The Weight of the Realm

The cup was tin, not silver — Gerberga had carried it from the kitchen herself and Gerberga did not carry silver to the river in a cold wind — and the dregs of the wine had frozen at the bottom in a thin red crust. The sun had lifted above the east wall of the compound but had not yet reached the roof of the ducal house. The frost on the cobbles held. Hugh’s boots broke it with a sound like the first break of thin ice on a still pond, and his breath went up in a slow column, and the bells of Saint-Stephen were sounding the end of the first hour of the first day of the year.

Behind him the wheel was still turning. He did not have to look back to know this. He could hear the water-work — the deep slow slap of the paddle-boards against the Moselle’s weight, the wooden groan of the axle in its greased socket, the thin high ring of the furnace-bellows rising and falling without a man’s hand to work them. The sound had been in his ears for an hour. It would be in his ears all day. It would be in his ears, he thought, for the rest of the life of the realm.

Leo had stayed at the bank. Kurt had gone back into the forge. Fulk was walking a step behind Hugh at the duke’s left, the ledger under his arm, his breath coming short in the cold. Gerberga was ahead of them on the path with Hedwig at her elbow. The ten yards between them was the distance a man keeps between his duke and his duchess when a child is close.

Hugh saw Gerberga stop at the doorstep of the ducal house. She had a hand on the jamb. Her other hand was under the heavy weight of her belly. Hedwig was steadying her at the shoulder. The stop was not a long stop — a breath, perhaps two — but Hugh saw it. He had been a husband for three and a half years. He had watched a woman carry a child to the end. He knew what a stop of that length meant.

“Fulk.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Send to the midwife.”

“She is already at the house, my lord.”

“Send to the second midwife.”

“She will be there by the second hour.”

“Good.”

They walked the last of the distance. Gerberga went in through the door with Hedwig at her arm. The door closed. Hugh stood on the step for a heartbeat — the cup still in his hand, the tin still cold against his palm — and then he handed the cup to Fulk and went up the outside stair to the solar without speaking to anyone.

* * *

The ducal house, Metz — the first hour

The solar was cold in the way that the solar was always cold on the first day of January. The brazier was lit and the shutter was at its morning gap — a finger’s breadth at the top of the east window, the gap they did not close because Hugh liked the wind to tell him when the weather was shifting — but the stone walls held the night in them still, and the cold came down out of the rafters and sat on the writing-table like a cold hand.

Hugh did not sit.

He stood at the east window with his hands behind his back and looked down the slope of the compound toward the forge and the river-bank beyond. From here he could see the pitched roof of the forge-bay and the pale column of smoke rising out of its chimney and, beyond the forge, the long dark line of the Moselle and the two wheels turning on the bank, the old and the new. The light was rising over the river. The frost on the compound stones caught the pink of it.

He was wearing the sword his father had worn at Charmoy. It hung at his left hip. He had not drawn it in eighteen months and had not yet cleaned the hilt of a dark spot on the pommel — a stain that he had decided long ago was not blood — and the weight of the weapon at his hip had become, over three years, the weight by which he measured everything else that was heavy.

He heard a door open below. A woman’s voice in the kitchen — Hedwig, steady, giving an order. The kettle moving onto a hook. The soft muffled sound of a woman walking up the inner stair not to the solar but to the bedchamber on the other side of the upper floor. That was the first midwife. Her name was Walburga. She had been at Metz for sixteen years. She had brought the last three bishops’ nephews into the world and had not lost a woman in eleven deliveries, and Gerberga had chosen her at Michaelmas when her time had become certain.

The second bell went. The forge below lit its second fire. He saw the smoke change shape. A man—Kurt, by the breadth of his shoulders—walked out of the bay with iron in tongs, laid it on the stone cooling bench outside the door, and turned back in.

The first blade of the new year. Kurt had wanted it to be Hugh who handled it. Hugh had handled the first blade of the old year at the feast of Saint Agnes, and the first of the year before that, and had intended to be at the bay at the second hour for the first of this year as well. He was not there. He was here. The blade would wait. The blade did not care.

He heard a cry from the bedchamber. It was short — a single sharp note of work, not of pain — and was cut off at its end by Walburga’s voice. The voice said, in Latin, that was well, that was coming, that was the work. Walburga spoke Latin at a birth the way a priest spoke Latin at a sacrament. Hugh had been told this by Hedwig long ago. The Latin was for the woman’s courage, and for the midwife’s authority, and for the thing that was being done.

Hugh did not move from the window.

