by John Updike
She wondered if her own motherlessness was discovered by the gaps of motherly feeling within her. She allowed nursemaids, tutors, riding masters, fencing instructors to intervene between herself and the growing boy. His games seemed designed to repel and exclude her—inscrutable, clattering games, with sticks and paddles, bows and arrows, dice and counters, noisy imitations of war in which he commanded, with his high-pitched voice and tense white face, the buffoon Yorik and some unwashed sons of the castle garrison’s doxies. The quiet hoops and tops and dolls of Gerutha’s girlhood had no place in this male world of projectile fantasy, of hits and thrusts and “getting even”—for a strict tally was kept in the midst of all the shouts and wrestling, she observed, as in the bloodier accountings of adult warfare, much as Horwendil boasted of how King Fortinbras, in being slain, had forfeited not only the invaded terrain in Jutland but certain coastal lands north of Halland on the coast of Sweathland, between the sea and the great lake of Vänern, lands held not for their worth, which was little, but as a gall to the opposing power, a canker of dishonor.
As she had been without siblings, so was Amleth. Her failure to be fecund again, she felt, was God’s rebuke for her failings of maternal feeling, which she could not hide from Him. She was troubled enough to mention the matter to Herda, the serving-maid who had seen her succumb to Horwendil’s suit, some seven years ago. In those years Herda had married Svend and borne him four children, before the King’s squire had been killed in one of Horwendil’s mop-up skirmishes with the Norwegians, whose throne had passed to the brother of Fortinbras, a foppish glutton with little fight in him. Horwendil delighted in striking against the outposts of this effete King’s loose rule.
“Dear little Amleth,” Gerutha tentatively began, “seems so isolated, such a brooding, quirkish five-year-old, that the King and I have long wondered whether a little brother or sister might turn him more sociable and humane.”
“So one might,” Herda tersely replied. She was wearing white as a sign of mourning for Svend. His death last year—in a raid wherein a supposedly defenseless little fishing port, rich from the herring trade, had treacherously hired itself a guard of Scottish swordsmen—had left her subdued. Gerutha sometimes scented in her maid bitterness against the throne. Kingship collects grudges and enemies as surely as a millpond accumulates silt.
“Humane, I say,” Gerutha went on, “because more and more I hear Amleth voice, toward his inferiors—the footmen and servers, and his playmates from the garrison’s brood—a certain cruelty, disguised as foolery. He and that loathsome Yorik are forever goading the poor solemn Lord Chamberlain with their tricks and madcap pretenses.”
“Having a brother or sister, my lady, doesn’t soften the soul, in my experience. I was one of nine, and some were shy, and some bold, and others good, and others the other way. We rubbed against one another like stones in a bucket, but sandstone remained sandstone and quartz quartz. The young prince means no harm; he has a good heart, but too busy a mind.”
“If only his father were to pay more attention … Amleth mocks me, even when he apes respect. Not yet six and he knows that women needn’t be listened to.”
“His Majesty keeps an eye out. He waits until the boy is ready to harden. Then he’ll take him up.”
“You and Svend …” She hesitated.
“We were happy, Your Highness, as things go for the less well born.”
“Your children—I envy you. You have them, and they have one another. Did you and Svend pray for so many?”
“Not much prayer involved, as I recall. They just came in the course of nature. They weren’t exactly wanted or unwanted. Sometimes, it could be, wanting them too much dampens the tinder, so to speak. The spark doesn’t catch. And, the King being so much away expanding his realm and smiting the Norwegians the way he does, maybe he misses the time. It’s God’s will, and God’s mystery. The trouble for most of us isn’t how to make ’em, but how to feed ’em.”
Gerutha stiffened, unwilling to see herself as her lessers saw her, as a queen ignorant of the common load. “How strange of God,” she agreed, “to bestow children upon those who cannot feed them and to deny them to those that could many times over.”
Herda paused, looking puffed up with perplexity, her pursed lips a stopper in a pink face. Then: “May I ask, have you much discussed your wanting another offspring with your lord the King?”
“As often as would be seemly. He is keener even than I to have more heirs. He envisions a succession, and does not like it hanging by a single thread. The Prince is not robust. His nervous temperament is susceptible to every shock.”
“It may be a sibling at this stage would be a shock. The King has a brother, and I have not heard His Majesty take much comfort from the fact.”
“Feng has chosen to abandon Denmark and pursue his fortunes in the progressive realms to the south.”
