Beowulf

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “And has closing the hall stopped the slaughter?” Beowulf asks him.

  “Nay,” Hrothgar replies. “It has not. The demon-murderer killed three horses and a slave in the stables, not a fortnight past.”

  Beowulf glances beyond Unferth and Wealthow, looking to the high, barred doors of Heorot. “Well then,” he says, and smiles at Hrothgar, who nods and grins back at him.

  “If closing the hall has not so profited my lord,” Beowulf continues, “and if, regardless of this wise precaution, the beast still comes to do his wicked murder, it seems a pity to waste such a magnificent hall, does it not?”

  “Oh, it does, indeed,” Hrothgar agrees. “It seems a most terrible waste. It seems a pity.”

  Unferth exchanges glances with Wealthow, then, turning to Hrothgar, says, “But, my liege…by your own command—”

  “Exactly,” Hrothgar interrupts. “By my own command. A command which I do hereby rescind, loyal Unferth. So, open the mead hall. Open it now.”

  By dusk—which seems hardly more than a gentle deepening of the gloom that loitered above the land in the wake of the storm—Heorot Hall has been reopened. The doors and windows have all been thrown wide to draw in fresh, clean air. New hay covers the floors, and the feasting tables have all been scrubbed clean. Old women clear away cobwebs and tend to embers that will soon enough become cooking fires to roast venison and fowl and fat hogs. And in the midst of all this, Beowulf’s men sit together at a round table in one corner of the hall. Wulfgar, true to his word, has returned their weapons to them, and now they are busy sharpening steel blades, tightening straps and harnesses, oiling leather sheaths and scabbards. Beowulf wanders through the hall, examining its architecture with a warrior’s keen eye, sizing up its strengths and weaknesses. Here and there are signs of the monster’s handiwork—deep gouges in the wooden beams, claw marks in tabletops, a patch of wood so bloodstained that water cannot ever wipe it clean again. Beowulf pauses before the huge door, inspecting its massive bar and the wide reinforcing bands of iron.

  Hondshew glances up from the blade of his broadsword and sees Yrsa, the girl from the gate, who’s busy scrubbing a table not too far from where the thanes are seated.

  “Ah, now there’s a beast I’d love to slay this very night,” he snickers, then stands and jabs his sword in her direction. “Not with this blade, mind you. I’ve another, better suited to that pricking.”

  Wiglaf kicks him in the rump, and Hondshew stumbles and almost falls.

  “Listen to me,” Wiglaf says, addressing all the thanes. “We don’t want any trouble with the locals, you hear. So, just for tonight, no fighting, and no swifan. Do you understand me?”

  Hondshew rubs at his backside but hasn’t stopped staring at Yrsa, who looks up, sees him watching her, and sticks out her tongue at him. Another of the thanes, Olaf, a lean but muscle-bound man with a wide white scar across his left cheek, draws his dagger and brandishes it at all the shadows lurking in all the corners of Heorot Hall.

  “I wa…wa…wasn’t p…p…planning on doing any swi…swi…swi…swifan,” he stutters.

  Hondshew sits down again and goes back to sharpening his sword. “Well, I wa…wa…was!” he declares, mocking Olaf.

  Wiglaf frowns and tries not to notice the way that Yrsa’s breasts strain the fabric of her dress when she bends over the table she’s cleaning. “Hondshew,” he says. “Just this once, make me feel like you’re pretending to listen to me. It’s only been five days since you waved your wife good-bye.”

  “Five days!” exclaims Hondshew. “By Odin’s swollen testicles…no wonder my loins are burning!”

  The thanes laugh loudly, and Yrsa pauses in her work to listen to them. To her ears, the bawdy laughter of men is a welcome sound, here beneath the roof timbers of Heorot Hall, and it gives her strength and cause to hope. She steals a quick look at Beowulf, who’s still inspecting the door, and Yrsa prays that even half the bold, fantastic stories she’s heard told about him are true and that, soon now, Grendel’s grip upon the night will be at an end.

