Grendel

by John Gardner

  --Except, of course, old Hrothgar. Violence and shame have lined the old man's face with mysterious calm. I can hardly look at him without a welling of confused, unpleasant emotion. He sits tall and still in his carved chair, stiff arms resting on the chair-sides, his clear eyes trained on the meadhall door where I'll arrive, if I come. When someone speaks to him, he answers politely and gently, his mind far away--on murdered thanes, abandoned hopes. He's a giant. He had in his youth the strength of seven men. Not now. He has nothing left but the power of his mind--and no pleasure there: a case of knives. The civilization he meant to build has transmogrified to a forest thick with traps. Hrothulf, he knows, is a danger to his sons; but he cannot abandon the child of his dead younger brother. Hygmod, his brother-in-law, is biding his time while Hrothgar lives, because of Wealtheow; but Hygmod, he knows, is no friend. And then there is a man named Ingeld, ruler of the Heathobards, as famous for slaughter as was Hrothgar in his day. The old man intends to deal out Freawaru to him; he has no assurance it will work. And then too there's his treasure-hoard. Another trap. A man plunders to build up wealth to pay his men and bring peace to the kingdom, but the hoard he builds for his safety becomes the lure of every marauder that happens to hear of it. Hrothgar, keen of mind, is out of schemes. No fault of his. There are no schemes left. And so he waits like a man chained in a cave, staring at the entrance or, sometimes, gazing with sad, absent-minded eyes at Wealtheow, chained beside him. Who is one more trap, the worst. She's young, could have served a more vigorous man. And beautiful: need not have withered her nights and wasted her body on a bony, shivering wretch. She knows all this, which increases his pain and guilt. She understands the fear for his people that makes a coward of him, so that, that night when I attacked her, he would not lift a finger to preserve her. And his fear is one he cannot even be sure is generous; perhaps mere desire that his name and fame live on. She understands too his bitterness at growing old. She even understands--more terrible, no doubt, than all the rest--old Hrothgar's knowledge that peace must be searched through ordeal upon ordeal, with no final prospect but failure. Lesson on lesson they've suffered through, recognizing, more profoundly each time, their indignity, shame, triviality. It will continue.

  How, if I know all this, you may ask, could I hound him--shatter him again and again, drive him deeper and deeper into woe? I have no answer, except perhaps this: why should I not? Has he made any move to deserve my kindness? If I give him a truce, will the king invite me in for a kiss on the forehead, a cup of mead? Ha! This nobility of his, this dignity: are they not my work? What was he before? Nothing! A swollen-headed raider, full of boasts and stupid jokes and mead. No more noble than Red Horse, Hrothulf's friend. No one would have balked at my persecuting him then! I made him what he is. Have I not a right to test my own creation? Enough! Who says I have to defend myself? I'm a machine, like you. Like all of you. Blood-lust and rage are my character. Why does the lion not wisely settle down and be a horse? In any case, I too am learning, ordeal by ordeal, my indignity. It's all I have, my only weapon for smashing through these stiff coffin-walls of the world. So I dance in the moonlight, make foul jokes, or labor to shake the foundations of night with my heaped-up howls of rage. Something is bound to come of all this. I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing!

  I have thought up a horrible dream to impute to Hrothgar.

  Hrothgar speaks:

  I have dreamt it again: standing suddenly still

  In a thicket, among wet trees, stunned, minutely

  Shuddering, hearing a wooden echo escape.

  A mossy floor, almost colorless, disappears

  In depths of rain among the tree shapes.

  I am straining, tasting that echo a second longer.

  If I can hold it. . . familiar if I can hold it. . .

  A black tree with a double trunk--two trees

  Grown into one--throws up its blurred branches.

  The two trunks in their infinitesimal dance of growth

  Have turned completely about one another, their join

  A slowly twisted scar . . . that I recognize. . ..

  A quick arc flashes sidewise in the air,

  A heavy blade in flight. A wooden stroke:

  Iron sinks in the gasping core.

  I will dream it again.

  9

  December, approaching the year's darkest night, and the

  only way out of the dream is down and through it.

