Beowulf

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “And what about you, Hondshew?” Beowulf asks.

  “Beowulf, that fat idjit there, he said I been off swifan sheeps and pigs and what not. You’d have hit him, too. Don’t tell me you would have done different, ’cause I know better.”

  “I duh-duh-didn’t say nuh-nuh-nothing about Beowulf swifan with puh-pigs,” Olaf grumbles defensively, and tugs his ear.

  “I think you just proved my point,” Wiglaf says to Beowulf, and turns his back on the door, gazing out across the wide, deserted expanse of Heorot Hall. One of the big cooking fires is still burning brightly, and it throws strange, restless shadows across the high walls.

  “You worry too much, Wiglaf,” says Beowulf.

  “Of course I do. That’s my job, isn’t it?” and then he looks over his shoulder to see Hondshew glaring menacingly at Olaf and the other thanes still milling about the door. “That’s good,” he tells them. “Now, tie it off with more chain. Hondshew, Olaf, you two ladies stop frican about and help them!”

  “More chain?” asks Beowulf. “But you just said it’s not going to hold.”

  “Aye, and you just agreed, but more chain means more noise. If it’s an alarm you want, then we’ll have a proper one.”

  “Where would I be without you, Wiglaf.”

  “Lost, my lord. Lost and wandering across the ice somewhere.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Beowulf laughs and then strips away his breechclout.

  “I already said you’re mad, didn’t I?”

  “That you did,” and now Beowulf retrieves his woolen cape from a nearby tabletop and wraps it into a tight bundle, then sits down on the floor, not too far distant from the door. He lies down, positioning the rolled-up cape beneath his head for a pillow. “Good night, dear Wiglaf,” he says, and shuts his eyes.

  “And while you’re lying there sleeping, what are we meant to do?”

  Beowulf opens his eyes again. Above him, the firelight dances ominously across the rafters of Heorot Hall. It’s not hard to imagine the twisted form of something demonic in that interplay of flame and darkness. He glances at Wiglaf, still waiting for an answer. “While I sleep, you sing,” says Beowulf.

  “Sing?” asks Wiglaf, and he makes a show of digging about in his ears, as if they might be filled with dirt or fluff and he hasn’t heard correctly.

  “Sing loudly,” adds Beowulf. “Sing as though you mean to shame the noise of Thor’s hammer.”

  “Yuh-yuh-you want us to suh-sing?” stutters Olaf, who’s standing just behind Wiglaf. “You mean a suh-song?”

  “Yes, Olaf,” replies Beowulf. “I think a song will probably do just fine.”

  Wiglaf looks from Beowulf to the barred entryway, then back to Beowulf again. “Okay,” he says. “This is like that other business, with the door being an alarm, isn’t it?”

  “Do you not recall,” asks Beowulf, “what that ferret Unferth said this afternoon?” And Beowulf pitches his voice up an octave or so, imitating Unferth. “‘Merrymaking in the hall always brings the devil Grendel down upon us.’ That’s what he said.”

  “Ahhhh,” laughs Wiglaf and taps at his left temple with an index finger. “Of course. We sing, and the doom that plagues Hrothgar’s hall will be drawn out of whatever dank hole it calls home.”

  Beowulf nods and closes his eyes again. “Wiglaf, I do not yet comprehend the meaning of it, but the sound of merrymaking, it harrows this unhappy fiend. It causes him pain somehow, like salt poured into an open wound.”

  “I had a wife like that once,” Hondshew says. He’s finished with the winch that lifts and lowers the crossbar and sits down on the floor near Beowulf. “But then a bear carried her off.”

  “I thuh-thought it wuh-was a wuh-wuh-wolf,” says Olaf. “You suh-suh-”

  “Yeah, fine. Wolf, bear, whichever. This woman, I tell you, she hated to hear anyone having a good time, singing, what have you. Used to put her in the foulest mood. Still, she was good in the sack. I have to give her that much. I think she was a Vandal.”

  Beowulf opens one eye and glares doubtfully at Hondshew. “You freely admit to swifan about with some Vandal wildcat, and yet you get offended when poor old Olaf brings up the matter of sheep?”

  “She might have been a Swede,” shrugs Hondshew.

  “So,” says Wiglaf, “you lie there on the floor, naked as the day you were born, and we lot, we serenade this bastard Grendel, right, ’cause he hates the sound of merrymaking. And then he comes for us.”

