Beowulf

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  And then she sees her husband, stumbling down from his throne, his body wrapped in no more armor than what a bedsheet might offer, his broadsword clenched tightly in his fists and gleaming dully in the firelight. She also sees Unferth, who does not rise to come to the aid of his king, but scrambles away on his hands and knees, fleeing into the shadows beyond the dais.

  “No!” Wealthow shouts at her husband, and the monster turns toward her, snatching away the protective barrier of the table with one enormous, knobby hand. The same claws that ripped Aesher apart sink into solid oak as though it were no more substantial than flesh and blood. It lifts the table above her, wielding it like a club.

  “Fight me!” howls King Hrothgar, trembling violently and waving his sword at the invader’s back. “Leave her alone, damn you! Fight me!”

  And all around them, the hall seems to grow still, no fight left in the surviving thanes, more terror gathered in this hall now than heroes. The beast bares its teeth again and glares triumphantly down at Queen Wealthow, but still she cannot move. Still she can only stand, watching her husband and waiting for the blow that will crush her and release her from this world where such demons may freely roam the night.

  “I said fight me, you son of a bitch,” Hrothgar yells, and strikes the creature, but his blade glances harmlessly off and does not even break its skin. “Surely, you did not come all this way to murder women. Fight me!”

  And now Wealthow can see that there are tears streaming down Hrothgar’s cheeks, and the monster turns slowly away from her and toward the king. Suddenly, facing Hrothgar, the thing begins to wail and moan, shrieking in pain as its whole body is wracked by some strange convulsion. Its muscles twitch and spasm, and its joints pop loud as the limbs of great trees caught in a fierce Mörsugur gale.

  “Yes,” roars Hrothgar. “That’s it. Fight me.”

  The creature takes two faltering steps backward, retreating from the king of Heorot Hall, from a fat old man, drunk and tangled in his bedclothes. Now it stands directly over Wealthow, its legs forming an archway high above her head. It whimpers, and drool the color of pus drips from its lips and forms a puddle at her feet. Again the monster roars, but this time there is more hurt and dismay than anything else in that appalling sound.

  “Me,” Hrothgar says, brandishing his sword, and he closes half the distance between himself and the monster, between himself and Lady Wealthow.

  “NNNNAAAAaaaaaaaaaay!” the beast cries out, its foul breath hurling that one word with enough force that Hrothgar is pushed backward and falls, losing his sheet and landing naked on his ass, his sword clattering to the floor. And then with its right hand, the creature seizes two of the fallen thanes and leaps into the air, vanishing up the chimney above the fire pit. In its wake, there is a terrific gust of wind, and for an instant, the fire flares yet more brightly—a blinding, blistering flash of heat and light—and then the wind snuffs it out, and the hall goes dark, the winter night rushing in to fill the emptiness left behind.

  The darkness brings with it a shocked silence, broken only by frightened sobs and the sounds that dying men make. Someone lights a torch, and then another. Soon, the night is broken by flickering pools of yellow light, and Wealthow sees that the mead hall lies in ruin around her. Unferth emerges from the gloom, clutching his sword like someone who is not a coward. The glow of the torches is reflected faintly in the golden torque about his neck. Wealthow goes to her shivering, weeping husband and kneels at his side, gathering up the sheet and covering him with it. She cannot yet quite believe she is still alive and breathing.

  “What was that?” she asks Hrothgar, and he shakes his head and stares up at the black hole of the chimney.

  “Grendel,” he replies. “That was Grendel.”

  2

  Alien Spirits

  Slick with the drying blood of murdered thanes and grimy with the soot of Heorot’s chimney, Grendel returns to his cave beyond the forest. Standing in the entrance, he feels the moon’s eye watching him, has felt its gaze pricking at his skin since the moment he emerged from the mead hall. It watched him all the way home, following his slow trek back across the moors and through the sleeping forest and over the bogs. He glances over his shoulder and up into the sky. Already, Máni has started sinking toward the western horizon and soon will be lost in the tops of the old trees.

