Hamlet Read Free

thin. As he passed a garden seat, it seemed that he saw them. He stopped between a pair of huge stone lions and stared at them. He was about fifty meters away.
    The black dog whined dolorously and sat on Hamlet’s feet.
    “Is it him?” Horatio asked Hamlet. “It is him, isn’t it?”
    Hamlet didn’t answer, just nodded. A full minute later he said, “I think so.”
    Bernardo gazed in rapture. He forgot to be scared. Here was one of the greatest events in the history of Denmark, surely, and he was intimately involved. Despite his confident words to the prince, he had not been sure of what he had seen before. But if it were Hamlet’s father, it was a ghost, and he, young Bernardo, son of a farmer from outside Gavatar, visiting Elsinore to spend a few months with his cousin Horatio, was witnessing what perhaps no one in the world had ever seen.
    When the man made a motion with his arm, Bernardo jerked backward as though he had been struck.
    “What does he want?” Horatio muttered to Hamlet. They both ignored Bernardo.
    “He wants me,” Hamlet said. “Always did.”
    The man motioned again.
    Hamlet shook Horatio free and started walking toward the two lions.
    “Come back,” Horatio hissed. “Come back.” He ran a few urgent steps after his friend. “You don’t know what he’ll do. He could kill you.”
    But then he stopped, and the black dog lay down on the path beside him and whimpered.
    Hamlet was aware of the sharpness of the night air, the gravel and the dead leaves that crackled like bones under his feet, the lonely cry of a distant curlew. He thought about the fresh grave he had stood coldly above, fewer than five months earlier. He recalled the clod of frozen earth he had tossed onto the coffin. He heard again the echo of the clod as it bounced off the wood, as though the box were hollow.
    As Hamlet walked toward him, the man in the distance seemed to grow bigger. Somehow the boy was unafraid. Oh, he trembled, but so did Horatio, so did Bernardo, so would anyone in the midnight cold. Only the man waiting, with the shadow of an alder tree across him, only he was still. And his hair had stopped blowing.
    Hamlet got close enough to see him clearly, except for his face, which looked to be all stubble and eyes, white eyes that seemed to have no pupils. He noticed that the brown cloak had a thin red collar. Now Hamlet felt, if not frightened, then disturbed. In the months since the funeral, the boy had forgotten most of his encounters with his father. During that time it was as though his mind concentrated on three images only: his father’s terse smile when he gave him the long-legged chestnut colt, the proud hands he laid on his head when Hamlet won his first fight, and the gentle hands that picked him up one night and carried him to bed, when the boy was felled by influenza and went to the doorway of death, lingering a long time, as if he would pass through. As if he wanted to pass through. Then he had returned.
    But this meeting, this strange encounter between the two stone lions, brought back a flood of other memories: battles and beatings, painful lessons in riding, tests of strength, and cold, hungry nights spent alone in his tower room when Hamlet had failed those tests. For the first time the boy faltered. He wanted so much to show the silver in his veins. He wanted to be the size of a king, man enough for anything. But Horatio and Bernardo were far behind, out of hearing, the night was as cold as the tomb, and the man in front of him was rotten with death.
    In spite of this, the boy spoke. “What do you want with me?”
    His question was enshrouded with mist from his mouth, as though he had forced open a cranny to hell. He tried to make his voice sound strong, but it cracked on the last two words.
    The man placed his left hand on the head of the lion. When he replied, Hamlet saw no mist of breath from his mouth. “Pay attention to what I have to tell you.”
    “I will.”
    “I have come to speak