Gertrude and Claudius (6 page)

Corambus held to his chain of thought. “The Church has done ill, I sometimes believe, in letting up, in these lax times, its imprecations against this unholy travesty of theatrical performance, which, aping Creation, distracts men from last things and from first things as well. And how close, come to think upon it, the boy clung to the late Yorik, until that tireless jester, shaky from all his merry dissipations, joined the mass of mankind in the last, best joke on us all. Your son loved him, madame, and loves all clowns and triflers, as releasing him from heavy thoughts of rule and self-discipline. Your husband sets the boy, it may be, too stern an example. But I have no doubt, when clear duty is set before him, that Amleth, though turning it this way and that in his mind, will end in doing the needful.”

“May it prove so,” Gerutha said, not entirely persuaded, and obliged to defend her husband. “The King
does not mean to be stern; he is beset with the threats of an unrestrained Norway, a seething Poland, a rebellious Holsten, not to speak of the peasants and the clergy, who constantly resent the cost of government.”

“Greatness has the disadvantage,” Corambus tactfully observed, “that all less great are enemies to it.”

“In honesty, the King is easier with the boy than I. As they more and more approach the same stature and follow the same pursuits, Horwendil speaks ever more lovingly of Amleth. It is I who, in the helplessness of my sex, entertain anxieties.”

Corambus sat erect for a moment, arranging upon his broad thighs the fall of his houppelande’s huge scalloped sleeves, and then leaned a little closer than before, and spoke in a softer voice. “Just so. It is not Amleth whose health seems out of joint, given the dreaming flamboyance and outward awkwardness common to the commencement of manhood, but, may I say, his mother. As a girl, Gerutha, you were radiant and serene; you warmed every heart. As a woman, of now thirty—”

“A year more than thirty, as of October. Amleth’s age reversed.”

“—you are still radiant but, in some intimate reach, disconsolate. Yet no visible discolor tinges your status, the highest a woman may attain in Denmark.”

“Too high and too large, if I lack spirit to fill it. My hopes when young had been set on siblings for Amleth, for a slew of siblings, to fill Elsinore with happy noise.”

“Children are indeed a comfort. Their needs supplant ours, and our being feels justified in their care. We hide
behind them, in a sense; our coming deaths are lost in the clutter of family matters. My Laertes, scarce older than your tricksome son, already thinks himself his father’s protector, as well as that of his little toddling sister, left motherless, alas—”

Gerutha reached out to touch the widower’s rounded hand as it returned to his chair’s arm, having dabbed at his eye with a voluminous sleeve. “Magrit is happy in Heaven,” she comforted him. “The world was a travail to her fine spirit.” The world, she thought, and the succession of stillbirths the poor woman had suffered between the son and the daughter she had successfully borne. In Gerutha’s sense of it this fine-spirited wife had been worn to a wraith by the demands of Corambus’s goatish lust.

The counsellor recalled himself, with a rasp in his voice, to his queen’s vague complaints. “The lack of children leaves a woman too idle,” he pronounced, “especially if her husband rules a scattered island kingdom, with miles of coast bare to foreign assault.”

“My husband”—Gerutha hesitated, but she had a sore grievance within, and sensed that what she said would gratify her sly listener—“is all that my father promised he would be, but”—she hesitated again, before giving way to her weaker side—“I did not choose him. Nor did he choose me but as part of a personal polity. He cherishes me, but as one of his public duties, at no risk to his many others, or to himself.”

She was bringing the attentive courtier too close to treason; Corambus recoiled into stiffness. “Why desire
risk?” He leaned forward again, his lower lip gleaming. “You read too many of these immoral Gaulish romances, which would make idle, sterile adoration the main business of life. If I may speak with the frankness of a father, you should read and embroider less, and exert your body in sport more. You should ride, you should hunt, as you did as a girl. You grow heavy, Your Majesty. Rorik’s quick blood turns stagnant in you and tips your balance of humors toward melancholy.”

She laughed, to wave him away with his effrontery, in which she heard a jealous fondness speak. “I never thought, my substantial old friend, to hear you admonish me for heaviness.”

“It was a manner of speaking—a spiritual heaviness.”

“Of course. Good Corambus, it has much lightened me to have you listen to my idle thoughts. Just to speak them revealed them as airy, and groundless.”

