Gertrude and Claudius Read online

  He set the open chair, shaped like an X, near the sluggishly burgeoning fire, and placed a cushion of green velvet on the conjured seat, for her. She settled herself, and he pulled the other of the pair of Venetian chairs near enough so he need not raise his voice above the clatter of the servants bringing out the plates and bowls, the knives and spoons, the loaded platters of their noontime repast. “His goodness oppressed me,” Feng went on, extending the conversation on horseback. “It was like a pillow he was pressing against my face. He was all answer, with no question.”

  “I once called him unsubtle,” Gerutha confided in turn, “and greatly angered my father.”

  “Subtlety is not yet fashionable in Denmark,” Feng said, “but in Europe it is the coming thing. For a thousand years we have all been God’s peasants, delving and tilling in the sweat of our brow, under the lowest possible clouds. In Rome, whose busy little bishop claims to be the shepherd of even the dull sheep of barren Jutland, I saw a marble hand, marvellous in its fidelity to the actual, emerge from the earth, where men were stealing dressed stones for their hovels. In Paris, the learned monks have fallen in love with the thoughts of an ancient magus called Aristotle. One of these scholastics assured me that God and His Heavenly mysteries need no longer be taken on faith, they can all be proven as rigorously as the laws of a triangle.”

  Somehow nervous, he was talking too rapidly, and looking at her but glancingly. “I fear,” Gerutha dared say, with deliberation, “that would leave our poor humanity off to one side. God should have sent not His Son but a theorem.”

  This near-blasphemy did draw Feng’s eyes, widened, to her. They were deliriously darker than Horwendil’s, the brown of crushed earth with grass in it, the residue of a creation, like Eve’s, which came second. “Tell me, Gerutha, what do you believe? I think your father was no profounder a convert than mine. They lived and killed with the innocence of animals.”

  “They lived as their survival and pleasure dictated, amid each day’s necessities. I believe,” she answered, “what the men stationed above me tell me to believe. Outside their credo, society offers women no safety. And you, my brother, believe what?”

  But he was not her brother. He was so swift to reply she blinked. “I believe men can be damned,” he said. “I am less sure they can be saved. After we eat, gentle Gerutha, there is something I must show you—a beauty that puts our thoughts of good and evil at the mercy of the real.”

  The food was plain but the better tasting for that, the smoked meats salty and the autumnal fruits crisp. First the party, to warm it after the two-hour ride, was brought wooden bowls of pottage whose strongest flavors were those of cabbage and coney; it was kept simmering, day and night, in an iron kettle outweighing a man. Then came cold cuts of ham injected with brine, morsels of goose preserved in honey, salt herring and cod cut in strips for dainty handling, and those little dry spicy sausages for which the peasants have an obscene name. Asparagus cooked and then dried, with cardoons and plantains soaked in wine to make them palatable, recalled the summer’s harvest of vegetables. For dessert and climax, a platter of dates and shelled almonds was passed—exotic delicacies in keeping with Feng’s foreign tastes. The human company and strengthening fire dispelled the chill in the low hall, so the air became close beneath the blackened planks of the ceiling.

  The Queen ate with the other women of the party at the lower end of the long table, lest their ears, though secure in snug coifs, be polluted by male humor given license by mead and hopped beer. Feng appeared to be so engaged in the men’s growingly uproarious discourse that he never sent a glance her way, yet he came to the end of the table for her while still crunching in his teeth his dessert of a yellow-streaked red apple. His teeth were irregular but seemed strong and all in place; he had not suffered the humbling pains and extractions that had left gaps in Horwendil’s prim mouth, less eager to smile than ever.

  Feng led Gerutha outside, across a courtyard whose frozen ruts gleamed with the noon’s melting, to a long thatch-roofed building that, from the whistling, fluttering sounds within it, she knew to be a mews. As the couple crossed the courtyard, the rooks in the overhanging oaks cawed in a convocation of protest and alarm; their racket was so sharp it seemed to Gerutha her ears had been suddenly uncoifed.

  The mews had a single door, just tall enough to admit a stooping man. Feng, though shorter than Horwendil, had to duck his head. Inside, the floor of sand and gravel crackled and shifted slightly beneath the Queen’s hesitant feet. The interior darkness gave her halt. The smell of rotted meat and the pungent mutes of winged carnivores assaulted her nostrils.

