Beowulf (4 page)

“Of course not. But he will eat—”

“Have swords been any good against him in the past?” Beowulf pursued relentlessly.

Hrothgar had to admit that they had not. But he could not see how one man, however good and strong, dared face the fiend without weapons.

Beowulf held up his hands. “Here are weapons enough,” he said. “I put more trust in these ten fingers than in a hundred swords.”

Hrothgar wanted to argue. He was desperately worried now. He thought Beowulf mad. He thought it was suicide to wait for Grendel—Grendel the murderously all-powerful—without at least a good keen blade for company. What could one man’s hands hope to do to that black terror?

Queen Wealhtheow silenced her husband’s objections. She brought the banquet to a close by giving Beowulf a golden cup to drink from.

Beowulf drank deep, his eyes not leaving hers.

He handed the cup back to her and smiled
as though he had taken sustenance from the deepest well in the world.

Then, as the Danes were about to leave, the night already rustling at hall Heorot’s doors, Unferth surprised them all, and perhaps himself, by saying: “I am going to stay. I want to see what happens when this fool tries to shake hands with Grendel.”

Beowulf’s men were weary and soon slept. They lay stretched out on couches all round the hall. Their sea voyaging, followed by the march to Heorot and the many cups of mead Hrothgar had given them, made them sleep deeply. Only Beowulf and Unferth stayed awake. They sat on either side of the empty throne, watching for Grendel’s coming.

Unferth played with a silver trinket. He kept pouring the little chain through his fingers, its links making a tinkling sound. Sometimes he drew it so tight about his wrist that it hurt. He smiled to himself in the dark. He had stopped drinking. He was afraid, but his fear fascinated him. His bladder ached; he wanted to make water; but he did not dare go out in the night to do so. He twisted about on the hard, uncomfortable step. He could feel the sweat trickling out of his hair.

Beowulf sat still.

It was a long night. It wore on slowly. The torches burned low. One of the Geats cried out in a bad dream. He woke, saw his leader’s face, and turned back to sleep again. A torch sputtered and went out.

Beowulf could see well in half-light. He did not blink or shut his eyes. Once he cracked his knuckles. Otherwise he just watched, and waited.

There was no sign of Grendel.

Unferth began gnawing at his fingernails. They tasted of dirt and where he had been poking at his boil. Unferth hated the taste of himself, but he had to have it.

Beowulf still sat still.

Then, as dawn began to drain the dark, both men heard a sound. Beowulf heard it first. It was a sound like the breaking of ice underfoot. It came quick and was gone again. Unferth shook his head, wondering if he had imagined it. Then there was a hissing, gasping, panting noise outside the door, swiftly stifled, as though someone—or some Thing—was holding his breath in the dark, waiting to pounce.

Again there came that splintery sound.

Unferth’s blood ran cold. He cowered into shadow. He felt his own water leaking down his leg, sore and warm and sticky.

Beowulf stood up. His voice rang through the raftered hall.

“Grendel,” he cried, “Grendel, child of Cain, come down into Heorot. I am Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow. I am Beowulf, not afraid of you. I am Beowulf, come to kill you!”

The monster squealed with rage. His throat was full of the noise of crunching bones. He scrabbled at the door. He tore it down with his talons. He fell into hall Heorot!

The first thing Beowulf noticed was the smell. It hit him like a great wave of rotting matter: rank, malignant, bringing tears to his eyes and making him cough. It filled the hall like a poison gas. He retched at the stink of the beast.

It was because Grendel was so huge and black that the smell came before anything the eyes could make out. He was a foul fog, a choking murk of evil vapors, looming and slithering on the ivory floor. Then Beowulf saw coil after coil of slimy skin, mucid, spongy, dripping with the filth of the swamps, smeared thick with blood and scum, maggoty, putrid, and a pair of eyes glaring green, and slobbering lips, and huge claws reaching …

Before Beowulf could move, those claws
snatched up one of the warriors stirring out of sleep.

Grendel tore his victim limb from limb, picking off arms and legs, lapping up the blood with a greedy tongue, taking big bites to crunch up bones and swallow gory mouthfuls of flesh. In a minute all that was left of the man was a frayed mess of veins and entrails hanging from the monster’s mouth.

