Beowulf

15 King Beowulf

And so the skein of years unwinds, the lone white eye of the moon trailing always on the heels of Sól’s flaming, wolf-harried chariot—day after day and year after year, season following season as it ever has since the gods raised Midgard long ago. And even as the passage of time is constant, so are the ways of men, and so it is that on this cold day in the month of Frermánudr, but two days remaining before Yule, Beowulf, King of the Ring-Danes, sits astride his horse looking out upon the battle raging where the sea touches his land. Thirty years older than the night he killed Grendel, this Beowulf, and greedy time reckons its toll upon all things under Midgard, even heroes and the kings of men. His hair and beard are streaked with the frost that stains any long life, and his face is creased and wizened. But he might easily be mistaken for a man ten years younger, if only because his eyes still burn as brightly and his body is still strong and straight. He wears the scars of a hundred battles, but he wears them no differently than he wears the golden circlet that once crowned King Hrothgar’s head.

Wiglaf, son of Weohstan, sits upon his own mount to Beowulf’s right, and together, from this small bluff at the end of the moorlands, they watch the men fighting down on the shore. The Frisian invaders made landfall in the night, but in only a few hours Beowulf’s archers and swordsmen, his thanes bearing axes and spears, have driven them back to the beaches. The Frisian force is in tatters, and there can be no hope left among them of victory. Even retreat seems unlikely, unless the man who commands these warriors should deign to call back his hounds. From the start, the Frisians were too few and too poorly trained to succeed in this attack, and any man still left alive among them will be fortunate to escape with his skin.

Beowulf shakes his head and shuts his eyes, wishing to see no more of this shameful, bloody scene.

“This is no longer a battle, Wiglaf,” he says. “It’s slaughter.”

Wiglaf, also marked by age and also yet a strong man, nods toward the battle.

“The Frisians want to make themselves heroes, my lord. They would have the bards sing of their deeds.”

“It’s going to be a short song,” sighs Beowulf, opening his eyes again.

“Aye,” says Wiglaf. “But can you blame them? Your legend is known from the high seas and the snow barriers to the great island kingdom. The whole world knows the lay of Beowulf and Grendel. You are the monster slayer.”

Beowulf shakes his head again and laughs, but there is not the least trace of humor in the sound.

“We are the monsters now,” he says, making no effort to hide his disdain and self-loathing. “We are become the trolls and demons.”

“They come to find the hero,” says Wiglaf, and he points to the handful of Frisian invaders who have not yet fallen.

“The time of heroes is dead, Wiglaf. The Christ God has killed it…leaving mankind nothing but weeping martyrs and fear…and shame.”

And now a voice comes from the beach, rising free of the clash and clamor of battle. “Show me to King Beowulf!” it demands. “I would die by his sword and his alone! Show me to Beowulf!”

Wiglaf glances nervously to Beowulf, who has tightened his grip on the reins.

“You cannot,” says Wiglaf firmly. “He means only to taunt you into delivering his own glory, my lord. You know that. Do not reward him.”

“Leave him!” shouts Beowulf, ignoring Wiglaf’s counsel. He spurs his horse forward, riding swiftly along the sandy bluff and into the midst of his warriors, most of whom have gathered about one of the last of the Frisians remaining alive. They have stripped away his helmet and much of his armor, forcing him down onto the bloodied sand. They kick at his bare head and unprotected belly, laughing and cursing the man, denying him the honor of death. Beowulf recognizes the Frisian as the leader of this invasion.

“Stop!” cries Beowulf, bringing his horse to a halt, its hooves spraying sand in all directions. The men do as they’re told, turning and gazing up at their king scowling down at them.

“What is this?” asks Beowulf to his thanes. “You think it sport to mock your opponent in this fashion? To kick and bully an unarmed man, then make jest of his pain? No. Let him die quickly, with some measure of dignity left intact. You are soldiers…behaving like a mob.”

And then Beowulf pulls tight on the reins, turning his horse about and almost colliding with Wiglaf, who has only just gained the foot of the bluff.

“Kill me yourself!” shouts the leader of the Frisians, getting slowly, painfully to his feet. “If you would have me dead, then kill me yourself, coward.”

And Beowulf sits there on his horse, staring ahead at Wiglaf, his back turned to both the Frisian and his own thanes. He can clearly read the warning in Wiglaf’s eyes, the caution that never seems to leave them for very long. The waves are loud upon the shore, the waves and the wind and the pounding of Beowulf’s heart in his ears.

“Kill me yourself,” the Frisian says again, sounding bolder now and taking a step nearer the king.

“Hold your tongue, bastard,” Wiglaf tells the man. “The king can never engage in direct battle.” And then to Beowulf’s thanes he says, “Kill the invader now. Do it quickly, and put his head on a spear. Plant it high on the bluff as a warning to others who would come to our land seeking their immortality.”

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.

He hears someone behind him and turns to find Ursula, a young girl he has taken for his mistress, or who has perhaps taken him as her lover. She is exquisite, even to eyes wearied by so much bloodshed and destruction, her fair skin and freckles and her hair like wheat spun into some fine silken thread. She stands, wrapped in the pelt of foxes and bears and silhouetted by the winter sky, and her expression is part concern and part relief.

“My lord?” she asks. “Are you hurt?”

“Not a scratch,” Beowulf replies, and kisses her. “You know, Ursula, when I was young, I thought being king would be about battling every morning, counting the golden loot in the afternoon, and bedding beautiful women every night. And now…well, nothing’s as good as it should have been.”

Ursula gives him half a frown. “Not even the ‘bedding a beautiful woman’ part, my lord?”

Beowulf laughs, trying to summon up an honest laugh for her. “Well, some nights, Ursula. Some nights.”

“Perhaps this night?” she asks hopefully, and tugs at the collar of his robes.

“No,” Beowulf tells her, and he laughs again, but this time it’s a rueful sort of laugh. “Tonight I feel my age upon me. But tomorrow, after the celebration. We can’t forget what tomorrow is, can we now?”

And now Ursula grows very serious. “Your day, my lord,” she says. “When the Saga of Beowulf is told, the tale of how you lifted the darkness from the land. And the day after, we celebrate the birth of Christ Jesus.”

Beowulf smiles for her and wipes hair from her face.

“Christmond,” he says, making no attempt to hide his feelings about this new religion, embraced now by fully half his kingdom, even by his own Queen Wealthow. “Is Yule no longer good enough?”

“Yule is the old way,” Ursula replies. “Christmond is the new way.”

“There is much yet to be said for the old ways, my dear,” Beowulf tells her. And now he hears footsteps, and when he looks up, the king finds Wealthow and a priest coming across the causeway toward them. The priest wears long robes of wool dyed red as blood and a large cross of gilded wood dangles from about his neck. When Wealthow speaks, her voice is as icy as her violet eyes.

“I see that you’ve survived, husband,” she says.

“Alas, my queen,” replies Beowulf, the sarcasm thick in his voice. “The Frisian invaders have been pushed back into the sea from whence they came. And you, my good lady, are not a widow…yet.”

Wealthow smiles, a smile that only looks sweet, and exchanges glances with the priest.

“How comforting, my husband.”

And then, feeling confrontational but having no desire to argue with Wealthow, Beowulf shifts his gaze to the priest. He is a gaunt man beneath his robes, a thin man from some Irish longphort or another, his face the color of goat’s cheese except for the broken veins on his hooked nose and the angry boil nestled in the wrinkles of his protruding chin. Beowulf grins at the priest, and the priest acknowledges him with a curt nod.

“You,” says Beowulf. “Father. I have a question that vexes me terribly. Perhaps you can answer it for me.”

“I can try,” the priest replies nervously, and Wealthow glares at her king.

“Good. Fine. Then tell me this, Father, if your god is now the only god, then what has he done with all the rest, the Æsir and the Vanir? Is he so mighty a warrior that he has bested them one and all, even Odin?”

The priest blinks and bows his head, gazing down at the stones at his feet. “There is but one God,” he says patiently, “and there has never been any other.”

Beowulf moves to stand nearer the priest, who is at least a full head shorter than he. “Then he must be an awfully busy fellow, your god, doing the work of so many. How, for example, does he contend with the giants, keep Loki’s children in check, prepare his troops at Ásgard, and yet still find time each day to dispense so much love and grace and forgiveness upon his people?”

“I will not be mocked, my lord,” the priest says very softly.

“Mocked?” chuckles Beowulf, looking first to Ursula, then to Wealthow and feigning innocence. “I am not trying to mock you, good priest. These questions vex me, truly, and I believed that you must surely know the answers, as you say this unnamed god speaks to you.”

“When you mock Him,” the priest says, “you do so at the risk of your own immortal soul.”

“Well, then, I suppose I must strive to be more careful.”

“Beowulf,” says Wealthow, stepping between the priest and her husband. “Stop it this minute.”

“But I haven’t yet asked him about Ragnarök,” Beowulf protests.

At last, the priest lifts his head and dares to meet Beowulf’s gaze from behind the protective barrier of the queen. “It is a heathen faerie story, this Ragnarök,” and then to Wealthow he adds, “Your husband is an infidel, and I will not be ridiculed—”

“I only asked—” begins Beowulf, but the cold fire in Wealthow’s eyes silences him.

“Forgive him, Father,” she says. “He is a difficult old man and too set in his ways.”

“That’s right,” mumbles Beowulf. “I’m hopeless. Please, do not mind me.” And Beowulf puts an arm tight about Ursula and holds her close to him, but she tries to pull away.

“We will speak later, husband,” Wealthow says.

“Of that I am certain,” Beowulf replies, and Queen Wealthow and the priest turn away and head back across the causeway toward the east tower. The snow is falling harder now, becoming a storm, and soon Beowulf loses sight of them in the mist and swirling snowfall.

“She frightens me,” says Ursula. “One day, she will kill me, I think.”

Beowulf laughs and hugs her again. “Nay, my pretty little thing. She will not touch a hair upon your head. Wealthow, she has her new Roman god now, so what need has she of an old warhorse like me? Do not fear her. She is all thunder and no lightning, if you catch my meaning.”

“We should get inside, my lord,” Ursula says, sounding no less worried for Beowulf’s reassurances. “I do not like this wind.” Beowulf does not argue, because the wind is cold and his need to wrangle words has been spent on the priest. He kisses Ursula atop her head.

“Indeed. It shall blow us all away,” he laughs. “It shall grab us up and blow us to the ends of the earth.”

“Yes, my lord,” she says, and then she takes Beowulf’s hand and leads her king along the causeway high above Heorot and into the sanctuary and comparative warmth of the western tower.

16 The Golden Horn

The storm ended sometime before dawn, and morning finds a glittering mantle of fresh snow laid thick over the rooftops and streets and courtyards of the keep. The giant eagle Hræsvelg, squatting high atop his perch in the uppermost limbs of Yggdrasil, beats mighty wings, and a vicious north wind howls across the world, whistling between the towers and moaning beneath the eaves. And Wiglaf, remembering the days when winter did not make his bones ache and his muscles stiffen, trudges through the deep snow to the granite platform where he delivers the king’s decrees and news of battle and other such important proclamations. He stands there in the shadow of the two great turrets, and his breath comes out like mouthfuls of smoke. Already, a large number of people have gathered about the plinth, awaiting his announcement. He acknowledges them with a nod, their pink cheeks and red noses, then slowly climbs the four steps leading up onto the platform. They are slick with ice and snow, and Wiglaf does not wish to spend the rest of his days crippled by broken bones his body has grown too old to heal properly or completely. He stands with his back to the towers and clears his throat, spits, then clears his throat again, wishing he were back inside, sitting comfortably before a roaring fire and awaiting his breakfast.

“On this day,” says Wiglaf, speaking loudly enough that all may hear him, “in honor of our glorious Lord of Heorot, let us tell the saga of King Beowulf.” He pauses to get his breath and spit again, then continues. “How he so fearlessly slew the murderous demon Grendel and the demon’s hag mother.”

And the wind from under Hræsvelg’s wings lifts Wiglaf’s words and carries them out beyond the inner fortifications and the confines of the keep, to echo through the village and off the walls of the horned hall. Those who hear stop to listen—men busy with ponies, women busy with their stewpots and baking, children making a game of the snow.

“Let his deeds of valor inspire us all. On this day, let fires be lit and the sagas told, tales of the gods and of giants, of warriors who have fallen in battle and who now ride the fields of Idavoll.”

And near the outermost wall of Beowulf’s stronghold, at the edges of the village, stands the house of Unferth, son of Ecglaf, who once served Hrothgar, son of Healfdene, in the days when the horned hall was new and monsters stalked the land. The house a sturdy and imposing manor, fashioned of stone and from timber hauled here from the forest beyond the moors. The steeple at the front of its pitched roof has lately been decorated with an enormous cross, the symbol of Christ Jesus, for lately has Lord Unferth forsaken the old ways for the new religion. And even this far out, Wiglaf’s words are still audible.

“I declare this day to be Beowulf’s Day!” he shouts, delivering the last two words with all the force and enthusiasm he can muster, before a coughing fit takes him.

Unferth stands shivering in the shade cast by the cross on his roof, and a little farther along, his son, Guthric and his son’s wife and Unferth’s six grandchildren wait impatiently in the sleigh, which has not yet been hitched to the ponies that will pull it through the village to the keep. The long years have not been even half so kind to Unferth as to Wiglaf and Beowulf, and he is stoop-shouldered and crooked, bracing himself on a staff of carved oak. He glares toward the towers and the sound of Wiglaf’s voice, then back at the sleigh and his family.

“Where the hell is that fool with the horses?” he calls out to Guthric. Then he turns and shouts in the direction of his stables, “Cain? Hurry it up!”

It has begun to snow again.

In the sleigh, Guthric—who might easily pass in both appearance and demeanor for his father in Unferth’s younger days—fiddles restlessly with the large cross hung about his neck. He looks at his wife and frowns.

“Beowulf Day,” he mutters. “Bloody, stupid old fool’s day, more like. He’s as senile as Father.”

Lady Guthric hugs herself and glances at the ominous sky. “He is the king,” she reminds her husband.

“Then he is the senile king.”

“The snow’s starting again,” frets Lady Guthric, wishing her husband would not speak so about Lord Beowulf, whether or not she might agree. She fears what might happen if the king were to learn of Guthric’s opinions of him, and she also fears that the storm is not yet over.

“Wife,” says Guthric, “do you know how bloody sick I am of hearing about bloody Grendel and bloody Grendel’s bloody mother?”

“I should,” she says, “for you have told me now a thousand times, at least.”

“What the hell was Grendel, anyway? Some kind of giant dog or something?”

“I’m sure I could not tell you, dear,” she replies, then tells the oldest of the children to settle down and stop picking on the others.

“And what the bloody hell was Grendel’s mother supposed to be? She doesn’t even have a bloody name!”

“I believe she was a demon of some sort,” his wife says, and looks worriedly at the sky again.

“A demon? You’d have me believe that broken-down old Geat bastard slew a goddamned bloody demon?”

“Guthric, you must learn not to blaspheme…at least not in front of the children.”

“A demon, my ass,” grumbles Guthric, watching his father now. “A toothless old bear, maybe. Or—”

“Can we just go?” his wife asks wearily, and dusts snow from her furs.

And now Unferth approaches the sleigh, shouting as loudly as he still may. “Cain! Cain, where are you!”

Guthric stands up, and, cupping his hands about his mouth, takes up his father’s cry. “Cain!” he yells, with much more vigor than the old man. “Where the bloody Christ are you?”

And Unferth strikes him with his walking stick, catching him hard on the rump, and Unferth immediately sits down again beside Guthric’s wife.

“Don’t you dare blaspheme in my presence!” growls Unferth, brandishing the stick as if he means to land a second blow, this time across his son’s skull. “I will not have you speak of the One True God, father of Our Lord Jesus, in such a manner!”

Guthric flinches and looks to his wife for support or defense against the old man’s wrath, but she ignores him, an expression of self-righteous vindication on her round pink face.

“You will learn,” Unferth tells the cowering Guthric, and his six grandchildren watch wide-eyed and eager, wondering just how bad a thrashing their father’s going to get this time.

There’s a sudden commotion, then, from the direction of the village gates, and Unferth turns away from the sleigh and his insolent, impious son to find two of his house guards approaching, dragging Cain roughly through the snow and frozen mud. One of the guards raises his free hand and jabs a finger at the slave—filthy and bedraggled, clothed only in a tattered hemp tunic and a wool blanket, rags wrapped tightly about his hands and feet to stave off frostbite.

“He ran off again, my lord,” says the guard. “We found him hiding in a hollow log at the edge of the moors. A wonder the fool didn’t freeze to death.”

The guards shove Cain roughly forward, and he stumbles and lands in a sprawling heap at Unferth’s feet. His woolen blanket has slipped off his skinny shoulders, revealing the glint of gold among the slave’s castoff garments.

“What have you got there?” Unferth asks, and bends down for a closer look, but Cain clutches something to his chest and curls up like a frightened hedgehog. Unferth raises his stick again. “Show it to me, damn you!” he snarls. “You know well enough I do not waste my breath on idle threats.”

Cain hesitates only a moment longer, something desperate in his cloudy, sickly eyes, and then he produces his golden treasure. It shines dimly in the overcast daylight, and Unferth gasps and drops his walking stick. He has begun to tremble uncontrollably and he leans against the sleigh for support.