  5

  Misbegotten

  And far across the moorlands, shrouded now with evening mist, out behind the forest’s ancient palisade, the creature Grendel crouches at the edge of the black pool inside his cave. The rotting corpse of one of Hrothgar’s slaughtered thanes lies nearby, and Grendel carefully picks choice scraps of flesh from the body and drops them into the water. There are many strange things that dwell within the lightless depths of the pool, and sometimes when Grendel is lonely, he lures hungry mouths to the surface with bits of his kills. Tonight, the water teems with a school of blind albino eels, each of them easily as long as a grown man is tall—or longer still—and big around as fence posts. Their long jaws are lined with needle-sharp teeth, and they greedily devour the morsels Grendel has given up to the pool and fight among themselves for the largest pieces. Grendel watches the foaming water and the snow-colored eels, comforted by their company, amused at their ferocity. He rocks backward and forward, absently humming a slow, sad, tuneless sort of song to himself, something he either made up or has heard men singing on some night or another. He can’t remember which.

  In his left hand, the creature clutches a broken lance, and impaled upon its spiked tip is the decomposing head of yet another fallen thane. The eyes have been eaten away by such worms and maggots as thrive in dung and decay and the muddy earth of the cave. The jaw bone hangs crookedly from the thane’s skull, and most of his front teeth are broken out. Grendel leans the decapitated head out over the frothing pool and pitches his voice high, imitating the speech of men.

  “Da-dee-da!” he cries out. “Da-dee-da! Oh, such horrible, horrible things! They’ll eat me all up, they will!”

  And then Grendel chuckles to himself and leans close to the dead thane’s right ear. “Who’s laughing now?” he asks to head. “Eh? Just who’s laughing now? Me—Grendel—that’s who.”

  Suddenly, one of the huge eels leaps free of the pool; hissing like a serpent, it strikes at the head, tearing away the crooked jaw and much of what was left of the thane’s face before falling back into the water with a loud plop. Grendel cackles with delight and shakes the mutilated head back and forth above the pool. The cave echoes with the creature’s laughter.

  “Oh me, oh my!” he wails. “It has eaten my poor, pretty face all up! What ever shall I do now? The beautiful women will not love me now!”

  Another of the eels leaps for the head, but this time Grendel yanks it quickly away before the fish’s jaws can latch on.

  “No more,” he scolds the eels. “No more tonight. You’ll get fat. Fat fish sink all the way down to the bottom and get eaten by other fish. More tomorrow.”

  Abruptly, the dark water seethes with some new and far more terrible presence, and all the eels slither away quietly into their holes. There is a wheezing, wet sound, like spray blown out from the spout of a whale, and the water bubbles.

  Startled, Grendel jumps to his feet, and in his panic, his body begins to change—his nails suddenly becoming long and curving claws, claws to shame the mightiest bear. The bones and muscles of his twisted, deformed frame begin to shift and expand, and his round, rheumy eyes start to narrow, sparking now with a predatory glint. Where only a moment before the eels fought viciously over mouthfuls of putrid flesh, now Grendel’s mother watches him from the surface of the pool. Her full, wet lips shimmer, their golden scales gleaming with some secret, inner fire that is all her own.

  “Grrrrendelllllll,” she purls.

  Recognizing her voice, Grendel grows calmer. Talons become only ragged fingernails again. His expanding, shifting skeleton begins to reverse its violent metamorphosis so that he seems to draw back into himself. He looks into his mother’s bright reptilian eyes and sees himself reflected there.

  “Modor?” he asks softly, falling back upon the old tongue. “Is something wrong?”

  She rises slowly from the pool, then, her long, webbed fingers gripping the travertine edges
and pulling herself nearer to her son.

  “I had an evil dream, my child,” she says, and the beauty of her voice soothes Grendel, and he wishes she would never leave him. “You were hurt,” she continues. “I dreamed you were calling out for me, and I could not come to you. And then, Grendel, then they butchered you.”

  Grendel watches her, floating there, half-submerged, then he smiles and laughs and shakes the lance and the thane’s head staked upon it.

  “I am not dead. See? I am happy. Look, Modor. Happy Grendel,” and in an effort to convince his mother that his words are true, Grendel does an awkward sort of shuffling dance about his cave, a clumsy parody of the dancing he’s glimpsed in the mead hall of King Hrothgar. From time to time, he stops to shake the thane’s head at the sky, hidden beyond the cavern’s roof, and to hoot and howl in the most carefree, joyous way he can manage.

