By the time he was big enough, he had become too big.

  Angry, he let himself drop to the ground.

  “The fruit has grown large and ugly this year,” said a familiar voice—Yorick, the old jester.

  “It’s too early for apples.”

  “Then what kind of weather is it that drops ugly boys out of the sky?”

  “I’m not ugly. Mother says I’m a very pretty little boy.”

  “Better to be ugly,” said Yorick, and there was sadness in his voice.

  “Why is that?” said Hamlet. “Pretty is always better.”

  “When you’re older, if you’re still pretty, then when you marry a woman you won’t know whether she is marrying you for your pretty looks or because you’re a prince.”

  “Why not both?”

  “Why not neither?”

  “I don’t want to marry anybody,” said Hamlet.

  “But you will,” said Yorick, “and you must be sure that she never knows you’re pretty. Marry someone who lives far away. Let her think you’re ugly as a toad. Then you’ll be sure she’s marrying you because of your royal blood.”

  “Why would I want that?”

  “If she marries you because you’re pretty, then when you get old like me she’ll love some other young man. But if she marries you because you’re a prince, then when you’re old you’ll still be prince—or King. So she’ll keep on loving you.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re a fool,” said Hamlet, “or I might believe you.”

  “It’s always good not to believe me,” said Yorick. “Ask your mother.”

  “Ask her what?”

  “If she married your father because he’s pretty.” Then Yorick turned serious. “I’m sent to call you in. Your father doesn’t know yet that you left your Companions, but he’d be angry if he knew. Don’t get your friends in trouble.”

  “I didn’t tell them to leave the garden,” said Hamlet. “They could have stayed.”

  “They all thought you would go to meet the hunt as well. And they can’t go back and do what they should have done—they’re in the castle now, and people are starting to ask where you are. Your mother sent me for you.”

  If he had said Polonius sent for him, Hamlet would not have gone—not till they sent soldiers for him, or Mother herself. But since it was Mother doing the sending, Hamlet went.

  “And you’re filthy,” said Yorick. “Covered with the dust of the dead. Go wash your face or people will think you’re a ghost.”

  “I will if there’s warm water.”

  “If you need warm water to wash in, you’ll never be man enough to be king.”

  “Cold water makes a King?” asked Hamlet scornfully.

  “Cold water makes a King wise,” said Yorick, “and in Denmark, only a wise man is clever enough to persuade the lords to make him King.”

  “Then why don’t Kings swim in the cold cold sea every day of the year?”

  “Because,” said Yorick, “only a fool would do that.” Then he laughed and cackled and cavorted till Hamlet was laughing, too, and followed him toward the castle.

  He stopped and washed at the same fountain that the soldiers used—it was an excuse to be near the foul-speaking men who smelled of horses and dogs and sweat and farts and ale; Hamlet adored them, and they liked him, too. But there were none about right now, for Father had invited all the hunt to his supper, where they would share the hog that had been roasting all the long morning.

  Yet Hamlet thought he heard someone speaking, and not inside the stables, where grooms would be caring for the horses, and not in the kennels, either, where the barksome dogs were being fed and petted. The voice came from around the corner of the great keep, and when Hamlet went toward the sound he realized it wasn’t speech; it was someone crying.

  It was Horatio. Hamlet knew his voice.

  Hamlet made a noise, so Horatio would know someone was coming. Thus when Hamlet came around the corner, Horatio was not crying at all, though his eyes were red and his nose was red and a little snotty, as was his sleeve.

  “How was the hunt?” asked Hamlet.

  Horatio tried a little smile. “I’m sorry to go, when I know you wanted to.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Hamlet, though of course that was a complete lie.

  “I asked your father why he didn’t take you, but he only said, ‘I take the one who’s ready for the hunt.’ I said, ‘The Prince is ready’ but he had them hoist me up on his horse in front of him.”

  My place. He took my place.

  “That’s your place,” said Horatio. “I’m sorry.”

