“Fine. Then let me ask you this,” continues Wiglaf. “To what end are you doing it?”
Beowulf pauses and wipes sweat from his face. “They will want proof,” he replies. “And I am giving them proof.”
“Would it not have been proof enough it you’d left it lying on the floor where it fell?”
Beowulf laughs and pounds the nail in deeper. “Are you turning squeamish on me, Wiglaf? You are starting to sound like an old woman.”
“I am only wondering, my lord, if King Hrothgar and Queen Wealthow will be pleased to find you have adorned the walls of their hall with the dismembered claw of that foul creature.”
Beowulf stops hammering and steps back, admiring his handiwork hanging there upon the wooden beam. “I do not find it so unpleasant to look upon. How is it any different from the head of a boar, or the pelt of a bear, or, for that matter, the ivory tusks of a walrus?”
“My lord,” says Wiglaf, exhausted and exasperated. “It is hideous to look upon, so like the arm of a man—”
Beowulf turns and glares down at him from the tabletop. “Wiglaf, you stood against the fiend yourself. It was no man.”
“I did not say it was a man, only that in form it is not unlike the arm of a man.”
Beowulf laughs, then wipes his face again and looks at the hammer in his hand, then back to the arm hanging limply from the beam. “I will have them see what I have done this night. I will have it known to them all, so there can be no mistake. Tonight, heroes fought beneath the eaves of this place…this Heorot…and a great evil was laid low. Four men died—”
“Yes, Beowulf. Four men died,” says Wiglaf, hearing the knife’s edge of indignation in his voice and wishing it were not there. “And still they lie where they fell, because you are too busy with your…your trophy.”
Beowulf laughs again, and this time there’s something odd and brittle in that laugh, something Wiglaf has heard before in the laughter of madmen and warriors who have seen too much horror without the release of death.
“As I said, Wiglaf. You sound like a worrisome old woman. I do not hear Hondshew or Már complaining,” and he uses the hammer to motion toward the corpses on the floor. “We will send them on their way soon enough. Odin Langbard shall not close the doors of his hall to them just yet, nor I have forfeited their seats at Allfather’s table.” And then Beowulf laughs that strange laugh again and goes back to hammering the spike deeper into the column.
The laugh pricks at the hairs on the back on Wiglaf’s neck and arms, and he wonders if perhaps some darkness was released with Grendel’s blood, some spirit or nixie that may now have found purchase in Beowulf’s mind. Thick blood still leaks like pitch from the monster’s arm, and who can say what poison might lie therein? What taint? The blood flows downward, tracing its way along the grooves and lines carved into the wood. Wiglaf recognizes the scene depicted in the carving—Odin hanging from the boughs of the World Ash, Yggdrasil, pierced through by his own lance. Nine nights and nine days of pain, to win the wisdom of nine songs that would grant him power throughout the nine realms, and the gift of the eighteen runes and a swallow of the precious mead of the giants. The blood of Grendel winds its way slowly about the limbs of the tree and the shoulders of a god.
“So be it. You have always known best,” he tells Beowulf, and Beowulf nods and strikes the nail again, causing the entire arm to shudder and spit another gout of that lifeless ichor.
“You are tired, Wiglaf,” says Beowulf. “And maybe you are disappointed that you have not this night found your own hero’s death.
“As you say,” Wiglaf replies and turns away from his lord’s awful trophy to look instead upon the mutilated corpses of his four fallen countrymen. Olaf and the others have laid each man out on his shield and covered him over with his cape. And, in truth, he feels no disappointment at all that he is still among the living, and if he is ever to find his path to Valhalla, it will have to be upon some other battlefield. He glances back at Beowulf, busy with his hammering and still laughing to himself, and sees that Grendel’s blood has reached all the way to the gnarled and twisted roots of Yggdrasil.
In the last hour before sunrise the snow changed to rain, a steady, drenching rain to turn the thoroughfares and commons of Hrothgar’s stockade from thick and frozen muck to gray lakes and gray rivers divided one from another by stretches of even grayer mud. The water pours from off rooftops and gurgles through rainspouts, as though the sky has found some reason of its own to mourn this day. But Wiglaf and Beowulf and the other Geats built the funeral pyre before the rain began, stacking cords of cured pine soaked in pitch and drenched in whale oil, and the fire burns high and bright and hot despite the downpour. A white column of smoke rises up to meet the falling rain, and the wood crackles loudly, and the puddles hiss and steam where they meet the edges of the pyre. Beowulf and his ten remaining thanes, the survivors of their battle with Grendel, stand in the shadow of the blaze, the rain dripping from their woolen capes. A handful of curious villagers loiter farther out, watching as the flames consume the corpses of Hondshew and the others.
“They were great warriors,” says Beowulf, and Wiglaf nods.
“And they suffered a most foul death,” Wiglaf replies. His eyes have begun to tear, and he squints and pretends it’s only from the smoke or only rain that’s gotten into his eyes.
Beowulf doesn’t look away from the pyre. “They have found the deaths that all brave men seek, and now they are einherjar. Together they have passed as heroes through Valgrind, welcomed by Bragi and the Valkyries. Today, they will ride the wide green plains of Ásgard, readying themselves for that time when they will join the gods and do battle against the giants in Ragnarök. And this night, while we are yet cold and weary and wet, they will feast at Odin’s table in Valhalla, and on the morrow wake gladly to the call of the rooster Gullinkambi, then once more will they ride the fields of Idavoll. They will not die old men, sick and bedridden.”
“Is that what you believe?” asks Wiglaf, glancing at his lord.
“It is what I know, Wiglaf,” replies Beowulf. “I have heard no better story. Have you?”
Wiglaf watches the fire. The funeral scaffold collapses in a flurry of red-hot embers, and whatever remains of the dead men tumbles into the heart of the pyre. “I have not,” he says.
“Then mourn the living,” sighs Beowulf. “Mourn old men who cannot fight their own battles, not the glorious dead who have fallen victorious against so terrible a foe.” And Beowulf glances toward the open door of the horned hall, still stained with Grendel’s dark blood.
“I’ve got their knives,” says Wiglaf, and he takes four daggers from his cloak. “We’ll carry them home…for their widows.”
Beowulf clenches his teeth together, looking for words that aren’t there, remembering again the sound of the creature’s voice, that it asked him to spare it.
“They will not be forgotten,” he tells Wiglaf, and takes him by the shoulder. “The scops will sing their glory forever. Come, before we catch our death. Let us drink to their memory. I want you to raise the first cup.”
Wiglaf tucks the daggers back into his cape and shakes his head. “Nay, I’m not in the mood for merrymaking. I’ll ride down to the mooring, to prepare the boat,” and then Wiglaf looks out from beneath his rain-soaked hood at Beowulf. “We still leave tomorrow, on the tide? Do we not?”
Above them, thunder rumbles off toward the beach.