by John Updike
“I wonder you and I dare talk of purity.”
Fengon’s teeth flashed their tawny pallor. The lower were irregularly crowded, and his canines were sharp. “Why not? Is not this encounter chaste? Has our conversation at any point held even a hint of adultery? If it has, may I cut off my tongue, as a starter. You receive me through so strait a gate”—he indicated the lancet window—“I could not bring a single Greek gift.”
“Have you gifts for me?” What a child she still was, she noticed of herself, so quickly curious as to what material objects might reveal of his thoughts of her in so far and fantastic a land. Outside the window, birds chirped in their version of abrupt and fluting Danish, and buttons of pale-green leaf, budded but yesterday, dotted the cool air darkened by larches. This man, for all the devious unknowns about him, brought her home to herself. No failing she displayed to him would meet the distracted frown her husband wore when she claimed his notice. Rodericke’s paternal approval had been reborn. The focus in which Fengon held her burned and soothed at once.
He laughed at her innocent avidity and said, “If I visit you again, perhaps I may use the front door, as did my servant Sandro, who sits down below with your Herda, sharing cakes and cider and a conspiratorial silence.”
She laughed in turn. “Can you see through walls? Did you truly become a magician in Byzantium?”
“Not a magician, but a—a cosmopolite, a connoisseur of human nature. I have lived where men of every race and disposition mingle, and all is tacitly permitted. The dunatos, the powerful ones, live in a luxury of porphyry and jasper while two steps from their gilded doors those without a home huddle and starve, the mother dying as the infant sucks on nothingness. Extremes of piety and cruelty meet there in a bloody mist. They punish adultery by cutting off the lady’s pert nose, after which she enters a nunnery, which in turn may be a brothel, so widespread is the holy vocation. When an emperor is deposed, which happens not infrequently, the new one, as if performing a courtesy, gouges out the eyes of his predecessor, the better to prepare him for the next world, and to remove him from the politics of this. Yet they are far from brutes, the Byzantines. The pleasures of battle seem to them unsavory. They prefer to buy off their enemies, or to hire others from less civilized lands to fight them. Their favorite method of private murder is poison, which their apothecaries have refined to a high art. These eastern Romans have severed conscience from religion, which frees them to move in their silks as in a pond overstocked with eels, one across another, without friction of the abrasive, hidebound kind so common here in the north, to which they have given the pretty name of Thule.”
She shuddered. “I am glad, nevertheless, that it was you who went, and not I.”
“They would have greatly esteemed you. Red-haired slaves bring twice what the less fair do.”
“Do you miss them terribly, these warm-water eels? I fear you must be impatient with our frozen ways.”
“I am of you, Geruthe, a Dane to the bone. None but one lady answers to my inner ideal. You are my haghia sophia, my holy wisdom.”
“Wisdom, sir, or folly?” She smiled, showing the gap between her front teeth.
“In Constantinople,” he explained, “there are many religious currents, and one holds that to each man belongs a Form of Light, which is his own spirit remained in Heaven, far from the hellish prison of matter all around us. At death his Form of Light will greet him with a kiss, a Kiss of Love so-called, reenacted in some heretical sects, to the horror of the strictly orthodox. She is his personal savior, manifesting Sophia Maria, the feminine principle of divinity. Call it high-flown if you will, I do believe you are such to me.”
Geruthe blushed at the heat of so inflamed a phrasing of his attraction. “It is high-flown to the point of blasphemy; it puts nature in altogether too extravagant a gown.”
“I recognize my feelings exactly in it. On our earthly plane, my devotion, I know, is absurd. You are a woman, and many exist, as I allowed a minute ago.”
She answered in offended kind. “You would theologize me out of my real existence. I would rather have the material gifts,” she told him, almost angrily, on a queen’s dignity, “that you say you possess but could not scrape through the window. Next time, use the door, as your servant has done. We are too old for puppy love’s acrobatics. Let Corambis’s haven be ours for the odd hour, for what conversations we wish, without timorous skulking. Those who know of it are our collaborators, and the risks of collaboration bind them to silence.”
