by John Updike
“How could we be discovered?” she asked.
“How could we be not, some day or other?” he asked. “The four around us know, and Corambis our absent host, and those at Elsinore who see you ride forth so faithfully, and those country folk who hail your passing, and the old couple who keep the cottage that guards our haven. All hold our truth hostage.”
She closed her eyes. He was tipping her, sliding her off their raft, making her think toward their fathomless doom. “Why would any of them tell Horvendile?”
“Personal advantage, or interrogation under torture, or the innocent pleasure each soul takes in the mishaps of others. A righteous anger, perhaps, that the commandments which restrain the world’s poor are disregarded by the mighty.”
“I have been heedless,” the Queen admitted, trying to consider herself. She sensed her body floating naked away from her thinking head—her breasts blown roses pink and white, her sex swollen and tender beneath its matted bush, her bare feet forming a distant audience of toes. “I was more indignant than I knew. Thirty years of lofty restriction gave intensity to my appetites and released them without a proper thought of consequences. Or if there was a thought, it paled before a queen’s habituated belief in her entitlements. I was idly impulsive and selfish when you and I began, and now it would be death to let you go.”
“Enamorata, it may be death to keep me,” Fengon warned. “Amor, mors.” He stroked her tingling hair and tugged a strand in illustration. “Fate cuts the sailor some slack, but then the line pulls taut. The creditor allows some grace, but then the debt is pressed. We have been wallowing, these summer months, in the blithe interim. However, just as some are invisible by being small, our very size and nearness to the King may make us hard to see. His will to see is not keen, I believe, for once he does see he has an obligation to act. An obligation, if I know my brother, he will move circumspectly to discharge. The disruption to Denmark might dislodge him as well. The populace is not prudish in its sympathies. You are the throne to many, and I have my loyalists in Jutland and some well-placed friends abroad.”
Her left hand returned from an idle investigation. “Ah, love, look—your little delegate to the lower parts has quite lost desire for your willing trull.”
Fengon looked down to where his breeches had been removed. “Thoughts of being beheaded do have a retractive effect.” He chucked her ruefully in the soft double plumpness beneath her chin. “I fear I am a fisherman who has lost his hook,” he said, “and you will glide away, back to familiar waters.”
“No, my lord, I am part of you now. We must glide on together.” And indeed like a big fish she slithered down in the bed, to revive his manhood with a Byzantine technique he had taught her. She liked it, this blind suckling, this grubbing at nature’s root. She fought gagging, and tugged at his balls. There was no need to think. Let be. His responsive needy swelling ousted every scruple from her head. Like maggots they would fatten, then fly.
“Il tempo fa tardi,” Fengon said to Sandro upon at last emerging. “Andiamo presto!”
“Il giorno va bene per Lei?” The servant had sensed trouble coming.
“Sì, sì. Era un giorno perfetto. E per te?”
Herda, though sitting composed by the clean-swept cold fireplace, had a flushed, smoothed face, and there was something awry where her wimple was pinned to her chin band. Her lips looked rubbed, her eyes watery.
“Molto bene, grazie, signore. Crepi il lupo!” May the wolf burst!
That summer’s warmth stretched into fall. October’s days, golden with the turning of the beech and chestnut forests, had sun-warmed centers, though the dawns showed frost on the orchard grass and ice on the courtyard puddles. Each evening nipped some minutes from the day’s length, and a crackling cold descended by midnight, revealing the first northern lights. They existed out of scale, in a star-strewn heaven cut to no measure but its own—waving tall curtains hung from nothing, disclosing nothing when they parted, unless it was dimmer folds of themselves, their evasive faint peacock colors, violet and turquoise, a far-off music of phosphorescence. They undulated along their vertical folds with a kind of beckoning motion, fading and returning.
