Free Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike Page A

a knitted sock, her head protruding at one end and the yellow feet, already encumbered with trailing jesses, at the other. The little head was black-capped. There were markings down the sides of her white face like inky stains bled from her eyes. As her own eyes widened to see better, Gerutha gasped in horror: Bathsheba’s lids were sewn shut, with stout, even stitches.
    “The eyes,” Feng said, hearing her sucked breath, for her face in its white wimple was turned from him. “They are what is called seeled. It is for her own protection; otherwise she will be frantic with the possibilities of freedom that she sees about her. Her talons have been trimmed, and her feet hobbled with bells, so the falconer can hear her slightest move. She is intricate and sensitive and excitable. For her to become a partner to men, she must be constrained, as a baby is swaddled, or as a king is held to his throne throughout a day’s sacred ceremony. She has all outdoors in her heart, and we seek to pour her, as through a funnel, into a convenient container. She is fed, Gerutha—fed easier meat than any she would be bringing down in her untamed state. Blindness to her is amercy, a lulling into safety. Have you never observed how, to catch a goose, the gooseboy throws a blanket over it, and it instantly goes still, in a kind of sleep?” His voice was lulling in her ear, grainy in pleasing abrasion.
    “It is as men subdue women with their sweeping vows,” she said. “Are her eyes ever unseeled?”
    “As soon as the falconer deems her ready for the hood. He is accustoming her to the human voice, to our touch and smell, which overwhelm a falcon’s fine senses. To soothe her, he sprinkles water upon her from his own mouth; he sings her the same song, over and over. He stays awake night after night, keeping her awake with him, until she at last will succumb and accept his glove as her natural resting place. These miraculous creatures are not like dogs and pigs; the realm they occupy nowhere touches ours, unless we patiently spin a link and pull them close to us.”
    “Poor Bathsheba, I wish she could understand all your beguiling explanations of her misery. Look, at the foot of the perch, she has lost some feathers! She will be as naked as when King David spied her from his palace roof.”
    She held out a small brown feather, tipped as if dipped in cream. He solemnly took it from her pink-palmed hand, and tucked it in his belt. “Here,” he said, “come meet Jochebed, the Biblical mother of Miriam, mother of Moses. She is a gyrfalcon, from the regions of constant ice and snow. She moults from white to brown and back again in the course of the seasons; you find her now fresh in her winter feathers. Gyrfalcons,” he went on, hisamorous unease seeking shelter behind an instructor’s brisk demeanor, “are larger than peregrines. Bathsheba is a peregrine. Jochebed has been trained to hunt cranes in the marshes, but I fear is as out of practice as her master. If a falcon is not held to her training, she reverts to an untamed state, and bates in her jesses, hurling herself into an upside-down fury; she rejects the perch and spurns to eat even such a steaming delicacy as a rabbit’s liver.”
    While talking, he had pulled on a leather gauntlet that extended nearly to his elbow. Clucking softly, ruffling the back of Jochebed’s white neck, Feng induced the hooded bird to step, with its knotted jesses, onto his wrist. Murmuring to her, he carried the bird outside, to where the mews with its solitary window backed upon a great down-trending meadow, its grasses quick with the whitening motions of the wind and the hurrying shadows of the fall clouds, which had thickened and grown scowling since this morning’s ride beneath a dappled white sky. “Behold: the falconer himself,” Feng said.
    It was an old man, Thord by name, wrinkled and bent by time but broad through the chest, as if to support wings. He doffed his peaked felt hat in greeting