“Father,” asks Guthric. “What’s wrong?”

“Do you not see it?” Unferth whispers, taking the golden drinking horn from Cain’s rag-swaddled hands. “My Lord Hrothgar’s most precious…” and he trails off, dumbstruck by the sight of the horn, lost so long ago.

“Is it gold?” asks Guthric as he turns about for a better view, his interest piqued.

“Yes, yes,” hisses Unferth. “Of course it is gold. This…this is the drinking horn King Beowulf was given by King Hrothgar in return for slaying Grendel…”

“But that was lost, wasn’t it?” asks Guthric.

His eyes wide with disbelief, Unferth looks from the golden horn to Cain, shivering on the ground, then back to the horn.

“Yes,” he tells his son. “It was lost. Beowulf cast it into the tarn, into the burning waters of Weormgræf, for the merewife greatly desired it. When she was slain…he said that he searched for it, but could not discover where it had come to rest in the mud and peat.”

“It must be worth a fortune,” says Guthric, climbing down from the sleigh and reaching for the drinking horn. But Unferth slaps his hand away.

“How came you by this?” he asks Cain, and when the slave doesn’t answer, Unferth kicks him in the belly.

“Shall I have a go at him?” one of the guards asks. “A few lashes, and the rat will start talking, sure enough.”

“No,” Unferth replies, shaking his head. “This is the king’s horn, and now it will go to the king. And so will Cain. Perhaps he will tell Lord Beowulf how he came upon it. Perhaps the questions of our king mean more to him than the questions of his master.” And Unferth kicks Cain again, harder than before. The slave gags and coughs a crimson spatter onto the snow.

“Bring out my ponies,” he tells the two guards. “And Guthric, you help them.”

“But Father—”

“Do not argue with me,” Unferth says without looking at his son. “Consider it fair penance due for your earlier transgression.”

And when the guards and his son have gone, Unferth kneels in the snow beside Cain and wipes blood from the slave’s lips and nostrils.

“You will tell where you came upon it,” Unferth tells him. “Or I shall have the pleasure of killing you myself.”

And far across the village, beyond the walls of the keep, Wiglaf descends the four steps leading down from the granite platform. The crowd is breaking up, going on about their business, and he has much left to do before the celebration begins. He glares up at the leaden sky and curses the falling snow, then adds another curse for his aching joints. Then he spies a lone figure watching from the causeway connecting the two towers and thinks it must be Beowulf. Wiglaf waves to him, but the figure does not wave back.

“What’s on your mind now, old man?” Wiglaf asks, uncertain if the question was meant for himself or for the figure standing on the causeway. And then he begins picking his way carefully back through the snow and ice, and his only thoughts are of hot food and a crackling hearth fire.

Unferth’s sleigh has almost reached the gates of the keep when Guthric tugs at the reins and brings the ponies to a halt. Despite the day’s foul weather, the streets are crowded with travelers who have journeyed to Heorot from other, outlying villages and farmsteads to celebrate Beowulf’s Day and the Yuletide. Too many unfamiliar faces for Unferth’s liking, too many wagons and horses and beggars slowing them down, and now that Guthric has stopped the sleigh, the unfamiliar faces stare back at Unferth as though it is he who should not be here. Cain sits behind his master, on the bench that Guthric’s wife and children occupied until he ordered them to remain at home. And Cain gazes disconsolately at all the men and women and children on the streets. The slave’s feet have been manacled so he cannot run again.

“What are you doing?” Unferth asks his son, and tries unsuccessfully to take the reins from Guthric. “We have to see our king. We must see him at once. We may have taken too long already!”

Guthric winds the reins tightly about his fists and stares up at the two towers of Beowulf’s castle, the one built straight and the other spiraling upwards like the shell of some gargantuan snail. His entire life has been lived in the shadow of those towers and in the knowledge that his father would have been king had not some adventurer from the east shown up to defeat monsters Guthric has come to doubt ever even existed. Some dark plot, more likely, some intrigue by which a foreign interloper might dupe doddering old Hrothgar and steal the throne for himself. Years ago it first occurred to him that “the demon Grendel” and the demon’s nameless mother might only have been fictions concocted by Beowulf in a campaign to wrest control of Denmark from the Danes. Perhaps the Geat and his thanes merely set some wild beast loose upon the unsuspecting countryside, some bloodthirsty animal that would not be recognized and so would be believed by the gullible and superstitious to constitute a sort of monster or otherworldly demon, a troll or even the spawn of giants. In the end, by whatever means the deception was carried out, his father was robbed of his kingship and Guthric of his own birthright. And now there is this horn, this relic from that faerie tale, supposedly lost forever.

“Father,” he says, “I would have you tell me why this horn is so very important. Clearly, it must be valuable, but there’s something else, isn’t there?”

“This is none of your concern,” snaps Unferth. “But we must hurry. We must—”

“Why, Father? Why must we hurry? What is so damned important about a bloody drinking horn that it has you so excited?”

Unferth wrings his hands anxiously and stares at the flanks of the two snow-dappled ponies, as though he might spur them to move by dint of will alone.

“Some things are not for you to know,” he tells Guthric. “Some things—”

“If the tale is to be believed, Hrothgar’s horn was lost at the bottom of a deep tarn. Tell me, how then might an idiot like Cain have come upon it. I do not even think he knows how to swim.”

“There is not time for this impertinence,” growls Unferth, going for his walking stick, but Guthric kicks it from the sleigh before his father can reach it. Then he turns and looks at Cain.

“Can you swim?” he asks the slave.

Cain looks confused for a moment, then he shakes his head.

“You see, Father? He cannot even swim, so how could he have possibly found a drinking horn lost at the bottom of a bottomless lake. Unless, of course, it was never lost there at all. Perchance, it was only hidden.”

Unferth glares furiously back at his son, then down at his staff, lying in the snow beside the sleigh. “Why,” he asks, “would King Beowulf hide his own drinking horn? You’re being a dolt, Guthric, which comes as no surprise whatsoever. You have as little sense as that bitch who gave birth to you.”

Guthric ignores the slight and continues, giving voice to thoughts he has so long kept to himself. “He would have needed it to appear as though he had bested this demon hag at great personal loss. So, he loses the prize he won for killing Grendel. And your ancestral sword, I might add. He gives up a horn and gains a kingdom. It seems a fair enough trade to me.”

“The horn was his already,” insists Unferth, clutching tight to the golden horn, now that he has lost his stick. “I keep telling you that. Are you deaf as well as a fool?”

“Father, listen to me. We will do as you wish. We will take this thing to King Beowulf, but first I would like to show it to someone else.”

“Who?” asks Unferth, raising one bushy gray eyebrow suspiciously.

Guthric takes a deep breath of the freezing air and glances about at the crowd moving slowly toward the mead hall and the night’s coming celebration. There is a troupe of actors, mostly dwarves, and they’re carrying a grotesque contraption made of furs and bones and leather, and Guthric realizes it’s meant to be the monster Grendel. A puppet or costume the actors will use to reenact that glorious battle between Beowulf and the fiend.

“A seer,” says Guthric. “A wisewoman I have spoken with before.”

Unferth looks horrified, then begins to scrabble out of the wagon to retrieve his walking stick.

“A seer? A witch is what you mean!” he says. “Have you learned nothing from the teachings of our Christ Jesus, that you would traffic with witches and have me do likewise!”

“I wear your cross,” replies Guthric.

“It is not my cross, and it means nothing, if you do not believe in what it represents. You profane God, wearing the cross and meeting with witches.”

Guthric scowls and lets go of the reins. He grabs his father’s cloak, hauling him back into the sleigh. “She is not a witch,” he tells Unferth. “She is only an old woman—older even than you, Father—who knows many things.”

“Because she consorts with spirits and demons,” sneers Unferth, still without his staff. “Because she keeps counsel with evil beings who wish to deceive us all.”

“I only want to show her the horn,” says Unferth. “Then we will go to the king, as you wish.”

“This is madness,” hisses Unferth. “We are wasting time, and now you would have me seek out the company of a witch and let her look upon this treasure which should be seen by Beowulf and none other.” Unferth has begun excitedly waving the horn about, and several passersby have stopped to gawk at the old man.

“You seem to think everyone in Heorot deserves a good look,” says Guthric, and Unferth immediately hides the horn beneath his robes once more.

“There is not time for this madness,” Unferth says again, though he seems to have exhausted himself, and much of his anger and panic seem to have drained away.

“Father, the damned thing has been lost for thirty years. I suspect another few hours will make no difference, one way or the other.”

“You do not know,” sighs Unferth.

Guthric glances back at Cain again. “Retrieve your master’s staff,” he says. “It has fallen from the sleigh.” When Cain nods forlornly at the iron shackles about his ankles, Guthric merely snorts. “You cannot run, but you can walk well enough to do as I have asked. Now, Cain, do as I have said and get Father’s staff, or I swear that I shall beat you myself.”

“Yes, my lord,” mumbles Cain, managing to clamber down from the sleigh.

“I knew you were never a true convert,” says Unferth. “But I did not know that you consorted with sorcerers and witches.”

“I consort with those who can tell me what I need to know,” replies Guthric, and again he looks toward the troupe of dwarf actors and their hideous Grendel suit. Something to frighten children and old men, an offense to thinking men and nothing more. One of the dwarves has set the immense head down upon the snow and is busy with the straps that seem to work its fierce jaws, which appear to Guthric to be nothing more than an absurd composite of bear teeth and boar tusks. A child points at the head and runs back to its mother, sobbing. The dwarves laugh and roar at the child. One of them works the phony jaws up and down, up and down, chewing at the air.

Better be a good boy, Guthric. Better be good and say your prayers, or Grendel will come in the night and gobble you up! How many nights had he lain awake, fearing the sound of Grendel’s footsteps or a misshapen face leering in at the window of his bedchamber?

And all at once Guthric is seized with a desire to put an end to this pathetic charade, to draw his sword and hack away at the dwarves’ puppet until nothing remains but dust and string and tatters. Nothing that can frighten children or keep alive the falsehoods that put a foreigner upon the Danish throne.

“Cain!” he shouts. “What the bloody hell is taking you so long?” but when he turns back toward his father, he sees that Unferth is holding on to his oaken staff and that Cain has already climbed back into the sleigh.

“How can I persuade you not to do this?” asks Unferth, staring down at the stick in his wrinkled hands.

“You cannot, Father. Do not waste your breath trying. You shall see, it’s for the best. And then, when my questions have been answered, we will go to see King Beowulf in his horned hall.” Unferth gives the reins a hard tug and shake, and he guides the sleigh away from the main thoroughfare and down a narrow side street.

And so it is that the old man and his son find themselves standing outside a very small and cluttered hovel wedged in between the village wall and the muddy sprawl of a piggery. At first, Unferth refused to enter the rickety shack, fearing for both his immortal soul and the welfare of his mortal flesh. The whole structure seems hardly more than a deadfall in which someone has unwisely chosen to take up residence, a precarious jumble of timber and thatch that might well shift or simply collapse in upon itself at the slightest gust of wind. But Guthric was persistent, and the snow was coming down much too hard for Unferth to remain behind in the sleigh with Cain (covered now with a blanket and tied fast to his seat).

The crooked front door is carved with all manner of runes and symbols, some of which Unferth recognizes and some of which he doesn’t, and a wolf’s skull—also decorated with runes—has been nailed to the cornice. When Unferth knocks, the entire hovel shudders very slightly, and he takes a cautious step back toward the sleigh. But then the door swings open wide and they are greeted by a slender woman of indeterminate age, neither particularly old nor particularly young, dressed in a nappy patchwork of fur and a long leather skirt that appears to have been stained and smeared with every sort of filth imaginable. Her black hair, speckled with gray, is pulled in braids, and her eyes are a bright and startling shade of green that makes Unferth think of mossy rocks at the edge of the sea.

“Father,” says Guthric, “this is Sigga, the seer of whom I spoke. She was born in Iceland.”

“Iceland?” mutters Unferth, and he takes another step back toward the sleigh. “Then what the hell is she doing here?”

“I often ask myself the same thing,” says Sigga, fixing Unferth with her too-green eyes.

“Well, then tell me this, outlander,” growls Unferth. “Are you some heathen witch, or are you a Christian? Do you offer your body up to evil spirits in exchange for the secrets you sell?”

Hearing this, Sigga grunts, some unintelligible curse, and shakes her head.

“I’m sorry,” Guthric says, frowning at his father. “My father takes his conversion very seriously.”

“I keep to the old ways,” Sigga tells Unferth, standing straighter and her eyes seeming to flash more brightly still. “And what I do with my body is no concern of yours, old man. I know you, Unferth, Ecglaf’s son, though you do not now seem to remember me. I midwifed at the birth of your son, and I did my best to save his mother’s life.”

“Then you are a witch!” snarls Unferth, and spits into the snow. “You admit it!”

Sigga clicks her tongue loudly against the roof of her mouth and glances at Guthric, then back to Unferth. She points a long finger at the old man, and says, “State your business with me, Ecglaf’s son, for I have better things to do this day than stand here in the cold and be insulted by Hrothgar’s forgotten lapdog.”

Unferth makes an angry blustering noise and shakes his staff at the woman. “Witch, I have no business here,” he sputters. “Ask my infidel son why we’ve come, for this was all his doing, I assure you.”

“Sigga, there is something I wish you to see,” says Guthric. “Our slave found it out on the moorlands, and—”

“Then come inside,” Sigga says to Guthric, interrupting him. “I will not catch my own death standing in the snow. As for you, Ecglaf’s son, you may come in where there is a fire or you may stand there shivering, if that’s what pleases you.”

“Father, show it to her,” says Guthric. “Let her see the golden horn.”

“Inside,” Sigga says again, and vanishes into the hovel. Unferth is still mumbling about demons and sorcery, whores and succubae, but when Guthric takes him by the arm and leads him over the threshold of Sigga’s house, he doesn’t resist. Inside, the air stinks much less of the piggery, redolent instead with the scent of dried herbs and beeswax candles, cooking and the smoky peat fire burning in the small hearth. In places, weak daylight shows through chinks in the walls. There are several benches and tables crowded with all manner of jars and bowls, a large mortar and pestle, dried fish and the bones of many sorts of animals. Bundles of dried plants hang from the low ceiling and rustle softly one against the other. Guthric takes a seat before the fire, warming his hands, but Unferth hangs back, taking great care to touch nothing in the place, for, he thinks, anything here—anything at all—might be tainted with some perilous malfeasance.

“A golden horn?” Sigga asks, sitting down on the dirt floor beside the hearth. “Is that what you said, Guthric? A golden horn?”

“Show it to her, Father,” says Guthric impatiently, then to Sigga, “Surely you have heard of the golden drinking horn that Hrothgar gave to King Beowulf, the one Hrothgar always claimed to have taken from a slain dragon’s hoard?”

“I know the story,” Sigga replies. “The golden horn is said to have been lost when Beowulf the Geat fought with the merewife after Grendel’s death. But…I do not set much store in the boasting of men. I say if Hrothgar ever saw a dragon, he’d have run the other way.”

“Insolent crone,” mutters Unferth. “Hrothgar was a great man, a great warrior.”

Sigga stares at him a moment, then asks, “So, have you come to argue politics and the worth of kings?”

Unferth glares back at her and his son, sitting there together like confidants or coconspirators, his one and only son keeping company with the likes of her. He grips his staff more tightly and says a silent prayer.

“What is it you have brought me?” Sigga asks Unferth. “I trust in my eyes. Now, show me this golden horn, and I will tell you what I see.”

“I once saw a drawing of Hrothgar’s horn, years ago,” says Guthric. “It was identical to the one found by our slave.”

“Shut up,” barks Unferth, producing the golden horn from a fold of his robes. It glistens in the firelight, and Sigga’s eyes grow very wide and she quickly turns away, staring into the hearth flames. “So now you see,” sneers Unferth. “The prize that Beowulf won thirty years ago, lost all these years in the black depths of Weormgræf when he battled the demon hag.”

“Is that true?” Unferth asks Sigga, his voice trembling now with excitement. “Is that what this is, Hrothgar’s royal drinking horn?”

“Please,” says Sigga. “Put it away.” She licks her lips and swallows, and though there are beads of sweat standing out on her forehead and cheeks, she tosses another block of peat onto the fire and stirs at the embers with an iron poker.

Guthric looks confused, but motions for his father to hide the horn once more beneath his robes. Unferth ignores him and takes a step nearer the place where Sigga sits.

“Is something wrong, witch?” he asks. “Does it so upset you to be wrong about the boasts of men?”

“Sigga, is this Hrothgar’s horn?” Guthric asks again, and she glances at him uneasily.

“She does not know,” snickers Unferth. “This bitch does not know what she sees. Let us take our leave, my son, and never again darken this vile doorstep.”

And now Sigga turns slowly toward Unferth, but she keeps her green eyes downcast, staring at the dirty straw covering the floor so she won’t see the glimmering object clasped in the old man’s hands.

“You listen to me, Unferth Ecglaf’s son, and heed my words. I cannot say for certain what that thing is, for there is a glamour upon it. The most powerful glamour I have ever glimpsed. There is dökkálfar magic at work here, I believe. I have seen their handiwork before. I have felt them near, when I was yet only a child.”

