Means & Luster

There can only be one prince in Denmark. It won’t be like it is in England, or in France, where a constellation of foreign interlopers may hang in orbit around better men – he cannot clap him on the back and kiss him by way of greeting, can’t embrace him, not here. This isn’t Wittenberg, and it isn’t home; he must bow, and stand silent through the new king’s speeches of loving conciliation and peace even as he’s choking to tell him what he’s seen. He’s his father’s son, and Horatio expects to see this more clearly than ever – expects to recognize the king’s cool dark eyes, the lines of his nose and lips, like a figure cast in the same mold from finer metal. He expects to see the proud boy he knew, unbowed and full of easy confidence. He expects to see another ghost.

The prince stands alone with his back to the wall, arms tightly crossed, hugging himself like a schoolboy. The prince has recently been weeping; his dark hair is an uncombed mess and his face is flushed, the skin around his eyes wet and red. The pinched set of his mouth suggests he’s struggling not to start up crying again. He rubs at his face with his sleeve as if he can martial his grief into a better order by removing its traces. Seeing him alone, and silent, makes Horatio’s throat ache with sympathy, but even that is chased with its own dart of shame. He shouldn’t be seeing this. It’s one thing to be intellectually conscious of a dear friend’s distress and another to witness it firsthand, and to be incapable of doing the least thing to help relieve him. The guardsmen hang back in the doorway, balking like dogs – they’ve seen his state as well with their own eyes and unsure of how to approach without affronting his dignity – whether to leave him be, until such a time as their dread news will be easier in the telling. He might be angered by the intrusion, or humiliated.

Horatio can’t find it in himself, not in all his sober philosophy, even to think against his prince. He must tell him the news himself. It starts with a greeting.

Horatio wants to run to him. Instead he bows, and it’s Hamlet who hurries to his side – as if he already knows the news is dire. Something lies before both of them, presaged by restless shades and uneasy greetings. They spend the rest of the afternoon together as it quickly turns to evening, waiting out each tolling of the bells before they can break away for their heavy task – Hamlet dodging his queenly mother’s inquiries and helping Horatio to settle in with what little baggage he possesses. The prince points out to him from across the room a bright-eyed girl with her brown hair in a thick braid; once she catches them looking, and turns her head away. He shows him his own chambers, sterile and boyish, and the kitchens, and the stables. When the sun’s gone down and the crowds begin to filter in, they wander out again into the night; Hamlet leads the way up to the battlements, sure-footed and certain that Horatio will follow.

Alone in the dark they lie still and wait, ears pricked for the shouts of guardsmen taking up their watch. Horatio draws his cloak around both of them, chafing Prince Hamlet’s bloodless hands between his own against the touch of the night air.

**

They begin with no particular purpose; Hamlet leads, and Horatio follows, trailing behind with practice swords and blunted daggers. Even the prince’s dinner knives are blunted, lest he harm himself, or anyone else. They contrive to leave him helpless, while pretending as if all is well, while Ophelia cries at night and grows sicker, and their fellow-classmates batten on like leeches. Some other treachery is brewing, something still worse is yet unborn. The new king must think Horatio harmless, or below his notice, too dull to bribe or fit for attending on women; his own dagger is still sharp.

They take the empty lobby for their practice-ground. All the curtains and tapestries are torn down and all the tapers in the hall are lit, chasing the shadows from all its carved flourishes and hiding-places. The high ceilings echo the sound of their scuffling footsteps, of sword skittering against sword (a sound more pleasing to the spectator than to the duelist) and of Hamlet’s hard breathing. Horatio is the more experienced fighter of the two of them, he has significant advantages in areas that have nothing to do with noble birth or the quality of his tutors. Soldiers brawl in earnest, both on the field of battle and in quarrels amongst themselves, and it’s a different creature altogether from the sporting duels from which both participants might walk away friends. But Hamlet is trickier than Horatio is, even if he tires sooner, and his wiry body is well-suited to his choice of weapons. They fight for practice at first, two familiar bodies going through the same drills and motions practiced at Wittenberg in back-rooms – and that are surely practiced still; life will go on behind them, in the short period of their absence, students still chatter in taverns and amuse themselves by playing at soldiers. And they will, as long as there are students. Life goes on outside these walls.