“As a kindness to the King, it may be. Absence can be a present. Concerning the delicate matter of which Your Highness flattered me to speak, a midwife might offer more detailed advice, though she would be fearful in these high places of seeming to know too much and being in the end hung as a witch or drawn and quartered as a traitor. My own advice would be to let nature follow its course, where we have such little choice in the matter. There’s a shape in things, fiddle and fuss however we will around the edges.”
“I shall strive to be more humble and submissive,” Gerutha sharply concluded, annoyed with herself for having sought wisdom in so lowly a place.
• • •
Years passed, and, though the Queen rarely shunned a wife’s bed-duty, the Prince remained an only child. As he aged into the first stages of manhood, growing suddenly leggy and his upper lip displaying a silken proto-mustache, Gerutha, nagged ever more strongly by a sense of estrangement from all that should gratify her, turned to Corambus, the last living official of Rorik’s court and a man whose affection for her she felt to be as old as she. If her father had been the life-giving sun, Corambus had been the reflective moon, moving at a harmonious distance, beaming down upon her when Rorik had been out of sight. His greeting, given several times a day as their paths crossed in Elsinore’s stone labyrinth—“How fares my gracious lady?”—was met on this one occasion by a request, plaintive beneath its regal dignity, for a brief audience. She received him an hour later within the fir-floored oriel solar that had once been Rorik’s chamber but which she had appropriated as her private closet, for romance-reading and embroidery and gazing from her two-pillared triple window toward the gray-green Sund, whose restless, moody expanse seemed possessed of a freedom she envied.
“Dear old friend, adviser to my father and now to my beloved husband,” she began, “I am curious as to your impressions of Amleth’s progress. His activities, ever more manly and martial, take him farther and farther from my weak woman’s scope.”
Corambus had been thin in Gerutha’s first memories of him, but fleshiness had overtaken him young, and, his high post demanding much patient sitting and feasting, had quite mastered his figure by his mid-fifties. Yet there was still something adroit about him; he moved crisply within invisible and supportive constraints, his framing notion of himself as a perfect courtier, a stout prop to the throne. Gingerly he seated himself on a three-legged chair whose flat triangular bottom and narrow spired back ill accommodated his anatomy, and tipped his large head (its rotundity emphasized by the quaint smallness of his ears and nose and the stubby goatee jutting from his chin) to lend a portly attention. He spoke in the twinkling, rounded gestures—a gracefully upheld forefinger, a deftly dropped wink—of a man whose physical substance confidently seconded his sense of his station. “The Prince has a fine seat on a charger, and rarely misses the straw man’s vital area with his lance. He draws the bowstring with a steady hand, but is a trifle quick to release. His chess is indifferent, lacking a degree of foresight; his duelling enthusiastic, if short on finesse; his Latin that of one who can only think in Danish. Otherwise there is little
to complain of. He is rex in ovo, as should, natura naturans, be the very case.”
Yet the old counsellor’s eyes were watchful from within his impressive head, under its stiff green hat in the shape of a brimmed sugarloaf; he was waiting for Gerutha to declare herself. His hair hung beneath his cap in greasy yellow-gray strands that had darkened the shoulder of his high-collared houppelande, and—another untidy touch—he had one of those wet lower lips that appear slightly out of control, spraying softly on certain sibilants, drifting to one side or another when relaxed.
The Queen asked, “Does he seem—how can I say this?—hard-hearted? Disrespectful to his elders, and callous to his inferiors? Somehow wanton in his moods, which are so strangely quick to change? With me he can be one moment affectionate, as though he understands me better than any man ever has, and the next moment be just a boy, turning his back as if I am of no more account than a wet nurse to the weaned. I feel, dear friend, an utter failure as a mother.”
