1
The first shovelful of dirt went up in a wide arc and came down with a thud that settled the matter. Two gravediggers kept at it, flinging earth as though the hole might, with enough encouragement, swallow all of Denmark and spare everyone the trouble. Rags were tied over their mouths against the smell. They worked in silence, broken only by iron striking flint, sparks jumping with every blow, their breath hanging white in the torchlight.
A skull came loose in the hands of one of them. He studied it a moment, then tossed it aside — the gesture of a man who had concluded there were already too many skulls in the world to lose sleep over one more.
Above them rose Kronborg. Danish flags snapped over the walls, proud in the wind, and for the length of one gust the whole scene arranged itself around a line of verse, as though the world had decided to supply its own program notes.
To be, or not to be—that is the question.
Inside the great hall, Hamlet was wrestling with precisely that question beneath painted ceilings and gilded beams. The room was full. Some of the audience watched Hamlet. The rest watched one another, which at court is a more reliable source of drama. The royal dais gleamed. King Frederik III and Queen Sophie Amalie sat rigidly in the front row with Kørbitz, Gabel, and Colonel Benfeldt behind them, and a court dwarf in jester’s motley circled the King’s chair while the wine made its rounds with professional frequency.
Hamlet stepped forward and declaimed:
“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them…”
The King could not keep his eyes off the door.
“Where are they?” he whispered to Gabel. “Shouldn’t they have been here long ago?”
Gabel nodded. Both men turned their worried faces back to the stage, where Hamlet pressed on, blissfully unaware that the evening’s real drama was unfolding some distance away, and at a considerably lower altitude.
“To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub…”
* * *
Helsingør’s main street was doing a brisk trade in merchants and townspeople until a Swedish detachment came through with shrill fifes and pounding drums, at which point the trade became a stampede.
Directly behind the soldiers walked Ib, dressed in the reeking rags of a night-soil man. He whistled as he went, which did nothing for the disguise and a great deal against it, and over one shoulder he carried a velvet-covered board with a large round hole in the middle.
He followed the soldiers around a corner to the gate of the Swedish garrison, knocked firmly, and waited until a hatch was yanked open and a guard’s face filled it.
“What do you want? Only soldiers in the service of His Swedish Majesty King Karl X Gustav are allowed in here!”
“The commandant sent for the night-soil man,” Ib said smoothly. “Said it was urgent.”
“You’re not the night-soil man,” the guard grunted. “You’re too tall. And much too cheerful. Get lost!”
The hatch slammed.
Ib knocked again, louder.
“That’s quite true. He’s sick. I’m Rasmus, his nephew. He sent me in his place.”
The guard opened the door this time, though he held on to his doubts.
“Anyone could say that.”
“Certainly,” Ib agreed.
He swung the board down from his shoulder and held it out like a craftsman presenting his life’s work.
“But not anyone could make one of these. Certainly not in the correct size.”
He let the words settle just long enough to sting.
“But if you would prefer to be held responsible for prolonging your commandant’s suffering, I’ll naturally be on my way.”
The guard caught him by the arm before he could turn. There are many things a sentry is trained to resist. His commandant’s bowels are not among them.
* * *
In the courtyard the washerwomen were hard at work. Two bent over tubs with their blouses loosened in the heat; a third stirred a large vat of blue dye. From a window above, Swedish soldiers leaned out, shouted encouragement, and rattled dice, contributing to the war effort in the manner that suited them best.
Ib strolled past with an easy grin and made for a side building. At the door he glanced through a small window and went in.
The corridor beyond was narrow and lit by a single smoking lamp. Two doors faced him. One had a heart painted on it.
The other read:
ARMORY.
Through the window came another glimpse of the washerwomen, one of whom was holding up a pair of enormous underdrawers to shrieks of appreciation.
Ib shook his head and went to the privy. He knocked.
No answer.
He opened the door, stepped in, and laid the board carefully over the empty hole — the one part of the night’s work that had been measured to fit.
Back in the corridor he lifted the lamp from the wall, drew a lock pick from his sleeve, and set to work on the armory.
The bolt clicked.
He went in and raised the lamp. Muskets stood in gleaming rows. Pistols, sabers, grenades, barrels of gunpowder, ladders, axes, even crossbows. Enough weapons to equip a rebellion.
Or two.
In one corner stood a basket of apples. Ib took one, polished it on his sleeve — the cleanest thing in the room by a comfortable margin — and was lifting it to his mouth when a cry went up beyond the walls.
“Plague! Plague!”
People fled in panic, which is the only sensible response to the word and the main reason it is so useful.