  “How was the hunt?” asked Hamlet again. It wasn’t Horatio’s fault, he knew, so he didn’t need apologies. But he still had to know what they actually did on this day’s hunt. So he could think about it. Lying on a grave, he could remember a day that he didn’t actually have, the day with Father on the hunt.

  Horatio told about it, but he never got excited. And when it came to the kill, he couldn’t say anything at all. “I saw a hart and two hinds astraddle the horses on the way home,” he said. “And the Earl of Jutland killed them all, so he was very proud and also grateful to your father for letting him take three from his deer-park.”

  “Father didn’t kill any of them?” asked Hamlet.

  “We got lost,” said Horatio. “We didn’t rejoin the hunt until on the way home. The Earl of Jutland wasn’t going to take a deer without the King, but old Bearhand told him that the King wanted him to take three—one for himself, one for the King’s house, and one to be cut up and shared with the poor.”

  “That was done like a Christian,” said Hamlet.

  “That’s what they all said,” said Horatio.

  “You must have been sorry, though, to miss the kill.”

  Horatio almost sobbed again. “I was very sorry to miss it,” he said, as soon as he had control of his emotions again.

  “I hope next time I can go,” said Hamlet.

  But Horatio said nothing at all. Hamlet took him by the shoulder and got him to wash his face, and by the time they got into the castle no one could tell that Horatio had been crying.

  If it had been only the once, Hamlet might have forgiven his father the shame of taking someone else before him. But as the months and years went by, and all the other boys were taken on hunts and other expeditions, and Hamlet never, it became more than a mere disappointment, more than a shame. It was Father’s way of repudiating him; Hamlet could see that. Whatever it is that Father valued in a boy, Hamlet did not have it.

  Not that Hamlet thought for a moment that the other boys were actually better. Hamlet always took pride in never allowing them to allow him to win at any of their contests. When he lost, he took it without shame or anger, and no one reported on the outcome to Father or Polonius, lest they interfere and punish someone for outdoing the Prince. Thus, whenever Hamlet won, he knew that his victory was real. He was the fastest runner, save Laertes; he was the best at Latin, save Rosencrantz; he was the strongest at wrestling, save Guildenstern, and then only on some days could the older boy throw him down.

  At one thing, though, Hamlet was the best save nobody, and that was the sword. It was a natural gift—the armsmaster said so. Right from the start, Hamlet had a way of sensing just where his opponent’s sword was going to be. With training, he began to understand this gift and refine it; by the time he was twelve he could watch a match with the swordmaster of Elsinore and name for him all the moves and tell what the losing swordsman should have done. It was all clear to him, all parts of swordsmanship—the stance, the flow, the point, the shaft, the heft, the guards, the parries, the slashes, the lunges. Left hand or right, taller opponent or heavier or shorter or lither, it didn’t matter, Hamlet could see what they were doing just a split second before they did it, and even if he spent half a match dancing away from a longer-armed opponent, no one ever laid point or blade on Hamlet’s body.

  Whether he had a gift for it or not, however, Hamlet took every activity seriously. Even when Mother brought the boys in and began their training as pages, teaching them orders of precedence and heraldry, and the meaning of various dishes and how each day’s dinner was the product of months of planning in garden, field, orchard, sty, pen, coop, and, above all, larder. How do you know when you need to hunt? How long must meat age? What spices preserve a sausage, and which merely make it palatable? What should be smoked and what should be salted down for winter? How many calves, lambs, and goslings should be allowed to live, and how long?

  Why should I know this, Mother?

  “Because you are Prince, my darling boy, and you have to know at a glance if your people are rich or poor, if they need relief or help from you, or if they are prosperous enough to be well and deeply taxed. You need to know if you have food enough for the men you keep around you, and you need to know how to order them—and the lords as well—so that quarreling is kept down and merit is always named and known.”

  So Hamlet set out to become the best at this as well, so that by the age of thirteen he was able to greet every visitor graciously by name and inquire after his family, and address all men by their right titles and afford them their right recognition.

