Beowulf

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Cain hesitates only a moment longer, something desperate in his cloudy, sickly eyes, and then he produces his golden treasure. It shines dimly in the overcast daylight, and Unferth gasps and drops his walking stick. He has begun to tremble uncontrollably and he leans against the sleigh for support.

  “Father,” asks Guthric. “What’s wrong?”

  “Do you not see it?” Unferth whispers, taking the golden drinking horn from Cain’s rag-swaddled hands. “My Lord Hrothgar’s most precious…” and he trails off, dumbstruck by the sight of the horn, lost so long ago.

  “Is it gold?” asks Guthric as he turns about for a better view, his interest piqued.

  “Yes, yes,” hisses Unferth. “Of course it is gold. This…this is the drinking horn King Beowulf was given by King Hrothgar in return for slaying Grendel…”

  “But that was lost, wasn’t it?” asks Guthric.

  His eyes wide with disbelief, Unferth looks from the golden horn to Cain, shivering on the ground, then back to the horn.

  “Yes,” he tells his son. “It was lost. Beowulf cast it into the tarn, into the burning waters of Weormgræf, for the merewife greatly desired it. When she was slain…he said that he searched for it, but could not discover where it had come to rest in the mud and peat.”

  “It must be worth a fortune,” says Guthric, climbing down from the sleigh and reaching for the drinking horn. But Unferth slaps his hand away.

  “How came you by this?” he asks Cain, and when the slave doesn’t answer, Unferth kicks him in the belly.

  “Shall I have a go at him?” one of the guards asks. “A few lashes, and the rat will start talking, sure enough.”

  “No,” Unferth replies, shaking his head. “This is the king’s horn, and now it will go to the king. And so will Cain. Perhaps he will tell Lord Beowulf how he came upon it. Perhaps the questions of our king mean more to him than the questions of his master.” And Unferth kicks Cain again, harder than before. The slave gags and coughs a crimson spatter onto the snow.

  “Bring out my ponies,” he tells the two guards. “And Guthric, you help them.”

  “But Father—”

  “Do not argue with me,” Unferth says without looking at his son. “Consider it fair penance due for your earlier transgression.”

  And when the guards and his son have gone, Unferth kneels in the snow beside Cain and wipes blood from the slave’s lips and nostrils.

  “You will tell where you came upon it,” Unferth tells him. “Or I shall have the pleasure of killing you myself.”

  And far across the village, beyond the walls of the keep, Wiglaf descends the four steps leading down from the granite platform. The crowd is breaking up, going on about their business, and he has much left to do before the celebration begins. He glares up at the leaden sky and curses the falling snow, then adds another curse for his aching joints. Then he spies a lone figure watching from the causeway connecting the two towers and thinks it must be Beowulf. Wiglaf waves to him, but the figure does not wave back.

  “What’s on your mind now, old man?” Wiglaf asks, uncertain if the question was meant for himself or for the figure standing on the causeway. And then he begins picking his way carefully back through the snow and ice, and his only thoughts are of hot food and a crackling hearth fire.

  Unferth’s sleigh has almost reached the gates of the keep when Guthric tugs at the reins and brings the ponies to a halt. Despite the day’s foul weather, the streets are crowded with travelers who have journeyed to Heorot from other, outlying villages and farmsteads to celebrate Beowulf’s Day and the Yuletide. Too many unfamiliar faces for Unferth’s liking, too many wagons and horses and beggars slowing them down, and now that Guthric has stopped the sleigh, the unfamiliar faces stare back at Unferth as though it is he who should not be here. Cain sits behind his master, on the bench that Guthric’s wife and children occupied until he ordered them to remain at home. And Cain gazes disconsolately at all the men and women and children on the streets. The slave’s feet have been manacled so he cannot run again.

  “What are you doing?” Unferth asks his son, and tries unsuccessfully to take the reins from Guthric. “We have to see our king. We must see him at once. We may have taken too long already!”

