by Susann Cokal
At the grieving feast, no one weeps harder than Nicolas, seated on Christian’s right; except of course the Queen, who spreads in between them. She has been allowed out of her quarters for this occasion of state. Nicolas promises it will do the nobles good to see their Queen with her full belly; she represents the future, with the Lunedies still on the throne.
But reports about Isabel overall are bad. She is crying so hard now that the courtiers can barely keep up with her; they have to dig into their thighs and wrists with the tips of their knives in order to summon enough pain for tears. She might weep her baby away.
The King is too grief-struck to weep anymore. He simply sits and lets the leek pie and battered dolphin congeal upon his plate. The peasants outside the gates will make a fine supper on his scraps, and of course the courtiers’; no one at table dares eat more than a royal, however hungry that person may be. Christian broods, watching Nicolas’s fine fingers scooping up food for the Queen, the famous ruby glowing as they move.
Isabel chews as if for duty, eyes still streaming. By accident (so the King believes), she catches one of Nicolas’s fingers between her teeth, giving it a sharp nip before realizing her mistake and setting Nicolas free.
Christian feels a tightness around his heart. “So now we have a Crown Princess,” he says aloud. His words shatter the silence; they echo down the hall, settling like ash into the fine dishes on the table. “Eventually, perhaps, a Queen. A woman to rule our kingdom.”
Nicolas, wiping his fingers, says in the softest of voices, “Your Majesty, do not forget the present Queen’s belly. We must take hope from that.” He nods gallantly toward Isabel.
Petulantly, Christian decides to ignore him, though he settles back into the traditional silence. He blames his wife, of course, for this death as for those of the princesses. Once again he considers having her hands tied to her bedposts. This may be the only way to protect the child-to-be. Then again, such an arrangement might make her weep even more violently, causing more harm to the infant . . .
As if she guesses his thoughts, Isabel bursts into a loud storm of tears that rinses away the last traces of her face paint, soaks her ruff, and leaves it limp around her neck. The weary courtiers politely follow suit and soak themselves. Faces bloom with pimples and sores around the table.
“Your Highness.” Krolik materializes at Isabel’s side with a boldness that would not be tolerated if the situation were not so dire. As it is, Christian just ignores the Polish doctor, lets him do as he thinks best. “On behalf of your husband, I must forbid you to cry any longer. Think of the child within you. The son.” He offers her a cup of his special wine; Nicolas lifts it to Isabel’s mouth. “Health to both your souls.”
With the glass cold against her lips, Isabel looks hard at Christian. “We can rename the oldest girl Christina if you like. Since it is so important that every ruler must have your name.” Then she is violently, expansively sick into his lap.
FOOTPRINTS
THAT night, a thick frost settles over the palace. It turns the rain into ice and lays a downy white fuzz on top; it dulls the outlines of stone ornaments — mermaids, crosses, crescent moons, In tenebris lumen meum metue — and holds the light inside itself, so the roofs glow like fairy sails and the sentries’ helmets glitter. Christian’s shoes leave dark, distinct prints as he steps gingerly out onto the west tower to join the heavens.
All the stars, not just the new one, hang so low that the King thinks he might grab them, even without use of the several perspective glasses that the rival scholars and nobles have set up here and use around the clock — for Christian has changed his mind about draping the heavens in crepe and ordered that at this time, above all others, the overbright new star and its neighbors must be studied and analyzed so the future may be corrected if need be.
Skyggehavn Bay is a black stretch behind the palace spires, punctuated only by a lantern moving on Saint-Peter’s-on-the-Isle. The city crouches to the other side, a bumpy, tumorous mass lit here and there with some dull gold light that makes dim parody of the stars overhead.
“The world looks small tonight, what,” says Christian, dully. The world is bound to look small on a night like this, a night without a son. His belly cramps in nearly unbearable pain, but he doesn’t think he needs the stool now. What he needs is distraction.
His courtiers rush to agree with what he just said. Stellarius and Candenzius bow low in their dark robes, murmuring that the King honors them too greatly by visiting on this night of all nights, a night with a small world. As they speak, white frost shakes loose from their beards and drifts through the air.