“Dökkálfar?” asks Guthric, his tongue fumbling at the unfamiliar word.

“Aye, the Nidafjöll dark elves,” Sigga replies, and wipes sweat from her face. “People of Svartálfheim, hillfolk, the dwellers in the Dark Fells.”

“Heathen nonsense,” scoffs Unferth. “Faerie tales. I thought you had no use for faerie stories, Guthric, but you bring me to hear them uttered by a lunatic.”

“Hear me,” whispers Sigga, her voice gone dry and hoarse. “I do not say these things lightly. Whatever it is, this horn you hold, it was not meant to be found. Or, it was meant to be found by something that harbors an ancient hatred and would see the world of men suffer.”

“She’s insane,” Unferth chuckles. “Come now, my son, let’s leave this wicked place. It should be razed and the earth here salted. And this witch should be stoned to death or burned at the stake.”

Sigga clenches her fists and smiles, and now the sweat from her face has begun to drip to the straw and dirt at her feet.

“Do not trouble yourself, Ecglaf’s son, for you hold this kingdom’s doom there in your hands. The one from whom that horn was stolen, she will soon come to reclaim it, her or one very like her, for it has been brought to Heorot in violation of some blood pact. A binding has been broken, and I would have you know that I will try to be far away from this village and our King Beowulf ere its owner misses it and comes calling.”

“A pact?” asks Guthric, his curiosity piqued. “What manner of pact?” And Sigga turns and stares at him a moment, then looks back to the fire.

“I do not know, Guthric, why you come here. You do not believe—”

“I believe all is not what it seems with our king,” Guthric tells her. “I believe there are secrets, secrets that have robbed my father of the throne and myself of princedom. And I would know these secrets.”

Sigga takes a deep breath and exhales with a shudder. “Child, you come always asking questions, but ever you seek only the answers that would make you happy, the answers which you believe you know already. And I ask you, please take this accursed thing from my home.”

“I will, Sigga. My father and I will take our leave and never come here again, but first, you will tell me of this pact.”

“She knows nothing,” grumbles Unferth, tucking the golden horn away. “Leave her be. I have business with the king.”

“She knows something, Father. She would not be so frightened if she knew nothing.”

Sigga stirs at the fire and shakes her head. “I listen to the trees,” she says. “The trees tell me things. The rocks speak to me. I speak with bogs and birds and squirrels. They tell me what men have forgotten or have never known.”

“Guthric, do not be a fool. She talks to rocks,” says Unferth, tapping at the floor with his staff. “She talks to squirrels.”

But Guthric ignores his father and leans closer to Sigga. “And what do they tell you?” he asks. “What have they told you of King Beowulf?”

“It is your death, that horn,” she says, almost too quietly for Guthric to hear. “And still, you care only for your question. Fine. Then I will tell you this,” and she sets the poker aside, leaning it against the hearth.

“She is a madwoman,” says Unferth. “Leave her be.”

“There is a tale,” says Sigga, “a story that the spruces growing at the edge of the bog whisper among themselves at the new moon. That Lord Beowulf made a pact with the merewife that he would become King of the Ring Danes and Lord of Heorot, and that this same pact was made with King Hrothgar before him.

“What is this merewife?” asks Guthric, and Sigga makes a whistling sound between her teeth.

“That I do not know. She has many names. She may have been worshipped as a goddess, once. Some have called her Njördr, wife of Njord, and others have named her Nerthus, earth mother. I do not believe that. She is something crawled up from the sea, I think, a terrible haunt from Ægir’s halls. Long has she dwelled in the tarn your father calls Weormgraef, and in unseen caverns leading back to the sea. By her, Hrothgar sired his only son.”

“How much more of this nonsense must we listen to? Have you not heard enough?” asks Unferth, stalking back and forth near the door, but Guthric shushes him.

“Hrothgar sired no sons,” says Guthric. “This is why the kingdom could be passed to the Geat so readily.”

“He sired one,” Sigga replies. “The monster Grendel, whom Beowulf slew. That was Hrothgar’s gift to the merewife, in exchange for his crown.”

“You cannot believe this,” says Guthric, looking toward his father, who has opened the cottage door and is staring out at the snow and the sleigh, Cain and the darkening sky.

“I tell you what the trees tell me,” she answers. “Grendel was Hrothgar’s child. But the pact was broken when Hrothgar allowed Beowulf to slay the merewife’s son. So, she took her revenge on both men—”

“I’ve heard enough,” says Guthric, standing and stepping away from the hearth. “I’m sure there is some speck of truth in this, somewhere. I have always known that Beowulf could not have come by the throne honestly. But I cannot believe in sea demons, nor that Hrothgar sired a monster.”

“You hear that which you wish to hear,” Sigga sighs. “Your ears are closed to all else. But I will show you something, Unferth’s son, before you take your leave.” And at that she reaches one hand into the red-hot coals and pulls out a glowing lump of peat. It lies in her palm, and her flesh does not blister or burn. “I brought you into Midgard, and I would have you know the danger that is now upon us all.”

The ember in her hand sparks, then seems to unfold like the petals of a heather flower. “Watch,” she says, and the flames become golden wings and glittering scales, angry red eyes and razor talons. “He is coming,” she says. “Even as we speak, he is on his way.” And then Sigga tilts her hand, and the coal tumbles back into the fire. “If you care for your wife and children, Guthric, you will take them and run. You will leave Heorot and not look back.”

Then the head of Unferth’s staff comes down hard against the back of Sigga’s skull, and there’s a sickening crunch before she slumps from the stool and lies dead before the hearth.

“Will you leave her now?” Unferth asks his son. “Or do you wish to remain here and keep her corpse from getting lonely?”

“Father…” gasps Guthric, the image of the dragon still dancing before his eyes. “What she said. I saw it.”

“Fine,” growls Unferth, wiping the blood from his staff. “Then go home to your wife and children. Run away, if cowardice suits you so well. Hide somewhere and cower from the lies this witch whore has told you. But I have business at the keep, and I will wait no longer. Already, the day is fading, and you have cost me hours I did not have to spare.”

“You saw it, too,” Guthric says.

“I saw a sorcerer’s trickery,” replies Unferth, and he turns and walks back to the sleigh as quickly as his bent and aching bones will allow. Later, he thinks, he will send men to feed the woman’s carcass to the pigs and burn the hovel. Cain sits shivering pitifully beneath his blanket and does not say a word as Unferth climbs aboard the sleigh and takes up the reins in both his hands. When he looks up, Guthric is watching him from the doorway of the witch’s foul abode.

“Are you coming with me?” Unferth asks.

“You saw it,” Guthric says again. “Maybe it was something you knew all along. Either way, I must go to my wife and to my children now. We must leave Heorot while there is still time.”

“I thought you did not believe in stories of monsters and demons,” laughs Unferth as he turns the ponies around in the narrow alleyway outside the hovel. “I thought you even doubted the God and savior whose cross you wear there round about your neck. But now, now you will flee from a dragon? Fine. Do as you will, son.” And then Unferth whips at the ponies’ backs with the reins, and they neigh and champ at their bits and carry him and Cain and the golden horn away into the white storm.

This near to midwinter, the days are almost as short as Danish days may be, hardly six hours from dawn until dusk, and by the time Unferth has secured an audience in the antechamber behind the king’s dais, the sun has set, and night has fallen. Already, the celebration in the horned hall has begun in earnest, and from the other side of the door come drunken shouts and music, the songs of scops and the rowdy laughter of thanes and their women. There is but a single table in the room and a single empty chair. Unferth pushes back the hood of his cloak and stomps his feet against the stone floor, dislodging muddy clumps of melting snow. Behind him, Cain stands shivering and staring out at the balcony and the dark sea beyond. There is a small fire burning in the fireplace, but the room is still so cold that their breath fogs.

Then the door leading out to the dais and the mead hall opens, and the noise of the celebration grows suddenly louder, but it is not King Beowulf come to speak with him, only Wiglaf, and Unferth curses silently.

“Unferth, you’re not celebrating your king’s glory tonight?” Wiglaf asks, and Unferth glares at the open door until Wiglaf shuts it again. “You and your family are missed in the hall,” adds Wiglaf.

“I have brought something for the king,” Wiglaf says, and he holds up the golden horn, wrapped in a fold of his robes.

Wiglaf extends his hand. “Then you’ll show it to me first.”

“Bollocks, Wiglaf. I’ll show it first to Beowulf. Believe what I say. The king needs to see it!”

The door opens again, and now Beowulf stands in the entryway, glaring at Unferth. “The king needs to see what?” he asks, and narrows his eyes.

Unferth steadies himself against that steely gaze and takes a deep breath. His frown melts into a smirk. “A gift fit for a king,” he says. “Lost and now found.”

Unferth unwraps the golden horn, and once again its curves and the ruby set into the dragon’s throat glitter in the firelight. At the sight of it, Beowulf’s eyes widen with an expression of astonishment and also what Unferth hopes is fear.

“Do you recognize it, my lord?” asks Unferth, already certain of the answer.

Beowulf stares at the horn, and for a time there is only the muffled noise from Heorot Hall, the wind howling around the corners of the balcony, the sea slamming itself against the cliffs far, far below.

“Where did you find…this?” Beowulf asks at last.

Unferth moves to stand nearer the king, holding the horn up so that Beowulf might have a better view of it.

“Somewhere in the wilderness beyond the village walls. My slave, Cain…he found it, if the truth be told. He will not say exactly where. I have beaten him, my lord, and still he will not say where it was he came upon it. My lord, isn’t this—”

“It is nothing!” roars Beowulf, and with a sweep of his arms, he knocks the horn from Unferth’s hands and sends it skidding, end over end, across the floor of the anteroom. The golden horn comes to rest at the feet of Queen Wealthow, who stands in the doorway, behind her husband. She reaches down and lifts the horn, once the finest prize in all King Hrothgar’s treasury.

“So,” she says. “I see it has come back to you…after all these years.” And she passes the horn to her husband; he takes it from her, but holds it the way a man might hold a venomous serpent.

“Where is he?” asks Beowulf, and there is a tremor in his voice. “The slave. The slave who found it. Is that him?” And he points toward Cain.

“Indeed, I have brought him here to you,” replies Unferth, and he turns and seizes Cain by the shoulders, forcing him roughly down upon the floor at Beowulf’s feet.

“Please,” Cain begs, “please don’t kill me, my king.”

Beowulf kneels beside Cain and shows him the horn. “Where did you find this treasure?” he asks.

Cain shakes his head and looks away, staring instead at the floor. “I…I’m sorry I ran away, my lord. Please…don’t hurt me anymore.”

At that, Unferth kicks Cain as hard as he can, and the slave cries out in pain and terror. “Answer your king!” snarls Unferth.

“Stop!” orders Beowulf, glaring up at Unferth. “He will tell us nothing if you beat him senseless.”

Cain gasps, and now his lips are flecked with blood. “I didn’t steal it,” he says. “I swear, I didn’t steal it.”

“Where?” asks Beowulf, lowering his voice and speaking as calmly as he can manage. “Where did you find it?”

“The bogs,” answers Cain, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Through the forest and down to the bogs.”

“The bogs,” says Beowulf, getting to his feet again.

“I was lost,” Cain continues, rubbing his hands together, then wiping at his bloody lips. “Lost in the bog, and I thought I would never find my way out again. But I found a cave…”

“A cave?” asks Beowulf. “That’s where you found the horn, inside a cave?”

“Aye,” mutters Cain, nodding and looking at the bloodstain and snot smeared across the back of his left hand. He sniffles loudly. “I found it in the cave. There was so much treasure in the cave, my lord. So many pretty rings and bracelets, so much gold and silver and so many pretty stones. Such riches. Oh, and there were statues—”

“And you took this from the cave?”

“I did, my lord. But there was so much treasure. And I only took this one small thing.”

“And that’s all you saw there?” asks Beowulf, glancing toward Wealthow, who’s watching the slave and so doesn’t notice. “Only treasure? No demon? No witch?”

Cain looks up and shakes his head. “I was going to take it back,” he says. “I swear. I only meant to keep it for a time, then return it.”

“There was no woman there?” asks Queen Wealthow.

“No woman, my lady,” Cain tells her. “Only treasure.”

And now Wealthow does look toward Beowulf, and her violet eyes seem to flash in the dim room.

“No woman was there,” Cain repeats, and sniffles again.

“Listen to me, Beowulf,” Unferth says, and takes a step nearer Beowulf and Wealthow. “While there is yet time, hear me. I know what this means.”

“You know nothing,” Beowulf replies. “It is only some trinket, some bauble misplaced a thousand years ago.”

“My lord, I have seen this horn before. I have held it, as have you and my lady Wealthow. This is no lost bauble. This is the very horn that Hrothgar gave to you.”

“My king,” Unferth continues, looking anxiously from Beowulf to Wealthow, then back to Beowulf, “you have no heir. But I have a son. I have a strong son. Now, while there is time, name Guthric heir to your throne.”

“Truly, it saddens me…how age has robbed you of your wits, friend Unferth,” says Beowulf. “But I will hear no more of this madness tonight or ever. Your slave found a trinket and nothing more.”

“A trinket from a dragon’s lair,” hisses Unferth. “Goddamn you, Beowulf, I know—” But before he can finish, Beowulf turns around and leaves the anteroom, disappearing through the doorway, swallowed alive by the noise and smoke of the celebration and Heorot Hall.

“I did not think you a man who spoke in blasphemies,” Wealthow says. Then she takes two gold coins from a pocket of her dress and holds them out to Unferth. “And please, take these in exchange for this man’s freedom.” She looks down at Cain, cowering on the floor. “I will not stand by and watch again while he is beaten like a cur for your amusement, old man.”

Unferth blinks at the coins and laughs, a sick and cheated sort of laugh, a laugh tinged through and through with bitterness and regret. He taps his staff smartly against the flagstones and jabs a crooked finger at the queen.

“I would take no gold from out this cursed house,” he sneers. “But if you wish a dog, my queen, then he is yours. Bid my lord to keep the golden horn for his own. I feel quite certain it has been trying to find its way back to him these last thirty years. Pray that none come seeking it, Queen Wealthow.”

“Show him out, Wiglaf,” says Wealthow, returning the coins to her pocket. “Then please care for this poor man. Find him some decent clothes.” Then she sets her back to Unferth and follows her husband, shutting the door to the dais behind her.

“I know the way,” Unferth tells Wiglaf, and as he hobbles slowly down the long hallway leading back out to the snowy night and his sleigh, the son of Ecglaf tries not to think about what he might or might not have seen dancing on a witch’s palm.

17 Fire in the Night

Sleeping safe beside King Beowulf, Ursula is dreaming of the very first time she laid eyes on Heorot. She was still only a child when her family gave up their farm on the hinterlands. Her brother had been taken by wolves one summer, and thereafter her mother’s mind became unhinged. She would wander alone at night across the moorlands, risking her own life, and nothing her husband could do or say would persuade her that the dead boy would never be found. So they came to Heorot, where Ursula’s father found work in the stables and, in time, her mother accepted the loss of her son. In the shadow of the keep towers, behind walls no wolf could breach, Ursula grew to be a woman.

In the dream, she is standing in the back of her father’s rickety wagon as it bumps and shudders along the rocky road leading to the village gates. She beholds the world with a child’s eyes, and though she has heard tales of Heorot and the mead hall of mighty King Beowulf, she did not imagine anything half so grand as this. Surely even the gods and goddesses in Ásgard must envy such a magnificent edifice, and, as the keep looms nearer, it seems as though she is slipping out of the world she has always known and into the sagas and bedtime stories her mother has told her.

“Papa, are there trolls here?” she asked.

“No trolls,” he replied. “There was one, long time ago, when I was still a young man. But it met its end in the coming of King Beowulf from Geatland.”

“Are there witches?”

“No witches, either,” said her father. “There was one, an evil hag from the bogs, but she, too, was slain by good King Beowulf.”

“What about dragons, Papa? Are there dragons here?”

And upon hearing this third question, her father shrugs and glances up at the leaden sky. “I am only a farmer,” he tells her. “What would I know of dragons? But I wouldn’t worry, child. Hrothgar, who was king before Beowulf, he slew the last dragon in these lands before I was born, or so my own father always said.”

And then she turns to her mother. In the dream, her mother’s eyes are bleeding, and there are black tufts of feathers sprouting from her arms.

“What about the wolves, Mama?” she asks.

“No wolves,” replies her mother. “Not here, for the walls are too high, and the warriors kill any wolves that come too near.”

“What if the wolves grew wings?” Ursula asks her mother, who scowls and grinds her teeth.

“Wolves cannot grow wings,” her mother answers. “Don’t be such a silly child.”

“They might dig tunnels deep below the ground,” Ursula suggests. “The dwarves might help them dig tunnels under the walls of Heorot.”

“The dwarves are no friends to the wolves,” her mother says. “Do not forget how they forged the chain Gleipnir, thin as a blade of grass, yet stronger than any iron. And the wolves could never do such a thing all on their own.” And then her mother coughs out a mouthful of black feathers and blood.

“What if the wolves came by sea?” asks Ursula. “What if the wolves built ships and learned how to sail the whale’s-road?”

