An Antic Disposition

by Alan Gordon

  “You look parched after watching us with your mouths hanging open,” said Amleth as the room applauded. “Allow me to refill your cups.” The thralls had fled long before, so this offer was met with approval. Amleth dashed to the kitchen and returned with two massive pitchers of wine. He jumped up on the table and dashed around the room, filling the cup of every man before him.

  “To warm beds and Danish maidens in them!” he shouted, and the mercenaries guffawed and drank.

  And in a minute, they were, to a man, slumped over the tables, snoring.

  “So, that’s what we looked like,” said Amleth, looking around the room.

  “What did you put in the wine?” I asked.

  “The Sleep of Death, of course,” he said. “Now, we must hurry. I will kill no more Danes tonight. Take those two over there and drag them into your quarters.”

  As I did so, Amleth threw on his cloak and scurried out the rear of the great hall. By the time I had returned, so had he, the cloak bulging and rattling. He upended it, and onto the main table fell the brick his father had given him, along with some five dozen stakes plucked from his stockade.

  With each mercenary he removed the man’s cloak, then tied it around him so that the knot hung just off the clay floor. Then he took a stake, put it through the knot, and pounded it into the floor with the brick, pinioning the soldier where he slept.

  When he was done, he tossed me my pack.

  “Get your cloak on,” he ordered me. Then he grabbed one of the barrels of pitch kept in the corner for waterproofing the stockade walls and tilted it on its side. He took an ax from one of the soldiers and hacked several holes in the barrel. Then he gave it a shove, and it rolled the length of the hall, spilling its contents everywhere. He repeated the process on the other side with a second barrel, then surveyed the scene before him.

  “They’ll be waking soon,” I said, horror creeping into me.

  “They won’t be waking at all,” he replied. He took three torches from sconces in the wall, then turned toward me.

  “Ever juggled torches?” he said, sending them into the air over his head. “Trickier than clubs, because the balance is uneven and there’s only one safe end to … oops! Clumsy of me.”

  One of the torches went sailing across the room and landed in a pool of pitch on the left. The flames shot up immediately.

  “Well, since I’ve only got two left,” he said, and he put his left hand behind his back while keeping them going with his right. “Damn, there goes another.”

  The right side of the room was burning now. He caught the last torch, then looked about the room critically.

  “You know, I never did like these tapestries,” he said, and he touched the torch to the cloths hanging on both sides. The flames encircled the room like a noose.

  Smoke was everywhere, and through it, I saw soldiers gasping in their sleep. Some were even moving feebly, trying to shake off the effects of the drug, but the stakes held them fast.

  “How long have you been planning this?” I asked.

  “Since I was nine,” said Amleth.

  I turned and started to leave the room, but he clamped his hand down on my arm.

  “Wait,” he said. “The secret to comedy is timing.”

  We stood there, the sweat pouring through our whiteface as the heat intensified. Then he pulled me out and shouted, “Fire!”

  I took up the cry, and we fled through the stockade, screaming for the guards to come down, our cloaks concealing our motley and white-face.

  “We’ll alert the town!” shouted Amleth as we raced across the drawbridge, but once we passed the first building we cut left and ran from Slesvig. Behind us, there was a thundering crash as the roof of the great hall collapsed and the flames soared higher than the stockade walls. We stopped to look at it for a moment.

  “Listen,” said Amleth. “I drugged them. I killed them. Take no part of this burden upon yourself.”

  “I helped you,” I said. “The sin lies with me as well.”

  “Then I owe you my thanks,” he said.

  “I have a price,” I said, turning to him.

  “Name it,” he said.

  “Tell me about my father,” I said.

  “We have to run,” he protested.

  “Then tell me while we run,” I insisted. “Everything that you can remember about him until we reach Gustav’s Stone.”

  “Agreed,” he said. “Let’s go. We can still make it there before dawn.” And we ran into the night, never setting foot in Slesvig again.

  * * *

  Claudia leaned into me, holding me tight.

  “Why did you never tell me this?” she asked.

  “I’ve never told anyone,” I said. “What could I tell you, Duchess? That you married a bastard born of an adulterous affair? That the man you married once helped burn sixty men to death in their sleep?”

  “Do you really think that matters to me?” she asked. “I gave up nobility and prosperity to follow you into poverty and danger. Why do you think I did that? Because I was worried about rank or social niceties? I married you because I loved you. I followed you because I believed in you, and in the Guild. And I am here with you now, and will still be here in the morning, and the next day, and every day after that.”

  We held on to each other for a while.

  “Whatever happened to Amleth?” she asked.

  “He went to England,” I said. “Worked his way into the English court and attached himself to a lady there. He became known as a melancholy fool, a most paradoxical and ironic creature. Had his share of adventures, from what I heard, then ended up fleeing with her into the country where he met a shepherdess and fell in love. He quit the Guild, married her, and now keeps a farm and carters as far away from courts as he could possibly get. I never saw him after we split up.”

