Beowulf (5 page)

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the time when men might sleep safely in the King's hall was not yet come. Grendel had fled away over the moors with the life streaming from his mortal wound, seeking the dark of his lair like a wild animal that has its death-hurt. But he had not died alone as a wild animal dies. In the dreadful sea-cavern where they dwelt his mother had been waiting his return.

She was of the same kind as Grendel, monstrous, evil, a Death-Shadow-in-the-Dark; but she had possessed the power to love, and she had loved her son, and was therefore more terrible than he had ever been. Now, mad with grief as a bitch-wolf whose cubs are taken from her, panting for revenge, she followed the day-old blood-trail to the threshold of Heorot and hurled back the door.

Within was a sudden dreadful uproar. Men sprang from the sleeping-benches, snatching up their weapons, but as no blade could bite on her son's charmed hide, so none could bite on hers. She surged forward, heedless of all that they could do against her, and with a triumphant yell she grasped Aschere, whom the King loved best of all his thanes, and next instant was gone with him into the night.

Lamentation swept through Heorot, where so short a time before had been laughter and the song of the harp. Word was carried to the King and he came and stood among them, with his grey beard wild from his pillow, and the tears of grief for Aschere his friend trickling down the deep-cut lines of his stern face.

Beowulf and his comrades, weary after their struggle of the night before, slept deep and dreamlessly, and heard no sound until Beowulf woke in the first greyness of the dawn, to find a hand shaking his shoulder and a voice crying in his ear that he must come to Hrothgar the King.

He flung a cloak round his nakedness and with his comrades went out after the messenger, and across the wet grass under the apple trees to Heorot the Hart. He found Hrothgar seated in his High Seat, no longer weeping but with his face as it were turned to stone.

‘My lord Hrothgar, what has happened here in the night?'

The old man stared straight before him, and his voice was dull and hard. ‘Evil has returned to Heorot.'

‘What evil? Surely Grendel has not come again. What evil? Tell me!'

‘Grendel? Nay, not Grendel. I have heard men speak before now of having seen not one but two Night-Stalkers among the moorland mists, and one of them in some sort like a woman. Fool that I was, and thrice-cursed fool. I paid no heed to the tale, but now I know all too surely that the tale was true. Dead is Aschere, my Councillor and shoulder-to-shoulder man. Many times we strove side by side in battle, shedding our blood together and sharing the mead horn afterwards; and now he is dead, slain by the foul kinswoman of the monster whom you slew.'

Beowulf straightened himself and shook off the last rags of sleep that still clung about him. ‘I have still my strength, Hrothgar the King, and still it is at your service.'

Nothing changed in the stony face of the old King, only his hands clenched and unclenched on the carved foreposts of the Seat. ‘Save us from this new horror, Beowulf, as you saved us from the other. You alone can do it. Yet not even you can bring back to life Aschere, who was near to me as my own heart.'

‘Sorrow not so grievously,' Beowulf said quickly. ‘It is better that a man should avenge his friend than mourn him overmuch. Each of us must wait the end of life, and if a man gain honour while he lives, as Aschere gained it, that is best for a warrior when the time comes that Wyrd cuts the web of his living from the loom. Abide but this one day and your friend shall not lie unavenged, though I cannot bring him back to you.' He covered the clenched hands with his own and looked into the stricken face of the King. ‘Listen, and believe me. Not in Earth's breast nor in the fiery heart of the mountains nor the black depths of the sea shall the She-Wolf escape my coming.'

Hrothgar drew a long breath, and seemed to draw in strength with it as a gift from the young champion. Light came again into his eyes, and he got slowly to his full height and looked about him. ‘Have my horse saddled, and others for Beowulf and whoever chooses to ride with us. We are for the Wolf-Woman's lair.'

Beowulf strode away to his own quarters, and even before the horses had been brought round, he had returned, wearing the ring-mail sark that was as fine as a salmon skin, and his own close-fitting helmet, and carrying his sword. And before the sun had risen clear of the rim of the hills he and Hrothgar, with a mingled company of Danes and Geats behind them, were pressing onward across the waste wet mosses of the moors, following Grendel's blood trail towards the seashore.

Far down the coast from the fjord with its shingle strand where the Geatish war-galley lay behind her barricade of oars, was a very different place; a sea-inlet between two steep nesses, with a narrow opening to the sea outside. Along the base of the cliffs lay black shelving rocks where the sea beasts basked at noontide, and others that were jagged and fanged like sea beasts themselves, and the waves of the open sea, driven into the confined space, boiled and weltered as in a cauldron. At the landward end of this evil place a stream coming down from the high moors had cut for itself through the years a deep gorge overhung with a tangle of sere and salt-burned trees that dripped grey lichen into the grey mists of the falling water and the spume that beat up from the churning waves below. A place of ill-omen; a dreadful place of which men told many stories—stories of giant shapes half glimpsed in the sea mists, of strange sounds echoing and strange lights flaring beneath the water, and storms that blew up out of nowhere and strange tides that set there, while elsewhere along the coast the winds and the tides were fair. Land animals shunned the place, they said, and if a deer hard-pressed by the hounds were driven to the edge of the stream it would turn there on the bank and die, rather than plunge into the water and swim for safety.

