by John Updike
A week had passed after her return when Corambis took her aside into a little recess of the long, pillared, unevenly paved corridor on the way to the chapel. “The excursion to Skåne has put a new gloss upon my queen’s mien,” he observed, but tentatively, as if willing to be contradicted. They had their secret between them, which freighted their words with danger.
“It was a relief to get away from Elsinore and its petty intrigues,” she said, rather loftily. “The King shone to glorious advantage. The people over there adored him.”
“The sun rises in the east,” Corambis said. His red-rimmed eyes, their lids yellow and loose, twinkled as if he had said something witty. She wondered how senile he was becoming: that absurd outdated sugarloaf hat, that houppelande with its trailing scalloped sleeves. She understood how Horvendile might feel: get rid of the gabby old baggage.
“The people are so trusting and loving,” she said. “One forgets, sometimes, whom one is ruling. It lifts the heart to see them.”
“Without forgetfulness, milady, life would be intolerable. All that we have ever felt or known would come crowding in upon us, like rags stuffed into a bag, as they say happens to unfortunates in the moment of drowning. It is averred that it is a painless death, but only the drowned could tell us with assurance, and they are silent, being so. That is, drowned.” He waited, head cocked and hat with it, to see what she might make of such assorted wisdom.
“I will endeavor not to drown,” she stated coolly. He was anxious, she could sense, to pick up the trail of their shared secret and bygone collusion.
“All Denmark wishes you to swim, none more fervently than I. It gladdens my cloudy old sight to see Rodericke’s daughter enjoy the love and esteem to which her proud blood entitles her. You have taken less joy in the throne, as we have previously discussed, than could be imagined by those multitudes who do not sit upon it.”
“We have had many discussions, on this matter or that, in our long acquaintance.”
“Indeed, and I beg forgiveness if I seem to thrust one more upon you. But, speaking of forgetfulness, as I believe we just were, unless I forget, a mutual friend of ours wonders whether or not he has been, in the stimuli and exaltations of your travels, forgotten.”
“He stays at Lokisheim, and seems himself forgetful.”
Corambis, last living link to her father’s dishevelled court, and safeguard of her childish identity, now seemed to be leading her astray, tugging her back to what she had resolved to put behind her. “He is far from forgetful, but respectful of your wishes.”
“My wish—” She could not quite entrust to this elderly intermediary words of severance that Fengon deserved to hear from her own lips.
Corambis’s tongue moved quickly into her pause. “He has a third gift to deliver, he bade me remind you. It is his last, and if you deign to receive it, it will spell quits to his giving, and to his heretical leanings, whatever that might mean. The phrase is his.”
“My wish, I started to say, is to avail myself no more of your quiet lodge by Gurre Sø, now that the weather is pleasant enough to offer retreat out of doors. Your queen is most grateful for your permissive hospitality. I recovered a measure of contentment and resignation in my virtual solitude.”
Yet her heart beat at the picture of Fengon alone with her there, where the secluded lake gleamed to its far inverting shore, reflecting the sky like a great oval salver.
“He asked me to beg you to name a day,” Corambis insisted gently, with a courtier’s reluctance to disturb royal equanimity.
Haughty, wishing this pander and his pathetic daughter banished from her arrangements, Geruthe named the next day.
The woods around them were freshly but fully leafed. A steady warm drizzle further reduced visibility. The far side of the lake with its church could not be seen. The month had changed from April to May. The guards who rode with her—stolid on the way, looser and even jolly on the way back, with the ale absorbed while waiting through her rendezvous—seemed solemn and tense today, as if aware of a decisive point reached. Herda, marking this long-deferred resumption of the picnic habit, had packed an ample lunch—enough cheese and bread and salt meat and dried fruit for six—and the sight of the bright osier basket so heavily laden lightened the whole adventure somehow, making it seem less terminal than Geruthe had conceived it. We eat, we ride, we experience the days in their tones of weather, we love, we marry, we encounter life in each of its God-ordained stages, no plague or accident cutting it short—life is part of nature, its beginning impossible to recall and its ending not to be contemplated outside of church, the home of last things.
