An Antic Disposition (25 page)

Eight of the barracks guards came in as Horace covered the faces of Amleth and Lother with their cloaks. They placed the bodies across spears carried lengthwise, and slowly trudged out of the great hall, the priest preceding them, intoning prayers in a quavering voice. Horace followed them.

The captains sat there looking at each other. Then one of them turned to a terrified thrall.

“Well?” shouted the captain. “What are waiting for? Get us more to drink!”

F
ather Gerald stopped
, leaning wearily on his staff. Around him, the fools, troubadours, and children sat in silence.

“I have often wondered if Gerutha knew that there was poison in the goblet that Fengi offered to Amleth,” he said. “I like to think so. I like to think that at the end, she sacrificed her life to save her son.”

“But he died anyway!” shouted Thomas. We all turned to look at the boy who was on his feet, outraged. “What kind of story is that!’”

“What do you mean, Thomas?” asked the priest gently.

“That’s not a proper story,” shouted the boy, near tears. “They’re all dead. What good is a story where everyone dies?”

“Death lies at the end of all of our lives,” said Father Gerald.

“I know that,” said Thomas impatiently. “But this is supposed to be a story.”

“Very true,” said Father Gerald, smiling. “But I never said it was over.”

T
he honor guard
carried the bodies to a room inside the cathedral where they could be prepared for burial. They lowered them gently onto several tables, then looked up at Horace.

“You are men of honor,” he said quietly. “But there is no need for you to be here. Your late commander would wish you to be at your posts. I will remain here with this good priest and pray for them.”

“Then God be with you, sir,” said one of the guards, and they filed somberly out of the room. The priest blessed them as they left, then watched for a moment. Then he closed the door and turned to Horace.

“Quickly,” said Father Gerald, handing him a stoppered flask and pulling another one from his pouch.

Horace pulled the cloak back from Amleth’s face and shook him roughly, then hauled him to a sitting position and slapped him several times. Father Gerald did the same with Lother. Suddenly the two Danes started coughing heavily.

“Drink up, lad,” urged Father Gerald, shoving the flask in Lother’s mouth.

“Come on, old man,” said Horace, grinning as Amleth’s eyes fluttered open.

Amleth clutched the flask weakly and forced some of the liquid down.

“Dear God, that was awful,” he muttered.

“The effects of the drug should wear off in a while,” said Father Gerald. “Well played, boys. Both of you.”

Lother looked blearily around the room.

“My head hurts,” he said, then he caught sight of Fengi’s and Gerutha’s bodies, lying under blankets.

“Are they … ?” he began.

“Yes,” said Father Gerald. “Unfortunately the poison she took was real. I’m sorry, Amleth. I didn’t see that coming.”

Amleth tried to get to his feet, and nearly fell.

“My legs are still wobbly,” he said.

“You walk all right for a dead man,” observed Horace. “All right, so we need to weight down your coffins and seal them before—“

The door crashed open. Reynaldo stood there, a crossbow in one hand and a sword in the other. He looked at Amleth, a sick smile on his face.

“I thought as much,” he said. “The blood gushing out of the boy. There was too much for that wound. Pig’s blood in a pig’s bladder under the tunic. You think you could fool me? My ancestors invented that trick.”

Father Gerald leaned upon his staff, looking every bit the old man.

“Repent, my son,” he quavered. “For your eternal soul is in jeopardy.”

“I fear no priest,” laughed Reynaldo, pointing the crossbow at Amleth.

“No one does,” said Father Gerald. “That’s the trouble with the world today.”

He struck up at the crossbow with his staff. The bolt flew harmlessly over Amleth’s head. The priest hit Reynaldo once in the throat, and the Tuscan fell, grabbing his neck.

“Pity,” said Father Gerald, squatting down to watch him die. “I had some questions I wanted to ask you.”

He administered extreme unction, then straightened and looked at Amleth.

“I have longed believed him responsible for the death of a man we both loved,” he said. “I swear that I do not seek revenge in life, but the opportunities do keep presenting themselves.”

“Well, that’s one coffin weight taken care of,” said Horace, dragging Reynaldo’s body away.

Father Gerald turned back to Amleth and Lother, who looked at him dumbfounded. He reached down and pulled two bags from under the table.

“Here’s your jester gear,” he said. “Get into your motley. Full makeup, but cloaks and hoods over everything.”

The two changed, then applied the whiteface and stared at each other. “I wouldn’t recognize you in daylight this way,” said Lother.

“You wouldn’t recognize yourself,” replied Amleth.

“All right,” said Father Gerald. “Get going, You know how to avoid the patrols, you should make Gustav’s Stone before daybreak.” He handed each of them a small purse with coins. “Then Lother to the Guildhall, and Amleth to England, you have the passwords. Every Guild member on the way will help you.”

