by John Updike
“Not a mansion, Your Majesty—by no means a mansion. Hardly a hut, in fact. A disused hunting lodge, rather, built of wood, battens and shakes, the old roof of thatch, the new of slate, built when there was more plentiful game near Elsinore, but thereafter disused, as I say. A curiosity adjoins—an ancient small round tower, of possibly religious purpose, a shrine or chapel erected by rogue anchorites before the great conversion under Harald Bluetooth, or perhaps a religion of an altogether different sort, lakes being often regarded as holy. I have incorporated, rather snugly if I do say so, this relic in the structure overall, filling the gaps in its archaic stonework with modern brick and mortar, refiguring the absent roof in slate and stout rafters, as I said, and supplying the chamber’s single gap for a window with the latest and most costly contrivances in fenestration—leaded glazing in the shape of diamonds and discs, and a casement, iron-hinged and levered, that can be latched and securely shuttered or else opened to the air and view of water, dependent on the whim and convenience of the occupant. This fanciful retreat of mine receives small use as long as Elsinore requires my presence, but my conception was that it could be my final home, when the cares of public service have been at long last lifted and I retire to terminal philosophy and holy exercises. It is, as you say, secluded, but near—a quarter of the way to Odinsheim, a half-hour’s ride from Elsinore without stretching the horse.”
Odinsheim and Lokisheim, both he and she thought. “It is in short a foretaste of Paradise,” Geruthe said, “prudently and deservedly prepared in advance of Judgment Day. Indeed, I have seen it, Corambis, one day this autumn when Herda and I took your dear Ophelia riding, to brighten her wan cheeks. She showed it to me with the glee of a girl and a dollhouse—all fitted with the latest contrivances for light and fire and water, yet faithful to the rugged old Norse manner, bristling with antlers and furs, not another dwelling even in sight save for the church whose staved steeple hangs inverted from the lake’s far shore, and not a sound but the mutter of wavelets, the chatter of birds, and the furtive traffic of woodland small fry, chasing or being chased. In such a place I could restore my lost composure. My question of you, most dear old friend, is this: Might I not, some two or three occasions in a fortnight, repair there for an afternoon’s repose, carrying embroidery or a saint’s life to occupy my hands and eyes, or else in idleness laying my hands upon my lap and absorbing goodness from the inhuman lake and woods? I need peace, and Elsinore does not play host to peace. Now that the middle point of my life, however generously we estimate it, has been surely passed, I crave something, let us call it rectitude if not holiness, that will fortify me for what of earth is left. Do grant your queen the brief loan of your haven. Few would know; Herda would come with me, and my personal guard, the most obstinately loyal and mute in our garrison, to put the seal on the solitude and secrecy I seek.”
She cut the long speech short there, though her nerves had pushed her tongue on and on, so perilous did her mild lies—containing, like all good lies, some truth—sound in her ears, and so fearful of Corambis’s response was she. It irritated her, even, to be at the mercy of her father’s and husband’s servant, a royal henchman, who in his habitual caution was making her beg unduly for a very modest favor. He should be flattered by this opportunity, though irregular, to serve her.
Corambis eyed her out of his head, squarishly round like a hollowed-out pumpkin, with a stare pinched by the effort to betray no expression. “The King—would he be among those kept ignorant of your whereabouts?”
This entangling venture into deceit was making Geruthe’s heart race, annoyingly. Quickly she answered, her white hands darting in multiple disclaimer, “There would be no harm in his knowing, of course, but in honesty I would rather he did not. For him to know would be to plant his presence inescapably in my mind, and I want my mind to be free of even so benign an interloper. In his erratic solicitude for me he might come visiting, all those rattling, caparisoned horses, at the moment when I was least attuned to his uxorious mood. This all sounds a bit heartless, I know, but if you reflect on your joyous years with Magrit you might recall how marriage must flow through intervals of privacy; otherwise a sludge of resentments never has time to clear.”
“Your departures and returns could not but be observed at the castle. There would be speculation.”