A change comes over the prince midway through their bout, and Horatio knows what it is – some blind demon of vengeance that rises behind his dark eyes and quickens his footsteps, or the imagination of a future challenger. He fights like a devil, and he knows the terrain better, as Horatio’s boots slip on the mirror-black tile and he stumbles scaling a ledge backward. The prince tries to rein himself in, Horatio can tell even as he strikes and parries and scatters himself to dodge. But his bitterness makes him sloppy, a little erratic – brutally good for his own purposes of assassination. It’s not a lengthy struggle. This much, too, is not for show.

Before he realizes it, his own weapon is in the prince’s hand, his knuckles smarting from the extraction of it from his grip. The next struggle is in earnest – knees, elbows, fists. Just as soon, Hamlet has him at the point of his sword, and Horatio cries out – he isn’t frightened, not in that moment, but he is seized for a moment with a spine-stiffening consciousness of his prince’s sheer resolve, the iron will behind all his quickness that could easily have driven that point home. There’s something in his prince’s face that renders it unrecognizable.

Horatio reaches out and touches his shoulder, as lightly as he can. It nearly staggers him, and he blinks away whatever it was that had swept over him, like a man waking up from a dream. Hamlet casts his sword down, and it clatters on the ground; his dagger has barely found its sheath before he’s falling against Horatio’s shoulder and enfolding him in his arms. Horatio embraces him, not sure if the prince is about to laugh, or weep, or burst out in another speech. His shoulder smells like sweat and laundered cloth and there are no more salt tears, only the clinch of a comradely arm and Hamlet’s hand knotting up in the cloth of his shirt.

“You nearly had me. Well fought, Horatio.”

(If he’d been anyone else, what would the prince have done?)

“My lord–” He’s not sure what he means to deny, or to affirm. “Well fought, my lord. It’s a pleasure to serve.”

He feels the prince’s sharp exhalation of breath leave his chest, before he releases him. Horatio settles back on his heels, his heart pounding in his throat. It’s cruel enough that the prince must die, but he’s never looked more bloomingly alive – even ill-tempered and half-mad in earnest, his dark eyes are warm and his cheeks are stained red with something like tenderness. Some other uneasy thought is welling up in him, unsaid.

“With what it is I must do – if I become too cruel and lose my wits, if you ever think to leave Denmark for a friendlier country–”

“Never,” Horatio says without hesitation. “Not for my own life.” What else is there to say? He’s an outsider here, and the king wants nothing to do with him, but he’s Hamlet’s man through and through, the chronicler of all his secrets; if any two friends ever shared a soul in common, it would have to be the pair of them. The quarrel may be Hamlet’s, but the duty of seeing justice done is on Horatio’s shoulders.

The thinnest sliver of a smile crosses Hamlet’s face, some glimmer of his old humor returning. “What a stalwart prince you’d have made, Horatio, in some other age. A better one than I.”

Hamlet takes his face between his hands and kisses him, fully on the mouth. Like lovers kiss, and the jolt of paling fear – that the prince knows, that he is found out for what he is, whatever Horatio is – is matched only by the joy of his touch, his lips, given confidently and without reserve. Years of their lives are in that kiss, years of fear and duty and affection, and they will not come again.

The prince has gone too far to turn away now, when the kiss is ended and the realization presses down on both of them that they’ve done a thing that can’t be taken back. Yet there’s still a sympathy between their bodies, like a pair of plucked strings sounding together. Hamlet lets him go, and his broad hands lie between them half-folded. Horatio brings them both up to brush their knuckles with his lips.

Horatio knows he can only hold on to flesh and blood. Hamlet’s spirit and mind are both drawn away elsewhere, inexorably, and it is nowhere he can follow. Hamlet will never again go walking in Wittenberg, even if he lives to see some improbably happy victory. His bloodstained prince no longer talks in his idle hours of missing Wittenberg, of running away with a company of players or any other earnest pastime not fit for princes. His resolve grows, even as his doubts multiply, and Horatio can’t wish it were otherwise without willing him to be a coward. The prince must end this as either a king or a corpse, and there is no room for Horatio in this small world – a world made for nobility and not merit nor affection. Horatio knows he will lose him. He can only lend him his heart, and hope for him like a heathen.