“And what happens to you?” asked Amleth.

“I leave for Roskilde,” said Father Gerald. “I have to convince Valdemar to send an army here to reclaim Slesvig.”

“He won’t be happy to see you,” said Amleth.

“No, he won’t,” grinned the priest. “Now, let me embrace you both. It may be the last time we see each other.”

Amleth flew into his arms and hugged him hard. Lother, who had known him for much less time, did so hesitantly.

Horace came in.

“Well, this is it,” he said, clasping each by the hand. “I’ll hold the fort. Metaphorically, that is. Don’t start thanking me, I’ll get all weepy, and that isn’t me, is it? Now, get out of here.”

Amleth and Lother shouldered their packs. Amleth touched his mother’s face briefly, then the two fools vanished through the door. “Need help weighting the other coffin?” asked Father Gerald.

“You don’t have time,” said Horace. “Go. I’ll be fine.”

F
ather Gerald sighed
.

“Valdemar was not happy to see me,” he said. “When he heard my news, he threw me into a dungeon. I sat there for six months, not knowing what had happened. Then, one day…”

T
he King
and the priest looked at each other.

“You look old,” said Father Gerald.

“So do you,” said Valdemar.

“I am old, I think,” said Father Gerald. “What’s your excuse?”

“Do you want to hear what I have to tell you, or shall I come back in another six months?” asked Valdemar.

“1 am listening,” said Father Gerald.

“You were a good fool,” said Valdemar. “I should have listened to you. I am sorry.”

“I have the power to forgive,” said Father Gerald.

“Of course, I cannot admit this to the outside world,” continued Valdemar. “The King cannot be wrong.”

“Of course not,” said Father Gerald.

“Which is why you were imprisoned for your insolence,” said Valdemar. “And why you will now be banished forever from Denmark.”

“But not put to death,” said Father Gerald.

“No,” said Valdemar. “Not that.”

“Very well,” said Father Gerald. “What happened to Slesvig?”

“Slesvig is still mine,” said Valdemar. “I have placed a man that I trust there.”

“You trusted Fengi, once,” the priest reminded him.

“When I was less experienced,” said Valdemar. “I think that I have gotten better at this by now.”

“We’ll see,” said Father Gerald.

“I have a son, you know,” said Valdemar.

“I know,” said the priest.

“We made him co-king,” said Valdemar. “He’s still young, though. I was thinking that he might benefit from some entertainment. Maybe a jester. I thought that you might be able to recommend one.”

Father Gerald smiled.

“I think that I can help you there,” he said.

A
nother Valdemar
now sits on the Danish throne,” said Father Gerald. “The grandson of the first. He looks like a good one. And he has a fool by his side. Is that ending more satisfactory, Thomas?”

“Yes, Father,” replied the boy. “But what became of Amleth and Lother?”

“They both went on to have careers in the Guild,” said Father Gerald. “But that is a different story. Many different stories, in fact.”

“And the moral of this one?” asked Sister Agatha.

“Moral?” said Father Gerald in puzzlement. “I am no Aesop. Draw what morals you wish. No, that isn’t right. One lesson I could teach from this is that both Terence and Amleth had chances to run from Slesvig and live long lives far from responsibility. Both chose to honor their commitments to the Guild instead, and it ended up costing Terence his own life and Amleth the lives of his mother and the woman he loved. But a war was averted and thousands of lives saved because they did not run from their appointed tasks. Now, I have talked too far into the night. Those who have regular morning chores must still perform them, but tomorrow, the rest shall sleep late.”

There were cheers at this, and the gathering broke up.

“Every time you tell that story, you kill more people,” Sister Agatha teased Father Gerald as she joined him.

“I do not,” protested Father Gerald. “That’s exactly how it happened.”

“You personally killed Sveyn?” she laughed as she escorted him to his room.

Claudia and I walked to our tent in silence. Helga followed us carrying a blessedly sleeping Portia. She placed the baby gently in her cradle, then yawned, waved, and staggered off to the novitiates’ quarters. We sat by the cradle watching our daughter as the moonlight shone into the tent. “Well?” said Claudia.

“Well, what?” I replied.

“You were part of that story, weren’t you?”

“Was I? I didn’t hear my name anywhere.”

“Father Gerald always changes the names when they involve Guild members,” she said.

“All right, who do you think I was?”

“You were Amleth,” she said triumphantly. “That’s why you were so tense about hearing it again.”

I sighed.

“Truly, wife, you usually do better than that,” I said. “How old a man do you think I am?”

She looked at me carefully, then shook her head.

“You’re right, that was stupid of me,” she said. “Amleth, if he lives, would be on the verge of fifty. You’re younger than that.”