“The cliffs are too steep,” her mother says, spitting more feathers. “And Lord Beowulf’s archers are always watchful of the sea for invaders and wolves in boats.”

“You worry about dragons,” says her father, giving the reins a sudden tug. “Worry about trolls and witches, girl, but say no more this day of wolves.”

“Then may I worry about bears?” she asks her father.

“You are a bear,” he says. “You are Ursula, our little bear, and bears should not fear their own.”

“I am a bear,” she says very softly, speaking only to herself, and her mother, who has become a raven, caws and flies away toward the sea. Her black wings seem to slice the edges of the sky, so that soon it has begun to rain. Not drops of water, though, but drops of blood that spatter on the fields and road. Her father tells her not to worry, that her mother will be better soon.

But then the dream has changed, as dreams are wont to do, and Ursula is grown and wandering the moorlands alone, just as her mother did years before, searching in vain for a stolen boy. The sky above her has been torn asunder, ripped to hang in blue-gray strips, and she knows that the time of Ragnarök must at last be upon Midgard. The monster wolf Fenrisulfr has at last grown so large that when he opens his mouth, his snout brushes the stars aside and his chin drags upon the earth. He has broken free of the dwarves’ chain and escaped his island prison of Lyngvi, and soon will the son of Loki devour Odin Allfather, before it is cut down by Odin’s son, the silent god Vi?ar. Ursula wants to look away, wants to turn and run back to the keep, but she cannot take her eyes from the sight of the Fenrisulfr, filling up all the tattered sky. His teeth are as mountains and his shaggy silhouette blocks out even the light of the sun. His jaws drip steaming rivers to scorch the world.

“I don’t want to see the end,” whispers Ursula, wishing now that the wolves had also taken her when they took her brother, that she would not have to live to see the Twilight of the Gods and Loki’s children set free to bring about the end of all things. The ground shakes beneath her feet, and everywhere she looks, the heather and bracken writhes with serpents and worms and maggots.

“It is only a golden drinking horn,” Beowulf tells her, but he sounds frightened, and never before has Ursula heard fear in his voice. “Something I lost. That is all.”

“My father,” she says, “told me that Hrothgar took it as a trophy when he defeated the dragon Fafnir.”

“That may be so,” Beowulf sighs. “I could not say.”

All around her, there is the terrible rending and splintering of the brittle spine of the world, wracked by the thunderous footsteps of Fenrisulfr as he marches past Heorot to keep his appointment with Vi?ar. The two towers of Beowulf’s keep crumble and fall into the sea, and the sky has begun to rain liquid fire.

“It is very beautiful,” Ursula says, admiring the golden horn in Beowulf’s hands.

“The gods always knew that chain would never hold the beast,” her father mutters as the gates of the village come into view. “The beard of a woman, a mountain’s roots, a fish’s breath…such a waste.”

“It means nothing to me,” says Beowulf.

“It was your prize for killing Grendel,” Ursula replies. “It was your reward.”

“My reward,” Beowulf whispers. “No, my reward was to die an old man and never ride the fields of Idavoll with the glorious dead. My reward was a frigid, Christ-worshipping wife and a pile of stones beside the sea.”

Fenrisulfr turns and stares down at her, and his eyes are gaping caverns filled up with fire and thick, billowing smoke. He sees her and flares his nostrils.

“Father,” she says. “Look. He is eating the sky alive.”

“No wolves,” he replies. “Worry about your dragons, little bear. Or you’ll end up like your poor mother.”

And she stares up into the furnace eyes of Fenrisulfr, seeing how little difference there is between a wolf and a dragon, on this last day, that they may as well be one and the same. A dragon devoured her brother, and King Hrothgar raided a wolf’s golden hoard.

King Beowulf places a dagger to the soft spot beneath his chin, but she feels the blade pressing against her own throat. And then the dream breaks apart in the instant before Ursula can scream, the final instant before she dreams her death and her king’s suicide, before Fenrisulfr swallows her and all of Heorot with her.

She lies naked and sweating and breathless beside Beowulf, and when she looks at him, he’s clutching the golden horn to his chest, muttering in his sleep, lost somewhere in the labyrinth of his own secret nightmares. She watches his restless sleep and slowly remembers what is real and what is not. When she is finally certain that she is awake, Ursula rises from the bed and pulls on her furs and fleece-lined boots and very quietly leaves the king’s bedchamber.

A spiral stairway leads up to the causeway connecting the two towers of the keep, and Ursula hugs herself against the chill air and climbs the granite steps. After the dream, she needs to see the sky and the sea and the moonlight falling silver on rooftops and the land beyond the village walls. She reaches the landing, a short hallway leading out to the causeway, and the air here is even colder than it was in the stairwell, and Ursula wishes she were wearing something beneath her furs.

She passes a tapestry, very old and neglected, torn in places and in need of mending. But even in the dim hallway, she can recognize the scene depicted there, Beowulf tearing the monster Grendel’s arm from its shoulder. She keeps walking, and soon she has reached the place where the hall opens out onto the causeway and the winter night. She takes one step out into the moonlight, then she stops. Queen Wealthow is standing on the bridge, only a dozen or so yards away, clothed in her own fur cloak. She does not turn toward Ursula, but stares up at the twinkling stars.

“Another restless night?” she asks Ursula.

Terrified, Ursula can only manage to nod, and then the queen turns toward her. In the darkness, Ursula cannot be certain of Wealthow’s expression, but there is no anger in her voice.

“It’s all right, girl,” the queen says. “I’m not an ogre. I’m not going to eat you.”

Ursula takes a few hesitant steps nearer Queen Wealthow. In the light of the moon and stars, the queen’s hair seems to glow like spun silver.

“He has bad dreams,” says Ursula. “They’ve been coming more often, and tonight they are very bad.”

Wealthow sighs and her breath steams.

“He is a king,” she says. “Kings have a lot on their conscience. They do not have easy dreams.”

Neither do I, thinks Ursula, wondering what sort of dreams queens have, what private demons might have brought Wealthow out into the night. Ursula glances at Wealthow, at the stars spread out overhead, then down at the stones beneath her feet. She wishes she could turn and flee back into the tower, back down to Beowulf’s bed. The air smells like salt, and she can hear the waves against the rocks.

“Sometimes,” she says, “he calls your name in his sleep, my Lady.”

“Does he?” asks Queen Wealthow, sounding distant and unimpressed.

“Yes, my Lady,” replies Ursula, trying not to stammer. “I believe he still holds you in his heart.”

Wealthow cocks one eyebrow and stares skeptically at her husband’s mistress. “Do you indeed?” she asks. Ursula catches the bitter note of condescension, and for a moment neither of them says anything else. The silence lies like ice between them, like the empty spaces between the stars, until Ursula finds her voice.

“I often wonder. What happened…”

“…to us?” asks Wealthow, finishing the question.

Ursula only nods, wishing she could take back the question, dreading the answer.

Wealthow watches her a second or two, then turns back to the stars. “Too many secrets,” she says.

And then, from somewhere across the moorlands, there is a low rumble, and at first Ursula thinks that it is only thunder, though there is not a single wisp of cloud anywhere in the sky.

“Did you hear—” she begins, but Wealthow raises a hand, silencing her. And only a heartbeat later, the southern sky is lit by a brilliant flash, a hundred times brighter than the brightest flash of lightning, brighter than the sun at midsummer noon. Ursula squints and blinks, her eyes beginning to smart and water.

It’s only the dream, she thinks. I’m still asleep, and this is only the dream, for after the white flash, a brilliant yellow-red-orange stream of flame erupts and rains down upon the homesteads beyond the gates of Heorot. The fire pours across the landscape like a flood, and the causeway rumbles and sways.

“God help us,” says Wealthow, and then she takes Ursula roughly by the arm and leads her back into the tower.

18 Scorched Earth

In his dreams, Beowulf has watched the fire fall, the sizzling gouts spewed forth from fanged jaws and splashing across the roofs and winter-brown moors. Everything become only tinder for the dragon’s breath, everything only fuel for the greedy flames. Sleeping, he has been shown the burning of homes and fields and livestock, has seen the outermost walls of the village seared and still the fire came surging forward, coming on like the tide, enveloping and devouring everything it touched. She has shown him everything, so much more than Beowulf could have possibly seen with waking eyes. He has seen the night split wide by this holocaust, and he has looked deep into the eyes of Death.

In the courtyard below the two grand towers of Heorot, King Beowulf stands and watches the stream of refugees fleeing the smoldering wreckage of the village, believing there may yet be some sanctuary to be found within the castle keep. But she has shown him everything, and he knows there will be no place to hide when next the sky begins to burn. The lucky ones have died in the night. Beyond the walls of the keep, an immense gray-black column of smoke and ash rises high into the sky to meet the winter clouds.

“By the gods,” whispers Wiglaf. “I have seen war, and I have seen murder and atrocities, but never have I seen such a thing as this.”

Beowulf does not answer, and he would shut his eyes if he thought it would drive these desperate, hurting faces from his mind. The freezing air reeks of smoke and brimstone and cooked flesh, and what snow still lies within the courtyard has been sullied with a thick covering of sticky black soot.

“I have even seen the work of demons,” says Wiglaf, “but this…”

“How many?” asks Beowulf, his mouth gone almost too dry to speak. “How many are dead?”

“I cannot say,” replies Wiglaf, shaking his head. “I have been all the way to the village gates and back, but…I just don’t know, my lord. Too many.”

The procession of the burned and bleeding, the broken and maimed, files slowly past, and most are silent, struck dumb by their pain or grief or the horrors they have witnessed. Others cry out, giving voice to their losses or injuries or dismay, and still others pause to look up into the face of their king. Faces slick with blood and fever and seeping blisters, faces filled with questions he does not know how to answer. Those who can yet walk stagger or shuffle or stumble along, but many more are carried into the keep by thanes or by the strongest of the survivors.

“It came out of the night sky,” a wide-eyed woman says. There’s a baby clutched tight in her arms, and Beowulf can plainly see the child is dead. “Our houses and farms, it burnt everything.”

He knows no words to comfort her. He has no words to comfort any of them. Wealthow is nearby, moving among the wounded, handing out wool blankets. The red-robed priest is with her, but he seems lost, and his lips mouth a prayer that seems to have no end. Beowulf wonders what consolation Christ Jesus and the god of the Romans has to offer, what salvation they might bring to bear against this wanton terror and destruction.

As much as any god watching on from Ásgard, he thinks. Little, or none at all.

Then Wiglaf takes hold of his shoulder and is saying something, simple words that Beowulf should understand but can’t quite wring the meaning from. And then he sees for himself and so does not need to be told—old Unferth in the arms of one of his guards, Unferth scorched and steaming in the cold morning air, his charred robes almost indistinguishable from his flesh. His beard and almost all his hair have been singed away, and there is only a crimson welt where his left eye used to be. The wooden cross still hangs about his neck, gone as black as the scalded, swollen hand that clings to it.

“My son,” murmurs Unferth, and so Beowulf knows that he is alive. “His wife and my grandchildren. All of them dead. All of them burned in the night. But not me, Beowulf. Not me.”

“You saw what did this?” Beowulf asks him, and Unferth grimaces, exposing the jagged stubs of teeth reduced almost to charcoal.

“The dragon,” replies Unferth. “I saw…the dragon. Your dragon, my lord.”

Beowulf glances up at Unferth’s guard. There’s a wide gash on the man’s forehead, and his face is bloodied, but he seems otherwise unharmed. “Did you see it, as well?” Beowulf asks the guard.

“I cannot say what I saw,” the guard replies. “But they are all dead, my sire, just as my Lord Unferth has said. I do not know how we alone escaped.”

“My son,” Unferth says again, then he coughs and there’s a sickening rattle in his chest. “Because that wretch Cain found the golden horn, yes? You had an…agreement with her. But now…now, you have the horn again, don’t you? Now…the pact is broken.”

“He is delirious,” says the guard, and Beowulf sees that the man is weeping now. “His reason is overthrown. I can make no sense of the things he says.”

“You have the damned horn,” snarls Unferth and a fat blister at one corner of his mouth bursts and oozes down his chin. “So the agreement is now ended…and my son…my son is dead.”

“What agreement?” asks Wiglaf. “Unferth, who said these things?”

Unferth’s remaining eye swings about wildly for a moment, then comes to rest on Wiglaf. “You must know…surely you know, good Wiglaf. Or has the King kept his secrets from you…all these years.”

“He is delirious,” the guard says again. “He does not know what he’s saying. Lord Unferth is dying, my king, and I should find the priest.”

“Sin,” sneers Unferth, and now that one eye, cloudy and bloodshot, glistening with pain, comes to rest on Beowulf. “Sins of the fathers. That’s the last thing I heard…before my family was burned alive, the very last thing I heard…before their screams. The sins, Beowulf. The sins of the fathers.”

“Who said this?” Beowulf asks. “Tell me, Unferth. Who said these things?”

“He did,” Unferth whispers, his voice shrunken now to hardly the faintest whisper, and Beowulf has to lean close to hear. “The pretty man with golden wings. He said it. You have a fine son, my king.” And then Unferth closes that mad and rolling eye, and Wiglaf points the guard toward the priest, still standing with Queen Wealthow and still muttering his futile pleas and supplications. When the guard has carried Unferth away, Wiglaf runs his fingers through his hair and takes a deep breath.

“He was insane, my lord,” says Wiglaf. “To have seen what he’s seen, the death of his house—any man would lose his wits. When I went down to the gates, I saw all that now remains of Unferth Hall. Slag and cinder, Beowulf, a glowing hole in the ground, and little else.” Wiglaf sighs and stares up at the column of smoke rising from the ruins of the village. “A dragon,” he says and swallows. “Do you believe that, my lord, that a dragon is abroad, that a fyrweorm has come among us.”

The pretty man with golden wings.

“What does it matter what I believe. What any of us believe. Unferth believed his crosses kept him safe from evil. I believed the age of monsters was behind us. Do not trouble yourself with belief, Wiglaf. Trust only what your eyes now see,” and he motions toward the village. “This was not the work of man.”

“But a dragon?”

“Or something near enough,” says Beowulf. “Call my officers. Have them meet me in the armory.”

“Some have surely died,” says Wiglaf. “Others are unaccounted for.”

“Then gather those who still draw breath, however many you can find. There is not much time, I fear. We must try and discover this fiend’s lair before it returns to finish what it began last night. And we must make such defenses as we are still able, to protect those who have so long looked to us for protection. I have failed them all, Wiglaf.”

“I will not believe that,” Wiglaf says. “No king has ever guarded the land of the Danes as you have. If this thing…if it is a dragon…”

“Then perhaps we will have one last chance to seek our place in Valhalla,” Beowulf tells him, watching Wealthow moving among the refugees. “Maybe we shall not die in our beds, sick old men fit only for Hel’s gray realm.”

You have a fine son, my king.

Wiglaf nods, but there is nothing like certainty or hope in his eyes. “This is not a troll and its mother,” he says. “Whatever it is.”

“Enough talk, Wiglaf. Make haste. The day will not be long, and we do not know what our enemy intends.”

And so Wiglaf leaves him there, surrounded by the dead and the soon to be dead, and Beowulf can still hear the firestorm from his dreams, and the screams, and the fearful sound of vast wings bruising the night sky.

The day shines dimly through the narrow windows set into the thick stone walls of the king’s bedchamber, but there is neither warmth nor joy nor even solace in that wan light. Beyond the walls of Beowulf’s keep, the village still burns, and the king’s warriors have reported that all their efforts to extinguish the blaze have been in vain. The breath of the great weorm has poisoned everything it touched, some strange incendiary substance that continues to burn even when doused with water and earth. The ground itself is burning. They have managed only to keep the flames from spreading inside the walls of the keep, and that pillar of smoke and ash still rises into the winter sky above the ruins of Heorot. It has turned the afternoon to twilight.

King Beowulf tugs at the straps of his breastplate, adjusting the fit of armor he has not worn since he was a younger man. Then he chooses a sword and shield from off the wall, and his longbow, too. He glances toward the windows, that hazy light falling across the bed he once shared with Wealthow, the bed he now shares with another woman—no, a girl, a girl young enough to be his own granddaughter. But it hardly seems to matter now, for surely he will not survive this day to ever again bed any girl or woman. It is waiting for him out there, what poor, mad, dying Unferth has named “the sins of the fathers.” The price of the life he has lived.

The life she gave me, he thinks, and takes a great ax down from the wall. It was never more than that.

Beowulf has already given Wiglaf and the officers of his thanes their orders, to take up positions along the northern rim of the gorge dividing Heorot from the moorlands. If he cannot defeat this beast, they will be all that stands between the dragon and the keep’s uttermost destruction. He could clearly see the doubt in Wiglaf’s eyes, doubt that any man or army of men might stand against such a calamity, but Beowulf also saw in Wiglaf’s eyes a grim determination.

The king lifts his heavy cape from an iron hook set into the wall, a great cloak sewn from wolf and bear pelts, and he drapes it around his shoulders. When he looks up again, Ursula is watching him from the doorway, and her cheeks are streaked with tears.

“I beg you,” she says, her voice hardly more than a sobbed whisper. “Do not leave me. Please…”

“You are free to go,” he tells her. “I release you. Find a good man, if one still lives when this day is done. Bear him children…bear him a son, Ursula.”