“I fear not for myself,” Fengon said, his words slowed as if each one must meet a test of honesty. “I have courted danger these years, giving God the option of ridding the world of my disruptive passion. This love was not dangerous when you were out of reach, my amors de terra lonhdana. But now that you are near, your face and gestures fitting as a key a lock my fanatically cherished memory of them, I fear for us both. I fear for the throne, and for Denmark.”
“You fear too much, it may be, and dream too hard. Great estates have rarely turned on the sleight of a lady’s favor. You call ethereal what in truth we share with all animals. I believe we have had this debate before, whether love is skyey or earthen. I am earthy, and dying to hold and weigh the gifts you say you have brought, from this Miklagard I will never see, a poor pale lady of Thule.”
Fengon gathered that she would grant him naught but this ultimatum today, and he bowed in leaving. Sandro had not expected him to emerge so soon, or to leave by way of the passage into the hearth-room, for he looked up startled from the depths of a dialogue between himself and Herda. She was twice his age, but with traces still of comeliness. By the great central bed of embers they huddled over unglazed cups of mulled cider. They were working out a language; Sandro filled in his gaps of Danish with supple gestures that left her blinking.
“Una regina,” Fengon told him in answer to the question in his face as they left, “non è una gallina.”
His first gift, brought the week following, when the buds of the maples and alders had gone from a button-like solidity to the particulate leafiness of tiny cabbages, was a cloisonné pendant in the form of a peacock, the spread tail a fan in whose center the neck and body of shimmering blue stood out against the proud spread of green feathers eyed in yellow and black. Each segment of enamel was outlined in gold finer than thread, even to the tiny chips of white and red, green and gray that gave anatomy to the profiled head with its downcurved beak. The maker of so fine a thing must soon have gone blind; his blindness was part of its worth. “You always give me birds,” Geruthe said, then remembered that the first such present, the pair of pied linnets, had come from Horvendile.
“The peacock,” he explained, “is their symbol of immortality. One sees these fowl often in the courtyards, dragging their splendid feathers in the dust, stretching their iridescent necks to make their maddening cry, more like that of a soul in torment than of an emblem of Paradise.”
“It is very beautiful, and heavy.” She lifted it, the pendant and its gold chain, which was so fine it slithered like a trickle of liquid into her pink palm.
“See if it feels so around your neck. May I put it on you?”
Geruthe hesitated, then bowed her head and let him take this liberty. His fingers as he did so stroked her hair, finest-spun and palest at the nape of her neck, where his fingers toyed with the chain’s catch. His lips, ruddy and shapely, were inches from her eyes as he felt for the fit. Finding it, his hands lifted, but his mouth did not move back. Each black hair of his mustache had an enamelled lustre. A feather of his breath, smelling of cloves brought from afar, brushed her nostrils. She lifted a finger to touch his fringed lips, to create there a tingle to mirror that which she had felt at the back of her neck. The weight of the pendant tugged there with a little cool strip of pressure. Their two bodies, proximate, felt huge to her, as if made up of tiny whirling microcosms, each part and filament of them as precious as the enamel fragments of the immortal peacock. The chill at the back of her neck pushed her
to seek the warmth of his lips, where her fingertips had briefly explored.
She and Fengon kissed, but not as avidly, as moistly, as they had in Elsinore. Here, in their own, more modest castle, they advanced with more caution, without the King’s paternal protection, attempting to domesticate the outrage their bodies were plotting. Geruthe felt guilt more keenly, since she was the married one, and yet an old sense of outrage rose up to meet and overpower her qualms for the length of the kiss and its several less heated, more practiced successors, until, weary of the revolution within, she pulled back, and begged Fengon for conversation.
But Byzantium and all of Europe south of Slesvig was becoming, each day he lingered in Denmark, less distinct to him, his travels reducing in his mind to an impatient temper foreign to stolid Danes, an edgy hardness waiting inside him like a sheathed sword. Geruthe worked at teasing his youthful past from him—the Jutland boyhood, the early raids at Horvendile’s side, his education, ragged and by rote, at the hands of priests—and talked then of herself, gaily, with a reckless frankness, remembering her grievances against father, husband, and son as if they were all episodes of an amusing history belonging to another woman. Fengon heard in her gaiety a new resolve, to go ahead, with a resilient hardness of her own. She was drunk, it seemed to him, on anticipation, and steeled against her own guilt.