“My next birthday will be my forty-second,” I said. “But you’re right about one thing. I was part of that story. I was the one called Fother.”

“It must have been terrible, living through all of that,” she said.

“It was.”

“But to affect you so powerfully even now…”

“It was much worse than what you heard,” I said.

“But didn’t Father Gerald…”

“He told a story,” I said harshly. “An old man with fading memories told it to us from his viewpoint and gave it the fool’s version of a happy ending, fou only think you know this story.”

She took my hand in hers.

“Tell me,” she said.

T
he two earliest
memories I have are of Amleth juggling silks in front of me and of my father beating me for the first time. The two came so close together that they are forever linked in my mind, the defiance of nature and the shock of reality. Magic and pain. Illusion and disillusionment.

I was four years old. I did not know why he started beating me, or why it happened so frequently. I assumed that I had done something meriting punishment, but I could not figure out what it was, and my father refused to enlighten me. Sometimes, all it took was my appearance in his presence to set him off.

My only comforts were my sister and Amleth. She would hold me and press cool wet cloths to the bruises, and he would make me laugh, which would ease the pain. The healing power of laughter, that was another early discovery.

I have no memory of Ørvendil, of course. Fengi and Gerutha were husband and wife since I first became aware of such matters, so it was a surprise when Amleth first told me that he had had another father. Having had only one parent, and a cruel one at that, I said that it was unfair that he had so many parents and I so few. He actually laughed at that, which seemed to make him feel better, confirming what I was learning about humor.

Of the fool, Yorick, I only have the vaguest of images. A tall man in whiteface smiling at me. I think that I remember him carrying me on his shoulders, but whether that is an actual recollection, or merely something that was told to me later so that it took root in my imagination, I cannot tell. For all I know, it may even have been something Amleth told me that happened to him.

I don’t remember my mother.

Once when I was older, Amleth at my request tried to draw me a picture of her, but after several attempts were crumpled and thrown into the fire, he gave up and dragged me to a nearby stand of trees whose leaves were turning. He picked up one reddish one that had fallen and handed it to me. Her hair was that color, he said. Only shiny.

I cannot see the change of the trees in autumn without thinking of her.

My father never spoke of her, and Alfhild tended to look distant and cry when I brought her up. Amleth was the one who ended up telling me stories about her, often while teaching me the rudiments of juggling and tumbling that he had absorbed from Yorick. I would become so enraptured in the sound of his voice as he repeated these tales that the juggling became automatic to me. I could negotiate the most treacherous landscape with the clubs keeping pace over me as if they were a band of trained birds.

My father, when he was not punishing me, did pay attention to my spiritual upbringing and my education. I was at the school at the Slesvig cathedral at an early age, and when I wasn’t fooling around and making the other boys laugh, or being punished by the priests for doing it, I found that I had a knack for languages and literature. My father encouraged this. He taught me those tongues that he knew, and recruited resident foreigners to teach me theirs. Reynaldo taught me Tuscan dialect, which I liked, and kept calling me the little spy, which I didn’t like. I still remember the first time I said something funny to him in his own language. He looked at me in astonishment, then roared with laughter, clapping me on the back. When he reported this triumph back to my father, I was taken into our rooms and whipped, despite Alfhild flinging herself on father’s arm to try and stop him.

When I stumbled out later, Amleth was sitting in his little fort, whittling a stake. He beckoned me over to him, his face solemn.

“You may have noticed that Gorm does not possess a sense of humor,” he said.

“So what?” I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve, sitting painfully by him.

“Yorick once told me that people without humor are the mortal enemies of people with it,” he said. “That’s why Gorm beats you.”

“I don’t understand why that’s so,” I said.

“Neither do I,” he said. “But I have seen it, so it must be true.”

“How did I get a sense of humor if he has none?” I asked.

“From your mother,” he said, smiling. “She had the most marvelous laugh, Yorick and I loved to hear it.”

“Was she funny?”

“Oh, yes. I remember a time..he began, and was off into a new reminiscence about her, one that made me laugh and tolerate the welts on my back a little better.

It never occurred to me that Amleth’s behavior was anything unusual, but then he was behaving like that ever since I knew him, and my knowledge of how normal children played in the town was limited, thanks to my restrictive father. Amleth was my playmate, teacher, inspiration, and idol. He was my brother, and he was going to marry my sister when she was old enough and adopt me and take us all to a better place.

That was my plan.

When I turned eight, I was given more freedom, and began to explore the town, sometimes with Amleth, sometimes on my own. Whenever I returned, my father would sit down with me and ask me in great detail about who I saw and what they did or said. I was so happy that he took an interest in anything I was doing that I would rattle on, occasionally inventing incidents to make up for a slow day. The inventions, when discovered, would bring on more chastisement, and I learned to confine my observations to the real.

