by John Updike
He wants me to talk about her, Fengon realized. To describe her in terms as shameless as his own, as a fornicatrice abandoned to lechery, stewing in guilt, turning over and over, a plump morsel in a pungent sauce, delicious, her legs splayed to display her hairy hell-hole: only that way could Horvendile repossess her, through his brother, in those hours when she had stolen herself away. Glancing back through the dappled months of forbidden passion, Fengon remembered the watery play of light in their round chamber and out on the lake, and Geruthe’s girlish voice flirting in delight at his gifts, and her mature rosy splendor pressed against him, as if to hide herself, at the moment of surrender. Protect me, she had begged.
Fengon still said nothing, just kept his gaze on his brother as the King prowled, in the lofty agitation of an inescapable predator. Horvendile saw that his brother would not share the naked spoils. He became irate. He sardonically accused, “You give me no counsel.”
“I cannot be accused and judge both. Be aware, however, that thrones can topple in convulsions they instigate. Under your reign as under any, Denmark is restless with perceived wrongs and conceivable gains. The men who profit under an established order are always out-numbered by those who have better hopes of a new.”
“You dare read me instructions, you who have overturned my household peace and my wedlock’s dignity? Who won to your vile lust, stinking of foreign brothels, the will of my virtuous queen? You were always my inferior, Fengon—a filthy skulking shadow, less good at sport, less strong, less fair, less studious, the lesser favorite of our priestly tutors and our father, yes, I so assert though Gervendile sought to give us equal posts in Jutland, as if in battle we had done equal service, shown equal bravery and military wit.”
Fengon, stung, touched the round-pommelled hilt, smoothed by much handling, of his sword. “I was less cruel than you,” he said, “less the enraptured despoiler in Norway’s helpless seaside parishes, but I deny that you had the edge of me in resourcefulness or courage.”
Horvendile’s long eyes had taken in his gesture. “You touch your sword? Would have at me? Come, brother, here is my breast, armored in velvet merely. You would not wound me worse than when you bewitched and pierced my most virtuous-seeming queen!”
His old trick of chest-baring, Fengon thought. Archers may be hiding behind an arras. Or crouched in alcoves above, ready to make me a porpentine if I take a step toward his presence.
“You were always foul at heart,” the King was going on, in a reminiscent, loitering tone, as his brother’s hand left the smooth hilt. “Your inevitable envy of me drove you to brooding, to unnatural introspection and fancy, in which you sought to embroil others, of the weaker, more suggestible sex. You idolized women and therefore sought to degrade them, knowing your exaltation to be unreal, the product of despicable cowardly fevers. Poor Lena, raised in those treeless island fields studded with ancient tombs, was a perfect match, with her own unreality, for your dominating fantastications. The blackest rumors have circled about her death, as to the abuses you imposed upon her innocence, but I have never believed them. I have believed you loved Lena as well as you could love any person not purely a figment of your blighted mind. Why have you hated me, Fengon? We shared the same parents, the same remorseless upbringing. I did not will my own excellence to spite you; you could have basked at my side with almost equal honor rather than infest the remote corners of Christendom with your perverse longings and expatriate’s pride, wasting your life among heretics and sybarites.”
Fengon said, “I do not hate you. I find you, for all that the world has conspired to puff you up, strangely negligible. And, as this interview proceeds, prating and tedious. What you think you know is less than the truth, but act upon it as you will. How do you answer your own question, concerning the hypothetical fable?”
“Death to the traitorous chamberlain, for a start,” Horvendile stated.
“His white hairs and years of fealty would argue for mercy.”
“They argue against it, enriching his affront. Evil long contemplated is evil doubled. A death by torture and quartering, as an example to other officials. The wicked brother—”
“Who has suppressed a thousand wicked thoughts—”
“—deserves obliteration but would be granted permanent exile. The execution of one whose same blood beats in the King might disrupt the plain minds of those who take us as divinity. Banishment is more grand than execution, suspending the sinner prolongedly in his regret and envy; it could even be construed a mercy to one long self-exiled and one who would, like Satan, prefer retreat in the earth’s bowels to having his eyes tormented by the radiance of his conqueror, his rightful lord.”
