Beowulf

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Then neither of them says anything more for a time. They stand there watching the constantly shifting rainbow patterns playing across the dark water flowing into the cave, its entrance starkly framed by a snarl of oaken roots. Almost anything might be waiting for me in there, thinks Beowulf. Almost anything at all.

  “It’s getting dark,” Wiglaf says finally. “You’ll need a torch. I wouldn’t mind having one of my own, to tell you the gods’ own truth.”

  “Do you still have your tinderbox?” asks Beowulf. “Is it still dry?”

  Wiglaf fumbles about inside his cloak and pulls a small bronze box from one pocket. The lid is engraved with a single rune, Sôwilô, the sun’s rune. He opens the box, inspecting the flint and tiny bundle of straw tucked inside. “Seems that way,” he tells Beowulf.

  “The farmer, he said the water burns,” and Beowulf nods toward the oily tarn.

  “Well, old Agnarr’s been right about everything else. Let me find a dry bough and we’ll see.” And Wiglaf climbs the bank to higher ground and hunts about beneath the oaks, returning with a sturdy bit of branch about as long as his forearm. Next he tears a strip of wool from the inside of his cloak and squats down beside the pool to soak it in the water.

  “You’re a handy fellow,” says Beowulf.

  “So they tell me,” laughs Wiglaf, but then there’s a loud splash from the tarn, and by the time he and Beowulf look up, there are only ripples spreading out across the surface. Wiglaf glances up at Beowulf. “Care for a swim?” he asks.

  “A funny handy fellow,” Beowulf replies, keeping both his eyes on the pool. “Grendel’s dam is not the only monster haunting this lake,” he says, for now he can see sinuous forms moving about just beneath the surface, the coils of something like an eel, but grown almost large as a whale. Wiglaf sees it, too, and he takes the strip of wool from the water and scrambles quickly away from the shore.

  One of the coils rises slowly from the water, its green-black hide glistening in the twilight before it slips back into the deep.

  “Maybe Hrothgar’s grandfather lied about killing the dragon,” says Wiglaf. “Could be he only wounded it.”

  “Finish the torch,” Beowulf tells him.

  “Could be it had babies.”

  “Finish the torch,” Beowulf says again, and he reaches for the golden horn of Hrothgar, still dangling from a loop on his belt. “You can keep the wee dragons busy while I take care of the she-troll.”

  “I’ll make a lovely morsel,” snorts Wiglaf, tying the damp wool securely about one end of the branch. Soon, with a few sparks from his flint, the bough has become a roaring torch. “The water burns,” he says, and forces a smile, passing the brand to Beowulf.

  “I will see you again, my friend Wiglaf, and soon,” Beowulf tells him, then, before Wiglaf can reply, Beowulf wades into the pool and disappears through the opening in the tangle of roots. Briefly, the hollow place beneath the trees glows yellow-orange with the torch’s light. When the entrance has grown dark again, Wiglaf moves farther away from the tarn, climbing back up the bank to sit out of the wind among the oaks. He lays his sword across his lap and watches the water and the things moving about just beneath it, and tries to remember the end of the story of Hildeburh and the Frisian king.

  The passage below the trees is narrow, and Beowulf stands near the entrance for a time, the cold water from the tarn flowing slowly about his knees. The ceiling of the tunnel is high enough that he does not have to stoop or worry about striking his head. He holds the brand in his left hand, Hrunting in his right, and the torchlight causes the walls of the cave to glitter and gleam brilliantly. Never before has he seen stone quite like this, neither granite nor limestone, something the color of slate, yet pocked with clusters of quartz crystals, and where the roots of the trees have pushed through from above, they have been covered over the countless centuries with a glossy coating of dripstone, entombed though they might yet be alive.

  Don’t tarry here, he thinks. Do this thing quick as you can, and be done with it. And so Beowulf follows the glittering tunnel deeper into the hillside, and when he has gone only a hundred or so steps, it opens out into a great chamber or cavern. Here the water spilling in from the tarn has formed an underground lake. He can only guess at its dimensions, as the torchlight is insufficient to penetrate very far into that gloom there below the earth. But he thinks it must be very wide, and he tries not to consider what creatures might lurk within its secret depths. The waters are black and still, and rimmed all about with elaborate stalactite and stalagmite formations.

