Beowulf

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “He was insane, my lord,” says Wiglaf. “To have seen what he’s seen, the death of his house—any man would lose his wits. When I went down to the gates, I saw all that now remains of Unferth Hall. Slag and cinder, Beowulf, a glowing hole in the ground, and little else.” Wiglaf sighs and stares up at the column of smoke rising from the ruins of the village. “A dragon,” he says and swallows. “Do you believe that, my lord, that a dragon is abroad, that a fyrweorm has come among us.”

  The pretty man with golden wings.

  “What does it matter what I believe. What any of us believe. Unferth believed his crosses kept him safe from evil. I believed the age of monsters was behind us. Do not trouble yourself with belief, Wiglaf. Trust only what your eyes now see,” and he motions toward the village. “This was not the work of man.”

  “But a dragon?”

  “Or something near enough,” says Beowulf. “Call my officers. Have them meet me in the armory.”

  “Some have surely died,” says Wiglaf. “Others are unaccounted for.”

  “Then gather those who still draw breath, however many you can find. There is not much time, I fear. We must try and discover this fiend’s lair before it returns to finish what it began last night. And we must make such defenses as we are still able, to protect those who have so long looked to us for protection. I have failed them all, Wiglaf.”

  “I will not believe that,” Wiglaf says. “No king has ever guarded the land of the Danes as you have. If this thing…if it is a dragon…”

  “Then perhaps we will have one last chance to seek our place in Valhalla,” Beowulf tells him, watching Wealthow moving among the refugees. “Maybe we shall not die in our beds, sick old men fit only for Hel’s gray realm.”

  You have a fine son, my king.

  Wiglaf nods, but there is nothing like certainty or hope in his eyes. “This is not a troll and its mother,” he says. “Whatever it is.”

  “Enough talk, Wiglaf. Make haste. The day will not be long, and we do not know what our enemy intends.”

  And so Wiglaf leaves him there, surrounded by the dead and the soon to be dead, and Beowulf can still hear the firestorm from his dreams, and the screams, and the fearful sound of vast wings bruising the night sky.

  The day shines dimly through the narrow windows set into the thick stone walls of the king’s bedchamber, but there is neither warmth nor joy nor even solace in that wan light. Beyond the walls of Beowulf’s keep, the village still burns, and the king’s warriors have reported that all their efforts to extinguish the blaze have been in vain. The breath of the great weorm has poisoned everything it touched, some strange incendiary substance that continues to burn even when doused with water and earth. The ground itself is burning. They have managed only to keep the flames from spreading inside the walls of the keep, and that pillar of smoke and ash still rises into the winter sky above the ruins of Heorot. It has turned the afternoon to twilight.

  King Beowulf tugs at the straps of his breastplate, adjusting the fit of armor he has not worn since he was a younger man. Then he chooses a sword and shield from off the wall, and his longbow, too. He glances toward the windows, that hazy light falling across the bed he once shared with Wealthow, the bed he now shares with another woman—no, a girl, a girl young enough to be his own granddaughter. But it hardly seems to matter now, for surely he will not survive this day to ever again bed any girl or woman. It is waiting for him out there, what poor, mad, dying Unferth has named “the sins of the fathers.” The price of the life he has lived.

  The life she gave me, he thinks, and takes a great ax down from the wall. It was never more than that.

  Beowulf has already given Wiglaf and the officers of his thanes their orders, to take up positions along the northern rim of the gorge dividing Heorot from the moorlands. If he cannot defeat this beast, they will be all that stands between the dragon and the keep’s uttermost destruction. He could clearly see the doubt in Wiglaf’s eyes, doubt that any man or army of men might stand against such a calamity, but Beowulf also saw in Wiglaf’s eyes a grim determination.

  The king lifts his heavy cape from an iron hook set into the wall, a great cloak sewn from wolf and bear pelts, and he drapes it around his shoulders. When he looks up again, Ursula is watching him from the doorway, and her cheeks are streaked with tears.

