Grendel (11 page)

I let go her feet. The people stared, unbelieving. I had wrecked another theory. I left the hall.

But I’d cured myself. That much, at least, I could say for my behavior. I concentrated on the memory of the ugliness between her legs (bright tears of blood) and laughed as I ran through the heavy snow. The night was still. I could hear their crying in the meadhall. “Ah, Grendel, you sly old devil!” I whispered to the trees. The words rang false, (The east was gray.) I hung balanced, a creature of two minds; and one of them said—unreasonable, stubborn as the mountains—that she was beautiful. I resolved, absolutely and finally, to kill myself, for love of the Baby Grendel that used to be. But the next instant, for no particular reason, I changed my mind.

Balance is everything, sliding down slime. . . .

Cut
B.

“Hrothulf! Come to Aunt Wealtheow!

You poor, poor dear boy!”

“It is very kind of you, madam, to take me in.”

“Nonsense, dearest! You’re Hrothgar’s flesh and blood!”

“So I’m told.” A mumble. Trace of smile.

The old king frowns in his carved chair.

The boy has the manners, he broods, of a half-tamed wolf.

Fourteen years old and already a God-damned pretender?

Age, old chain of victories, where is your comfort?

He clears his throat.

No no; I jump to conclusions.

The boy has been through a bad time,

naturally. Father-funeral and all the rest.

And gifted, of course, with a proud heart,

like all his line. (Oft Scyld Shefing …)

(The hawk in the rafters hands down no opinion.)

The Shaper sings—the harp soughing out through the long
   room

like summer wind—“By deeds worth praise

a man can, in any kingdom, prosper!”

So.

The boy sits solemn and hears the harp

behind closed eyes. The October hills in his calm mind

run wolves.

Theorum:
Any action (
A
) of the human heart

must trigger an equal and opposite reaction (
A
¹
).

Such is the golden opinion of the Shaper.

And so—I watch in glee—they take in Hrothulf;

quiet as the moon, sweet scorpion,

he sits between their two and cleans his knife.

In ratty furs the peasants hoe their fields,

fat with stupidity, if not with flesh. Their foodsmells

foul the doorways, dungeon dark, where cow-eyed girls

give tit to the next generation’s mindless hoe. Old men

with ringworm in their beards limp dusty lanes

to gather like bony dogs at the god-lined square

where the king’s justice is dispensed; to nod like crows

at slips of the tongue by which a horse is lost, or delicate
   mistakes

of venue through which murderers run free. “Long live

the king!” they squeak, “to whom we owe all joy!”

Obese with imagined freedom if not with fat, great lords

of lords look down with cowdog eyes and smile.

“All’s well,” they sigh. “Long live the king! All’s well!”

Law rules the land. Men’s violence is chained

to good (i.e., to the king): legitimate force

that chops the bread-thief’s neck and wipes its ax.—Death

by book.

Think, sweating beast! Look up and think!

Whence came these furs on the backs of your kind
   protectors?

Why does the bread-thief die and the murdering thane

escape by a sleight by the costliest of advocates?

Think! Squeeze up your wrinkled face

and seize the hangnail tip of a searing thought:

Violence hacked this shack-filled hole in the woods where
   you

play freedom games. Violence no more legitimate then

than a wolf’s. And now by violence they lock

us in—you and me, old man: subdue our vile

unkingly violence. Come into the shade.

I would have a word with you and your wart-hog son.

In short, I watched the idea of violence growing in him, and apprehension in all of them, and I enjoyed myself (old hellroads-runner, earth-rim-roamer), sucking glee from spite,—O sucking to the pits! He hardly spoke when he first came, skinny, pimply, beardless except for the babyhair on his upper lip and chin. At the end of a year he never spoke at all, unless he was forced to it or found himself alone with the foul old old peasant he met in the
woods sometimes, his counselor. Hrothulf had hair as black as coal and hazel eyes that never blinked. He stood, always, with his head slung forward and his lips in a pout, like a man straining to remember something. The old man—he was nicknamed Red Horse—had a perpetually startled look, round, red eyes and mouth, white hair that flared around his high, empty dome like the beams of the sun: the look of a man who has suddenly remembered something. I followed the two down shaded paths, skull-lined, since I had used them often (but our travelers did not see the skulls)—Hrothulf stumbling over roots and stones, the old man swinging along on one stiff leg. He spit when he talked, his eyes bugged. He stunk.

“To step out of the region of legality requires an extraordinary push of circumstance,” the old man yelled. He was deaf and shouted as if everyone else were too. “The incitement to violence depends upon total transvaluation of the ordinary values. By a single stroke, the most criminal acts must be converted to heroic and meritorious deeds. If the Revolution comes to grief, it will be because you and those you lead have become alarmed at your own brutality.”

Hrothulf fell down. The old man went on swinging along the path, oblivious, waving his fists. Hrothluf looked around him in slight surprise, understood that he had fallen, and got up. He almost fell again as he ran to catch his adviser. “Make no mistake, my beloved prince,” the old
man was yelling. “The total ruin of institutions and morals is an act of creation. A
religious
act. Murder and mayhem are the life and soul of revolution. I imagine you won’t laugh when I tell you that. There are plenty of fools who would.”

“Oh no, sir,” said Hrothulf.

