of ladies most deject and wretched

[chariestmaid]

The first feeling is fury. When Ophelia wakes from a warbling, uncertain dream like the reedy call of a recorder, there are tears in her eyes, but she can tell they're tears of anger. Ophelia would always cry, whenever she tried to argue on her own behalf, always broke down and bit her tongue before she got another word in. But if something saddened her, she could never summon tears. Her father didn't believe her because of it — she doubted her own feelings, doubted they counted if she couldn't express them appropriately. Hamlet could, he could swear his love with all the holy vows of heaven, before he ripped up his own words and threw them back at her.

And now her father’s left her, to weep herself to sleep. All propriety, all decorum left with him, not that it was been enough to cover her. He put his jacket on her shoulders instead of his arm, and turned his back to her, to go with the king.

Fury fades, and what remains is a drowsy numbness, a sense of wrongness as she sees herself as if from the outside: a missing cog in a breaking-down machine. What should she be feeling now? Ophelia doesn't know.

Hamlet was right, she thinks. She wasn't made to live in a court. She should have been a convent girl. She should have worn a veil, so no man could ever see her face, nor smear the paintings from it.  The chariest maid, her brother once said, is prodigal enough if she unmask her beauty to the moon. She keeps her eyes down, lest the moon catch her crying, or her angry tears unmask her.

When she looks up again, she's still clutching her father's jacket, thinking of the shame she'll bring when she's found out of doors. How did she come to be in these woods? It’s a quiet relief, after the stone walls of Elsinore, to see so much green.

Comments

[chariestmaid]

It's what her brother always wanted, she thinks. It's what she might have imagined, but never could have, so what's the use in wanting? "Where do you hail from? Sir," she adds, with self-conscious manners.

[lightbearinglord]

"Hanguang-jun will do," Lan Wangji supplies, entirely familiar with the feeling of casting about for the correct formality. "I come from Gusu, in China."

[chariestmaid]

So far. She wonders how long the trip would take to Denmark, by ship. How much longer over land? This place must be truly remarkable, to bring such different peoples together. "I know nothing of it," she admits. "Will you tell me more?"

[lightbearinglord]

"I will." Lan Wangji allows a silent beat to pass. "Will you accompany out of the woods while I do so?"

[chariestmaid]

"Yes." She'll need a guide out of the woods, anyway, but it feels like a kindness not to say it outright. It feels like she's been offered a task she can complete, a deal she can deliver on easily.

[lightbearinglord]

So decided, Lan Wangji nods. He is confident that Ophelia will follow him like a pensive shadow as he begins to walk the winding way out from the trees. He has often been someone else's pensive shadow in his life; it's another echo of familiarity. "China is far to the east of Denmark," he says, his voice as measured as his steps, "and Gusu is near its eastern coast. The sea is a short journey from my home. The Christian God means little to us there."

[chariestmaid]

“I have always thought there were more gods than our own,” Ophelia remarks, with a calm surprising even her. “Or more forces in nature than our God could explain.”

[lightbearinglord]

"I have liked nothing that I have learned of your god," Lan Wangji says, simple and cutting with it. "Gods are sometimes greedy and capricious, but yours has too much power for those vices."

[chariestmaid]

She thinks through whether or not she agrees, and there's something soothing in turning the thought around, like a pebble in her hand. Like reading a letter from Hamlet on the structure of the universe and the immanence of God, before discourse on virtue and beauty became a barb to throw at her. "Men are greedy and capricious," she remarks. "Many think the Word of God has been too long barred by men of the Church, who remade God in their own image."

[lightbearinglord]

Men are greedy and capricious indeed; Lan Wangji has no inclination to dispute that claim. Still, it is when those men get ahold of outsized power that he finds them objectionable. "Do those who think so claim that your god is, in truth, kinder and more charitable than what is said?"

[chariestmaid]

"Mayhap." She thought it telling, at the time, that with all his wild words from Wittenberg, Hamlet was less concerned with God's kindness or charity than he was with God's intelligence. At the time, she thought it fondly, thinking that even princes couldn't help seeing themselves in God. But Hamlet didn't see a ruler, he saw some anxious scholar setting up the universe like he was solving a puzzle, moving shape and substance around just so. It endeared him to Ophelia. "In some respects, He is a harder God for His children to please. He tests us only on His word, not on adherence to priestly convocations. But His will is absolute, His chosen predestined; He will hear no petitions and make no indulgences." No one yet, to Ophelia's knowing, has spoken of a God who does not test His children at all.

[lightbearinglord]

"I had never before heard of a god with a will so immovable." They are beginning to emerge from the wooded part of the grounds now, the forest's edge marked by broad, flat stones. "The gods of my world want offerings, but they rarely administer tests. We are not their children."

[chariestmaid]

"Even the old god of Denmark was called Allfather," she says. "But there were other gods beside him. Family. Our God has only one Son alike to Him in divinity ... the rest of us were fallen from birth."

[lightbearinglord]

"Mn. I have been told the story of Eden." In the presence of one of its major players, but that seems a jarring detail to foist upon Ophelia in this moment.

[chariestmaid]

"Women were punished with the pain of childbirth," tone flat, eyes absent. "Because Eve was the first to eat the fruit."

[lightbearinglord]

"Because a trap was set. Is that right?"

[chariestmaid]

"A test," she says, nothing of her tone to indicate whether it's correction or clarification. A test was set. Like the test she was for Hamlet, Eve with apple-red lips, but his betrayed look was the look of animal caught by a trap. Where's your father?