  Guthric winds the reins tightly about his fists and stares up at the two towers of Beowulf’s castle, the one built straight and the other spiraling upwards like the shell of some gargantuan snail. His entire life has been lived in the shadow of those towers and in the knowledge that his father would have been king had not some adventurer from the east shown up to defeat monsters Guthric has come to doubt ever even existed. Some dark plot, more likely, some intrigue by which a foreign interloper might dupe doddering old Hrothgar and steal the throne for himself. Years ago it first occurred to him that “the demon Grendel” and the demon’s nameless mother might only have been fictions concocted by Beowulf in a campaign to wrest control of Denmark from the Danes. Perhaps the Geat and his thanes merely set some wild beast loose upon the unsuspecting countryside, some bloodthirsty animal that would not be recognized and so would be believed by the gullible and superstitious to constitute a sort of monster or otherworldly demon, a troll or even the spawn of giants. In the end, by whatever means the deception was carried out, his father was robbed of his kingship and Guthric of his own birthright. And now there is this horn, this relic from that faerie tale, supposedly lost forever.

  “Father,” he says, “I would have you tell me why this horn is so very important. Clearly, it must be valuable, but there’s something else, isn’t there?”

  “This is none of your concern,” snaps Unferth. “But we must hurry. We must—”

  “Why, Father? Why must we hurry? What is so damned important about a bloody drinking horn that it has you so excited?”

  Unferth wrings his hands anxiously and stares at the flanks of the two snow-dappled ponies, as though he might spur them to move by dint of will alone.

  “Some things are not for you to know,” he tells Guthric. “Some things—”

  “If the tale is to be believed, Hrothgar’s horn was lost at the bottom of a deep tarn. Tell me, how then might an idiot like Cain have come upon it. I do not even think he knows how to swim.”

  “There is not time for this impertinence,” growls Unferth, going for his walking stick, but Guthric kicks it from the sleigh before his father can reach it. Then he turns and looks at Cain.

  “Can you swim?” he asks the slave.

  Cain looks confused for a moment, then he shakes his head.

  “You see, Father? He cannot even swim, so how could he have possibly found a drinking horn lost at the bottom of a bottomless lake. Unless, of course, it was never lost there at all. Perchance, it was only hidden.”

  Unferth glares furiously back at his son, then down at his staff, lying in the snow beside the sleigh. “Why,” he asks, “would King Beowulf hide his own drinking horn? You’re being a dolt, Guthric, which comes as no surprise whatsoever. You have as little sense as that bitch who gave birth to you.”

  Guthric ignores the slight and continues, giving voice to thoughts he has so long kept to himself. “He would have needed it to appear as though he had bested this demon hag at great personal loss. So, he loses the prize he won for killing Grendel. And your ancestral sword, I might add. He gives up a horn and gains a kingdom. It seems a fair enough trade to me.”

  “The horn was his already,” insists Unferth, clutching tight to the golden horn, now that he has lost his stick. “I keep telling you that. Are you deaf as well as a fool?”

  “Father, listen to me. We will do as you wish. We will take this thing to King Beowulf, but first I would like to show it to someone else.”

  “Who?” asks Unferth, raising one bushy gray eyebrow suspiciously.

  Guthric takes a deep breath of the freezing air and glances about at the crowd moving slowly toward the mead hall and the night’s coming celebration. There is a troupe of actors, mostly dwarves, and they’re carrying a grotesq
ue contraption made of furs and bones and leather, and Guthric realizes it’s meant to be the monster Grendel. A puppet or costume the actors will use to reenact that glorious battle between Beowulf and the fiend.

  “A seer,” says Guthric. “A wisewoman I have spoken with before.”

  Unferth looks horrified, then begins to scrabble out of the wagon to retrieve his walking stick.

  “A seer? A witch is what you mean!” he says. “Have you learned nothing from the teachings of our Christ Jesus, that you would traffic with witches and have me do likewise!”

  “I wear your cross,” replies Guthric.

  “It is not my cross, and it means nothing, if you do not believe in what it represents. You profane God, wearing the cross and meeting with witches.”

  Guthric scowls and lets go of the reins. He grabs his father’s cloak, hauling him back into the sleigh. “She is not a witch,” he tells Unferth. “She is only an old woman—older even than you, Father—who knows many things.”