  From the pool, his mother whispers, “You must not go to them tonight. You have killed too many of them.”

  “But I am strong, Mother. I am big, and I am strong. None of them are a match for me. I will eat their flesh and drink their sweet blood and grind their frail bones between my teeth.”

  “Please, my son,” his mother implores. “Do not go to them.”

  Grendel stops dancing and lets the thane’s head and the broken spear clatter to the floor of the cave. He shuts his eyes and makes a disappointed, whining sound.

  “Please,” his mother says from the pool. “Please promise me this one thing. Not this night, Grendel. Stay here with me this night. Stay by the pool and be content to feed your pets.”

  Grendel sits down on the ground a few feet from the edge of the water. He doesn’t meet his mother’s eyes, but stares disconsolately at the dirt and rocks and his own bare feet.

  “I swear,” he sulks. “I shall not go to them.”

  “Even if they make the noises? Even if the noises make your poor head ache?”

  Grendel hesitates, considering her question, remembering the pain, but then he nods reluctantly.

  “Gut. Man medo,” she whispers, satisfied, then slips once more beneath the surface of the black pool. Ripples spread out across it, and small waves lap against its stony edges.

  “They are only men,” Grendel whispers sullenly to himself and also to the head of the dead thane. “They are only men, and it was only a dream she had. Many times have I had bad dreams. But they were all only dreams.”

  In his cave, Grendel watches the water in the pool grow calm once more, and he thinks about the concealing night and the conspiring fog waiting outside the cave, and he tries not to remember the hurting noise of men.

  6

  Light from the East

  By sunset, the clouds above Heorot Hall have broken apart, becoming only scattered, burning islands in a wide winter sky. The goddess Sól, sister of the moon, is sinking low in the west, rolling away toward the sea in her chariot as the hungry wolf Skoll pursues close behind. Her light glimmers on the water and paints the world orange.

  In Hrothgar’s mead hall, his people are gathering for a feast in honor of Beowulf, who has promised to deliver them from the fiend Grendel. An enormous copper vat, filled to the brim with mead, is carried in, and a cheer rises from Beowulf’s thanes. But the others, the king’s men and women, those who have seen too many nights haunted by the monster, do not join in the cheer. From the cast of their faces, the gathering might seem more a funeral than a feast, more mourning than a reception for the Geats, who have promised to deliver them from their plight. But there is music, and soon enough the mead begins to flow.

  Beowulf stands on the steps of the throne dais with Queen Wealthow, examining a curious carving set into the wall there, a circular design that reminds Beowulf of a wagon wheel. A mirror, placed some distance away in Hrothgar’s anteroom, redirects the fading sunlight from a window onto the wall and the carving.

  “It can measure the length of the day,” Wealthow explains, and she points at the sundial. “When the sun touches the lowest line, soon the day will be finished.”

  “And Grendel will arrive?” asks Beowulf, turning from the carving to look into the queen’s face, her violet eyes, the likes of which he has never seen before. Indeed, Beowulf doubts he has ever seen a woman half so beautiful as the bride of Hrothgar, and he silently marvels at her.

  Wealthow sighs. “I hope that Odin and Heimdall are kind to you, Beowulf. It would be a great shame on this house to have one so brave and noble die beneath its roof.”

  Beowulf shakes his head, trying to concentrate more on what she’s saying to him than on the sight of her.

  “There is no shame to die in battle with evil,” he tells her. “Only honor and a seat in Valhalla.”

  “And if you die?”

  “Then there will be no corpse to weep over, my lady, no funeral pyre to prepare, and none to mourn me. Grendel will dispose of my carcass in a bloody animal feast, cracking my bones and sucking the flesh from them, swallowing me down.”

  “I would mourn you, my lord. Your men would mourn you, also.”

  “Nay, my men would join me in the monster’s belly,” Beowulf laughs.

  “You shouldn’t jest about such things,” Queen Wealthow says, frowning now. “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “Afraid? And where’s the reason in that? The three Norns sit at the foot of Yggdrasil, spinning all our lives. I am but another string in their loom, as are you, my Lady Wealthow. Our fates were already woven into that tapestry when the world was young. There’s nothing to be gained in worrying over that which we cannot change.”

