“It is no matter,” Grendel whispers, and he apologizes, and maybe the trees are listening and understand him, and maybe they aren’t and don’t. “I was on the moors and cannot even say how I came to be here. But I will not lie down among you, not if you won’t have me.” And so he stumbles on, grown so weak, so tired, that each step seems to take a lifetime or two, and there are whole hours laid in between his slow heartbeats.
A deer trail leads him away from the mumblesome, resentful trees and out into the wide gray swath of peat bog and still, deep ponds, the fell marches before the sea, this dank land that would never turn away a giant or a dragon or a troll. Or only dying Grendel. He sits down by a frozen tarn and stares at the patterns his blood makes on the ice. It’s snowing harder now, fat wet flakes spiraling lazily from the moonless sky, and Grendel opens his dry mouth and catches a few of them on his tongue. There are mists here, too, but they are thin and steamy and would never hide his ghost. Still, he thinks how easily he might break through the rime and sink, falling slowly through weedy gardens tended by vipers and nicors and fat slate-colored fish. And he would lie there in the comforting slime, forgetting life and forgetting all hurt and, in time, forgetting even himself.
“The Wolf of the Bees, he would never find me down there,” Grendel laughs, then coughs, and his breath fogs in the night. “Let him try, Mother. Let him drown here in the reeds and come to sleep beside my bones. I will gnaw him in dead dreams.”
“You cannot lie down here,” his mother replies, though he cannot see her anywhere. “Come back to me,” she says. “I would have you here with me.”
But Grendel sits a while longer there beside the frozen pool, tracing odd, uncertain shapes in the fresh snow and his cooling blood. The shapes would tell a story, if his thoughts were still clear enough for that, a happy story in which he killed the Beowulf, in which he took the horned hall for his own den and was never again plagued by the noise of men and their harps and flutes and drums. With an index finger, he tries to draw sharp teeth and a broken shield, but the falling snow erases everything almost as quickly as he can trace it on the ice.
It would cover me, too, he thinks, if I only sit here a little longer.
“Come home,” his mother sighs, her voice woven somehow invisibly into the wind. “Come home, my Grendel.”
And so Grendel remembers the cave, then, his mother’s pool and her white eels, and dimly he realizes that he’s been trying to find his way back there all along. But first the pain distracted him, and then the mists, and the spiteful trees, and the dark spatter of his blood across the ice. He gets slowly to his feet, and the unsteady world cracks and shifts beneath him. Grendel stands there clutching the damp stump where his stolen arm used to be, sniffing the familiar air, and he squints into the snowy night, struggling to recall the secret path. Where to tread, where not to tread, the shallow places where there are steppingstones and the places where there are only holes filled with stagnant, tannin-stained water.
They will not have him, these haunted fens. He will not die here, beneath the sky where carrion crows and nibbling fish jaws and the Beowulf might find him. Become more than half a ghost already, Grendel takes a deep, chilling breath, gritting his teeth against the pain, and sets out across the bog.
“Come back,” the mists call, but he ignores them.
“We have reconsidered and will have you, after all,” mutters the old forest, but he ignores it, as well.
“We are the same, you and I,” calls the moorlands from very far away. But Grendel knows he could never find his way back there, even if the jealous trees would deign to let him pass.
And before long he has reached the other side, only losing his way once or twice among the rushes and rotting spruce logs. Soon, there is solid ground beneath him again, and Grendel stumbles over the dry and stony earth and into the mouth of his cave. It does not seem so terribly cold here in the shadows, out of wind, sheltered from the falling snow. He staggers to the edge of his mother’s pool and collapses there, his blood seeping into the water and staining it the way the peat moss stains the marshes. His mother is waiting, and she buoys him up in her strong arms and keeps the hungry eels and crabs at bay.
“Do not cry,” she says, and kisses his fevered brow with cool lips.
“He hurt me, Modor,” sobs Grendel, who had not known he was sobbing until she said so. “Mama, how can that be?”
“I warned you,” she says. “Oh, Grendel, my son. My poor son. I warned you. You must not go to them…”
Grendel opens his eyes, which he’d not realized were shut, and gazes up at the dripstone formations hanging like jagged teeth from the ceiling of the cave.
“He killed me, Modor,” Grendel sobs.
“Who killed you, Grendel my son. Who? Who was it did this awful thing to you?”
Those are the fangs of the world serpent, thinks Grendel, blinking away his tears and staring in wide-eyed wonder at the sparkling stalactites overhead. I am lying now in the maw of the Midgard serpent, Jörmungand Loki-Son, and soon he will swallow me, and I will be finished, forever.
“Who took your arm, Grendel?” asks his mother.
“The Wolf of the Bees,” replies Grendel, and he shuts his eyes again. “He tore my arm away…it hurts so…”
“The Wolf of the Bees?”
“It is a riddle, Mother. Who is the Wolf of the Bees?”
“My son, there isn’t time for riddles,” she tells him, stroking his face with her graceful, long, webbed fingers, her golden nails.
“I am so cold,” Grendel says very quietly.
“I know,” she says.
“He was only a man…but so strong…so very, very strong. He hurt me, Mama.”
“And he shall pay, my darling. Who was this man?”
“He told me his name in a riddle. He said, ‘I am ripper and tearer and slasher and gouger. I’m the teeth of the darkness and talons of the night. I am Beowulf,’ he said.”
“Beowulf,” she says, repeating the kenning. “Wolf of the bees.”
“He was so strong,” Grendel says again, and he wonders if it will be this cold in the serpent’s belly at the bottom of the ocean. “I’m so cold,” he says again.
“I know,” his mother replies. “You are tired, my sweet son. You are so awfully tired. Sleep now,” and she covers his eyes as the last shimmer of life escapes them. “I am here. I will not leave you.”
And now his eyes are as empty as the eyes of any dead thing, and grieving, she bears him down along the roots of mountains and into the depths of her pool. The eels taste his blood, but wisely keep their distance. She drags his body along the spiraling course of that flooded granite throat, that sea tunnel scabbed with barnacles and fleshy anemones, blue starfish and mussels and clusters of blind, wriggling worms. Following some tidal pull ever, ever down into lightless halls where her son was born, chambers that have never known the sun’s chariot nor the moon’s white eye. And she carries the name of his killer on her pale lips, Beowulf, etched there like a scar.
11
The Trophy and the Prize
From the safety of their bedchamber, the king and queen have listened to the battle between the Geats and the monster Grendel. Wealthow standing alone at a window and Hrothgar lying alone in his bed, they have heard such sounds as may pass through wood and stone and thatch. Cries of anger and of pain, the shattering of enormous timbers and the sundering of iron, sudden silences, the shouts of men and the howls of a demon. They have not spoken nor thought of sleep, but have only listened, waiting for that final quiet or some decisive noise, and now they hear the glad voices of weary men—the victory cheer rising from Heorot. King Hrothgar sits up, only half-believing, wondering if perhaps he’s fallen asleep and so is only dreaming these muffled cries from joyous, undefeated warriors.