  “It takes a moment of adjustment, to see,” Feng said at her side, softly, so as not to break the web of restrained noises about them—a rustle of armor-stiff feathers, a scratch of lethal talons on a perch, a touchy jingle of bells, and the voices of the birds themselves, a mutter of smothered weeping as removed as is earth from sky from the high-pitched shriek of a raptor aloft, climbing in slow circles to make its diving strike.

  The half-darkness brightened. Details came forth: the cages woven of hardened withies, the dung-bleached perches, the extra jesses and leashes hanging along the wall, the ghostly-pale plumed hoods holding the birds transfixed in an artificial blindness. Falconry had always seemed to Gerutha a cruel sport—an abuse of the wild, the perversion of a piece of unfettered nature into an instrument of human amusement. She had felt distaste for it since the first time her father had showed her the mews at Elsinore, a building grand as a church, its flocks allowed, with the windows safely gridded, to fly back and forth in the high, sun-barred space.

  In these cramped and dingy mews she felt Feng’s poverty as he must feel it, compared with the King’s. Now that her eyes could see, she counted a mere quartet of live inhabitants, amid the musty wrecks of empty cages. No wonder so much of the sport’s cunning leather apparatus hung idle and unoiled from cobwebbed pegs. “My absences have maimed my retinue,” Feng said. “A half-dozen birds and two falconers, an ancient and his lame grandson. How much do you know of the sport?”

  “My father afforded me a few glimpses, and my husband fewer than that. I believe Horwendil takes little pleasure in the pastime, though the royal mews is maintained, to impress visitors with the pomp of the sport. For some men it is something of a religion, I believe. As with the true faith, women are not ordained as priests.”

  “And yet only the female can be properly called a falcon. The male, a tiercel, is a third smaller, with half the fire and natural fury. Here is a young brancher, netted a few days ago and now being hacked, as they call it. By brancher we mean between the state of an eyas, taken from the nest though unfledged, and that of a passager, a haggard fully fledged, netted in passage as it were. Forgive what may seem to you pedantry; but there is a science of sorts that insists on its own nomenclature.”

  “I have heard these terms,” Gerutha said.

  “We call this proud young beauty Bathsheba.”

  By the wan light of a single small window at the end of the mews opposite the low door, Gerutha sought to see. The bird was held like a rolled-up parchment in a knitted sock, her head protruding at one end and the yellow feet, already encumbered with trailing jesses, at the other. The little head was black-capped. There were markings down the sides of her white face like inky stains bled from her eyes. As her own eyes widened to see better, Gerutha gasped in horror: Bathsheba’s lids were sewn shut, with stout, even stitches.

  “The eyes,” Feng said, hearing her sucked breath, for her face in its white wimple was turned from him. “They are what is called seeled. It is for her own protection; otherwise she will be frantic with the possibilities of freedom that she sees about her. Her talons have been trimmed, and her feet hobbled with bells, so the falconer can hear her slightest move. She is intricate and sensitive and excitable. For her to become a partner to men, she must be constrained, as a baby is swaddled, or as a king is held to his throne throughout a day’s sacred ceremony. She has all outdo
ors in her heart, and we seek to pour her, as through a funnel, into a convenient container. She is fed, Gerutha—fed easier meat than any she would be bringing down in her untamed state. Blindness to her is a mercy, a lulling into safety. Have you never observed how, to catch a goose, the gooseboy throws a blanket over it, and it instantly goes still, in a kind of sleep?” His voice was lulling in her ear, grainy in pleasing abrasion.

  “It is as men subdue women with their sweeping vows,” she said. “Are her eyes ever unseeled?”

  “As soon as the falconer deems her ready for the hood. He is accustoming her to the human voice, to our touch and smell, which overwhelm a falcon’s fine senses. To soothe her, he sprinkles water upon her from his own mouth; he sings her the same song, over and over. He stays awake night after night, keeping her awake with him, until she at last will succumb and accept his glove as her natural resting place. These miraculous creatures are not like dogs and pigs; the realm they occupy nowhere touches ours, unless we patiently spin a link and pull them close to us.”