Doffing his conical green hat, swirling his abundant sleeves, the Lord Chamberlain took his leave, satisfied that he had offered what bracing advice he could. If he had irritated her, she had irritated him by asking that he give serious ear to a woman’s vagaries. Yet it pleased him to know that there was a crack in the King’s arrangements, a stir of unease near the throne. He bowed his way out, leaving Gerutha to her days.

O the days, the days in their all but unnoticed beauty and variety—days of hurtling sun and shade like the dapples of an exhilarated beast, days of steady strong cold and a blood-red dusk, tawny autumn days smelling of hay and grapes, spring days tasting of salty wave-froth
and of hearth-smoke blown down from the chimney pots, misty days of sifted sunshine and gentle fitful rain that glistened and purred on the windowsill like a silvery cat, days of luxurious tall clouds that brought thunder east from Jutland, days when the shoreline of Skåne lay vivid as a purple hem upon the Sund’s rippling breadth, days of high ribbed skies like an angel’s carcass, December days of howling sideways snow, March days of hail from the north like an angry knocking at the door, June days when greenness smothered every vista, days without qualities, days with a hole in the middle, days that never knew their own mind and ended in insomnia, days of travel, days of ceremony when she and Horwendil were fixed in place like figures beaten in brass or else overanimated like actors, dancing through sheets of candlelight and forests of food, wash days when amid laughter and lye she slaved with the red-handed wenches in thrall to Elsinore, sick days when she floated in a fever and received a parade of soft-spoken visitors one of whom might be faceless Death taking her to join Rorik and Marlgar and Ona, Ona who had died when younger than she, and then days of tender recovery, days when beech trees were in long red bud and the willows yellow, days when a serving-girl dropped a stillborn child, days when Horwendil was absent, days when she and he had made love the night before, days when she ate too much, days when she light-headedly fasted, days that began with the Sund glazed like a lake of mercury beneath a pearly dawn, days when wind whipped spray from wild waves like flares of white fire, menstrual days, saints’ days—the
days passed, and Gerutha felt them stealing away with her life, all the while that she moved through such activities and engagements as befitted a Scandinavian queen, helpmate to a handsome blond king who with the years grew ever more admirable and remote, as if enlarging as he receded from her.

“The Hammer,” Feng told her. “I used to call him the Hammer. Dull, but he hit you square on the head.”

And that was how Gerutha felt on the days after she and the King had made love—hammered into a somewhat blissful submission, nailed down, dispatched. Feng, Horwendil’s brother, had returned from adventuring in the south, having placed his sword and lance and versatile tongue at the service, most recently, of the masters of Genoa in its long struggles with Pisa over the control of Corsica and Sardinia. “The Mediterranean,” Feng explained to Gerutha, “is warm enough for a man to swim in pleasurably, if certain transparent bell-shaped creatures do not sting him to death. On the other shore lies Africa, where the Muslim infidels refine their tortures and abominations, and to the east lies an empire of curious Oriental Christians, who send armies to dispute the presence or absence of an ‘i’ in a Greek theological term, and who permit their priests to marry and wear beards. I would like, next, to visit there. Their nobles, rather than wield the cudgel and broadsword as in these backward northern lands, prefer the dagger and have greatly developed the art of poisoning, so I have been
told. Many insidious Asiatic influences are brought back to Genoa by returning Crusaders and their captives, along with much wealth and ingenuity of thought. You would like the land south of the Alps, Gerutha. It is hilly and green, and each hilltop city vies with the others, making endless work for us roving warriors. There is a jewelled, fantastic aspect not seen in our foggy bogs, or boggy fogs. The villages perch most astoundingly on rocks; the slopes are terraced up to every crag; and the people, who are darker-skinned than we, have a soft and clever nature, sunny yet assiduous in the practice of manual crafts.”

“I remember,” she said, “an oval silver platter, with strange intense linear designs all along its broad brim, that you sent to our wedding, which you were unable to attend.”

“I regretted my absence. I thought I would not be missed.”

“You were, by me, though we had not met since I was a child, when you favored me with a glance now and then. I have often thought back to how you seemed. The brother of one’s husband is a figure of interest, providing another version of him—him recast, as it were, by another throw of the dice.”