Fengon and Sandro were late, as they had never been before, as if putting off an adverse verdict. When they came, they were soaked by the nine leagues from Lokisheim. Fengon distractedly explained, “We had to be careful, where the road was rocky, the horses didn’t slip on the wet stones.” He knew he had lost ground. Alone with her in their corner room, he twitched with nervous energy, and shivered in his soaked cloak. He smelled of wet wool, wet leather, wet horse. The fire the lame caretaker had built had nearly died in the delay; together they worked at reviving it. Fengon laid too many logs too close; Rodericke had told Geruthe as a girl, one night as she sat drowsy in his lap after dinner, that a fire was a creature that needed like all others to breathe. Their interview today would be short; there would not be time for the brazier coals to heat.
The log fire poked into a reluctant revival, Fengon stood and said accusingly, “You enjoyed Skåne.”
“Women enjoy travel. It is a pity, since we are rarely invited.”
“Horvendile was a satisfying companion.”
“Yes, Fengon. Pomp is his element, and his happiness overflowed onto me.”
“I fear that those of us you left behind gave you little reason to return.”
She had to smile, for all her grim resolve, at this bearded man’s boyish sulk. “I had, for reason, the third gift you promised me. From your temper, you would as soon save it for another, who gratifies you more.”
“You gratify me all too well, as I believe I have persuaded you. But my inkling today is that it would be presenting a vain bribe to my executioner.”
Outside the lancet window the soft rain pattered from shelf to shelf of fresh greenery. Never had they felt so sealed in. Fengon was unexpectedly vivid to her—his soaked odor, his clever face tanned with spring’s windy sun, his nervous, offended warmth. Horvendile and the ecclesiastical pageants of Skåne seemed far at her back. Geruthe had noticed before how hard it was to hold one man in mind while confronting another.
She told him, lightly, “All mortals are mounting the gallows steps, but how near to the top we have come only God knows. Your inkling characterizes me unkindly. As soon call me your rescuer. We know equally well the height of the fall we might take. To banish you from these private audiences would be but to reinforce your own wise action when you last banished yourself from Denmark, a dozen years ago.”
“I was well short of fifty then, and am now nearing sixty. I thought to shake your spell, but instead it strengthened and I have weakened. My life runs low on chances. But have no mercy on me. The Queen must save herself; her whim is justice, her word is my law.”
Geruthe laughed, at her fickle, fluttering feelings as much as at Fengon’s chastising gravity. He looked monkish in his soggy hood. “Take off your stinking cloak, at least,” she commanded him. “Did you bring my final present in it?”
“Bundled dry against my breast,” he said. Removing his cloak, he spread out for her on the bed a long woman’s tunic woven of interlocking and wavering peacock colors, green and blue and yellow spiced with black and red specks, the fabric more flexible than skin itself, though stiffened at the collar and sleeve-ends and hem with rows of tiny sewn pearls. Its threads caught the light as if faceted. “This kind of cloth is novel in Denmark,” Fengon explained. “Silk. The thread is secreted by horned green worms fed only on mulberry leaves. The eggs and seeds, the legend goe
s, were once smuggled out of China by Persian friars in their hollow staffs, and thus to Byzantium. The cocoons the worms spin, for a blind moth that lives but a few days, are boiled and picked apart by children’s fingers, and then old women braid the filaments into yarn, woven in turn into patterns as miraculous as that which you see, to image forth the bejewelled glory of Heaven.”
Geruthe touched the shimmering cloth, and in that touch was her undoing. “I should put it on,” she said.
“Not so your husband will see it, for he would know it is no item of northern manufacture.”