  The trees are dead.

  The days are an arrow in a dead man's chest.

  Snowlight blinds me, heatless fire; pale, apocalyptic.

  The creeks are frozen; the deer show their ribs.

  I find dead wolves--a paw, a scraggly tail sticking up

  through snow.

  The trees are dead, and only the deepest religion can break

  through time and believe they'll revive. Against the

  snow, black cuts on a white, white hand.

  In the town, children go down on their backs in the

  drifted snow and move their arms and, when they rise,

  leave behind them impressions, mysterious and ominous,

  of winged creatures. I come upon them as I move

  through sleeping streets to the meadhall, and though I

  know what they are, I pause and study them, picking at

  my lip.

  I do not pretend to understand these feelings. I record

  them, check them off one by one for the dead ears of

  night.

  Something is coming, strange as spring.

  I am afraid.

  Standing on an open hill, I imagine muffled footsteps

  overhead.

  I watch one of Hrothgar's bowmen pursue a hart. The man, furred from his toes to his ears, walks through the moon-and-snowlit woods, silent as an owl, huge bow on his shoulder, his eyes on the dark tracks. He moves up a thickly wooded hill, and at the crest of it, standing as if waiting for him, he finds the hart. The antlers reach out, motionless, as still as the treelimbs overhead or the stars above the trees. They're like wings, filled with otherworldly light. Neither the hart nor the hunter moves. Time is inside them, transferred from chamber to chamber like sand in an hourglass; it can no more get outside than sand in the lower chamber can rise to the upper without a hand to turn stiff nature on its head. They face each other, un-moving as numbers on a stick. And then, incredibly, through the pale, strange light the man's hand moves--click click click click--toward the bow, and grasps it, and draws it down, away from the shoulder and around in front (click click) and transfers the bow to the slowly moving second hand, and the first hand goes back up and (click) over the shoulder and returns with an arrow, threads the bow. Suddenly time is a rush for the hart: his head flicks, he jerks, his front legs buckling, and he's dead. He lies as still as the snow hurtling outward around him to the hushed world's rim.

  The image clings to my mind like a growth. I sense some riddle in it.

  Near Hrothgar's hall stand the images of the Scyldings' gods, grotesque faces carved out of wood or hacked from stone and set up in a circle, eyes staring inward, gazing thoughtfully at nothing. The priests approach them, carrying torches, their shaggy white heads bent, obsequious. "Great spirit," the chief of the priests wails, "ghostly Destroyer, defend the people of Scyld and kill their enemy, the terrible world-rim-walker!" I smile, arms folded on my chest, and wait, but nobody comes to kill me. They sing, an antique language as ragged and strange as their beards, a language closer to mine than to their own. They march in a circle, from god to god--maybe uncertain which one is the Great Destroyer. "Is it you?" their meek old faces ask, lifting the torch to each monster-shape in turn. "Not I," whispers the head with four eyes. "Not I," whispers sly old dagger-tooth. "Not I," says the wolf-god, the bull-god, the horse-god, the happily smiling god with the nose like a pig's. They stab a calf and burn it, the corpse still jerking. The old peasant, friend of Prince Hrothulf, whispers crossly: "In the old
days they used to kill virgins. Religion is sick."

  Which is true. There is no conviction in the old priests' songs; there is only showmanship. No one in the kingdom is convinced that the gods have life in them. The weak observe the rituals--take their hats off, put them on again, raise their arms, lower their arms, moan, intone, press their palms together--but no one harbors unreasonable expectations. The strong--old Hrothgar, Unferth--ignore the images. The will to power resides among the stalactites of the heart. (Her-kapf.)

  Once, years ago, for no particular reason, I wrecked the place; broke up the wooden gods like kindling and toppled the gods of stone. When they came out in the morning and saw what I'd done, no one was especially bothered except the priests. They lamented and tore their hair, the priests, as fraught and rhetorical as they were when they prayed, and after a few days their outcries made people uneasy. On the chance that there might be something to it all, whatever a reasonable man might think, the people tipped the stone gods up again, with levers and ropes, and began to carve new gods of wood to replace those I'd ruined. It was dull work, you could see by their faces, but it was, for some reason, necessary. When the ring was complete, I considered wrecking it again, but the gods were inoffensive, dull. I decided the hell with it.