  “I beg you,” she says, her voice hardly more than a sobbed whisper. “Do not leave me. Please…”

  “You are free to go,” he tells her. “I release you. Find a good man, if one still lives when this day is done. Bear him children…bear him a son, Ursula.”

  She crosses the room to stand beside him, and Beowulf sighs and gently cradles her face in his scarred and callused hands.

  “Please, child. Do as I’ve asked,” Beowulf says. “Let me go down to this battle knowing that you will not waste your life grieving for an old man.”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t want anyone else. I want you, my lord.”

  “I’m not the man you think me to be, Ursula.”

  “You are King Beowulf,” she replies. “You’re a great man, and a hero. This I know to be true.”

  “You know a legend,” sighs Beowulf. “You know only the stories told by scops.”

  “I believe—” Ursula begins, but Beowulf places his hand firmly over her mouth, for he will hear no more of this, not today, not ever.

  “Then you are as much a fool as all the rest of them,” he tells her, making his voice as hard and unfeeling as he can manage. Confusion and fury flash bright in Ursula’s wet eyes. She pushes him away and runs from the room.

  Beowulf turns back toward the wall and catches his reflection in a shield still hanging there. “You are a tired old man,” he says, speaking to that haggard image of himself trapped in the polished metal. “You go to seek your death in the wilderness.”

  “Indeed you do,” says Queen Wealthow, and he turns about to find her standing in the open doorway. Her gown and furs, her face and hair, are smeared with black soot and stained with the blood of the dying and wounded whom she has helped to tend. “And indeed, husband, you are a tired old man. Cladding yourself in the armor of a younger Beowulf will not change that in the least.”

  “Woman, have you nothing better to do this day,” he says, “than to trouble yourself mocking me? Shouldn’t you be with your priest, doing the holy works of your weeping, merciful Christ Jesus?”

  Wealthow steps into the room, pulling the door shut behind her.

  “Why don’t you take that poor girl and live out your remaining years in peace. You are an old man, Beowulf. Let some young hero save us. Some wanderer from a far shore, a Frisian, perhaps…or a Swede. Some callow fool come looking for gold and glory and a crown.”

  Beowulf glares at her for a moment. He can smell the stink of burning seeping from her clothing.

  “And start the whole nightmare all over again?” he asks, then shakes his head. “No. I have visited this horror upon my kingdom, like Hrothgar before me. And so I must be the one to make an end to it. Now. Today. I must be the one to finish her.”

  Wealthow’s startling violet eyes, hardly dimmed by age, match his glare, match it and double it, and she walks quickly from the closed door to stand before him.

  “Was she so beautiful?” Wealthow asks, and now there is anger in her voice. “Beowulf, is there in all the world any beauty so costly, any mere earthly beauty worth what you have seen today?”

  “I could lie,” Beowulf says. “I could tell you, my queen, that in the wisdom of my many years I have learned there is no beauty worth this terrible price. I could tell you she was only a hideous sea hag who bewitched me, casting a wicked glamour that only caused me to think her so beautiful a being. But how would that profit either of us? Yes, Wealthow, she is beautiful, a beauty beyond reckoning and beyond mere words and almost beyond imagining. A beauty the gods in Ásgard would themselves die for.”

  “The gods,” scoffs Wealthow.

  “Or even your ghostly
Jesus,” adds Beowulf. “Even he would have climbed down off his Roman cross for the love of such beauty.”

  “That is heathen blasphemy,” Wealthow mutters.

  Beowulf tries to laugh, but it’s a dry and humorless sound. “Aye,” he says. “For I am still a heathen king, and so I have not yet learned proper Christian blasphemy.”

  “It is not too late. You do not have to go to meet this fiend as an unbeliever and unbaptized. The priest—”

  “—will get none of me,” cuts in Beowulf. “Oh no, not that Irish sheepfucker. It is enough, I should think, that he has duped the better part of my kingdom with his talk of sin and salvation and heavenly life eternal. No, I will keep the gods of my father and his fathers before him. If there is any life awaiting me beyond this one, then I will be content to take my seat in Odin’s hall, should I earn that honor. Else I will find myself with Loki’s daughter in her foul hall on the banks of the Gjöll.”

