“Wiglaf, there is something I would have you know. Something you must know.”
“There’s a story about this place,” Wiglaf says, as though he has not heard Beowulf. “It was told by a woman in the village, an Icelander wench called Sigga. Some say she is a witch and a seer. I expect she’s dead now, dead or dying. She said this hill”—and Wiglaf motions toward the trees and the steep bank—“did not begin as a dragon’s hoard or as a demon’s den. She said that it’s the barrow of the last man of a long-forgotten race. The name of that man and his people has been lost to the world for three hundred years.”
“Wiglaf,” Beowulf begins, but Wiglaf shakes his head and points up at the trees, their limbs heavy with raven feathers.
“Sigga said that the three oaks were planted by that last man, and that they are meant to represent the three Norns—Urd, Skuld, and Verdandi. The roots of the trees are the great tapestry of fate that the Norns have woven. I have heard it said that the witch called this place—”
“Wiglaf!” Beowulf cuts in impatiently, as his voice draws a raucous new chorus of caws from the ravens. “There is something I have to say to you. And you have to listen.”
Wiglaf turns suddenly about to face his king, and Beowulf has never seen such fury in the Geat’s eyes as he sees there now, some desperate wrath boiling up, wild and hot. Wiglaf’s cheeks are flushed an angry scarlet, and he narrows his eyes.
“Nay,” he says, raising his voice to a shout. “There is nothing I must know I do not know already! You are Beowulf. Beowulf the mighty! Beowulf the hero! King Beowulf, the slayer of and destroyer of trolls and sea hags and demon spawn! That is what I know, my lord, and all I need to know, this day or any other. Now…let’s do what we came here to do. Let’s kill this bloody flying devil where it sleeps and get on with our bloody lives!”
For a moment, Beowulf stares back at him in stunned silence, while the ravens caw and flutter their wings in the trees. He thinks that maybe he has never truly seen Wiglaf before now, that he has only ever glimpsed some shadow of the man, and he knows, at least, that he has done the right thing, naming Wiglaf his successor to the throne.
“Now,” says Wiglaf, then pauses to get his breath. Already, the anger is draining from his face. “Do you want me to go in with you?” he asks his king.
Beowulf merely shakes his head.
“Good, I will wait here,” replies Wiglaf, eyeing the ravens in the three oaks. “Perhaps I can make some decent sport of our blustering friends up there,” and he reaches for his longbow.
King Beowulf has not forgotten the path down to the merewife’s lair, for too many nights has he retraced it in his fitful sleep. The path below the trees, the first pool there below the hill—still infested with white eels and its muddy bottom still strewn with bleached bones and skulls—then the treacherous underground river spilling into some ancient chasm that the she-demon took for her home long ages ago. Beowulf doesn’t fight the current, though the rocks batter and bruise his flesh. And in time he emerges once more from that lowest pool, from the icy water accumulated there in a void left when a buried monster rotted away—another dragon, perhaps—leaving only its bones to become the caverns walls, its massive spine to form a roof. Beowulf stands shivering and dripping a few feet away from the icy shore.
Unlike the tarn, this place has changed somehow since last he came here. It seems to have grown, the distances between the cavern’s walls, from its floor to the stalactite-draped ceiling, increasing by hundreds of feet. The sickly blue elfin light that lit the chamber thirty years ago has dimmed, and the pool is black as pitch. There does not seem to be nearly so much golden treasure as before, as though the slave Cain is not the only man who has found his way here and plundered the hoard. Beowulf takes Hrothgar’s drinking horn from beneath his mail and sodden robes, and it glows, casting a warm light across the rocks at his feet and pushing back some of the stifling darkness. The sound of dripping water is very loud, and Beowulf imagines if he stood here long, that dripping might come to sound as loud as the blows of Thor’s hammer.
Beowulf holds the horn high above his head, and shouts into the gloom, “Come forth! Show yourself!” But by some peculiar property of this accursed place, some aural trick, a long and eerie silence falls between the act of speaking and the sound of his own voice. When his delayed utterance does finally greet Beowulf’s ears, it seems to roll back as little more than an echo, diminished by the darkness and distance of the place.
Come forth! Show yourself!
Come forth! Show yourself!
Come forth! Show yourself!
He takes another step toward the edge of the pool, moving nearer the pebbly, muddy shore, but the moment seems to stretch itself into long minutes. So, thinks Beowulf, the sorcery shrouding this fetid grotto has been fashioned to twist sound and time, and that thought takes at least as long as a single footstep, fifteen minutes, ten, half an hour. His left boot sends up a crystal spray, each droplet rising so slowly from the pool, every one of them a perfect liquid gem reflecting and refracting the red-orange glow of the drinking horn or the soft blue phosphorescence of the cavern walls. Beowulf looks down, and there’s his face gazing back up at him from the pool. But it’s the face of his younger self, not the visage of the old man he’s become. Those eyes are still bright with the vigor of his lost youth, and the beard that face wears has not yet gone gray. Then the sluggish arc of the droplets brings them back down across the water, and they strike the pool like deafening thunderclaps. Each drop creates a perfect ring of ripples that languidly radiate across the surface, intersecting with other ripples, and for some period of time he cannot judge, he stands there transfixed, watching them. When the water is finally still again, the face looking up at him from the pool is only that of a battle-scarred old man.
And then he feels dizzy and sick to his stomach and feels something else, as well—an odd, unwinding sensation, as though time is suddenly catching up with itself again. His next footstep toward the shore takes no more or less time than any footstep should.
“I have not come to play games,” he mutters, climbing out onto the shore, the rocks shifting and crunching noisily beneath his feet. Breathless, he pauses at the edge of the pool, exhausted by the arduous journey down from the tarn and the three oaks. There’s a stitch in his side and the faint coppery taste of blood on his tongue, and Beowulf wonders if maybe he cracked a tooth as he was tossed and pummeled along the underground river connecting the two subterranean pools. He spits pink foam onto the ground at his feet.
“I no longer have the patience for such games,” Beowulf says. “So show yourself, and save the trickery for someone who hasn’t seen it all before.”
There is a rattling, clanging sound from the shadows to his right, and Beowulf turns to see half a dozen figures shambling toward him across the stony beach. They are little more than skeletons, held together by desiccated scraps of sinew and shriveled bits of skin, wrapped up in rusty armor and rags. Some of them have lost an arm or a leg, and Beowulf sees that the nearest is missing his lower jaw bone. The figures glare back at him from eyeless skulls, dazzling cerulean orbs of the cave’s faerie light shining out from otherwise-empty sockets. Beowulf reaches for his sword, but immediately the skeletal figures stop their staggering advance and stand very still, still as stone or mortar, all of them watching him.