Christian asks himself: A king has unlimited honors to give, unlimited wealth, unlimited land — what does he receive in return?
Love. The dutiful love of his people. The answer comes to him in his father’s voice, a voice the people did love. Christian IV was handsome until the day he died from a stray splinter in a joust. Christian V is not handsome. Nor is he loved.
Christian cannot bear to look at Nicolas in this moment. He turns instead to the closest of the perspective devices (Candenzius’s) and crouches to look up into it. He is pleased, once more, to be so much taller than the ordinary man that he cannot stand straight at the glass. Then again, he thinks his men should adjust their machines to his height; they could always stand on boxes, but how is the King to make himself shorter?
“Tell me what I am seeing,” he says.
“Your Majesty” — Candenzius hovers deferentially at his elbow —“the streams of star poisons are visible just now. I have brought the device into particular focus.”
“Hmm.” Christian gazes, sees nothing — just the same stars, somewhat dimmed in the complicated system of lens, light, and metal. “How do these poisonous streams look?”
“If you’ll permit me . . .” Candenzius steps to the glass, gives one of the lenses a quarter turn, checks again for himself while Stellarius watches with a dour expression.
“If Your Majesty would care to look through my glass,” the astronomer says, “you might see an interesting configuration in Scorpio that augurs for —”
“I have it!” Candenzius cheers for himself and steps back, bowing the King forward.
Given a choice without caring to choose, Christian steps listlessly up to Candenzius’s lens. He is suddenly bored with the stars, with court, with children and family and the question of succession. It is unfair that a king must spend so much of his life thinking about his own death and what will happen to his throne thereafter. But, to follow through with what he has declared he wants, he bends to the glass and looks.
And there it is. The optical trick of the glass transports him again up into the vault of sky, poking about giant spheres of brightness. And now he sees the poison streaming between them — not a milky trickle of light, as he expected, but a sort of wavering dark, like the heat that rises above a pot just before it boils. The stars are pushing this poison at each other in a raging battle. Inviting him to dive in, to crest the waves of it, like a warrior sailing off to a splendid, blinding fight.
“Beautiful,” he murmurs without thinking.
He looks up and sees the face of his love, Nicolas, dark in the starlight. The Count’s lips are pressed together as if for a kiss.
“Poison, Your Majesty!” Candenzius sounds delighted. “So clearly visible!”
Christian abruptly declares that he will retire to his cabinet.
Poison-auntie use to say there were no sore like the wound of not having, and the worst sorrow come of not knowing whether to weep be cause there be no thing to weep over. She make some potions not for killing but against sadness, to puff a spirit light as air or fill a heart with feeling where there were no feeling before, a dream-heavy kind of happiness.
Back then, half the aunties gone mad with emptiness. They figure they selves ruined to live behind walls with other women, men made in to women, swords to cut if they do not do as told, just one husband for all of them, and he gone to con
quer other lands six months the year. If they have a child that lives and they live too, then they be doubly kept, for to leave a baby be the sin that put them in a sack with a stone at they feet and the sack toss over the wall in to the bay, to make a garden of corpses till the eels come by and eat them. As happen, I believe, with my own mother, for every lady there be called my auntie, and I belong to none of they.
Some times in this narrow place there be too much to feel. Too-much live in my gut with an ache, too-much live in my fingers that poke and grope around it. A fear that smash against my heart till I cannot say what make me sick. Other than the thing inside me.
I see them girls shaking skirts when I go past; they think to shake away witch craft. I hear whisper-wonders about why I keep this position when so many children die and my first mistress be disgrace. Why I were the one to win Isabel’s favor when I pulled that finger from the muck. If I could speak, I may say, I were not the one who saw it first. Or, I did not kill the Prince. Or may be I would simple let them wonder at my power, like poison-auntie did.
When I go to my box of belongs, each night I see it rearrange. But they will find no clue in there.
