by John Updike
The jogging motion ceased. The sleigh had halted before the dark doorway of Horwendil’s manor house. Her husband beneath his wolfskin pushed heavily against her, dismounting from the sleigh. His brother, Feng, had not come to the wedding but had sent from a southern land of clever craftsmen an ornately worked silver platter; its large reflective oval skidded in her mind and sailed off as the horned sleigh stopped.
“Why didn’t your brother come?” she asked from within her dreaming confusion.
“He is jousting and conniving beyond the Elbe. Denmark is too small for him, when I am in it.” Horwendil had come around the sleigh—around the horses shivering in their clouds of steam—and stood waiting, a motionless ghost in the moonlight, for her to dismount into his arms, so he could carry her into his house. She willed herself to be light, but nevertheless he uttered a grunt smelling of stale wine. Close to her eyes his thin lips grimaced. His face in the moonlight looked bloodless.
His manor was not small, though unmoated, and the rooms seemed low and close after those of Elsinore. No fire was lit downstairs. Men moving unsteadily, freshly awoken, led them in with torches. They went down a devious corridor to a circular stone stair. Long triangles of shadow leaped and shuddered ahead of them as they climbed. They passed through a bare anteroom, where a lone guard slept. Horwendil cuffed him awake as they passed. A fire had been kept blazing in their bedchamber for hours, so the space was stiflingly hot. Readily Gerutha shed her heavy hooded cloak lined with miniver, her sleeveless surcoat of gold cloth diapered in a pattern of crosses and florets, her blue tunic with wide flowing sleeves and a band of jewelled embroidery at the throat, under that a white cotte with longer, tighter sleeves, and, lastly, the thin camise worn next to the skin, sweated with much dancing. A thick silent woman with trembling hands undid the laces and cord belt and wrist ties, leaving it to her, in Horwendil’s company alone, to shed the camise. This she did, stepping from the cast-off cloth as from a cleansing pool.
By the snapping firelight her nakedness felt like a film of thin metal, an ultimate angelic costume. From throat to ankles her skin had never seen the sun. Gerutha was as white as an onion, as smooth as a root fresh-pulled from the earth. She was intact. This beautiful intactness, her life’s treasure, she roused herself—betranced before the leaping fire, the tips of her falling hair reflecting its hearthbound fury—to bestow, as decreed by man and God, upon her husband. She was aroused. She turned to show Horwendil her pure front, vulnerable as his had been when he had bared it, for a famous dangerous moment, to the possibility of Koll’s thrust.
He was asleep. Her husband, in a coarse-knit boxy nightcap, had collapsed from excessive festivity, and from the three-hours’ bath in winter air followed by this sauna of a bedchamber. One long strong arm lay relaxed upon the blanket as if severed up to the shoulder, where a naked ball of muscle gleamed beneath an epaulette of golden fur. A strand of saliva from his slumped lips glittered like a tiny arrow.
My poor dear hero, she thought, carrying that great soft frame through life with but his wits and a leather shield to keep it from being hacked to death. Gerutha discovered in this moment a woman’s secret: there is a pleasure in feeling love that answers, as with the heat of two opposing fireplaces, to that of being loved. The flow of a woman’s love, once started, can be stanched but with great pain. A man’s is a spurt in comparison. She hurried her naked, glimmering body to their bed, a single candle lit on the stand beside, and found her own cap, folded like a thick rough love note on the pillow, and fell asleep cupped in the shadow of Horwendil’s sometimes thunderous slumber.
In the morning, awakening sheepish to one another, they repaired the omission of the bridal night, and the bloodied sheet was displayed solemnly to old Corambus, Rorik’s Lord Chamberlain, who on the deep snow had skied over from Elsinore with a trio of official witnesses: a priest, a doctor, and a royal scribe. Her virginity was a matter of state, for there was little doubt that Horwendil would be the next king, and her son the next after that, if God were kind. Denmark had become a province of her body.
Days healed the hurt of the deflowering, and the nights brought her a slowly learned delight, but Gerutha could not rid herself of the memory of that first snub, when, aroused by her own bared beauty, she had turned to receive a thrust that was not delivered. An ideal lover would have stayed awake for his prize, however weary and besotted. Horwendil was lusty enough since, with many exclamations of praise falling from his neat lips as they skimmed her flesh, and with enough explosive thrusting to fill a bucket, but, a sensitive princess, she felt something abstract in his passion: it was but an aspect of his general vigor. He would have been lusty with any woman, and of course had been with a number before her. Nor was his devotion of a quality that would keep him, if away from her long enough, from making use of a pretty Pomeranian captive or a Lapp serving maid.
