Grendel (5 page)

He sings to a heavier harpsong now, old heart-string scratcher, memory scraper. Of the richest of kings made sick of soul by the scattered bones of thanes. By late afternoon the fire dies down and the column of smoke is white, no longer greasy. There will be others this year, they know; yet they hang on. The sun backs away from the world like a crab and the days grow shorter, the nights grow longer, more dark and dangerous. I smile, angry in the thickening dusk, and feast my eyes on the greatest of meadhalls, unsatisfied.

His pride. The torch of kingdoms. Hart.

The Shaper remains, though now there are nobler courts where he might sing. The pride of creation. He built this
hall by the power of his songs: created with casual words its grave mor(t)ality. The boy observes him, tall and solemn, twelve years older than the night he first crept in with his stone-eyed master. He knows no art but tragedy—a moving singer. The credit is wholly mine.

Inspired by winds (or whatever you please), the old man sang of a glorious meadhall whose light would shine to the ends of the ragged world. The thought took seed in Hrothgar’s mind. It grew. He called all his people together and told them his daring scheme. He would build a magnificent meadhall high on a hill, with a view of the western sea, a victory-seat near the giants’ work, old ruined fortress from the world’s first war, to stand forever as a sign of the glory and justice of Hrothgar’s Danes. There he would sit and give treasures out, all wealth but the lives of men and the people’s land. And so his sons would do after him, and his sons’ sons, to the final generation.

I listened, huddled in the darkness, tormented, mistrustful. I knew them, had watched them; yet the things he said seemed true. He sent to far kingdoms for woodsmen, carpenters, metalsmiths, goldsmiths—also carters, victualed, clothiers to attend to the workmen—and for weeks their uproar filled the days and nights. I watched from the vines and boulders of the giants’ ruin, two miles off. Then word went out to the races of men that Hrothgar’s hall was finished. He gave it its name. From neighboring
realms and from across the sea came men to the great celebration. The harper sang.

I listened, felt myself swept up. I knew very well that all he said was ridiculous, not light for their darkness but flattery, illusion, a vortex pulling them from sunlight to heat, a kind of midsummer burgeoning, waltz to the sickle. Yet I was swept up. “Ridiculous!” I hissed in the black of the forest. I snatched up a snake from beside my foot and whispered to it, “I knew him
when!”
But I couldn’t bring out a wicked cackle, as I’d meant to do. My heart was light with Hrothgar’s goodness, and leaden with grief at my own bloodthirsty ways. I backed away, crablike, further into darkness—like a crab retreating in pain when you strike two stones at the mouth of his underwater den. I backed away till the honeysweet lure of the harp no longer mocked me. Yet even now my mind was tormented by images. Thanes filled the hall and a great silent crowd of them spilled out over the surrounding hill, smiling, peaceable, hearing the harper as if not a man in all that lot had ever twisted a knife in his neighbor’s chest.

“Well then he’s changed them,” I said, and stumbled and fell on the root of a tree. “Why not?”

Why not?
the forest whispered back—yet not the forest, something deeper, an impression from another mind, some live thing old and terrible.

I listened, tensed.

Not a sound.

“He reshapes the world,” I whispered, belligerent. “So his name implies. He stares strange-eyed at the mindless world and turns dry sticks to gold.”

A little poetic, I would readily admit. His manner of speaking was infecting me, making me pompous. “Nevertheless,” I whispered crossly—but I couldn’t go on, too conscious all at once of my whispering, my eternal posturing, always transforming the world with words—changing nothing. I still had the snake in my fist. I set it down. It fled.

“He takes what he finds,” I said stubbornly, trying again. “And by changing men’s minds he makes the best of it. Why not?” But it sounded petulant; and it wasn’t true, I knew. He sang for pay, for the praise of women—one in particular—and for the honor of a famous king’s hand on his arm. If the ideas of art were beautiful, that was art’s fault, not the Shaper’s. A blind selector, almost mindless: a bird. Did they murder each other more gently because in the woods sweet songbirds sang?