Truth be, if there be truth, I do not know why I am here. With out the scarlet skirt to remind, Queen Isabel have forgot I helped her miracle, she never ask for me. May be I have been forgot entire, or may be Nursery Master Krolik have some plan. I were not one who waited on Prince Christian in especial — that were all ways Elinor, the Prince’s favorite.
Now Prince and Elinor both are gone, and there remain just a hand full of nurse and two little princess, too weak even to attend they brother’s grieving feast. They snuggle in the swans and mew like kittens; they do not like that the lion sit empty. They fear the journey they will make soon, to wherever it be that dead children go.
I feel my own doom too — it is a black bat in my belly. Soon I will be dead or at very least I will be shake out of court for ever. So each night may be the last I paint they girls’ wounds with guaiac from a little pot. A very little pot, a very little guaiac, I do n’t put on so much as the others be cause this is another thing I do not know about.
The little girls whimper that guaiac burns, ask me for drinks and sugar treats. I murmur, “Shhh, shh, sh,” but when their eyes fall on Ava Mariasdatter, they forget me and clap hands.
“A story!” cry Beatte. She is now the oldest. “I want the Frog Prince!”
Gorma say, “Princess on the Glass Mountain.”
I paint another of her sores and she start to weep. “Shhh, shh, sh,” I soothe her. I dab at wounds as if removing drips of guaiac, in doing this I wipe her guaiac away.
Ava Mariasdatter kneel at the fire place to do her work, but the princesses keep demanding for her. I must decide do I glare at Ava or ignore her till another nursey command her go, for she will not disappear if I order her only with my eyes.
When I wrote to Krolik, in my best language to imitate Duchess Margrethe, the letter that made Ava scrub-maid instead of nursey-maid, I did not expect she would still be in these rooms. I thought she would be in kitchens, privies, halls. But she is constant here to tend the fire place and watch from her eye-corners what the princesses be doing. She speak her stories to them when others do not see. May be she still spies for Nicolas and for Arthur. No doubt she want to call me witch.
When I think this the lump in my belly turn over and make my throat sour. I swallow hard and when I Shhh, shh, sh, I do it to calm the lump and not the girls.
“A story!” they whine together. “Tell us!”
Ava clang the brush in to her bucket as if she have some big grief on the world, as if this should not be her task, ruining her fingers that have been raised up for sewing fine seams and broideries. She open her mouth. “Once —” she begin.
At her noise, another nurse do say, “Go clean elsewhere.” Even with out understanding that Ava like to whisper tales of magic, or that this be what Beatte and Gorma expect when they see her.
Ava answer, “Doctor Krolik wanted special care to be taken with the fire places.” She play the game of martyr-maid and keep scraping round the coals to take out ash. Her apron be black.
This other nurse put hands on hips and stand square. “You can do that after the princesses are put to their night beds.”
“I want a story!” sob Beatte.
Gorma cry, too, “Stories!”
I paint another blister and wipe away the sting.
The nurses do take Ava out. As Ava pass me by, I shake my skirt. The wind stir a puff of ash that settle gray upon her face, and in this small way I have pleasure.
INSIDE THE KING
AFTER the grieving feast, the nights fold into each other like ribs of a fan. One, two, seven, and Christian’s belly grows ever tighter with pain, a knot cinched taut as a rope’s ends are pulled. Tonight he sits in his latrine closet and tries to push the pain away, make himself the king he needs to be.
Who would this person be? He tries to imagine. A stalwart, most assuredly unsheeplike man, noble, brave, and strong. Who puts love of his land and people before any other matter.
An infelicitous noise escapes.
Nicolas sponges the royal brow, coughing to disguise that sound. Nicolas is always most polite about such things. Christian squelches the impulse to apologize; a king must never say he is sorry, must never be embarrassed. Because he must never do anything embarrassing or wrong.
“Could you bring me some of Krolik’s wine?” he asks, as if the noise were really part of a conversation.
