There’s a low murmur of disappointment from the Danes, as if they are being cheated of some rightful and well-deserved prize. But a number of the men raise their swords to do as Wiglaf has ordered.
“Stop!” Beowulf commands, turning his horse to face the Frisian once again. The thanes look confused, but immediately lower their weapons and begin to back away.
“You think me a coward?” Beowulf asks the leader of the Frisians as he nudges his horse forward, until he is looming over the battered man.
“I think you are an old man,” replies the Frisian, standing up as straight as he can manage and looking Beowulf directly in the eyes. He has retrieved his weapon from the sand, a bearded ax, its iron head rusty and pitted but keen and slick with blood. “I think you’ve forgotten which end of an ax is sharp and how to wield a sword in battle. You watch from a safe distance, squatting on your pony, and then call the battle won by your own hand.”
Beowulf draws his sword and dismounts, never taking his eyes off the Frisian.
“Hear me, my lord,” says Wiglaf. “The king can never engage in direct battle.”
“And whose rule is that, anyway?” Beowulf asks without turning to face his advisor, and Wiglaf does not reply. The thanes have begun to form a loose circle, with Beowulf and the Frisian at its center.
“So,” says Beowulf to the Frisian, “you want your name added to the song of Beowulf? You think maybe that ballad should end with me slain by the blade of some netherland halfwit with no name that I have yet heard?”
“I am called Finn,” the man replies. “And I am a prince among my people. And my name shall be remembered forever.”
Beowulf nods and smiles, holding the pommel of his sword between thumb and forefinger, letting it swing this way and that like the arm of a deadly pendulum, the tip of the blade barely grazing the sand.
“Only if you kill me,” he tells the man. “Otherwise, you are nothing.” And Beowulf drives his sword into the sand at his feet, burying it halfway to the hilt, and he walks unarmed toward the Frisian.
“Give the king a weapon!” orders Wiglaf, and there are eager cries from the thanes:
“Take mine, Lord Beowulf!”
“No, take mine!”
“Kill the bastard with my sword!”
At least a dozen good blades are offered, but Beowulf waves them all away. He closes the space between himself and the Frisian, who stands his ground, gripping his ax and smiling as though this is a fight he has already won. Beowulf stops with scarcely ten feet remaining between them and begins loosening the leather straps on his breastplate. Still advancing on the Frisian warrior, he removes his mail and gauntlets and both leather greaves. Now less than five feet remains between him and Finn, and Beowulf is within reach of the warrior’s ax. Beowulf rips open his white woolen tunic and strikes his chest hard with his right fist.
“What are you doing?” asks Finn, staring at Beowulf’s naked torso, at the awful tapestry of scars there, the marks left by more battles than Beowulf could ever recall. The Frisian’s smile has faded, and he clutches his ax so tight his hands have gone white and bloodless.
“You think you’re the first to try to kill me, Finn, Prince of Frisia?” asks Beowulf. “Or even the hundredth?”
When Finn does not reply, Beowulf continues.
“Then let me tell you something, netherlander. Perhaps it is something you have not heard. The gods won’t allow me to find death at the head of your feeble ax. Neither will Odin Allfather let me die by a sword or lance or arrow…or be taken by the sea,” and Beowulf motions toward the waves behind Finn. “The gods will not even allow me to pass in my sleep…ripe as I am with age.” Then Beowulf strikes his bare chest again, harder than before.
“Plant your ax here, Finn of Frisia. Take my life.”
“Are you a madman?” asks the Frisian, and he begins to back away, holding his ax up in front of him. “Has some animal or demon spirit taken your mind? Are you bersërkr?”
“That may well be so,” replies Beowulf. “Am I not called the Wolf of the Bees, the bear who slays giant-kin and sea hags.”
“Take a sword and fight me like a man!”
“I don’t need a sword. I don’t need an ax. I need no weapon to lay you in your grave.”
“Someone give him a fucking sword,” Finn says to the Danish thanes. He’s sweating now, and his hands have begun to shake. “Give him a blade, or I’ll…I’ll…”
“You’ll what?” growls Beowulf. “Kill me? Then do it! Stop talking and cowering and fucking kill me!”
Finn looks down and is surprised to find the ocean lapping at his ankles; Beowulf has driven him all the way back to the sea. The Frisian grits his teeth, raises the ax above his left shoulder, and tries to raise it higher still. But he’s shaking so badly now that the weapon slips from his fingers and lands with a dull splash at his feet.
“Do you know why you can’t kill me, friend?” asks Beowulf. “Because I died years ago…when I was still a young man.” And Beowulf pulls the edges of his torn tunic closed, hiding his scarred chest from view, and when he looks once again at Finn there is pity in Beowulf’s gaze.
“It is as simple as that,” he says. “You cannot kill a ghost.” Then to his war captain, Beowulf says, “Give the prince a piece of gold and send him home to his kin. He has a story to tell.” And Beowulf, King of the Danes, climbs onto his horse and follows Wiglaf back up the slope, leaving the battlefield behind. Overhead, the winter sky is filled with black and gray wings, a riotous host of crows and gulls, vultures and ravens, already gathering to take their fill of the dead and dying.
And as time changes men and whittles away at the mountains themselves, so must men, trapped within time, change themselves and the world around them. So, too, have the fortifications begun in the distant days when the great-grandfather of Hrothgar ruled the Danes been changed by the will of King Beowulf. Using stone quarried from open pits along the high sea cliffs, fine new towers and stronger walls have been erected, a bulwark against foreign armies and the elements and anything else that might wish to do the people of this kingdom harm. Where once stood little more than a shabby cluster of thatched huts and muddy footpaths, there now rises a castle keep that might be the envy of any Roman or Byzantine general, that Persian or Arab rulers might look upon and know that the Northmen have also learned something of the arts of warfare and defense, of architecture and the mathematics needed to raise a stronghold to impress even the gods in Ásgard. And on this day, after the battle on the shore and the routing of the Frisians, Beowulf stands alone on the great stone causeway connecting the two turrets of Heorot. A hundred feet below him, in a snow-covered courtyard paved with granite and slate flagstones, Wiglaf is preparing to address the villagers who have begun to gather there.
Beowulf turns away, pulling his furs tighter and turning instead to face the sea, that vast gray-green expanse reaching away to the horizon. The frigid wind bites at any bit of exposed skin, but the bite is clean. After the beach and the things he saw there, the things he said and did and those things that were said and done in his name, he greatly desires to feel clean.
Perhaps, he thinks, this is why so many men are turning from Odin and his brethren to the murdered Roman Christ and the nameless god who is held to be his father. That promise, that they will be made somehow pure and clean again and freed from the weight and consequences of the choices they have made.
Beowulf sighs and leans forward on the roughhewn merion, watching as countless snowflakes swirl lazily down to the waves, where they melt and lose themselves in the heaving sea. He tries hard to recall how it was in the days before he left Geatland and the service of Hygelac and came to Hrothgar’s aid, when he welcomed rather than dreaded the sight of the sea and the thought of all the hidden terrors of that deep.