“Fie, fie. And the Queen?”
Horvendile heard the tension in his brother’s voice. He smiled: that lipless mouth so often pinched shut in cold-blooded snap judgment now broadened and prodded up his cheeks, twitching his skimpy beard’s curls. “The Queen, you feckless infatuate, is the King’s to dispose of. When our forefathers ruled in the mists, impaling was considered a fit punishment for offenses such as hers. Jörmunrekr, the bards relate, had Svanhildr pegged and trampled to death by wild horses, for her reputed adultery.”
“She was falsely accused, and havoc was loosed, the legend goes on to report. Punish me, burn me, instead, or punish yourself. It was your neglect and contempt that Geruthe in her sweetness of womanly soul was seeking to repair.”
“The Queen is mine, however grossly you have used her, and however you slander a marriage of which she exposed to you only the aspects that flattered you and excused her grotesque, incestuous adultery. Give her up, Fengon, along with all thought of your own good repute. You both must be, for the sake of truth and order, disgraced. I will see your Jutland lands confiscated, and all connection to the royal rights disowned.”
“Rights by inheritance more Geruthe’s than yours,” Fengon interposed.
Horvendile brushed the point aside. “You will wander as a pauper, Fengon, and the mark of shame and malice my hired tongues set upon you will make your murderer a hero. You will be less than dirt, for dirt has no name to dishonor. Burn, if you will burn, in the knowledge that beauteous Geruthe still sits wived to me, however chastened and grieved by such thorns of remorse in her bosom as will help her scarified soul to sing in Heaven, at the end of all our squalid trials.”
His mind had moved on. Fengon felt himself in his brother’s long icy eyes no more than a gnat to be crushed—already crushed, already a small smear on this page of history. Horvendile told him condescendingly, “The tortuous revenges of the past have no place in our Christian age; her fate is what it has been these thirty years, to be immutably my wife. You have misjudged me, my incestuous, covetous brother, if you think that I am second to you even in love of Geruthe. But my love is as firm and pure as yours has been wanton and rootless. Though base, you have no base; mine is as wide as Denmark. Ha.”
Horvendile had scored as neatly as when his broad-sword severed King Koll’s foot. Fengon felt blood impotently pour from him. To be severed from Geruthe … Her compliant good nature, after a time of grief and penitence, would entwine itself with her husband’s again, and her weak flesh and gentle, sensible spirit yield back all that had been her lover’s. He had been carved by this regal butcher to a core of defiance that as yet was without resource. Gutted of hopes, Fengon felt his soul pass from the mixed condition of common mankind to the adamancy of the Devil’s party, blackened by a blind vow not to be overcome. He curtly bowed. “I await your judgment, then.”
“Wait in silence a while. State business with ambassadors from Poland calls me this instant to a broader, more amenable sphere than that of this triple betrayal, which makes me heartsick, in truth. I take no joy in knowing that men are garbage, and women too, and that royal love and favor breed a voluptuous ingratitude.”
“I beg you, pious brother, impale me if that would please you, but spare the obliging old man his head, and the Queen public disgrace, your private chastisements r
un as they will. She has ever taken an innocent pride in her status as Rodericke’s cherished daughter.”
“My announcements are of my sole determination, and any comment you deliver on the Queen is a knavish impertinence. I know her, too, remember. I vowed to cherish her. Speak not to me again. I curse you, brother, and the monstrous joke of nature that bade us issue from the same womb.”
Thus ingloriously dismissed, Fengon was aware as he left the King’s presence of the transformation working within him—cold distances opening up, beyond rage, through which his thought moved with the flashing speed of a duellist’s reflexes. His romanticism had been boiled away. The bones of things were laid bare. Geruthe no longer loomed as the princesse lointaine or Form of Light but as a treasure he must seize back, a territory he must not lose. Still, he had no idea what he must do, only that he must stop at nothing. Like a tiercel aloft his mind glided, motionless, with black unhooded eyes, each patch of earth below magnified by its subdivision into many quickly perceived coverts, where life might lurk.