  “You are so sure this is the way of things?” she asks him, still frowning and glancing down at the dais steps.

  “I’ve heard no better story,” he replies. “Have you?”

  She looks back up at him but doesn’t answer.

  “Ah, Beowulf…there you are!” And Wealthow and Beowulf turn to see four thanes bearing King Hrothgar toward the dais. Straining, they carefully set his litter onto the floor of the hall. “I was thinking about your father,” says the king, as one of the thanes helps him from his seat upon the litter.

  “My father?” asks Beowulf.

  “Yes. Your father. Good Ecgtheow. There was a feud, I believe. He came here fleeing the Wylfings. As I recall, he’d killed one of them with his bare hands.”

  “Heatholaf,” Beowulf says. “That was the name of the Wylfing my father slew.”

  “Yes! That was him!” exclaims Hrothgar, starting up the steps toward Beowulf and Wealthow. The thanes have already carried the litter away, and the king’s court is assembling behind him. “I paid the blood debt for your father, and so he swore an oath to me. Long ago, that was. My kingship was still in its youth. Heorogar—my elder brother and the better man, I’d wager—had died. And here comes Ecgtheow, on the run, and so I sent wergeld to the Wylfings and ended the feud then and there. Ah…but no good deed goes unrewarded. I saved his skin, and now you’re here to save ours, eh?” He slaps Beowulf on the back, and Wealthow flinches.

  “I am thankful for the kindness you showed my father,” Beowulf replies. “And thankful too for this opportunity to repay his debt to my lord.”

  “Well,” says Hrothgar, “truth be told, it weighs heavy on my old heart, having to burden another with the grief this beast Grendel has visited upon my house. But the guards of Heorot—the demon has carried the best of them away. My following, those loyal to me, has dwindled, Beowulf. But you are here now. You will kill this monster. I have no doubt of it.”

  And now there is the sound of laughter, low and bitter, from the shadows behind the king’s throne. Unferth emerges from the gloom, slowly clapping his hands.

  “All hail the great Beowulf!” he sneers. “Here to save our pathetic Danish skins, yes? And we are so damned…ah, now what is the word?…grateful? Yes. We are so damned grateful, mighty Beowulf. But might I now ask a question, speaking as a great admirer of yours.”

  Beowulf does not reply but only stares, unblinking, back at Unferth’s
green eyes.

  “Yes, then? Very good. For you see, there was another Beowulf I heard tell of, who challenged Brecca the Mighty to a swimming race, out on the open sea. Is it possible, was that man the same as you?”

  Beowulf nods. “Aye, I swam against Brecca,” he says.

  Unferth scowls and scratches at his black beard a moment. “I thought surely it must have been a different Beowulf,” he says, furrowing his brow. “For, you see,” and now Unferth raises his voice so it will be heard beyond the dais, “the Beowulf I heard of swam against Brecca and lost. He risked his life and Brecca’s on the whale’s-road, to serve his own vanity and pride. A boastful fool. And he lost. So, you see the source of my confusion. I thought it had to be someone else, surely.”

  Beowulf climbs the last few steps, approaching Unferth, and now the mead hall falls silent.

  “I swam against Brecca,” he tells Unferth again.

  “Yes, so you’ve said. But the victory was his, not yours. You swam for seven nights, but in the end he outswam you. He reached the shore early one morning, cast up among the Heathoreams. He returned to the country of the Bronding clan, and boasted of his victory—as was his right. But you, Beowulf…a mighty warrior who cannot even win a swimming match?” Unferth pauses long enough to accept a cup of mead from his slave boy, Cain. He takes a long drink, wipes his mouth, then continues.

  “Speaking only for myself, of course, I not only doubt that you will be able to stand for one moment against Grendel—I doubt that you’ll even have the nerve to stay in the hall the full night. No one has yet lasted a night against Grendel.” Unferth grins and takes another drink from his cup.

  “I find it difficult to argue with a drunk,” Beowulf tells him.

  “My lord,” says Queen Wealthow, glaring at Unferth. “You do not have to bandy words with the son of Ecglaf—”

  “And it is true,” Beowulf continues, “that I did not win the race with Brecca,” and he closes his eyes, so vivid are the memories of the contest, carrying him at once back to that day—he against Brecca, both of them pitted against the sea…