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quarters during those weeks while the provincial
thing
convened at Viborg.Some few voices there were raised for Feng, as the brother, though eighteen months younger, who was wilier in foreign ways and more apt to circumvent the schemes of the Germans, Polacks, and Sweathlanders without recourse to war; war was becoming, as undisturbed harvests and commerce increased creature comforts in castle and hovel alike, unfashionable. Some others spoke up loyally for this or that member of the noble
råd
—the Count of Holsten, prominently—whose kinship network offered more promise of holding the pieces of Denmark together, here on the northern edge of a roiling Europe. But in the end the final vote out of Viborg seemed certain to name Horwendil, the slayer of Koll and the spouse of Gerutha.
    Only Corambus, Rorik’s Lord Chamberlain, took Horwendil’s preëmptory move into the king’s place at all amiss. Though Gerutha thought of him as old, in truth Corambus was not much above a lusty forty, with a baby son and a younger wife, Magrit of Møn, so fair as to appear transparent and so delicate in her sensibility as to be in her utterances fey and, even, melodiously addled. She was not long to outlive her second childbed ten years hence, and (to extend this glance ahead in our tale) Corambus was never utterly to relax his resentment against Horwendil, whom the adviser in his own counsels thought to be an uncouth usurper. Though he scrupulously performed the routines of serving the new king, it was the Queen, Rorik’s only child, the only surviving vessel of his presiding spirit, whom Corambus truly served and loved. He had loved her as had all those denizens of Elsinore brought daily into touch with theamiable, radiant princess, and even as Gerutha became a married woman his love did not turn away, but lingered, it may be, to the point of jealousy, though she thought of him as old, and his official manner had early turned prudent, fussy, and sententious.
    Even before the messengers from Viborg brought the foreordained verdict—unanimous, the four provinces agreeing—Horwendil was soliciting support in the
råd
for a strike against Fortinbras. His rites of coronation were perfunctory, curtailed by the assembling of an army to expel the Norwegian invader from his beachheads in Jutland. While these military preparations were hurried to their fulfillment, Gerutha slowly ripened, her beautiful swollen belly veined with silvery stretch marks. And as it happened, by one of those auspicious conjunctions that mark the calendars of men’s memories, golden-bearded Fortinbras was met, defeated, and killed, in the sandy dunes of Thy, upon the same day in which the Queen won through a blood-eagle agony to bear a male heir, whom they named Amleth. The infant, blue from his own part in her struggle, was born with a caul, the sign of a great man or a doomed one—soothsayers differed.
    The name, which Horwendil proposed, honored his victory, in the west-Jutland dunes within sight of the wind-tossed Skagerrak, by referring to remembered verses in which bards sang of the Nine Maidens of the Island Mill, who in ages past ground Amleth’s meal—
Amloa mólu.
What the phrase meant the bards themselves, having passed the phrase from generation to generation like a pebble gradually worn smooth, did notknow; the meal was interpreted to be the sands of the shore, the mill the grinding world-machine that reduces all the children of the earth to dust. Gerutha had hoped to have the infant named Rorik, thus honoring her father and planting a seed of prospective rule in the child. Horwendil chose to honor himself, though obliquely. Thus her new-bloomed love for this fruit of her body took a spot of blight.
    Amleth for his part found her milk sour—at least, he cried much of the night, digesting it, and even as his mouth fastened onto her stinging breast he wrinkled his nose in disgust. He was not large, else her day of labor might have stretched to kill