The King was held to Elsinore more than in the summer, when he set forth for weeks at a time to survey his domains and call upon his provincial governors, themselves held in place by the need to supervise—or to keep watch upon those who did supervise—the burgeoning crops, the grazing herds, the game-ridden forests, the laborious harvests and the rightful taxes thereon, which the villeins and fiefholders tirelessly schemed to avoid. In their shortness of sight they did not comprehend that without the royal taxes there would be no royal armies and hired companies to defend them against the Norwegians and the Pomeranians and those many others who wished to conquer the land and make all Danes slaves. There would be no castles to give them shelter in an invasion, or bridges to carry them across rivers on the way to market and to the fairs and carnivals—carnivals where, it seemed to the King, men and women who should be working wasted days and health in gawking at freaks and frauds, in promiscuous mingling and in drunkenness and gluttony that made the clever stupid and the stupid stupider. The Church was short-sighted in multiplying saints and with them saints’ days and excuses for fairs and folly. Soon there would be no workdays and purposes in common. Without a funded central authority, every hamlet would remain an island, and there would be no Crusades, or nobly sponsored tourneys, or unifying wars.
While King Horvendile was away ensuring that the land’s riches provided the mite that was due the royal coffers, Geruthe and Fengon felt free to spend long hours together, sating not only their lust—which grew more rather than less, as practice and familiarity widened their liberties—but satisfying the innocent curiosity whereby those steeped in love feed upon the most trivial of the details that compose, particle by particle, the other’s being. Fengon especially wished to possess her girlhood, to penetrate to the image of his full-fleshed mistress as a sturdy female child making her benign, broad-browed, solemn way through the confusions of Rodericke’s court in the bereft years after her mother’s death. He doted upon this little girl with her unblaming green-gray eyes and sweet small dark space between her front teeth—this rosy child in a brocaded cap that covered her ears and half of her cascading hair—a child neglected yet coddled, passed from the lap of one favorite lady to that of another and then impatiently returned to the care of her nurse, ancient gnarled Marlgar, who would take her to the high safe solar above the adult din, to her little sidewalled bed and rag dolls whose three names she still remembered after forty years, reciting them so fondly their clay-bead eyes and bunched noses and stitched smiles rose before her, as she told him all this, more than once.
“Were you lonely?” he asked.
“I think not,” she answered, gravely thinking back, like looking for her reflection at the bottom of a well. “I had no brother or sister, but there were children my age in Elsinore, the children of inferiors. We played Saracens and knights, and dangled grasshoppers at the golden carp in the moat. Marlgar followed me everywhere but rarely denied me a game or a pleasure. She came from one of the small islands north of Lolland, where the children run free. My father could be gruff, and his friends in their drunkenness unseemly, but I knew I would come to no harm. I was a princess, I early knew, and wondered what prince I would love and marry; the thought of him was often with me. And now he is here, beside me.”
“Oh, dear heart, I am not the perfect prince a child imagines. I am a king’s dark and disreputable shadow. Your little princess—she knew she would be always taken care of, without her willing it?”
“Yes. I could will little, but to be good and not complain.”
“And you are like that still, passive and pleasant.”
“I suppose so. Does it irk you?”
“It enchants me, and frightens me a little.”
“Don’t be frightened, my love. All that lives must die. To waste this life in fretful care for the nex
t, or for a future calamity—that, too, is a sin. Birth lays upon us the natural commandment to love each day and what it brings.”
“Geruthe,” he exclaimed, taking pleasure as always in the rueful three syllables of her name, that spelled out her flesh in his mind. “Your wise sweetness, or sweet wisdom—how unreal our perils appear to you.”
“No, they appear real enough, but then I made the decision to risk them. A woman as well as a man must keep her own accounts.” She stroked his bare shoulders, smooth as armor but for a violet welt left by a Turkish scimitar. She trailed a fingertip down the scar, to where his bearish chest-hair began. “My agony in the travail of Hamblet’s birth put life and royalty in my debt. I decided, it may be, at last to collect. My father and future husband together bargained me away, and you have given me back my essential value, the value of that little girl you so belatedly dote upon.”
Fengon groaned. “Your trust sometimes crushes me. The world would say I have been base, as base as any squealing stoat who rushes where his lust points him.”
