Grendel (3 page)

One of them said—a tall one with a long black beard—“It moves independent of the tree.”

They nodded.

The tall one said, “It’s a growth of some kind, that’s my opinion. Some beastlike fungus.”

They all looked up into the branches.

A short, fat one with a tangled white beard pointed up into the tree with an ax. “Those branches on the northern side are all dead there. No doubt the whole tree’ll be dead before midsummer. It’s always the north side goes first when there ain’t enough sap.”

They nodded, and another one said, “See there where it grows up out of the trunk? Sap running all over.”

They leaned over the sides of their horses to look, pushing the torches toward me. The horses’ eyes glittered.

“Have to close that up if we’re going to save this tree,” the tall one said. The others grunted, and the tall one looked up at my eyes, uneasy. I couldn’t move. He stepped
down off the horse and came over to me, so close I could have swung my hand and smashed his head if I could make my muscles move. “It’s like blood,” he said, and made a face.

Two of the others got down and came over to pull at their noses and look.

“I say that tree’s a goner,” one of them said.

They all nodded, except the tall one. “We can’t just leave it rot,” he said. “Start letting the place go to ruin and you know what the upshot’ll be.”

They nodded. The others got down off their horses and came over. The one with the tangled white beard said, “Maybe we could chop the fungus out.”

They thought about it. After a while the tall one shook his head. “I don’t know. Could be it’s some kind of a oak-tree spirit. Better not to mess with it.”

They looked uneasy. There was a hairless, skinny one with eyes like two holes. He stood with his arms out, like a challenged bird, and he kept moving around in jerky little circles, bent forward, peering at everything, at the tree, at the woods around, up into my eyes. Now suddenly he nodded. “That’s it! King’s right! It’s a spirit!”

“You think so?” they said. Their heads poked forward.

“Sure of it,” he said.

“Is it friendly, you think?” the king said.

The hairless one peered up at me with the fingertips of
one hand in his mouth. The skinny elbow hung straight down, as if he were leaning on an invisible table while he thought the whole thing through. His black little eyes stared straight into mine, as if waiting for me to tell him something. I tried to speak. My mouth moved, but nothing would come out. The little man jerked back. “He’s hungry!” he said.

“Hungry!” they all said. “What does he eat?”

He looked at me again. His tiny eyes drilled into me and he was crouched as if he were thinking of trying to jump up into my brains. My heart thudded. I was so hungry I could eat a rock. He smiled suddenly, as if a holy vision had exploded in his head. “He eats
pig!”
he said. He looked doubtful. “Or maybe pigsmoke. He’s in a period of transition.”

They all looked at me, thinking it over, then nodded.

The king picked out six men. “Go get the thing some pigs,” he said. The six men said “Yes sir!” and got on their horses and rode off. It filled me with joy, though it was all crazy, and before I knew I could do it, I laughed. They jerked away and stood shaking, looking up.

“The spirit’s angry,” one of them whispered.

“It always has been,” another one said. “That’s why it’s killing the tree.”

“No, no, you’re wrong,” the hairless one said. “It’s yelling for pig.”

“Pig!” I tried to yell. It scared them.

They all began shouting at each other. One of the horses neighed and reared up, and for some crazy reason they took it for a sign. The king snatched an ax from the man beside him and, without any warning, he hurled it at me. I twisted, letting out a howl, and it shot past my shoulder, just barely touching my skin. Blood trickled out.

“You’re all crazy,” I tried to yell, but it came out a moan. I bellowed for my mother.

“Surround him!” the king yelled, “Save the horses!”—and suddenly I knew I was dealing with no dull mechanical bull but with thinking creatures, pattern makers, the most dangerous things I’d ever met. I shrieked at them, trying to scare them off, but they merely ducked behind bushes and took long sticks from the saddles of their horses, bows and javelins. “You’re all crazy,” I bellowed, “you’re all insane!” I’d never howled more loudly in my life. Darts like hot coals went through my legs and arms and I howled more loudly still. And then, just when I was sure I was finished, a shriek ten times as loud as mine came blaring off the cliff. It was my mother! She came roaring down like thunder, screaming like a thousand hurricanes, eyes as bright as dragonfire, and before she was within a mile of us, the creatures had leaped to their horses and galloped away. Big trees shattered and fell from her path; the earth trembled. Then her smell poured in like blood
into a silver cup, filling the moonlit clearing to the brim, and I felt the two trees that held me falling, and I was tumbling, free, into the grass.

