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her, and not ever entirely healthy. Always some small complaint nagged at the child—colic, a rash in his crotch, endless colds and croup, fevers followed by a long lying abed that, as he aged, she, healthy and upright most every day of her life, came to resent as self-indulgent. As the powers of language and imagination descended upon him, the boy dramatized himself, and quibbled over everything, with parent, priest, and tutor. Only the disreputable, possibly demented jester, Yorik, seemed to win his approval: young Amleth loved a joke, to the point of finding the entire world, as it was composed within Elsinore, a joke. Joking, it seemed to his mother, formed his shield for fending off solemn duty and heartfelt intimacy.
    Her heart felt deflected. Something held back her love for this fragile, high-strung, quick-tongued child. She had become a mother too soon, perhaps; a stage in her life’s journey had been skipped, without which she couldnot move from loving a parent to loving a child. Or perhaps the fault was in the child: as water will stand up in globules on a fresh-waxed table or on newly oiled leather, so her love, as she felt it, spilled down upon Amleth and remained on his surface, gleaming like beads of mercury, unabsorbed. He was of his father’s blood—temperate, abstracted, a Jutish gloom coated over with the affected manners and luxurious skills of a nobleman. Not merely noble: he was a prince, as Gerutha had been a princess.
    She wondered if her own motherlessness was discovered by the gaps of motherly feeling within her. She allowed nursemaids, tutors, riding masters, fencing instructors to intervene between herself and the growing boy. His games seemed designed to repel and exclude her—inscrutable, clattering games, with sticks and paddles, bows and arrows, dice and counters, noisy imitations of war in which he commanded, with his high-pitched voice and tense white face, the buffoon Yorik and some unwashed sons of the castle garrison’s doxies. The quiet hoops and tops and dolls of Gerutha’s girlhood had no place in this male world of projectile fantasy, of hits and thrusts and “getting even”—for a strict tally was kept in the midst of all the shouts and wrestling, she observed, as in the bloodier accountings of adult warfare, much as Horwendil boasted of how King Fortinbras, in being slain, had forfeited not only the invaded terrain in Jutland but certain coastal lands north of Halland on the coast of Sweathland, between the sea and the great lake of Vänern, lands held not for theirworth, which was little, but as a gall to the opposing power, a canker of dishonor.
    As she had been without siblings, so was Amleth. Her failure to be fecund again, she felt, was God’s rebuke for her failings of maternal feeling, which she could not hide from Him. She was troubled enough to mention the matter to Herda, the serving-maid who had seen her succumb to Horwendil’s suit, some seven years ago. In those years Herda had married Svend and borne him four children, before the King’s squire had been killed in one of Horwendil’s mop-up skirmishes with the Norwegians, whose throne had passed to the brother of Fortinbras, a foppish glutton with little fight in him. Horwendil delighted in striking against the outposts of this effete King’s loose rule.
    “Dear little Amleth,” Gerutha tentatively began, “seems so isolated, such a brooding, quirkish five-year-old, that the King and I have long wondered whether a little brother or sister might turn him more sociable and humane.”
    “So one might,” Herda tersely replied. She was wearing white as a sign of mourning for Svend. His death last year—in a raid wherein a supposedly defenseless little fishing port, rich from the herring trade, had treacherously hired itself a guard of Scottish swordsmen—had left her subdued. Gerutha sometimes scented in her maid bitterness against the throne. Kingship collects grudges and enemies as surely as a millpond