Nicolas’s physician has invented a new elixir that eases pain. It is sweet and dreamful, and Christian takes a sip with delight: because Nicolas’s middle finger brushed Christian’s lip as he raised the cup. It’s left behind a musky perfume and the manly tint of sweat. The air around wisps with the breath curling from Nicolas’s delicate nostrils.
A chink of glass against marble: the cup returns to its table. Christian shifts. Nicolas coughs again.
“Another sip,” Christian commands, and again Nicolas lifts the cup. This time his finger does not touch Christian’s mouth, but Christian feels the fingers in the warmth of the silver brim.
That delicious warmth spreads through the King’s belly, not exactly untying the knots but making them possible to bear. Filling in pockets of pain, smoothing over sore spots.
Christian sighs and rubs his backside on the red velvet padding. He lets himself grow careless about noises; Nicolas coughs a few more times. Dear Nicolas.
“Another sip.”
Such a blessing, this wine, these fingers.
The night sky is a coverlet worn out and mended many times — sometimes with a spangled fabric, sometimes with a dun. In places the moon and stars shine through; in others a thick gray cloud moves swift as a rat. We get sudden showers of sleety rain, then rayed brightness as Cassiopeia is revealed with that new star outshining the moon. The air, of course, is cold. There’s little left of the year.
Little left of my heart, I add with a taint of poetry that should make me sneer at myself. Once again I am abandoned; I have nothing but my buckets and a pair of hands worn raw with scrubbing. I haven’t spoken with Grammaticus in some weeks. I’ve spied him only from a distance as he rushes from one event to another. I no longer possess the courage to wait outside his rooms.
Pitying myself, I gaze at the new star and wish hard for a rescue, a way to win Grammaticus back. No, as long as I am wishing . . . Jacob, return to me. If you are at sea, use the bright new star to guide you . . .
Sleet brushes my face like a sloppy kiss. A spider kiss.
Soon wishes turn to anger. I stamp a foot, and then another, feeling a crackle as frost gives way to the warmth beneath the stones. It seems intolerable that I can do nothing to bring Jacob back to me, or even Arthur Grammaticus — an unsatisfactory suitor but a suitor (of a sort) nonetheless. Though I never loved him; I loved only Jacob. How is it possible for my heart to ache so long for one person? I must stop it, squash it, turn love to ha
te, and make myself a happier, freer person. Like Midi Sorte, who is full of hate and quite content, who has stolen Arthur (or never relinquished him in the first place) and forever looks as if she’d like to strike me, even at those times when (I admit to myself) I have most longed to be her friend.
There’s one clear way to cleanse myself of unwanted feelings: I can make a sacrifice at the witch’s hollow. Of course, once the priests learned what was happening there, they forbade it; the sacrifices reeked too much of pagan superstition, though some argued that nothing was more Catholic than sacrifice. (The Church never quite decided officially about Princess Sophia’s finger, either: Is it a miracle or merely an oddity? We may never know.) Throughout the murky early winter hours, it’s usually possible to find some hooded figure or other muttering a charm or prayer by that muddy lip, with an object disappearing inside. The guards, bored, chase them away, then watch the tributes sucked into the muck.
A guard passes now, én, to, én, to, marching. Women move in rhythms of three; men always act to a beat-step of two.
The guard wishes me a good evening. I wish one back to him.
Én, to, én, to. I look up through my breath and see men on top of the west tower, directing perspective machines at the sky. Stellarius, no doubt, and Candenzius, making use of the long darkness and my father’s invention. Arthur must be with them to record whatever it is they observe.
So much of my history, and of History, in one place.
Thinking to rid myself of all memories, all past and feeling, I dig into my waist pocket. I don’t know what I expect to find, but my hand gropes past my mother’s bracelet, kept there for safety (the dorter’s seen a theft or two lately), and comes up with Jacob’s amber needle case. I have held it close out of sentiment, but it is the perfect object to sacrifice. With a prayer, of course. Walking toward the hollow, with the guard’s back to me, I hold the case tight in my fist, letting the dry skin there crack. I pray . . . for a sense of tranquillity, of not-wanting, of health to my soul.