Beowulf (2 page)

Out in the black fen something stirred. It was cruel and slimy and its eyes shone green. A part of the night it moved through, its wicked heart was darker than the darkest place in that night. Even the moon would not look at it.

A trail of blood was left on the mud where the creature crawled. This was because it fed on living things and had grown so fat and swollen in its greed that bits of the people it had eaten dripped from its scummy lips and crooked teeth. Its claws were red and its breath, coming in little gasps, stank like a drain.

The fen was full of evil things that feared the light. There were vampires and witches and ogres and worms that burned. Horses with no heads and with hands instead of hooves loomed out of the fog. Black bats flew there, with wings like coffin-lids. Rats as big as dogs swarmed about in packs, killing and eating anything that got in their way. Some of the pools were so thick and dreggy that no one knew what lurked in the bottom of them. A few were bottomless, and went straight down to hell.

It was from the darkest of these pools that the creature with green eyes had come. It was chief of all the horrors of the fen, and even the angry rats turned tail and fled when they saw its grisly head emerging. Now it made a noise in its throat like the crunching of bones or the sudden fracture of ice underfoot.

A bat shrieked.

“Grendel,” hissed the warning wind in the grasses. “Grendel, Grendel, Grendel!”

The creature Grendel dragged himself toward hall Heorot.

Morning came. The sun shone. The birds began to sing.

Hrothgar woke up bathed in sweat from a terrible dream. “My hall,” he cried, “my lovely hall was full of blood!”

His servants tried to comfort him. “It was only a drecim, master. You ate cheese before retiring for the night. Bad dreams mean cheese, nothing more.”

But the king would not be comforted. He held his head in his hands and turned his face to the wall.

“Go down into the hall,” he said at last. “Go down and see the worst, and then come back and tell me what you have seen.”

Dutifully the servants did as he com
manded them. They laughed and joked as they went down to the first twist of the great stair that ran through Heorot like a corkscrew. “Hrothgar’s a brave man and a good king,” said one. “But he always was a bit superstitious.”

His companion agreed. “Never eat cheese last thing at night,” he said. “Not even if you’ve got a stomach like Scyld Scefing. Simple as that.”

Their feet echoed on the stair.

“Bit quiet, isn’t it?”

“Nothing strange about that. The place is so big. Nice day, though. Hear the larks singing? Tell you what, let’s take the couches out in the sun and give them a bit of an airing. Good idea?”

No answer.

The servant looked at his fellow. The first servant’s face had gone white. He pointed waveringly down the stair.

Both men started shaking with fright.

There was no sign to be seen of the thirty warriors of the king’s bodyguard.

And another of Hrothgar’s dreams had come true. The ivory floors and walls of the great banqueting hall were dripping with blood.

“It’s like a slaughterhouse,” said Hrothgar. He had got over his despair. His eyes were angry and his mouth was set in a tight grim line as he watched the servants mopping and scrubbing the blood from the ivory hall.

His wife, Wealhtheow, laid her hand on his arm. “Husband,” she said simply, “who can have done this terrible thing?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Hrothgar. “But when I find the culprits I shall make them pay for it with blood of their own.”

Unferth, the son of Ecglaf, was standing nearby. He was a rude and drunken fellow, always ready to argue, even with the king himself. “You’ll never have revenge, great Hrothgar, mighty as you are,” he said, rather sneeringly, in a hard, dull voice.

“How’s that?” demanded Hrothgar.

Unferth shrugged. His shoulders were narrow
and he had a boil on his neck. He rubbed with his toe at a smudge of blood on the floor where he stood. “Because this was no mortal deed,” he said. “Thirty men gone in a single night, and no trace of their having offered resistance. Well, it’s obvious what happened. They were eaten.”

Wealhtheow gasped. “Eaten?” she exclaimed.

Unferth nodded. A horrid little look of amusement hovered about his mouth. “That’s right. Grendel was here!”

“I’ve never believed in Grendel,” the queen said slowly. “It’s just a tale to frighten children when they’re naughty. ‘If you’re not good, Grendel will come and gobble you up’—that’s what my old nurse used to say.” She shivered, half-pleased by the memory. “Besides,” she went on, “all those stories of Grendel are very old. Nobody believes in that kind of thing anymore.”

