“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 grotesque 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.