Free Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike

table, lest their ears, though secure in snug coifs, be polluted by male humor given license by mead and hopped beer. Feng appeared to be so engaged in the men’s growingly uproarious discourse that he never sent a glance her way, yet he came to the end of the table for her while still crunching in his teethhis dessert of a yellow-streaked red apple. His teeth were irregular but seemed strong and all in place; he had not suffered the humbling pains and extractions that had left gaps in Horwendil’s prim mouth, less eager to smile than ever.
    Feng led Gerutha outside, across a courtyard whose frozen ruts gleamed with the noon’s melting, to a long thatch-roofed building that, from the whistling, fluttering sounds within it, she knew to be a mews. As the couple crossed the courtyard, the rooks in the overhanging oaks cawed in a convocation of protest and alarm; their racket was so sharp it seemed to Gerutha her ears had been suddenly uncoifed.
    The mews had a single door, just tall enough to admit a stooping man. Feng, though shorter than Horwendil, had to duck his head. Inside, the floor of sand and gravel crackled and shifted slightly beneath the Queen’s hesitant feet. The interior darkness gave her halt. The smell of rotted meat and the pungent mutes of winged carnivores assaulted her nostrils.
    “It takes a moment of adjustment, to see,” Feng said at her side, softly, so as not to break the web of restrained noises about them—a rustle of armor-stiff feathers, a scratch of lethal talons on a perch, a touchy jingle of bells, and the voices of the birds themselves, a mutter of smothered weeping as removed as is earth from sky from the high-pitched shriek of a raptor aloft, climbing in slow circles to make its diving strike.
    The half-darkness brightened. Details came forth: the cages woven of hardened withies, the dung-bleachedperches, the extra jesses and leashes hanging along the wall, the ghostly-pale plumed hoods holding the birds transfixed in an artificial blindness. Falconry had always seemed to Gerutha a cruel sport—an abuse of the wild, the perversion of a piece of unfettered nature into an instrument of human amusement. She had felt distaste for it since the first time her father had showed her the mews at Elsinore, a building grand as a church, its flocks allowed, with the windows safely gridded, to fly back and forth in the high, sun-barred space.
    In these cramped and dingy mews she felt Feng’s poverty as he must feel it, compared with the King’s. Now that her eyes could see, she counted a mere quartet of live inhabitants, amid the musty wrecks of empty cages. No wonder so much of the sport’s cunning leather apparatus hung idle and unoiled from cobwebbed pegs. “My absences have maimed my retinue,” Feng said. “A half-dozen birds and two falconers, an ancient and his lame grandson. How much do you know of the sport?”
    “My father afforded me a few glimpses, and my husband fewer than that. I believe Horwendil takes little pleasure in the pastime, though the royal mews is maintained, to impress visitors with the pomp of the sport. For some men it is something of a religion, I believe. As with the true faith, women are not ordained as priests.”
    “And yet only the female can be properly called a falcon. The male, a tiercel, is a third smaller, with half the fire and natural fury. Here is a young brancher, netted a few days ago and now being hacked, as they call it. By brancher we mean between the state of an eyas, takenfrom the nest though unfledged, and that of a passager, a haggard fully fledged, netted in passage as it were. Forgive what may seem to you pedantry; but there is a science of sorts that insists on its own nomenclature.”
    “I have heard these terms,” Gerutha said.
    “We call this proud young beauty Bathsheba.”
    By the wan light of a single small window at the end of the mews opposite the low door, Gerutha sought to see. The bird was held like a rolled-up parchment in