“I do,” snapped Unferth. “Grendel is the wickedest fiend who ever crawled in darkness. He lives with the wolves and the mists. Some say that when Cain killed his brother, Abel, he ran away on all fours, howling, like a dog, and did not stop until he found a den at the end of the earth. And in that den, cast out and damned by God, Cain joined with a
loathly snake, as black as jet, that drank the scum that comes on liquids bubbled up from the bowels of hell. One of their children had three heads, and vipers instead of fingers. Another was mouthed like a shark, but could fly through the air. The most hideous and evil of all was Grendel. The earth quaked at his birth, and stars pitched into the sea. He is made of hate, greedy for men’s blood, the archenemy of all good things, the vilest—”

“All right,” said Hrothgar, “there’s no need to sound as though you enjoy it so much.”

Unferth scratched his boil with a grimy fingernail. His eyes, small and malicious, fed on Queen Wealhtheow’s fear. “Grendel did this,” he said, with sinister softness, after a long, uneasy pause during which the only sound came from the scrubbing-brushes of the servants trying to clean the blood from the walls. “I know it.”

“I believe you do,” Hrothgar said. “It takes an evil nose to smell the devil.”

Wealhtheow tossed her golden hair. She said, “If it is true, and there is such a wickedness at work in the night, then who can withstand it? The fiend must be angered by the shining hall you have built, husband. The happiness of the harp, the songs of the poets,
the laughter of your warriors—all this must bruise his vicious heart.”

“That’s right,” sneered Unferth. “Grendel will be back. And next time it will be worse.” He looked sideways as he spoke, as if fascinated by the prospect.

Hrothgar nodded grimly. “Let him come,” he said. “He will not be made welcome.”

“What will you do?” Wealhtheow asked.

“I shall wait for him,” promised Hrothgar, “this night and every night. I shall wait for him with the nine lords who have the bravest hearts and the sharpest swords in this land of Danes. No child of Cain is going to ruin hall Heorot.”

Unferth took a swig from his drinking-horn. Aloud, he praised King Hrothgar’s courage. Silently, he drank a toast to the demon Grendel.

Nine warlords came at Hrothgar’s call. They swore vengeance when they learned what had happened to the thirty warriors of the king’s bodyguard. “It was because they slept,” declared one. “Grendel shall not catch us unawares.” All were keen that so terrible a deed should be swiftly avenged, and that no further disaster befall the great hall the king had built for them to feast in.

Swords were honed, shields polished, helmets daubed with grease so that the monster should not seize them easily to bite off their heads. Hrothgar himself wore a golden breastplate that shone in the least light. He was determined to meet Grendel face to face, because of the insult to Heorot.

Night fell. There was no moon, and the stars looked sparse and adrift in the punished sky. Queen Wealhtheow paced the corridors, wringing her white hands until the knucklebones nearly pierced the delicate flesh. Unferth, drunk, his buckle-belt undone, leaned from a turret to scan the murky marsh. Hrothgar and his lords waited in the banqueting hall below. Food was set out, steaming on the tables; but nobody felt like eating it.

The coming of Grendel was neither swift nor slow. This time, the night so thick, it was impossible to tell the precise moment when the creature emerged from his dreggy pool and began to drag his coils toward hall Heorot. There was only the sound to go by—the foul breath squeaking in little gasps, the noise in his throat like the splintery crunching of bones. The rats could not see him and ran over his scales in the dark. Grendel let them go. He was hungry for more than rats.

The door of the banqueting hall was thick and studded. Stout bars held it shut against the night’s alarms. None of the ten waiting warriors had slept a wink. Hrothgar’s eyes never left the door. He sat bolt upright, sword in hand, a broad axe at his side. The others were in similar attitudes.

But they had no chance against the fury of the beast.

One moment the door was standing …

The next, it was down, smashed by a single blow, and Grendel was upon them!