  “Absolutely,” says Beowulf. “Unless I’m wrong.”

  “We won’t hold it against you, should that prove to be the case,” and then Wiglaf turns to face the other men. “You heard him. He wants us to sing.”

  Thirteen sets of thoroughly confused eyes stare blankly back at Wiglaf, and nobody moves a muscle or says a word.

  “So…sing!” shouts Wiglaf.

  “And sound happy, while you’re at it,” says Beowulf. “Like you mean it. And remember, all of you, sing loud.”

  “Right,” replies Wiglaf, “loudly enough to shame the clang of Thor’s hammer.” Wiglaf clears his throat and spits out a yellowish glob of snot onto the floor of the mead hall. “I’ll get it started then,” he says.

  Beowulf shuts his eyes a third time and shifts about on the hard floorboards, trying to get comfortable should they be in for a long wait. The image of Lady Wealthow is waiting there behind his eyelids, unbidden, her milky skin and golden hair, the haughtiness of a queen and the careless beauty of a girl.

  So, what would Wiglaf make of my focus? he wonders. But the singing has already begun, some horrid bit of doggerel of Hondshew’s invention, and Beowulf decides it’s better if Wiglaf believes there’s naught on his mind this night but gore and valor and slain monsters.

  Olaf is busy murdering the first verse, but at least, thinks Beowulf, he doesn’t stutter when he sings.

  There were a dozen virgins,

  Frisians, Danes, and Franks!

  We took ’em for some swifan’

  And all we got were wanks!

  And now all the thanes join in for the chorus, making up in sheer volume all that they lack in pitch and melodiousness.

  Ooooh, we are Beowulf’s army,

  Each a mighty thane,

  We’ll pummel your asses, and ravage your lasses,

  Then do it all over again!

  “Damn good thing you can fight, Hondshew,” mumbles Beowulf, smiling at the awful lyrics and the memory of Lady Wealthow. “Because, by Odin’s long gray beard, you’d have starved by now as a scop.” And he lies there, listening to the rowdy rise and fall of the song, to the comforting crackle from the fire pit, and alert to every night sound beyond the walls of the horned hall.

  “Well, come on,” he whispers, half to the luminous ghost of Wealthow floating there behind his eyes and half to unseen Grendel. “I don’t mean to wait all night…”

  9

  The Coming of Grendel

  Grendel sits alone at the place where the old forest ends and the scrubby land slopes away toward the deep, rocky chasm dividing the moors from the walls and gates of Hrothgar’s fortifications. Overhead, the moon is playing a game of tag with stray shreds of cloud, but the creature has learned not to look to Máni for aid. There may yet be giant blood flowing somewhere in Grendel’s veins, but he is a gnarled and mongrel thing, a curse, impure, and time and again the Jötnar have shown they have no love for him. Never have they spoken to him or answered his pleas, never once have they deigned to offer the smallest deliverance from his torment. He crouches beneath the trees, clutching his aching head, his pounding ears, wishing there were any way to drive the ruinous noise of men from his skull and yet not break the covenant with his mother. But he has come this far already, pain-wracked and driven from the safety of his cave beyond the fell marches. He has come so near the mead hall and the homes of men that he can smell them, can almost taste them, and so has he not already broken his promise?

  And here below boughs and boles grown as rough and k
notted as himself, the change begins again. And perhaps this is all he’ll ever get from the giants, this hideous transformation that overtakes him when rage and hurt and hate are at last more than he can bear. No vow between mother and son the equal to a fury so great it can dissolve his will and warp muscle and reshape bone, so complete that it can finally make of him something yet more monstrous. A grotesque parody of his giant-kin, perhaps, some trollish joke between the gods who have warred always with the Jötnar.

  “I would keep my word,” he groans, wishing his mother were there to hear, wishing she were there to help and lead him safely back to the cave and the edge of her pool. “I would be true, Modor. I would…” but then the pain has become so great he can no longer think clearly enough to fashion words. And still their song jabs and cuts and mocks him from that mismatched scatter of stone and thatch perched upon the high sea cliffs.

  Her sister was from Norway,

  She cost me twenty groats!

  She showed me there was more ways

  Than one to sow my oats!

