Gertrude and Claudius Read Online Free PDF

invasion, the conquest of pagans. History had descended to the Danes on runic stones: Harald’s atJelling read, “The Harald who made the Danes Christians.” Gerutha was more touched by the runestone Harald’s father had left at Jelling: “King Gorm erected this memorial to Tyra his wife, glory of Denmark.” Glory of Denmark: Gorm had known how to value a woman, back before the Cross arrived to dull the Danish spirit. The Christian creed reinforced Horwendil’s tendency to moroseness but would not countervail, once he was on a raid in a long ship, the old warrior ethic of plunder and self-careless ecstasy. Christ was on all lips but in their hearts the Danes still adored Tyr, god of sport and war and fertility. A noble wife could expect to be honored but not in realms beyond the small circle that domestic peace draws around women and children—unforgiving realms where men dealt with the necessities of blood and competition.
    Since her submission to the will of her father, Gerutha had gained for herself a reputation for realism, for reasonableness. She was gracious toward her inferiors and saw quickly into the limits of a situation. A good woman lay in the bed others had made for her and walked in the shoes others had cobbled. The ductile temperament of her sex enabled her to do these things with grace and even zest. In much of her being she could not help revering the man who possessed her, who housed and protected her and—this the key to all right relations—
made use
of her. To be useful and busy gives each day a gloss of holy purpose. God’s heavenly will reposes here in proper duty. Without such repose, the days will shriek. Boredom or war will come.
    For Gerutha’s body was soon busy creating another. The first thaw of spring saw her monthly blood-letting skipped, and then another, as the grass began to green on the sunny side of Odinsheim’s walls. By the time that swallows, returned from their winter paradise which she would never see, were circling up from the pond carrying wands of straw and flecks of mud to their balcony-like nests beneath the eaves of the barn, she was certain, and released to their chances the two linnets Horwendil had brought her as his courtship gift. It was the male, the darker, with the more distinct pied markings, who seemed bewildered, fluttering about in the bedchamber, perching atop an armoire behind the curtains as if seeking some new limit to his freedom, and the duller, smaller female who darted out the open window and waited, singing her song on the bent branch of a fresh-leafed willow, for her mate to join her. “Hurry, hurry,” Gerutha mockingly chastened him, “or she will find another!”
    As the creature within her grew, displacing organs of which she had never before been conscious, and generating inconvenient surges of distemper and yearning, nausea and faintness, her father was failing. The yellow shrunken look she had noticed at her wedding had intensified until he seemed the size of a child, curled in bed around his devouring illness. Rorik of course disdained to complain, but in her sixth month, when her own discomforts had yielded to a dreamy sleepy state of blank contentment, he told her, with a smile that pulled his mustache awry, that he felt in the grip of the blood eagle.He referred to the mode of execution in the saga days whereby a man’s ribs were hacked from his backbone and his heart and lungs pulled out through the huge red wound, the screaming blood eagle. Some noble captives, it was said, begged for it, to show their courage.
    Gerutha had never liked to hear of such things, the elaborate cruelties men invented for one another, though pain and death were deeply part of the nature God had created. Her father saw repulsion flit across her face and told her, in the gentle voice that he had always used to urge a lesson home irresistibly, “All can be borne, my child, because it must be. My death works in me, and your child in you. Both will out, as