“Yes,” roars Hrothgar. “That’s it. Fight me.”
The creature takes two faltering steps backward, retreating from the king of Heorot Hall, from a fat old man, drunk and tangled in his bedclothes. Now it stands directly over Wealthow, its legs forming an archway high above her head. It whimpers, and drool the color of pus drips from its lips and forms a puddle at her feet. Again the monster roars, but this time there is more hurt and dismay than anything else in that appalling sound.
“Me,” Hrothgar says, brandishing his sword, and he closes half the distance between himself and the monster, between himself and Lady Wealthow.
“NNNNAAAAaaaaaaaaaay!” the beast cries out, its foul breath hurling that one word with enough force that Hrothgar is pushed backward and falls, losing his sheet and landing naked on his ass, his sword clattering to the floor. And then with its right hand, the creature seizes two of the fallen thanes and leaps into the air, vanishing up the chimney above the fire pit. In its wake, there is a terrific gust of wind, and for an instant, the fire flares yet more brightly—a blinding, blistering flash of heat and light—and then the wind snuffs it out, and the hall goes dark, the winter night rushing in to fill the emptiness left behind.
The darkness brings with it a shocked silence, broken only by frightened sobs and the sounds that dying men make. Someone lights a torch, and then another. Soon, the night is broken by flickering pools of yellow light, and Wealthow sees that the mead hall lies in ruin around her. Unferth emerges from the gloom, clutching his sword like someone who is not a coward. The glow of the torches is reflected faintly in the golden torque about his neck. Wealthow goes to her shivering, weeping husband and kneels at his side, gathering up the sheet and covering him with it. She cannot yet quite believe she is still alive and breathing.
“What was that?” she asks Hrothgar, and he shakes his head and stares up at the black hole of the chimney.
“Grendel,” he replies. “That was Grendel.”
2
Alien Spirits
Slick with the drying blood of murdered thanes and grimy with the soot of Heorot’s chimney, Grendel returns to his cave beyond the forest. Standing in the entrance, he feels the moon’s eye watching him, has felt its gaze pricking at his skin since the moment he emerged from the mead hall. It watched him all the way home, following his slow trek back across the moors and through the sleeping forest and over the bogs. He glances over his shoulder and up into the sky. Already, Máni has started sinking toward the western horizon and soon will be lost in the tops of the old trees.
“Did you think I could not do it for myself?” Grendel asks the moon. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”
But the moon doesn’t answer him. Grendel did not expect that it would. For all he knows, the son of Mundilfæri is a mute and has never spoken a single word in all his long life, hanging there in the night sky. Grendel sighs and looks down at the two corpses he’s carried all the way back from Heorot, then he slips out of the moonlight and into the comforting darkness of the cave.
He cannot recall a time before this cave was his home. Sometimes he thinks he must have been born here. Not far from its entrance, there is a pool of still, clear water, framed in drooping, dripstone stalactites and sharp stalagmites jutting up from the cave’s floor. They have always seemed to him like teeth, and so the pool is the cave’s throat—maybe the throat of all the earth—and so perhaps he is only something that the world coughed up, some indigestible bit of a bad meal, perhaps.
Grendel drops the dead thanes onto a great mound of bones heaped high in a corner of the cave, not far from the pool’s edge. Here, the bleached bones of men lie jumbled together with the remains of other animals—the antlered skulls of mighty harts, the crumbling skeletons of bears and seals, wolves and wild boar. Whatever he can catch and kill, and in all his life Grendel has not yet encountered anything that he cannot kill. Relieved of his burden, he turns back to the pool and gazes down at his reflection there in the still water. In the darkness, his eyes glitter faintly, his irises flecked with gold.
“Grendel?” his mother asks. “Hwæt oa him weas?”
Surprised and startled by her voice, the melodic crystal music of her words, he turns quickly about, spinning around much too suddenly and almost losing his balance.
“What have you done? Grendel?”
“Mother?” he asks, searching the gloom of the cavern for some evidence of her beyond her voice. “Where are you?” He glances up at the ceiling, thinking her voice might have come from somewhere overhead.
“Men? Grendel…I thought we had an agreement concerning men.”
Yes, she must be on the ceiling, watching from some secret, shadowed spot almost directly above him. But then there’s a loud splash from the pool, and Grendel is drenched with freezing water.
“Fish, Grendel. Fish, and wolves, and bear. Sometimes a sheep or two. But not men.”
He turns slowly back to the pool, and she’s there, waiting for him.
“You like men,” he tells her. “Here…” and he retrieves one of the dead thanes, the least gnawed of the two, and offers it to her.
“No,” she says sternly. “Not these fragile things, my darling. Remember, they will hurt us. They have killed so many of us…of our kind…the giants, the dragonkind. They have hunted us until there are almost none of us left to hunt. They will hunt you, too, if you make a habit of killing them.”
“But they were making so much noise. They were making so much merry…and it hurt me. It hurt my head. I couldn’t even think for the noise and the pain.” And Grendel holds the dead thane out to her again. “Here, Mother, this one is sweet. I have peeled away all the hard metal parts.”
“Just put it down, Grendel.”
And so he does, dropping it into the pool, where it sinks for a moment, then bobs back to the surface. Immediately, blood begins to stain the clear water. Grendel has started crying now, and he wants to turn away, wants to run back out into the night where only the moon can see him.
“Was Hrothgar there?” his mother asks, and now there’s an edge in her voice.
“I did not touch him.”
“You saw him? He saw you?”
“Yes, but I didn’t hurt him.”
His mother blinks her wide, brilliant eyes, then stares at him a few seconds more, and Grendel knows that she’s looking for any sign that he’s lied to her. When she finds none, she slides gracefully up from the pool, moving as easily as water flowing across stone, or as blood spilling over the blade of an ax. She reaches out, her scaly flesh damp and strong and even more soothing than the dark haven of his cave. She wipes away some of the gore and grime from his cheeks and forehead.
“I did not touch him, Mother,” Grendel tells her a third time.
“I know,” she replies. “You’re a good boy.”
“I couldn’t stand it any longer.”
“My poor, sensitive boy,” she purrs. “Promise me you will not go there again,” but Grendel only closes his eyes and tries not to think about shattered trees or the broken bodies, tries not to let his mind linger on the noise of men or his hatred or the beautiful, golden-haired woman he would have killed, there at the last, had Hrothgar not stayed his hand.
3
Raids in the Night
Grendel’s attacks did not end after the first assault upon Heorot. Some hatreds are too old and run far too deep to be satisfied by a single night of bloodshed and terror. Night after night he returned, his hatred and loathing for the Danes driving him from his cave again and again, intent that the noise of Hrothgar’s hall would be silenced once and for all. There would be no more deafening, painful nights. There would be no more merrymaking. And as winter closed ever tighter about the land, until the snow had gone to an icy crust and the warm sun was only a dim memory of summers that might never come again, Hrothgar’s great gift to his people became a haunted, fearful place. But Grendel did not restrict his attacks to the hall alone, taking young and old alike, men and women and children, the weak and the strong, wherever he might come upon them. He held Heorot, coming and going as pleased him and making it the most prized trophy in his lonely war, but he also roamed the old woods and the moors, the farms and homesteads, and took all those who crossed his path.