“Well, if the King were to discover these harmless retreats of mine, he would be told, correctly, that they were spiritual exercises, improving meditations. I who once wasted my afternoons dreaming through idle romances involving knights and scaly monsters will bring instead vellum-bound copies of the Gospels, or the Epistles, or else edified commentaries, such as our Bishop propagates from Roskilde. It is true, good Corambis, and none bore closer witness than you, that my father’s court was indifferently pious, and my instruction in the mysteries of Christ was considerably neglected. I support the Creed, like all respectable Danes, but can scarcely spell out its articles. Christ died and was raised, thus overturning nature, fallen since Adam; but nature remains without and within us. How could my king, whose faith runs so much deeper than mine own, and whose overarching project is to render the nation he rules more truly Christian, object if I seek, in seclusion, to refine my knowledge of holiness?”
Corambis did not like Horvendile and never had, and he did like her: Geruthe’s advantage lay with these intuitions, borne out by a thousand small incidents and sensations accumulated in her many days within the walls of Elsinore.
“He would not,” the Lord Chamberlain decided, and, with a slippery brief smile, which made his goatee bob, and an awkward jerky bow attempted without rising, so that the chair creaked, he went on, “nor can I deny my queen recourse to my humble shelter, if such a condescension into the forested wild is what her spirit craves.”
“I crave it, though fearfully, as a foray into spaces of myself yet blank. I am timid, but too advanced in age not to go forward.”
“In a selfless cause,” he reminded her. “A campaign for your very soul. I will advise the man and wife who from their nearby cottage keep watch over my lodge on Gurre Sø that the Queen is welcome to come and go and that her visits should be undisturbed.”
“The Queen is most grateful and will search for a way to express her pleasure,” she said.
But the old politician would not let her off so cheaply. “All blessings flow from the throne to its servants,” he said. “Nothing in my keeping could be denied to you. But yet I confess this drawback: for one in my position, to keep a secret from the King is treason, the most capital of crimes.”
There was truth in this, and, though she was regally accustomed to having many fates bound up with hers, her heart quailed at taking the old man with her into treachery. He had not her grievances, nor her ardor. “A domestic secret merely,” she lightly told him. “You are my co-conspirator in a plot to make me a better wife, a wiser consort.”
Corambis sighed and shifted his weight once more, adjusting his conical green hat to align with the dissatisfied tilt of his head. He put his hands on the chair arms as if to push off and rise; his hands looked alarmingly withered, though the middle of him still appeared plump. “I do it for you as you were,” he confessed to her, weary of circumspection. “You were so buoyant a lass, to be tied to that plumb weight.”
Horvendile, the blond beast who came courting in his burgundy cloak and shirt of mail, a plumb weight? She defended him: “He loves me still, I think.”
“In due portion, not a pennyweight more,” Corambis said, seeing more clearly than she the course they were on, and not wishing to muddy the picture. Blinking at the future, he sighed. “When a king and queen disagree, it puts their advisers’ heads near the block.”
“I would not have you risk yourself for my sake,” Geruthe lied.
He slumped back into the ill-fitting chair. “Even advisers cannot always be slaves to good advice. ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be,’ it is said, yet life is a tangle of payments and defaults; it ensnares us all into debt
. I suspect that our king would like to see me dismissed, which renders my risk either greater or less than otherwise—quite which, I cannot judge. But I think my stake, measured in years of royal favor remaining, is small and dwindling.”
“You are the father of a future queen,” Geruthe assured him. “As such, you are scarcely dismissable.”
“Ah, don’t push that chance too hard, milady. Ophelia is still a child; she is apt to yield what cannot be recovered, getting nothing for it but contempt. Hamblet is arrogant, and walks on a longer tether than she, and enjoys using the full length of it. I fear he does not value my angel as do you and I.”
It was with difficulty that Geruthe gave her attention to this thread of the plot, she was so intent on her own, so enraptured by the prize she had won. She had secured a place away from Elsinore. And spring was coming. The willow buds were long and a living yellow, and those of the oaks grew ruddy and fat.