To this place Grendel's blood trail led the Geatish and Danish warriors, and on the cliff edge above it, lying abandoned like some fragment of a mouse that a great cat has dropped from its jaws, they found Aschere's head, where Grendel's Dam had torn it off before she plunged down to her lair.

Dismounting, the thanes gathered about it in silence. Hrothgar in their midst knelt stiffly beside the last dreadful relic of his dead sword-brother, and put back the tangle of blood-soaked hair with hands as gentle as a woman's; but he spoke no word—there was no word to speak. In a short while he rose, saying to the thanes about him, ‘Hobble the horses; from here we must go on foot.'

One by one, following the old King and the young hero, they dropped over the edge out of the morning sunlight, and began the long climb down through the rocks and tree roots of the dark gorge to the foot of the cliffs. As they went, it seemed to every man that a cold murk, a shadow that was more than the headlands cutting off the light of day, rose about them, deadening heart and spirit; a shadow that grew chiller and more deadly with every downward step they took.

At last the gorge widened, the stream sprang out over a ledge and plunged down to join the churning waters of the sea-hole, and following it they came scrambling out from a world of trees into a world of spray-lashed rocks. On the rock ledges the great tusked seals and walruses lay basking, another menace to be outfaced; and all among the rocks the water was fouled with murky crimson as slow gouts of blood still came welling up from below. The roar of the water was in their ears, but under the roar, like the still depths far down beneath the fret and turmoil of the surface waves, was a great silence. No sea birds cried in this place, and the silence, like the shadow, pressed upon the heart.

One of the Danes had brought a war-horn with him, and in a gesture of defiance he put the silver mouthpiece to his lips and set the dim gorge and the gloom beneath the trees echoing with the eager battle-music. The echoes flung back and forth along the base of the cliffs, splintering on the sheer rock faces, and the sea beasts, roused from their sleep, plunged roaring and bellowing into the water.

Beowulf snatched a bow from the Geat who stood nearest to him. ‘An arrow—quick, an arrow, Scaef,' and when the other gave it to him he notched it to the bowstring and drew and loosed in one swift movement. The arrow sped out into the midst of the threshing herd, and stood quivering in the neck of a huge bull walrus. The men with him set up a shout, and some began to scramble out along the weed-slippery rocks; a dozen spears and sharp walrus hooks were in the body of the wildly struggling beast, and it was dragged to land and killed with a blow behind the head from a heavy shield rim. For a few moments the Geats and Danes gathered to stare and exclaim over it, for it was a great brute and would yield much ivory. But it was not for walrus hunting that they had come to this accursed place, and almost at once they turned away to the true venture in hand.

Beowulf had no preparations to make. He was already clad in his ring-mail sark, his boar-crested helm pulled low upon his brow, his sword in his hand—not the King's gift sword, but his own weapon that he had carried through many a fight by sea and land, and which fitted his grasp as if hand and hilt had been made for each other. But he was not, after all, to carry his own sword into the fight that was waiting for him, for at the last instant Hunferth the King's Jester, the bitter-tongued and flame-tempered, pulled the sword from his own wolfskin sheath and came shouldering through the other warriors to thrust it half angrily into Beowulf's hand. ‘Here, take my sword—Hrunting, men call it. The blade was tempered with brew of poison twigs and hardened with battle blood. It is a powerful blade and has never yet failed its man in combat.'

Beowulf looked from the Jester's face to the wave-grey blade in his hand, and slowly back again. This was the man who had flung insults in his teeth only two nights since. But he saw Hunferth regretted the insults now, and for him that was enough. He passed his own sword to the nearest of his Geats, and took the weapon which the other held out to him, smiling a little into the hot dark eyes. ‘Friend, I thank you for the loan. With Hrunting, or surely not at all, I will overcome this Wolf-Woman of the sea.'

Then he turned to the King standing by. ‘Hrothgar, Lord of the Danes, I go now, and whether we shall meet again is as Wyrd may choose. If I do not return, I pray you send those gifts which you gave to me home to Hygelac my own Hearth-Lord—all save the great sword; let you give that to Hunferth your Jester, as a gift from a friend in place of his sword Hrunting, which will have perished with me.'

For a long moment, the Jester's sword naked across his thighs, he stood looking about him, at the distant sunlight that he could see touching golden on the high crests of the headlands and the clear blue of the open sea beyond, wondering if ever he would feel the lifting deck of his war-boat beneath his feet again; looking into the troubled faces of one after another of his sword-brothers, and wondering if that also was for the last time.

‘Wait for me here,' he said.

Then he turned from them all, and with the great sword held above his head, plunged down into the surf.