Corambus tut-tutted and allowed himself a knowing smile, a rictus that tipped his head and sucked his shiny lower lip sideways. “You accuse yourself where no other would think to. Not a mother alone raises a prince; the entire state is responsible. Having endured the labor, you discharged the major duty—God often welcomes a young mother to Paradise at that point. By giving the infant suck for a year, you performed what many a noble lady, fastidious of her high bosom, delegates to an uncouth peasant girl. As Amleth learned to walk, to lisp, to string together sentences, to make sense of letters, to begin to grasp the tools and usages and necessities of the world, you were attentive beyond the accustomed royal behavior. Shamefully often, a child born to be God’s agent on earth is worse neglected than the offspring of a trull and a passing highwayman. You have done lovingly by your boy. Let go, my good queen. Amleth at thirteen is formed for good or ill. The quirks that disturb you I would lay to his predilection for the actor’s trade. He must try on many attitudes in rapid succession. To be sincere, then insincere, and then sincere in his insincerity—such shifts fascinate him. How marvellous, to his student mind, is this human capacity to be many things, to take many roles, to enlarge one’s preening, paltry identity with many half-considered feints and deceptions. You have noticed, I am sure, his animation and awe when a troop of players travels to Elsinore—how avidly he studies their rehearsals, takes note of the fine points of their illusions, imitates while private in our lobbies and cloisters the rolling cadence of their recitations.”
“Yes,” the Queen interrupted eagerly, “I hear him in his solar, orating to himself!”
Corambus held to his chain of thought. “The Church has done ill, I sometimes believe, in letting up, in these lax times, its imprecations against this unholy travesty of theatrical performance, which, aping Creation, distracts men from last things and from first things as well. And how close, come to think upon it, the boy clung to the late Yorik, until that tireless jester, shaky from all his merry dissipations, joined the mass of mankind in the last, best joke on us all. Your son loved him, madame, and loves all clowns and triflers, as releasing him from heavy thoughts of rule and self-discipline. Your husband sets the boy, it may be, too stern an example. But I have no doubt, when clear duty is set before him, that Amleth, though turning it this way and that in his mind, will end in doing the needful.”
“May it prove so,” Gerutha said, not entirely persuaded, and obliged to defend her husband. “The King does not mean to be stern; he is beset with the threats of an unrestrained Norway, a seething Poland, a rebellious Holsten, not to speak of the peasants and the clergy, who constantly resent the cost of government.”
“Greatness has the disadvantage,” Corambus tactfully observed, “that all less great are enemies to it.”
“In honesty, the King is easier with the boy than I. As they more and more approach the same stature and follow the same pursuits, Horwendil speaks ever more lovingly of Amleth. It is I who, in the helplessness of my sex, entertain anxieties.”
Corambus sat erect for a moment, arranging upon his broad thighs the fall of his houppelande’s huge scalloped sleeves, and then leaned a little closer than before, and spoke in a softer voice. “Just so. It is not Amleth whose health seems out of joint, given the dreaming flamboyance and outward awkwardness common to the commencement of manhood, but, may I say, his mother. As a girl, Gerutha, you were radiant and serene; you warmed every heart. As a woman, of now thirty—”
“A year more than thirty, as of October. Amleth’s age reversed.”
“—you are still radiant but, in some intimate reach, disconsolate. Yet no visible discolor tinges your status, the highest a woman may attain in Denmark.”
“Too high and too large, if I lack spirit to fill it. My hopes when young had been set on siblings for Amleth, for a slew of siblings, to fill Elsinore with happy noise.”
“Children are indeed a comfort. Their needs supplant ours, and our being feels justified in their care. We hide behind them, in a sense; our coming deaths are lost in the clutter of family matters. My Laertes, scarce older than your tricksome son, already thinks himself his father’s protector, as well as that of his little toddling sister, left motherless, alas—”
Gerutha reached out to touch the widower’s rounded hand as it returned to his chair’s arm, having dabbed at his eye with a voluminous sleeve. “Magrit is happy in Heaven,” she comforted him. “The world was a travail to her fine spirit.” The world, she thought, and the succession of stillbirths the poor woman had suffered between the son and the daughter she had successfully borne. In Gerutha’s sense of it this fine-spirited wife had been worn to a wraith by the demands of Corambus’s goatish lust.
The counsellor recalled himself, with a rasp in his voice, to his queen’s vague complaints. “The lack of children leaves a woman too idle,” he pronounced, “especially if her husband rules a scattered island kingdom, with miles of coast bare to foreign assault.”
“My husband”—Gerutha hesitated, but she had a sore grievance within, and sensed that what she said would gratify her sly listener—“is all that my father promised he would be, but”—she hesitated again, before giving way to her weaker side—“I did not choose him. Nor did he choose me but as part of a personal polity. He cherishes me, but as one of his public duties, at no risk to his many others, or to himself.”