She crosses the room to stand beside him, and Beowulf sighs and gently cradles her face in his scarred and callused hands.

“Please, child. Do as I’ve asked,” Beowulf says. “Let me go down to this battle knowing that you will not waste your life grieving for an old man.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t want anyone else. I want you, my lord.”

“I’m not the man you think me to be, Ursula.”

“You are King Beowulf,” she replies. “You’re a great man, and a hero. This I know to be true.”

“You know a legend,” sighs Beowulf. “You know only the stories told by scops.”

“I believe—” Ursula begins, but Beowulf places his hand firmly over her mouth, for he will hear no more of this, not today, not ever.

“Then you are as much a fool as all the rest of them,” he tells her, making his voice as hard and unfeeling as he can manage. Confusion and fury flash bright in Ursula’s wet eyes. She pushes him away and runs from the room.

Beowulf turns back toward the wall and catches his reflection in a shield still hanging there. “You are a tired old man,” he says, speaking to that haggard image of himself trapped in the polished metal. “You go to seek your death in the wilderness.”

“Indeed you do,” says Queen Wealthow, and he turns about to find her standing in the open doorway. Her gown and furs, her face and hair, are smeared with black soot and stained with the blood of the dying and wounded whom she has helped to tend. “And indeed, husband, you are a tired old man. Cladding yourself in the armor of a younger Beowulf will not change that in the least.”

“Woman, have you nothing better to do this day,” he says, “than to trouble yourself mocking me? Shouldn’t you be with your priest, doing the holy works of your weeping, merciful Christ Jesus?”

Wealthow steps into the room, pulling the door shut behind her.

“Why don’t you take that poor girl and live out your remaining years in peace. You are an old man, Beowulf. Let some young hero save us. Some wanderer from a far shore, a Frisian, perhaps…or a Swede. Some callow fool come looking for gold and glory and a crown.”

Beowulf glares at her for a moment. He can smell the stink of burning seeping from her clothing.

“And start the whole nightmare all over again?” he asks, then shakes his head. “No. I have visited this horror upon my kingdom, like Hrothgar before me. And so I must be the one to make an end to it. Now. Today. I must be the one to finish her.”

Wealthow’s startling violet eyes, hardly dimmed by age, match his glare, match it and double it, and she walks quickly from the closed door to stand before him.

“Was she so beautiful?” Wealthow asks, and now there is anger in her voice. “Beowulf, is there in all the world any beauty so costly, any mere earthly beauty worth what you have seen today?”

“I could lie,” Beowulf says. “I could tell you, my queen, that in the wisdom of my many years I have learned there is no beauty worth this terrible price. I could tell you she was only a hideous sea hag who bewitched me, casting a wicked glamour that only caused me to think her so beautiful a being. But how would that profit either of us? Yes, Wealthow, she is beautiful, a beauty beyond reckoning and beyond mere words and almost beyond imagining. A beauty the gods in Ásgard would themselves die for.”

“The gods,” scoffs Wealthow.

“Or even your ghostly Jesus,” adds Beowulf. “Even he would have climbed down off his Roman cross for the love of such beauty.”

“That is heathen blasphemy,” Wealthow mutters.

Beowulf tries to laugh, but it’s a dry and humorless sound. “Aye,” he says. “For I am still a heathen king, and so I have not yet learned proper Christian blasphemy.”

“It is not too late. You do not have to go to meet this fiend as an unbeliever and unbaptized. The priest—”

“—will get none of me,” cuts in Beowulf. “Oh no, not that Irish sheepfucker. It is enough, I should think, that he has duped the better part of my kingdom with his talk of sin and salvation and heavenly life eternal. No, I will keep the gods of my father and his fathers before him. If there is any life awaiting me beyond this one, then I will be content to take my seat in Odin’s hall, should I earn that honor. Else I will find myself with Loki’s daughter in her foul hall on the banks of the Gjöll.”

“You still believe these things?” asks Wealthow.

“In more than sixty years, I have heard nothing better. Certainly not the ravings of your dear sheepfucking Irish priest.”

Wealthow takes a deep, resigned breath.

Beowulf swallows and scratches at his beard. “My lady, I do not wish to leave you with anger and bitter words,” he says. “I would have you know, Wealthow, that I am sorry, that I do regret the suffering I have visited upon you and my people. I was a fool.”

“You were a young fool,” she tells him, still trying to sound angry, but her voice has softened, losing its keen self-righteous edge.

“Now I am a sorry old fool,” Beowulf says. Then he pauses, lost for a moment in those eyes, lost in the memories of this strong woman who was herself only a girl when first he came to Heorot. “You should know, I have always loved you, my queen.”

“And I have always loved you,” she whispers, and smiles a sad and weary smile, then looks away so that he will not see the tears brimming in her eyes.

“She is only a child,” Beowulf says. “Do not be unkind to her when I am gone.”

“She is much more than a child,” Wealthow replies. “You should have recognized that by now. But do not worry yourself, husband. I mean her no harm. She knows that. She will always have a place here, if she so wishes it.”

“That is very gracious of you.”

Wealthow shrugs, then glances back to her king.

“I will miss you,” she says. “May you find whatever it is you seek.”

Beowulf smiles, wishing that he might know one last night with the woman he took as his wife and queen so many long years ago, that he might hold her and know the peace he once knew in the sanctuary of her arms.

“Keep a memory of me,” he says. “Not as a king and a hero, not as a demon slayer, but only as a man, fallible and flawed as any man. That is how I would be remembered.” And then the King of Heorot kisses his wife for what he knows will be the final time, and she does not flinch and does not pull away.

19 Dark Harrower and Hoard-Guard

In truth, Beowulf is glad for Wiglaf’s company. The king had ordered his herald and oldest friend, Weohstan’s son, to remain behind with those warriors charged with defending the keep and what little remained of the village, the thanes commanded to protect the lives of those who survived the dragon’s night raid. But Wiglaf protested, saying that the king should not ride out across the moorlands alone, and that one old man more or less would make little difference if Beowulf should fail and the fyrweorm return to Heorot. Better I ride at your side, Wiglaf said, and in the end Beowulf had relented. It is a grim prospect, to face death, but grimmer by far is the prospect of facing it in the wilderness alone. By the time the Geats rode out, the fires that had engulfed the village had mostly burned themselves out, leaving behind little to show that only the day before had stood a living, breathing town of men.

And now, looking once more out across the oily tarn, the peat-stained waters of Weormgræf, Beowulf is thankful he did not come here alone. In three decades, the place has changed in no way that he can detect. The poisoned surface of the lake still dances with that same unclean iridescent sheen. The grass still grows thick and brown around its boggy shores, and at this spot where the mist-bound land rises up into a steep bank crowned with three mighty oaks, the steaming lake still flows down beneath the earth, gurgling softly as it passes between the knotty roots of the three oaks. The air stinks of rotting vegetation and fungi, mud and peat and dead fish.

But this time, Beowulf and Wiglaf did not cross the ancient forest beyond the moorlands and then the wide and treacherous marches, picking their way on foot. There is another route, one not known in those faraway days when Grendel and its dam terrified the men and women of the horned hall. And so the two men have come on horseback, wandering bleak and rocky paths down to the lake and the three trees and the cave leading deep below ground. But as they near the trees and the water’s edge, their mounts whinny piteously and stamp their hooves against the gravelly soil and shy away from the Weormgræf.

“You cannot blame them,” Wiglaf says, then he leans forward and whispers something comforting into his horse’s right ear.

“This is the place,” says Beowulf, tugging hard at the reins of his own mount, pressing his heels lightly into the frightened horse’s ribs. “Long years has it haunted my dreams, Wiglaf. In nightmares, I’ve come here a thousand times. But never once did I suspect I’d have need to visit it again awake.”

Wiglaf pats the horse’s neck, then sits up straight in his saddle and stares out across the tarn. “It hasn’t changed,” he says. “It’s the same sorry piss hole it was the day you killed Grendel’s mother, a blighted waste fit only for demons and their kin.”

“But I have changed. I am no longer a boastful young man,” Beowulf mutters, half to himself. “Once, I might have called this night-ravager out to face me in the open. I might have faced it as I faced Grendel, naked and without any weapon but my own strength.”

Wiglaf turns his head and looks to Beowulf, who is staring at the three trees and the entrance to the cavern. His eyes are distant, and to Wiglaf he seems lost in unpleasant thoughts. For a while, there are only the sounds of the skittish horses, the wind, and a noisy flock of ravens watching from the oaks. When the King of the Ring-Danes speaks again, his voice seems to Wiglaf to have grown heavy as the cold air, as though every word is an effort.

“There is something I must say, my Wiglaf.”

“Yes, my lord?”

Beowulf takes a bracing, deep breath and exhales fog. Some part of him had wished that they would reach this place and find that the grasping, probing roots of the trees had long ago sealed the entryway, that the ground itself had collapsed, closing off the path leading down to those haunted subterranean pools.

“I have no heir,” he says. If I should be slain by this creature…” and he pauses and takes another deep breath. “…if I should die this day,” Beowulf continues, “then you shall be king, Wiglaf. I have arranged it with the heralds. They have been given my instructions.”

Wiglaf turns away, looking back out across the tarn. “Don’t speak of such things, my lord,” he tells Beowulf.

Beowulf sighs loudly and stares at the grim opening waiting for him there between the oaken roots. A sorrow has come over him, and he has never been a man at ease with sadness. He is holding the golden drinking horn, Hrothgar’s horn returned to Heorot by Unferth’s slave.

“Wiglaf, there is something I would have you know. Something you must know.”

“There’s a story about this place,” Wiglaf says, as though he has not heard Beowulf. “It was told by a woman in the village, an Icelander wench called Sigga. Some say she is a witch and a seer. I expect she’s dead now, dead or dying. She said this hill”—and Wiglaf motions toward the trees and the steep bank—“did not begin as a dragon’s hoard or as a demon’s den. She said that it’s the barrow of the last man of a long-forgotten race. The name of that man and his people has been lost to the world for three hundred years.”

“Wiglaf,” Beowulf begins, but Wiglaf shakes his head and points up at the trees, their limbs heavy with raven feathers.

“Sigga said that the three oaks were planted by that last man, and that they are meant to represent the three Norns—Urd, Skuld, and Verdandi. The roots of the trees are the great tapestry of fate that the Norns have woven. I have heard it said that the witch called this place—”

“Wiglaf!” Beowulf cuts in impatiently, as his voice draws a raucous new chorus of caws from the ravens. “There is something I have to say to you. And you have to listen.”

Wiglaf turns suddenly about to face his king, and Beowulf has never seen such fury in the Geat’s eyes as he sees there now, some desperate wrath boiling up, wild and hot. Wiglaf’s cheeks are flushed an angry scarlet, and he narrows his eyes.

“Nay,” he says, raising his voice to a shout. “There is nothing I must know I do not know already! You are Beowulf. Beowulf the mighty! Beowulf the hero! King Beowulf, the slayer of and destroyer of trolls and sea hags and demon spawn! That is what I know, my lord, and all I need to know, this day or any other. Now…let’s do what we came here to do. Let’s kill this bloody flying devil where it sleeps and get on with our bloody lives!”

For a moment, Beowulf stares back at him in stunned silence, while the ravens caw and flutter their wings in the trees. He thinks that maybe he has never truly seen Wiglaf before now, that he has only ever glimpsed some shadow of the man, and he knows, at least, that he has done the right thing, naming Wiglaf his successor to the throne.

“Now,” says Wiglaf, then pauses to get his breath. Already, the anger is draining from his face. “Do you want me to go in with you?” he asks his king.

Beowulf merely shakes his head.

“Good, I will wait here,” replies Wiglaf, eyeing the ravens in the three oaks. “Perhaps I can make some decent sport of our blustering friends up there,” and he reaches for his longbow.

King Beowulf has not forgotten the path down to the merewife’s lair, for too many nights has he retraced it in his fitful sleep. The path below the trees, the first pool there below the hill—still infested with white eels and its muddy bottom still strewn with bleached bones and skulls—then the treacherous underground river spilling into some ancient chasm that the she-demon took for her home long ages ago. Beowulf doesn’t fight the current, though the rocks batter and bruise his flesh. And in time he emerges once more from that lowest pool, from the icy water accumulated there in a void left when a buried monster rotted away—another dragon, perhaps—leaving only its bones to become the caverns walls, its massive spine to form a roof. Beowulf stands shivering and dripping a few feet away from the icy shore.

Unlike the tarn, this place has changed somehow since last he came here. It seems to have grown, the distances between the cavern’s walls, from its floor to the stalactite-draped ceiling, increasing by hundreds of feet. The sickly blue elfin light that lit the chamber thirty years ago has dimmed, and the pool is black as pitch. There does not seem to be nearly so much golden treasure as before, as though the slave Cain is not the only man who has found his way here and plundered the hoard. Beowulf takes Hrothgar’s drinking horn from beneath his mail and sodden robes, and it glows, casting a warm light across the rocks at his feet and pushing back some of the stifling darkness. The sound of dripping water is very loud, and Beowulf imagines if he stood here long, that dripping might come to sound as loud as the blows of Thor’s hammer.

Beowulf holds the horn high above his head, and shouts into the gloom, “Come forth! Show yourself!” But by some peculiar property of this accursed place, some aural trick, a long and eerie silence falls between the act of speaking and the sound of his own voice. When his delayed utterance does finally greet Beowulf’s ears, it seems to roll back as little more than an echo, diminished by the darkness and distance of the place.

Come forth! Show yourself!

Come forth! Show yourself!

Come forth! Show yourself!

He takes another step toward the edge of the pool, moving nearer the pebbly, muddy shore, but the moment seems to stretch itself into long minutes. So, thinks Beowulf, the sorcery shrouding this fetid grotto has been fashioned to twist sound and time, and that thought takes at least as long as a single footstep, fifteen minutes, ten, half an hour. His left boot sends up a crystal spray, each droplet rising so slowly from the pool, every one of them a perfect liquid gem reflecting and refracting the red-orange glow of the drinking horn or the soft blue phosphorescence of the cavern walls. Beowulf looks down, and there’s his face gazing back up at him from the pool. But it’s the face of his younger self, not the visage of the old man he’s become. Those eyes are still bright with the vigor of his lost youth, and the beard that face wears has not yet gone gray. Then the sluggish arc of the droplets brings them back down across the water, and they strike the pool like deafening thunderclaps. Each drop creates a perfect ring of ripples that languidly radiate across the surface, intersecting with other ripples, and for some period of time he cannot judge, he stands there transfixed, watching them. When the water is finally still again, the face looking up at him from the pool is only that of a battle-scarred old man.

And then he feels dizzy and sick to his stomach and feels something else, as well—an odd, unwinding sensation, as though time is suddenly catching up with itself again. His next footstep toward the shore takes no more or less time than any footstep should.

“I have not come to play games,” he mutters, climbing out onto the shore, the rocks shifting and crunching noisily beneath his feet. Breathless, he pauses at the edge of the pool, exhausted by the arduous journey down from the tarn and the three oaks. There’s a stitch in his side and the faint coppery taste of blood on his tongue, and Beowulf wonders if maybe he cracked a tooth as he was tossed and pummeled along the underground river connecting the two subterranean pools. He spits pink foam onto the ground at his feet.

“I no longer have the patience for such games,” Beowulf says. “So show yourself, and save the trickery for someone who hasn’t seen it all before.”

There is a rattling, clanging sound from the shadows to his right, and Beowulf turns to see half a dozen figures shambling toward him across the stony beach. They are little more than skeletons, held together by desiccated scraps of sinew and shriveled bits of skin, wrapped up in rusty armor and rags. Some of them have lost an arm or a leg, and Beowulf sees that the nearest is missing his lower jaw bone. The figures glare back at him from eyeless skulls, dazzling cerulean orbs of the cave’s faerie light shining out from otherwise-empty sockets. Beowulf reaches for his sword, but immediately the skeletal figures stop their staggering advance and stand very still, still as stone or mortar, all of them watching him.

“Hail Beowulf,” the nearest says, its voice like iron scraping dry bone. And Beowulf realizes that this wraith was once the Geat Hondshew, one of the boldest and bravest of all his thanes. “Great Beowulf, who killed the monster Grendel.”

To Hondshew’s left, another thane, this one unrecognizable as its face is far too decomposed to bear resemblance to any living man, raises a bony finger and jabs it in Beowulf’s direction.

“Hail Beowulf,” it croaks. “Great Beowulf, who slew Grendel’s demon mother.”

Behind it, another of the dead thanes makes an awful, choking sound that might be laughter. “Hail mighty Beowulf,” it says. “The wisest king, and the mightiest who ever ruled the Ring-Danes.”

Now Beowulf takes several steps backward, retreating to the edge of the wide black pool. His hand still rests firmly on the pommel of his sword, but he does not draw it from out its sheath.

“This is but some deceit!” shouts Beowulf. “Some poor jest to throw me off my guard, to weaken my resolve!”

“Hail Beowulf,” mumbles another of the fallen thanes, and Beowulf thinks this one might have once been Afvaldr who all the men called Afi. There is a dreadful commotion of rattling vertebrae and ribs, and Afi grinds his decaying teeth and points at Beowulf. “Good and faithful Beowulf,” he says, “who left us all for dead.”