As he left the audience chamber, he saw the arras move near the doorway. He had not taken ten steps down the empty arcade outside the great hall before Corambis was beside him, breathing wheezily. The old man had heard it all and was terrified. His green sugarloaf hat had left his head, whose white hairs radiated from his bald spot as if fleeing in panic. Hectic red spots on his withered cheeks showed high excitement, yet his voice, that instrument of his life’s work, had a revived timbre, a youthfully urgent diction restored by shock.
“He will be three hours at lunch,” he said, as if a rapid conversation were being resumed. “The Polacks drink deep, and come to their sticking points the long way around. He will be heavy with wine. He will see no need to hasten in his dealings with us and the Queen, so fixed is his conviction of imperturbable power. He will, I wager, take his nap in the orchard as usual. It has become his fixed habit as the years bear upon him, in order to flee the claims of citizens and courtiers, to rest his watchful eyes and brain, an hour or possibly as much as two each afternoon in sleep, from April to October, and even into November, which All Saints’ Day has just now ushered in, repelling the season’s chill with furs, or thickly woven wool, or a close-knit cap upon his head, where in summer’s heat no covering is needed—”
“Yes, yes. Get on. Less telling, and more told, Corambis. We can be seen and overheard here.”
“—within a gazebo, or pergola, or some would say a belvedere or baldachino, built for this homely purpose of unshaved logs and boards but hastily planed, near the southern wall of the middle bailey, to catch warmth from the stones, there in the orchard, this side the moat and the other side, I say, of the bailey wall, in all but the least amenable of weathers, even in a rain not too windblown, so does His Majesty like the orchard air, in one season white with petals and loud with bees and in another heavy with green shade and now fragrant with fallen fruit and wasps that thrive on the deadfall—”
“Tell it, for God’s sake.”
“There he will sleep, alone, undefended.”
“Ah, yes. And how is access?”
“A single set of spiral stairs, so tight two men could not pass, descends from the King’s apartments to a narrow door to which few have the key, I being one, in case he ever needed to be summoned to a crisis of arms or of diplomacy.”
“Give me it,” Fengon said, and held out his hand for the little-used key, which Corambis fussily, tremblingly disengaged from a ring of others. Its rust stained Fengon’s palm. “How many hours have I before he sleeps?”
“The gentlemen from Poland, as I say, are prone to divagate, prevaricate, and expostulate to a degree that makes prognostication—”
“Estimate. Our lives could hang on this.”
“Upward of three hours, less than four. The day is warm for fall, he will not wait till the shadows have brought the evening chill.”
“This gives me time to Lokisheim and back, if I ride like the very devil. I have a substance there whose chemistry is apt. He is always alone?”
“The moat defends him, and he luxuriates in being, for this interval, he who suffers constant observing, unobserved.”
“I could make my way through the royal apartments, descend, and wait.”
“My lord, suppose you are accosted?”
“I will say I seek the Queen. He from whom the secret needed to be kept now knows.”
“Should I inform the Queen of what has just passed?”
“Tell her nothing. Nothing.” The old man winced as Fengon gripped his arm. “She must be kept innocent, for her sake and ours. Though she connived at love, she would balk at—at this necessary step. Only ignorance will keep her heart and countenance clear. The Polacks will hold him safe some hours, but do not, if you will keep watch, let her come into his presence, lest he may undelude her and give her a wound whose outcry exposes us all. Now tell me, is there any other way back into the castle from the orchard?”
Corambis tilted his dishevelled big head, a pumpkin stuffed with the conspiracies of five decades of Danish rule. Even on the brink of his own quartering he relished a plot to which he was privy. He answered, “The drawbridge whereby the orchard pickers cross the moat will be up and chained for the winter. But”—a dim light dawned—“a hollow shaft descends from the hostlers’ latrine in the stables. It might be scrambled into and thence up. But for a gentleman, the filth—”
“I’ll judge that nicety. Let us part smartly, and hope to meet again. If not in this world, in the interminable next.”
Fengon had become an unfeeling tool in his own furious grip. By himself he saddled his horse, luckily his fastest, the black Arabian, now going gray in the muzzle. He fumbled at the buckles, cursing Sandro, who used to handle the Genoan saddle with such loving deftness. Mounted at last, and waved out through the barbican gate, he galloped the twelve leagues to Lokisheim, through the Forest of Gurre and beyond, driving his horse to a lather like that within his heated clothes. His retainers received him with amazement, since he had left but at that dawn, and blanketed and watered the shivering steed while Fengon rushed inside.