  “And Horace?”

  “He’s the Chief Fool in Paris, now. La Vache died a few years ago.”

  “Did Amleth tell you about your father?”

  “What he could. I still don’t know anything about Yorick before he came to Slesvig. The sparrow-hawk he had meant that he must have won the fools’ contest at Fecamp, but I have never met a fool who knew much about him. All I have of my father are stories from Amleth and Father Gerald.”

  “And this absurd, tall, skinny body,” she said. “What strikes me is that both you and he were fools who fell in love with ladies who ended up marrying other men. His lady ended up loving him, but they died unhappily. You, on the other hand, ended up winning your lady. For all the horrors that you have been through, you were still judged worthy of that.”

  “Judged by whom?”

  “By the world, by fate, by God, and by the First Fool, Our Savior,” she said. “Let’s set about the task of raising our daughter, and we’ll call it a happy ending. Shall we?”

  I held her to me, and we eventually went to sleep. And when I woke up in the morning, she was still there.

  Coda

  .. what would you undertake

  To show yourself your father’s son in deed

  More than in words?”

  —Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII

  It ends like this.

  Two fools stood at a crossroads in southern Jutland. They had run through the night, the older one gasping out story after story while they dodged patrols and clambered over windbreaks. They passed Magnus’s farm not long before dawn. The old farmer, who slept little these days, saw them run by, and thought he recognized someone he had long thought dead. But then they were gone, and he thought he had dreamt it.

  The faint glow of the flames behind them had vanished, but the first glimmerings of the sun tried to pierce the thick clouds coming in right as they crossed the tiny bridge over the stream east of Gustav’s Stone. “Sunrise,” said the younger fool. “We made it.”

  “May I stop talking now?” pleaded the older one hoarsely. “I have no voice left. We should eat before we go on.”

  They sat with their backs to the
stone as they ate, looking at the bridge.

  “Good old Gustav,” said the older one.

  “Good old Gustav,” echoed the younger one. He hesitated. “Will you ever come back?”

  “No,” said the other one. “There’s nothing left for me there. Best to make a clean break with the past.” He looked at the ancient burial mounds to the north. “There’s too much past here, anyway.”

  They finished eating, then stood and stretched.

  “I guess this is it,” said the younger one reluctantly.

  “I guess so,” said the older. Then he fumbled inside his pouch. “Look, I want to give you something.”

  “What?” said the other.

  “When I found Yorick’s grave, I buried his bundles with him,” said the older fool. “But there’s one thing of his that I still carry.”

  He pulled out a small wooden flute and handed it to the younger fool.

  “But this was his birthday present to you,” protested the younger fool. “I can’t take this.”

  “Please,” said the older. “I want you to have it.”

  “All right,” said the younger. “Thanks.”

  They stood awkwardly for a moment.

  “Well, touch stone for luck,” said the younger, rapping his knuckles on the standing stone.

  “What?”

  “I’ve always heard that if you pass Gustav’s Stone on a pilgrimage, you touch it for luck,” he explained.

  “We’re certainly due for some,” said the older fool.

  He rapped his knuckles on the stone.

  “Touch stone for luck,” he said. “Touch stone, turn and leave. Touchstone. I like it.”

  “Like what?” asked the younger.

  “I need a new name,” said the older.

  “Oh,” said the younger. He turned to look at the runes. Then something caught his eye. He leaned over and picked up a small stone that sat by the larger.

  “Look at this,” he said, and the older fool peered over his shoulder. There were faint words scratched onto the face of the stone. “Terence was here,” read the older fool.

  “Wonder who he was,” said the younger.

  “No idea,” said the older. “At least he has a stone.”

  “I suppose so,” said the younger, setting it carefully back where he had found it.

  They looked at each other.

  “I guess this is it,” said the older fool, holding out his hand. “Stultorum numerus…”

  “Infinitus est,” said the younger, clasping it.

  It began to snow as they let each other go.

  “I told you it was going to snow,” said the older fool. “Good thing. It will cover our tracks.”

  “See?” said the younger. “Our luck’s changing already.”

  They thumbed their noses at each other, then the older fool took the west road across the bog, and the younger fool headed south into the forest. The wind scattered the snow about, covering the bog, the bridge, the burial mounds, the large stone and the small. Around them the forgiving snow fell, until the face of the world itself was white.

  Historical Note

  Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear?

  Let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.

  After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live. ”

  —Hamlet, Act II, Scene II

  The Danish town of Slesvig is now the German town of Schleswig, the border between the two countries having moved north in the nineteenth century. It was of this long-standing dispute that Lord Palmerston famously observed, “Only three people understood the Schleswig-Holstein question. The first was Albert, the Prince consort, and he is dead; the second is a German professor, and he is in an asylum: and the third was myself—and I have forgotten it.’’ The St. Petri Dom, or cathedral, has been somewhat modified from its twelfth-century origins, but with its tower and striking red roof preserved. Another survivor of the time, the church of St. Andreas, still stands south of the Schlei inlet, not far from the Wikinger Museum Haithabu.