“You fell in battle,” Beowulf replies. “I know my eyes have been deceived, for this day you ride the battlefields of Idavoll—”

“I was murdered by the monster’s mother while I slept,” snarls the apparition. “That is no glorious death. I will never have a seat in Valhalla.”

“This is not real,” says Beowulf. “I cannot be fooled by such shoddy witchcraft.”

Another of the shamblers has made its way to the front of the pack, and right away Beowulf recognizes him. The once-corpulent Olaf is now little more than a scarecrow.

“Hail the guh-great King Beowulf,” snarls Olaf. “Liar and muh-muh-monster. Lecher and fuh-fuh-fool.”

“You built your kingdom with our spilled blood,” says the thing that wants Beowulf to believe it was once Hondshew and scurrying black beetles and albino spiders dribble from its lipless mouth. “You built your glorious keep from our bones.”

And now all the dead men raise their arms and cry out in unison, “Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail!”

“I will not see this,” Beowulf hisses. “I will not hear this filthy coward’s lie. Show yourself!”

And like a handful of dust in a strong gale, the wraiths come apart in some unfelt gust, vanishing back into the half-light and murk from whence they came. At once there is a new disturbance in the merewife’s cavern, the din of great, leathery wings from somewhere directly overhead. And before Beowulf can draw his weapon, he is assailed by a violent blast of hot wind that almost knocks him off his feet. The air now reeks of brimstone and carrion rot. He hears footsteps and turns toward the ledge of ancient granite altar stone where, thirty years before, Grendel’s corpse lay. The enormous sword, surely a giant’s blade, is still mounted on the wall above the stone. Near the altar is a tunnel, yet another tributary of this underground waterway, and from that tunnel comes the disquieting echo of a soft male voice.

“How strange,” says the voice. “When I listened at windows and from rooftops to the talk of the mighty King Beowulf, all the talk I heard was of a hero, valiant and wise, courageous and noble. But here, now I see…you’re nothing, a pathetic, empty nothing.”

Beowulf tries to push the images of the wraiths from his mind, steeling himself for this new horror, whatever it might be.

“I am Beowulf,” he says.

Now, the water in the tunnel has begun to burn, whirling sheets of flame racing across it and licking at the travertine and granite walls. And in that flickering light Beowulf can clearly see the speaker, the image of a slender, well-muscled young man, and he is not standing in the water but walking upon it, as though he might weigh no more than a feather. The man’s skin is golden, as golden as the drinking horn, and he is clothed only in a strapwork harness of curled leather. Except for his glistening, gilded skin, this young man might well be Beowulf, as he was in his twentieth or twenty-fifth year. There is a sinking, sour realization growing in Beowulf’s mind, and he shudders and forces himself not to look away.

Give me a child, Beowulf. Enter me now and give me a beautiful, beautiful son.

You have a fine son, my king.

“I am Beowulf,” the Lord of the Ring-Danes says again.

“You are shit,” replies the golden man. Those three words bite at Beowulf’s heart like the iron heads of an archer’s shaft.

“Who,” begins Beowulf, then stops and swallows, his mouth gone dry as dust. “What are you?”

The golden man, wreathed all in flame yet unburning, smiles a vicious smile. “I’m only something you left behind…Father.”

Beowulf feels a weakness in his knees, and his heart begins to race and skips a beat.

“Here,” he says, holding out the golden horn. “Take back your damned, precious bauble. The man who stole it has been punished. Have it, demon, and leave my land in peace.” And with those words, Beowulf hurls the drinking horn toward the golden man and the fiery tunnel entrance. It lands at his feet with an audible splash, but also does not sink into the water as it should. The golden man looks down at the horn and shakes his head.

“It is much too late for that,” he says, and raises one bare foot and gently presses it down upon the horn, crushing it flat against the water in an instant. Where the horn had been, there is only a bubbling puddle of molten metal. It floats on the steaming water for a second or two, then Beowulf watches in disbelief as it flows up over the foot and ankle that crushed it, melding seamlessly with the golden man’s skin.

“How will you hurt me, Father?” he asks, stepping through a curtain of flame to stand on the stone floor of the cave, between Beowulf and the altar ledge. “With your fingers, your teeth…your bare hands?”

Beowulf licks his parched lips, and he can feel the heat from the flames against his face.

“Where is your mother?” he asks. “Where is she hiding?” And then, shouting toward the cave’s ceiling. “Show yourself, bitch!”

The golden man laughs, a sound like rain and a handful of coins scattered across cobbles. “Nobody ever sees my mother,” he tells Beowulf. “Unless, of course, she wishes. Not even me.”

“This is madness,” mutters Beowulf.

“You have a wonderful land, my Father,” the golden man says and takes another step toward Beowulf. “A beautiful home. Oh, and women. Such beautiful, frail women. When I came and listened at windows, sometimes they spoke of your women. Your wise Queen Wealthow. Your pretty bed warmer, Ursula. I wonder—which of them do you think I should kill first?”

“Why? Tell me, please, why are you doing this?”

The golden man raises a shimmering eyebrow and pretends not to understand the question. “Why am I offering you a choice?” he asks Beowulf.

“No, you bastard,” snarls Beowulf. “Why would you harm either of them?”

The golden man nods his pretty head, and the smile returns to his face. “Oh, I see. Because you love them both so much, Father. And because I hate you.”

“Your mother, she asked me for a son. I only gave her what she asked for.”

Now the golden man is striding confidently toward Beowulf, trailing a mantle of flame in his wake. And with each step he takes, he seems to grow larger. At first Beowulf thinks it’s only some other enchantment or guile of the cavern, but then he remembers how he watched the mortally wounded Grendel grow smaller.

“And she gave you a kingdom and crown,” the golden man says. “And you have them still, your lands and your treasure…your glory and your women. But what have I, dear Father? Where do I fit in your grand scheme?”

“You are your mother’s son,” Beowulf replies. “She never asked—”

“Never asked? Haven’t you ever wondered? You, an old man without an heir to his throne, have you never lain awake in the stillness of the night and wondered about the son whom you used to barter for power and riches? That he might have dreams and aspirations, that he might wish to be something more than a phantom and a bad memory?”

“My heir? You are an abomination.”

The golden man, taller than Beowulf now by a head, is standing only ten or twenty feet away, and he smirks and glances at the ground.

“An abomination,” says the golden man. “Like poor Grendel, you mean? Grendel, the ill-made and misbegotten son of good King Hrothgar—”

“The son of Hrothgar?” asks Beowulf, disbelieving. “Can you speak nothing but lies?”

“You did not know? Did you truly think you were my mother’s first dalliance with a son of Odin? Your Queen Wealthow knew, even before you met her—”

“I did not know it, and I do not know it now, for there is naught in you but bitter guile and deception.”

“Say what you will, Father. My skin is thick, and you cannot make me hate you any more than I already do. Indeed, if you were to engrave my hatred on every star in the sky, upon every grain of sand on every beach from now until the end of time, you would still not possess the smallest inkling of just how much I hate you.”

“How could I have known?” asks Beowulf.

“What matter? I am, as you say, an abomination, a demon born of an abominable union and unfit to sit upon your throne or upon any throne of man.”

And now the golden man, the son of Beowulf, has grown to such a great height that he stands easily twice as tall as his father, almost as tall as the monster Grendel. And his gleaming body has begun another and far more terrible sort of transformation, that smooth metallic skin suddenly becoming rough and scaled. The flourishes and whorls of the curled leather strapwork he was wearing have vanished, leaving only their intricate patterns behind, spirals of buff and amber on his gilded hide. From his face and skull, an assortment of horns and other bony nodules and excrescences have begun to sprout. Where a moment before towered a man of unearthly, incomparable beauty, now there stands some equally unearthly but hideous creature, neither quite reptile nor man.

“How will you kill me, Father?” the thing asks, but its dulcet voice has become an ugly, guttural rumble as lips and cheeks fold back and shrink away, tissue retracting to reveal a mouthful of uneven yellowed fangs and a purplish forked tongue. Its thick saliva drips to the cavern floor and spatters across the stones where it instantly flashes to puddles of blue-white flame. “Crush my arm in a door and tear it off? Do you think that will be enough? Or will you cut off my head and take it back to your pretty women as a trophy?”

Beowulf draws his sword, and the creature sneers and laughs at him. Its hands have become talons, and its arms have grown so long they reach the ground.

“Last night, you visited unspeakable suffering upon my people,” Beowulf says, holding the blade out before him, horrified by the metamorphosis he is witnessing, but incapable of looking away. “You have murdered—women and children, old men in their sleep. You are as much a coward as was your foul half brother, Grendel. You rain death upon those you despise and never do you look them in the face.”

“I am looking you in the face, Father.” But its bristling, venomous mouth is no longer suited to human speech, and Beowulf can only just make out the slurred and garbled words.

“Then fight me and leave the others be, for they have never done you harm.”

“But you love them, Father. Or so you profess, so you would have them believe. And I do hate you, so what better way might I ever harm you than by harming them? How better to take my vengeance?” More fire leaks from its jaws and spreads across the cobbles; Beowulf takes a quick step backward to avoid the flames.

There is a loud splash from the pool behind him, but Beowulf does not look away from the grinning dragon thing to see what might have made the sound.

“Enough,” the creature snorts, and now it has grown enormous, its horned skull brushing against the stalactites, breaking off bits of the smaller dripstone formations. Its neck is long and ripples with serpentine muscles, and where its arms were but a moment before there are gigantic leathery wings. A spiked and spiny tail lashes from side to side, and with one blow it smashes the altar stone to rubble. The beast is gigantic, the size of a small whale at least, almost as large as the sea monsters Beowulf fought when he swam against Brecca so long ago. It shakes its massive head from side to side, and scalding air washes over Beowulf.

“THERE WILL BE NO MORE TALK!” it bellows. “NOW, FATHER, YOU WILL WATCH AS I BURN YOUR WORLD TO CINDERS!”

And as the dragon opens its jaws wide, belching blinding gouts of liquid fire, Beowulf turns and dives headlong into the deep black pool. The cold water closes around him, soothing his blistered skin, and he lets himself sink to the muddy bottom bathed in the red-orange light from above. He looks back up at the roiling inferno writhing across the surface, wondering how long before the entire pool is turned to steam. Then there is a gentle but insistent tug at his arm, and when Beowulf looks down again, the merewife is floating before him. Even more beautiful than his memories of her, and he thinks if only Wealthow could see her, surely then his wife would understand why he has done the things he has done. Her yellow hair drifts like a wreath about her face, and her blue eyes seem brighter than any dragon’s fire. Her lips do not move, but he plainly hears her voice inside his head.

At last, you have met our son? she asks, and smiles, then raises a hand and lightly brushes his cheek with long, webbed fingers. He is so very much more than my poor idiot Grendel, but then his father…his father is so much more than that fat dullard Hrothgar ever was.

“Stop him,” Beowulf says, mouthing the words, and precious air rushes from his throat, rising in silvery bubbles toward the fire overhead.

Why would I do that? she replies. He is his father’s son, dear Beowulf. He is a willful being, a veritable wolf of the bees.

She drifts forward to kiss him, but now Beowulf can see the jagged, serrate teeth set into her blue-gray gums, the shimmer of scales between her breasts, and the Geat King is gripped by a powerful wave of revulsion. He raises his sword between them.

You will not hurt me, she whispers without speaking. You could not, even if you tried. Now, go and witness the grand deeds our beautiful son has come to work upon this land. He will be disappointed if you are not there to see. And she motions toward the surface of the pool.

On the hill overlooking the tarn, Wiglaf leans against one of the three oaks as the earth continues to shudder and roll beneath him. He has lashed both the horses to one of the lower limbs, and is grateful for having taken that precaution, for they would have fled in terror as soon as these convulsions began. Ripples spread out across the iridescent mirror of Weormgræf, and small waves have begun to lap at the shore. The horses snort and neigh. Their eyes roll, and they buck and pull at their restraints.

“You old fool,” Wiglaf mutters. “What in the name of Odin’s hairy scrotum have you gone and stirred up in there?”

And then Beowulf comes crashing through the tangled curtain of roots where the lake flows away under the hill. He flings himself down flat against the shore, and before Wiglaf can call out to him, the hill itself seems to exhale a white-hot burst of fire that incinerates the roots and then spreads out over the tarn, setting the oily, combustible water aflame. Beowulf rolls away from the edge of the tarn, and Wiglaf scrambles down the slope to help him. But then the earth heaves as though the last day of all has arrived, as though the Midgard serpent itself has awakened, and Fenrir is abroad and loosed upon the world. Wiglaf loses his footing and tumbles over on top of Beowulf.

“What have you done?” he asks, and the king glances back at the lake, squinting at the intensity of the flames.

“Be patient,” Beowulf tells him. “I fear you will soon enough see that for yourself.”

One last time the hillside heaves and shudders, and there’s a deafening crack as the oak farthest from the reined horses splinters, its roots tearing free of the rocky soil, and it topples over into the tarn with a tremendous splash. Only a moment later, the fallen tree is brushed aside by the horror that comes clawing its way up from the caverns below, and Wiglaf stares speechless at the golden dragon as it erupts from the earth, scattering a fusillade of dirt and stone, mud and glowing embers. It unfurls its mighty wings and sails out across the burning lake.

Beowulf is already on his feet again, moving swiftly up the hill toward the terrified horses.

“It’s a bloody damned dragon,” says Wiglaf, pointing at the beast soaring across the bog.

“And it’s heading for Heorot!” Beowulf shouts back at him. “Now, get up off your arse and stop gawking like you’ve never seen a monster before!”

“I’ve never seen a swifan dragon,” mutters Wiglaf, standing up, but still watching the fyrweorm as it hammers at the air with its wings, silhouetted against the winter sky and rising ever higher, moving out across the marches toward the old forest and the moorlands beyond.

20 Fire Worm

If Wiglaf hadn’t stopped him, Beowulf would have set out on horseback across the marches. And by now his mount would likely be hopelessly mired, leaving him to make the long, slow crossing on foot. Beowulf thinks it might have been his last idiotic mistake. Instead, he and Wiglaf have ridden back toward the moors by the same route that carried them to the poisoned, haunted tarn, a winding, rocky path skirting the bogs and the edges of the forest. And though they have ridden as fast as the horses can carry them along this craggy, treacherous path, it almost seems to Beowulf that he is back in the cavern again, caught once more in the merewife’s time-bending spell so that each second takes an eternity to come and go. He cannot imagine that they will reach Heorot ahead of the monster, that they will return to find anything remaining but blazing debris where the keep once stood. And then Wiglaf shouts and points to the sky above the ancient trees, and Beowulf sees that the dragon is soaring in wide circles beyond the highest limbs.

“What’s it doing?” asks Wiglaf.

“The bastard’s waiting on me,” replies Beowulf…. what better way might I ever harm you than by harming them? How better to take my vengeance?

Beowulf tugs back hard on the reins, and his horse skids to a stop in a cloud of dust and grit. Wiglaf rides past, then slows his own mount and circles back.

“Ride on to the keep,” Beowulf tells him, not taking his eyes off the dragon. “Warn them. Tell the archers to be ready. I’ll see what I can do to slow it down.”

“No,” Wiglaf says. “I’ll not leave you to face that beast alone, my lord. We’ll face it together. The archers already have their orders.”

“You will do as I have said, Wiglaf. We will not argue. I know what has to happen now.”

“Oh,” snorts Wiglaf. “So, it’s not enough to kill demons and be crowned King of Denmark and bed a queen. Now you’d have me believing you know the weaving of the Norns and have seen their skein for yourself.”

“Only a glimpse,” Beowulf replies. “Now, do what I need you to do. Make haste for Heorot. Ride as though Loki’s wargs were on your ass, and do not look back.”

Wiglaf lingers a few seconds more at his king’s side, peering through the settling dust as the dragon wheels and dips just above the tops of the tallest trees. There is a dreadful majesty in the rise and fall of those vast wings, a fearful grace in the motions of its unhurried flight.

“He’s going to kill you,” Wiglaf sighs. “You know that, right?”

“There is an old score to be settled this day,” Beowulf says. “An old debt, friend Wiglaf, and it is none of yours. Now ride. Do not make me ask you a third time.”

“Very well. But I’m warning you, there’ll be Hel to pay if you reach the gates of Valhalla before me. How’s that going to look to Hondshew and Afi and the rest, me staggering in last of all?”

“I’ll be along soon,” Beowulf tells him, and Wiglaf frowns and gives the reins a firm shake, urging his horse forward again. Soon, Beowulf is alone at the edge of the shadowy wood, and Wiglaf is only a distant, dusty smudge.

Riding along beneath the canopy of the old trees, it isn’t difficult for Beowulf to keep an eye on the slowly circling dragon. There are enough gaps in between the boughs, and so many of them are completely bare of leaves in this dead month of Frermánudr that he only occasionally loses sight of the creature. His horse’s hooves seem to clop unnaturally loud against the forest floor as Beowulf picks his way between the immense boles of ash and spruce and oak, larch and birch and fir. There is no trail here, except the indistinct paths made by deer and auroch and wild boars, and more than once he has to backtrack to get around a deadfall. He fears that the dragon might choose to follow Wiglaf, that it might take note of his dash back to Heorot and choose to pursue instead of waiting for Beowulf to catch up. But no, the dragon is waiting. This has been its plan all along. Beowulf understands that it, and its wicked mother, want him to miss none of the coming devastation. And were it to gain the keep before him, Beowulf might arrive too late and only see the aftermath. Overhead, the fyrweorm beats its wings, a sound that reminds the Geat of a storm wind whipping at canvas sails, and Beowulf glances up at the beast.