Hrothgar was not able to remember rightly what happened then, nor exactly how he managed to escape with his life. The hall was a confusion of swords and blood, the brave lords hurling themselves at Grendel, and the fiend snatching them up in his claws and snapping their backs as if they were no more than toys. Man after man went into those terrible jaws, and still Grendel came on, unsatisfied, his green eyes glaring, his slimy skin not even scratched by the hacking axes. It was as if the night itself had poured into hall Heorot, killing and eating mere men, the creatures of day. Torches went out as Grendel came past them. Soon the hall was pitch black, and the only sound the crunching and munching of bones and flesh.

High above, Queen Wealhtheow began to scream and pray. Unferth had fainted, either from fear or excitement. A burning brand he had been holding in his hand rolled down the stair. The queen caught hold of it. The flame licked at her fingers. She cried out in agony, and threw the thing down into the dark where the monster was. The brand missed Grendel, but it crashed to the floor beside the prostrate figure of Hrothgar, singeing his red hair where the great horned helmet had been knocked off.

Perhaps this saved her husband’s life. His golden breastplate shone like a holy light in all that dark. Even the baleful green of the monster’s eyes seemed to dim before it.

For whatever reason, Grendel hesitated a moment.

Wealtheow, seizing her chance, wanting to die with the man she loved, flew down the stair and flung herself on her husband’s unconscious body. Her blue cloak covered him like a wing.

Thinking him dead, she kissed him and moaned his name. “Hrothgar! My lord, my love! Hrothgar!”

Then she fainted.

When she woke, the king was still in her arms, badly wounded but alive. Her blue
cloak was dark with his blood. She began to tear it up to bind his wounds. Unferth stood over them, holding the brand, with a tortured look in his eyes as if it were his own hand burning.

Hrothgar’s poets took the story of Grendel with them wherever they went. One of them told it in the court of Hygelac, king of the Geats, which lay far from the land of the Danes, over the stormy sea. He found eager listeners to his tale.

“We have heard of the great hall Heorot,” said Hygelac. “Men say that its timbers reach up for the clouds, and that its golden roofs can be seen a day’s march away, brighter than the sun itself.”

“Then men tell true,” answered the poet, “for that is how Heorot is by day. But by night it’s a different story. After darkfall the hall stands abandoned. None dare go there.”

“For fear of Grendel?”

“For fear of Grendel.”

Now, King Hygelac had a nephew, and his nephew’s name was Beowulf. Beowulf was
only a young man, but already he had won fame on account of his goodness and daring. In his person, Beowulf was below average size; he looked taller sitting down than standing up, because his broad chest and shoulders were out of proportion to his legs, which were short. He had straight brown hair and strong wrists. People found it difficult to say what was memorable or remarkable about his face—but all remembered it. He had a way of looking straight at the person he was talking to, his shoulders set square, his hands on his knees, his eyes unwavering, that always struck others as honest and open. And when someone spoke to him, he sat just as still and attentive, listening with his eyes.

In fact, Beowulf’s eyes were not strong, and part of their sensitivity was due to his not seeing too well. As a boy, he had been fond of playing with bees—Beowulf means “the bee-hunter”—and one day an angry swarm had attacked his face, stinging his cheeks and eyelids rather badly. Whether or not this was responsible for his short sight, who could say? But certainly the stings had been deep and painful enough to keep him in a darkened room for weeks, and when he emerged into daylight again he found things seemed more misty and distant than they had before. A setback
like this did not daunt him. He did not even blame the bees. Beowulf was the rare kind of person who makes strength of his own weaknesses. His eyes being poor, he determined to see not just as well as other people, but better than most. He did this by cultivating habits of quickness and concentration that enabled him to be truly
seeing
where others were only looking. And this matter of the eyes was typical of his whole manner of being. Beowulf had made the best of all he had, putting each imperfection to work in the service of his integrity. Thus, his real strength lay in the balance of his person—which is, perhaps, another way of saying that he was strong because he was good, and good because he had the strength to accept things in him that were bad.

When Beowulf had heard all the stories about the dreadful deeds of the demon Grendel, he determined to go and help Hrothgar, if he could. His ship was made ready, a fine seaworthy craft with a great curved prow. He chose fourteen men to go with him. They were brave indomitable fellows, well tested in battle and willing to follow their hero wherever he went. However, it was not merely for their skill as warriors that Beowulf picked them. He had heard enough about Grendel to
know that the monster could not be killed by strength alone.