“My lady?” asks Beowulf, uncertain what she means.
“That a man—like my husband—may in his youth slay a fearsome dragon, which most would count a glorious deed. Even the gods, I should think. And yet, if he is unlucky and survives that encounter, he may yet grow old and feeble and die in his bed. So—dragon or no—the bravest man may find himself before the gates of Hel. Or, in your own case, Lord Beowulf…” And here she trails off, shivering and hugging herself against the chill, staring down at the sea far below.
Beowulf waits a moment, then asks, “In my own case?”
She turns and looks at him, and at first her eyes seem distant and lost, like the eyes of a sleeper awakened from some frightful dream.
“Well,” she says. “You are alive, though by your bravery Grendel is slain. You are not in Valhalla with your fallen warriors. You have, instead, what? A golden horn?”
“Perhaps I will find my luck, as you name it, on some other battlefield,” Beowulf tells her, then glances back down at the horn. “And it is a fine and wondrous thing, this gaudy bauble of your husband’s pride.”
Wealthow takes a deep breath. “Nothing that is gold ever stays long. Is that all you wanted, Beowulf? A drinking horn that once belong to a worm? Would you have none of my husbands other treasures?”
And now he looks her directly in the eyes, those violet eyes that might seem almost as icy as the whale’s-road on a long winter’s night, as icy and as beautiful.
“My lord Hrothgar,” he says, “has declared I shall not now want for anything.” And he moves across the balcony to stand nearer to Wealthow. “I recall nothing he held exempt from that decree. Steal away from your husband. Come to me.”
Wealthow smiles and laughs softly, a gentle sound almost lost beneath the noise of the wind and the breakers.
“I wonder,” she says, “if my husband even begins to guess what thing he has let into his house? First driven by greed…now by lust,” and she turns away from the sea to face Beowulf. “You may indeed be most beautiful, Lord Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow, and you may be brave, but I fear you have the heart of a monster.” And then she smiles and kisses him lightly on the cheek. Their eyes meet again, briefly, and her bright gaze seems to rob him of words, and Beowulf’s still searching for some reply after she’s departed the balcony and returned once more to the noisy mead hall, and he’s standing alone in the moonlight.
12
The Merewife
Beyond the moorlands and the forest and the bogs, in the cave below the cave, this deeper, more ancient abscess in the thin granite skin of the world, the mother of Grendel mourns alone. She has carried her son’s mutilated body from the pool, the pool below the pool above, and has gently laid him out on a stone ledge near a wall of the immense cavern. Once, the ledge was an altar, a shrine built by men to honor a forgotten goddess of a forgotten people, and the charcoal-colored slate is encrusted with the refuse of long-ago offerings—jewels and bits of gold, silver, and bronze, the bones of animals and men. Whatever it might have been, now it is only her dead son’s final bed. She bends low, her lips brushing his lifeless skin, her long claws caressing his withered corpse. She is old, even as the mountains and the seas mark time, even as the Æsir and Vanir and the giants of Jötunheimr count the passing of the ages, but the weight of time has not hardened her to loss. It has, if anything, made her more keenly aware of the emptiness left behind by that which has been taken away.
“Oh, my poor lost son,” she whispers. “I asked you not to go. I warned you they were dangerous. And you promised…”
If any others of her race remain in all the wide, wide world, she does not know of them and so believes herself to be the last. Neither troll nor giant nor dragon-kin, and yet perhaps something of all three, some night race spawned in the first days of creation, when Midgard was still new, and then hunted, driven over uncountable millennia to the brink of oblivion. She had a mother, whom she almost remembers from time to time, waking from a dream or drifting down toward sleep. If she ever had a father, the memory of him has faded away forever.
Long before the coming of the Danes, there were men in this land who named her Hertha and Nerthus, and they worshipped her in sacred groves and still lakes and secret grottoes as the Earth’s mother, as Nerpuz and sometimes as Njördr of the Ásynja, wife of Njörd and goddess of the sea. And always she welcomed their prayers and offerings, their tributes and their fear of her. For fear kept her safe, but never was she a goddess, only some thing more terrible and beautiful than mere men.
She is legend now, half-glimpsed by unfortunate travelers on stormy nights. Sailors and fisherman up and down the Danish coast trade fearful whispers of mermaids and sea trolls and sahagin. Those passing by the bog on midsummer nights may have glimpsed for themselves the aglaec-wif, aeglaeca, the merewif or demon wife. But she and all her vanished forebears would have surely long passed completely and permanently beyond the recollection of mankind, if not for Grendel.
In the cave below the cave, crouching there before the cold altar stone, she sings a song she might have first heard from her own mother, for she does not recall where and when she learned it. A dirge, a mourning song to give some dim voice to the inconsolable ache welling up inside her.
But the song buckles and breaks apart in her throat, becoming suddenly a far more genuine expression of her grief, a wild and bestial wail to transcend any mournful poetry. It spills like fire from out her throat, and the walls of the cavern shudder with the force of it.
And then for a time she lies weeping at the foot of the altar stone, her long, webbed fingers gouging muddy furrows into the soft earth, scraping at the stone beneath, snapping dry bones.
“I will avenge you, my poor son,” she sobs. “He will come to me. I will see to it. He will come, and I will turn his own strength against him. He will pay, and dearly will he pay…” but then the capacity for speech deserts her again.
The merewife rises, coiling and uncoiling, her scales shining in the ghostly light of these moldering, phosphorescent walls, and she leans down over the altar and cradles her dead son in her arms again. Her long and spiny tail whips furiously about, madly lashing at thin air and stone and the treasures that have lain here undisturbed for a thousand years, and it crushes everything it strikes to dust and splinters. She holds the name of her son’s murderer in her mind, the bold riddler of Hrothgar’s hall, the champion of men and the wolf of the bees. And her sobs become a wail, and then her wail becomes a shriek that rises up and up, leaking out through every minute crevice and fissure, slithering finally from the gaping mouth of the cavern—the cave above her cave—and cracking apart the gaunt ribs of the night.
Something awakens Beowulf, who lies where he fell asleep hours before, wrapped in furs, on the floor not far from the fire pit. He opens his eyes and lies listening to the soft noises of the sleeping mead hall—a woman sighing in her dreams, the ragged snores of drunken men, the warm crackle of embers, someone rolling over in slumber. The faint creaking sound of settling timbers. All the lamps are out, and the hall is dark save a faint red glow from the dying fire. Nothing is out of place, no sound that should not be here. Outside the walls of Heorot, there is the chilling whistle of wind about the eaves, and far away, the faint thunder of waves falling against the shore. He thinks of Wiglaf, alone on the beach with the ship, and wonders if he’s sleeping.