“I should put it on now, for its giver to appraise. Stand there.” She wondered at her tone of command. She had mounted to an eminence of abandon. The rain thickened to a torrent outside and the room dimmed, but for the shuddering glow of the revived fire. Its heat coated Geruthe’s skin as she shed her own damp cloak, and the sleeveless surcoat, and her long plain tunic with its flowing sleeves, and the white cotte beneath that, leaving only a linen chemise, in which she shivered. Fine drops ricocheting from the stone sill of the window behind her, its casement left ajar, pricked her bared skin. The fire’s heat on her arms and shoulders felt like an angelically thin armor. Again she was reminded of something from a far corner of her life—a wifely memory faintly tasting of humiliation. The Byzantine tunic, stiff where those bands were knobbed with pearls, shrouded her head for a rustling instant, in which the sound of the rain overhead on the slates merged with the amplified rush of blood in her ears. Then, her head restored to air and light, she posed in the splendid sheath of silk, so stiff and pliable at once, so crystalline and fluid. The peacock colors changed from green to blue and back again as she moved: the silk shifted tint somehow as feathers will. She lifted her arms so the ample sleeves fell free, wide wings, and then continued the motion to remove from her coiled braids the bronze pins, skewers long enough to reach a man’s heart through his ribs. The rain outside, the heat at her back, the silk on her skin immersed her in nature, where there was no sin, no turning back. “Do I look as you imagined?”
“A thousand times I believed I had imagined it, but I had failed. There are realities we cannot conceive.”
“Do I overfill it at my matronly age, so it hangs less pleasingly than upon one of your bony Byzantine whores?”
He did not answer the taunt; really the sight of her seemed to have made Fengon stupid.
“Why are you standing so far away?”
He jumped a step, startled from his enchanted contemplation. “You commanded me to. You were severe with me.”
“That was before you robed me in the costume of a Mediterranean jade. See, I have black hair. I have olive skin.” Her face was hot; his stupefied gaze was a fire. His body, shorter and tenser than her husband’s, radiated a rapt helplessness, his arms out from his body and curved as if carrying a great weight. “Come, my brother,” she said. “What you robed, you may disrobe.”
With those curving arms he lifted up the clinging tunic, and the chemise, its ties undone, came off with it. Geruthe pressed her rosy ripeness into the abrasions of Fengon’s rough clothes. His riding shirt had leather shoulders to cushion mail. She inhaled the rain-drenched dead-animal smell. “Protect me,” she whispered, adhering tight against him as if for concealment, her lips seeking the gap in his bristling wet beard.
Afterwards, she toyed with the long bronze pins, skewers for her hair, and held one to his naked chest as he lay beside her in the bed. With the point of the other she dimpled the white skin between her heavy breasts. “We could make an end now,” she suggested, her eyes, widened and softened by love, sly with the possibility.
Fengon in his limp state considered her offer. Such a further and ultimate relaxation would conveniently crown his triumph. Gently he lifted the skewers from her grip, pinched the flesh beneath her chin, and weighed a warm breast in his palm. “I fear we have too much of our fathers in our natures,” he said, “to give the world so easy a victory.”
• • •
She felt this would happen but once, this unfolding of herself, and so she was luxuriously attentive to it, as if she were both storyteller and heroine, physician and invalid. In their hours of stolen intimacy, Fengon disclosed to her in the white mirror of his own body, furred and pronged, a self laid up within her inner crevices and for forty-seven years merely latent, asleep. All her unclean places came alive, and came clean. Did she not carry in her veins the warrior blood of Rodericke and of his father, Hother, the vanquisher of Guimon, who had betrayed Gevare and whose live body Hother burned in revenge? Protest had been lurking in her, and recklessness, and treachery, and these emerged in the sweat and contention of adulterous coupling.
She and Fengon seized what mattresses there were, at times too impatient for the convenience of the mock court they had established in Corambis’s lodge: a grassy bramble not a league beyond Elsinore’s moat, or a stone niche in a little-used gallery where hiked skirts and lowered breeches created sufficient access for their souls’ emissaries, those lower parts so rich in angelic sensation. She would have lain down in warm mud for him, even the mud of the pigsty, to enter the exaltation she found in his brute love. He was not always gentle nor always rough; he maintained the small surprises of the seducer’s art, which yet she had to feel arose involuntarily in him, to impart movement to the great element of herself beyond the control of her will.