  “Poor Bathsheba, I wish she could understand all your beguiling explanations of her misery. Look, at the foot of the perch, she has lost some feathers! She will be as naked as when King David spied her from his palace roof.”

  She held out a small brown feather, tipped as if dipped in cream. He solemnly took it from her pink-palmed hand, and tucked it in his belt. “Here,” he said, “come meet Jochebed, the Biblical mother of Miriam, mother of Moses. She is a gyrfalcon, from the regions of constant ice and snow. She moults from white to brown and back again in the course of the seasons; you find her now fresh in her winter feathers. Gyrfalcons,” he went on, his amorous unease seeking shelter behind an instructor’s brisk demeanor, “are larger than peregrines. Bathsheba is a peregrine. Jochebed has been trained to hunt cranes in the marshes, but I fear is as out of practice as her master. If a falcon is not held to her training, she reverts to an untamed state, and bates in her jesses, hurling herself into an upside-down fury; she rejects the perch and spurns to eat even such a steaming delicacy as a rabbit’s liver.”

  While talking, he had pulled on a leather gauntlet that extended nearly to his elbow. Clucking softly, ruffling the back of Jochebed’s white neck, Feng induced the hooded bird to step, with its knotted jesses, onto his wrist. Murmuring to her, he carried the bird outside, to where the mews with its solitary window backed upon a great down-trending meadow, its grasses quick with the whitening motions of the wind and the hurrying shadows of the fall clouds, which had thickened and grown scowling since this morning’s ride beneath a dappled white sky. “Behold: the falconer himself,” Feng said.

  It was an old man, Thord by name, wrinkled and bent by time but broad through the chest, as if to support wings. He doffed his peaked felt hat in greeting his master, his queen, and the gyrfalcon, as if members all of one exalted crew. In a scythed stretch of near meadow he and his grandson, Ljot, were engaged, Feng explained, in keeping a third falcon, a black-and-russet sparrow hawk named Jezebel, primed for a hunt by setting her upon field mice they had caught and crippled, twisting and cracking one leg to slow them. For Gerutha’s amusement they demonstrated: Ljot, a thin-limbed, limping child with white lashes and a milky stare, eased from a sack and released a trembling dun body that propelled itself furiously, hopping and zigzagging in its maimed state, for the cover of deep grass. Just as cover seemed attained, Thord released the bird, who in a dark gust sailed and dipped and in an instant quelled the hapless small creature, which her talons then let fall to the ground.

  “Sparrow hawks do not stoop from a height,” Feng explained to her. “They glide and snatch by stealth.”

  “And appear to be too sated to eat what they kill,” she said, growing accustomed enough to Feng to dare a note of chastisement.

  “She leaves it for her masters. She has been trained to eat nothing but what comes from a human hand. Now let us show you how Jochebed hunts cranes.”

  A lure had been made of two blue crane’s wings tied together with a horsehide thong. The child brought this clumsy contraption from a shed beside the mews and carried it off a distance on the scythed stretch. Thord, making a rattling parental noise at the back of his throat, took the falcon on his gloved fist and with a swift twirl of his other hand knotted a thin leash into the rings at the ends of the jesses. Still with that hand he pulled off her hood by its scarlet tassel.

  The hawk’s eye! It was bigger than Gerutha could have imagined, blacker and more gleaming—a pearl of pure night. Or so she thought until the gyrfalcon twitched her head into an angle of sunlight and a many-rayed flower of gold and brown was revealed beneath the transparent cornea. Jochebed’s glistening flat head was so finely feathered it seemed bald, and a pepper of fine markings patterned her snowy neck feathers. The hook-beaked head trembled and twitched as the eye took them in, scanning the assembled faces for prey. When the eye seemed to fasten on Gerutha’s, the Queen felt her breath snatched. Thus death would not overlook even her, as in her girlhood she had once blithely imagined, the world seeming then one endless morning.

  “Look away, my lady,” the old falconer softly pleaded. “A strange human face is poison to them, until they are thoroughly manned.”

  Gerutha flinched, hurt by the admonition, for in truth she had been accustomed since infancy to be admired. She glanced sideways toward Feng, but he was intent on the business of falconry, his dark gaze as implacable as Jochebed’s.

