Gertrude and Claudius (5 page)

Even before the messengers from Viborg brought the foreordained verdict—unanimous, the four provinces agreeing—Horwendil was soliciting support in the
råd
for a strike against Fortinbras. His rites of coronation were perfunctory, curtailed by the assembling of an army to expel the Norwegian invader from his beachheads in Jutland. While these military preparations were hurried to their fulfillment, Gerutha slowly ripened, her beautiful swollen belly veined with silvery stretch marks. And as it happened, by one of those auspicious conjunctions that mark the calendars of men’s memories, golden-bearded Fortinbras was met, defeated, and killed, in the sandy dunes of Thy, upon the same day in which the Queen won through a blood-eagle agony to bear a male heir, whom they named Amleth. The infant, blue from his own part in her struggle, was born with a caul, the sign of a great man or a doomed one—soothsayers differed.

The name, which Horwendil proposed, honored his victory, in the west-Jutland dunes within sight of the wind-tossed Skagerrak, by referring to remembered verses in which bards sang of the Nine Maidens of the Island Mill, who in ages past ground Amleth’s meal—
Amloa mólu.
What the phrase meant the bards themselves, having passed the phrase from generation to generation like a pebble gradually worn smooth, did not
know; the meal was interpreted to be the sands of the shore, the mill the grinding world-machine that reduces all the children of the earth to dust. Gerutha had hoped to have the infant named Rorik, thus honoring her father and planting a seed of prospective rule in the child. Horwendil chose to honor himself, though obliquely. Thus her new-bloomed love for this fruit of her body took a spot of blight.

Amleth for his part found her milk sour—at least, he cried much of the night, digesting it, and even as his mouth fastened onto her stinging breast he wrinkled his nose in disgust. He was not large, else her day of labor might have stretched to kill her, and not ever entirely healthy. Always some small complaint nagged at the child—colic, a rash in his crotch, endless colds and croup, fevers followed by a long lying abed that, as he aged, she, healthy and upright most every day of her life, came to resent as self-indulgent. As the powers of language and imagination descended upon him, the boy dramatized himself, and quibbled over everything, with parent, priest, and tutor. Only the disreputable, possibly demented jester, Yorik, seemed to win his approval: young Amleth loved a joke, to the point of finding the entire world, as it was composed within Elsinore, a joke. Joking, it seemed to his mother, formed his shield for fending off solemn duty and heartfelt intimacy.

Her heart felt deflected. Something held back her love for this fragile, high-strung, quick-tongued child. She had become a mother too soon, perhaps; a stage in her life’s journey had been skipped, without which she could
not move from loving a parent to loving a child. Or perhaps the fault was in the child: as water will stand up in globules on a fresh-waxed table or on newly oiled leather, so her love, as she felt it, spilled down upon Amleth and remained on his surface, gleaming like beads of mercury, unabsorbed. He was of his father’s blood—temperate, abstracted, a Jutish gloom coated over with the affected manners and luxurious skills of a nobleman. Not merely noble: he was a prince, as Gerutha had been a princess.

She wondered if her own motherlessness was discovered by the gaps of motherly feeling within her. She allowed nursemaids, tutors, riding masters, fencing instructors to intervene between herself and the growing boy. His games seemed designed to repel and exclude her—inscrutable, clattering games, with sticks and paddles, bows and arrows, dice and counters, noisy imitations of war in which he commanded, with his high-pitched voice and tense white face, the buffoon Yorik and some unwashed sons of the castle garrison’s doxies. The quiet hoops and tops and dolls of Gerutha’s girlhood had no place in this male world of projectile fantasy, of hits and thrusts and “getting even”—for a strict tally was kept in the midst of all the shouts and wrestling, she observed, as in the bloodier accountings of adult warfare, much as Horwendil boasted of how King Fortinbras, in being slain, had forfeited not only the invaded terrain in Jutland but certain coastal lands north of Halland on the coast of Sweathland, between the sea and the great lake of Vänern, lands held not for their
worth, which was little, but as a gall to the opposing power, a canker of dishonor.

