“Show yourself, beast!” Beowulf calls out as best he can, his voice still raw from having swallowed, then spat up so much of the pool. “Let me see you.”
“In time. Do not hurry so to meet your doom.”
“Bitch,” he hisses and spits into the mud. Sitting upright, fighting back dizziness and nausea, his vision begins to clear. And at last Beowulf looks for the first time upon the strange realm into which the current has delivered him. At once he knows this can be no ordinary cavern, but instead the belly of some colossus. The fyrweorm slain by Beow, perhaps, just as Unferth said, and now its calcified ribs rise toward the ceiling like the arches of Hel’s own hall. They glow blue-green with an unearthly phosphorescence, as do the walls, and Beowulf sees that there is a mighty hoard of treasure heaped all about the floor and banked high along the walls. In some places, the stones and those titan ribs are encrusted with a dazzling mantle of gold and gemstones.
Slowly, he gets to his feet, clutching Hrunting and holding Hrothgar’s horn out before him. Its shine illuminates more of the cavern floor before him, and Beowulf can see one corner heaped high with the rotting corpses of recently dead thanes, their armor ripped apart as though it had been no more than birch bark, their bellies gutted, their faces obliterated by claws and teeth. And Beowulf also sees the stone slab where the body of Grendel now rests. The monster’s severed arm lies propped in place against its mangled shoulder. The corpse is a shriveled, pitiable thing, a gray husk devoid of any of its former threat, and Beowulf finds it hard to believe this could be the same creature he battled two nights before. Above the corpse and the slab hangs a broadsword, sheathed and mounted on iron brackets, a sword so large and heavy no mortal man could ever hope to lift it, a sword that might well have been forged in the furnaces of the Frost Giants.
“Does it pain you,” Beowulf says, taking a single cautious step toward the altar, “to see him dead? To see him lying broken and so diminished?”
“You do not yet know pain,” the voice says. “As yet, that word means nothing to you, little man.” And then there’s a scrabbling, scratching sound from somewhere close behind him, and Beowulf turns quickly about, peering into the shadows and the eerie blue-green light of the cavern for its source. But there’s no sign of whatever might have made the noise, no evidence except the taunting voice to say he’s not alone. Beowulf holds the golden horn still higher.
“I see you brought me treasure,” the voice says.
“I have brought you nothing but death,” he replies.
And now Beowulf catches sight of something there amongst the hoarded riches, what appears to be a golden statue, though a statue of what he cannot say. Perhaps it was an idol, long ago, for he has heard stories of ancient cults and the old religion once practiced by the Danes, of blood sacrifices made by men and women who did not hold Odin as the highest among the Æsir. Sacrifices to goddesses said to inhabit especially deep lakes, though this statue surely resembles no goddess. It is a grotesque thing, as though its creators had in mind some hideous amalgam of a lizard and a sea beast. Its eyes are lapis lazuli, and its coarse mane seems to have been woven from a golden thread. Beowulf turns back toward the altar, and he gazes in awe at the giant sword hanging there above Grendel’s body.
“Your beautiful horn,” the voice says. “It glows so…delightfully.”
And once again he hears that scurrying from somewhere close behind him, and this time Beowulf does not turn, but only glances back over his shoulder. Light reflecting off the pool dances across the walls of the cave and across the statue. Something seems different about it, as though it subtly shifted position—the angle of its head, the arrangement of its reptilian limbs—when he looked away. But this must be only some trick of the cave’s peculiar lighting, some deceit his eyes have played upon his mind.
“Show yourself,” he says. “I have not come so far, through flood and muck, to bandy words with a shade.”
“You have come because I have called for you,” the voice replies, and now Beowulf does turn to face the statue once again. But it is vanished, gone. Before he can long ponder its disappearance, there’s a loud splash from the pool, as though something has fallen from the wall into the water. Only a loose stone, perhaps, but he raises Hrunting and watches the pool.
“I have come to avenge those who were slain while they slept,” he says. “I have come to seek justice for the thirteen good men who sailed the whale’s-road and fought with me.”
Ripples begin spreading out across the surface, creating small waves that lap against the shore, and from the shimmering water rises the likeness of a woman, entirely naked and more beautiful than any Beowulf has ever before beheld or imagined. There is an odd metallic glint to her complexion, as though her skin has been dusted with gold, and all about her there is a glow like the rising sun after a long and bitter night. Her flaxen hair is pulled back into a single braid, so long that it reaches almost to her feet. Her pale blue eyes shine bright and pure, as though blazing with some inner fire. And then she speaks, and it is the same voice that has mocked him since he entered the dragon’s belly.
“Are you the one they call Beowulf?” she asks. “The wolf of the bees? The bear? Such a strong man you are. A man with the strength of a king in him. The king you will one day become.”
“What do you want of me, demon?”
She moves gracefully, fearlessly, toward him, somehow treading on the surface of the water. Her long braid swings from side to side, seeming almost to undulate with a life all its own, flicking like a serpent or the tail of an excited animal.
“I know that underneath your glamour you’re as much a monster as my son Grendel. Perhaps more so.”
Beowulf takes a step back from the edge of the pool.
“My glamour?” he asks.
“One needs a glamour to become a king,” she replies. “That men will follow you. That they will fear you.”
And now, in hardly the time it takes to draw a breath, she has reached the shore and is standing before him, her lustrous skin and twitching braid dripping onto the stones at her feet.
“You will not bewitch me,” he growls, and slashes at her throat with Hrunting, expecting to see her head parted cleanly from her shoulders and toppling back into the pool from whence she has risen. But she grabs the blade, moving more quickly than his eyes can follow. She holds it fast, and try though he might, Beowulf cannot wrest it from her grip. She smiles, and dark blood oozes from her palm, flowing onto the blade of Unferth’s ancestral sword.
“And I know,” she says, gazing directly into Beowulf’s eyes. “A man like you could own the greatest tale ever sung. The story of your bravery, your greatness, would live on when everything now alive is gone to dust.”
And now Beowulf sees that where her blood has touched the iron blade it has begun to steam and dissolve, the way icicles melt in bright sunshine.
“Beowulf,” she says, “it has been a long time since a man has come to visit me.”
And then she pushes hard against Hrunting, shedding more of her corrosive blood, and the entire blade is liquefied in an instant, spilling onto the ground between them in dull spatters of silver. The hilt falls from Beowulf’s hand and clatters loudly against the rocks, and his fingers have begun to tingle. And he feels her inside his head, her thoughts moving in amongst his own. He gasps and shakes his head, trying to force her out.
“I don’t need…a sword…to kill you.”
“Of course you don’t, my love.”
“I slew your son…without a sword.”
“I know,” she purrs. “You are so very strong.”
She reaches out, her fingertips brushing gently, lovingly, against his cheek, and already the gash in her palm has healed. Beowulf can see himself reflected in her blue eyes, and his pupils have swollen until his own eyes seem almost black.