  Limping, whistling, Ljot whirled the lure so it battered the air; it was touching to see him run, so raggedly and earnestly, his white face flashing as he kept looking back. He set the clumsily flapping device at the edge of the tall grass half a bowshot away, and crouched out of sight. A weak, moist, insistent whistling arose from where he crouched. Feng explained in Gerutha’s ear that the whistle had been fashioned by slitting a dried crane’s larynx. Thord released the falcon; it hurtled through the air trailing behind it a thin cord, the creance, attached to the leash. Thord, making that throaty rattling noise in his excitement, let the cord play out as the bird flew; Gerutha heard it hiss in the grass. Jochebed, feet flared, landed on the mockery of the blue-winged crane. Ljot popped from hiding holding out as reward a furry leg of fresh-killed rabbit. While the falcon fed, the boy gathered the jesses and pulled them tight. The falcon was reunited with old Thord, who stroked with a stiff feather her cruel fleshless feet, her hooked beak with bits of rabbit fur blood-stuck to it. Feng explained in Gerutha’s ear how, bit by bit, the creance would be done away with, and the variety of game would be broadened to snipe and partridge. Live birds, their wings broken and their eyes seeled, would be staked in a meadow, for the falcon’s education. Thus, patient step by step, would the natural killer be brought into partnership with men.

  What a cruel and boylike business, Gerutha thought, what a cumbersome charade, at the same time admiring a certain honed passion in it, this expertise passed like a much-sharpened scythe down the generations. Men must play with death, to make it less terrible when it comes. Feng took off his gauntlet, on which he had fetched Jochebed outdoors, and invited Gerutha to thrust her hand into it. It felt dangerous to do so, inserting her hand where a woman’s had not gone before. The glove was too ample, and quite warm inside—warm from Feng’s skin. Under his direction she took Jochebed upon her wrist. The bird was lighter than she looked, all hollow bones and avid hunger: lighter than a kitten, or than a basket of colored thread on her arm. The incurved talons made a tiny ripping noise as they gripped and regripped the padded, tattered gauntlet. Jochebed’s lethal feet tightened, while her skull maintained its restless motion; the gleaming black globular eye in its socket was seeking the perfect adjustment, the precise angle from which to appraise Gerutha’s face.

  Thord abruptly slipped the hood over the inquisitive head, and eased Jochebed from Gerutha’s gauntlet to his own. “Don’t mean to be short,” he said, not looking her in the eye. “But a human gaze affrights them. We bring them right tenderly out of the dark.” His relati
onship with these birds, she saw, took priority over the feasance he owed his queen.

  Feng asked her, “How did the sensation suit you—murder on your wrist?”

  The sun’s beams were being occluded; the cloud fragments overhead had swollen and darkened, piling up like ice cakes on the windward side of the Skaw. The short November day was quickly shedding its unseasonable warmth.

  “We are females, she and I,” Gerutha responded. “We must take what we can of what the world offers. No doubt she would eat greens, if nature had not made her a slave to flesh. We should not judge her by the rules we make for sheep.”

  Feng laughed, his teeth uneven but thrilling in that red mouth, there between his trimmed mustache and pointed, Italianate beard. “I would like to leave you a present of a pet. Not Jochebed, she is too much your sister, but perhaps dainty Bathsheba, when her eyes are unseeled.”

  “Leave me?”

  “Yes. I must be off again. Denmark is not yet a nesting-ground for me. My Genovese masters consented to my absence on the plea of personal affairs; those affairs have been surveyed and their shifts reinforced. None but my falcons will miss me; my brother has Denmark in hand. Denmark and the lady through whom, in the feelings of the people, the throne descends. The country loves you, Gerutha, to even the most errant Dane.” He curtly bowed, in case she missed the identification of himself.

  It was one of the few unsubtle things he had done; a woman of course knows what is happening, what negotiations between the speechless lower parts are advanced under cover of elevated manners. “Errant,” she said, “I hope not in loyalty. My husband the King has come to rely upon your attendance in his court. He values your present counsel and the accord of your shared past. You recall him to his youthful self. The sons of Gerwindil should not be so much parted.”