“It has been my fate,” said Feng, with some impatience, “to be seen always as a lesser version of my brother. Accordingly I have travelled to where the comparison could not be made. His wedding to King Rorik’s daughter loomed, I supposed, as yet another opportunity to compare my fortune unfavorably with his.”

This man spoke with a thrilling freedom, Gerutha thought, in a way challenging both to her and to himself. He enunciated easily, with intriguing variations in speed, the words tripping and then languishing on his lips, which were not thin and prim like Horwendil’s or fat and slippery like the lower lip of Corambus but ruddy and shapely, the exact amount of necessary flesh, like a woman’s lips, without being exactly feminine. His lips were not cut like Horwendil’s or loosely poured like Corambus’s but molded, as if by loving and careful fingers. His voice was deeper—a more lustrous instrument, expertly bowed—than her husband’s, and his skin darker, whether from natural tinge or southern sojourn she didn’t know. He was one or two inches shorter: nearer her own height. “Eighteen years ago, if memory serves,” he said, “the Holy Roman Emperor’s diplomacy had sent me to the Kingdom of Aragon, where the stalls behind the cathedrals offered items of an illicit trade with the Emirate of Granada, artifacts produced by the fanatically patient hands of the infidels. The design you noticed is a writing, running opposite to the direction of ours, stating, I believe, that there is no god but Allah, and a camel trader called Mahomet is his prophet.”

His voice had become dry and rapid, with a certain drag of mockery slowing some sentences as if holding them up to the light of irony. His hair was black and cut short, with stiff gray strands bracing the erect coiffure. There was a patch above one temple where a shiny dent declared an old wound and the hair had grown in pure white, to give a pied look. His eyes were less blue and less
long than Horwendil’s; they were brown and slightly slant, with dramatically thick eyelashes, like an actor’s eye-rings of kohl. His nose was hooked, with avid flared nostrils. He appeared, though younger, older than Horwendil, more seasoned. He had marinated in a saturnine essence. Gerutha liked the creases that the exposure and wear of his travels had wrought upon his leathery skin, and the way his face was worn to its lean tendons, with muscular ins and outs. He had the wiry vitality of one who had escaped constraints. She sensed that this man could casually lie and deceive those who loved him, but this did not repel her; it gave his interior in her mind’s eye something of his exterior’s agreeably creased, contoured texture. As Horwendil had aged, his appearance had become prey to the tendencies of fair, thin-skinned men. The tip of his small straight nose had turned pink, and his upper eyelids drooped, and the puffiness of his throat and jaw and cheeks were insufficiently concealed by the patchy, curly beard she had coaxed him, when still a wife with influence, into growing.

Feng was forty-seven. After the legendary slaying of Koll, Horwendil had expanded and consolidated his fortunes and secured the kingship, while Feng set out upon the forest paths and crumbling Roman highways of the world to the south. He had returned now to Denmark to reverse, if he could, the decay of his mortgaged Jutland estates—pillaged by his neighbors and his overseers, while his peasants had been ravaged by plague and crop failure—and to establish, with some months’ residence in the manor that Rorik had granted him, a place in his
brother’s royal court. His largely foreign guard of soldiers, their horses and pages, had all to be accommodated at Elsinore, for days at a time. Horwendil grumbled. Feng turned out to be a formidable convivialist; he drank without stint, though he showed drunkenness only in an extra deliberation of his movements. In the late stages of a feast he preyed, it was said, upon the serving-girls, but this disgusted Gerutha less than it should have. Rorik had behaved similarly, once his Ona was dead. Feng, too, it turned out, had once had a wife, Lena of the Orkney Isles, married not long after his brother’s wedding. Her figure had been as slender as a fairy queen’s, Gerutha gathered, and her hair so fine that a length hanging down her back could be coiled into a circlet no bigger than a wedding ring. Feng carried such a lock pinned to his undertunic over his heart, it was said: Herda passed on this servants’ gossip, seeing her lady’s interest. Lena had died, it was related, of nothing more distinct than her own unearthly beauty and goodness, before she could bear a child. So many good women dead young: it seemed a characteristic of these fallen, plaguey times. Gerutha could not but wonder if her own persistent vitality betrayed a lack of virtue, some unstated pact with evil. She was now thirty-five, regarded by all save herself as old.