Gertrude and Claudius Read Online Free PDF Page B

the gods demand.” Amused at himself for slipping back into paganism, Rorik lay a dry hot hand on her softer, moister one and said, “The priests your good husband consults never tire of reminding us that we each bear a cross, in imitation of Christ. Or did Christ pick up a cross in imitation of us? In any case there is enough store of suffering for all to share, and if the priests say true I will soon see Ona, as young as when she died, and I will be young with her. If their stories are fables, I will not feel disappointment. I will be done with feeling.”
    “Horwendil listens to priests,” she said loyally, “because, he says, they know the thoughts of the peasants.”
    “And have connections to Rome, and to all those lands where Rome has planted its Hell-preaching churches. Horwendil is right, my dear trusting daughter—this religion of slaves, and then of peasants and of merchants, has the future in it. The infidels are being routed in theHoly Land and Spain, and here in the north, the last of Europe to succumb, the heathen altars are so many idle stones. The peasants no longer know what they mean, and cart the stones off to fence pigsties.”
    Gerutha had been baptized and raised in the Christian creed and usages, but without fervor, in her father’s sometimes rowdy bachelor court. Rorik’s own view of ultimate matters—where we come from, where we go—she had assumed to be weakly conventional, like her own. “Father, you sound scornful, but Horwendil seeks through the faith not only to be a better lord to his vassals but a better man to his peers. He is gentle to me, even when his mood does not permit him to desire me.” His demands of her, she thought to herself, had been, as her condition more clearly declared itself, light, even as her need to be reassured of her beauty had grown. “He wants to be good,” she concluded, with a plaintive simplicity that surprised her own ears, as if the child buried in her had piped up.
    “I would rather hear you say that he is good,” Rorik pronounced through his pain. “How far short does his wanting fall?”
    “Not short,” she said sharply. “Not short at all. Horwendil is splendid. He is in every way suitable, as you promised he would be.” There was some malice in her reminding him of his self-serving assurances. As long as the dying live, the living do not spare them.
    “In every way,” he repeated at last, sighing as if feeling the vengeful intent of her thrust. “Between two people there is no ‘every way.’ Even Ona and I, there was alanguage barrier, a discord of unspoken expectations. Each match will have its unmatched parts. The sons of Gerwindil have the wildness of Jutland. It is a grim land, where shepherds in their loneliness go mad and curse God. For months the black-bellied clouds off the Skagerrak never lift. Horwendil seeks to be a good man, but Feng, his brother, neglects his adjacent estate and has mortgaged much of his Jutland inheritance to go adventuring to the south—as far, I hear, as a formerly Norman island called Sicily. This is reckless and ruinous behavior. Did I mislead you, my dear daughter, by pressing upon you marriage to a son of Gerwindil? I felt my fatal worm in me even then, and wanted to see you safe in another man’s keep.”
    “And so I
am
safe,” she said softly, understanding that this conversation was Rorik’s apology, in case one were ever needed. But no harm had been done, it seemed to sensible Gerutha: her marriage was an excellent one.
    Rorik died, and the prospects of election favored Horwendil. Gerutha, to spare herself the frequent journey, had moved with her retinue back to Elsinore to attend her dying father. After all the pomp of his burial in the misty, flinty churchyard where the bones of Elsinore’s inhabitants moldered—lawyer mingling with tanner, courtier with hangman, maiden with madman—Horwendil moved to the royal castle to be with his wife, settling himself prematurely in the King’s