“Tell me about Byzantium,” she bade Fengon at their first assignation. As winter receded, she had established her use of Corambis’s lakeside lodge, accepting from horseback the curtsies of the old woman in her thatched cottage, while her lame-legged husband—he had been a woodsman; the ax had slipped—scuttled along the path to start the fires burning. Her two mute guardsmen would wait in the dirt-floored entry room, with a sluggish peat blaze to warm their hands and feet by. Herda sat in a sunken stone-floored chamber, the lodge hearth-room, its central hearth big enough to spit a boar and a smoke vent at the roof’s peak opened and closed with a long pole, and benches against the walls that could have served huntsmen as beds. Geruthe took refuge two rooms away—beyond the high-ceilinged banquet hall adorned with stag antlers and stretched bearskins, the great snarling skulls still attached, down a low-roofed newly built passage, and up six steps—in the old round tower. This bedchamber’s one glazed casement window, lancet in shape, opened on a curtain of greenery. Long-needled larches were mixed with faster-growing trees whose spreading leaves would, if unchecked by a woodsman, smother them. The lake glittered through the leaves. A small fireplace, rimmed with a band of blue-tinged tiles from Friesland, was vented by a flue built into the outside wall in the newest fashion, but Geruthe preferred to be warmed by standing braziers filled with glowing coals, one on either side of her as she sat at her embroidery frame or slowly turned the bright parchment pages of Gospels in recalcitrant Latin.
Small inked men in pink-and-blue robes, with large fish-shaped eyes and stiff little minnow-mouths, offered, at each dotted and knotted initial, to animate the holy texts, along with animals of unreal coloring and fantastic form, and winged angels bringing miniature scrolls to mankind, or blowing gilded horns, or lifting two fore-fingers in dire wide-eyed warning; she was happy to let a vague sense of glad tidings and remote heavenly organization arise from the pages much as the braziers emanated heat at her elbows. When she became too warm, she moved about the room with its canopied feather bed, touching the luxuries of smooth tile and marble mantel and tin candle-sconce and leaded glass—the old widower’s concupiscence expressed in gadgetry. Bubbles in the diamond-shaped panes of glass made the tree trunks waver and bend. She listened to a mouse scurry and her heart flutter as she tried to gauge the depth of the betrayal she was plotting. Birdsong outside the window, quickening as the April light signalled to the feathered tribe the approach of nesting season, soothed Geruthe with nature’s essential innocence. And yet how were these creatures rewarded for their innocence? With death the next season, when the falcon stoops, or snow covers the seedy grasses.
Carefully she had revealed to Fengon, in their cramped and snatched but gatheringly pointed exchanges in stolen corners of vast, formal, echoing Elsinore, the existence of her retreat, and then its whereabouts, and then, some days ago, a day, today, when she would be there alone but for her servants and not averse to a visit from him, if he could contrive secrecy. The lancet window’s hinged casement swung outward, and when wide open it was not too narrow to admit a man, one agile enough to raise himself to the sill. The sill was a man’s height and half again off the ground. Emblematically, a venerable vine, with profuse heart-shaped leaves, had gripped the large old stones so securely that the masons when renovating, fearing its removal would tumble all down, had merely trimmed its branches and worked around its crooked trunk; stubbornly flourishing, it offered a slippery ladder, affording boot-tips a scant purchase. Fengon, having tethered his horse out of sight and accepted a boost from Sandro, clung and struggled upwards grunting and smirking at such middle-aged heaving: Geruthe had to hurry and pull at one arm when it seemed he was stuck midway through the window, the heaviness of his fifty-nine years exactly balanced against his muscular will. Thus with her help he arrived erect and mussed in the room, his wolfish teeth sheepishly grinning in his speckled oval beard.
Seeing her backed away, having helped him in but startled by the sudden possibility of his rough embrace, he contented himself with a courtly, taming kiss that barely grazed the back of her trembling white hand. Now, still lightly panting, seated with her in the overlapping rings of heat emitted by the twin braziers, he sought, as they hesitated at the edge of the incestuous crime yawning at their feet, to obey her command. Talking not directly to the purpose was one of the diplomatic arts he had learned.