Horwendil was a Christian. He reverenced Harald Bluetooth, the father of modern Denmark, whose conversion deprived the German emperor of his favorite excuse for invasion, the conquest of pagans. History had descended to the Danes on runic stones: Harald’s at Jelling read, “The Harald who made the Danes Christians.” Gerutha was more touched by the runestone Harald’s father had left at Jelling: “King Gorm erected this memorial to Tyra his wife, glory of Denmark.” Glory of Denmark: Gorm had known how to value a woman, back before the Cross arrived to dull the Danish spirit. The Christian creed reinforced Horwendil’s tendency to moroseness but would not countervail, once he was on a raid in a long ship, the old warrior ethic of plunder and self-careless ecstasy. Christ was on all lips but in their hearts the Danes still adored Tyr, god of sport and war and fertility. A noble wife could expect to be honored but not in realms beyond the small circle that domestic peace draws around women and children—unforgiving realms where men dealt with the necessities of blood and competition.
Since her submission to the will of her father, Gerutha had gained for herself a reputation for realism, for reasonableness. She was gracious toward her inferiors and saw quickly into the limits of a situation. A good woman lay in the bed others had made for her and walked in the shoes others had cobbled. The ductile temperament of her sex enabled her to do these things with grace and even zest. In much of her being she could not help revering the man who possessed her, who housed and protected her and—this the key to all right relations—made use of her. To be useful and busy gives each day a gloss of holy purpose. God’s heavenly will reposes here in proper duty. Without such repose, the days will shriek. Boredom or war will come.
For Gerutha’s body was soon busy creating another. The first thaw of spring saw her monthly blood-letting skipped, and then another, as the grass began to green on the sunny side of Odinsheim’s walls. By the time that swallows, returned from their winter paradise which she would never see, were circling up from the pond carrying wands of straw and flecks of mud to their balcony-like nests beneath the eaves of the barn, she was certain, and released to their chances the two linnets Horwendil had brought her as his courtship gift. It was the male, the darker, with the more distinct pied markings, who seemed bewildered, fluttering about in the bedchamber, perching atop an armoire behind the curtains as if seeking some new limit to his freedom, and the duller, smaller female who darted out the open window and waited, singing her song on the bent branch of a fresh-leafed willow, for her mate to join her. “Hurry, hurry,” Gerutha mockingly chastened him, “or she will find another!”
As the creature within her grew, displacing organs of which she had never before been conscious, and generating inconvenient surges of distemper and yearning, nausea and faintness, her father was failing. The yellow shrunken look she had noticed at her wedding had intensified until he seemed the size of a child, curled in bed around his devouring illness. Rorik of course disdained to complain, but in her sixth month, when her own discomforts had yielded to a dreamy sleepy state of blank contentment, he told her, with a smile that pulled his mustache awry, that he felt in the grip of the blo
od eagle. He referred to the mode of execution in the saga days whereby a man’s ribs were hacked from his backbone and his heart and lungs pulled out through the huge red wound, the screaming blood eagle. Some noble captives, it was said, begged for it, to show their courage.
Gerutha had never liked to hear of such things, the elaborate cruelties men invented for one another, though pain and death were deeply part of the nature God had created. Her father saw repulsion flit across her face and told her, in the gentle voice that he had always used to urge a lesson home irresistibly, “All can be borne, my child, because it must be. My death works in me, and your child in you. Both will out, as the gods demand.” Amused at himself for slipping back into paganism, Rorik lay a dry hot hand on her softer, moister one and said, “The priests your good husband consults never tire of reminding us that we each bear a cross, in imitation of Christ. Or did Christ pick up a cross in imitation of us? In any case there is enough store of suffering for all to share, and if the priests say true I will soon see Ona, as young as when she died, and I will be young with her. If their stories are fables, I will not feel disappointment. I will be done with feeling.”
“Horwendil listens to priests,” she said loyally, “because, he says, they know the thoughts of the peasants.”