“Be patient,” he says. “I am coming, worm. Do not fear that your previous hatred will be misspent.”

Before very much longer, Beowulf has ridden far enough into the wood that the dragon passes directly overhead. His horse whinnies and staunchly refuses to go any farther.

“Fair enough,” he tells the horse, and pats its withers and the strong crest of its neck. Then, very carefully, he gets to his feet and stands upright in the saddle, a trick he learned when he was still a boy in Geatland. Though his balance isn’t what it once was, he only wobbles a little. There’s a low oak limb within reach, and he uses it to pull himself into the tree. Beowulf straddles the limb and stares up as the dragon soars past once again, trailing smoke and embers. Below him, the horse snorts.

“Aye, it is a long damn climb,” he says to the horse. And then Beowulf claps his hands together loudly, and the startled animal turns and gallops back toward the moors. Beowulf sits on the limb a moment, watching the horse go and getting his breath, then he begins to climb the oak. The limbs are large and spaced closely together, and it proves an easier undertaking than expected. Halfway up the tree, he remembers that this day is Yule, the day after Beowulf’s Day, and that it is also Christmond, the day the followers of the Roman Christ Jesus have claimed as their own. Either way, he should by rights be sitting on his throne in the horned hall, feasting on roast pig and drinking mead and marking the turning of the wheel of the year toward spring, not climbing this bloody huge tree to confront a dragon intent upon destroying his kingdom. He’s certain that it’s no accident that the dragon—this creature born of his union with the merewife thirty years ago—has chosen this day over all others to make itself known.

When he has climbed more than halfway up the oak, higher now than the tops of most of the trees in the forest, there’s a horrendous screeching from the sky. Beowulf looks up to see the dragon swooping low, coming in close this time around, its jaws agape and steaming with noxious vitriol. He wraps one arm tightly about the tree, then uses his free hand to tug the bearded ax from his belt.

“Let’s make an end to this!” he shouts, as the monster comes skimming across the treetops, decapitating a spruce with the leading edge of its left wing. But at the last possible moment, it veers sharply away, and Beowulf realizes that it means to make a game of this, to toy with him as long as possible. On its next pass, however, he’s ready, and when the dragon swoops down, he pushes off from the tree, lunging toward the monster and managing to snag the spiked blade of his ax upon one of its hooked talons. An instant later and Beowulf is soaring above the forest, carried aloft below the beast’s armored belly. He clings tightly to the ax handle and tries not to think about how far the fall would be if he loses his grip.

“So be it,” growls Beowulf. “If it’s sport you’re after, you’ll have sport. But know this, bastard, that the game will end in your death.”

When the dragon realizes what Beowulf has done, it roars and spits rivers of fire into the trees, setting them alight. Its gigantic wings rise and fall more swiftly now and with more force, gathering speed, and its barbed tail whips viciously from side to side, tearing away many of the uppermost branches in its path and scattering them like so much kindling. Once or twice, Beowulf is very nearly dashed against those tallest limbs, but then, suddenly, the forest is behind them, and the dragon is racing out over the moorlands. In the distance, through the fog, Beowulf can make out the charcoal column of smoke rising from the ruined village coming into view, and he can also see the two spires of the keep and the causeway connecting them.

“No!” he says. “You will not have them, you ugly son of a whore, not this day nor any other,” and he cranes his head to get a better view of the monster’s gleaming underside. However, it resembles nothing so much as a heavily cobbled street paved over with gold, and Beowulf can scarcely imagine the blade has been forged that might pierce that hide.

But then the dragon belches flame again, scorching the grass and bracken far below, and this time Beowulf sees a distinct reddish glow from a fist-sized patch of skin near the base of its long neck. And he recalls the ruby set into the throat of the dragon on the golden drinking horn, also he remembers what Hrothgar once told him—There’s a soft spot just under the neck, you know. You go in close with a knife or a dagger…it’s the only way you can kill one of the bastards.

The dragon dives lower, and when Beowulf looks down again he can see the deep gorge dividing Heorot from the moors and the wooden bridge that spans it. The dragon is making for the bridge, he realizes, and a moment later he hears a man shouting from somewhere below, one of his commanders giving his archers the order to fire. And then Beowulf sees the soldiers rising up from the tall grass near the edge of the gorge, their longbows charged.

“Now!” cries the commander, and a volley of arrows is loosed and rises up, whistling through the cold evening air to greet the creature. But it incinerates most of them with another blast of its incandescent breath, and the rest bounce harmlessly off their target. The dragon sprays bright fire toward the archers, even as they release a second hail of arrows. One whizzes past Beowulf’s right ear and another grazes his left leg just below the knee, and he wonders if this is how he shall die, slain by his own soldiers.

Then, abruptly, the dragon banks and dips, diving headlong toward the bridge. The archers break ranks and scatter this way and that as the screeching monster bears down on them, and Beowulf can feel his hold on the ax handle finally beginning to slip. The gorge lies directly below him now, a precipitous, boulder-filled chasm leading down to the sea, and a fall that no man could ever hope to survive. But already his aching, sweat-slicked hands are sliding down the shaft, and he knows that only seconds remain before he loses his grip. When the dragon spreads its wings and glides over the trestle, Beowulf lets go of the ax, dropping only a scant five or six feet to the surface of the wooden bridge. He lands hard and rolls along the deck and is back up on his feet in time to see the dragon’s tail scraping along the walls of the gorge, digging ragged furrows in the earth and uprooting one of the small trees growing along the steep walls. The monster banks to the south, and Beowulf guesses that it’s turning, coming around for another pass at the bridge. The Danish warriors stationed on the bridge watch the great beast’s approach, as though they are too stunned by the monster’s proximity and Beowulf’s sudden appearance among them to do more than stare.

“Ready the wagons!” Beowulf shouts, and the sound of his voice is enough to startle the men from their awestruck stillness and get them moving again. More arrows are nocked by the archers, and several of the thanes roll two great wagons out onto the bridge. Inside one cart is a tremendous catapult, and in the other a crossbow, constructed after the fashion of a Roman ballista—a solid oak structure held together with iron plates and nails. At the back of the weapon, two thanes hastily work the twin winches, ratcheting the taut bowstring into the firing position. He might have no use for the religion of the Romans, but the son of Ecgtheow has learned much from their war craft.

“Wait for him,” says Beowulf to his men, not daring to take his eyes off the dragon as it speeds back toward the bridge. When the creature is near enough that Beowulf can spot his axe still dangling from its talon, he gives the signal and the men in the wagons open fire. The bolt flies from the crossbow, but rebounds impotently off the dragon’s adamantine hide. But from the catapult is launched an enormous net woven of braided hemp and strong enough to haul a small whale from out the sea. Beowulf watches as the net arcs up and over the gorge, unfolding directly in the creature’s path. There is not time for the dragon to avoid the net, and a moment later its head, neck, and shoulders are ensnared, tangled in the weave.

A joyous cheer rises from the men, but Beowulf knows it is too soon to claim victory, and at once the dragon proves him to be right. With a single gout of flame, it effortlessly burns away most of the hemp, and as the beast soars by over the heads of the thanes, the ruined net falls away in a heap to lie smoking upon the deck of the bridge. Beowulf turns and watches as the dragon turns for another pass.

“Come on, then!” cries Beowulf, unsheathing his sword as the dragon wheels about in a wide arc. There is not time to reload the crossbow or the catapult, and the men who armed them make a dash for shelter. A few of the archers are still huddled there on the bridge, and they call out to their king, begging him to take cover while there is yet time. But Beowulf ignores their pleas and warnings. He will not cower and watch while this demon lays waste to his land, while it burns his keep and murders his thanes. The dragon turns back toward Heorot and the bridge, bellowing and spraying flame as it dives, and now Beowulf sees that this time it means to fly directly beneath the span.

“So it is a game,” he whispers, and as the thing races toward him between the sheer granite walls of the gorge, the King of Heorot Hall turns and vaults deftly over the bridge’s low railing, timing his leap perfectly so as to land on the monster’s broad and scabrous shoulders. Beowulf brings the blade of his sword down, putting all his weight behind the thrust. But when the iron blade strikes the dragon’s flesh it shatters like glass, and he’s left holding little more than the weapon’s hilt. The dragon flaps its wings once and rises from the gorge, and as it does so, it turns its head to glare back at Beowulf with furious amber eyes, eyes that shine and spark with a hateful, vengeful intensity.

“Are you ready to die, you filthy piece of shit?” Beowulf howls, but the cold wind whipping past snatches at the words, and he hardly even hears the question himself. Before the dragon turns its head away again, Beowulf imagines that it tries to smile, some smirking expression on those toothsome, lipless jaws half-approximating a smile.

The dragon shrieks and whirls back toward the trestle a fourth time, banking so abruptly and with such force that Beowulf is almost thrown off its back. It opens its mouth wide and vomits an inferno across the timber bridge. The same thanes who only moments before had begged Beowulf to take cover with them are engulfed in fire, as are the two wagons. For some, death is instantaneous, but others somehow manage to rise and stagger a little ways through the flames before collapsing. Three or four men nearest either end of the bridge drop and roll in the snow banked high there, but this is no earthly fire that can be extinguished with melted snow.

Satisfied with the carnage, the dragon turns away from the blazing bridge, spying a ragtag troop of thanes retreating to the east along the cliff’s crumbling edge. Once more, the fading day is rent by the monster’s hideous shrieks, a sound to shame even the mighty cries of Odin Allfather’s ravens. It folds its wings against its ribs and drops from the sky, falling upon the hapless men. Some are crushed beneath its belly and the living bulwark of its chest, and others are impaled upon talons and snatched up in those jaws and flung screaming into the gorge.

When every one of the thanes is dead, the dragon looks back at Beowulf again with that same smirking grimace as before. But now Beowulf can hear the golden man’s voice, even though no voice comes from that slavering maw.

You see? it asks. You see how easily men die? You see how none may stand against me, Father?

“I will have your lizard’s head on a spike!” snarls Beowulf, and his head is filled with the golden man’s laughter.

Will you, Father? Will you do that? No, I think not.

And then the dragon is airborne again, pitching and rolling in an attempt to dislodge Beowulf. But the Geat king digs his strong fingers deep into the grooves between bony plates and scales and holds on.

Wiglaf has ridden hard from the edge of the forest and across the moors, but it is no small distance, and by the time he reaches the gorge leading back to Heorot, the bridge is ablaze, and the air reeks of burning human flesh. He yanks back on the reins, and his horse rears and kicks. To Wiglaf’s left, the ridge is scattered with the bodies of thanes who have simply been pulverized or torn asunder. The stone is smeared with blood and gore, and he can see where the monster’s talons gouged deep grooves into the rock itself. He spares a quick glance at the heavens, and there’s the dragon, maybe a hundred feet overhead. And there’s King Beowulf, clinging to its back.

“Well,” Wiglaf says to the horse, “at least it’ll make a fine tale…if either of us lives to tell it,” and he wraps the reins tightly in his hands. He starts to urge the horse forward, but just then there’s a low rumble from the bridge, a loud crack, and one side of the burning structure breaks apart and tumbles into the gorge. Only a narrow section of the deck remains, three feet wide at most. And all of it is on fire, the flames rising above the shattered bridge to form a whirlwind and a twisting pillar of black smoke and red-orange cinders.

Wiglaf takes a deep breath, then spurs his horse forward and together they dash through the flames and out across the remains of the bridge, even as more planks pull free and fall away behind them. Squinting through the heat and blinding glare, Wiglaf thinks he’s made it, that in only another second he will have gained the far side and Heorot. But the deck in front of him suddenly sags and collapses, plummeting into the gorge. He kicks the horse, driving his heels hard into its ribs. The terrified animal screams and leaps for the rocky edge of the gorge, carrying Wiglaf up and out of the flames.

Only just barely does the horse clear the chasm, landing at such an awkward angle and with such force that the animal’s legs buckle beneath it and its rider is thrown. Wiglaf slides from his saddle, tumbling ass over tit, and comes down hard on the stones sticky with mud and ash. There is a terrible, uncertain instant, then, as the horse’s hooves scrabble desperately at the slick rocks for purchase, and Wiglaf realizes that it’s off balance and slipping backward toward the gorge. But the son of Weohstan still holds the reins wrapped tightly in his hands, and with all his might he pulls upon them.

“Oh no you don’t, hross,” Wiglaf grimaces, as he strains and the leather straps begin to slice through his gloves; the soles of his boots skid across the muck, dragging him forward. “If I have to go chasing after dragons, than so do you!” The horse slips another inch toward a long fall and certain death, before it neighs and gives a mighty kick with its hindquarters. Wiglaf feels the reins go slack as the beast at last finds its footing, and soon his feet are once again in the stirrups and the horse is galloping along the crooked road toward Heorot.

After its attack on the bridge, the dragon soars back out over the moorlands. Beowulf has succeeded in pulling himself forward onto the creature’s spiny neck, and he lies there flat against its hide, contemplating his next move. The dragon twists its head madly from side to side, straining to see him, but Beowulf has found a blind spot.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m still here. You haven’t lost me yet.”

Surely, Father, you cannot hope to win this battle, the golden man says, speaking from somewhere inside Beowulf’s skull. Here is the glorious warrior’s death you have always wanted.

“You will kill no more of my people.”

I will do ever as I please, the dragon replies, the dragon and the golden man, two faces and one voice for the same nightmare. And now the dragon is banking sharply once again, turning back toward Heorot.

“It was no accident Unferth’s slave found your hoard and returned with the horn,” says Beowulf, drawing his long dagger from its leather sheath.

There are no accidents, answers the golden man. The skein was woven long ago, Father. We only move like spiders along its threads.

Lying flat against the dragon’s spine, Beowulf can almost reach down to that soft, glowing spot on the underside of its throat, that one fortunate chink in its otherwise-impenetrable armor. He grips the dagger and stretches his arm as far as he may. Only another few inches and he could easily plunge the blade into the unprotected patch of skin.

What do you think you’re doing, Father?

“Something that someone should have done long ago,” Beowulf replies, and the dragon ripples the muscles along its neck. The sudden, violent movement almost throws Beowulf off, almost causes him to drop the dagger as he struggles for a better purchase on the beast’s knobby spine.

Look, Father. There’s one of your pretty women now.

Beowulf raises his head, his eyes watering from the wind, but he sees that they’ve almost reached the keep, and he also sees Ursula standing alone on the causeway connecting the two spires. Already they have come so close that Beowulf can see the terror in her wide eyes.

She will die quickly, the golden man says, and the dragon dives for the causeway. The wind screams through its wings, and Beowulf imagines that it is Ursula screaming.

“Run!” he shouts at the girl, but she does not move, either because she cannot hear him or because she is too paralyzed with fear.

Again, the dragon’s mouth gapes open very, very wide, its jaws distending and unhinging like those of some titanic adder. A sickening gurgle rises from someplace deep in its chest, and the monster spews forth a seething ball of fire. In his mind, Beowulf hears the golden man laughing triumphantly, and he can only watch helplessly as the deadly missile roars toward Ursula. But then he realizes that Queen Wealthow is running across the causeway toward her, and in the last moments before the dragon’s breath strikes the keep, Wealthow knocks the girl aside, and both women roll out of harm’s way. The flame splatters across slate and mortar, and as the dragon sails by between the towers, Beowulf sees Wealthow hauling Ursula to her feet before they run for the safety of the eastern tower.

Cheated of its kill, the enraged dragon bellows, and the golden man screams inside Beowulf’s head. Immediately, it wheels back for another assault upon the women.

Beowulf can only hope that Ursula and Wealthow have had time to find shelter somewhere deep within the tower’s thick stone walls. Holding tight to one of the spikes rising from the dragon’s neck, Beowulf tries again to reach down and under its throat to plunge the dagger into the soft spot there, but it remains just out of reach.

If only your arm were a little longer, the golden man laughs. They cannot escape me, Father. I will pull the castle down to its very foundations if need be, but I will have them, and I will have them now. I will taste their blood upon my tongue.

“You will taste nothing this day, worm, but the sting of my blade,” Beowulf growls, “and that is the last thing you will ever taste.”

The dragon snarls, gnashing its rows of yellowed teeth, each almost as long as a grown man’s forearm. It flares its cavernous nostrils and two greasy, fetid plumes of smoke stream back into Beowulf’s face.

By the time Wiglaf finds himself once more before the gates of Heorot, the causeway far above him is shrouded all in flame. He guides his horse as quickly as he may through the blasted outer defenses and then onward, through the desolation where once the village and Hrothgar’s mead hall stood. Everywhere are the corpses of the fallen, lying where the dragon’s breath struck them down. But few are anything more than the roughest charcoal husks, only dimly suggesting the forms of vanished men and women, children and livestock. Here and there, blue-white tongues of flame still lick hungrily from the blackened, cratered earth. The stench is almost beyond bearing, and repeatedly Wiglaf’s horse tries to bolt, but he holds firmly to the reins and urges the terrified animal on until they have gained the keep. Above him, the causeway is in flame and the golden monster from Weormgræf seems to fill half the winter sky.