  The teeth of the dragon, thinks Beowulf, but he pushes the unpleasant thought aside. They are only stone, and he has seen the likes of them before. He takes a few steps into the cavern, playing the torchlight out across the pool, when suddenly it gutters and goes out, as though it has been snuffed by a breath both unseen and unfelt. The blackness rushes in about him, and it’s little consolation that a lesser man might now retreat and relight the torch.

  The oil from the tarn has burned out, he tells himself. It was no more than that. I am alone in the dark, but it is only the dark of any cave.

  But then, suddenly, an eldritch glow comes to take the place of the extinguished torch, a bright chartreuse light like the shine of a thousand fireflies sparking all at once. And Beowulf realizes that this new illumination is coming from Hrothgar’s golden horn, hanging on his belt. He reaches for it cautiously, for surely anything that shines with such radiance must be hot to the touch. But the metal is as cool as ever. Cold, in fact. He tosses the useless torch aside and unhooks the horn from his belt. There is nothing healthy in this new light, nothing natural, though he cannot deny it holds a fascination and that there is some unnerving beauty about it.

  “So the demon shuns the light of the world,” he says, speaking only half to himself, captivated by the horn’s unearthly splendor. “But it also knows I cannot find my way down to it without some lamp to guide me, so I am given this, a ghostly beacon fit only for dwarves, that I may arrive and yet not offend her eyes.”

  For a moment, he stares out across the lake, seeing nothing, hearing nothing but the steady drip of water from the cavern’s roof and the indistinct babble of the stream from the tunnel flowing gently about his legs into the pool.

  “Show yourself, aeglaeca!” he shouts, expecting if not her answer at least the company of his own echo. But there comes neither. Only the sounds of water, which seem to make the silence that much more absolute.

  “This is not like you!” Beowulf shouts, much louder than before. “You were bold enough when you stole into Heorot to murder sleeping men! Have you now lost your nerve, she-troll?” But once again there is no reply and no echo.

  “Then I shall come down to you!” he bellows as loudly as he can. And Beowulf begins to undress, for his iron breastplate and mail are heavy and would surely drag him straight to the muddy bottom of the subterranean lake. “We will meet in whatever dank place you now cower,” he cries out across the water, “if that is how you would have it!”

  Does she hear me? Is she listening? Is she crouched out there somewhere, biding her time, laughing at me?

  Beowulf leaves his armor and belt, his tunic and breeches and boots, bundled together and lying in a dry place at the edge of the pool. Carrying only Hrunting and the golden horn, which is glowing even more brightly than before, he wades out into the icy water. The floor of the lake is slimy underneath his bare feet, and once or twice he slips, almost losing his balance. When the water has risen as high as his chest, Beowulf draws as deep a breath as he may and slips below the surface. Holding the horn out before him like a lantern, he swims along the bottom. The pool is stained with peat from the tarn and by silt, and the glow of Hrothgar’s horn reaches only a few feet into the red-brown murk. But soon he can see the bottom, strewn with the bones of men and many sorts of animals jumbled together—horses and wild boars, deer and auroch, the toothsome skulls of great bears and the wide, pronged antlers of bull moose. Her dining
hall, then, this lake below the hill, and for long ages must she have returned to this place with her victims, feeding where none will disturb her.

  Nestled in among the bones are gigantic white crayfish, their spiny shells gone as pale as milk down here in the eternal night, and they wave their huge pincers menacingly as Beowulf passes. There are other things, as well, eels as white as the crayfish and large as sharks, their long jaws armed with row upon row of needle-sharp teeth. Whenever they come too near, he fends them off with Unferth’s sword. Only once does the blade find its mark, carving a long gash in a serpentine body and sending the eel slithering away to safety. Blood clouds the water, making it still harder for Beowulf to find his way.

  He rises for another gulp of air, only to discover that this far out the ceiling of the cave has grown unexpectedly low, now mere inches above the pool. He can see that it slopes down to meet the water only a few feet ahead, so this will be his last breath unless he chooses to turn back.

  “If the Norns decree I should survive this ordeal,” he says, wiping water from his eyes, “then by the gods, I will teach you to swim, Wiglaf.” And then he takes another breath and submerges again.

