“Is that a cheer?” he asks his wife. “Could that be a cry of victory?”
She doesn’t make reply, but only stands there at the window, looking out on cold and darkness, anxiously clutching a scarf, nervously wringing the cloth in her hands. It was a gift from the king, a precious scrap of silk from some land far away to the south, some fabled, sun-drenched place where it is always summer and dark-skinned men ride strange animals.
And now the door bursts open, banging loudly against the wall, and the king’s herald, Wulfgar, rushes into the room. Delight and relief glow in his eyes like a fever.
“My lord!” he gasps, winded and panting. “My lord Hrothgar! My lady! It is over! Beowulf has killed the demon! Grendel is dead!”
“Praise Odin.” Hrothgar sighs and clutches at his chest, at his racing heart. “Call the scops, Wulfgar. Spread the word! Tomorrow will be a glorious day of rejoicing, the likes of which this house has never seen!”
“I will, my lord,” answers Wulfgar, and he disappears again, leaving the door standing open.
Hrothgar stares at the empty doorway a moment, still waiting to awaken to the news of Beowulf’s death, to the sight of Grendel crouching there above him. He climbs out of bed and slowly crosses the room to stand with Wealthow. She’s stopped twisting the scarf, and there are tears in her eyes, but she’s still gazing out the window at the night. He places a hand gently on her shoulder, and she flinches.
“Our nightmare is over,” he says, and his hand moves from her shoulder and down toward her breast. “Come to bed, my sweet. Be with me in this hour of triumph.”
“Do not touch me,” she says and roughly pushes his hand aside. “Nothing is changed. Nothing.”
Hrothgar chews impatiently at his lower lip and glances back to their bed. “My kingdom must have an heir. I need a son, Wealthow.” He turns back to her, and Wealthow takes a small step nearer the window. “The terror that haunted us is passed, and it is time to do your duty.”
“My duty?” she scoffs, turning on him and letting the scarf slip through her fingers and fall to the floor between them. “Do not speak to me of duty, my lord. I will not hear it.”
“You are my wife,” Hrothgar begins, but she silences him with the wet glint of her eyes, with a cold smile and an expression of such utter contempt that he looks away again, down at the brightly colored swatch of silk where it has settled on the stone floor.
“You are a wicked old man,” she hisses. “And now that fortune and the deeds of greater men have delivered you from this ordeal, this calamity, you would bed me and have me bear your child?”
Hrothgar walks back to their bed and sits down again, staring at the palms of his hands. “Wealthow, may I not even enjoy this moment, these good tidings after so much sorrow and darkness?”
She turns to the window, setting her back to him.
“You may take whatever joy you can find, my lord, so long as you find it without me.”
“I should never have told you,” he mutters, clenching his fat and wrinkled hands into feeble fists. “It should have ever stayed my secret alone to bear.”
“My Lord Hrothgar is so awfully wise a man,” laughs Wealthow, a sour and derisive laugh. And then there is another, different sort of sound from the direction of Heorot Hall—the heavy pounding of a hammer.
“What are you doing?” asks Wiglaf.
“I would think that’s plain enough for anyone to see, dear Wiglaf,” replies Beowulf, and he goes back to his grisly work. He’s standing atop one of the long mead tables, using a blacksmith’s hammer to nail the monster’s severed arm up high on one of Heorot’s ornately carved columns. An iron spike has been driven through the bones of its wrist, and every time the hammer strikes the spike, it throws orange sparks.
“Fine. Then let me ask you this,” continues Wiglaf. “To what end are you doing it?”
Beowulf pauses and wipes sweat from his face. “They will want proof,” he replies. “And I am giving them proof.”
“Would it not have been proof enough it you’d left it lying on the floor where it fell?”
Beowulf laughs and pounds the nail in deeper. “Are you turning squeamish on me, Wiglaf? You are starting to sound like an old woman.”
“I am only wondering, my lord, if King Hrothgar and Queen Wealthow will be pleased to find you have adorned the walls of their hall with the dismembered claw of that foul creature.”
Beowulf stops hammering and steps back, admiring his handiwork hanging there upon the wooden beam. “I do not find it so unpleasant to look upon. How is it any different from the head of a boar, or the pelt of a bear, or, for that matter, the ivory tusks of a walrus?”
“My lord,” says Wiglaf, exhausted and exasperated. “It is hideous to look upon, so like the arm of a man—”
Beowulf turns and glares down at him from the tabletop. “Wiglaf, you stood against the fiend yourself. It was no man.”
“I did not say it was a man, only that in form it is not unlike the arm of a man.”
Beowulf laughs, then wipes his face again and looks at the hammer in his hand, then back to the arm hanging limply from the beam. “I will have them see what I have done this night. I will have it known to them all, so there can be no mistake. Tonight, heroes fought beneath the eaves of this place…this Heorot…and a great evil was laid low. Four men died—”
“Yes, Beowulf. Four men died,” says Wiglaf, hearing the knife’s edge of indignation in his voice and wishing it were not there. “And still they lie where they fell, because you are too busy with your…your trophy.”
Beowulf laughs again, and this time there’s something odd and brittle in that laugh, something Wiglaf has heard before in the laughter of madmen and warriors who have seen too much horror without the release of death.
“As I said, Wiglaf. You sound like a worrisome old woman. I do not hear Hondshew or Már complaining,” and he uses the hammer to motion toward the corpses on the floor. “We will send them on their way soon enough. Odin Langbard shall not close the doors of his hall to them just yet, nor I have forfeited their seats at Allfather’s table.” And then Beowulf laughs that strange laugh again and goes back to hammering the spike deeper into the column.
The laugh pricks at the hairs on the back on Wiglaf’s neck and arms, and he wonders if perhaps some darkness was released with Grendel’s blood, some spirit or nixie that may now have found purchase in Beowulf’s mind. Thick blood still leaks like pitch from the monster’s arm, and who can say what poison might lie therein? What taint? The blood flows downward, tracing its way along the grooves and lines carved into the wood. Wiglaf recognizes the scene depicted in the carving—Odin hanging from the boughs of the World Ash, Yggdrasil, pierced through by his own lance. Nine nights and nine days of pain, to win the wisdom of nine songs that would grant him power throughout the nine realms, and the gift of the eighteen runes and a swallow of the precious mead of the giants. The blood of Grendel winds its way slowly about the limbs of the tree and the shoulders of a god.
“So be it. You have always known best,” he tells Beowulf, and Beowulf nods and strikes the nail again, causing the entire arm to shudder and spit another gout of that lifeless ichor.
“You are tired, Wiglaf,” says Beowulf. “And maybe you are disappointed that you have not this night found your own hero’s death.
“As you say,” Wiglaf replies and turns away from his lord’s awful trophy to look instead upon the mutilated corpses of his four fallen countrymen. Olaf and the others have laid each man out on his shield and covered him over with his cape. And, in truth, he feels no disappointment at all that he is still among the living, and if he is ever to find his path to Valhalla, it will have to be upon some other battlefield. He glances back at Beowulf, busy with his hammering and still laughing to himself, and sees that Grendel’s blood has reached all the way to the gnarled and twisted roots of Yggdrasil.