  “You still believe these things?” asks Wealthow.

  “In more than sixty years, I have heard nothing better. Certainly not the ravings of your dear sheepfucking Irish priest.”

  Wealthow takes a deep, resigned breath.

  Beowulf swallows and scratches at his beard. “My lady, I do not wish to leave you with anger and bitter words,” he says. “I would have you know, Wealthow, that I am sorry, that I do regret the suffering I have visited upon you and my people. I was a fool.”

  “You were a young fool,” she tells him, still trying to sound angry, but her voice has softened, losing its keen self-righteous edge.

  “Now I am a sorry old fool,” Beowulf says. Then he pauses, lost for a moment in those eyes, lost in the memories of this strong woman who was herself only a girl when first he came to Heorot. “You should know, I have always loved you, my queen.”

  “And I have always loved you,” she whispers, and smiles a sad and weary smile, then looks away so that he will not see the tears brimming in her eyes.

  “She is only a child,” Beowulf says. “Do not be unkind to her when I am gone.”

  “She is much more than a child,” Wealthow replies. “You should have recognized that by now. But do not worry yourself, husband. I mean her no harm. She knows that. She will always have a place here, if she so wishes it.”

  “That is very gracious of you.”

  Wealthow shrugs, then glances back to her king.

  “I will miss you,” she says. “May you find whatever it is you seek.”

  Beowulf smiles, wishing that he might know one last night with the woman he took as his wife and queen so many long years ago, that he might hold her and know the peace he once knew in the sanctuary of her arms.

  “Keep a memory of me,” he says. “Not as a king and a hero, not as a demon slayer, but only as a man, fallible and flawed as any man. That is how I would be remembered.” And then the King of Heorot kisses his wife for what he knows will be the final time, and she does not flinch and does not pull away.

  19

  Dark Harrower and Hoard-Guard

  In truth, Beowulf is glad for Wiglaf’s company. The king had ordered his herald and oldest friend, Weohstan’s son, to remain behind with those warriors charged with defending the keep and what little remained of the village, the thanes commanded to protect the lives of those who survived the dragon’s night raid. But Wiglaf protested, saying that the king should not ride out across the moorlands alone, and that one old man more or less would make little difference if Beowulf should fail and the fyrweorm return to Heorot. Better I ride at your side, Wiglaf said, and in the end Beowulf had relented. It is a grim prospect, to face death, but grimmer by far is the prospect of facing it in the wilderness alone. By the time the Geats rode out, the fires that had engulfed the village had mostly burned themselves out, leaving behind little to show that only the day before had stood a living, breathing town of men.

  And now, looking once more out across the oily tarn, the peat-stained waters of Weormgræf, Beowulf is thankful he did not come here alone. In three decades, the place has changed in no way that he can detect. The poisoned surface of the lake still dances with that same unclean iridescent sheen. The grass still grows thick and brown around its boggy shores, and at this spot where the mist-bound land rises up into a steep bank crowned with three mighty oaks, the steaming lake still flows down beneath the earth, gurgling softly as it passes between the knotty roots of the three oaks. The air stinks of rotting vegetation and fungi, mud and peat and dead fish.

  But this time, Beowulf and Wiglaf did not cross the ancient forest beyond the moorlands and then the wide and treacherous marches, picking their way on foot. There is another route, one not known in those faraway days when Grendel and its dam terrified the men and women of the horned hall. And so the two men have come on horseback, wandering bleak and rocky paths down to the lake and the three trees and the cave leading deep below ground. But as they near the trees and the water’s edge, their mounts whinny piteously and stamp their hooves against the gravelly soil and shy away from the Weormgræf.

  “You cannot blame them,” Wiglaf says, then he leans forward and whispers something comforting into his horse’s right ear.

  “This is the place,” says Beowulf, tugging hard at the reins of his own mount, pressing his heels lightly into the frightened horse’s ribs. “Long years has it haunted my dreams, Wiglaf. In nightmares, I’ve come here a thousand times. But never once did I suspect I’d have need to visit it again awake.”

