Beowulf (2 page)

Then Beowulf got to his feet, and strode up the hall to stand before the High Seat where Hygelac sat with his small son against his knee. ‘My lord Hygelac, I ask your leave to go on a sea-faring.'

Hygelac looked at his young kinsman keenly. ‘Maybe I will give you leave to follow the sea-roads again; but first tell me what is in your heart.'

‘When my father needed a friend at his shoulder, he found such a one in this Hrothgar of the Danes,' Beowulf said. ‘Shelter he gave to my father and my mother, and to me also when the time came that she bore me; and my first memories are of lying on a wolfskin before his fire. He paid the Wergild, the fine, for the man my father slew, and made peace between him and the Wylfings, so that a time came in my sixth summer, when my father might return home to his own kind again. Now it seems that Hrothgar himself stands sorely in need of a friend and it is time for me to repay the debt.'

Hygelac bent his head, and trouble lay like a shadow on his face. ‘I thought so. I thought so . . . Beowulf, sister's-son, you are foremost among my warriors, and save for the boy here, you are almost the only kinsman left to me; and I grieve to see you go upon such a perilous sea-faring. Yet a man should pay his debts. Go then, but remember that there will be anxious eyes watching here from the cliff tops for your returning sail at sea.'

H
ROTHGAR'S
Coast Warden, sitting his horse on the cliff top northward of Heorot, saw a strange vessel running in from the open sea, between the high headlands at the mouth of the fjord. A war-galley, long and slim and swift; and the light blinked on the painted shields hung along her bulwarks and the grey battle-gear of the men who swung to her oars. Her square striped sail fell slack as the headland took the wind from it, and then came rattling down, and urged by her rowers she headed like some eager many-legged sea creature for the low shelving beach where the cliffs dropped at the head of the fjord.

Frowning, the Coast Warden wheeled his horse, and touching his heel to its flank, urged it into the cliff path that looped down in the same direction. He came out through the furze and the salt-burned bush-tangle above the shore, just as the strange war-boat came lightly in through the shallows. Her crew unshipped their oars and sprang overboard into the white oar-thresh while it still foamed along her sides, and now they were running her up the shingle to strand on the tide-line.

Fifteen of them, the Coast Warden counted; and the sunlight sparkled on their weapons as they swung their painted linden shields clear of the bulwarks; and yet they had not the wolf-pack look of a raiding band. Again he touched his heel to his horse's flank and, spear in hand, rode down into their midst, where they turned at the sound of hooves and stood waiting for his coming, gathered about the upreared dragon prow of their vessel.

To one who was clearly the leader among them, a very tall man whose eyes were coloured like deep water on a cloudy day, the Coast Warden spoke boldly, yet courteously enough. ‘Who are you, strangers from across the sea, and what purpose brings you to this landfall on the Danish shore? You come in war array, armed as for battle, yet you have not the look of those who come to burn farms and drive off women and cattle.'

‘In truth, though we come in war array, the battle that we seek is not with the Danish folk,' the tall man said. ‘As to who we are—I am Beowulf, sister's-son to Hygelac King of the Geats, and these with me are my sword-brothers and hearth-companions. As to our purpose—a few days since, word came to Hygelac's Court that Hrothgar of the Danes was in need of champions to rid him of the monster that walks his hall at night; and so we are come, following the Whale's Road southward across the grey Baltic from our own strand.'

For a long moment, while the surf creamed on the shore, the Coast Warden sat his horse and looked at them, his eyes narrowed under his brows; he was old and a judge of men. Then he nodded. ‘So. It is long and long that Hrothgar and all his folk have waited for such champions. Come then, and I will set you on your way to the King's hall.'

‘First we must make all secure here,' said Beowulf, and he reached up his hand and set it on the swell of the painted dragon-prow above him, caressingly as though it were a living thing. ‘Horse or vessel should be tended first of all things at a journey's end.'

‘Have no fear for your proud vessel. I will send trustworthy men of my own to make all fast with a barricade of oars against the high tide.' The old man was eager now. ‘If you are indeed the champions you seem, let Hrothgar my lord wait no longer, for he has waited over long already for help,' and he pointed along a rough track that wound up from the beach through the furze and the hazel thickets. ‘See, our way lies yonder.'