  There is no record of the palace started by Ørvendil ever being completed, but the foundation of the Gray Monastery is believed to be originally from a palace built in town. There is no trace of the stockade on the island at the mouth of the river, although a very fine fifteenth-century castle, the Schloss Gottorf, now stands on the site. Its status as a museum and landmark prevents any further excavation on the island.

  The success of Valdemar the First in unifying the Danish throne in 1157, combined with the rise of Absalon to the Bishropic of Roskilde, and later the See of Lund, marked the beginning of a Golden Age in Danish history, often referred to as the Age of the Valdemars for the three kings of that name. Perhaps their most lasting achievement was the founding of a merchants’ haven, or Kjoebenhavn, on the eastern coast of the island of Sjælland. It would eventually become Copenhagen, the present capital.

  The story of Amleth was first found in written form in the Gesta Danorum, or History of the Danes, by Saxo Grammaticus around the beginning of the thirteenth century. Saxo was a clerk to Archbishop Absalon, and probably wrote it at his behest. It remains our principal source for Danish history of this period, which is unfortunate, as it is also widely considered to be unreliable. Saxo uncritically mixed in Norse mythology, folklore, gossip, rumor, and religious moralizing in unequal measure. (English translations are difficult to find, but a nineteenth-century one of the first nine chapters is at http://www.sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/DanishHistory/.)

  His account of the fatal dinner of the three kings in Roskilde differs significantly from that of the Fools’ Guild. He places his patron Absalon squarely and heroically at the side of Valdemar, and fails to mention anything of the crucial contributions of the jesters Gerald and Larfner. Father Gerald’s version, as recorded by Theophilos, makes it clear that Absalon, or Axel as he was known then, was absent from this key event in the life of Valdemar, although his brother Esbern Hvide (“The Swift”) is given prominence. Considering the long, mutual antipathy between the Guild and the Church, it is not surprising that each favored itself at the expense of the other. As to which version is more likely to be true— there may not be enough grains of salt in the Lubeck mines with which to take in reading either one. It is worth noting, however, that while Saxo wrote to publicly flatter the Archbishop, the Fools’ Guild account was a private history, meant only for Guild archives. That alone might tip the balance toward the Guild’s version, but we can never be certain.

  Yet while the Gesta Danorum makes an inadequate history, it has unquestionably provided us with the source of one of the greatest plays in the history of Western civilization. Or was it just one of the sources?

  Scholars generally believe that the history passed to Shakespeare first through a 1570 French version, Histoires tragiques, by Francois de Belleforest, then possibly through an earlier staged version in English known now as the Ur-Hamlet, possibly by Thomas Kyd. (A good discussion of this transmutation may be found in Saxo Grammaticus and the Life of Hamlet by William F. Hansen, University of Nebraska Press, 1983.)

  However, as has been proposed in earlier historical notes for this series of translations, it is possible that Shakespeare received Fools’ Guild records that included this story, either pilfered from their repository at an abbey in western Ireland by William Kempe, as believed by this author, or through the poet Edmund Spenser, the theory of the historian and author Peter Tremayne. A close analysis of Shakespeare’s play will find numerous instances of plot never mentioned in Saxo’s history, but found in that of Theophilos.

  I am sorry to report that with this translation I have finished the store of surviving manuscripts at the abbey. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the good souls there for their generosity of spirit, and for their discretion. Also, for bearing with my disastrous efforts in the kitchen—Brother Liam, you remain in my prayers, and I am glad to hear that you ar
e back on your feet.

  However, as this translation goes to press, I am the recipient of some exciting news. A recent earthquake in northern Italy has dislodged a pile of rubble that had blocked a previously unknown tunnel entrance at a ruined monastery in the Dolomites. The archaeologists who had been excavating the site were stunned to find a group of sealed casks containing scroll after scroll of records marked with the seal and motto of the Fools’ Guild! I have been invited to assist in the examination of these documents, and will report back to you any new discoveries contained therein. Until then, fellow fools.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks go first and foremost to Professor Anthony Perron of Northwestern University, for pointing me in the right direction. The author gratefully acknowledges the scholarship of Birgit and Peter Sawyer, Tobias Faber, William F. Hansen, Hastings Rashdall, F. M. Powicke, A. B. Emden, Palle Lauring, Robert Bartlett, and the many contributors to Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, Phillip Pulsiano, editor.

  Thanks to Jim Huang, Sue Feder, and Jo Ellyn Clarey for guiding me through the convention thickets; to Keith Kahla, my editor, and Mitchell Waters, my agent, without whom this book would not exist, and you would be standing there with empty hands, perhaps being mistaken for a mime.

  Above all, to my wife, Judy, and son, Robert, for sharing their time, their space, and their lives.