The teeth of the dragon, thinks Beowulf, but he pushes the unpleasant thought aside. They are only stone, and he has seen the likes of them before. He takes a few steps into the cavern, playing the torchlight out across the pool, when suddenly it gutters and goes out, as though it has been snuffed by a breath both unseen and unfelt. The blackness rushes in about him, and it’s little consolation that a lesser man might now retreat and relight the torch.
The oil from the tarn has burned out, he tells himself. It was no more than that. I am alone in the dark, but it is only the dark of any cave.
But then, suddenly, an eldritch glow comes to take the place of the extinguished torch, a bright chartreuse light like the shine of a thousand fireflies sparking all at once. And Beowulf realizes that this new illumination is coming from Hrothgar’s golden horn, hanging on his belt. He reaches for it cautiously, for surely anything that shines with such radiance must be hot to the touch. But the metal is as cool as ever. Cold, in fact. He tosses the useless torch aside and unhooks the horn from his belt. There is nothing healthy in this new light, nothing natural, though he cannot deny it holds a fascination and that there is some unnerving beauty about it.
“So the demon shuns the light of the world,” he says, speaking only half to himself, captivated by the horn’s unearthly splendor. “But it also knows I cannot find my way down to it without some lamp to guide me, so I am given this, a ghostly beacon fit only for dwarves, that I may arrive and yet not offend her eyes.”
For a moment, he stares out across the lake, seeing nothing, hearing nothing but the steady drip of water from the cavern’s roof and the indistinct babble of the stream from the tunnel flowing gently about his legs into the pool.
“Show yourself, aeglaeca!” he shouts, expecting if not her answer at least the company of his own echo. But there comes neither. Only the sounds of water, which seem to make the silence that much more absolute.
“This is not like you!” Beowulf shouts, much louder than before. “You were bold enough when you stole into Heorot to murder sleeping men! Have you now lost your nerve, she-troll?” But once again there is no reply and no echo.
“Then I shall come down to you!” he bellows as loudly as he can. And Beowulf begins to undress, for his iron breastplate and mail are heavy and would surely drag him straight to the muddy bottom of the subterranean lake. “We will meet in whatever dank place you now cower,” he cries out across the water, “if that is how you would have it!”
Does she hear me? Is she listening? Is she crouched out there somewhere, biding her time, laughing at me?
Beowulf leaves his armor and belt, his tunic and breeches and boots, bundled together and lying in a dry place at the edge of the pool. Carrying only Hrunting and the golden horn, which is glowing even more brightly than before, he wades out into the icy water. The floor of the lake is slimy underneath his bare feet, and once or twice he slips, almost losing his balance. When the water has risen as high as his chest, Beowulf draws as deep a breath as he may and slips below the surface. Holding the horn out before him like a lantern, he swims along the bottom. The pool is stained with peat from the tarn and by silt, and the glow of Hrothgar’s horn reaches only a few feet into the red-brown murk. But soon he can see the bottom, strewn with the bones of men and many sorts of animals jumbled together—horses and wild boars, deer and auroch, the toothsome skulls of great bears and the wide, pronged antlers of bull moose. Her dining hall, then, this lake below the hill, and for long ages must she have returned to this place with her victims, feeding where none will disturb her.
Nestled in among the bones are gigantic white crayfish, their spiny shells gone as pale as milk down here in the eternal night, and they wave their huge pincers menacingly as Beowulf passes. There are other things, as well, eels as white as the crayfish and large as sharks, their long jaws armed with row upon row of needle-sharp teeth. Whenever they come too near, he fends them off with Unferth’s sword. Only once does the blade find its mark, carving a long gash in a serpentine body and sending the eel slithering away to safety. Blood clouds the water, making it still harder for Beowulf to find his way.
He rises for another gulp of air, only to discover that this far out the ceiling of the cave has grown unexpectedly low, now mere inches above the pool. He can see that it slopes down to meet the water only a few feet ahead, so this will be his last breath unless he chooses to turn back.
“If the Norns decree I should survive this ordeal,” he says, wiping water from his eyes, “then by the gods, I will teach you to swim, Wiglaf.” And then he takes another breath and submerges again.
Below him, the grisly carpet of bones has thinned out, and Beowulf soon comes upon an immense cleft in the lake’s floor, a wide black chasm beckoning him on to still-greater and more terrible depths. A weak but persistent current flowing into the hole tugs at him, and he hesitates only a moment, sensing this must surely be the path that will lead him to Grendel’s mother. There is no knowing how far it might extend, if it will ever come to another pocket of air, but he pushes on, regardless.
And before Beowulf has gone very far, the current has grown markedly stronger, so that he hardly has to swim at all. The chasm narrows, becoming another tunnel, and the current sucks him helplessly along its moss-slicked course. The golden horn glows more brightly than ever, but it is cold comfort indeed that he will not die in utter darkness. The spent air filling his lungs is aching to escape, and his heart pounds loudly in his ears. The tunnel becomes narrower still, so that he is dragged roughly along this stone gullet, his flesh cut and battered by the pockets of quartz crystals and by every irregularity in the rock. And still the tunnel grows narrower. Soon, he thinks, he will be able to go no farther, so constricted will be this passageway, and as he lacks the strength and air to fight his way back against the current, he will drown here. This will be his grave, and the mother of the demon Grendel will have won. He feels his grip on Hrunting growing slack, and the golden horn almost slips from his fingers. Oblivion begins to press in at the edges of his mind, and Beowulf closes his eyes and waits to die.
But then the tunnel releases its hold on him, and he is buoyed suddenly upward, and Beowulf finds himself gasping at the surface of another underground pool. The current carries him onto a rocky shore, where he lies coughing and vomiting gouts of salty water, coming slowly back to himself. He opens his stinging eyes, blinking and squinting, trying to force them into focus.
“Where have you brought me to, demon?” he croaks, then begins to cough again.
“To me,” replies a voice from somewhere overhead, a voice that is at once beautiful and loathsome and fearsome to hear. “Is that not where you wished to find yourself, here with me?”
Beowulf rises slowly onto hands and knees, rough bits of gravel biting into his exposed skin. “You are the mother of the monster Grendel?” he asks the voice, then coughs up more water.
“He was my son,” the voice says. “But, I assure you, he was no monster.”
“Your voice,” says Beowulf, rolling over onto his back, turning to face the voice and brandishing Hrunting. “Your voice…it’s not what I would have expected of a sea hag and the mother of a troll.”
“He was no troll,” the voice replies, and now Beowulf thinks that there’s a hint of anger there.