He demanded more and more as these conversations continued, wanting specifics on certain people that he found of interest. I gradually realized that he was training me to become a spy. I remember thinking, oh, well, most boys follow in their father’s footsteps, and I tried to become better at it. I learned how to hide using any cover available, and how to climb buildings and eavesdrop without actually dropping from the eaves.

When I told Amleth about this new occupation of mine, he became concerned.

“It’s not the spying, mind you,” he said as we juggled near the ruins of the Viking tower. “It’s who you’re doing it for, and why. I know that he’s your father, but…”

He stopped.

“But what?” I asked.

“You won’t like what I am going to say,” he said.

“Say it anyway,” I said.

“He is not a good man,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But he is my father, and I have no other choice.”

“You will,” he said. “I will make sure of it. Will you promise me something?”

“Yes.”

“Never tell him anything that could end up hurting anyone.”

“But if he catches me, I will be the one who gets hurt.”

He squatted in front of me and put his hands on my shoulders.

“Then don’t let him catch you,” he whispered.

I still remember our last day together before he left for Paris, both for how forlorn I felt and because we juggled nine clubs together for the first time. I took his request to amuse my sister seriously, and since my father forbade her the world, I devoted myself to bringing the world to her. Strange, looking back, but I essentially did for her what I had done for my father: I sat and described in great detail everyone and everything I saw, and she would practically inhale the words from my mouth, so starved was she for anything that wasn’t a stockade wall.

She would devise games in which I would follow a person of her choosing for a week, giving her a slice of an individual life over time rather than the confusing profusion of many lives swimming by a moment. I would shadow that person for as long as I could stay unobserved, which was a great amusement to me. At night, when I would finish my daily account as we lay in bed, clinging to each other, she would sigh at the simple pleasures of living in the world, then kiss my cheek.

At some point, she crossed over into womanhood, and it was then that my father shut her in the upper room by herself at night while he and I slept downstairs. Needless to say, I did not consider this a fair trade.

When Amleth came back from Paris to visit the first time, I could tell that something had changed in him. He was to the rest of Slesvig still a brooder with a tinge of madness, but when I finally got him alone, he seemed both more guarded and more purposeful than I had known him to be.

“Do you like the cathedral school?” I asked as we walked to our old juggling spot.

“More or less,” he said. “I like the city itself very much.”

“Do you think I will manage well enough there?” I asked as we began our warm-ups and stretches.

“I am sure you will do fine,” he said. “When do you think Gorm will allow you to go?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s disappointed that his old school has declined so much. He went to Ste. Genevieve, and thought the cathedral students were licentious drunkards.”

“He was right, for the most part,” laughed Amleth. “I now room with two of them. Of course, Rolf and Gudmund were like that in Slesvig, too.”

He had six clubs going effortlessly over his head, his hands a blur.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that you’ve been studying juggling with someone,” I said. “You never did six that well here.”

He looked at me in surprise, then grinned.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he said. “I have found a juggling master who gives lessons. It is my version of vice.”

“Fine, so long as you teach me what you’ve learned,” I said.

“All right, try doing this,” he said, and the lesson began.

When we had finished, he looked at me for a moment.

“How are you with a sword?” he asked.

“My father has taught me how to use one,” I replied. “And I practice with the guards some of the time.”

“Not good enough,” he said, pulling a pair of wooden practice swords from his bag. “It’s about time you learned how to fight properly.”

And every day he would teach me what his father had taught him. Of course, he had begun at an earlier age, and with daily instruction from the source, but he passed on all that he could when he was home, and I added swordplay to my routines when I would sneak out to practice.

When he returned to Paris, my sister, who had brightened considerably for the course of his visit, became more and more moody, despite my best efforts to cheer her up. I begged my father to be gentler with his methods, but that only produced the opposite effect. Oh, and I earned another beating for my pains.

I tried to dissuade Alfhild from entering the convent that last year, but she had convinced herself of Amleth’s betrayal. It was wholly out of character with the Amleth I knew. I suspected that it had something to do with his juggling lessons, but he had sworn me to secrecy about them, and to my everlasting regret, I honored that oath rather than tell my sister. When father drove off with her inside a closed carriage, I felt that the last vestige of my childhood was gone. I had turned thirteen two days before she left. She was the only one who remembered my birthday, and gave me an embroidered kerchief.

That last summer Amleth came back with his friend Horace, who lightened the mood at the evening table and flirted shamelessly with Gerutha. I was old enough to notice how starved she was for this kind of attention. Fengi was so busy with his plans that he barely noticed her, and despite her grand airs, she was so familiar to the stockade guards that her parading by no longer merited a glance, even with my sister no longer there to distract them.