As she had been without siblings, so was Amleth. Her failure to be fecund again, she felt, was God’s rebuke for her failings of maternal feeling, which she could not hide from Him. She was troubled enough to mention the matter to Herda, the serving-maid who had seen her succumb to Horwendil’s suit, some seven years ago. In those years Herda had married Svend and borne him four children, before the King’s squire had been killed in one of Horwendil’s mop-up skirmishes with the Norwegians, whose throne had passed to the brother of Fortinbras, a foppish glutton with little fight in him. Horwendil delighted in striking against the outposts of this effete King’s loose rule.

“Dear little Amleth,” Gerutha tentatively began, “seems so isolated, such a brooding, quirkish five-year-old, that the King and I have long wondered whether a little brother or sister might turn him more sociable and humane.”

“So one might,” Herda tersely replied. She was wearing white as a sign of mourning for Svend. His death last year—in a raid wherein a supposedly defenseless little fishing port, rich from the herring trade, had treacherously hired itself a guard of Scottish swordsmen—had left her subdued. Gerutha sometimes scented in her maid bitterness against the throne. Kingship collects grudges and enemies as surely as a millpond accumulates silt.

“Humane, I say,” Gerutha went on, “because more and more I hear Amleth voice, toward his inferiors—the
footmen and servers, and his playmates from the garrison’s brood—a certain cruelty, disguised as foolery. He and that loathsome Yorik are forever goading the poor solemn Lord Chamberlain with their tricks and madcap pretenses.”

“Having a brother or sister, my lady, doesn’t soften the soul, in my experience. I was one of nine, and some were shy, and some bold, and others good, and others the other way. We rubbed against one another like stones in a bucket, but sandstone remained sandstone and quartz quartz. The young prince means no harm; he has a good heart, but too busy a mind.”

“If only his father were to pay more attention … Amleth mocks me, even when he apes respect. Not yet six and he knows that women needn’t be listened to.”

“His Majesty keeps an eye out. He waits until the boy is ready to harden. Then he’ll take him up.”

“You and Svend …” She hesitated.

“We were happy, Your Highness, as things go for the less well born.”

“Your children—I envy you. You have them, and they have one another. Did you and Svend pray for so many?”

“Not much prayer involved, as I recall. They just came in the course of nature. They weren’t exactly wanted or unwanted. Sometimes, it could be, wanting them too much dampens the tinder, so to speak. The spark doesn’t catch. And, the King being so much away expanding his realm and smiting the Norwegians the way he does, maybe he misses the time. It’s God’s will, and God’s mystery. The trouble for most of us isn’t how to make ’em, but how to feed ’em.”

Gerutha stiffened, unwilling to see herself as her lessers saw her, as a queen ignorant of the common load. “How strange of God,” she agreed, “to bestow children upon those who cannot feed them and to deny them to those that could many times over.”

Herda paused, looking puffed up with perplexity, her pursed lips a stopper in a pink face. Then: “May I ask, have you much discussed your wanting another offspring with your lord the King?”

“As often as would be seemly. He is keener even than I to have more heirs. He envisions a succession, and does not like it hanging by a single thread. The Prince is not robust. His nervous temperament is susceptible to every shock.”

“It may be a sibling at this stage would be a shock. The King has a brother, and I have not heard His Majesty take much comfort from the fact.”

“Feng has chosen to abandon Denmark and pursue his fortunes in the progressive realms to the south.”

“As a kindness to the King, it may be. Absence can be a present. Concerning the delicate matter of which Your Highness flattered me to speak, a midwife might offer more detailed advice, though she would be fearful in these high places of seeming to know too much and being in the end hung as a witch or drawn and quartered as a traitor. My own advice would be to let nature follow its course, where we have such little choice in the matter. There’s a shape in things, fiddle and fuss however we will around the edges.”

“I shall strive to be more humble and submissive,” Gerutha sharply concluded, annoyed with herself for having sought wisdom in so lowly a place.

