“Grendel?” Beowulf asks, still watching the queen.
“What? Did you not know our monster has a name?” asks Wealthow. “The scops who sing of our shame and defeat, have they left that part out?”
“Yes, the monster is called Grendel,” Hrothgar says, speaking much more quietly now, and he begins wringing his hands together. “Yes, yes. It is called Grendel.”
“Then I shall kill your Grendel,” says Beowulf, speaking directly to Wealthow. “It does not seem so very daunting a task. I slew a tribe of giants in the Orkneys. I have crushed the skulls of mighty sea serpents. So what’s one troll? Soon, my lady, he shall trouble you no longer.”
The queen starts to reply, opens her mouth, and Beowulf can feel the awful weight of the words lying there on her tongue. But Hrothgar is already speaking again, addressing his court, filled once more with false bravado.
“A hero!” shouts the king. “I knew that the sea would bring to us a hero! Unferth, have I not said to look ever to the sea for our salvation?”
There’s a halfhearted cheer from the people on the steps, then, but Wealthow does not join in, and Unferth glares suspiciously at Beowulf and does not answer his king.
Then Hrothgar leans near to Beowulf and cocks an eyebrow. “Will you go up to the moors, then, and through the forest to the cave by the dark mere?” he asks Beowulf. “Will you fight the monster there in its den?”
Beowulf nods toward Wiglaf and Hondshew and his other thanes. “I have fourteen brave men with me,” he says. “But we have been long at sea. I think, my lord, that it is high time to break open your golden mead—famed across the world—and to feast together in your legendary hall”
At this, Unferth steps forward, past Lady Wealthow, to stand before Beowulf.
“Do you not know, great Beowulf, Geat lord and son of Ecgtheow? The hall has been sealed…by order of the king. Merrymaking in the hall always brings the devil Grendel down upon us.”
“And has closing the hall stopped the slaughter?” Beowulf asks him.
“Nay,” Hrothgar replies. “It has not. The demon-murderer killed three horses and a slave in the stables, not a fortnight past.”
Beowulf glances beyond Unferth and Wealthow, looking to the high, barred doors of Heorot. “Well then,” he says, and smiles at Hrothgar, who nods and grins back at him.
“If closing the hall has not so profited my lord,” Beowulf continues, “and if, regardless of this wise precaution, the beast still comes to do his wicked murder, it seems a pity to waste such a magnificent hall, does it not?”
“Oh, it does, indeed,” Hrothgar agrees. “It seems a most terrible waste. It seems a pity.”
Unferth exchanges glances with Wealthow, then, turning to Hrothgar, says, “But, my liege…by your own command—”
“Exactly,” Hrothgar interrupts. “By my own command. A command which I do hereby rescind, loyal Unferth. So, open the mead hall. Open it now.”
By dusk—which seems hardly more than a gentle deepening of the gloom that loitered above the land in the wake of the storm—Heorot Hall has been reopened. The doors and windows have all been thrown wide to draw in fresh, clean air. New hay covers the floors, and the feasting tables have all been scrubbed clean. Old women clear away cobwebs and tend to embers that will soon enough become cooking fires to roast venison and fowl and fat hogs. And in the midst of all this, Beowulf’s men sit together at a round table in one corner of the hall. Wulfgar, true to his word, has returned their weapons to them, and now they are busy sharpening steel blades, tightening straps and harnesses, oiling leather sheaths and scabbards. Beowulf wanders through the hall, examining its architecture with a warrior’s keen eye, sizing up its strengths and weaknesses. Here and there are signs of the monster’s handiwork—deep gouges in the wooden beams, claw marks in tabletops, a patch of wood so bloodstained that water cannot ever wipe it clean again. Beowulf pauses before the huge door, inspecting its massive bar and the wide reinforcing bands of iron.
Hondshew glances up from the blade of his broadsword and sees Yrsa, the girl from the gate, who’s busy scrubbing a table not too far from where the thanes are seated.
“Ah, now there’s a beast I’d love to slay this very night,” he snickers, then stands and jabs his sword in her direction. “Not with this blade, mind you. I’ve another, better suited to that pricking.”
Wiglaf kicks him in the rump, and Hondshew stumbles and almost falls.
“Listen to me,” Wiglaf says, addressing all the thanes. “We don’t want any trouble with the locals, you hear. So, just for tonight, no fighting, and no swifan. Do you understand me?”
Hondshew rubs at his backside but hasn’t stopped staring at Yrsa, who looks up, sees him watching her, and sticks out her tongue at him. Another of the thanes, Olaf, a lean but muscle-bound man with a wide white scar across his left cheek, draws his dagger and brandishes it at all the shadows lurking in all the corners of Heorot Hall.
“I wa…wa…wasn’t p…p…planning on doing any swi…swi…swi…swifan,” he stutters.
Hondshew sits down again and goes back to sharpening his sword. “Well, I wa…wa…was!” he declares, mocking Olaf.
Wiglaf frowns and tries not to notice the way that Yrsa’s breasts strain the fabric of her dress when she bends over the table she’s cleaning. “Hondshew,” he says. “Just this once, make me feel like you’re pretending to listen to me. It’s only been five days since you waved your wife good-bye.”
“Five days!” exclaims Hondshew. “By Odin’s swollen testicles…no wonder my loins are burning!”
The thanes laugh loudly, and Yrsa pauses in her work to listen to them. To her ears, the bawdy laughter of men is a welcome sound, here beneath the roof timbers of Heorot Hall, and it gives her strength and cause to hope. She steals a quick look at Beowulf, who’s still inspecting the door, and Yrsa prays that even half the bold, fantastic stories she’s heard told about him are true and that, soon now, Grendel’s grip upon the night will be at an end.
5
Misbegotten
And far across the moorlands, shrouded now with evening mist, out behind the forest’s ancient palisade, the creature Grendel crouches at the edge of the black pool inside his cave. The rotting corpse of one of Hrothgar’s slaughtered thanes lies nearby, and Grendel carefully picks choice scraps of flesh from the body and drops them into the water. There are many strange things that dwell within the lightless depths of the pool, and sometimes when Grendel is lonely, he lures hungry mouths to the surface with bits of his kills. Tonight, the water teems with a school of blind albino eels, each of them easily as long as a grown man is tall—or longer still—and big around as fence posts. Their long jaws are lined with needle-sharp teeth, and they greedily devour the morsels Grendel has given up to the pool and fight among themselves for the largest pieces. Grendel watches the foaming water and the snow-colored eels, comforted by their company, amused at their ferocity. He rocks backward and forward, absently humming a slow, sad, tuneless sort of song to himself, something he either made up or has heard men singing on some night or another. He can’t remember which.
In his left hand, the creature clutches a broken lance, and impaled upon its spiked tip is the decomposing head of yet another fallen thane. The eyes have been eaten away by such worms and maggots as thrive in dung and decay and the muddy earth of the cave. The jaw bone hangs crookedly from the thane’s skull, and most of his front teeth are broken out. Grendel leans the decapitated head out over the frothing pool and pitches his voice high, imitating the speech of men.