  “Because she consorts with spirits and demons,” sneers Unferth, still without his staff. “Because she keeps counsel with evil beings who wish to deceive us all.”

  “I only want to show her the horn,” says Unferth. “Then we will go to the king, as you wish.”

  “This is madness,” hisses Unferth. “We are wasting time, and now you would have me seek out the company of a witch and let her look upon this treasure which should be seen by Beowulf and none other.” Unferth has begun excitedly waving the horn about, and several passersby have stopped to gawk at the old man.

  “You seem to think everyone in Heorot deserves a good look,” says Guthric, and Unferth immediately hides the horn beneath his robes once more.

  “There is not time for this madness,” Unferth says again, though he seems to have exhausted himself, and much of his anger and panic seem to have drained away.

  “Father, the damned thing has been lost for thirty years. I suspect another few hours will make no difference, one way or the other.”

  “You do not know,” sighs Unferth.

  Guthric glances back at Cain again. “Retrieve your master’s staff,” he says. “It has fallen from the sleigh.” When Cain nods forlornly at the iron shackles about his ankles, Guthric merely snorts. “You cannot run, but you can walk well enough to do as I have asked. Now, Cain, do as I have said and get Father’s staff, or I swear that I shall beat you myself.”

  “Yes, my lord,” mumbles Cain, managing to clamber down from the sleigh.

  “I knew you were never a true convert,” says Unferth. “But I did not know that you consorted with sorcerers and witches.”

  “I consort with those who can tell me what I need to know,” replies Guthric, and again he looks toward the troupe of dwarf actors and their hideous Grendel suit. Something to frighten children and old men, an offense to thinking men and nothing more. One of the dwarves has set the immense head down upon the snow and is busy with the straps that seem to work its fierce jaws, which appear to Guthric to be nothing more than an absurd composite of bear teeth and boar tusks. A child points at the head and runs back to its mother, sobbing. The dwarves laugh and roar at the child. One of them works the phony jaws up and down, up and down, chewing at the air.

  Better be a good boy, Guthric. Better be good and say your prayers, or Grendel will come in the night and gobble you up! How many nights had he lain awake, fearing the sound of Grendel’s footsteps or a misshapen face leering in at the window of his bedchamber?

  And all at once Guthric is seized with a desire to put an end to this pathetic charade, to draw his sword and hack away at the dwarves’ puppet until nothing remains but dust and string and tatters. Nothing that can frighten children or keep alive the falsehoods that put a foreigner upon the Danish throne.

  “Cain!” he shouts. “What the bloody hell is taking you so long?” but when he turns back toward his father, he sees that Unferth is holding on to his oaken staff and that Cain has already climbed back into the sleigh.

  “How can I persuade you not to do this?” asks Unferth, staring down at the stick in his wrinkled hands.

  “You cannot, Father. Do not waste your breath trying. You shall see, it’s for the best. And then, when my questions have been answered, we will go to see King Beowulf in his horned hall.” Unferth gives the reins a hard tug and shake, and he guides the sleigh away from the main thoroughfare and down a narrow side street.

  And so it is that the old man and his son find themselves standing outside a very small and cluttered hovel wedged in between the village wall and the muddy sprawl of a piggery. At first, Unferth refused to enter the rickety shack, fearing for both his immortal soul and the welfare of his mortal flesh. The whole structure seems hardly more than a deadfall in which someone has unwisely chosen to take up residence, a precarious jumble of timber and thatch that might well shift or simply collapse in upon itself at the slightest gust of wind. But Guthric was persistent, and the snow was coming down much too hard for Unferth to remain behind in the sleigh with Cain (covered now with a blanket and tied fast to his seat).

  The crooked front door is carved with all manner of runes and symbols, some of which Unferth recognizes and some of which he doesn’t, and a wolf’s skull—also decorated with runes—has been nailed to the cornice. When Unferth knocks, the entire hovel shudders very slightly, and he takes a cautious step back toward the sleigh. But then the door swings open wide and they are greeted by a slender woman of indeterminate age, neither particularly old nor particularly young, dressed in a nappy patchwork of fur and a long leather skirt that appears to have been stained and smeared with every sort of filth imaginable. Her black hair, speckled with gray, is pulled in braids, and her eyes are a bright and startling shade of green that makes Unferth think of mossy rocks at the edge of the sea.