From Sandro’s discreet demeanor, on the ride back to Lokisheim, his visit with the Queen had been closer to the proper duration.
Her second gift, brought in a week when the buds were loosening enough to fill the woods with a yellow-green fog, was a chalice, silver so thinly worked it could cut a lip, only the stem bejewelled, but thickly so, with knobs of green chrysoprase, rose quartz, and reddish-brown carnelian. The bowl of the goblet was incised with lacy designs that inspection revealed to be trees, trees more symmetrical than trees could be and spiralling inward toward a foliate impossibility in which snakes were nested, snakes and apples, and birds too large for the linear branches upon which they symmetrically rested. Their eyes were ringed, their beaks tangent to triangular bunches of what she guessed were grapes.
On the cup’s other side, opposite this laden and intertwining tree, symmetrical beasts posed beside a pillar topped by a cross, a cross whose forked ends flared outward into lines that enclosed a kind of star. Crouched on either side of the pillar as if posed before a mirror, the beasts were horses in body except that the feet were not hooved but taloned, too long-toed to be lions’ paws. The forelegs at their shoulders broadened upward into feathered wings, and the faces, seen frontally, were not horses’ heads or lions’ but those of smiling women, women wearing bangs and on their thin necks necklaces whose square elements echoed the segmented locks of the bangs. And the faces of these women—perhaps they were children—were beautiful and serene. “Are these phoenixes?” Geruthe asked, emerging from her trance of inspection to discover that Fengon’s face was beside hers, sharing the inspection, for he had purchased this gift long ago and had half forgotten its Byzantine details.
“Something of the sort,” he said. His voice so close to her ear bore its own scratchy, moist breath-marks, a texture from within, a rustle of uncertainty. “The Greek word is chimaira—from ‘she-goat,’ but meaning a she-monster, put together of the parts of sundry animals.” His hand, she realized, was resting on her waist, the side away from him, his touch no heavier than another layer of cloth. In the sudden warmth of the April day she had discarded her dark wool mantle, leaving only a gold-embroidered bliaut covering her chemise of white linen. She did not move away or reveal that she knew she was being touched.
“And the precious stones,” she said, caressing their lumpy smoothness, rimmed in pronged silver settings. “Another extravagant mixture. So thick and encrusted a stem, on so fine and easily dented a cup. It makes the products of even our most skillful Danish smiths seem coarse.” It reminded her, in its lumpy heft, of something she had often handled, with mixed emotions, distaste and dread yielding to amusement and wonder.
“What I liked about it,” said Fengon, in his soft, on-running voice, “and what made me think of you, years ago in a market in Thessaloniki, was its cheerfulness, a rounded good humor about it—the faces of the chimeras reminded me of you, two of you.”
Light from the lancet window clarified the incised lines. Yes, she thought, the smiling faces were not unlike the plump face she saw in her oval metal mirror each day, though she did not wear her hair in Attic bangs but pulled back in coiled braids. Two of her, for two brothers—the fancy gave rise to the unease, the foreboding, that she sought each day to keep down, like a surge of nausea. “We should drink together from this gorgeous gift,” she decreed. “Perhaps Sandro and Herda are not too wrapped in discussion to fetch us a flagon of Rhenish wine. Corambis keeps a cask in his larder; he has laid in provisions here for a siege. Horvendile speaks of him more and more as a rascal, looking only to his own prosperity.” She regretted pronouncing her husband’s name, though Fengon had known it, and the man it designated, twice as long as she.
“The Hammer is never altogether wrong,” he said, releasing her from his touch and dancing away in that frisky, foreign way he had. “Were I Corambis, I too would be looking to my own security. If we define ‘rascal’ thus, few can dodge the epithet. Wine by all means, though we have but one cup. Is it enough?”