Down the alley came a doctor in a grotesque costume: long coat, tall hat, and a mask ending in an enormous birdlike beak. In his arms he carried a limp ten-year-old girl whose face was a map of plague sores.
Ib lifted the bar from the armory’s double doors to the rear alley and made ready to throw them open.
The doors opened from the outside first.
The plague doctor stepped in and set the girl down.
She sat up at once.
Perfectly healthy.
The mask came off.
Svend Poulsen.
“Ib, you watch the door. Regitze, help me here.”
Ib groaned.
“Why don’t we just blow the whole place up? I’m getting tired of all this acting.”
“Come on!” Svend snarled.
Out in the courtyard, a fresh complication presented itself. One of the washerwomen was pinning the underdrawers to the line just as the suspicious guard came back, and he put the question to her directly.
“Where’s the night-soil man?”
“How should I know?” she replied, pointing toward the side building. “He went straight in there. Haven’t seen him since.”
The guard turned toward the door.
Inside the armory, Svend worked fast. He pulled every other musket from the racks and fed them into a sack while Regitze came behind him, nudging the survivors apart so the rows still looked honest. It is a particular kind of theft that leaves the shelf looking untouched, and the best kind to practice on a man who counts by glancing.
Out in the courtyard the commandant himself appeared — a large man sweating beneath his hat, a newspaper folded under one arm. He made for the side building, collided with the guard, and without breaking stride smacked him across the face with the paper.
Ib’s grin appeared at the window, broad and contented, the face of a man enjoying the view rather than one standing in the middle of a Swedish garrison with his life resting on a privy seat.
Outside, the commandant let the guard have it.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
The guard stammered.
“The night-soil man, Commandant…”
“Get out! Back to your post! Run!”
The guard shuffled toward the gate.
“Faster!” the commandant roared.
And then a more pressing authority than the Swedish crown made itself felt. His face changed. He seized his backside and bolted for the side building.
Inside the armory, Ib slipped through the door and pulled it shut behind him. Svend, lowering powder containers into a sack Regitze held open, looked up sharply.
“The commandant!” Ib whispered, stabbing a finger toward the door.
They went still and listened.
Footsteps came running closer.
A door slammed.
Hinges creaked.
Ib mimed enormous relief.
Safe.
For now.
Inside the privy, the commandant fought his trousers like a drowning man fighting a rope. Then he stopped dead. He had seen the new seat, fitted neatly in place.
A smile of profound satisfaction spread across his face.
He stroked the wood.
Whatever else the day held, it had already delivered the one thing he had asked for.
* * *
Behind the garrison, a two-wheeled cart creaked up to the armory gate behind a horse that had plainly been consulted on none of this. On the seat sat Marius, a cloth tied over his mouth, his eyes burning at the Swedish soldiers who marched past giving him a wide berth, as though the plague itself had hired a wagon.
Once they were gone, he knocked.
A hatch opened, and sacks came tumbling out. Marius caught them, threw them into the cart, and climbed aboard just as the hatch closed again.
Behind it, Svend and Regitze had resumed their roles — the doctor in the bird-beaked mask, his conveniently diseased patient — and swung onto the back of the cart as it rattled away.
Ib came last, the apple between his teeth and the lamp restored with care to its hook, because a man who has just robbed an armory may as well leave the lighting as he found it. He shut the armory door and crept down the corridor.
He stopped only when he heard the commandant inside the privy folding his newspaper and getting to his feet.
Ib went on, on tiptoe.
Out in the courtyard he let out the breath he had been holding.
“That was close,” he muttered to himself.
He bit into the apple, only to find the same guard as before blocking his way.
“Where did you get that apple?”
“From the commandant. A thank-you for the new seat.”
Ib tossed him the apple core.
“Here. Enjoy it. And have a pleasant trip home to Sweden.”
He strolled away, leaving the guard holding a core and the slowly arriving conviction that something had been done to him — open-mouthed, and unable to name a single part of it.
2
A voice rang out from the great hall:
“Part them! They are incensed.”
Inside Kronborg’s great hall, Hamlet’s duel with Laertes had reached its climax, the blades crashing together and throwing sparks.
King Frederik watched with the same worried frown he had worn all evening. Beside him, Queen Sophie Amalie smiled serenely, the very picture of composure — as a woman can afford to be when the poison on the stage is not meant for her.
Onstage, Hamlet lunged.
Laertes fell, wounded.
“They bleed on both sides,” said Horatio.
Osric bent over the fallen man.
“How is’t, Laertes?”
Laertes groaned:
“Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric. I am justly killed with mine own treachery.”
Hamlet spun around.
“How does the Queen?”
“She swoons to see them bleed,” replied the King.
But the Queen herself cried out:
“No, no, the drink, the drink! O my dear Hamlet! The drink, the drink! I am poisoned!”
