Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike

gap between her teeth was a perfection, a sweet surprise when she smiled.
Sas betas dens
, he remembered from a poem by Bertran de Born.
Vuolh sas betas dens en dos.
I want her beautiful teeth as a gift. A woman to be exalted by love must have a flaw, a weakness, and Gerutha’s, as he saw it, was her malleability, a passive lax streak that had allowed her father and then her husband to have their way. Her affection for nature had bred in her a fatalism, a propensity to surrender. She would surrender to him, too, if pressed. He felt that. And sheshould be his because only he
saw
her. His brother had gone blind in his kingship and had always been thick, a dealer in broad, approximate, merely useful truths.
    For Feng to live with Gerutha beside him would be to bathe daily in the radiance from which now he must keep averting his eyes, though her afterimage burned at the back of his brain. She would turn the lead in him to gold, lift from his heart the dark Jutish stain it had taken early. And—hardly to be considered, but a fact—she would make him a king. Denmark and Gerutha would be his together. So grand a possibility hovered a few feet away, as he stood cravenly attending in the shuffle of his brother’s court. Feng’s desire, when it took him from behind, was so strong his knees would threaten to buckle and his head would pound with impatience.
    As the craving within him raged, his brother passed from contemptible to pitiable, hateful to helpless. Horwendil knew nothing of how his immeasurable treasure burdened him with risk. He had no idea, or at most a passing, frivolous idea, of his brother’s lovesick envy. Feng must remove his dangerous envy from the realm of this wooden-headed monarch—defenseless in his pomp, unsuspecting in his fraternity. The ghost of their father, Gerwindil, watched. A shred of conscience tied the wicked brother’s hands. Feng went south to serve again the Emperor’s theoretical liegemen the consuls of Genoa, and farther south still in that service, and then east as emissary to Genoa’s ally, the porphyry-and-ivory throne of Byzantium.
    By way of farewell he had bid Thord carry Bathsheba,her eyes unseeled, to the Queen at Elsinore. During a dozen years of adventure, of farther hardening, Feng now and then wondered how his gift had fared. Pinned inside his undertunic of coarsest and most durable linen, he carried everywhere the soft brown breast feather she had handed him, as pledge and irritant.

II
    T HE KING was irate. “But what can the boy still be studying at Wittenberg?” Horvendile asked. “He is twenty-nine! I am all of sixty, with aches and pains and spells of irresistible lethargy. It is high time Hamblet came home and studied kingship.”
    Geruthe kept brushing out her thick hair, which in the half-light of this gloomy winter morning emanated a coruscating halo of static phosphorescence as she brushed. Some sparks were blue, and others yellow and remarkably long as they leaped from where with her brush of stiffest boar bristle she sharply pulled taut an extended coppery strand. The more she brushed, the more filaments stood up all over her head. “I think he finds us unsubtle,” she said. “We drink too much. We eat crudely, with hunting knives. We are barbarians, compared with his professors down there.”
    “Unsubtle! What does he think life is—a theatrical performance to be minced through by boys in women’s clothes?”
    “He doesn’t talk to me about what he thinks,” she said, “or indeed about anything. But I understand from what Corambis has let drop of what Laertes tells
him
, there’s a ferment going on in cultivated circles to the south, various bits of ancient knowledge the Crusaders brought back, the Arabs and the Byzantine monks have been transcribing them for centuries but nobody read them, something about a new way of looking at the world
scientifically
, whatever that is, letting nature tell us about itself in little details, one after another, as