Unferth was being sick. The green eyes flickered in his direction. He screamed, and scratched at the wall for a hiding place, but there was none. Two torches went out as Grendel slithered past them.

The hall was left completely in darkness save for some inklings of dawn at the smashed door and where the windows were. The Geats jumped up in panic and fought with each other trying to find their swords and spears. Grendel made a new noise above the uproar. He gurgled bloodily with glee. The dark was his den, his home, his proper habit. He hated light. The hall shook to its foundations with his terrible laughter. He groped for Unferth.

But all at once the light had caught him. It had him by the claw. It was Beowulf!

The creature gave a dreadful squeal as Beowulf
touched him. Ten strong fingers locked about his hairy wrist. To Grendel, it was as if the sun itself had caught him in its clutch. Made of wickedness as he was, the good in this man burned him. The mortal fingers were like ten red-hot nails driven into his skin. Grendel had never known strength like this. He roared and shook to be free, to crawl away, to escape into the ruins of the night. But Beowulf would not let him go.

Now Beowulf began to talk. His voice was quiet, and there was hullabaloo in the hall, what with the soldiers rushing about confusedly in the dark, and Unferth screaming, and the monster threshing about to get loose—yet Grendel heard every word like thunder in his brain. He did not know what was worse: Beowulf’s grip or what Beowulf said.

Beowulf said: “Light holds you, Grendel. Light has you in its power. You, who have shunned the sun, meet me, once stung by bees that drank the sun. There’s honey in my veins, Grendel, a liquid sunlight that can kill you quite. These fingers that you feel are ten great stars. Stars have no fear. I do not fear you, Grendel. I do not fear, therefore I do not fight. I only hold you, child of Cain. I only fix you fast in your own evil, so that you cannot turn it out on any other. It is your own evil,
Grendel, that undoes you. You must die, creature of night, because the light has got you in a last embrace.”

Grendel was in a fury. He bellowed and lashed. He wanted above all else to get away from this thing that was so contrary to himself. He tried every vicious trick he knew. But Beowulf stood firm, holding the monster in a grip so tight that it almost made his own big fingers crack and the bones poke out of the straining flesh. Hall Heorot rocked down to its stone roots with the rage of the demon’s struggling.

Somewhere deep in Grendel’s hellish heart a memory stirred. It grew and spread and flooded his whole being with despair. Something to do with light and another of these children of day—one who had flung herself between him and his food, and by her love had thwarted him, so that he had felt powerless to approach and had slunk away, abashed by mystery. Grendel did not know the word “love” or the word “good.” To him, they were part of the light he hated. There had been such light about that woman in the blue cloak. He had had to get away from it. But the light in the woman was as nothing to the light in this man Beowulf. And try as he would, he could not get away.

Grendel grew angrier and angrier. He shook his arm about and dashed it against the wall. Beowulf, badly bruised, refused to relinquish his hold. When shaking did not work, and banging did not work, Grendel tried jerking his arm. But Beowulf wound his own legs round a pillar. He took the full force of the monster’s pull—and still held on.

There was a fearful snapping of bones and tearing of sinews and muscles.

Then hot stinking blood fountained everywhere.

Beowulf had pulled Grendel’s arm out of its socket!

The monster howled. It was a pandemonium of pain, as though all the men he had eaten cried out too. He dragged himself along the ivory floor, blood pumping from his wound with each fierce beat of his angry heart. He knew he must die from loss of blood.

Beowulf let Grendel go. He listened to the hideous howling dying away across the fen. The light grew stronger. The sun lit all the windows of hall Heorot.

Beowulf’s men crowded round him. It was some little time before they realized the full extent of their hero’s victory. Beowulf was bruised and bloody, and his cheeks were thick with slime off the monster’s body. But when he hung Grendel’s torn-out arm from a hook in the rafters, all the Geats burst out cheering. It was foul and green and scaly, with a tangle of blood-soaked hair at the wrist, and sharp
claws where the fingers should have been. Nobody liked to touch it, but everyone looked.

Beowulf acknowledged the congratulations wearily. He called for water. It was brought. He washed the blood and dirt from his body, and combed his hair. Then he went to Unferth.