  I have eaten several priests. They sit on the stomach like duck eggs.

  Midnight. I sit in the center of the ring of gods, musing on them, pursuing some thought that I cannot make come clear. They wait, as quiet as upright bones in the softly falling snow. So Hrothgar waits, lying on his back with his eyes open. Wealtheow lies on her back beside him, her eyes open, her hand resting lightly in his. Hrothulf's breathing changes. He is having bad dreams. Unferth sleeps fitfully, guarding the meadhall; and the Shaper, in his big house, tosses and turns. He has a fever. He mumbles a few inchoate phrases to someone who is not there. All the gods have hats of snow and snow-crested noses. In the town below me there are no lights left. Overhead, the stars are blanked out by clouds.

  But someone is awake. I hear him coming toward me in the snow, vaguely alarming, approaching like an arrow in a slowed-down universe, and a shudder runs through me. Then I see him, and I laugh at my fear. An old priest, palsied, walking with a cane of ash. He thinks it has magic in it. "Who's there?" he pipes, coming to the edge of the ring. He has a black robe, and his beard, as white as the snow all around us, hangs almost to his knees. "Who's there?" he says again, and pokes himself through between two gods, feeling ahead of himself with the cane. "Is there somebody here?" he whimpers.

  "It is I," I say. "The Destroyer."

  A violent shock goes through him. He shakes all over, practically falls down. "My lord!" he whimpers. He goes down on his knees. "O blessed, blessed lord!" A look of doubt crosses his face, but he resists it. "I heard someone down here," he says. "I thought it was--" The doubt comes again, mixed with fear this time. He squints, cocks his head, struggling to penetrate his blindness by force of will. "I am Ork," he says uncertainly, "eldest and wisest of the priests." I smile, say nothing. I intend to paint the images with the old man's steaming blood. "I know all mysteries," the priest says. "I am the only man still living who has thought them all out."

  "We are pleased with you, Ork," I say, voice very solemn. Then, suddenly impish--at times I cannot resist these things: "Tell us what you know of the King of the Gods."

  "The King?" he says.

  "The King." I do not giggle.

  He rolls his blind eyes, figuring the odds, snatching through his mind for doctrines.

  "Speak to us concerning His unspeakable beauty and danger," I say, and wait.

  The snow falls softly on the images. The old priest, kneeling, has one knee on his beard and is unable to lift his head. He shakes all over, as if the palsy is something outside him, an element like wind.

  "The King of Gods," he whispers, and searches his wits.

  At last he folds his arthritic white hands, raises them before him like a nightmare flower, and speaks. "The King of the Gods is the ultimate limitation," he keens, "and His existence is the ultimate irrationality." A tic goes down one cheek; jerks the corner of his mouth. "For no reason can be given for just that limitation which it stands in His nature to impose. The King of the Gods is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality. No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality."

  He tips his head, waiting for some response from me that will tell him how he's doing. I say nothing. The old man clears his throat, and his face takes on an expression still more holy. The tic comes again.

  "The King of the Gods is the actual entity in virtue of which the entire multiplicity of eternal objects obtains its graded relevance to each stage of concrescence. Apart from Him, there can be no relevant novelty."

  I notice, with surprise, that the priest's blind eyes are brimming with tears. They seep down his cheeks into his beard. I raise my fingers to my mouth, baffled.

  "The Chief God's purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of novel intensities. He is the lure for our feeling." Ork is now weeping profusely, so moved that his throat constricts. I observe in wonder. His knotted hands shake and sway.

  "He is the eternal urge of desire establishing the purposes of all creatures. He is an infinite patience, a tender care that nothing in the universe be vain."

