the English in a tidy nutcracker.”

Fengon did laugh, imprudently. “I would be happy to see the English in a nutcracker, but not one where my wife would form one handle, to be seized as you demanded. I wish no wife. I am beyond such wishing. I am an old soldier, accustomed to the friendly stench of men.”

“You wish no wife. How can that be? Are you unnatural?”

“As natural as you, brother. More, indeed, since I have not made myself King by capturing an unwilling girl.”

“Has Geruthe told you she was unwilling?”

“No, I surmised it. I surmised it at the time, and avoided witnessing your triumph, as brutal as your rape of Sela before you slew her.”

“Sela was a scourge upon our coasts,” Horvendile said calmly, his long eyes watchful. There was a fishy glaze to the whites of the King’s eyes that belonged to the something amphibian about his lipless, decisive mouth. Fengon should not have let his anger out, defending a teenaged bride long transformed to wife, and who had perhaps been more willing than she admitted to her lover. His romanticism had betrayed him. When he had lunged to attack, the balance between the brothers had shifted.

“Perhaps you do not wish a wife,” Horvendile said, heavily, dully, sure of his ground, “because you already have a wife of sorts—another man’s wife. Don’t speak, Fengon. Imagine this fable with me. A good and faithful king has a wandering brother, who comes to his castle at last, weary of fruitless adventuring, and in his embittered idleness seduces the Queen, with the aid of the King’s treacherous, senile Lord Chamberlain. The adulterous couple sate their unspeakable lust month after month, in a secret shelter the pandering Lord Chamberlain has provided in his enmity to the King, whom he knows to be planning to relieve him of his lucrative post. I ask you, as my loving brother and trusted member of my
råd
, what should this so grievously abused king, the guardian of the Lord’s commandments and protector of his own extended household, do?”

Fengon felt supernaturally quickened, his every nerve bathed in the soothing, cleansing liquor of emergency. The pit had opened under him, but it was no deeper than his own death, which must be borne in any case. As when in hand-to-hand battle with Turk or Saracen, Alsatian mercenary or Pisan, all facets of the situation flashed upon him at once, and the copiously tinted world was stripped to a few stark monochromes—the white of life, the red of blood and counterblow, the black of death. Fengon responded, “The King should first torture his sources for so bizarre and unlikely a tale, to persuade them to retract and confess their lies.”

“My most informative source is not here to torture. He has gone back to Calabria. Our icy autumn nights
frightened him with their portents of worse winter coming, and he betrayed you for safe passage to his sunny land of origin.”

Fengon held silent, but he felt his flushed face speak for him. His years of diplomacy had overpersuaded him of his seductive powers, of a capacity to elicit loyalty, especially from young men and foreigners. The limits of language imposed a false closeness, a false bottom to his reading of another. He would have trusted Sandro with his life. He
had
trusted him with his life.
Crepi il lupo!

Horvendile began to prowl the audience chamber, treading on pelts of wolf and bear, exulting in his mastery of the situation, demonstrating his vengeful ease. “Blame not just Sandro—many eyes observed, many tongues tattled. Even my own instincts, which I know you and Geruthe think are hopelessly dulled by my ponderous crown, told me something was amiss—or, rather, something had been added. She was different with me—more expressive, as if to make up in lesser confidences and gifts of attention the great secret she must withhold. She was, will it wound you to hear?, more ardent, rather than less as common decency might predict. She continued to simmer, removed from the fire. The fire of damnation, the priests would tell us—the priests who know the flesh by the book and by the lurid light of the confessional but not as we do, in nature, as a two-edged instrument, a forked violence and mending, the wellspring of nurture and the ruin of reason. Geruthe is decent,” Horvendile went on, toying with them all, mere puppets in his mind. “She was not blithe about blackening my honor, which is
coterminous with that of Denmark. Our marriage bed was still a shrine to her, though she defiled it. I benefited by her chagrin, without at first scenting the source. There was something, it would be too rude to say rotten, but overripe about her and her attentions.”

He wants me to talk about her
, Fengon realized. To describe her in terms as shameless as his own, as a fornicatrice abandoned to lechery, stewing in guilt, turning over and over, a plump morsel in a pungent sauce, delicious, her legs splayed to display her hairy hell-hole: only that way could Horvendile repossess her, through his brother, in those hours when she had stolen herself away. Glancing back through the dappled months of forbidden passion, Fengon remembered the watery play of light in their round chamber and out on the lake, and Geruthe’s girlish voice flirting in delight at his gifts, and her mature rosy splendor pressed against him, as if to hide herself, at the moment of surrender.
Protect me
, she had begged.

Fengon still said nothing, just kept his gaze on his brother as the King prowled, in the lofty agitation of an inescapable predator. Horvendile saw that his brother would not share the naked spoils. He became irate. He sardonically accused, “You give me no counsel.”

“I cannot be accused and judge both. Be aware, however, that thrones can topple in convulsions they instigate. Under your reign as under any, Denmark is restless with perceived wrongs and conceivable gains. The men who profit under an established order are always out-numbered by those who have better hopes of a new.”

“You dare read me instructions, you who have overturned my household peace and my wedlock’s dignity? Who won to your vile lust, stinking of foreign brothels, the will of my virtuous queen? You were always my inferior, Fengon—a filthy skulking shadow, less good at sport, less strong, less fair, less studious, the lesser favorite of our priestly tutors and our father, yes, I so assert though Gervendile sought to give us equal posts in Jutland, as if in battle we had done equal service, shown equal bravery and military wit.”

Fengon, stung, touched the round-pommelled hilt, smoothed by much handling, of his sword. “I was less cruel than you,” he said, “less the enraptured despoiler in Norway’s helpless seaside parishes, but I deny that you had the edge of me in resourcefulness or courage.”

Horvendile’s long eyes had taken in his gesture. “You touch your sword? Would have at me? Come, brother, here is my breast, armored in velvet merely. You would not wound me worse than when you bewitched and pierced my most virtuous-seeming queen!”

His old trick of chest-baring
, Fengon thought.
Archers may be hiding behind an arras. Or crouched in alcoves above, ready to make me a porpentine if I take a step toward his presence.

“You were always foul at heart,” the King was going on, in a reminiscent, loitering tone, as his brother’s hand left the smooth hilt. “Your inevitable envy of me drove you to brooding, to unnatural introspection and fancy, in which you sought to embroil others, of the weaker, more suggestible sex. You idolized women and therefore
sought to degrade them, knowing your exaltation to be unreal, the product of despicable cowardly fevers. Poor Lena, raised in those treeless island fields studded with ancient tombs, was a perfect match, with her own unreality, for your dominating fantastications. The blackest rumors have circled about her death, as to the abuses you imposed upon her innocence, but I have never believed them. I have believed you loved Lena as well as you could love any person not purely a figment of your blighted mind. Why have you hated me, Fengon? We shared the same parents, the same remorseless upbringing. I did not will my own excellence to spite you; you could have basked at my side with almost equal honor rather than infest the remote corners of Christendom with your perverse longings and expatriate’s pride, wasting your life among heretics and sybarites.”