I woke up in the cave, warm firelight flickering on walls. My mother lay picking through the bone pile. When she heard me stir, she turned, wrinkling her forehead, and looked at me. There were no other shapes. I think I dimly understood even then that they’d gone deeper into darkness, away from men. I tried to tell her all that had happened, all that I’d come to understand: the meaningless objectness of the world, the universal bruteness. She only stared, troubled at my noise. She’d forgotten all language long ago, or maybe had never known any. I’d never heard her speak to the other shapes. (How I myself learned to speak I can’t remember; it was a long, long time ago.) But I talked on, trying to smash through the walls of her unconsciousness. “The world resists me and I resist the world,” I said. “That’s all there is. The mountains are what I define them as.” Ah, monstrous stupidity of childhood, unreasonable hope! I waken with a start and see it over again (in my cave, out walking, or sitting by the mere), the memory rising as if it has been pursuing me. The fire in my mother’s eyes brightens and she reaches out as if some current is tearing us apart. “The world is all pointless accident,” I say. Shouting now, my fists clenched. “I exist, nothing else.” Her face works. She gets up on all
fours, brushing dry bits of bone from her path, and, with a look of terror, rising as if by unnatural power, she hurls herself across the void and buries me in her bristly fur and fat. I sicken with fear. “My mother’s fur is bristly,” I say to myself. “Her flesh is loose.” Buried under my mother I cannot see. She smells of wild pig and fish. “My mother smells of wild pig and fish,” I say. What I see I inspire with usefulness, I think, trying to suck in breath, and all that I do not see is useless, void. I observe myself observing what I observe. It startles me. “Then I am not that which observes!” I am
lack. Alack!
No thread, no frailest hair between myself and the universal clutter! I listen to the underground river. I have never seen it.

Talking, talking, spinning a skin, a skin …

I can’t breathe, and I claw to get free. She struggles. I smell my mama’s blood and, alarmed, I hear from the walls and floor of the cave the booming, booming, of her heart.

It wasn’t because he threw that battle-ax that I turned on Hrothgar. That was mere midnight foolishness. I dismissed it, thought of it afterward only as you remember a tree that fell on you or an adder you stepped on by accident, except of course that Hrothgar was more to be feared than a tree or snake. It wasn’t until later, when I was full-grown and Hrothgar was an old, old man, that I settled my soul on destroying him—slowly and cruelly. Except for his thanes’ occasional stories of seeing my footprints, he’d probably forgotten by then that I existed.

He’d been busy. I’d watched it all from the eaves of the forest, mostly from up off the ground, in the branches.

In the beginning there were various groups of them: ragged little bands that roamed the forest on foot or horseback, crafty-witted killers that worked in teams, hunting through the summer, shivering in caves or little huts in the winter, occasionally wandering out into the snow to plow through it slowly, clumsily, after more meat. Ice clung to their eyebrows and beards and eyelashes, and I’d hear them whining and groaning as they walked. When two hunters from different bands came together in the woods, they would fight until the snow was slushy with blood, then crawl back, gasping and crying, to their separate camps to tell wild tales of what happened.

