“This is Hrunting,” Unferth says, and holds the weapon up for Beowulf to see. “It belonged to my father Ecglaf and to my father’s father before him.” The blade glints in the dim lights of the bedchamber, and Beowulf can see that it is an old and noble weapon. Unferth holds it out to him.
“Please,” he says. “It is my gift to you. Take my sword, Beowulf.”
Beowulf nods and accepts the blade, inspecting the ornate grip and pommel, gilded and jeweled and graven with scenes of battle. A prominent fuller runs the length of the sword, lightening the weapon. “It is fine, and I am grateful for your gift. But a sword like this…it will be no fit match for demon magic.”
“Still,” says Unferth, “Hrunting may be more than it seems. My father told me the blade was tempered in blood, and he boasted it had never failed anyone who carried it into battle.”
“A shame he cannot speak of its might from personal experience,” Wiglaf says, and Beowulf tells him to be quiet.
“Something given with a good heart,” Beowulf says to Unferth, “that has its own magic. And it has a good weight to it, friend Unferth”
“I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”
“And I am sorry I mentioned that you murdered your brothers…they were hasty words.”
Wiglaf snorts. “The truth spoken in haste remains the truth.”
Beowulf holds the sword Hrunting up before him, admiring the ancient weapon, the runes worked into its iron blade.
“You know, Unferth,” he says, “if I track Grendel’s dam to her lair, I may not return. Your ancestral sword might be lost with me.”
Unferth nods once and folds his arms. “As long as it is with you, it will never be lost.”
And now Beowulf turns to face Wiglaf. “And you, mighty Wiglaf. Are you still with me?”
“You are a damned fool to follow this creature back to whatever fetid hole serves as its burrow,” he says, instead of answering the question put to him.
“Undoubtedly,” replies Beowulf. “But are you with me.”
Wiglaf laughs again, a laugh with no joy or hope to it. “To the bloody end,” he says.
“And where are we to seek the demon?” Beowulf asks the king. At first Hrothgar only shrugs and scrapes the blade of his sword across the floor, but then he clears his throat and raises his head to look Beowulf in the eyes.
“There is perhaps one living who knows,” says Hrothgar. “A man from the uplands. I have heard him speak of them, Grendel and its mother, and he has told stories of the places where they dwell. Unferth, he can take you to speak with this man.”
“Will you stay behind, my king?” asks Wealthow, still standing at the window, speaking with her back to the room and all assembled there. “While Lord Beowulf once more seeks his death that your kingdom might be saved, will you stay behind with the women and children and the old men?”
Hrothgar coughs and wipes his mouth on the back of his right hand. “I am an old man,” he says. “I would be no more to Beowulf than a burden. And I doubt there remains a horse in all my lands with the heart and strong back needed to bear me across the moorlands. I am sorry, Beowulf—”
“Do not apologize,” says Beowulf, holding up a hand and interrupting Hrothgar before he can finish. “It is not necessary, my lord. In your day, you fought wars, and you slew dragons. Now your place is here, with your people. With your queen.”
At this, Wealthow shakes her head and mumbles something under her breath but does not turn from the window.
“For my part,” continues Beowulf, “I’d rather die avenging my thanes than live only to grieve the loss of them. If the Fates decree that I shall ever return to my homeland, better I can assure my kinsmen that I sought vengeance against this murderer than left that work to other men.”
“A fool throws his life away,” says Wealthow very softly, and Hrothgar sighs, shaking his head.
“All those who live await the moment of their death,” Beowulf says, turning toward the Queen of Heorot Hall, wishing that she would likewise turn to face him, wanting to see her violet eyes once more before he takes his leave. “That is the meaning of this life. The long wait for death to claim us. A warrior’s only solace is that he might find glory before death finds him. When I am gone, what else shall remain of me, my lady, except the stories men tell of my deeds?”
But she does not make reply, and she does not turn to look at Beowulf.
“We should not tarry,” says Wiglaf. “I’d rather do this thing by daylight than by dark.”
So Hrothgar bids them farewell and promises new riches upon their return, coffers of silver and gold. And then Beowulf and Wiglaf follow Unferth from the bedchamber and back down to the muddy stockade.
13
The Pact
They find the uplander of whom Hrothgar spoke tending to his horse in the stables, not far from the village gates. He is named Agnarr, tall and wiry and old enough to be Beowulf’s own father, and his beard is almost as white as freshly fallen snow. Only by the sheerest happenstance did he escape the slaughter of the previous evening, having business elsewhere in the village, and now he is readying for the hard ride back to his farm. At first, when Unferth asks him to tell all he knows of the monsters and the whereabouts of their lair, the man is suspicious and reluctant to speak of the matter.
“Are these days not evil enough without such talk?” he asks, and lays a heavy wool blanket across the back of his piebald mare. The horse is nervous and snorts and stamps her hooves in the hay. “You see? She knows what visited us in the night.”
“If these days be evil,” says Beowulf, handing Agnarr his saddle, a heavy contraption of leather and wood, “then is it not our place to make them less so?”
The old man takes the saddle from Beowulf and stands staring indecisively back at Unferth and the two Geats. “Have you seen the tracks?” he asks. “They are everywhere this morning. I do not doubt the spoor would be easy enough to follow back across the moors.”
“There is the forest,” Unferth says, “and bogs, and many stony places where we might lose the trail.”
“Are you Beowulf?” asks Agnarr. “The one who took the monster Grendel’s arm?”
“One and the same,” replies Beowulf. “But it seems I did not finish the job I came here to do. Tell me what you know, and I may yet put an end to this terror.”
Agnarr stares at the Geat a very long while, his hesitancy plain to see, but at last he takes a deep breath and then begins to speak.
“It is an ancient terror,” the old man sighs, then saddles the mare. “In my day, I have glimpsed them from afar, the pair of them, if indeed they be what troubles the King’s hall. They might be trolls, I have supposed, or they might be something that has no proper name. The one you fought, Grendel, and another, which looked almost like a woman. It moved like a woman moves. It had breasts—”
“We know what they are,” says Unferth impatiently, and he glances toward the stable doors. “We would have you tell us where we might find them.”
“As I have said, I cannot say for certain that it was she who visited Heorot last night and did this murder. I only know what I have seen.”
“Where?” asks Beowulf a second time, more brusquely than before.
“I am coming to that,” replies Agnarr, and he ties a heavy cloth sack onto the saddle, looping it through an iron ring. “I just wanted to be clear what I know and what I do not know.”
The old man pauses, stroking his horse’s mane, then continues. “These two you ask after,” he says, “they do not live together, I think. Not many leagues from here, east, then north toward the coast, and past the forest, there is a tarn. Deep, it is. So deep that no man has ever sounded its bottom. But you will know it by three gnarled trees—three oaks—that grow above it, clustered upon an overhanging bank, their roots intertwined.” The old man tangles his fingers tightly together to demonstrate.