  “Did you think I could not do it for myself?” Grendel asks the moon. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  But the moon doesn’t answer him. Grendel did not expect that it would. For all he knows, the son of Mundilfæri is a mute and has never spoken a single word in all his long life, hanging there in the night sky. Grendel sighs and looks down at the two corpses he’s carried all the way back from Heorot, then he slips out of the moonlight and into the comforting darkness of the cave.

  He cannot recall a time before this cave was his home. Sometimes he thinks he must have been born here. Not far from its entrance, there is a pool of still, clear water, framed in drooping, dripstone stalactites and sharp stalagmites jutting up from the cave’s floor. They have always seemed to him like teeth, and so the pool is the cave’s throat—maybe the throat of all the earth—and so perhaps he is only something that the world coughed up, some indigestible bit of a bad meal, perhaps.

  Grendel drops the dead thanes onto a great mound of bones heaped high in a corner of the cave, not far from the pool’s edge. Here, the bleached bones of men lie jumbled together with the remains of other animals—the antlered skulls of mighty harts, the crumbling skeletons of bears and seals, wolves and wild boar. Whatever he can catch and kill, and in all his life Grendel has not yet encountered anything that he cannot kill. Relieved of his burden, he turns back to the pool and gazes down at his reflection there in the still water. In the darkness, his eyes glitter faintly, his irises flecked with gold.

  “Grendel?” his mother asks. “Hwæt oa him weas?”

  Surprised and startled by her voice, the melodic crystal music of her words, he turns quickly about, spinning around much too suddenly and almost losing his balance.

  “What have you done? Grendel?”

  “Mother?” he asks, searching the gloom of the cavern for some evidence of her beyond her voice. “Where are you?” He glances up at the ceiling, thinking her voice might have come from somewhere overhead.

  “Men? Grendel…I thought we had an agreement concerning men.”

  Yes, she must be on the ceiling, watching from some secret, shadowed spot almost directly above him. But then there’s a loud splash from the pool, and Grendel is drenched with freezing water.

  “Fish, Grendel. Fish, and wolves, and bear. Sometimes a sheep or two. But not men.”

  He turns slowly back to the pool, and she’s there, waiting for him.

  “You like men,” he tells her. “Here…” and he retrieves one of the dead thanes, the least gnawed of the two, and offers it to her.

  “No,” she says sternly. “Not these fragile things, my darling. Remember, they will hurt us. They have killed so many of us…of our kind…the giants, the dragonkind. They have hunted us until there are almost none of us left to hunt. They will hunt you, too, if you make a habit of killing them.”

  “But they were making so much noise. They were making so much merry…and it hurt me. It hurt my head. I couldn’t even think for the noise and the pain.” And Grendel holds the dead thane out to her again. “Here, Mother, this one is sweet. I have peeled away all the hard metal parts.”

  “Just put it down, Grendel.”

  And so he does, dropping it into the pool, where it sinks for a moment, then bobs back to the surface. Immediately, blood begins to stain the clear water. Grendel has started crying now, and he wants to turn away, wants to run back out into the night where only the moon can see him.

  “Was Hrothgar there?” his mother asks, and now there’s an edge in her voice.

  “I did not touch him.”

  “You saw him? He saw you?”

  “Yes, but I didn
’t hurt him.”

  His mother blinks her wide, brilliant eyes, then stares at him a few seconds more, and Grendel knows that she’s looking for any sign that he’s lied to her. When she finds none, she slides gracefully up from the pool, moving as easily as water flowing across stone, or as blood spilling over the blade of an ax. She reaches out, her scaly flesh damp and strong and even more soothing than the dark haven of his cave. She wipes away some of the gore and grime from his cheeks and forehead.

  “I did not touch him, Mother,” Grendel tells her a third time.

  “I know,” she replies. “You’re a good boy.”

  “I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

  “My poor, sensitive boy,” she purrs. “Promise me you will not go there again,” but Grendel only closes his eyes and tries not to think about shattered trees or the broken bodies, tries not to let his mind linger on the noise of men or his hatred or the beautiful, golden-haired woman he would have killed, there at the last, had Hrothgar not stayed his hand.