She was bringing the attentive courtier too close to treason; Corambus recoiled into stiffness. “Why desire risk?” He leaned forward again, his lower lip gleaming. “You read too many of these immoral Gaulish romances, which would make idle, sterile adoration the main business of life. If I may speak with the frankness of a father, you should read and embroider less, and exert your body in sport more. You should ride, you should hunt, as you did as a girl. You grow heavy, Your Majesty. Rorik’s quick blood turns stagnant in you and tips your balance of humors toward melancholy.”
She laughed, to wave him away with his effrontery, in which she heard a jealous fondness speak. “I never thought, my substantial old friend, to hear you admonish me for heaviness.”
“It was a manner of speaking—a spiritual heaviness.”
“Of course. Good Corambus, it has much lightened me to have you listen to my idle thoughts. Just to speak them revealed them as airy, and groundless.”
Doffing his conical green hat, swirling his abundant sleeves, the Lord Chamberlain took his leave, satisfied that he had offered what bracing advice he could. If he had irritated her, she had irritated him by asking that he give serious ear to a woman’s vagaries. Yet it pleased him to know that there was a crack in the King’s arrangements, a stir of unease near the throne. He bowed his way out, leaving Gerutha to her days.
O the days, the days in their all but unnoticed beauty and variety—days of hurtling sun and shade like the dapples of an exhilarated beast, days of steady strong cold and a blood-red dusk, tawny autumn days smelling of hay and grapes, spring days tasting of salty wave-froth and of hearth-smoke blown down from the chimney pots, misty da
ys of sifted sunshine and gentle fitful rain that glistened and purred on the windowsill like a silvery cat, days of luxurious tall clouds that brought thunder east from Jutland, days when the shoreline of Skåne lay vivid as a purple hem upon the Sund’s rippling breadth, days of high ribbed skies like an angel’s carcass, December days of howling sideways snow, March days of hail from the north like an angry knocking at the door, June days when greenness smothered every vista, days without qualities, days with a hole in the middle, days that never knew their own mind and ended in insomnia, days of travel, days of ceremony when she and Horwendil were fixed in place like figures beaten in brass or else overanimated like actors, dancing through sheets of candlelight and forests of food, wash days when amid laughter and lye she slaved with the red-handed wenches in thrall to Elsinore, sick days when she floated in a fever and received a parade of soft-spoken visitors one of whom might be faceless Death taking her to join Rorik and Marlgar and Ona, Ona who had died when younger than she, and then days of tender recovery, days when beech trees were in long red bud and the willows yellow, days when a serving-girl dropped a stillborn child, days when Horwendil was absent, days when she and he had made love the night before, days when she ate too much, days when she light-headedly fasted, days that began with the Sund glazed like a lake of mercury beneath a pearly dawn, days when wind whipped spray from wild waves like flares of white fire, menstrual days, saints’ days—the days passed, and Gerutha felt them stealing away with her life, all the while that she moved through such activities and engagements as befitted a Scandinavian queen, helpmate to a handsome blond king who with the years grew ever more admirable and remote, as if enlarging as he receded from her.
“The Hammer,” Feng told her. “I used to call him the Hammer. Dull, but he hit you square on the head.”
And that was how Gerutha felt on the days after she and the King had made love—hammered into a somewhat blissful submission, nailed down, dispatched. Feng, Horwendil’s brother, had returned from adventuring in the south, having placed his sword and lance and versatile tongue at the service, most recently, of the masters of Genoa in its long struggles with Pisa over the control of Corsica and Sardinia. “The Mediterranean,” Feng explained to Gerutha, “is warm enough for a man to swim in pleasurably, if certain transparent bell-shaped creatures do not sting him to death. On the other shore lies Africa, where the Muslim infidels refine their tortures and abominations, and to the east lies an empire of curious Oriental Christians, who send armies to dispute the presence or absence of an ‘i’ in a Greek theological term, and who permit their priests to marry and wear beards. I would like, next, to visit there. Their nobles, rather than wield the cudgel and broadsword as in these backward northern lands, prefer the dagger and have greatly developed the art of poisoning, so I have been told. Many insidious Asiatic influences are brought back to Genoa by returning Crusaders and their captives, along with much wealth and ingenuity of thought. You would like the land south of the Alps, Gerutha. It is hilly and green, and each hilltop city vies with the others, making endless work for us roving warriors. There is a jewelled, fantastic aspect not seen in our foggy bogs, or boggy fogs. The villages perch most astoundingly on rocks; the slopes are terraced up to every crag; and the people, who are darker-skinned than we, have a soft and clever nature, sunny yet assiduous in the practice of manual crafts.”