She collapsed.
In the royal box, Kørbitz choked on his wine. It was the most sincere performance of the evening, and the only one no one had rehearsed.
Gabel leaned toward the King and tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
“I believe our hero has returned, Your Majesty.”
Frederik followed his gaze and found them: Svend in his green hunter’s clothes and Ib in his sergeant’s uniform, slipping along the side of the hall with the modesty of men who had spent the evening robbing a Swedish garrison and preferred not to be congratulated for it in public.
Even the court dwarf looked up and recognized them.
* * *
A short while later, in the King’s chamber, a window was being bricked up while footsteps crossed the floor.
“Shakespeare is a great writer,” Frederik said dryly. “Something is rotten in Denmark.”
He passed a large map of the Nordic countries, flagged for Sweden and Denmark, and went to his desk with Gabel and Svend behind him.
“The rotten thing in Denmark,” he continued, “is the Swedes. Karl Gustav was supposed to have withdrawn his troops fourteen days ago, and the country is still crawling with them. And they are not ghosts in a play!”
He slapped another report onto the pile, gathered the whole stack, and pushed it at them.
“Armories and powder magazines. Every one of them filled to bursting. Proof enough! Karl Gustav intends to stay.”
“And live at our expense.” His fist came down on the desk. “Denmark is Sweden’s larder. I almost regret forbidding you to thin out his weapons stockpile, Poulsen.”
Svend allowed himself the faintest smile — the smile of a man who had thinned it that very afternoon and saw no pressing reason to raise the subject.
* * *
Back onstage, the actors were clearing the scenery.
Ib stood holding a skull, turning it this way and that as though weighing the fate of all mankind and finding it lighter than expected.
“When you come right down to it,” he mused, “there’s no difference between kings and queens and ordinary people. Even Kulsoen probably looks like this by now.”
He wandered over to the actor who had played the Queen, now halfway out of costume, the beard stubble coming through the wig and the makeup.
The man gave him a sour look.
“I could tell you a story,” Ib went on, “that would make your hair stand on end. About a witch who was left out for the wolves by a brave man who—”
The “Queen” cut him off with a snarl, in Cockney English.
“Piss off!”
Ib blinked.
“Easy now. Show some respect for the dead.”
“I said piss off!”
Ib shook his head, bewildered by the foreign tongue but entirely certain of his etiquette.
“Whatever that means, ladies do not speak that way. You can peess orrff yourself!”
He took the wig in both hands and hauled it down over the man’s forehead until it split at the crown, then kept pulling until it hung over his nose.
A queen to the last, and now blind as well.
* * *
In the King’s chamber, Gabel folded his hands behind his back.
“Patience, Your Majesty, remains our strongest weapon. We must not provoke the Swedes any more than absolutely necessary.”
Frederik III’s face tightened.
“No, no, of course not. But we must do something. Discreetly, naturally, but something! Otherwise we’ll become the laughingstock of the entire world.”
Svend inclined his head.
“Then it will have to be extremely discreet, Your Majesty. The people of North Zealand are sick and starving. They have neither the strength nor the courage to fight. In fact, only one man has joined us so far.”
“One?”
The King stared at him.
“Yes,” said Svend. “Our host, the old estate bailiff at Krogerup. An influential man who knows Helsingør as though he built the town himself.”
The King glanced at Gabel.
“His son was the engineer at Kronborg’s cannon foundry, Your Majesty,” Gabel explained. “The one who died last winter. An excellent family.”
“The Swedes are short of both cannon and shot,” Svend continued. “We found none in their depots. That alone is keeping them from attacking.”
“It isn’t quite that simple,” Gabel objected. “But you are right. Without artillery, it is unlikely that Karl Gustav will turn against Copenhagen again.”
Frederik leaned forward, his voice tightening.
“You are my eyes and ears, Poulsen. I want to know every move the Swedes make in North Zealand. And I would very much like you to find more people willing to help. More eyes. More ears. Like the brave Gønger down south.”
His gaze slid toward Gabel.
“And should you feel tempted to act…”
A beat.
“Do it discreetly.”
Gabel threw out his arms as though to protest, but the King had already turned to the masons bricking up the window.
“Aren’t you finished yet?”
The two men fell on the work and began laying bricks at a speed no mason had ever reached for the sake of the craft alone.
“I can’t stand looking across at the land we lost,” the King muttered.
It was the one view in the castle no amount of discretion could repair. So he was having it walled off instead.
* * *
On their way out of the hall, Ib pressed a small round medallion from Hamlet’s costume into Svend’s hand.
“A souvenir.”
Svend put it in his pocket.
