“Da-dee-da!” he cries out. “Da-dee-da! Oh, such horrible, horrible things! They’ll eat me all up, they will!”
And then Grendel chuckles to himself and leans close to the dead thane’s right ear. “Who’s laughing now?” he asks to head. “Eh? Just who’s laughing now? Me—Grendel—that’s who.”
Suddenly, one of the huge eels leaps free of the pool; hissing like a serpent, it strikes at the head, tearing away the crooked jaw and much of what was left of the thane’s face before falling back into the water with a loud plop. Grendel cackles with delight and shakes the mutilated head back and forth above the pool. The cave echoes with the creature’s laughter.
“Oh me, oh my!” he wails. “It has eaten my poor, pretty face all up! What ever shall I do now? The beautiful women will not love me now!”
Another of the eels leaps for the head, but this time Grendel yanks it quickly away before the fish’s jaws can latch on.
“No more,” he scolds the eels. “No more tonight. You’ll get fat. Fat fish sink all the way down to the bottom and get eaten by other fish. More tomorrow.”
Abruptly, the dark water seethes with some new and far more terrible presence, and all the eels slither away quietly into their holes. There is a wheezing, wet sound, like spray blown out from the spout of a whale, and the water bubbles.
Startled, Grendel jumps to his feet, and in his panic, his body begins to change—his nails suddenly becoming long and curving claws, claws to shame the mightiest bear. The bones and muscles of his twisted, deformed frame begin to shift and expand, and his round, rheumy eyes start to narrow, sparking now with a predatory glint. Where only a moment before the eels fought viciously over mouthfuls of putrid flesh, now Grendel’s mother watches him from the surface of the pool. Her full, wet lips shimmer, their golden scales gleaming with some secret, inner fire that is all her own.
“Grrrrendelllllll,” she purls.
Recognizing her voice, Grendel grows calmer. Talons become only ragged fingernails again. His expanding, shifting skeleton begins to reverse its violent metamorphosis so that he seems to draw back into himself. He looks into his mother’s bright reptilian eyes and sees himself reflected there.
“Modor?” he asks softly, falling back upon the old tongue. “Is something wrong?”
She rises slowly from the pool, then, her long, webbed fingers gripping the travertine edges and pulling herself nearer to her son.
“I had an evil dream, my child,” she says, and the beauty of her voice soothes Grendel, and he wishes she would never leave him. “You were hurt,” she continues. “I dreamed you were calling out for me, and I could not come to you. And then, Grendel, then they butchered you.”
Grendel watches her, floating there, half-submerged, then he smiles and laughs and shakes the lance and the thane’s head staked upon it.
“I am not dead. See? I am happy. Look, Modor. Happy Grendel,” and in an effort to convince his mother that his words are true, Grendel does an awkward sort of shuffling dance about his cave, a clumsy parody of the dancing he’s glimpsed in the mead hall of King Hrothgar. From time to time, he stops to shake the thane’s head at the sky, hidden beyond the cavern’s roof, and to hoot and howl in the most carefree, joyous way he can manage.
From the pool, his mother whispers, “You must not go to them tonight. You have killed too many of them.”
“But I am strong, Mother. I am big, and I am strong. None of them are a match for me. I will eat their flesh and drink their sweet blood and grind their frail bones between my teeth.”
“Please, my son,” his mother implores. “Do not go to them.”
Grendel stops dancing and lets the thane’s head and the broken spear clatter to the floor of the cave. He shuts his eyes and makes a disappointed, whining sound.
“Please,” his mother says from the pool. “Please promise me this one thing. Not this night, Grendel. Stay here with me this night. Stay by the pool and be content to feed your pets.”
Grendel sits down on the ground a few feet from the edge of the water. He doesn’t meet his mother’s eyes, but stares disconsolately at the dirt and rocks and his own bare feet.
“I swear,” he sulks. “I shall not go to them.”
“Even if they make the noises? Even if the noises make your poor head ache?”
Grendel hesitates, considering her question, remembering the pain, but then he nods reluctantly.
“Gut. Man medo,” she whispers, satisfied, then slips once more beneath the surface of the black pool. Ripples spread out across it, and small waves lap against its stony edges.
“They are only men,” Grendel whispers sullenly to himself and also to the head of the dead thane. “They are only men, and it was only a dream she had. Many times have I had bad dreams. But they were all only dreams.”
In his cave, Grendel watches the water in the pool grow calm once more, and he thinks about the concealing night and the conspiring fog waiting outside the cave, and he tries not to remember the hurting noise of men.
6
Light from the East
By sunset, the clouds above Heorot Hall have broken apart, becoming only scattered, burning islands in a wide winter sky. The goddess Sól, sister of the moon, is sinking low in the west, rolling away toward the sea in her chariot as the hungry wolf Skoll pursues close behind. Her light glimmers on the water and paints the world orange.
In Hrothgar’s mead hall, his people are gathering for a feast in honor of Beowulf, who has promised to deliver them from the fiend Grendel. An enormous copper vat, filled to the brim with mead, is carried in, and a cheer rises from Beowulf’s thanes. But the others, the king’s men and women, those who have seen too many nights haunted by the monster, do not join in the cheer. From the cast of their faces, the gathering might seem more a funeral than a feast, more mourning than a reception for the Geats, who have promised to deliver them from their plight. But there is music, and soon enough the mead begins to flow.
Beowulf stands on the steps of the throne dais with Queen Wealthow, examining a curious carving set into the wall there, a circular design that reminds Beowulf of a wagon wheel. A mirror, placed some distance away in Hrothgar’s anteroom, redirects the fading sunlight from a window onto the wall and the carving.
“It can measure the length of the day,” Wealthow explains, and she points at the sundial. “When the sun touches the lowest line, soon the day will be finished.”
“And Grendel will arrive?” asks Beowulf, turning from the carving to look into the queen’s face, her violet eyes, the likes of which he has never seen before. Indeed, Beowulf doubts he has ever seen a woman half so beautiful as the bride of Hrothgar, and he silently marvels at her.
Wealthow sighs. “I hope that Odin and Heimdall are kind to you, Beowulf. It would be a great shame on this house to have one so brave and noble die beneath its roof.”
Beowulf shakes his head, trying to concentrate more on what she’s saying to him than on the sight of her.
“There is no shame to die in battle with evil,” he tells her. “Only honor and a seat in Valhalla.”
“And if you die?”
“Then there will be no corpse to weep over, my lady, no funeral pyre to prepare, and none to mourn me. Grendel will dispose of my carcass in a bloody animal feast, cracking my bones and sucking the flesh from them, swallowing me down.”
“I would mourn you, my lord. Your men would mourn you, also.”
“Nay, my men would join me in the monster’s belly,” Beowulf laughs.