In single file, for the track was too narrow to walk abreast, Beowulf and his comrades followed the old Warden on his horse up from the head of the fjord, a grey mailed serpent of men, the forged rings of their battle-sarks ringing as they moved. On the crest of the ridge where the wind-shaped trees fell back, the track changed abruptly into a paved road, and there they checked, with the sea wind humming against their mailed shoulders. Behind them was the way home, the fjord running out between its nesses to the open sea, and the war-boat lying like a basking seal among the brown sea-wrack and the drift-wood on the high tide line. Ahead of them lay the unknown and the hazard that they had come to seek. From their feet the land dropped away into a shallow vale, then rose again to sombre moors inland, and a mile off, in the trough of the vale between the coast and the moors, Beowulf, narrowing his eyes into the sunlight, could see a great hall rising among a scatter of lesser roofs, the green and brown of tilled land, the darker dapple of orchard trees. And straight towards the hall, purposeful as the flight of an arrow, ran the paved road on which he stood.

‘Yonder is Heorot,' said the Coast Warden's voice in his ear. ‘The road will take you to the very door-sill. I must be away back to the coast, but do you go forward now, my friends, and have no fear for your ship; she shall be well tended.' And without another word he swung his horse in a half circle and was gone, trampling away down the rough track behind them. And Beowulf and his companions went forward alone.

Down from the high coast-wise ridge they strode, into the green pasture lands where the cattle and horses grazed, through the cornland where the young barley was already a mist of green over the dark earth, between the first heather-thatched homesteads of the settlement, each with its bee skeps along the wall and its few apple trees, where children and dogs and lean pigs were playing together, and women grinding corn or spinning in their doorways looked up to watch the strangers pass.

It all seemed peaceful enough—now, with the sun still high in the sky.

In the midst of the settlement the roof of the King's hall rose higher and higher as they drew towards it; Heorot the Hart, heather-thatched like all the rest, but with the gilded antlers on the gable ends proudly up-tossed towards the sky. Straight to the foreporch doorway ran the paved road; and up it, their war-gear sounding on them as the feathers of wild swans sound in flight, strode the fifteen Geats.

In the doorway one of the household thanes stood leaning on a spear; a dark man with beads of yellow sea-washed amber round his neck. His gaze was upon them as they came to a halt before him; and he asked, as the Coast Warden had asked, ‘Who are you, strangers who come in war-harness to the threshold of Hrothgar the King? And what is it that you seek here?'

‘As to who we are—I am sister's-son to Hygelac, King of the Geats, and these with me are my sword-brothers and hearth-companions,' Beowulf replied, as he had done before. ‘As to what we seek here—we would have word with Hrothgar the King, for our business is with him.'

‘Wait then, and I will carry your name to Hrothgar,' said the man, and turned back into the fire-flickered shadows behind him, from which came men's voices and the smell of roast meat.

Beowulf and his comrades sat down on the guest-bench in the sunlight before the door, but they had only a short time to wait before the door-thane returned, and at his bidding they stacked their shields and ashen spears against the wall, and followed him into the hall where Hrothgar's house-thanes sat at meat.

Great and splendid indeed was Heorot to the gaze of Beowulf as he stepped across the door-sill on to the many-coloured flagstones of the floor. Down the midst of the hall the fires blazed on their three hearths, and the smoke curled upwards to find its way out through the openings in the roof high overhead, and through the drifting haze that hung about the place he saw the warriors at the long tables, with mead horns and boar flesh and huge piles of barley cakes before them; saw too the walls and roof-trees rich with worked hangings and ornaments of white walrus ivory, and the shields and spears of the warriors hung above the mead benches.

Hrothgar's High Seat was not midway up the hall, as was the High Seat in Hygelac's hall, but on a raised dais at the far end, and so the Geatish warriors must walk the full length of the place, between the long trestle tables, to come to him; and all tongues fell silent and every eye was turned upon them, but especially upon their tall leader, as they passed.

At the step of the dais Beowulf halted and stood proudly confronting Hrothgar; and the Danish King leaned forward, hands clenched on the foreposts of his great carved seat, to stare down at him.