What he sought lay hidden in the carved rope-handled coffer beneath the crossed halberts. When he undid the fish-shaped clasps and lifted the lid, out flew the iodine scent of the Aegean. Toward the bottom, beneath layers of folded silks and worked leather and carvings of ivory and cedar—reserve treasures had his wooing of Geruthe needed them—he found a thick jade cross, Greek in that its arms were of equal length. A lady had once given it to him. “In case you meet an enemy,” she had languidly explained. Younger then, thinking to strike a courtly tone, he had said something stupid about fearing no enemy if she remained his friend. She was older than he, and had waved away the flattery. In Byzantium, it was understood that lives and loves simply end. She had said, “Just as the cross holds both the agony of death and the promise of eternal life, so the juice of hebona combines the essences of yew and henbane, with other ingredients inimical to the blood’s humors. Introduced into the mouth or ear, it produces an instant curdling, a violent brother to creeping leprosy. Death is quick, though terrible to behold, and certain.”
Sealed by crimson wax, one of the cross’s two equal arms had been laboriously hollowed to conceal a stoppered slender vial of Venetian glass. Fengon dug away the wax with the point of his bodkin and the vial slipped out. The lethal liquid had precipitated a fine brown sediment in its years of concealment; lightly shaken, it cleared to a pale yellow, which even here in the dark low hall caught a glow from somewhere. Suppose she had lied? She had lied often otherwise. She had lied idly, for the joy of creating multiple worlds. Fengon’s hands shook, jarred by his ragged breathing, as he lifted the liquid to the light, then slipped the little vial into the inner pocket of his doublet. His rump and the insides of his thighs were sore; the small of his back screamed with his ride’s repeated percussion. He was old, old; he had squandered his life. He smelled to himself of old age, of wet straw gone fusty, unforked in the
stable.
The gallop back to Elsinore was urged to the edge of the Arabian’s capacity. Fengon whipped the aging horse mercilessly, while vowing aloud, yelling crazily in the animal’s uncomprehending ear—its hairy exterior perked, its interior lilylike and a tint akin to human flesh—to put him out, if his heart did not burst, to lush pasture with a herd of plump mares. Answering the watchman’s shout in full stride, Fengon thundered across the moat, beneath the spiked portcullis, into the barbican and the outer bailey, which on one side accommodated the stables. No hostler was on hand: good. One less witness, if witnesses were ever sought. He stalled the horse himself. He patted the soaked black nose, the blood-spattered nostrils, and whispered to the beast, “May I do as bravely.” Two rides of two hours each had been achieved in scarce three. Fengon’s image was squat and miniature, a bearded troll, in the long-lashed orb of the horse’s eye, with its purple iris.
Feeling airy and shaken again on foot, he glided unchallenged along the inner wall to the lesser hall, up wide stairs troughed with centuries of wear and through the deserted lobby to the great hall, up stairs again, more stealthily, through the audience chamber and into the King and Queen’s own fir-floored suite. He heard from several rooms away a lute and the thready entwined voices of recorders—the Queen and her ladies were being entertained, while they stitched at their embroidery frames. Perhaps the King’s footmen had gone to listen. With a snake’s silence Fengon moved through his brother’s deserted solar and found the opening, low like the niche that holds a church’s basin of holy water, which led to a spiral stair. It rubbed him on all sides, so narrow it was, and lit but by one meurtrière halfway down. The vertical slot of landscape—flashing moat, part of a thatched house, smoke from something being burned in a field—made his eyes wince and set a watery light on the curved wall behind him.
He descended into a well of darkness. The dry planks and rusted iron strapwork of a door met his fingertips; he stroked these mixed rough surfaces for the keyhole, as one strokes a woman’s body for its secret small site of release. He found it. Corambis’s key fit. The oiled works turned. The orchard outside appeared to be empty. He had arrived first. Thank—who? Not the Devil, Fengon didn’t want to believe he was forever in thrall to the Devil.