  3

  Raids in the Night

  Grendel’s attacks did not end after the first assault upon Heorot. Some hatreds are too old and run far too deep to be satisfied by a single night of bloodshed and terror. Night after night he returned, his hatred and loathing for the Danes driving him from his cave again and again, intent that the noise of Hrothgar’s hall would be silenced once and for all. There would be no more deafening, painful nights. There would be no more merrymaking. And as winter closed ever tighter about the land, until the snow had gone to an icy crust and the warm sun was only a dim memory of summers that might never come again, Hrothgar’s great gift to his people became a haunted, fearful place. But Grendel did not restrict his attacks to the hall alone, taking young and old alike, men and women and children, the weak and the strong, wherever he might come upon them. He held Heorot, coming and going as pleased him and making it the most prized trophy in his lonely war, but he also roamed the old woods and the moors, the farms and homesteads, and took all those who crossed his path.

  And word spread, in the songs of skalds, in the whispered tales told by travelers and traders, of the lurking doom that had fallen upon Hrothgar’s kingdom.

  On a freezing morning when the frost might as well be steel and the sun has not yet seen fit to show itself, the king lies with his queen on soft pallets of straw bound with woolen cloth and deer hide. Hrothgar opens his eyes, uncertain at first what has awakened him, but then he sees Unferth standing beside the bed.

  “My lord?” Unferth asks, whispering so as not to disturb Lady Wealthow. “My lord, it has happened again.”

  And Hrothgar would shut his eyes and fight his way back down to sleep, back to dreams of warm sunlight and nights without monsters, but Unferth would still be there when he opened them again. He dresses quickly and as quietly as he might, managing not to wake his wife, and then he follows Unferth to Heorot. Soon, he is standing in the cold with Unferth and Wulfgar and a number of thanes outside the mead-hall doors, the hall’s new doors, reinforced with wide iron bands and easily twice as thick as those that Grendel burst asunder.

  “How many this time?” asks Hrothgar, his breath fogging like smoke.

  Unferth takes a deep breath and swallows before he replies. “In truth, I could not say. The bodies were not whole. Five. Ten, perhaps. It was Nykvest’s daughter’s wedding feast.”

  “Grendel’s coming more frequently,” Hrothgar sighs and tugs at his beard. “Why does not this demon simply make my hall his home and save himself the trouble of stalking back and forth each night across the moorlands?”

  Hrothgar looks down and sees the red-pink stain leaking from beneath the door.

  “The new door hasn’t even been touched,” he says, and angrily smacks the wood hard with one open palm.

  “Nay,” Unferth replies. “The Grendel devil obviously came and went through the skorsten.” And he points up at the chimney vent in the roof of Heorot Hall. Hrothgar sees the blood right away, spattered across the thatched roof, then on the snow below the eaves, dappling the monster’s splayed footprints. The trail leads away across the compound grounds and vanishes in the mist.

  Hrothgar takes a deep breath and puffs out more steam, then rubs at his bleary eyes. “When I was young I killed a dragon, in the Northern Moors,” he says, and Unferth hears a hint of sadness or regret in the king’s voice. “But now I am an old man, Unferth. Too old for demon slaying. We need a hero, a cunning young hero, to rid us of this curse upon our hall.”

  “I wish you had a son, my lord,” Wulfgar says, and takes a step back from the door and the spreading bloodstain on the threshold. His boots crunch loudly on the frozen ground.

  Hrothgar grunts and glares at him. “You can wish in one hand, Wulfgar, and shit into the other—see which fills up first.”

  Hrothgar turns his back on the door, on Heorot and this latest butchery, and faces the small group of people that has gathered outside the hall.

  “Men,” he says, “build another pyre. There’s dry wood behind the stables. Burn the dead. And then close this hall. Seal the doors and windows. And by the king’s order, there shall be no further music, singing, or merrymaking of any kind.” He takes another gulp of the frigid air and turns away. “This place reeks of death,” he murmurs, then shuffles off through the snow, heading back toward his bed and sleeping Wealthow. After a moment, Unferth and Wulfgar follow him and have soon caught up.

