she didn’t know. He was one or two inches shorter: nearer her own height. “Eighteen years ago, if memory serves,” he said, “the Holy Roman Emperor’s diplomacy had sent me to the Kingdom of Aragon, where the stalls behind the cathedrals offered items of an illicit trade with the Emirate of Granada, artifacts produced by the fanatically patient hands of the infidels. The design you noticed is a writing, running opposite to the direction of ours, stating, I believe, that there is no god but Allah, and a camel trader called Mahomet is his prophet.”
His voice had become dry and rapid, with a certain drag of mockery slowing some sentences as if holding them up to the light of irony. His hair was black and cut short, with stiff gray strands bracing the erect coiffure. There was a patch above one temple where a shiny dent declared an old wound and the hair had grown in pure white, to give a pied look. His eyes were less blue and lesslong than Horwendil’s; they were brown and slightly slant, with dramatically thick eyelashes, like an actor’s eye-rings of kohl. His nose was hooked, with avid flared nostrils. He appeared, though younger, older than Horwendil, more seasoned. He had marinated in a saturnine essence. Gerutha liked the creases that the exposure and wear of his travels had wrought upon his leathery skin, and the way his face was worn to its lean tendons, with muscular ins and outs. He had the wiry vitality of one who had escaped constraints. She sensed that this man could casually lie and deceive those who loved him, but this did not repel her; it gave his interior in her mind’s eye something of his exterior’s agreeably creased, contoured texture. As Horwendil had aged, his appearance had become prey to the tendencies of fair, thin-skinned men. The tip of his small straight nose had turned pink, and his upper eyelids drooped, and the puffiness of his throat and jaw and cheeks were insufficiently concealed by the patchy, curly beard she had coaxed him, when still a wife with influence, into growing.
Feng was forty-seven. After the legendary slaying of Koll, Horwendil had expanded and consolidated his fortunes and secured the kingship, while Feng set out upon the forest paths and crumbling Roman highways of the world to the south. He had returned now to Denmark to reverse, if he could, the decay of his mortgaged Jutland estates—pillaged by his neighbors and his overseers, while his peasants had been ravaged by plague and crop failure—and to establish, with some months’ residence in the manor that Rorik had granted him, a place in hisbrother’s royal court. His largely foreign guard of soldiers, their horses and pages, had all to be accommodated at Elsinore, for days at a time. Horwendil grumbled. Feng turned out to be a formidable convivialist; he drank without stint, though he showed drunkenness only in an extra deliberation of his movements. In the late stages of a feast he preyed, it was said, upon the serving-girls, but this disgusted Gerutha less than it should have. Rorik had behaved similarly, once his Ona was dead. Feng, too, it turned out, had once had a wife, Lena of the Orkney Isles, married not long after his brother’s wedding. Her figure had been as slender as a fairy queen’s, Gerutha gathered, and her hair so fine that a length hanging down her back could be coiled into a circlet no bigger than a wedding ring. Feng carried such a lock pinned to his undertunic over his heart, it was said: Herda passed on this servants’ gossip, seeing her lady’s interest. Lena had died, it was related, of nothing more distinct than her own unearthly beauty and goodness, before she could bear a child. So many good women dead young: it seemed a characteristic of these fallen, plaguey times. Gerutha could not but wonder if her own persistent vitality betrayed a lack of virtue, some unstated pact with evil. She was now thirty-five, regarded by all save herself as old.
In her company Feng was
His voice had become dry and rapid, with a certain drag of mockery slowing some sentences as if holding them up to the light of irony. His hair was black and cut short, with stiff gray strands bracing the erect coiffure. There was a patch above one temple where a shiny dent declared an old wound and the hair had grown in pure white, to give a pied look. His eyes were less blue and lesslong than Horwendil’s; they were brown and slightly slant, with dramatically thick eyelashes, like an actor’s eye-rings of kohl. His nose was hooked, with avid flared nostrils. He appeared, though younger, older than Horwendil, more seasoned. He had marinated in a saturnine essence. Gerutha liked the creases that the exposure and wear of his travels had wrought upon his leathery skin, and the way his face was worn to its lean tendons, with muscular ins and outs. He had the wiry vitality of one who had escaped constraints. She sensed that this man could casually lie and deceive those who loved him, but this did not repel her; it gave his interior in her mind’s eye something of his exterior’s agreeably creased, contoured texture. As Horwendil had aged, his appearance had become prey to the tendencies of fair, thin-skinned men. The tip of his small straight nose had turned pink, and his upper eyelids drooped, and the puffiness of his throat and jaw and cheeks were insufficiently concealed by the patchy, curly beard she had coaxed him, when still a wife with influence, into growing.
Feng was forty-seven. After the legendary slaying of Koll, Horwendil had expanded and consolidated his fortunes and secured the kingship, while Feng set out upon the forest paths and crumbling Roman highways of the world to the south. He had returned now to Denmark to reverse, if he could, the decay of his mortgaged Jutland estates—pillaged by his neighbors and his overseers, while his peasants had been ravaged by plague and crop failure—and to establish, with some months’ residence in the manor that Rorik had granted him, a place in hisbrother’s royal court. His largely foreign guard of soldiers, their horses and pages, had all to be accommodated at Elsinore, for days at a time. Horwendil grumbled. Feng turned out to be a formidable convivialist; he drank without stint, though he showed drunkenness only in an extra deliberation of his movements. In the late stages of a feast he preyed, it was said, upon the serving-girls, but this disgusted Gerutha less than it should have. Rorik had behaved similarly, once his Ona was dead. Feng, too, it turned out, had once had a wife, Lena of the Orkney Isles, married not long after his brother’s wedding. Her figure had been as slender as a fairy queen’s, Gerutha gathered, and her hair so fine that a length hanging down her back could be coiled into a circlet no bigger than a wedding ring. Feng carried such a lock pinned to his undertunic over his heart, it was said: Herda passed on this servants’ gossip, seeing her lady’s interest. Lena had died, it was related, of nothing more distinct than her own unearthly beauty and goodness, before she could bear a child. So many good women dead young: it seemed a characteristic of these fallen, plaguey times. Gerutha could not but wonder if her own persistent vitality betrayed a lack of virtue, some unstated pact with evil. She was now thirty-five, regarded by all save herself as old.
In her company Feng was
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