  Below him, the grisly carpet of bones has thinned out, and Beowulf soon comes upon an immense cleft in the lake’s floor, a wide black chasm beckoning him on to still-greater and more terrible depths. A weak but persistent current flowing into the hole tugs at him, and he hesitates only a moment, sensing this must surely be the path that will lead him to Grendel’s mother. There is no knowing how far it might extend, if it will ever come to another pocket of air, but he pushes on, regardless.

  And before Beowulf has gone very far, the current has grown markedly stronger, so that he hardly has to swim at all. The chasm narrows, becoming another tunnel, and the current sucks him helplessly along its moss-slicked course. The golden horn glows more brightly than ever, but it is cold comfort indeed that he will not die in utter darkness. The spent air filling his lungs is aching to escape, and his heart pounds loudly in his ears. The tunnel becomes narrower still, so that he is dragged roughly along this stone gullet, his flesh cut and battered by the pockets of quartz crystals and by every irregularity in the rock. And still the tunnel grows narrower. Soon, he thinks, he will be able to go no farther, so constricted will be this passageway, and as he lacks the strength and air to fight his way back against the current, he will drown here. This will be his grave, and the mother of the demon Grendel will have won. He feels his grip on Hrunting growing slack, and the golden horn almost slips from his fingers. Oblivion begins to press in at the edges of his mind, and Beowulf closes his eyes and waits to die.

  But then the tunnel releases its hold on him, and he is buoyed suddenly upward, and Beowulf finds himself gasping at the surface of another underground pool. The current carries him onto a rocky shore, where he lies coughing and vomiting gouts of salty water, coming slowly back to himself. He opens his stinging eyes, blinking and squinting, trying to force them into focus.

  “Where have you brought me to, demon?” he croaks, then begins to cough again.

  “To me,” replies a voice from somewhere overhead, a voice that is at once beautiful and loathsome and fearsome to hear. “Is that not where you wished to find yourself, here with me?”

  Beowulf rises slowly onto hands and knees, rough bits of gravel biting into his exposed skin. “You are the mother of the monster Grendel?” he asks the voice, then coughs up more water.

  “He was my son,” the voice says. “But, I assure you, he was no monster.”

  “Your voice,” says Beowulf, rolling over onto his back, turning to face the voice and brandishing Hrunting. “Your voice…it’s not what I would have expected of a sea hag and the mother of a troll.”

  “He was no troll,” the voice replies, and now Beowulf thinks that there’s a hint of anger there.

  “Show yourself, beast!” Beowulf calls out as best he can, his voice still raw from having swallowed, then spat up so much of the pool. “Let me see you.”

  “In time. Do not hurry so to meet your doom.”

  “Bitch,” he hisses and spits into the mud. Sitting upright, fighting back dizziness and nausea, his vision begins to clear. And at last Beowulf looks for the first time upon the strange realm into which the current has delivered him. At once he knows this can be no ordinary cavern, but instead the belly of some colossus. The fyrweorm slain by Beow, perhaps, just as Unferth said, and now its calcified ribs rise toward the ceiling like the arches of Hel’s own hall. They glow blue-green with an unearthly phosphorescence, as do the walls, and Beowulf sees that there is a mighty hoard of treasure heaped all about the floor and banked high along the walls. In some places, the stones and those titan ribs are encrusted with a dazzling mantle of gold and gemstones.

  Slowly, he gets to his feet, clutching Hrunting and holding Hrothgar’s horn out before him. Its shine illuminates more of the cavern floor before him, and Beowulf can see one corner heaped high with the rotting corpses of recently dead thanes, their armor ripped apart as though it had been no more than birch bark, their bellies gutted, their faces obliterated by claws and teeth. And Beowulf also sees the stone slab where the body of Grendel now rests. The monster’s severed arm lies propped in place against its mangled shoulder. The corpse is a shriveled, pitiable thing, a gray husk devoid of any of its former threat, and Beowulf finds it hard to believe this could be the same creature he battled two nights before. Above the corpse and the slab hangs a broadsword, sheathed and mounted on iron brackets, a sword so large and heavy no mortal man could ever hope to lift it, a sword that might well have been forged in the furnaces of the Frost Giants.

