tree, as a rigid young bear, in his diagonally quilted doublet, younger and smaller and firmer than Horvendile. And tasting not of rotting teeth and recent food softened with ale but of living wood, like a mandrake root when as a little girl she chewed and sucked it, excited by the almost-taste, the hint of sweetness coming from underground.
She broke off the embrace. She was panting, an immediate desire slaked but others crowding after it, a chain of shameless petitioners, making her dizzy. “This is sin,” she told her partner in it.
He took a dance step backward, his lips twisted by a triumphant amusement. “Not by the laws of love,” he rapidly, softly urged. “There are sins against the Church, and sins against nature, which is God’s older and purer handiwork. Our sin has been these many years one of denying our natures.”
“You think I have loved you?” she asked, not deaf to his presumption, though her body felt swollen and abandoned and longing for his arms as an animal hunted and wounded seeks the safety of the forest.
“I cannot believe—” he began carefully, sensing that she might seize the slightest affront as an excuse to flee his presence forever. “It is a possibly heretical article of my own faith,” he began again, “that a creator would not engender so fierce a love in me without allowing in its object the gleam of a response. Can prayer be so futile? You have always received my presence kindly, for all my sins of absence.”
Her heart, her hands were fluttering; she felt her life threatened with a large meaning, larger than any since she had been a little princess begging the crumbs of Rodericke’s love amid the tumble and alarums of his bawdy court. When you are small, the meanings are large; if in later life you lose childhood’s background of assured forgiveness and everlasting rescue, a swerving sense of largeness now and then nevertheless returns. “I can carry on this conversation,” she breathed to Fengon, “but not at Elsinore. Look at us, whispering in this cold and smoky nook while your man waits outside, thinking the worst! In these royal precincts nothing goes unobserved, and my own conscience grimaces at the least action that is not queenly. It was better, my dear brother-in-law, when I could cherish the image of you in a place that stretched me to imagine, and remembered fondly how you dared to tease a queen, in a voice pitched like no other she heard, than have you here and face your bold claims.”
He slumped to his knees on the stones at her feet, showing her not his face but his bowed head with its grizzled, thick hair and splash of white where a ground had been survived. “I make no claims, Geruthe. I am abeggar sheerly. The truth is simple: I live only in your company. The rest is performance.”
“This is not performance?” Geruthe said dryly, brushing his tingling hair with a hand gone cold in the fatality of her commitment. “We must find a better stage—one not borrowed from our king.”
“Yes,” he said, rising and taking as practical a tone as her own. “My brother is my king, too, and that would gall even if I were not in the base position of desiring his wife.”
“Me—so far past my prime? Dear Fengon, did you not meet in those Mediterranean lands younger women to help you forget your plump and aging sister-in-law? One hears that blood runs hot and the nights are thick with the aromas of lemons and flowers, away from our sullen skies.” She was trying to move them off that treacherous, leaden ground where they had made, it was plain though unstated, an illicit compact.
He joined her in banter. “They are, and there were such women—women throng every land—but I am a son of the barren heath, and looked in vain for the northern lights in those skies where the stars hung close as fruit. Our lights move elusively, tantalizingly. In comparison, the hot sun and fat moon that encourage the southern races in their lucidity of spirit
She broke off the embrace. She was panting, an immediate desire slaked but others crowding after it, a chain of shameless petitioners, making her dizzy. “This is sin,” she told her partner in it.
He took a dance step backward, his lips twisted by a triumphant amusement. “Not by the laws of love,” he rapidly, softly urged. “There are sins against the Church, and sins against nature, which is God’s older and purer handiwork. Our sin has been these many years one of denying our natures.”
“You think I have loved you?” she asked, not deaf to his presumption, though her body felt swollen and abandoned and longing for his arms as an animal hunted and wounded seeks the safety of the forest.
“I cannot believe—” he began carefully, sensing that she might seize the slightest affront as an excuse to flee his presence forever. “It is a possibly heretical article of my own faith,” he began again, “that a creator would not engender so fierce a love in me without allowing in its object the gleam of a response. Can prayer be so futile? You have always received my presence kindly, for all my sins of absence.”
Her heart, her hands were fluttering; she felt her life threatened with a large meaning, larger than any since she had been a little princess begging the crumbs of Rodericke’s love amid the tumble and alarums of his bawdy court. When you are small, the meanings are large; if in later life you lose childhood’s background of assured forgiveness and everlasting rescue, a swerving sense of largeness now and then nevertheless returns. “I can carry on this conversation,” she breathed to Fengon, “but not at Elsinore. Look at us, whispering in this cold and smoky nook while your man waits outside, thinking the worst! In these royal precincts nothing goes unobserved, and my own conscience grimaces at the least action that is not queenly. It was better, my dear brother-in-law, when I could cherish the image of you in a place that stretched me to imagine, and remembered fondly how you dared to tease a queen, in a voice pitched like no other she heard, than have you here and face your bold claims.”
He slumped to his knees on the stones at her feet, showing her not his face but his bowed head with its grizzled, thick hair and splash of white where a ground had been survived. “I make no claims, Geruthe. I am abeggar sheerly. The truth is simple: I live only in your company. The rest is performance.”
“This is not performance?” Geruthe said dryly, brushing his tingling hair with a hand gone cold in the fatality of her commitment. “We must find a better stage—one not borrowed from our king.”
“Yes,” he said, rising and taking as practical a tone as her own. “My brother is my king, too, and that would gall even if I were not in the base position of desiring his wife.”
“Me—so far past my prime? Dear Fengon, did you not meet in those Mediterranean lands younger women to help you forget your plump and aging sister-in-law? One hears that blood runs hot and the nights are thick with the aromas of lemons and flowers, away from our sullen skies.” She was trying to move them off that treacherous, leaden ground where they had made, it was plain though unstated, an illicit compact.
He joined her in banter. “They are, and there were such women—women throng every land—but I am a son of the barren heath, and looked in vain for the northern lights in those skies where the stars hung close as fruit. Our lights move elusively, tantalizingly. In comparison, the hot sun and fat moon that encourage the southern races in their lucidity of spirit
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