She smiled. “You were discreet, and let all possible time go by. I was ready to receive you at my wedding. You sent an empty platter instead. As to the world, there is the truth from without, and the truth from within. The truth within is ours. I have found you trustworthy, and faithful to me. We cannot be destroyed, but by one letting the other go.”
He kissed her hands, naked whenever she met him, though heavily ringed when she sat on the throne beside Horvendile.
In Elsinore, then, as winter approached through the golden days of harvest, the King could turn his attention to domestic matters. One fatal day, that day of bare slant light called All Saints’, he summoned his brother to a private audience.
“Rumors reach me,” the King began, “that you come to Elsinore more often than we meet, as brothers and comrades.” He had taken on ballast since Fengon had last observed him, and held his head and torso as if the muscles of his thick neck ached.
“You have the kingdom to supervise, and I but my lagging estates, here and in our homeland. But for when the råd gathers, or the thing is called to convene, I would not obtrude my counsel.”
“Your counsel and visible support mean much to the throne. After the Prince, none stands closer to it than you.”
“But the Prince, from all accounts, is healthy, and, beyond his whimsical disposition, able.”
“Able, but scandalously absent.”
“Hamblet improves his mind in the realms of our august ally the Emperor, to fit himself better to rule, when the time comes. But you are not old, and of our father’s tough stock.”
“Alas, not every noble Dane lives to die of decrepitude. Some are hurried along. I feel stiff and languid, often, but never mind. Who tells you the Prince is able?”
Fengon hesitated but a blink, before seeing no harm in an honest answer. “His mother and your Lord Chamberlain—both give a loving report of his manly abilities.”
“Natural affection and politic courtesy shape their impressions. My son is a mystery to me.”
“Though I have no claimed children, I believe it is ever thus, brother, with father and sons. The son’s world differs from the father’s if only by the dominating presence of the father in it. The same might be said of younger brothers and elder. You see clear to your objectives; I see always you ahead of me, intervening.”
Horvendile’s broad face, with its prim small mouth, sought briefly to encompass these geometries, sifting them for impudence. But he had some center of concern, and would not be dragged from it. “The Queen—you hold discourse with her frequently.”
Alerted, Fengon became more deliberately urbane. He felt oddly weightless, all his senses on tiptoe. “My tales of exotic travel give some relief to her monotonous days. She has an adventurous mind, but is much pent-up in royal routine.”
“This summer she went with me to Skåne.”
“And enjoyed herself royally. She said you were admired and admirable.”
“She talks much of me?”
“Of little else.”
“And what is her tenor?”
“Dear old frater, you press me as if I were a partner in your marriage. She spoke adoringly, last spring on her return, of your exemplary goodness, your hard-won power, your love of your people, which they of course reciprocate.”
“She thinks I am foolish, to love Denmark so possessively. She thinks I take too much to heart the old notion that if goodness does not flow from God through the King then the people will suffer and sink, all mutual obligations cancelled, and only an animal selfishness left, and savage anarchy. The King is the sun which warms the land. If something is amiss with him, his beams are bent. Crops fail, and rot infects the grain that is gathered and stored.”
Images so grandiose tempted Fengon to raise a smile against them, saving his own sanity, fending off a vocabulary bloated by self-glorifying superstition. Kingship had driven Horvendile mad. The Hammer struck another blow: “I often wonder, brother, why you do not marry.”
“Marry, I? Marriage seems to be the theme of this conference.”
“We are not yet to the bottom of our themes. But bear with me, and ration your smiles. Lena of Orkney, whom you took to bride when my own wedding had shown the way, and whom I met and thought a suitable match for your dreaming, romantic nature, died untimely. You have been vital these decades since, traversing a continent of possible brides, and have shunned your clear duty to our family and to Denmark. You have not played your part in the enlargement of our interests. Even now, the daughter of the King of Scotland, ambassadors inform me, is sound and intelligent, and appetizingly young: a strong link between our courts would put the English in a tidy nutcracker.”
