Gertrude and Claudius Read Free

hair, his short straight nose, his icy blue eyes long as minnows in his wide face, his thin-lipped mouth with its strict look—stood in her mind rendered small by even the near future’s distance from her. Whereas Rorik was here, his hand touching hers, his profoundly known visage a foot from her own, a translucent wart in the crease above one nostril of his large, porous hooked nose. A regal weariness emanated from all his creases, along with a leathery smell, his thick skin browned in the salt and sun of his youth’s sea-raids across the rimy Baltic and up the great unpeopled rivers of Rus. His robes, not the velvetermine-trimmed robes of a state occasion but the undyed wadmal he wore within the family apartments, had the secret little greasy stink of sheep in the rain. Her bones vibrated to the familiar rumble of his voice’s rote endearments, and her skull felt the paternal pressure of his other hand cupped on her head in blessing. Gerutha found herself, as if cuffed from behind, kneeling before him in a spasm of filial feeling.
    On his side, Rorik, leaning over to kiss the neat gash of the bone-white scalp where her hair was centrally parted, was conscious of a tingle on his face as of tiny snowflakes; stray individual hairs, too fine to be seen, had rebelled against the brushed order of his daughter’s coiffure, held by a jewelled chaplet like a dainty version of his own cumbersome, eight-sided crown, which he donned on those same state occasions as warranted the confining, all but immobilizing robes of velvet and ermine. He pulled his face back from the sensation of her excessively vigorous hair and experienced a start of guilt, her pose before him was so demurely slavish—that of a captured slave, drugged with hellebore, about to be sacrificed.
    But marriage to Horwendil, with a queendom all but certain with it, was no such slavery, surely. What did women want? There had been that in Ona which he had never reached, save in the instant when their bodies clasped and found release in a brainless rhythm of thrust and counterthrust, her pelvis as active in the business as his—a passion as if to be sacrificed, to be consumed in this act of, after all, capture. Then, in the next instant, their sweats still wet on the bedclothes and their breathingfluttering back into their chests like two homing doves, she would begin to recede. Or was it he receding, the capture achieved and he the lighter for it? They had been like a pair of conspiring cutthroats met in the dark and, their furtive transaction accomplished, swiftly and unceremoniously parted by a mutual hatred. No, not hatred, for a kindly afterwash would hold them side by side a while, beneath the embroidered canopy, behind the linen bed curtains doubled in thickness so their struggling shadows would not show through, within the tall stone room patrolled by cold drafts and churlish servants, as their sweated bodies dried, and he and she would engage in drowsy fumbling conversation, his eyelids still retaining visions of her naked beauty above him, below him, upside down beside him, her abundance of untamed raven hair between parted white thighs having tickled his lips. They would talk, many a time, of their growing daughter, the radiant fruit of one such clipping—the child’s piecemeal assumption of mobility and speech, the dropping away of treasured mispronunciations and lisped coinages as she gathered to herself more correct language and adult manners.
    Gerutha had remained the chief, tyrannically single topic of their delight because no brother or sister followed, as if a door had slammed shut in Ona’s womb. Within three years Rorik’s queen was dead, taking with her into silence her midnight cries of release from that captivity of concupiscence which Eve’s curious sin has laid upon mankind, and into silence also the soft Wendish syllables whose unemphatic mispronunciation of guttural Danish delighted him as much as any missaying oftheir daughter’s.