“He was insane, my lord,” says Wiglaf. “To have seen what he’s seen, the death of his house—any man would lose his wits. When I went down to the gates, I saw all that now remains of Unferth Hall. Slag and cinder, Beowulf, a glowing hole in the ground, and little else.” Wiglaf sighs and stares up at the column of smoke rising from the ruins of the village. “A dragon,” he says and swallows. “Do you believe that, my lord, that a dragon is abroad, that a fyrweorm has come among us.”
The pretty man with golden wings.
“What does it matter what I believe. What any of us believe. Unferth believed his crosses kept him safe from evil. I believed the age of monsters was behind us. Do not trouble yourself with belief, Wiglaf. Trust only what your eyes now see,” and he motions toward the village. “This was not the work of man.”
“But a dragon?”
“Or something near enough,” says Beowulf. “Call my officers. Have them meet me in the armory.”
“Some have surely died,” says Wiglaf. “Others are unaccounted for.”
“Then gather those who still draw breath, however many you can find. There is not much time, I fear. We must try and discover this fiend’s lair before it returns to finish what it began last night. And we must make such defenses as we are still able, to protect those who have so long looked to us for protection. I have failed them all, Wiglaf.”
“I will not believe that,” Wiglaf says. “No king has ever guarded the land of the Danes as you have. If this thing…if it is a dragon…”
“Then perhaps we will have one last chance to seek our place in Valhalla,” Beowulf tells him, watching Wealthow moving among the refugees. “Maybe we shall not die in our beds, sick old men fit only for Hel’s gray realm.”
You have a fine son, my king.
Wiglaf nods, but there is nothing like certainty or hope in his eyes. “This is not a troll and its mother,” he says. “Whatever it is.”
“Enough talk, Wiglaf. Make haste. The day will not be long, and we do not know what our enemy intends.”
And so Wiglaf leaves him there, surrounded by the dead and the soon to be dead, and Beowulf can still hear the firestorm from his dreams, and the screams, and the fearful sound of vast wings bruising the night sky.
The day shines dimly through the narrow windows set into the thick stone walls of the king’s bedchamber, but there is neither warmth nor joy nor even solace in that wan light. Beyond the walls of Beowulf’s keep, the village still burns, and the king’s warriors have reported that all their efforts to extinguish the blaze have been in vain. The breath of the great weorm has poisoned everything it touched, some strange incendiary substance that continues to burn even when doused with water and earth. The ground itself is burning. They have managed only to keep the flames from spreading inside the walls of the keep, and that pillar of smoke and ash still rises into the winter sky above the ruins of Heorot. It has turned the afternoon to twilight.
King Beowulf tugs at the straps of his breastplate, adjusting the fit of armor he has not worn since he was a younger man. Then he chooses a sword and shield from off the wall, and his longbow, too. He glances toward the windows, that hazy light falling across the bed he once shared with Wealthow, the bed he now shares with another woman—no, a girl, a girl young enough to be his own granddaughter. But it hardly seems to matter now, for surely he will not survive this day to ever again bed any girl or woman. It is waiting for him out there, what poor, mad, dying Unferth has named “the sins of the fathers.” The price of the life he has lived.
The life she gave me, he thinks, and takes a great ax down from the wall. It was never more than that.
Beowulf has already given Wiglaf and the officers of his thanes their orders, to take up positions along the northern rim of the gorge dividing Heorot from the moorlands. If he cannot defeat this beast, they will be all that stands between the dragon and the keep’s uttermost destruction. He could clearly see the doubt in Wiglaf’s eyes, doubt that any man or army of men might stand against such a calamity, but Beowulf also saw in Wiglaf’s eyes a grim determination.
The king lifts his heavy cape from an iron hook set into the wall, a great cloak sewn from wolf and bear pelts, and he drapes it around his shoulders. When he looks up again, Ursula is watching him from the doorway, and her cheeks are streaked with tears.
“I beg you,” she says, her voice hardly more than a sobbed whisper. “Do not leave me. Please…”
“You are free to go,” he tells her. “I release you. Find a good man, if one still lives when this day is done. Bear him children…bear him a son, Ursula.”
She crosses the room to stand beside him, and Beowulf sighs and gently cradles her face in his scarred and callused hands.
“Please, child. Do as I’ve asked,” Beowulf says. “Let me go down to this battle knowing that you will not waste your life grieving for an old man.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want anyone else. I want you, my lord.”
“I’m not the man you think me to be, Ursula.”
“You are King Beowulf,” she replies. “You’re a great man, and a hero. This I know to be true.”
“You know a legend,” sighs Beowulf. “You know only the stories told by scops.”
“I believe—” Ursula begins, but Beowulf places his hand firmly over her mouth, for he will hear no more of this, not today, not ever.
“Then you are as much a fool as all the rest of them,” he tells her, making his voice as hard and unfeeling as he can manage. Confusion and fury flash bright in Ursula’s wet eyes. She pushes him away and runs from the room.
Beowulf turns back toward the wall and catches his reflection in a shield still hanging there. “You are a tired old man,” he says, speaking to that haggard image of himself trapped in the polished metal. “You go to seek your death in the wilderness.”
“Indeed you do,” says Queen Wealthow, and he turns about to find her standing in the open doorway. Her gown and furs, her face and hair, are smeared with black soot and stained with the blood of the dying and wounded whom she has helped to tend. “And indeed, husband, you are a tired old man. Cladding yourself in the armor of a younger Beowulf will not change that in the least.”
“Woman, have you nothing better to do this day,” he says, “than to trouble yourself mocking me? Shouldn’t you be with your priest, doing the holy works of your weeping, merciful Christ Jesus?”
Wealthow steps into the room, pulling the door shut behind her.
“Why don’t you take that poor girl and live out your remaining years in peace. You are an old man, Beowulf. Let some young hero save us. Some wanderer from a far shore, a Frisian, perhaps…or a Swede. Some callow fool come looking for gold and glory and a crown.”
Beowulf glares at her for a moment. He can smell the stink of burning seeping from her clothing.
“And start the whole nightmare all over again?” he asks, then shakes his head. “No. I have visited this horror upon my kingdom, like Hrothgar before me. And so I must be the one to make an end to it. Now. Today. I must be the one to finish her.”
Wealthow’s startling violet eyes, hardly dimmed by age, match his glare, match it and double it, and she walks quickly from the closed door to stand before him.
“Was she so beautiful?” Wealthow asks, and now there is anger in her voice. “Beowulf, is there in all the world any beauty so costly, any mere earthly beauty worth what you have seen today?”
“I could lie,” Beowulf says. “I could tell you, my queen, that in the wisdom of my many years I have learned there is no beauty worth this terrible price. I could tell you she was only a hideous sea hag who bewitched me, casting a wicked glamour that only caused me to think her so beautiful a being. But how would that profit either of us? Yes, Wealthow, she is beautiful, a beauty beyond reckoning and beyond mere words and almost beyond imagining. A beauty the gods in Ásgard would themselves die for.”