Yet I wasn’t satisfied. His fingers picked infallibly, as if moved by something beyond his power, and the words stitched together out of ancient songs, the scenes interwoven out of dreary tales, made a vision without seams, an image of himself yet not-himself, beyond the need of any shaggy old gold-friend’s pay: the projected possible.

“Why not?” I whispered, jerking forward, struggling to make my eyes sear through the dark trunks and vines.

I could feel it all around me, that invisible presence, chilly as the first intimation of death, the dusty unblinking eyes of a thousand snakes. There was no sound. I touched a fat, slick loop of vine, prepared to leap back in horror, but it was only vine, no worse. And still no sound, no movement. I got up on my feet, bent over, squinting, and edged back through the trees toward the town. It followed me—whatever it was. I was as sure of that as I’d ever been of anything. And then, in one instant, as if it had all been my mind, the thing was gone. In the hall they were laughing.

Men and women stood talking in the light of the meadhall door and on the narrow streets below; on the lower hillside boys and girls played near the sheep pens, shyly holding hands. A few lay touching each other in the forest eaves. I thought how they’d shriek if I suddenly showed my face, and it made me smile, but I held myself back. They talked nothing, stupidities, their soft voices groping like hands. I felt myself tightening, cross, growing restless for no clear reason, and I made myself move more slowly. Then, circling the clearing, I stepped on something fleshy, and jerked away. It was a man. They’d cut his throat. His clothes had been stolen. I stared up at the hall, baffled, beginning to shake. They went on talking
softly, touching hands, their hair full of light. I lifted up the body and slung it across my shoulder.

Then the harp began to play. The crowd grew still.

The harp sighed, the old man sang, as sweet-voiced as a child.

He told how the earth was first built, long ago: said that the greatest of gods made the world, every wonder-bright plain and the turning seas, and set out as signs of his victory the sun and moon, great lamps for light to land-dwellers, kingdom torches, and adorned the fields with all colors and shapes, made limbs and leaves and gave life to the every creature that moves on land.

The harp turned solemn. He told of an ancient feud between two brothers which split all the world between darkness and light. And I, Grendel, was the dark side, he said in effect. The terrible race God cursed.

I believed him. Such was the power of the Shaper’s harp! Stood wriggling my face, letting tears down my nose, grinding my fists into my streaming eyes, even though to do it I had to squeeze with my elbow the corpse of the proof that both of us were cursed, or neither, that the brothers had never lived, nor the god who judged them. “Waaa!” I bawled.

Oh what a conversion!

I staggered out into the open and up toward the hall with my burden, groaning out, “Mercy! Peace!” The
harper broke off, the people screamed. (They have their own versions, but this is the truth.) Drunken men rushed me with battle-axes. I sank to my knees, crying, “Friend! Friend!” They hacked at me, yipping like dogs. I held up the body for protection. Their spears came through it and one of them nicked me, a tiny scratch high on my left breast, but I knew by the sting it had venom on it and I understood, as shocked as I’d been the first time, that they could kill me—eventually
would
if I gave them a chance. I struck at them, holding the body as a shield, and two fell bleeding from my nails at the first little swipe. The others backed off. I crushed the body in my hug, then hurled it in their faces, turned, and fled. They didn’t follow.

I ran to the center of the forest and fell down panting. My mind was wild. “Pity,” I moaned, “O pity! pity!” I wept—strong monster with teeth like a shark’s—and I slammed the earth with such force that a seam split open twelve feet long. “Bastards!” I roared. “Sons of bitches! Fuckers!” Words I’d picked up from men in their rages. I wasn’t even sure what they meant, though I had an idea: defiance, rejection of the gods that, for my part, I’d known all along to be lifeless sticks. I roared with laughter, still sobbing. We, the accursed, didn’t even have words for swearing in!
“AAARGH!”
I whooped, then covered my ears and hushed. It sounded silly.