  At the edge of the forest, Grendel gnashes his teeth and covers his ears as his skeleton creaks and his joints pop. The pain and rage fester inside him like pus beneath infected skin, and like an infection, his body bloats and swells, growing quickly to more than twice its size. Some magic he will never understand, some secret of his curse, and soon his head is scraping against the limbs that only a few minutes before hung so far above his head. If only it would not stop here, if only he might keep on growing until he stood so tall that he could snatch the disinterested moon from out the night sky and hurl it down upon the roof of Heorot. There would be silence then, silence that might last forever, as much of forever as he needs, and never again would the bright eye of the moon taunt him from its road between the clouds.

  Very soon, the change is done with him, having made of Grendel something worthy of the fears and nightmares of the Danes, and he stands up straight, bruised and bleeding from the speed and violence with which he has assumed these new dimensions. He glances back toward home, his gray-blue eyes gone now all to a simmering, molten gold, and he peers through the highest branches and across the tops of trees. From this distance and through the mists, he cannot make out the entrance of his cave, but he knows well enough where it lies, where his mother sits coiled in her watery bed with eels and kelp to keep her company. And then Grendel turns back toward Heorot and the voices of the men and makes his way swiftly across the moors.

  “Doesn’t someone know some other song?” asks Hondshew, wishing now he’d bothered to think up a few more verses. He’s seated at a bench with the other Geats, and though the singing has finally stopped, they’re all still smacking their fists or empty cups against the tabletop, making as much racket as they can.

  “Huh-how can huh-he suh-suh-sleep through this?” asks Olaf, and nods toward Beowulf, who hasn’t moved from his spot on the floor.

  “I don’t think he’s really asleep,” whispers Hondshew.

  Wiglaf stops banging his cup against the table. “Why don’t you go ask him and see?” he asks Hondshew.

  “You’re not singing,” mutters Beowulf. “And I don’t recollect complaining that I’d had my fill of your pretty voices.”

  “We’ve been through the whole thing three times now,” says Hondshew. “Maybe this Grendel beast, maybe he don’t mind Geat singing as much as he minds Dane singing, eh?”

  Wiglaf grins and points a finger at a wiry, gray-haired thane named Afvaldr, though no one ever calls him anything but Afi. “Don’t you know a ballad or three?” he asks, and Afi shrugs his bony shoulders and keeps whacking his fist against the table.

  “Not a one,” answers Afi. “You must be thinking of Gunnlaugr. Now, he had a pair of lungs on him, old Laugi did. You could hear him all the way from Bornholm clear across the sea to the Fårö-strait when the mood struck him. Why, once I—”

  “A shame the dumb bastard went and drowned in Iceland last winter,” sighs Hondshew.

  “Aye,” says Afi. “A shame, that.”

  “Beowulf, I do not think the frican beast is falling for it,” Wiglaf says. “Maybe—”

  “—that’s because you’ve stopped singing,” replies Beowulf, not bothering to open his eyes.

  “I think I’ve strained my damned windpipe already,” says Hondshew. “What if Wiglaf’s right? What if this Grendel demon’s decided to sit this one out, eh? Here we sit, howling like a pack of she-wolves in heat, making complete asses of ourselves—”

  “Shut up,” Beowulf says, and he opens his eyes. “It’s coming.”

  “Wot? I don’t hear—” begins Hondshew, but then there’s a deafening thud, and the great door of Heorot Hall shudders in its frame. And for a long moment, the Geats sit still and quiet, and there’s no sound but the fire and the wind around the corners of the hall. All of them are watching the door now, and Wiglaf reaches for his sword.

  “It’s here,” whispers Beowulf. “Draw your weapons.”

  But the silence continues, the stillness, the crackling from the fire pit.

  “What the hell is he waiting for?” hisses Hondshew.

  And then the mead-hall door is hammered thrice more in quick succession—Thud! Thud! Thud! Dust sifts down from the rafters, and chains rattle.

  “Guh-guh-Grendel,” stammers Olaf. “He nuh-nuh-knocks.”

  There’s a smattering of nervous laughter at Olaf’s grim joke. Beowulf is sitting upright now, watching the door intently, his entire world shrunk down to that great slab of wood and rope and iron.

  “Ah, that is no monster,” snorts Hondshew, getting to his feet and drawing his enormous broadsword from its scabbard on his back. “That must be my plum, Yrsa! She’s ready for me to taste her sweet fruit!”