“Open these damned gates, you fools!” Wiglaf shouts as a handful of men struggle with the damaged mechanism meant to raise and lower the heavy iron portcullis grille. Beowulf ordered it closed behind them when he and Wiglaf left for the tarn many hours before, and the heat has since all but fused certain of the gears and counterweights. When the thanes have managed to raise it a foot or so, Wiglaf slides off his horse and scrambles beneath the metal pickets. Getting to his feet, he pauses again to stare up at the horror looming bright above the bailey.

One of the thanes, a man named Halli, rushes to Wiglaf’s side. “The refugees have all been moved into the castle,” he says. “Most of the men have also sought shelter, but…” and then Halli trails off and glances up toward the flaming causeway.

“But what?” asks Wiglaf, unable to look away from the dragon.

“My Lord, I am told the queen is up there,” replies Halli and points toward the bridge between the towers. And an icy fist clenches Wiglaf’s guts as the dragon releases another gout of fire.

“Get that bloody gate open and get my horse inside,” he barks at Halli, then draws his sword and dashes across the courtyard toward the entrance to the east tower. Inside, he takes the steps two and three at a time, his heart slamming like Thor’s own hammer inside his chest.

“Faster!” cries Wealthow, all but dragging her husband’s lover toward the sanctuary of the keep’s eastward tower. Behind them, the causeway has been completely swallowed by flame, and beneath her feet the bridge shudders ominously, as though the structure has sustained some mortal injury and might come apart at any moment, spilling them both to their deaths in the bailey far below. She does not dare look to see if the dragon is coming back. She already knows that it is, for Wealthow can hear the thunderous beating of its wings growing louder.

“But it’s going to kill him,” Ursula says breathlessly, trying to pull her hand free of Wealthow’s grip.

“In all likelihood,” replies the queen. “But that doesn’t mean we have to die as well. Now shut up and run.”

From his perch upon the dragon’s neck, Beowulf can plainly see that there will not be sufficient time for the two women to gain the tower’s entryway before the dragon is upon them once again, before they are within range of its fiery exhalations. He makes another futile attempt to reach around to the soft spot on the creature’s underside. But his arm is simply too short, the dragon’s neck too large around. Desperate, Beowulf glances over his shoulder at the great wings, fleshy membranes stretched taut between struts of bone, and to his eyes there does not appear to be any armor protecting them. Indeed, they are thin enough as to be translucent, and he can even make out the fine pattern of veins beneath the skin.

Shall I kiss them for you? the golden man whispers from somewhere inside Beowulf’s head. Shall I take them one at a time, or the both together?

Beowulf stands up, letting the wind force him backward along the monster’s spine until he is past its shoulder blades and come even with those membranous wings. Perhaps, he thinks, Old Hrothgar was wrong. Perhaps there is more than one way to hurt the bastards. And he dives for the right wing, plunging the dagger’s blade into and through the tough but not inviolable flesh. The dragon shrieks in anger and surprise and unexpected pain. With one hand, Beowulf holds tight to the leading edge of the wing, and with the other he slices a long gash from front to back. Immediately, black blood seeps from the wound, and the air pressing from below rushes up through the wound, tearing it wider still.

“Does it hurt, worm?” Beowulf mutters, knowing now that he does not need to raise his voice to be heard by the dragon. There is no reply but for its shrill cry, and Beowulf pulls the dagger free and drives it in a second time, sawing another long slash in the wing, this one running parallel to the first. The monster tilts suddenly to the left, losing altitude and control, going into a spin as it struggles to stay aloft. Frantically, it flaps the damaged left wing, struggling to regain control and finally shakes Beowulf loose, tossing him high into the air. For several seconds, the King of the Ring-Danes is falling, watching as the dragon drops away below him, the creature rolling over and over again as the earth rushes up to meet them.

So, at last, this is how I shall die, thinks Beowulf, more amused than frightened of the end, much too tired and too relieved that Wealthow and Ursula have been spared to feel any fear at the thought of so unlikely a death as toppling from the back of a dragon.

But then, as the monster pitches forward and rolls completely over onto its back, it spreads its wings wide and the death spiral abruptly ends. Once more, the dragon is gliding, and a second later, Beowulf catches up, slamming hard into the low keel of its girded breastbone. Though stunned and gasping, the breath knocked from his lungs, he succeeds in digging his fingertips and the toes of his boots firmly between the armor scutes before the dragon rolls over again and rights itself.

Nice try, Father, the monster laughs bitterly, flapping hard and favoring its right wing now. It has begun a slow, steep climb, so that Beowulf finds himself standing upright, watching as they rise toward the causeway. But not enough, the golden man says. Never quite enough.

On the causeway, Wealthow has stopped running, certain for a moment that Beowulf has brought the dragon down, and she rushes to the balustrade and looks over the edge, expecting to see them both lying dead and broken on the flagstones below. Instead, she’s greeted by the spiteful amber glare of the creature’s roasting eyes staring up at her and by the sight of Beowulf clinging to its chest. The dragon flaps its wings again, and now it has risen level with the causeway, its eyes still fixed upon Wealthow, and it rears back and opens its jaws wide. Wealthow feels its breath on her, like a sulfurous, carrion wind blowing off some infernal battlefield.

“Run!” shouts Beowulf, but now she knows how the girl must have felt, unable to move or even look away from the awful grandeur of the thing. She is dimly aware of Ursula tugging hard at the sleeve of her gown.

“My queen,” Ursula says, though her voice seems to come from someplace very distant, two words spoken from a half-forgotten dream or from the borders of a land beyond the walls of Midgard.

The dragon roars, its serpentine throat distending, filling up with flame, and the patch of skin just above Beowulf’s head glows bright as a midsummer sun. And then Ursula is screaming and shoving Wealthow aside, both of them falling to the deck and rolling away as the air around them fills with fire.

It seems to Wiglaf that he spends at least a small eternity ascending the spiral stairwell, and when he has finally gained the uppermost level of the tower, a fierce burning pain rages within his chest as though the dragon has somehow found its way inside him, and Wiglaf is dizzy and nauseous and gasping for breath. Worse still, the landing and alcove at the top of the stairs is filled with smoke and the stench of the dragon’s flame. He covers his mouth and nose with one arm and squints through the gloom with stinging, watering eyes, but sees at once that the causeway beyond is wreathed in flames. Even if Wealthow yet lives, there is no hope remaining that he may now reach her, for it seems the very furnaces of the fire giants, the forges of all Muspéllsheim, have been placed outside the tower. And yet he does not turn back, struggling to find some path through the flames and searing heat. And finally he is rewarded with a fleeting glimpse of the queen and also of his King’s mistress, the woman Ursula. But once again the heat drives him back from the burning causeway, and his lungs fill with choking fumes as the tower begins to sway and shudder all around him.

“Twice now you’ve missed them,” says Beowulf. “What kind of dragon is it cannot even kill two women caught out in the open?”

The fireball spilled from the creature’s maw and surged across the causeway’s span, but not before Ursula had pushed Wealthow out of the path of the blast, not before they were both safely out of range. Now, two pillars of flame spurt from the causeway, and his mistress and his queen are both trapped there between them. The dragon beats its wings, already preparing to unleash another attack, and this time there is nowhere left for the women to run.

“What manner of son are you, worm?” asks Beowulf, and then he answers his own question. “None of mine,” he growls, and plunges his dagger into the soft, glowing spot at the base of the creature’s throat. The blade and his fist punch straight through hide and sinew and into the hollow kiln of the monster’s gullet.

Inside Beowulf’s aching skull, the golden man screams, even as the dragon shrieks and coughs forth another gout of flame, searing most of the flesh from Beowulf’s hand and arm and turning the dagger to molten slag. This blast misses the causeway, however, and momentarily billows overhead like an impossible, burning cloud. The king of the horned hall cries out, this pain greater by far than any he has ever felt in all his life, a long life that has been filled with so much pain. His right foot slips as the dragon’s body is wracked by horrendous convulsions, and he almost falls. But Beowulf grits his teeth, tasting his own blood, and hangs on.

“It is over,” he whispers, and the dragon’s body trembles. “Take me, and let them be.”

The golden man’s voice has finally left his head, and Beowulf cranes his neck, gazing back over his shoulder at the causeway connecting the towers. Wealthow and Ursula are huddled together against the far balustrade. He can see that their gowns have been singed and their faces are stained with soot. They are bruised and terrified, but they are both alive, and even now Beowulf can feel the dragon’s life ebbing away.

“By the gods, it is over,” he says again, resting his cheek against the dragon’s chest. “Die.”

But the fyrweorm narrows its eyes and rears back again, cocking its head to one side as it prepares to send another blast of fire down upon the keep. This time, however, there is merely a labored, strangling sound from the depths of its mighty chest, and no flame erupts from out that maw. And Beowulf understands that he has punctured and destroyed some crucial part of its anatomy, some organ without which the monster cannot spark and make fire. Enraged, the dragon shrieks and hammers the air with its wings. It hisses and strikes at the causeway with only its jaws, shearing away a section of the balustrade and part of the deck, snapping off several of its fangs. Ursula screams and Wealthow hides her face, but the women remain out of the monster’s reach. Again, it strikes and snaps its jaws, but this time they close on empty air. The beast is once more losing altitude, its left wing too torn to keep it airborne any longer. It is drifting back from the causeway.

And the golden man’s words echo in Beowulf’s mind.

How will you hurt me, my Father? Your fingers? Your teeth? Your bare hands?

And with the last of his strength, Beowulf forces the charred stump of his arm deeply into the beast’s torn throat, pushing it in up to his shoulder, ripping through more of the soft muscle and organ meat beneath its golden armor. The dragon bellows, and from their place on the causeway, Ursula looks up to see its amber eyes roll back in its head.

“Let go,” sighs Beowulf, unsure if he’s speaking to the golden man or himself.

The dragon’s chin slams down upon the deck of the causeway, the end of its snout only scant inches from the two women. It rests there for a moment, and then slips backward, its wings falling slack at its slides as the creature tumbles out of control. It seems to Beowulf that the long fall lasts almost forever, that last precious glimpse of Wealthow and Ursula before the endless descent down, down, down to the slate-gray sea crashing against the craggy rocks below the keep.

In the reckless frenzy of its death throes and its final savage assault upon the causeway, the dragon has dislodged keystones and rent the colossal pillars supporting the bridge. The very foundations of the causeway where it joins with the native granite have been broken by the force of the beast’s attack, and though the dragon has fallen, the entire structure begins quickly to sag and collapse in upon itself. In only moments, the work of Heorot’s engineers and architects has been undone, and Wealthow and Ursula hold tight to one another as the deck begins to list. They have somehow been so fortunate as to survive the creature’s murderous and fiery onslaughts, only to find their deaths in the destruction of the bridge.

Wealthow glances desperately toward the eastern tower, where only moments before she saw Wiglaf trying to reach them. But the fire burns even more fiercely than before, as though the masonry itself is feeding the blaze. There is no sign of Wiglaf anywhere.

A nearby section of the causeway cracks apart suddenly, slinging bits of rock and mortar and raising a cloud of dust. Ursula screams and hides her faces in Wealthow’s arms as the bridge begins to tilt toward the sea. And the Queen of Heorot Hall holds tight to the woman her husband bedded in her stead, the one he must have come to love more than her, for what profits anyone bitterness or spite, and Wealthow waits for the end.

“I am so sorry,” the girl sobs, but Wealthow tells her there is nothing left now to be sorry for.

“But I took him from you.”

“Child, you took nothing I did not first let slip away from me,” says Wealthow.

And at that moment, the causeway cracks again, and this time a large portion of the flaming deck dividing them from the eastern tower and their escape pulls free and tumbles toward the crashing waves and jagged shingle far below. As it goes, it opens a narrow, crumbling pathway through the flames. And there is Wiglaf, still standing on the other side.

“Get up,” Wealthow tells Ursula, all but lifting the girl to her feet, not knowing how long the path might endure or how soon until the entire structure drops away beneath them. “We have to run. We can live, but we have to run, and we have to run fast.”

Through her tears, Ursula stares, uncertain and terrified, toward Wiglaf and the slight gap in the roaring wall of fire. “But…” Ursula begins.

“Run, damn you,” Wealthow growls, pushing her ahead toward Wiglaf, who has begun picking his way toward them through the ruin. “Run, or I will throw you over the side myself and be done with it.”

And then Ursula is running, with Wealthow close on her heels, the two women dashing toward deliverance as the causeway groans beneath them. But another explosion erupts from somewhere close behind them, and the deck abruptly leans away from the sea, pivoting on its columns and swaying instead in the direction of the eastern tower and Wiglaf. Wealthow loses her footing and begins sliding across the precipitously listing causeway toward a spot where the teeth of the dragon broke away the balustrade and so there’s nothing there to stop her from slipping over the edge. Ursula shouts for Wiglaf and lunges for her queen, managing to grab hold of Wealthow’s left hand. But Ursula is only strong enough to slow Wealthow’s progress toward the causeway’s shattered rim, and now both women are sliding nearer the edge.

“Wiglaf!” Ursula cries out, digging her heels into the quavering deck.

“Please, save yourself” Wealthow implores the girl. “It’s too late for me, but we don’t both have to die here.” And with that, Queen Wealthow wrenches her hand free of Ursula’s grasp. The girl screams, but in the last instant before Wealthow tumbles over the edge, Wiglaf catches her and straining, digging deep for the last of his strength, hauls her safely back onto the deck.

“What you ladies say we get the hell out of here?” he moans, and then the Geat leads them both to the eastern towers. Only moments after they have gained that harborage, the swaying causeway again changes its course, pulling free of the tower wall in a final, decisive lurch before plummeting toward the sea. It leaves behind only a wide gulf of smoky air to mark the space between the spires of Heorot.

Beowulf comes to on a small patch of sand in the lee of a boulder, awakened by the chill of the icy waves. For a second, it seems he lies atop the fallen dragon, but then as salt water and foam retreat, he sees that he lies beside the golden man from the merewife’s cave. A terrible wound extends from the man’s throat all the way down his chest to his belly. His eyelids flutter, and then he opens them and stares up at the winter clouds.

“Father?” he coughs. “Are you here? I can’t see you.”

“I’m here,” Beowulf replies weakly. He ignores the pain that seems to radiate from every part of his body and drags himself closer, cradling his son’s head in the crook of his good arm “I’m sorry…”

“Are we dead?” the golden man asks, and blood leaks from his lips.

“Almost,” Beowulf replies, before another wave rushes forward and crashes over them both. Beowulf gasps at the cold, and when the sea recedes again, he is alone on the sand. The golden man is gone, returned to his mother. The King of the Ring-Danes lies back down on the beach, watching the clouds passing by overhead, dimly aware that he has begun to cry, but his tears seem of little consequence here beside the resounding ocean.

I will lie here just a little longer, thinks Beowulf, and then he hears footsteps, the crunch of boots on the pebble-strewn sand. He turns his head, and Wiglaf is walking toward him across the beach.

“You lucky bastard,” mutters Beowulf.

Wiglaf kneels next to him, inspecting the cauterized stump of his right arm.

“I told you we were too old to be heroes,” he says. “Let me get you to a healer.”

“No,” Beowulf tells him, and shakes his head. “Not this time, old friend.”

“You’re Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow,” Wiglaf says. “The scops sing your deeds in all the lands of the world. No way a little thing like this is going to finish you off. That’s not how this story will end.”

“No,” Beowulf tells him again. “I’m done, my Wiglaf. And it is not so bad an ending. It will be a fine enough tale for Gladsheim.”

“Aye,” replies Wiglaf, sitting down and brushing wet hair away from Beowulf’s blood-streaked face. “It will make a fine tale for Odin’s hall, but not this day, my lord. I have a fresh, strong horse, there, just beyond the rocks.”

Beowulf smiles for Wiglaf and closes his eyes, listening to the waves and to something he hears woven in between the waves. It might be the voice of a woman singing, the most beautiful voice he has ever heard.

“Do you hear her?” he asks Wiglaf.

“I hear nothing my lord, but the sea and the wind and the gulls.”

“The song, Wiglaf,” says Beowulf. “It’s Grendel’s mother, the merewife…my son’s mother…my…” but he trails off then, distracted by the pain and uncertain what word he was going to say next, whether it might have been lover or mother, foe or destiny.

He opens his eyes again, for now the song has grown so loud he does not have to try so hard to pick it free of the noise of the sea. Wiglaf is gazing down at him, and Beowulf has never seen Wiglaf look so frightened.

“No, lord. Don’t say such things. You slew Grendel’s mother. When we were yet young men. It’s in the saga—”

“Then the saga is a lie,” says Beowulf, raising his voice, angry and almost shouting, and he feels something pulling loose inside his chest. “A lie,” he says again. “Wiglaf, you know it was a lie. You always knew.”

Wiglaf does not say a word, and Beowulf shuts his eyes again, wanting only to listen to the song flowing up from the sea.

“And it is too late for lies,” he whispers. “Too late…”

A wave rushes up the shore, soaking Wiglaf, and when he looks back down at Beowulf’s pale face, Wiglaf realizes that he’s alone on the beach. King Beowulf is dead.