As the bands grew larger, they would seize and clear a hill and, with the trees they’d cut, would set up shacks, and on the crown of the hill a large, shaggy house with a steeply pitched roof and a wide stone hearth, where they’d all go at night for protection from other bands of men. The inside walls would be beautifully painted and hung with tapestries, and every cross-timber or falcon’s perch was carved and gewgawed with toads, snakes, dragon shapes, deer, cows, pigs, trees, trolls. At the first sign of spring they would set out their shrines and scatter seeds on the sides of the hill, below the shacks, and would put up wooden fences to pen their pigs and cows. The women worked the ground and milked and fed the animals while the men hunted, and when the men came in from the wolf-roads
at dusk, the women would cook the game they’d caught while the men went inside and drank mead. Then they’d all eat, the men first, then the women and children, the men still drinking, getting louder and braver, talking about what they were going to do to the bands on the other hills. I would huddle, listening to their noise in the darkness, my eyebrows lifted, my lips pursed, the hair on the back of my neck standing up like pigs’ bristles. All the bands did the same thing. In time I began to be more amused than revolted by what they threatened. It didn’t matter to me what they did to each other. It was slightly ominous because of its strangeness—no wolf was so vicious to other wolves—but I half believed they weren’t serious.

They would listen to each other at the meadhall tables, their pinched, cunning rats’ faces picking like needles at the boaster’s words, the warfalcons gazing down, black, from the rafters, and when one of them finished his raving threats, another would stand up and lift up his ram’s horn, or draw his sword, or sometimes both if he was very drunk, and he’d tell them what
he
planned to do. Now and then some trivial argument would break out, and one of them would kill another one, and all the others would detach themselves from the killer as neatly as blood clotting, and they’d consider the case and they’d either excuse him, for some reason, or else send him out to the forest to live by stealing from their outlying pens like a wounded fox. At
times I would try to befriend the exile, at other times I would try to ignore him, but they were treacherous. In the end, I had to eat them. As a rule, though, that wasn’t how all their drinking turned out. Normally the men would howl out their daring, and the evening would get merrier, louder and louder, the king praising this one, criticizing that one, no one getting hurt except maybe some female who was asking for it, and eventually they’d all fall asleep on each other like lizards, and I’d steal a cow.

But the threats were serious. Darting unseen from camp to camp, I observed a change come over their drunken boasts. It was late spring. Food was plentiful. Every sheep and goat had its wobbly twins, the forest was teeming, and the first crops of the hillsides were coming into fruit. A man would roar, “I’ll steal their gold and burn their meadhall!” shaking his sword as if the tip were afire, and a man with eyes like two pins would say, “Do it now, Cowface! I think you’re not even the man your father was!” The people would laugh. I would back away into the darkness, furious at my stupid need to spy on them, and I would glide to the next camp of men, and I’d hear the same.

Then once, around midnight, I came to a hall in ruins. The cows in their pens lay burbling blood through their nostrils, with javelin holes in their necks. None had been eaten. The watchdogs lay like dark wet stones, with their heads cut off, teeth bared. The fallen hall was a square of
flames and acrid smoke, and the people inside (none of them had been eaten either) were burned black, small, like dwarfs turned dark and crisp. The sky opened like a hole where the gables had loomed before, and the wooden benches, the trestle tables, the beds that had hung on the meadhall walls were scattered to the edge of the forest, shining charcoal. There was no sign of the gold they’d kept—not so much as a melted hilt.

Then the wars began, and the war songs, and the weapon making. If the songs were true, as I suppose at least one or two of them were, there had always been wars, and what I’d seen was merely a period of mutual exhaustion.

I’d be watching a meadhall from high in a tree, nightbirds singing in the limbs below me, the moon’s face hidden in a tower of clouds, and nothing would be stirring except leaves moving in the light spring breeze and, down by the pigpens, two men walking with their battle-axes and their dogs. Inside the hall I would hear the Shaper telling of the glorious deeds of dead kings—how they’d split certain heads, snuck away with certain precious swords and necklaces—his harp mimicking the rush of swords, clanging boldly with the noble speeches, sighing behind the heroes’ dying words. Whenever he stopped, thinking up formulas for what to say next, the people would all shout and thump each other and drink to the Shaper’s long life. In the shadow of the hall and by the outbuildings,
men sat whistling or humming to themselves, repairing weapons: winding bronze bands around gray ashspears, treating their swordblades with snake’s venom, watching the goldworker decorate the handles of battle-axes. (The goldworkers had an honored place. I remember one of them especially: a lean, aloof, superior man of middle age. He never spoke to the others except to laugh sometimes—“Nyeh heh heh.”)