Beowulf (9 page)

Beowulf winked one watery eye. “Perhaps it’s better that nobody should just now,” he said. “Tell them what you like, the ones out there, but remember the world will need to be a little older before it understands this last exploit of Beowulf. Yes, and all the others too! Meanwhile, it must have an ordinary kind of hero to believe in. Make sure you give them that, Wiglaf. It will serve for now. And one day—who knows how far ahead?—if my name should live, someone will stumble on this story and put the pieces together again, and come up with the truth of it.”

Wiglaf shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said. “Not this last bit, anyway.”

“Beowulf,” said Beowulf. “Beowulf, the bee-hunter. Well, it might occur to somebody.”

They buried Beowulf’s body in a great green fist of land that stuck out into the sea. And
they heaped white stones upon it, to show how much they had loved him. In the years that followed, the place became a well-known landmark for mariners. Men would point to it on the way to sea, saying: “There is Beowulf’s grave.” And no one saw it without feeling an inch taller where he stood.

Wiglaf never told the whole story about the bees. He became king in Beowulf’s stead, and ruled wisely and well to the end of his days. When people asked him this or that about the dead hero, he had one way of answering—with a little puzzling smile in his eyes as he silently recalled a golden stream of bees disappearing down a dragon’s throat. “Beowulf,” he said, “was Beowulf.”

“Come now,” the more curious people protested, smelling a mystery. “There must have been more to it than that.”

“No more, no less,” said Wiglaf. “Beowulf was Beowulf.”

And that was all he would say, ever.