  “Father,” says Guthric, “this is Sigga, the seer of whom I spoke. She was born in Iceland.”

  “Iceland?” mutters Unferth, and he takes another step back toward the sleigh. “Then what the hell is she doing here?”

  “I often ask myself the same thing,” says Sigga, fixing Unferth with her too-green eyes.

  “Well, then tell me this, outlander,” growls Unferth. “Are you some heathen witch, or are you a Christian? Do you offer your body up to evil spirits in exchange for the secrets you sell?”

  Hearing this, Sigga grunts, some unintelligible curse, and shakes her head.

  “I’m sorry,” Guthric says, frowning at his father. “My father takes his conversion very seriously.”

  “I keep to the old ways,” Sigga tells Unferth, standing straighter and her eyes seeming to flash more brightly still. “And what I do with my body is no concern of yours, old man. I know you, Unferth, Ecglaf’s son, though you do not now seem to remember me. I midwifed at the birth of your son, and I did my best to save his mother’s life.”

  “Then you are a witch!” snarls Unferth, and spits into the snow. “You admit it!”

  Sigga clicks her tongue loudly against the roof of her mouth and glances at Guthric, then back to Unferth. She points a long finger at the old man, and says, “State your business with me, Ecglaf’s son, for I have better things to do this day than stand here in the cold and be insulted by Hrothgar’s forgotten lapdog.”

  Unferth makes an angry blustering noise and shakes his staff at the woman. “Witch, I have no business here,” he sputters. “Ask my infidel son why we’ve come, for this was all his doing, I assure you.”

  “Sigga, there is something I wish you to see,” says Guthric. “Our slave found it out on the moorlands, and—”

  “Then come inside,” Sigga says to Guthric, interrupting him. “I will not catch my own death standing in the snow. As for you, Ecglaf’s son, you may come in where there is a fire or you may stand there shivering, if that’s what pleases you.”

  “Father, show it to her,” says Guthric. “Let her see the golden horn.”

  “Inside,” Sigga says again, and vanishes into the hovel. Unfert
h is still mumbling about demons and sorcery, whores and succubae, but when Guthric takes him by the arm and leads him over the threshold of Sigga’s house, he doesn’t resist. Inside, the air stinks much less of the piggery, redolent instead with the scent of dried herbs and beeswax candles, cooking and the smoky peat fire burning in the small hearth. In places, weak daylight shows through chinks in the walls. There are several benches and tables crowded with all manner of jars and bowls, a large mortar and pestle, dried fish and the bones of many sorts of animals. Bundles of dried plants hang from the low ceiling and rustle softly one against the other. Guthric takes a seat before the fire, warming his hands, but Unferth hangs back, taking great care to touch nothing in the place, for, he thinks, anything here—anything at all—might be tainted with some perilous malfeasance.

  “A golden horn?” Sigga asks, sitting down on the dirt floor beside the hearth. “Is that what you said, Guthric? A golden horn?”

  “Show it to her, Father,” says Guthric impatiently, then to Sigga, “Surely you have heard of the golden drinking horn that Hrothgar gave to King Beowulf, the one Hrothgar always claimed to have taken from a slain dragon’s hoard?”

  “I know the story,” Sigga replies. “The golden horn is said to have been lost when Beowulf the Geat fought with the merewife after Grendel’s death. But…I do not set much store in the boasting of men. I say if Hrothgar ever saw a dragon, he’d have run the other way.”

  “Insolent crone,” mutters Unferth. “Hrothgar was a great man, a great warrior.”

  Sigga stares at him a moment, then asks, “So, have you come to argue politics and the worth of kings?”

  Unferth glares back at her and his son, sitting there together like confidants or coconspirators, his one and only son keeping company with the likes of her. He grips his staff more tightly and says a silent prayer.

  “What is it you have brought me?” Sigga asks Unferth. “I trust in my eyes. Now, show me this golden horn, and I will tell you what I see.”

  “I once saw a drawing of Hrothgar’s horn, years ago,” says Guthric. “It was identical to the one found by our slave.”