“And have connections to Rome, and to all those lands where Rome has planted its Hell-preaching churches. Horwendil is right, my dear trusting daughter—this religion of slaves, and then of peasants and of merchants, has the future in it. The infidels are being routed in the Holy Land and Spain, and here in the north, the last of Europe to succumb, the heathen altars are so many idle stones. The peasants no longer know what they mean, and cart the stones off to fence pigsties.”
Gerutha had been baptized and raised in the Christian creed and usages, but without fervor, in her father’s sometimes rowdy bachelor court. Rorik’s own view of ultimate matters—where we come from, where we go—she had assumed to be weakly conventional, like her own. “Father, you sound scornful, but Horwendil seeks through the faith not only to be a better lord to his vassals but a better man to his peers. He is gentle to me, even when his mood does not permit him to desire me.” His demands of her, she thought to herself, had been, as her condition more clearly declared itself, light, even as her need to be reassured of her beauty had grown. “He wants to be good,” she concluded, with a plaintive simplicity that surprised her own ears, as if the child buried in her had piped up.
“I would rather hear you say that he is good,” Rorik pronounced through his pain. “How far short does his wanting fall?”
“Not short,” she said sharply. “Not short at all. Horwendil is splendid. He is in every way suitable, as you promised he would be.” There was some malice in her reminding him of his self-serving assurances. As long as the dying live, the living do not spare them.
“In every way,” he repeated at last, sighing as if feeling the vengeful intent of her thrust. “Between two people there is no ‘every way.’ Even Ona and I, there was a language barrier, a discord of unspoken expectations. Each match will have its unmatched parts. The sons of Gerwindil have the wildness of Jutland. It is a grim land, where shepherds in their loneliness go mad and curse God. For months the black-bellied clouds off the Skagerrak never lift. Horwendil seeks to be a good man, but Feng, his brother, neglects his adjacent estate and has mortgaged much of his Jutland inheritance to go adventuring to the south—as far, I hear, as a formerly Norman island called Sicily. This is reckless and ruinous behavior. Did I mislead you, my dear daughter, by pressing upon you marriage to a son of Gerwindil? I felt my fatal worm in me even then, and wanted to see you safe in another man’s keep.”
“And so I am safe,” she said softly, understanding that this conversation was Rorik’s apology, in case one were ever needed. But no harm had been done, it seemed to sensible Gerutha: her marriage was an excellent one.
Rorik died, and the prospects of election favored Horwendil. Gerutha, to spare herself the frequent journey, had moved with her retinue back to Elsinore to attend her dying father. After all the pomp of his burial in the misty, flinty churchyard where the bones of Elsinore’s inhabitants moldered—lawyer mingling with tanner, courtier with hangman, maiden with madman—Horwendil moved to the royal castle to be with his wife, settling himself prematurely in the King’s quarters during those weeks while the provincial thing convened at Viborg. Some few voices there were raised for Feng, as the brother, though eighteen months younger, who was wilier in foreign ways and more apt to circumvent the schemes of the Germans, Polacks, and Sweathlanders without recourse to war; war was becoming, as undisturbed harvests and commerce increased creature comforts in castle and hovel alike, unfashionable. Some others spoke up loyally for this or that member of the noble råd—the Count of Holsten, prominently—whose kinship network offered more promise of holding the pieces of Denmark together, here on the northern edge of a roiling Europe. But in the end the final vote out of Viborg seemed certain to name Horwendil, the slayer of Koll and the spouse of Gerutha.
Only Corambus, Rorik’s Lord Chamberlain, took Horwendil’s preëmptory move into the king’s place at all amiss. Though Gerutha thought of him as old, in truth Corambus was not much above a lusty forty, with a baby son and a younger wife, Magrit of Møn, so fair as to appear transparent and so delicate in her sensibility as to be in her utterances fey and, even, melodiously addled. She was not long to outlive her second childbed ten years hence, and (to extend this glance ahead in our tale) Corambus was never utterly to relax his resentment against Horwendil, whom the adviser in his own counsels thought to be an uncouth usurper. Though he scrupulously performed the routines of serving the new king, it was the Queen, Rorik’s only child, the only surviving vessel of his presiding spirit, whom Corambus truly served and loved. He had loved her as had all those denizens of Elsinore brought daily into touch with the amiable, radiant princess, and even as Gerutha became a married woman his love did not turn away, but lingered, it may be, to the point of jealousy, though she thought of him as old, and his official manner had early turned prudent, fussy, and sententious.
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 compl
aint 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.