He heard Gerberga’s voice answer. He could not make out the words, but he could hear the shape of them — low, controlled, a register she used for the council-hall and the horse-yard and the long work of a thing that had to be done properly or would be done badly. It was her work-voice. Hugh had heard it perhaps thirty times in three years. He knew what it meant. Gerberga had stepped into the work and had closed the door of it behind her.

He turned from the window.

He went to the writing-table. He opened the writing-case. He took out a single clean leaf of good Gallic parchment — not the thin working stuff, the other kind, the kind that a duke kept for the charter of a new abbey or the confirmation of a peace. He laid it flat. He did not take up the pen. He put the parchment at his right hand and sat down and waited.

* * *

The ducal house, Metz — the second hour

Taksony rode into the compound at the end of the second hour.

Hugh heard the horse before he saw it — a single horse coming at a slow canter up the north path, not in a hurry but not idle, the hooves ringing on the cobbles in a rhythm Hugh would have known in his sleep. He went to the window. The rider came through the inner gate and halted in the yard. He was alone. He was wearing the old gray cloak he wintered in, and his horse was dark with sweat to the flanks, and his breath and the horse’s breath went up in a single column.

Taksony had been at the Saargau, five days’ ride east, since Advent. He had heard two nights ago — a courier out of Metz had passed him on the road without stopping — that Gerberga’s time was close. He had turned and ridden. He had ridden, Hugh thought looking down, the way a man rides when he has decided not to sleep.

A groom took the horse. Taksony came up the stair.

Hugh heard him stop at the top of the stair. He did not knock at the solar door. He did not come in. He stood at the stair-head, outside, the way a man stands when he has remembered halfway up what a house of a woman in labor is. Hugh crossed the solar and opened the door himself.

Taksony had taken the cap from his head. His hair was flat against his skull where the cap had been, and the cold had reddened the bridge of his nose and the line of his cheekbones above the mustache.

“Lord-Prince.”

“Duke.”

They did not embrace. They had not embraced since the grave at Enns a year before, and neither had taken up the practice since; the embrace had been used and it was not a thing to use lightly. Taksony came into the solar with his cap in his hand.

“She is well?”

“She is in the work. Walburga is with her. It has not been long.”

“How long?”

“An hour.”

Taksony nodded. He was fifty-one years old and had fathered seven sons and outlived four of them, and he knew the hours of a birth the way he knew the hours of a campaign. An hour was nothing. An hour was the first hour. The work had not yet started truly. He crossed to the brazier and held his hands out to it.

Hugh said, “Why are you here?”

“Because a godfather should not be at the Saargau when his godson is born.”

Hugh was still at the door. He closed it behind Taksony with care.

“You have not been named godfather.”

“I will be named.”

“The bishop has said it cannot be done without a letter from Rome. The bishop has written the letter. The letter will not come back before Easter.”

“Then I will stand at the font at Easter.”

“The boy must be baptized in the week. Ademar will not wait longer than the octave. The cold kills children in the first week. The boy will be baptized on the tenth.”

“Then I will be at the font on the tenth, and the papal letter will come after, and I will be called godfather by the bishop’s mouth before the letter comes and by Rome’s mouth after. Either way I will be godfather. Either way my name will be in the book.”

Hugh did not answer at once. He went to the writing-table and he looked at the blank parchment. He stood at it with his hands on the edge of the table and he thought about the question of a Magyar at the font of Metz cathedral and what it would mean and what the bishops of the realm would say and what Ota would say and what his father’s ghost would say, and what Bishop Ademar, who had stood at his own baptism in that same font in his infancy, would say.

He thought about Eudoxia, who would stand at the other side of the font. He thought about Leo. He thought about the wheel that was turning at the river. He thought about Adalgis, who was in the ground at Enns.

He said, “You will be godfather.”

Taksony inclined his head. He did not say thank you. A thanks at that moment would have been the wrong size for the thing.

Hugh said, “Sit.”

Taksony sat. He laid the cap on the arm of the chair. The brazier was at his knee. The cold of the ride went slowly out of his hands.

They did not speak for a while after that. They listened to the house. They heard Walburga’s voice below, low and unhurried. They heard Gerberga’s work-voice answering. They heard Hedwig cross the lower floor and go out to the kitchen and come back with something on a tray. They heard the forge-wheel distantly, still turning, always turning now.

Eudoxia came up at the end of the third hour. She did not knock. She came through the solar door with her hair uncovered — it was uncovered at a birth, never else — and she spoke to Hugh as a midwife speaks to a husband, not as a scholar speaks to a duke.

“The work is good. She is strong. The child is sitting well. It will not be long.”

“How long?”

“An hour. Perhaps less. The baby is low and is moving.”