  The more he learned, though, the more Hamlet realized that his father was not, in fact, very good at any of it. He treated powerful men of ancient family as if they mattered little, and then inadvertently showed too much favor to one who had not earned it and had no right to it.

  Like the way Father treated his brother, Uncle Claudius, as if he were the royal fool instead of old Yorick. Holding him up to ridicule in front of visitors. Yet Claudius bore it with dignity, showing neither rancor nor eagerness to please. He bore it as if he had been afforded great honor, as he deserved, being also a prince and son of one King and brother of another.

  It had seemed natural and funny, back when Hamlet was little and Prince Claudius was still not yet fully a man. Beardless, too thin, gawky—of course Father teased him.

  But by the time Hamlet began to get his growth at age thirteen, Claudius was as strong and sturdy a man, as fine-looking, as sharp-minded as any lord. As the King himself. Or perhaps stronger, sturdier, finer-looking, and sharper-minded than the King. To Hamlet, long used to his father’s public disdain of him, Uncle Claudius seemed more kingly than the King. And yet still Father publicly shamed him.

  Didn’t Father see that it made himself, not Claudius, look ridiculous? Oh, people laughed, because it was plain the King wanted them to. But Hamlet saw that when the japery was over, people cast looks of pity at Uncle Claudius. And more than that—more than once Hamlet saw lords and great men of the realm conferring quietly with Uncle Claudius, and with great solemnity, as if they discussed matters grave and stately. This they would not do if they thought Uncle Claudius a fool.

  Hamlet even said so once, when he and Laertes were alone on the riverbank after a long swim. The other Companions were still in the water, and could not hear them.

  “I wish Uncle Claudius were my father,” said Hamlet.

  Laertes turned on him savagely—angrily, even. “Do you wish your mother were an adulteress then? Or do you wish her not to be your mother, either?”

  “I was just . . . wishing,” said Hamlet. “Father hates me, so I might as well not be his son.”

  Laertes looked out across the water, his face dark with—what, anger? “There is no boy happier than the King’s own son,” he said.

  “Then all the boys in the world must be sad all the time,” said Hamlet, “because I am. No matter how hard I work to become the prince he wants me to be—”

  “And Prince Claudius admires you? Is that it? Instead of becoming what your father wants you to be, you’d rather have a father who is satisfied with what you already are? What kind of King will you be, then? The kind who surrounds himself with toadies who always tell him that he’s wonderful and brilliant? Or the kind of King who surrounds himself with men who are wiser and stronger than he is, so he can use their wisdom and strength for the good of the Kingdom?”

  Hamlet always hated it when Laertes got into a mood to preach sermons. It was a trait he shared with his father; Polonius was so full of platitudes they slopped out of him like milk from a swinging bucket.

  “If the King surrounds himself with men who are wiser and stronger,” said Hamlet, “then why is he King, and not those men?”

  “Be careful,” said Laertes. “There’s only so much treason I can listen to without having to behead myself.”

  “I’m not talking about my lord Father anymore,” said Hamlet. “I’m speaking of myself. I know our history. Many a son has been passed over when he wasn’t worthy to be King. If my father shows such disrespect for me, then why would the earls look for virtues that my father didn’t find in me?”

  “And if he kept you with him as his constant companion,” said Laertes, “then you’d learn only the way to be a King like him, instead of a better one.”

  “Do you really think he shuns me so I’ll be a better King?”

  In answer, Laertes got up and plashed out into the water.

  Hamlet watched him, thinking two things:

  Why is there no one I can talk to about the things that matter most to me?

  How beautiful he is.

  They are all beautiful, Hamlet thought, looking at his Companions as they swam and splashed and dived. Strong and vigorous, lovely of face. As if my father chose them for me to make sure I never thought of myself as strongest, most vigorous, or handsomest. As if he wanted to make sure my opinion of myself stayed forever as low as his opinion of me.