“The pantry holds dozens.”
“But this one is ours. Yours, since I gave it to you, with my pledged adoration.” He ventured from their covert chamber, and in time Herda, her face composed in the mask of service, brought them not only a pottery flagon on a lindenwood tray but bread and cheese. Fengon used the dagger at his belt to make portions for them. The wine was thick and sweet, and under its influence, drinking first from opposite sides and then from the same of the heavy-stemmed cup, they could not help rubbing against each other, and fell to the bed, where, removing no clothes, they groped for sensitive flesh while exchanging reechy kisses, their mouths sour with wine, tainted with cheese, but for all that sweet, deeply so; it was as if two great angelic funnels were pouring through their joined lips the long-dammed contents of their souls, all the wounds in need of healing, all the comforts until now unbestowed. They became in their clothes sweaty and pink. His hands sought her loins, her breasts through the embroidered bliaut, with its welts of thread, that sheathed her from neck to heels. A ridge of dew appeared on Geruthe’s upper lip, which bore a transparent down he had never noticed before; her hand sought below his belted velvet tunic the baubly stalk his gift had reminded her fingers of. But for all this compulsive ardor, these swathed caresses and stifled groans, the hissing and broken murmurs, the spiritual undertaking was too great to be consummated today. The weight of fatality was too heavy for their mere flesh.
On the morrow she accompanied the King to Skåne, that band of distant purple beyond the sullen Sund. A Danish land since the dark age when the Jutes and Angles divided the great peninsula now ruled from Elsinore, Skåne, with Halland and Blekinge, bordered the territories of the Swedish king, who coveted Skåne’s rich soil and herring harvest. Horvendile felt it politic to exhibit the royal presence there. He and his queen paid state visits to Lund, where the Archbishop mounted a three-day banquet, and to Dalby, where the Bishop organized a state procession around the city walls, led by a host of saints’ bones in individual reliquaries. Geruthe and Horvendile paid a patriotic visit to the battlefield of Fotevig, where over a century ago Erik the Memorable had decisively defeated Niels and his son Magnus, who had treacherously murdered Duke Knud the Breadgiver, conqueror of the Wends, in Haraldsted Wood. Magnus fell at Fotevig together with no fewer than five bishops. Erik’s victory had been aided by three hundred German armored knights hired for the occasion, a technological innovation which at a blow rendered popular levies upon the peasantry obsolete.
Fengon’s freelance profession, Geruthe reflected, had been born here. In Horvendile’s constant company, she found her liaison with his brother increasingly dreamlike. Horv
endile was always at his best when travelling, being fêted and paraded, charming other dignitaries with his fattened Nordic handsomeness. The cheering populace lined their routes, and threw spring flowers—daffodils, apple blossoms—under the hooves of their snorting steeds, who were spooked by the tumult.
A byproduct of his buoyant mood was a more devoted attention to his queen. Their lovemaking resumed, in the canopied beds of their ecclesiastical hosts, as if their young marriage had never grown jaded and old. Her husband was bulkier than Fengon, his body not so wiry and keen in her arms, his beard less thick and stiff, but he was good, a dutiful king and husband, and on both counts hers, her king, her husband, her conqueror. Satisfactorily he hammered her. She had only to hold still, like the faithful runestone King Gorm had erected to Tyra, Denmark’s glory, and fair fortune and renown would come to her. Her incestuous flirtation with Fengon, seen from a distance, appalled her. How perilously close she had come to falling! As soon as she returned, she would tell him, gently but unmistakably, that their meetings must come to an end. Her impatience to do so, to rid herself of imminent (how could she have come so close!) disgrace, gave her insomnia in Skåne.
But after her return to Elsinore, Fengon was rarely in attendance, and when he did come his business was with his brother and the court. Geruthe’s impulse of renunciation was replaced by a painful sensation of having been herself renounced. Her cheeks burned in shame to think back upon the avowals she had urged into his ear, and their delving kisses, and her heat within her clothes, whose embrace had alone held her from a ruinous surrender.