She looked at Taksony. She had not known Taksony was in the house. She nodded to him once and he rose to his feet and inclined his head to her — a Kabar lord to a Byzantine stranger-daughter, in the solar of a Frankish duke, on the morning of a Frankish heir — and Eudoxia nodded back and turned and went down the stair.

Hugh sat at the writing-table. He took up the pen. He did not write yet. He held the pen above the blank parchment and he listened to the house.

* * *

The ducal house, Metz — the third hour

The third hour bell sounded from Saint-Stephen at just past the quarter.

The bell was the one the cathedral rang for the sixth hour of the office — terce, the Latin hour, the hour when the Spirit had come down at Pentecost — and at Metz it was rung loud because the Saint-Stephen bell-tower stood high on the ridge and the sound carried along the Moselle to Jouy and back. Hugh heard it through the shutter-gap. He heard it in his ribs.

At the third stroke of the bell a cry came from the bedchamber.

It was not Gerberga’s cry. It was a child’s.

Hugh stood up from the writing-table. He set down the pen. He went to the solar door and he opened it and he stood at the top of the stair and he waited without moving. The bell was still going. He counted. Four. Five. Six. Seven. The bell stopped at nine as it always did.

The child’s cry went on after the bell.

It was a thin high cry — the right cry, the one that said the lungs were full and the throat was open — and it did not stop but became a second cry and then a third, and between the cries Hugh heard Walburga’s voice, low and satisfied, and he heard Eudoxia’s voice as well, also low, also satisfied, and he heard Gerberga’s voice, quieter now, the work-voice shifting into the voice of a woman who had finished the work.

Hedwig came up the stair.

She was carrying the child.

The child had been wrapped in a linen wrapper that Hedwig had brought from the chest at Michaelmas — fine white linen, the kind kept folded for three months in a cedar box against this day — and the child’s face was above the wrapper, dark-haired, red, eyes shut against the cold air of the stairwell. The cry had stopped. He was breathing in the hard small way of a creature ten minutes into the world. Hedwig stopped at the top of the stair. She held the child toward Hugh in both her hands.

“My lord. A son.”

Hugh took the child.

The child weighed — he thought at the moment and would think later and would say to Taksony over the cup that evening — about eight pounds. He had the dark hair that came from Gerberga’s side and he had the long nose that came from Hugh’s side, and on the first finger of his right hand, as he lay in Hugh’s two palms in the cold of the solar stair, he had a nail that was already chipped, a tiny ragged edge along the cuticle, as though he had been working some small stone in the womb.

Hugh held him.

He did not speak for a moment.

Taksony came out of the solar behind him. Hedwig stepped back a half-pace to give them the stair. Taksony did not approach close. He stood at the solar door, cap in hand, and he looked at the child in Hugh’s palms without moving.

“A son,” Hedwig said again, as though she needed Hugh to have it twice.

“Gerberga?”

“Well. She is well. She is very well. She is asking after you.”

“I will come.”

“She said — to tell you — take the child first to the window. She said he should see the sky before he sees her.”

Hugh turned. He carried the child to the east window of the solar. He lifted him. He held him up in both hands to the gap at the top of the shutter and the thin morning sky that was above the river.

The child opened his eyes.

They were dark — too dark to call yet, the gray-blue dark that newborns carry for a month — and they moved slowly in the cold light and fixed, for perhaps a heartbeat, on nothing Hugh could name. The sky or the shutter or the light. He did not know. He did not move. He stood with his son at the window in both his hands and the sky was above them and the wheel was turning on the river and the forge was burning and the bell had rung at the third hour, and in the low east light along the floor of the solar he saw the shadow of a cloak-peg on the stone, the empty peg on the north wall that had been Adalgis’s at the council-hours and had been empty now for fifteen months, and he saw, or thought he saw, the shape of an arm that was not there.

“Adalgis,” he said, quietly, to the cloak-peg and the child.

He lowered the boy.

He crossed the solar to the writing-table. He laid the child gently on the clean parchment — the child was that small — and he took up the pen and he wrote, in his own hand, in the Latin that Leo had taught him and that Fulk had cleaned for him and that he had written a hundred times at the close of chancery documents and had never before written at the head of one:

Natus est filius. Trium horarum. Anno DCCCCIV.

A son is born. Of the third hour. In the year nine hundred and four.

The ink dried as he watched. The child did not cry. The child lay on the parchment with his eyes open and his chipped fingernail moving slowly against the linen at his chin. Taksony came across the solar and stood at Hugh’s shoulder and looked down at the page and at the child on it and did not speak.

Hedwig said, from the door, “My lord. The duchess.”

“I am coming.”