  What kind of scrawny, weepy, screaming, drooling, pissing, puking, shitting, flatulent wretch was I as a baby, that he hated me from the moment I was born?

  “No more or less of those things than any other baby,” Yorick told him, on the day Hamlet dared to ask him the question. “And you still do all those things, just like everybody else. All that’s changed is that you now know when and where to do them.”

  “All I have of my father is his name,” said Hamlet.

  “What if his greatest gift,” said Yorick, “is to give you no gift?”

  “Which is the greater fool,” answer Hamlet, “the fool who thinks he’s wise, or the fool who knows he’s a fool and plays the part?”

  “The fool who knows he’s a fool is wise, and therefore no fool,” said Yorick. “But the greater fool is the wise man who does not know he is wise, for then he follows not his own counsel.”

  “Where did you learn that bit of wisdom?”

  “From Polonius.”

  “I thought so.”

  “It’s one of my duties in the castle of Elsinore,” said Yorick. “To clean up after my betters. I mop up the excess wisdom that drops upon the floor, stew it into a soup, soup it into a stew, and then serve it back to my betters as a fine feast of foolery.”

  “Better to steep it into soap,” said Hamlet, “so we could wash with it.”

  “How can wisdom go into soap, since soap is full of lyes?”

  “Sometimes to lie is wise.”

  “And sometimes to ask why is a lie,” said Yorick. “So lies are wise and whys are lies.”

  “You pile so many meanings together that none of it means anything,” said Hamlet.

  “Which is why I’m still employed here at Elsinore. If anyone ever found a meaning in what I said, I’d soon be dead.”

  An observation that pretended to be mere jest, but which Hamlet knew to be true. Yorick might be a fool by trade, but even he could see that Father was not much of a King.

  Hamlet was at sword practice, the last time he saw his father alive. He no longer practiced with his Companions, for he had long since proven himself their master and had nothing to learn from them, even with old Bernardo, the Italian swordmaster watching to criticize. These days his arms were long enough to practice with men—with strong soldiers who had wielded sabers, cutlasses, and great two-handed swords in battle, and with lordlings who had dueled with rapiers and remained alive to tell of it.

  They practiced with nocked and dull-edged blades, their bodies covered with heavy padding—except that Hamlet wore almost none, because it hindered him. So when Father came out to watch, Hamlet was afraid he’d rail at Bernardo for risking royal blood by letting him duel without enough protection.

  But that was Mother who worried about him; Father gave no sign that he cared one way or another.

  When the practice was done, and Bernardo had his man gather the practice swords into the wheelbarrow, Father did the thing he never did. He called his son by name.

  “Hamlet!”

  It made him tremble inwardly, to hear his name in that voice. At once he turned and trotted to his father; he would have run full out, except the distance was so short.

  “My lord Father,” said Hamlet, falling to one knee.

  “Oh get up,” said Father. “Why should a servant waste time washing those leggings because you had to kneel in the mud?”

  So there was no honor intended when Father called him.

  “Your mother’s been pestering me for months that we’ve run out of useful teachers for you. So we’re sending you to the university in Heidelberg. Try not to turn yourself into something useless—clerks make poor Kings.”

  As if Father knew what a good King was. “Which of my Companions may I take with me?”

  “I’m dissolving your Companions and bringing them all directly into my service,” said Father. “You’ll take none of them—only enough servants and men-at-arms that you don’t embarrass Denmark by appearing paltry compared to the German princes who attend there.”

  “As my lord Father wishes,” said Hamlet. “When is my journey to begin?”

  “Tomorrow,” said Father. “As I told your mother, once I agree to let you go, what’s the point of keeping you here?”

  Hamlet bowed. It was bitter, to hear how Father still despised him; but he couldn’t help but be glad that there would be no waiting. It would be hard to leave home—to leave his Companions, especially Laertes and Horatio, and, too, he would miss Mother. And Yorick. But it would be good to go somewhere else, to see something of the world. To be away from the darkness of Father’s disregard for him.