And now there’s a dull knock from the other side of the door.
Beowulf takes a deep breath and holds one finger up to his lips, silencing the thanes. Slowly, he turns to face the door. “Have you not had enough?” he asks and is answered by the voice of Wiglaf.
“Enough for this lifetime and the next, thank you very much” replies Wiglaf, and Beowulf leans forward, resting his forehead against the door a moment. He laughs softly to himself, an embarrassed, relieved sort of laugh, and pulls the door open again. There’s a viscous smear of gore streaking the doorframe, and Wiglaf is standing there, shivering and staring back at him.
“It made for the moors,” Wiglaf says, stepping past Beowulf, “but I don’t imagine it will get very far. That was a mortal wound, even for such a demon.” He stands staring down at the severed arm as an exhausted victory cheer rises from the surviving thanes.
“He spoke, Wiglaf,” Beowulf says and steps out into the freezing winter night, wiping Grendel’s blood from his face.
“Aye, I heard,” Wiglaf replies. “There are tales of trolls and dragonkind that can speak. But I never thought I’d hear it for myself. You think old Hrothgar will keep his promise now you’ve slain his beast?” And when some moments have passed and Beowulf does not reply, Wiglaf turns and peers out the open doorway, but there is only the night and a few snow flurries blown about by the wind.
10
The Death of Grendel
The kindly night takes Grendel back, one of its own come wandering, broken and lost, and for a time there is only the pain and confusion. No direction or intent, no destination, but only the need to put distance between himself and the one who called itself a bear, though it was not a bear. The man who is not merely a man and claimed to be the wolf of the bees and so a bear. The one who answered him all in riddles.
For a time, Grendel thinks he might lie down in the mists and die alone on the moors. It would be a soft enough bed for death, and the mists seem to have become some integral part of him, a shroud unwinding from his shriveling soul even as it winds so tightly about him. It would release him, and yet also would it hold him together, these colorless wisps curling soundlessly up from the tall grass and bracken. It would conceal him, should the Bee Wolf come trailing hungrily after, still unsatisfied and following Grendel’s meandering footprints and the blood he dribbles on leaves and stones. He would only be a phantom, there on the moorlands, nothing that could ever be wounded again, for even the sharpest swords pass straight through fog and empty air, doing no damage whatsoever, and no hateful human voice can injure that which cannot hear.
But then Grendel finds himself once more beneath the ancient trees, though he knows at once he is not welcomed by the forest. It wishes no part in his demise or decay and tells him so, muttering from the boughs of towering larches and oaks, beech and ash. If you fall here, say the trees, our roots will not have you. We will not hide your bones. We will not taste you, nor will we offer any peace. And they speak of some long-ago war with the giants, with the dragons, too, and to them Grendel’s blood stinks of both. They remind him of the wood that he has so thoughtlessly splintered on other nights as he raged and made his way down to the dwellings of men. He will not now be forgiven those former violations.
“It is no matter,” Grendel whispers, and he apologizes, and maybe the trees are listening and understand him, and maybe they aren’t and don’t. “I was on the moors and cannot even say how I came to be here. But I will not lie down among you, not if you won’t have me.” And so he stumbles on, grown so weak, so tired, that each step seems to take a lifetime or two, and there are whole hours laid in between his slow heartbeats.
A deer trail leads him away from the mumblesome, resentful trees and out into the wide gray swath of peat bog and still, deep ponds, the fell marches before the sea, this dank land that would never turn away a giant or a dragon or a troll. Or only dying Grendel. He sits down by a frozen tarn and stares at the patterns his blood makes on the ice. It’s snowing harder now, fat wet flakes spiraling lazily from the moonless sky, and Grendel opens his dry mouth and catches a few of them on his tongue. There are mists here, too, but they are thin and steamy and would never hide his ghost. Still, he thinks how easily he might break through the rime and sink, falling slowly through weedy gardens tended by vipers and nicors and fat slate-colored fish. And he would lie there in the comforting slime, forgetting life and forgetting all hurt and, in time, forgetting even himself.
“The Wolf of the Bees, he would never find me down there,” Grendel laughs, then coughs, and his breath fogs in the night. “Let him try, Mother. Let him drown here in the reeds and come to sleep beside my bones. I will gnaw him in dead dreams.”
“You cannot lie down here,” his mother replies, though he cannot see her anywhere. “Come back to me,” she says. “I would have you here with me.”
But Grendel sits a while longer there beside the frozen pool, tracing odd, uncertain shapes in the fresh snow and his cooling blood. The shapes would tell a story, if his thoughts were still clear enough for that, a happy story in which he killed the Beowulf, in which he took the horned hall for his own den and was never again plagued by the noise of men and their harps and flutes and drums. With an index finger, he tries to draw sharp teeth and a broken shield, but the falling snow erases everything almost as quickly as he can trace it on the ice.
It would cover me, too, he thinks, if I only sit here a little longer.
“Come home,” his mother sighs, her voice woven somehow invisibly into the wind. “Come home, my Grendel.”
And so Grendel remembers the cave, then, his mother’s pool and her white eels, and dimly he realizes that he’s been trying to find his way back there all along. But first the pain distracted him, and then the mists, and the spiteful trees, and the dark spatter of his blood across the ice. He gets slowly to his feet, and the unsteady world cracks and shifts beneath him. Grendel stands there clutching the damp stump where his stolen arm used to be, sniffing the familiar air, and he squints into the snowy night, struggling to recall the secret path. Where to tread, where not to tread, the shallow places where there are steppingstones and the places where there are only holes filled with stagnant, tannin-stained water.
They will not have him, these haunted fens. He will not die here, beneath the sky where carrion crows and nibbling fish jaws and the Beowulf might find him. Become more than half a ghost already, Grendel takes a deep, chilling breath, gritting his teeth against the pain, and sets out across the bog.
“Come back,” the mists call, but he ignores them.
“We have reconsidered and will have you, after all,” mutters the old forest, but he ignores it, as well.
“We are the same, you and I,” calls the moorlands from very far away. But Grendel knows he could never find his way back there, even if the jealous trees would deign to let him pass.
And before long he has reached the other side, only losing his way once or twice among the rushes and rotting spruce logs. Soon, there is solid ground beneath him again, and Grendel stumbles over the dry and stony earth and into the mouth of his cave. It does not seem so terribly cold here in the shadows, out of wind, sheltered from the falling snow. He staggers to the edge of his mother’s pool and collapses there, his blood seeping into the water and staining it the way the peat moss stains the marshes. His mother is waiting, and she buoys him up in her strong arms and keeps the hungry eels and crabs at bay.