  “Does it pain you,” Beowulf says, taking a single cautious step toward the altar, “to see him dead? To see him lying broken and so diminished?”

  “You do not yet know pain,” the voice says. “As yet, that word means nothing to you, little man.” And then there’s a scrabbling, scratching sound from somewhere close behind him, and Beowulf turns quickly about, peering into the shadows and the eerie blue-green light of the cavern for its source. But there’s no sign of whatever might have made the noise, no evidence except the taunting voice to say he’s not alone. Beowulf holds the golden horn still higher.

  “I see you brought me treasure,” the voice says.

  “I have brought you nothing but death,” he replies.

  And now Beowulf catches sight of something there amongst the hoarded riches, what appears to be a golden statue, though a statue of what he cannot say. Perhaps it was an idol, long ago, for he has heard stories of ancient cults and the old religion once practiced by the Danes, of blood sacrifices made by men and women who did not hold Odin as the highest among the Æsir. Sacrifices to goddesses said to inhabit especially deep lakes, though this statue surely resembles no goddess. It is a grotesque thing, as though its creators had in mind some hideous amalgam of a lizard and a sea beast. Its eyes are lapis lazuli, and its coarse mane seems to have been woven from a golden thread. Beowulf turns back toward the altar, and he gazes in awe at the giant sword hanging there above Grendel’s body.

  “Your beautiful horn,” the voice says. “It glows so…delightfully.”

  And once again he hears that scurrying from somewhere close behind him, and this time Beowulf does not turn, but only glances back over his shoulder. Light reflecting off the pool dances across the walls of the cave and across the statue. Something seems different about it, as though it subtly shifted position—the angle of its head, the arrangement of its reptilian limbs—when he looked away. But this must be only some trick of the cave’s peculiar lighting, some deceit his eyes have played upon his mind.

  “Show yourself,” he says. “I have not come so far, through flood and muck, to bandy words with a shade.”

  “You have come because I have called for you,” the voice replies, and now Beowulf does turn to face the statue once again. But it is vanished, gone. Before he can long ponder its disappearance, there’s a loud sp
lash from the pool, as though something has fallen from the wall into the water. Only a loose stone, perhaps, but he raises Hrunting and watches the pool.

  “I have come to avenge those who were slain while they slept,” he says. “I have come to seek justice for the thirteen good men who sailed the whale’s-road and fought with me.”

  Ripples begin spreading out across the surface, creating small waves that lap against the shore, and from the shimmering water rises the likeness of a woman, entirely naked and more beautiful than any Beowulf has ever before beheld or imagined. There is an odd metallic glint to her complexion, as though her skin has been dusted with gold, and all about her there is a glow like the rising sun after a long and bitter night. Her flaxen hair is pulled back into a single braid, so long that it reaches almost to her feet. Her pale blue eyes shine bright and pure, as though blazing with some inner fire. And then she speaks, and it is the same voice that has mocked him since he entered the dragon’s belly.

  “Are you the one they call Beowulf?” she asks. “The wolf of the bees? The bear? Such a strong man you are. A man with the strength of a king in him. The king you will one day become.”

  “What do you want of me, demon?”

  She moves gracefully, fearlessly, toward him, somehow treading on the surface of the water. Her long braid swings from side to side, seeming almost to undulate with a life all its own, flicking like a serpent or the tail of an excited animal.

  “I know that underneath your glamour you’re as much a monster as my son Grendel. Perhaps more so.”

  Beowulf takes a step back from the edge of the pool.

  “My glamour?” he asks.

  “One needs a glamour to become a king,” she replies. “That men will follow you. That they will fear you.”

  And now, in hardly the time it takes to draw a breath, she has reached the shore and is standing before him, her lustrous skin and twitching braid dripping onto the stones at her feet.

  “You will not bewitch me,” he growls, and slashes at her throat with Hrunting, expecting to see her head parted cleanly from her shoulders and toppling back into the pool from whence she has risen. But she grabs the blade, moving more quickly than his eyes can follow. She holds it fast, and try though he might, Beowulf cannot wrest it from her grip. She smiles, and dark blood oozes from her palm, flowing onto the blade of Unferth’s ancestral sword.