did not shy from my duties, though the first birth was ominously hard. I was willing to face torture again, to supply the throne.”
“The womb is the appointed venue,” he argued, “the male principle a mere tangency. Resentment of our early betrothal, it may be, curdled your fructifying juices. They lacked no supply of seed.”
Gerutha’s gray-green eyes flashed like poplar leaves before a storm. “Seed sown, it may be, in such coolness of spirit it failed to kindle the willing soil on which it fell.”
His visage changed; he blanched, then flushed and stepped closer as if to embrace her, this furry wall of a man, suddenly breached. “Oh, Gerutha,” Horwendil brought forth, “I was not cool. I am not cool toward you now, eighteen years after our wedding night.”
“You fell asleep.”
“To spare you a drunken lout I did—to bring you my better, morning self.”
There was something archaic in his homage, something reminding her of Marlgar’s old-fashioned accent above her cradle, that made the Queen flinch into repentance of her angry mood. “Forgive me, husband. I cannot imagine a man serving me more worthily and lovingly.”
Yet she could imagine such, at moments when awake beside his snoring mass, or when in mid-morning, as she lifted her eyes from the parchment page of a
chanson de geste
describing El Cid or Roland, Christian heroes in armor that fitted their lean bodies like a serpent’s skin, her gaze greeted, through the two-pillared window of her solar, the bile-colored Sund and the bleak beckoning strip that was Skåne.
November, even late November, when the trees have shed their faded leaves and the wild asters have been stripped back to stalks by the morning frosts, brings its unexpectedly warm days, and on one such Feng invited Gerutha to visit his estate. The King being away, she accepted. They rode in an entourage, the Queen side-saddle since the people must not see her with her skirts hiked. The horse she rode, a young chestnut stallion, felt taut and skittery beneath her, the springs and sinews of him tightened to beyond what the brain in his great long skull could quite control. Gerutha felt herself inside this skull, seeing in two directions at once, the two views failing to meld. Sunlight gilded the gray twigs; the shorn farmland through which their strung-out party passed released to the warming air odors of cow-dungand rotting fruit-fall, of parching hay and smoking peat. Dark dapples like schools of fish fanned out against the sky’s glowing white, an incandescent sheet cut up and scattered as the horses carried their riders into a copse of birches and pines and out again onto a ridge where a forsaken crossroads shrine to the Virgin held a jumble of plaster fragments, some of them blue. The land on either side of the ridge lay in strips tinted according to the crops they had borne, each exiguous fief jealously tilled by its holder, the boundary corners marked with conical cairns.
All this she saw and sensed through one eye: out of the other Gerutha descried herself, in russet riding cloak and diapered green bliaut that exposed but the pointed tips of her ankle-high elkskin boots, gliding through this rare adventure, under the protection of her husband’s brother, out into the land that for her had been mostly scenery viewed through the wide-silled windows of a castle that had been first her father’s and then her husband’s.
Her life as appraised through this inward eye had been a stone passageway with many windows but not one portal leading out. Horwendil and Amleth were the twin proprietary guards of this passageway and heavily barred death was its end. Death, the end of nature and the opening, the priests of the Crucified God claimed, to a far more glorious world. But how could any world be more glorious than this one? Its defining light, its countless objects and perspectives, its noises of life, of motion. The children of peasants lined the village roadsides to see the
“The womb is the appointed venue,” he argued, “the male principle a mere tangency. Resentment of our early betrothal, it may be, curdled your fructifying juices. They lacked no supply of seed.”
Gerutha’s gray-green eyes flashed like poplar leaves before a storm. “Seed sown, it may be, in such coolness of spirit it failed to kindle the willing soil on which it fell.”
His visage changed; he blanched, then flushed and stepped closer as if to embrace her, this furry wall of a man, suddenly breached. “Oh, Gerutha,” Horwendil brought forth, “I was not cool. I am not cool toward you now, eighteen years after our wedding night.”
“You fell asleep.”
“To spare you a drunken lout I did—to bring you my better, morning self.”
There was something archaic in his homage, something reminding her of Marlgar’s old-fashioned accent above her cradle, that made the Queen flinch into repentance of her angry mood. “Forgive me, husband. I cannot imagine a man serving me more worthily and lovingly.”
Yet she could imagine such, at moments when awake beside his snoring mass, or when in mid-morning, as she lifted her eyes from the parchment page of a
chanson de geste
describing El Cid or Roland, Christian heroes in armor that fitted their lean bodies like a serpent’s skin, her gaze greeted, through the two-pillared window of her solar, the bile-colored Sund and the bleak beckoning strip that was Skåne.
November, even late November, when the trees have shed their faded leaves and the wild asters have been stripped back to stalks by the morning frosts, brings its unexpectedly warm days, and on one such Feng invited Gerutha to visit his estate. The King being away, she accepted. They rode in an entourage, the Queen side-saddle since the people must not see her with her skirts hiked. The horse she rode, a young chestnut stallion, felt taut and skittery beneath her, the springs and sinews of him tightened to beyond what the brain in his great long skull could quite control. Gerutha felt herself inside this skull, seeing in two directions at once, the two views failing to meld. Sunlight gilded the gray twigs; the shorn farmland through which their strung-out party passed released to the warming air odors of cow-dungand rotting fruit-fall, of parching hay and smoking peat. Dark dapples like schools of fish fanned out against the sky’s glowing white, an incandescent sheet cut up and scattered as the horses carried their riders into a copse of birches and pines and out again onto a ridge where a forsaken crossroads shrine to the Virgin held a jumble of plaster fragments, some of them blue. The land on either side of the ridge lay in strips tinted according to the crops they had borne, each exiguous fief jealously tilled by its holder, the boundary corners marked with conical cairns.
All this she saw and sensed through one eye: out of the other Gerutha descried herself, in russet riding cloak and diapered green bliaut that exposed but the pointed tips of her ankle-high elkskin boots, gliding through this rare adventure, under the protection of her husband’s brother, out into the land that for her had been mostly scenery viewed through the wide-silled windows of a castle that had been first her father’s and then her husband’s.
Her life as appraised through this inward eye had been a stone passageway with many windows but not one portal leading out. Horwendil and Amleth were the twin proprietary guards of this passageway and heavily barred death was its end. Death, the end of nature and the opening, the priests of the Crucified God claimed, to a far more glorious world. But how could any world be more glorious than this one? Its defining light, its countless objects and perspectives, its noises of life, of motion. The children of peasants lined the village roadsides to see the
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