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accumulates silt.
    “Humane, I say,” Gerutha went on, “because more and more I hear Amleth voice, toward his inferiors—thefootmen and servers, and his playmates from the garrison’s brood—a certain cruelty, disguised as foolery. He and that loathsome Yorik are forever goading the poor solemn Lord Chamberlain with their tricks and madcap pretenses.”
    “Having a brother or sister, my lady, doesn’t soften the soul, in my experience. I was one of nine, and some were shy, and some bold, and others good, and others the other way. We rubbed against one another like stones in a bucket, but sandstone remained sandstone and quartz quartz. The young prince means no harm; he has a good heart, but too busy a mind.”
    “If only his father were to pay more attention … Amleth mocks me, even when he apes respect. Not yet six and he knows that women needn’t be listened to.”
    “His Majesty keeps an eye out. He waits until the boy is ready to harden. Then he’ll take him up.”
    “You and Svend …” She hesitated.
    “We were happy, Your Highness, as things go for the less well born.”
    “Your children—I envy you. You have them, and they have one another. Did you and Svend pray for so many?”
    “Not much prayer involved, as I recall. They just came in the course of nature. They weren’t exactly wanted or unwanted. Sometimes, it could be, wanting them too much dampens the tinder, so to speak. The spark doesn’t catch. And, the King being so much away expanding his realm and smiting the Norwegians the way he does, maybe he misses the time. It’s God’s will, and God’s mystery. The trouble for most of us isn’t how to make ’em, but how to feed ’em.”
    Gerutha stiffened, unwilling to see herself as her lessers saw her, as a queen ignorant of the common load. “How strange of God,” she agreed, “to bestow children upon those who cannot feed them and to deny them to those that could many times over.”
    Herda paused, looking puffed up with perplexity, her pursed lips a stopper in a pink face. Then: “May I ask, have you much discussed your wanting another offspring with your lord the King?”
    “As often as would be seemly. He is keener even than I to have more heirs. He envisions a succession, and does not like it hanging by a single thread. The Prince is not robust. His nervous temperament is susceptible to every shock.”
    “It may be a sibling at this stage would be a shock. The King has a brother, and I have not heard His Majesty take much comfort from the fact.”
    “Feng has chosen to abandon Denmark and pursue his fortunes in the progressive realms to the south.”
    “As a kindness to the King, it may be. Absence can be a present. Concerning the delicate matter of which Your Highness flattered me to speak, a midwife might offer more detailed advice, though she would be fearful in these high places of seeming to know too much and being in the end hung as a witch or drawn and quartered as a traitor. My own advice would be to let nature follow its course, where we have such little choice in the matter. There’s a shape in things, fiddle and fuss however we will around the edges.”
    “I shall strive to be more humble and submissive,” Gerutha sharply concluded, annoyed with herself for having sought wisdom in so lowly a place.
    •  •  •
    Years passed, and, though the Queen rarely shunned a wife’s bed-duty, the Prince remained an only child. As he aged into the first stages of manhood, growing suddenly leggy and his upper lip displaying a silken proto-mustache, Gerutha, nagged ever more strongly by a sense of estrangement from all that should gratify her, turned to Corambus, the last living official of Rorik’s court and a man whose affection for her she felt to be as old as she. If her father had been the life-giving sun, Corambus had been the reflective moon, moving at a harmonious distance, beaming down upon her when Rorik had been out of sight. His greeting, given several