My sudden awareness of my foolishness made me calm.

I looked up through the treetops, ludicrously hopeful. I think I was half prepared, in my dark, demented state, to see God, bearded and gray as geometry, scowling down at me, shaking his bloodless finger.

“Why can’t I have someone to talk to?” I said. The stars said nothing, but I pretended to ignore the rudeness. “The Shaper has people to talk to,” I said. I wrung my fingers. “Hrothgar has people to talk to.”

I thought about it.

Perhaps it wasn’t true.

As a matter of fact, if the Shaper’s vision of goodness and peace was a part of himself, not idle rhymes, then no one understood him at all, not even Hrothgar. And as for Hrothgar, if he was serious about his idea of glory—sons and sons’ sons giving out treasure—I had news for him. If he had sons, they wouldn’t hear his words. They would weigh his silver and gold in their minds. I’ve watched the generations. I’ve seen their weasel eyes.

I fought down my smile.

“That could change,” I said, shaking my finger as if at an audience. “The Shaper may yet improve men’s minds, bring peace to the miserable Danes.”

But they were doomed, I knew, and I was glad. No denying it. Let them wander the fogroads of Hell.

Two nights later I went back. I was addicted. The Shaper was singing the glorious deeds of the dead men, praising war. He sang how they’d fought me. It was all lies. The sly harp rasped like snakes in cattails, glorifying death. I snatched a guard and smashed him on a tree, but my stomach turned at the thought of eating him. “Woe to the man,” the Shaper sang, “who shall through wicked hostilities shove his soul down into the fire’s hug! Let him hope for no change: he can never turn away! But lucky the man who, after his deathday, shall seek the Prince, find peace in his father’s embrace!”

“Bullshit!” I whispered through clenched teeth. How was it that he could enrage me so?

Why not?
the darkness hissed around me.
Why not? Why not?
Teasing, tormenting, as cold as a dead hand closing on my wrist.

Imagination, I knew. Some evil inside myself pushed out into the trees. I knew what I knew, the mindless, mechanical bruteness of things, and when the harper’s lure drew my mind away to hopeful dreams, the dark of what was and always was reached out and snatched my feet.

And yet I’d be surprised, I had to admit, if anything in myself could be as cold, as dark, as centuries old as the presence I felt around me. I touched a vine to reassure myself. It was a snake. I snapped back in terror.

Then I calmed myself again. The fangs hadn’t hit. It came to me that the presence was still there, somewhere deeper, much deeper, in the night. I had a feeling that if I let myself I could fall toward it, that it was pulling me, pulling the whole world in like a whirlpool.

Craziness, of course. I got up, though the feeling was as strong as ever, and felt my way back through the forest and over to the cliffwall and back to the mere and to my cave. I lay there listening to the indistinct memory of the Shaper’s songs. My mother picked through the bone pile, sullen. I’d brought no food.

“Ridiculous,” I whispered.

She looked at me.

It was a cold-blooded lie that a god had lovingly made the world and set out the sun and moon as lights to land-dwellers, that brothers had fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed. Yet he, the old Shaper, might make it true, by the sweetness of his harp, his cunning trickery. It came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it. As they did too, though vicious animals, cunning, cracked with theories. I wanted it, yes! Even if I must be the outcast, cursed by the rules of his hideous fable.

She whimpered, scratched at the nipple I had not sucked in years. She was pitiful, foul, her smile a jagged white tear in the firelight: waste.

She whimpered one sound:
Dool-dool! dool-dool!,
scratching at her bosom, a ghastly attempt to climb back up to speech.

I clamped my eyes shut, listened to the river, and after a time I slept.

I sat up with a jerk.

The thing was all around me, now, like a thunder charge.

“Who is it?” I said.

No answer. Darkness.

My mother was asleep; she was as deadlooking as a red-gray old sea-elephant stretched on the shore of a summer day.

I got up and silently left the cave. I went to the cliffwall, then down to the moor.