  He begins to moan, shaking violently, and it occurs to me that perhaps he is merely cold. But instead of hugging himself, as I expect him to, he stretches out his arms toward the sky, huge-knuckled fingers gnarled and twisted as if to frighten me. "O the ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil, such as hatred, or suffering, or death! The ultimate evil is that Time is perpetual perishing, and being actual involves elimination. The nature of evil may be epitomized, therefore, in two simple but horrible and holy propositions: 'Things fade' and 'Alternatives exclude.' Such is His mystery: that beauty requires contrast, and that discord is fundamental to the creation of new intensities of feeling. Ultimate wisdom, I have come to perceive, lies in the perception that the solemnity and grandeur of the universe rise through the slow process of unification in which the diversities of existence are utilized, and nothing, nothing is lost." The old man falls forward, arms thrown out in front of him, and weeps with gratitude. I have trouble deciding what to do.

  Before I can make up my mind about him, I become aware that there are others moving toward the place, drawn by the old man's keening. So quietly that even old Ork cannot hear me, I tiptoe out of the ring and hide behind a fat stone image of a god with a skull in his lap and a blacksmith's apron. Three of his fellow priests arrive. They gather around him, bend over to look at him. The snow falls on them softly.

  FIRST PRIEST: Ork, what are you doing here? It is written that the old shall keep to the comfort of their beds!

  SECOND PRIEST: It's a bad habit, beloved friend, this wandering about at night when monsters prowl.

  THIRD PRIEST: Senility. I've been telling you the old fool's gone senile.

  ORK: Brothers, I've talked with the Great Destroyer!

  THIRD PRIEST: Bosh.

  FIRST PRIEST: Blasphemy! It is written: "Ye shall not see my face."

  SECOND PRIEST: Think what shape you'll be in for your morning devotions!

  ORK: He stood as near to me as you are.

  FIRST PRIEST: "Worship is the work of priests. What the gods do is the business of the gods." You know the text.

  THIRD PRIEST: He's a blamed fool. If a man hankers for visions, he should do it in public, where it does us some good.

  SECOND PRIEST: It doesn't look right, beloved friend, wandering around in the middle of the night. A man should try to be more regular.

  ORK: Nevertheless, I saw him. My life of study and devotion has been rewarded! I told him my opinion of the King of the Gods, and he didn't deny it. I believe I'm approximately right.

  FIRST PRIEST: The theory's ridiculous. Idle speculation. For it is written--

  SECOND PRIEST
: Please do come in with us, beloved friend. I hate being up after midnight. It ruins me the whole next day. It makes me put my clothes on wrong, and scramble the service, and eat incorrectly--

  THIRD PRIEST: Lunatic priests are bad business. They give people the willies. One man like him can turn us all to paupers.

  As I listen, shaking my head at the strangeness of the priestly conversation, another priest comes running up, younger than the others, pulling his outer robe on as he comes. They turn their heads, looking at the younger priest in annoyance. It occurs to me that perhaps he has been drinking. "What's this?" he cries. "Precious gods, what's this?" He throws his hands out, delighted by all he sees. Ork tells him what he has seen, and he listens in rapture. Before Ork has finished, the younger priest drops to his knees and throws his hands up, shaggy lips smiling, wild.

  FOURTH PRIEST: Blessed! O blessed! (On his knees he goes over to Ork, seizes the old man's head between his hands, and kisses him.) I feared for you, dear blessed Ork--I feared your bloodless rationalism. But now I see, I see! The will of the gods! The rhythm is re-established! Merely rational thought--forgive me for preaching, but I must, I must!--merely rational thought leaves the mind incurably crippled in a closed and ossified system, it can only extrapolate from the past. But now at last, sweet fantasy has found root in your blessed soul! The absurd, the inspiring, the uncanny, the awesome, the terrifying, the ecstatic--none of these had a place, for you, before. But I should have seen it coming. O I kick myself for not seeing it coming! A vision of the Destroyer! Of course, of course! Before we know it, you'll be kissing girls! Can't you grasp it, brothers? Both blood and sperm are explosive, irregular, feeling-pitched, messy--and inexplicably fascinating! They transcend! They leap the gap! O blessed Ork! I believe your vision proves there is hope for us all!