Unferth, alone, ignored, skulked under the great throne. His teeth were chattering, his eyes went to and fro, he kept trying to drink from an empty horn. But when Beowulf laid a friendly hand on his shoulder, to comfort him, he turned and snapped at it like a wolf.

“Murder!” he snarled. “You killed him! He was beautiful, and you killed him!” And he began to sob and rock, cradling his knees in his hands.

The astonished Geats roared disapproval. “Beautiful! He says the beast was beautiful!” Some of them wanted to take ungrateful Unferth out and hang him from the nearest tree. But Beowulf told them to leave the wretch to himself.

“To Unferth, Grendel
was
beautiful,” was all he would say when his men asked him why.

“Here comes Hrothgar,” called one by the ruined door.

The king could not believe what Beowulf had done. He stood in Heorot and stared at the terrible trophy, Grendel’s arm, which still dripped steaming blood on the ivory floor.

As for Wealhtheow, she came to Beowulf with open arms and tears in her sky-blue eyes. He knelt before her, and she kissed him tenderly on the forehead.

The sun seemed to dance over the land of the Danes. An exultation of larks rose from the fen itself. They went up, up, up, trilling dew from their wings, and busily rested, and sang, and sang.

King Hrothgar clapped his hands. “Clean the hall!” he shouted to his servants. “Scrub the tables! Polish the benches! Hang the walls with the richest tapestries! Bring meat and mead enough for a man as strong as a hundred men! All this for Beowulf! Honor to Beowulf! Long live Beowulf, who has freed us from the monster Grendel!”

They raced their horses. They made poems and songs. They told stories of all the heroes that ever lived, and said their deeds were small compared with what brave Beowulf had done in a single night. Hrothgar gave Beowulf gifts, and the gifts were these: a banner of gold, a helmet that would not break, a sword
as sharp as a flame. He also made him a present of eight of his swiftest horses, each horse decked with a golden bridle and a saddle encrusted with precious stones. And Wealhtheow gave Beowulf a ring of the purest gold to wear on his finger, and a golden collar to carry about his neck. This collar, some say, was called Brisingamen and was the most perfect thing in the world.

The feasting went on for three days and three nights. Only Unferth held apart from it, sitting in a dark corner, twisting his cloak in his hands, muttering of Grendel’s “beauty,” and prophesying doom. Nobody paid any attention to him. Once, Beowulf offered him a drink. But Unferth spat it out. “I want blood,” he said.

Of the stories told by Hrothgar’s poets, all in honor of Beowulf’s feat and meant to provide comparisons with what he had done, the one that made the deepest mark on Beowulf’s mind was the story of Sigemund and the Fire Dragon. This is how it went.

Long ago there was a prince called Sigemund who was a great hero. He was strong as a bear and tall as a mountain tree. He could snap chains round his chest simply by taking a big breath, and bend iron bars that it took
two men to lift. Because he used his giant strength only in the service of good, he was always a very popular man. Everyone loved him.

None loved Sigemund more than his loyal nephew, Fitela. Fitela was as unlike his uncle as it is possible for two men to be. He was small in stature, timorous and shy by nature. Men said that Fitela would run away from his own shadow if Sigemund was not with him. However, this never happened, because Sigemund always was with him; the two of them were inseparable; they fought together, drank together, prayed together. You never saw huge Sigemund but you saw little Fitela, taking six strides to keep up with his uncle’s one, peering askance at murky places, tugging at the giant’s sleeves and offering him all sorts of useless advice in a high, squeaky voice.

Together they performed many brave deeds. Nor was puny Fitela as good-for-nothing in battle as you might think. He could skip through an enemy’s legs and trip him up in a trice, while the man was still concentrating on Sigemund as his only opponent. He could hang on to horses’ tails and make them rear, tumbling their riders to the ground, where it was easy enough for Sigemund
to finish them off. He had great value as an impish wreaker of havoc in a line of hostile soldiers, for he had only to hop about in front of them, pulling faces, and then race round the back and shout a few names—“Milk-chops! Skellybum! Barmysword! Hey, you with the woolly eyebrows growing out of your ears!”—to reduce the most well-disciplined squad to an angry confusion that left them with no chance as soon as Sigemund came on the scene. In any kind of adventure Sigemund and Fitela thus proved themselves an unbeatable pair.