Beowulf (4 page)

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the darkest hour of the spring night Grendel came to Heorot as he had come so many times before, up from his lair and over the high moors, through the mists that seemed to travel with him under the pale moon; Grendel, the Night-Stalker, the Death-Shadow. He came to the foreporch and snuffed about it, and smelled the man-smell, and found that the door which had stood unlatched for him so long was, barred and bolted. Snarling in rage that any man should dare attempt to keep him out, he set the flat of his talon-tipped hands against the timbers and burst them in.

Dark as it was, the hall seemed to fill with a monstrous shadow at his coming; a shadow in which Beowulf, half springing up, then holding himself in frozen stillness, could make out no shape nor clear outline save two eyes filled with a wavering greenish flame.

The ghastly corpse-light of his own eyes showed Grendel the shapes of men as it seemed sleeping, and he did not notice among them one who leaned up on his elbow. Laughing in his throat, he reached out and grabbed young Hondscio who lay nearest to him, and almost before his victim had time to cry out, tore him limb from limb and drank the warm blood. Then, while the young warrior's dying shriek still hung upon the air, he reached for another. But this time his hand was met and seized in a grasp such as he had never felt before; a grasp that had in it the strength of thirty men. And for the first time he who had brought fear to so many caught the taste of it himself, knowing that at last he had met his match and maybe his master.

Beowulf leapt from the sleeping-bench and grappled him in the darkness; and terror broke over Grendel in full force, the terror of a wild animal trapped; so that he thought no more of his hunting but only of breaking the terrible hold upon his arm and flying back into the night and the wilderness, and he howled and bellowed as he struggled for his freedom. Beowulf set his teeth and summoned all his strength and tightened his grip until the sinews cracked; and locked together they reeled and staggered up and down the great hall. Trestles and sleeping-benches went over with crash on crash as they strained this way and that, trampling even through the last red embers of the dying fire; and the very walls seemed to groan and shudder as though the stout timbers would burst apart. And all the while Grendel snarled and shrieked and Beowulf fought in silence save for his gasping breaths.

Outside, the Danes listened in horror to the turmoil that seemed as though it must split Heorot asunder; and within, the Geats had sprung from their sleeping-benches sword in hand, forgetful of their powerlessness against the Troll-kind, but in the dark, lit only by stray gleams of bale-fire from the monster's eyes, they dared not strike for fear of slaying their leader; and when one or other of them did contrive to get in a blow, the sword blade glanced off Grendel's charmed hide as though he were sheathed in dragon scales.

At last, when the hall was wrecked to the walls, the Night-Stalker gathered himself for one last despairing effort to break free. Beowulf's hold was as fierce as ever; yet none the less the two figures burst apart—and Grendel with a frightful shriek staggered to the doorway and through it, and fled wailing into the night, leaving his arm and shoulder torn from the roots in the hero's still unbroken grasp.

Beowulf sank down sobbing for breath on a shattered bench, and his fellows came crowding round him with torches rekindled at the scattered embers of the fire; and together they looked at the thing he held across his knees. ‘Not even the Troll-kind could live half a day with a wound such as that upon them,' one of them said; and Waegmund agreed. ‘He is surely dead as though he lay here among the benches.'

‘Hondscio is avenged, at all events,' said Beowulf. ‘Let us hang up this thing for a trophy, and a proof that we do not boast idly as the wind blows over.'

So in triumph they nailed up the huge scaly arm on one of the roof beams above the High Seat of Hrothgar.

The first thin light of day was already washing over the moors, and almost before the grizzly thing was securely in place the Danes returned to Heorot. They came thronging in to beat Beowulf in joyful acclaim upon his bruised and claw-marked shoulders, and gaze up in awe at the huge arm whose taloned fingers seemed even now to be striving to claw down the roof beam. Many of them called for their horses and followed the blood trail that Grendel had left in his flight up through the tilled land and over the moors until they came to the deep sea-inlet where the monster had his lair, and saw the churning waves between the rocks all fouled and boiling with blood. Meanwhile others set all things on foot for a day of rejoicing, and the young men wrestled together and raced their horses against each other, filling the day with their merrymaking, while the King's harper walked to and fro by himself under the apple trees, making a song in praise of Beowulf ready for the evening's feasting which this night would not end when darkness fell.

At last Hrothgar and his Queen came from their own place, with his chief thanes and her women behind them, to hear the story of the night's battle and gaze up at the bloody trophy nailed to the roof beam.

‘I hoped to force the Night-Prowler down on to one of the sleeping-benches and there choke the foul life out of him,' Beowulf said, rubbing his shoulders. ‘In that I failed, for despite all my strength he broke free of Heorot after all. Yet as you see, he left his arm with me as ransom for the rest of his carcass; and it is in my mind that not even Grendel may long outlive such a wound as he carries with him.'

Hrothgar gazed long and silently at the arm, then brought his gaze down to the face of the young warrior, and his eyes were bright as they had not been for many a long day. ‘So it is in my mind also,' he said. ‘Much sorrow have we suffered at Grendel's hands, my folk and I; many staunch warriors I have wept for in the years since Heorot was built—this hall that should have been our joy.'