  “The scops are singing the shame of Heorot,” Hrothgar says, speaking softly and keeping his eyes on the snow at his feet. “As far south as the middle sea, as far north as the ice-lands. Our cows no longer calf, our fields lie fallow, and the very fish flee from our nets, knowing that we are cursed. I have let it be known that I will give half the gold in my kingdom to any man who can rid us of Grendel.”

  Unferth glances at Wulfgar, then back to Hrothgar.

  “My king,” he says. “For deliverance our people sacrifice goats and sheep to Odin and Heimdall. With your permission, might we also pray to the new Roman god, Christ Jesus? Maybe…maybe he can lift this affliction.”

  “You may pray as it best pleases you, son of Ecglaf. But know you this. The gods will not do for us that we will not do for ourselves. No, Unferth. We need a man to do this thing, a hero.”

  “But surely,” persists Unferth, “praying cannot hurt.”

  “Yes, well, that which cannot hurt also cannot help us. Where was Odin Hel-binder—or this Christ Jesus of the Romans—when the demon took poor Nykvest’s daughter? Answer that question or bother me no more with this pointless talk of prayers and sacrifices and new gods.”

  “Yes, my liege,” Unferth replies, then follows Hrothgar and his herald across the snow.

  4

  The Coming of Beowulf

  The storm-lashed Jótlandshaf heaves and rages around the tiny, dragon-prowed ship as though all the nine daughters of the sea giant Ægir have been given the task this day of building a new range of mountains from mere salt water. Towering waves lift the vessel until its mast might almost scrape the low-slung belly of the sky, only to let go and send it plunging down, down, down into troughs so deep the coils of the World Serpent cannot possibly lie very far below the hull. Overhead are banks of clouds as black as pitch, spilling blinding sheets of rain and lightning, and deafening thunder to rend a man’s soul wide. There are fourteen thanes at the oars, their backs aching as they strain and struggle against the storm, their hands cold and bloodied and pierced with splinters.

  A fifteenth man stands braced against the oaken mast, and the wild wind tugs at his cape of heavy black wool and animal skins, and the icy rain stings his face. The ship lurches forward, then back, teetering on the crest of a wave, and he almost loses his footing. He squints into the sheeting rain, unable to turn loose of the mast to shield his eyes, searching the gray blur where the horizon ought to be. But the storm has stolen it away, has sewn sea to sky and sky to sea. The ship lurches violently forward once more and begins racing down th
e face of the wave. When it’s finally level again, one of the thanes leaves his place at the oars and makes his way slowly along the slippery deck to stand with the man leaning against the mast.

  “Can you see the coast?” he asks, shouting to be heard above the din of the storm. “Do you see the Danes’ guide-fire?”

  The ship rolls suddenly to port, but rights itself before the sea can rush in and swamp the craft.

  “I see nothing, Wiglaf! Unless you count the wind and rain!”

  “No fire? No sun or stars by which to navigate? We’re lost, Beowulf! Given to the sea, gifts to the Urdines!”

  Beowulf laughs, getting a mouthful of rain and sea spray in the bargain. He spits and wipes his lips, grinning back at Wiglaf. He takes his right hand from the mast beam and thumps his chest hard, pounding at the iron-studded leather armor he wears.

  “The sea is my mother! She spat me up years ago and will never take me back into her murky womb!”

  Wiglaf scowls and blinks against the rain. “Well,” he says, “that’s fine for you. But my mother’s a fishwife in Uppland, and I was rather hoping to die in battle, as a warrior should—”

  The boat rolls again, this time listing sharply to port, and Wiglaf curses and clutches at Beowulf’s cape to keep from falling.

  “Beowulf, the men are worried this storm has no end!”

  Beowulf nods and wraps his right arm tightly about Wiglaf’s shoulders, helping him to steady himself as the ship begins to climb the next great wave.

  “This is no earthly storm! That much we can be sure. But this demon’s tempest won’t hold us out! No, Wiglaf, not if we really want in! There is no power under Midgard that will turn me back!”

  “But the gods—” Wiglaf begins.

  “The gods be damned and drowned!” Beowulf howls into the storm, sneering up at the low black clouds. “If they have yet to learn I cannot be frightened away with a little wind and water, then they are foolish beings, indeed!”