“The very soul! What does a kingdom pretend to do? Save the values of the community—regulate compromise—improve the quality of the commonwealth! In other words, protect the power of the people in power and keep the others down. By common agreement of course, so the fiction goes. And they do pretty well. We’ll give them that.”

Hrothulf nodded. “We have to give them that.”

“Rewards to people who fit the System best, you know. King’s immediate thanes, the thanes’ top servants, and so on till you come to the people who don’t fit at all. No problem. Drive them to the darkest corners of the kingdom, starve them, throw them in jail or put them out to war.”

“That’s how it works.”

“But satisfy the greed of the majority, and the rest will do you no harm. That’s it. You’ve still got your fiction of consent. If the lowest of the workers start grumbling, claim that the power of the state stands above society, regulating it, moderating it, keeping it within the bounds of order—an impersonal and higher authority of justice. And what if the workers are beyond your reconciliation? Cry ‘Law!’
Cry ‘Common good’ and put on the pressure—arrest and execute a few.”

“A stinking fraud,” Hrothulf said, and bit his lip. There were tears in his eyes. The old serf laughed.

“Exactly, my boy! What is the state in a time of domestic or foreign crisis? What is the state when the chips are down? The answer is obvious and clear! Oh yes! If a few men quit work, the police move in. If the borders are threatened, the army rolls out. Public force is the life and soul of every state: not merely army and police but prisons, judges, tax collectors, every conceivable trick of coercive repression. The state is an organization of violence, a monopoly in what it is pleased to call
legitimate
violence. Revolution, my dear prince, is not the substitution of immoral for moral, or of illegitimate for legitimate violence; it is simply the pitting of power against power, where the issue is freedom for the winners and enslavement of the rest.”

Hrothulf stopped. “That’s not at all what I intend,” he said. “There can be more freedom or less freedom in different states.”

The old man stopped too, several steps ahead of him on the forest path, and looked back, polite by an effort. “Well, that may be,” he said. He shrugged.

Hrothulf, though clumsy, was no fool. He said angrily (unaware of the irony that he, a prince, had a right to
anger, and the old man, a peasant, did not). “Nobody in his right mind would praise violence for its own sake, regardless of its ends!”

The old man shrugged and put on a childish smile. “But I’m a simple man, you see,” he said, “and that’s exactly what I do. All systems are evil. All governments are evil. Not just a trifle evil.
Monstrously
evil.” Though he still smiled, he was shaking, only half controlling it. “If you want me to help you destroy a government, I’m here to serve. But as for Universal Justice—” He laughed.

Hrothulf puckered his lips, stared thoughtfully past him.

Hrothgar’s nephew was kind, for all that, to the cousins he half intended to displace. He was a moody, lonely young man, after all, afraid of strangers, awkward even with the adults he knew well, and the cousins were plump blond children of three and four. There was one other cousin, Freawaru, Hrothgar’s daughter by a woman who’d died. Whenever Freawaru spoke to him, Hrothulf blushed.

He sat between the two boys at the table and helped them with their food, smiling when they talked but rarely answering. The queen would glance at the three now and then. So would others, sometimes. They all knew what was coming, though nobody believed it. Who can look into the wet-mouthed smiles of children and see a meadhall burning,
or listen past their musical prattle to the midnight roar of fire?

—Except, of course, old Hrothgar. Violence and shame have lined the old man’s face with mysterious calm. I can hardly look at him without a welling of confused, unpleasant emotion. He sits tall and still in his carved chair, stiff arms resting on the chair-sides, his clear eyes trained on the meadhall door where I’ll arrive, if I come. When someone speaks to him, he answers politely and gently, his mind far away—on murdered thanes, abandoned hopes. He’s a giant. He had in his youth the strength of seven men. Not now. He has nothing left but the power of his mind—and no pleasure there: a case of knives. The civilization he meant to build has transmogrified to a forest thick with traps. Hrothulf, he knows, is a danger to his sons; but he cannot abandon the child of his dead younger brother. Hygmod, his brother-in-law, is biding his time while Hrothgar lives, because of Wealtheow; but Hygmod, he knows, is no friend. And then there is a man named Ingeld, ruler of the Heathobards, as famous for slaughter as was Hrothgar in his day. The old man intends to deal out Freawaru to him; he has no assurance it will work. And then too there’s his treasure-hoard. Another trap. A man plunders to build up wealth to pay his men and bring peace to the kingdom, but the hoard he builds for his safety becomes the lure of every marauder that happens
to hear of it. Hrothgar, keen of mind, is out of schemes. No fault of his. There are no schemes left. And so he waits like a man chained in a cave, staring at the entrance or, sometimes, gazing with sad, absent-minded eyes at Wealtheow, chained beside him. Who is one more trap, the worst. She’s young, could have served a more vigorous man. And beautiful: need not have withered her nights and wasted her body on a bony, shivering wretch. She knows all this, which increases his pain and guilt. She understands the fear for his people that makes a coward of him, so that, that night when I attacked her, he would not lift a finger to preserve her. And his fear is one he cannot even be sure is generous; perhaps mere desire that his name and fame live on. She understands too his bitterness at growing old. She even understands—more terrible, no doubt, than all the rest—old Hrothgar’s knowledge that peace must be searched through ordeal upon ordeal, with no final prospect but failure. Lesson on lesson they’ve suffered through, recognizing, more profoundly each time, their indignity, shame, triviality. It will continue.