Fengon did laugh, imprudently. “I would be happy to see the English in a nutcracker, but not one where my wife would form one handle, to be seized as you demanded. I wish no wife. I am beyond such wishing. I am an old soldier, accustomed to the friendly stench of men.”
“You wish no wife. How can that be? Are you unnatural?”
“As natural as you, brother. More, indeed, since I have not made myself King by capturing an unwilling girl.”
“Has Geruthe told you she was unwilling?”
“No, I surmised it. I surmised it at the time, and avoided witnessing your triumph, as brutal as your rape of Sela before you slew her.”
“Sela was a scourge upon our coasts,” Horvendile said calmly, his long eyes watchful. There was a fishy glaze to the whites of the King’s eyes that belonged to the something amphibian about his lipless, decisive mouth. Fengon should not have let his anger out, defending a teenaged bride long transformed to wife, and who had perhaps been more willing than she admitted to her lover. His romanticism had betrayed him. When he had lunged to attack, the balance between the brothers had shifted.
“Perhaps you do not wish a wife,” Horvendile said, heavily, dully, sure of his ground, “because you already have a wife of sorts—another man’s wife. Don’t speak, Fengon. Imagine this fable with me. A good and faithful king has a wandering brother, who comes to his castle at last, weary of fruitless adventuring, and in his embittered idleness seduces the Queen, with the aid of the King’s treacherous, senile Lord Chamberlain. The adulterous couple sate their unspeakable lust month after month, in a secret shelter the pandering Lord Chamberlain has provided in his enmity to the King, whom he knows to be planning to relieve him of his lucrative post. I ask you, as my loving brother and trusted member of my råd, what should this so grievously abused king, the guardian of the Lord’s commandments and protector of his own extended household, do?”
Fengon felt supernaturally quickened, his every nerve bathed in the soothing, cleansing liquor of emergency. The pit had opened under him, but it was no deeper than his own death, which must be borne in any case. As when in hand-to-hand battle with Turk or Saracen, Alsatian mercenary or Pisan, all facets of the situation flashed upon him at once, and the copiously tinted world was stripped to a few stark monochrom
es—the white of life, the red of blood and counterblow, the black of death. Fengon responded, “The King should first torture his sources for so bizarre and unlikely a tale, to persuade them to retract and confess their lies.”
“My most informative source is not here to torture. He has gone back to Calabria. Our icy autumn nights frightened him with their portents of worse winter coming, and he betrayed you for safe passage to his sunny land of origin.”
Fengon held silent, but he felt his flushed face speak for him. His years of diplomacy had overpersuaded him of his seductive powers, of a capacity to elicit loyalty, especially from young men and foreigners. The limits of language imposed a false closeness, a false bottom to his reading of another. He would have trusted Sandro with his life. He had trusted him with his life. Crepi il lupo!
Horvendile began to prowl the audience chamber, treading on pelts of wolf and bear, exulting in his mastery of the situation, demonstrating his vengeful ease. “Blame not just Sandro—many eyes observed, many tongues tattled. Even my own instincts, which I know you and Geruthe think are hopelessly dulled by my ponderous crown, told me something was amiss—or, rather, something had been added. She was different with me—more expressive, as if to make up in lesser confidences and gifts of attention the great secret she must withhold. She was, will it wound you to hear?, more ardent, rather than less as common decency might predict. She continued to simmer, removed from the fire. The fire of damnation, the priests would tell us—the priests who know the flesh by the book and by the lurid light of the confessional but not as we do, in nature, as a two-edged instrument, a forked violence and mending, the wellspring of nurture and the ruin of reason. Geruthe is decent,” Horvendile went on, toying with them all, mere puppets in his mind. “She was not blithe about blackening my honor, which is coterminous with that of Denmark. Our marriage bed was still a shrine to her, though she defiled it. I benefited by her chagrin, without at first scenting the source. There was something, it would be too rude to say rotten, but overripe about her and her attentions.”