•  •  •

Years passed, and, though the Queen rarely shunned a wife’s bed-duty, the Prince remained an only child. As he aged into the first stages of manhood, growing suddenly leggy and his upper lip displaying a silken proto-mustache, Gerutha, nagged ever more strongly by a sense of estrangement from all that should gratify her, turned to Corambus, the last living official of Rorik’s court and a man whose affection for her she felt to be as old as she. If her father had been the life-giving sun, Corambus had been the reflective moon, moving at a harmonious distance, beaming down upon her when Rorik had been out of sight. His greeting, given several times a day as their paths crossed in Elsinore’s stone labyrinth—“How fares my gracious lady?”—was met on this one occasion by a request, plaintive beneath its regal dignity, for a brief audience. She received him an hour later within the fir-floored oriel solar that had once been Rorik’s chamber but which she had appropriated as her private closet, for romance-reading and embroidery and gazing from her two-pillared triple window toward the gray-green Sund, whose restless, moody expanse seemed possessed of a freedom she envied.

“Dear old friend, adviser to my father and now to my beloved husband,” she began, “I am curious as to your impressions of Amleth’s progress. His activities, ever more manly and martial, take him farther and farther from my weak woman’s scope.”

Corambus had been thin in Gerutha’s first memories of him, but fleshiness had overtaken him young, and, his
high post demanding much patient sitting and feasting, had quite mastered his figure by his mid-fifties. Yet there was still something adroit about him; he moved crisply within invisible and supportive constraints, his framing notion of himself as a perfect courtier, a stout prop to the throne. Gingerly he seated himself on a three-legged chair whose flat triangular bottom and narrow spired back ill accommodated his anatomy, and tipped his large head (its rotundity emphasized by the quaint smallness of his ears and nose and the stubby goatee jutting from his chin) to lend a portly attention. He spoke in the twinkling, rounded gestures—a gracefully upheld forefinger, a deftly dropped wink—of a man whose physical substance confidently seconded his sense of his station. “The Prince has a fine seat on a charger, and rarely misses the straw man’s vital area with his lance. He draws the bowstring with a steady hand, but is a trifle quick to release. His chess is indifferent, lacking a degree of foresight; his duelling enthusiastic, if short on finesse; his Latin that of one who can only think in Danish. Otherwise there is little to complain of. He is
rex in ovo
, as should,
natura naturans
, be the very case.”

Yet the old counsellor’s eyes were watchful from within his impressive head, under its stiff green hat in the shape of a brimmed sugarloaf; he was waiting for Gerutha to declare herself. His hair hung beneath his cap in greasy yellow-gray strands that had darkened the shoulder of his high-collared houppelande, and—another untidy touch—he had one of those wet lower lips that
appear slightly out of control, spraying softly on certain sibilants, drifting to one side or another when relaxed.

The Queen asked, “Does he seem—how can I say this?—hard-hearted? Disrespectful to his elders, and callous to his inferiors? Somehow
wanton
in his moods, which are so strangely quick to change? With me he can be one moment affectionate, as though he understands me better than any man ever has, and the next moment be just a boy, turning his back as if I am of no more account than a wet nurse to the weaned. I feel, dear friend, an utter failure as a mother.”

Corambus tut-tutted and allowed himself a knowing smile, a rictus that tipped his head and sucked his shiny lower lip sideways. “You accuse yourself where no other would think to. Not a mother alone raises a prince; the entire state is responsible. Having endured the labor, you discharged the major duty—God often welcomes a young mother to Paradise at that point. By giving the infant suck for a year, you performed what many a noble lady, fastidious of her high bosom, delegates to an uncouth peasant girl. As Amleth learned to walk, to lisp, to string together sentences, to make sense of letters, to begin to grasp the tools and usages and necessities of the world, you were attentive beyond the accustomed royal behavior. Shamefully often, a child born to be God’s agent on earth is worse neglected than the offspring of a trull and a passing highwayman. You have done lovingly by your boy. Let go, my good queen. Amleth at thirteen is formed for good or ill. The quirks that disturb you I would lay to his predilection for the actor’s trade. He
must try on many attitudes in rapid succession. To be sincere, then insincere, and then sincere in his insincerity—such shifts fascinate him. How marvellous, to his student mind, is this human capacity to be many things, to take many roles, to enlarge one’s preening, paltry identity with many half-considered feints and deceptions. You have noticed, I am sure, his animation and awe when a troop of players travels to Elsinore—how avidly he studies their rehearsals, takes note of the fine points of their illusions, imitates while private in our lobbies and cloisters the rolling cadence of their recitations.”

“Yes,” the Queen interrupted eagerly, “I hear him in his solar, orating to himself!”