  There is more laughter from the thanes, bolder than before, and Hondshew bows, then turns and stumbles across the hall until he is leaning against the barred door.

  “Hondshew,” says Beowulf, rising to one knee. “That might not be the wisest course of action.”

  “Ah, you’ll see,” laughs Hondshew, and then he calls out through the door, “Patience, my lovely! Give a poor fellow a chance to find his pecker!”

  Now Wiglaf stands, his own sword drawn, and he looks anxiously from Beowulf to the door. “Hondshew. No—”

  “You drunken idiot,” mutters Beowulf.

  “Nah, you just don’t know her the way I do,” chuckles Hondshew and then he raps three times on the door with his knuckles. “She’s a demon all right. I’ll grant you that. One of Loki’s own whelps, I’d wager.” And Hondshew presses one ear against the door. “Are you listening, my plum? Are you ready for another go?”

  The thanes have all stopped laughing, and the hall of King Hrothgar has fallen silent and still again. There is a faint scrambling noise from the other side of the door, and then the wood creaks and pops and the hinges strain, and the whole thing bulges slowly inward as some titanic force presses upon it from without.

  Beowulf is about to order Hondshew to move away from the doors, when the huge crossbar snaps like a twig. A rain of splinters and deadly shards of the fractured iron brackets are blown out into the hall, and Hondshew is thrown high into the air and sails by over Beowulf’s head to land in a heap on the far side of the room. But there’s no time to see whether or not he’s been killed. The doors of Heorot have swung open wide and hang crooked now on buckled hinges, all those chains dangling broken and useless from their pulleys. Beowulf stares awestruck at the hideous thing standing in the doorway, framed by the night, its scarred hide glistening a wet and greenish gold in the firelight.

  “Wiglaf,” he says calmly, though his heart is racing in his chest.

  “I suppose,” says Wiglaf, “this means the old man wasn’t exaggerating. Right about now, I bet you’re wishing you’d left your armor on.”

  The monster roars and takes another step into the mead hall, advancing on the thanes. Steaming drool leaks from its mouth and spatters the floor. It swipes at the a
ir with taloned hands and glares directly at Beowulf.

  “I think it fancies you,” Wiglaf says.

  “Save your wit,” Beowulf replies without taking his eyes off the beast. “I fear we’ll have need of it when this is over.”

  And then Már, the thane standing on Wiglaf’s left and the youngest in the party, lets out a piercing howl, a crazy whoop that comes out more terror than battle cry, and he charges the creature. Wiglaf grabs for his cape, but the boy is too fast for him. So is Grendel. Before Már’s ax can land even a single blow, the creature is upon him, plucking Már up in one fist like a child’s toy. The beast snarls, its thin lips folding back to expose sickly black gums and yellowed eyeteeth long as a man’s forearm; Már barely has time to scream before he’s bitten in two. There’s a sudden spray of blood and gore, and the severed body falls twitching at Grendel’s feet.

  Meanwhile, Beowulf has climbed atop one of the long banquet tables and is moving very slowly and deliberately toward the creature. Wiglaf is shouting commands, and other thanes have begun to close in on the monster. But Grendel only sneers and laughs at them, a gurgling throaty laugh like the sea rushing in between two stones, then drawing quickly back again. It lunges forward and grabs hold of another of Beowulf’s men, a heavyset Geat named Humli, clutching him in both its clawed hands. Humli makes to slash at its face with his sword, but Grendel slams him headfirst into one of the ceiling beams, then tosses the lifeless body into the fire pit. A third thane charges, but is simply swatted away with the back of Grendel’s left hand and sent crashing into the mead vat. The vat spills and pours out into the fire pit, hissing violently and sending up a dense plume of steam and ash. The air stinks of mead and smoke and charred flesh.

  And now Hondshew rushes screaming from the shadows of Heorot, bloody and battered, his armor hanging askew and his eyes bright and frenzied. He rushes toward Grendel, his heavy broadsword raised above his head. Hondshew vaults easily over one of the overturned tables, and the monster growls and stoops to meet its attacker. Hondshew’s blade finds its mark, plunging into the creature’s skull, but Grendel only snarls and grins furiously back at the Geat, still holding tight to the hilt of his sword and dangling several feet above the floor.