  Wiglaf pats the horse’s neck, then sits up straight in his saddle and stares out across the tarn. “It hasn’t changed,” he says. “It’s the same sorry piss hole it was the day you killed Grendel’s mother, a blighted waste fit only for demons and their kin.”

  “But I have changed. I am no longer a boastful young man,” Beowulf mutters, half to himself. “Once, I might have called this night-ravager out to face me in the open. I might have faced it as I faced Grendel, naked and without any weapon but my own strength.”

  Wiglaf turns his head and looks to Beowulf, who is staring at the three trees and the entrance to the cavern. His eyes are distant, and to Wiglaf he seems lost in unpleasant thoughts. For a while, there are only the sounds of the skittish horses, the wind, and a noisy flock of ravens watching from the oaks. When the King of the Ring-Danes speaks again, his voice seems to Wiglaf to have grown heavy as the cold air, as though every word is an effort.

  “There is something I must say, my Wiglaf.”

  “Yes, my lord?”

  Beowulf takes a bracing, deep breath and exhales fog. Some part of him had wished that they would reach this place and find that the grasping, probing roots of the trees had long ago sealed the entryway, that the ground itself had collapsed, closing off the path leading down to those haunted subterranean pools.

  “I have no heir,” he says. If I should be slain by this creature…” and he pauses and takes another deep breath. “…if I should die this day,” Beowulf continues, “then you shall be king, Wiglaf. I have arranged it with the heralds. They have been given my instructions.”

  Wiglaf turns away, looking back out across the tarn. “Don’t speak of such things, my lord,” he tells Beowulf.

  Beowulf sighs loudly and stares at the grim opening waiting for him there between the oaken roots. A sorrow has come over him, and he has never been a man at ease with sadness. He is holding the golden drinking horn, Hrothgar’s horn returned to Heorot by Unferth’s slave.

  “Wiglaf, there is something I would have you know. Something you must know.”

  “There’s a story about this place,” Wiglaf says, as though he has not heard Beowulf. “It was told by a woman in the village, an Icelander wench called Sigga. Some say she is a witch and a seer. I expect she’s dead now, dead or dying. She said this hill”—and Wiglaf motions toward the trees and the steep bank—“did not begin as a dragon’s hoard or as a demon’s den. She said that it’s the barrow of the last man of a long-forgotten race. The name of that man and his people has b
een lost to the world for three hundred years.”

  “Wiglaf,” Beowulf begins, but Wiglaf shakes his head and points up at the trees, their limbs heavy with raven feathers.

  “Sigga said that the three oaks were planted by that last man, and that they are meant to represent the three Norns—Urd, Skuld, and Verdandi. The roots of the trees are the great tapestry of fate that the Norns have woven. I have heard it said that the witch called this place—”

  “Wiglaf!” Beowulf cuts in impatiently, as his voice draws a raucous new chorus of caws from the ravens. “There is something I have to say to you. And you have to listen.”

  Wiglaf turns suddenly about to face his king, and Beowulf has never seen such fury in the Geat’s eyes as he sees there now, some desperate wrath boiling up, wild and hot. Wiglaf’s cheeks are flushed an angry scarlet, and he narrows his eyes.

  “Nay,” he says, raising his voice to a shout. “There is nothing I must know I do not know already! You are Beowulf. Beowulf the mighty! Beowulf the hero! King Beowulf, the slayer of and destroyer of trolls and sea hags and demon spawn! That is what I know, my lord, and all I need to know, this day or any other. Now…let’s do what we came here to do. Let’s kill this bloody flying devil where it sleeps and get on with our bloody lives!”

  For a moment, Beowulf stares back at him in stunned silence, while the ravens caw and flutter their wings in the trees. He thinks that maybe he has never truly seen Wiglaf before now, that he has only ever glimpsed some shadow of the man, and he knows, at least, that he has done the right thing, naming Wiglaf his successor to the throne.

  “Now,” says Wiglaf, then pauses to get his breath. Already, the anger is draining from his face. “Do you want me to go in with you?” he asks his king.