Unlike Horvendile, Fengon was at home in the pit of the flesh. His soul did not dart looks about for an exit to some safer, more public chamber, lit by social chatter and churchly candles. When done, the King was anxious to skulk off to his own closet; a nature-hating piety learned in Jutland unmanned him. Love’s gratifications, violent and uncaring when part of his pirate raids, bordered in his mind on the Devil’s domains. Whereas Fengon was content to loiter in a twinned concupiscence, telling Geruthe over and over, with his tongue and eyes and rethickened horn, all the truth about herself that she could hold. He uncovered in her not just the warrior but the slave. Had he bid her lie down in pigshit she would have squeezed her buttocks together in the clench and rejoiced to be thus befouled. At night, reliving the afternoon’s embraces, she would lick her pillow in hunger to be with her lover again—her redeemer from lawful life’s deadening emptiness, her own self turned inside out and given a man’s bearish, boyish form. Her father’s court had held no more eager slut than she.
Geruthe found she relished even the deception, the rank duplicity of having two men. Horvendile was pleased by how quickly he aroused her now. She tried to hold back caresses and tricks learned from his brother. Over the years her husband had turned to her ever more rarely, as little as once each waxing and waning of the moon, but now, roused by he knew not what disturbances below his horizon, he more often answered her body’s silent call. Fengon sensed when she had been with her husband, though Geruthe would deny it. “You have the Hammer’s smell,” he accused. “You come to me already satisfied.”
“Never satisfied but by you, Fengon. Only you know me. Only you know the way to my heart’s heart, my inmost seat of passion. The other is but a duty, a duty of submission laid upon the wife by the stiff-mouthed priests, to whom we are sinful poor animals.”
“But you do submit. Like the lowest trull, you spread your legs for a repulsive customer. I should beat you. I should pound the pale slime of that spouting cock from your gut.”
“You may hurt me with words and looks,” she warned, “but leave no marks.”
His eyes flashed, reading her meaning. “So your dim and pompous husband, revelling in his liberties with you, may observe no traces of his maddened rival, no blue-black bruises left by a devil’s hand.”
His upper lip lifted in a snarl; she wanted to kiss him, for taking so serious a wound. Instead, she applied balm:
“He does not revel, Fengon. He exploits his rights, if he does, matter-of-factly, his purpose too blunt and damp to strike any spark.” This was not quite the truth, not in her quickened duplicitous state; she felt the thrill of dece
ption between her legs, where two men contended, one the world’s anointed and the other her own anointed. She knew them, and neither wholly knew her. “Ardor is a matter of spirit,” she continued in a reassuring vein, “more than of the body, for a woman. Many a wife perforce opens her arms to a man she hates.”
“Do you hate him? Tell me you do.”
Now that he begged her to lie, she could not. His doleful look was so earnest, she must try to be honest. “Near it, sometimes, but not quite. Horvendile’s sins against me have been those of omission, whose pain is low and dull but unremitting. He saw me first as desirable property, and of his property he is a considerate enough caretaker. But, yes, in that he has taken from me the days of my life, and encouraged in me a mummifying royal propriety, I do hate him. You, by daring me to love, have led me to see how badly tended I have been. But the world is such. He is my master. Outside of Elsinore, I am nothing—less than a female serf, who has at least her native sturdiness, her hungry sprats, her beanpatch, her straw bed.”
If Geruthe had hoped that Fengon would dispute her nothingness outside of Elsinore, she was disappointed. She felt the ratchet of desire in him slip, displaced by other, more thoughtful machinations. His brown eyes darkened—his black pupils expanded—looking into the future’s cave. “What do we do,” he asked, the grains in his soft voice each distinct, “if he discovers us?”
They were secluded in the round tower room of Corambis’s lodge. They had removed their clothes and lay on the canopied bed as on a raft in a warm sea. A high-summer day flooded the air with the hum of insects and the humidity of growth pressing and snaking into every niche; the vine at the window sought to thrust its heart-shaped leaves inside. The trees all about and the surface of the lake glittered with a million shifting details, a sea of organic incidents in which the lovers’ own incident drifted. But a cool shadow of forethought had fallen across their bodies; their rapture was chilled.