‘But the sorrow is passed, and now it shall be your joy indeed,' Beowulf said.

‘Aye, now it shall be our joy indeed . . . And that is your doing. Well might Ecgtheow your father rejoice in Valhalla in the fame that you have won; well may your mother if she yet lives praise the All-Father for the son she bore—the son she bore at my court, to be a friend and champion to me in my old age.' Hrothgar laid his arm across Beowulf's great shoulders and was near to weeping. ‘From this day forward you shall be a son to me in love, and there is nothing that I would give to my own sons that you may not have from me for the asking.'

The hall was cleaned of all signs of the struggle that had raged there in the night, fresh fern was strewn about the hearths, benches and trestle boards brought in to replace those that had been broken, and the walls were hung with new embroideries from the chests in the women's quarters, on which the cunning worm-knots and the serpent-tailed birds glimmered with gold in the light of the re-kindled fires. And hasty preparations were made for a feast such as had never been known in Heorot before, even on the first night of all. Hrothgar made Beowulf sit beside him in the High Seat, and all down the hall Danes and Geats sat side by side, drinking deep to Beowulf the Hero from the great mead horns, and making loudly merry, only falling silent to listen while the harper sang the triumph song that he had made under the apple trees earlier that day.

When the feasting was at its height Hrothgar called to certain of his thanes. ‘Now the time has come for gift making. Go now, my friends, and bring in those gifts that I have made ready for the Geatish champions who have so nobly earned them.'

And the men went out, and returned bowed under the weight of the precious things they bore, and set them down in a gleaming pile before the King.

Then the King gave to Beowulf a magnificent gold-embroidered banner, and a helmet and a battle-sark and a drinking cup all curiously worked with gold, and a great heavy sword wrought by the dwarf-kind long ago in the dark caverns beneath the earth. Then eight splendid horses were led into the hall and brought to the Geatish leader to touch their proud crests in token of acceptance; and on the foam-white back of the finest of them was strapped Hrothgar's own war saddle, gold-sheathed and rich with red coral and yellow Baltic amber. For each of Beowulf's companions also there was a sword as fine as their leader's. ‘Fourteen swords,' said Hrothgar, as he gave the last into the last warrior's hand. ‘Sorely I grieve that there is no fifteenth. But a sword is of little worth to a dead man; and so for Hondscio who died last night—this.' And he held out to Beowulf a bag of gold arm-rings that had been weighed out earlier that day. ‘The Wergild for a brave man—for his kinsfolk who wait for him in Geatland, where he will not come again.'

‘The day that we land on our own shore, before evening of that day, shall the gold and the King's words be with Hondscio's kindred,' Beowulf said. But though the young warrior was avenged, his heart was sore as he laid the gold with his own gifts, that he must go home with one lacking from the brotherhood.

While the horses still trampled and tossed their heads and snorted at the firelight, the curtains over the bower doorway parted as they had done last evening, and Wealhtheow the Queen came through them in her crimson robe, walking tall under the royal gold-work on her head, and her women following behind her.

She carried the mead cup to the King her lord, as she had done before, and held it for him to drink. ‘You have made your gifts to this new son that you have taken to your heart,' she said, smiling. ‘And now it is my turn, and I have brought gifts of my own from the women's quarters.' And she turned to Beowulf and held out the cup to him also. ‘For the thing that you have done for us, may you live valiant and beloved to the end of your days. My sons are your brothers now; be a friend and a brother to them in their need, for they could find none better in all the world.'

Then from the women who followed her she took two gold arm-rings each fit for an earl, and a sark of link-mail so fine that it hung from her hands in folds like silk and glimmered living silver as a salmon's skin, and lastly a jewelled collar of ancient workmanship such as Beowulf had never seen or even dreamed of before; and each of these things she gave to the Geatish leader. ‘Beowulf, if ever you find yourself forgetting us, wear this to help your memory,' she said as she placed the collar about his throat.

Beowulf smiled. ‘I shall not need even so fair a jewel as this to aid my memory of the friends I have found at Hrothgar's Court.'

‘That is well,' said the Queen, ‘for I think that your friends at Hrothgar's Court will long remember you.' Then gathering her women about her she went out, quietly and proudly as she had come, between the heavy curtains into the women's quarters.

Long and long the feasting continued, and Hrothgar himself took the harp from his bard and sang the stories that the warriors had used to sing round the fires in the long winter nights when he was young. Outside, it had grown dark long since, but the revellers no longer feared the shadows, and kept the fires up and passed the harp and the mead horns from hand to hand until at last their eyes grew heavy and the time was come for sleeping. Then Hrothgar rose, and bidding his thanes a good night, withdrew to his own place, where Wealhtheow the Queen waited for him; and Beowulf and his sword-brothers were borne off to the guest-place that had been made ready in their honour. And in Heorot the Hart, the King's house-thanes lay down to sleep in their proper places, each man with his weapons and his round linden shield hanging on the wall above his head.