“It is a land much like Denmark,” he answered, “composed of islands, though the islands of Byzantium are shuffled by the fortunes of war, which for centuries have been favoring her enemies—the Genoans, the Venetians, the Franks, the Nicaeans, the Bulgarians, the Georgians, the Sultans of Seljuk, the Alans and the Cumans, the Khans of Persia, the Mamlukes of Egypt. Its once-vast empire is ground small between the followers of Mahomet, who consider the Byzantines cursed infidels, and the Christians loyal to the Pope in Rome, who consider them damned heretics. For all that, there is a metropolitan excitement to Constantinople which capitals less bedevilled lack. It is the greatest city in the world, unless China holds its compare. The court has a pomp, a hieratic glitter, that none other in Europe can equal. It is the pivot point, Constantinople, where Asia meets Europe, and black Africa impinges upon the white wastes that feed the Volga and the Don. Everybody comes there, Geruthe, all the world mingling—there are even, I was astonished to discover, Danes. Our Viking forebears made their way down the tumultuous rapids of the Dnieper with their battle-axes and amber and furs; some survived to father blue-eyed Greeks. Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and English compose the Emperor’s Varangian Guard, and are much esteemed for their brute pugnacity. A special graveyard exists for us, near the Adrianople Gate. I spent many a good hour bringing my compatriots up to date, in a language they had all but forgotten how to speak. To the old Norsemen, Constantinople was Miklagard, the fairy city, where dreams were reality. The Byzantines, in a mirroring fantasy, call Denmark Brittia and say that a wall divides the country in two parts: one side is healthy and happy, and the other is pestilential and full of snakes. This better describes their own divided natures; they are both pious and wicked in the extreme. They are cruel as children are cruel, in unfeeling innocence. Their version of Christian worship is only outward mummery, greatly prolonged; the priests perform the miracle of transubstantiation behind an ornamented screen, and then gobble up all the bread themselves. The people are darker than we, but only by a tinge, and they have a glossy blackness of hair beside which mine is dull. My little spot of white they took as a sign of magical powers. They are inordinately fond of garlic, baths, and castration.”
“Fengon, you speak of your social congress with the Danish community, but did you make no contact with, say, a Greek woman keen to bear a blue-eyed child?”
He waved her jealous probe away, as unworthy of his heart’s queen. “Communication was erratic. Their rulers and priests—often the same men—speak of course some Latin as well as Greek, a more liquid and running tongue. The lower orders, dealing with a foreigner, make do in a patchwork of phrases taken from French and Italian and even some German, though they think that Hungary is a Germa
nic nation, and Spain a caliphate, neither of which absurdity is entirely wrong. The Jewish and Lebanese merchants that pour through Constantinople have extensive linguistic skills, as do the prostitutes, who constitute a large and thriving class. The government in its cynical debasement exacts an eighth of this charming sisterhood’s earnings for its coffers.”
Geruthe went rigid; if at this moment she could have called upon her beloved Horvendile to slay this insolent mocker, lazing in his whorish recollections, she would have.
“So I was informed by hearsay,” Fengon went on smoothly. “Myself, I was pledged to an unattainable lady, and content to be chaste in her service. It was not difficult to suppress craving in a realm so given to, on the one hand, disgusting excess and, on the other, asceticism and self-torture. Monasteries are built upon the remotest crags and islets, to escape the world’s temptations, and yet for some monks the isolation and privation of such places is not enough, and they corrupt one another with frequent sodomy. Holy men are admired in proportion to the cruelty they inflict upon themselves. They condemn their bodies to sleeplessness, to standing upright for days on end; they jubilantly starve their sinful bellies; they mount pillars and live atop them for decades. They show more care for the worms that live in their wounds than for their own tormented flesh. In their mania for purity they live in holes, like St. Joannikos, or dwell in swamps as food for mosquitoes, like St. Makarios. There are hesychasts, who sincerely expect the divine light to come pouring forth from their navels.”
Geruthe tittered in surprise; Fengon was encouraged to go on with his incredible tale: “For a time, Geruthe, their church turned against its own icons, and ripped marvellous mosaics from the walls and domes of its basilicas, and condemned to death those faithful who harbored in their homes images of Christ and His blessed mother. Their churches, unlike our own, with their clean smells of cedarwood and mistletoe, stank of sickly incense, of rancid chrism and the drippings of votive lamps. Lunatics and saints were indistinguishable in Byzantium, as were bishops and assassins—their morbid religiosity made me long for the simplicity of our fresher, barer faith, which deals less with outer show than with inner purity.”