Grendel: Chapters 6–8

Futility, doom, became a smell in the air, pervasive and acrid as the dead smell after a forest fire—my scent and the world’s, the scent of trees, rocks, waterways wherever I went.

I killed stragglers now and then—with a certain grim pleasure very different from that which I got from cracking a cow’s skull—but I’d never yet struck at the hall, hadn’t even revealed myself there—except on that one ridiculous night when I walked up and tried to join them.

It enraged me. It was their confidence, maybe—their blissful, swinish ignorance, their bumptious self-satisfaction, and, worst of all, their hope.

I felt laughter welling up inside me—at the dragon-charm, at Hrothgar’s whispering and trembling by the meadhall door, at everything—the oblivious trees and sky, the witless moon.

And now at last the grim laughter came pouring out, as uncontrollable as the dragon’s laugh, and I wanted to say, “Lo, God has vanquished mine enemies!”

I stood waiting, bent forward with my feet apart, flat-footed, till they ended their interminable orations.

He took a tentative step toward me, then paused, holding his sword out and shaking it.

An evil idea came over me—so evil it made me shiver as I smiled—and I sidled across to the table.

He looked hurt and slightly indignant.

And now I was raining apples at him and laughing myself weak. He covered his head, roaring at me. He tried to charge through the barrage, but he couldn’t make three feet.

His face and throat and arms were a crosshatch of festering cuts, the leavings of the firesnakes.

All very well to talk about dignity and noble language and all the rest, as if heroism were a golden trinket, mere outward show, and hollow.

“Oh, I heard what you said. I caught your nasty insinuations. ‘I thought heroes were only in poetry,’ you said. Implying that what I’ve made of myself is mere fairytale stuff.”

A little of his voice came back, so that he no longer had to whisper but could bring out his words in a slightly reedy whine.

Three dead trees on the moor below, burned up alive by lightning, are ominous portents.

“Over here!" he screams. Waves his arms. They hesitate, feign deafness, ride away north.

I have not committed the ultimate act of nihilism: I have not killed the queen.

It was the second year of my raiding. The army of the Scyldings was weakened, decimated.

Then, from all corners of Hrothgar’s sphere of influence and from towns beyond—the vassals’ vassals—an army began to form.

The grass, the withering leaves were full of whispering, but the campground was hushed, muffled by their presence, as if blighted.

I followed their trail—footprints, hoofprints, and wagon ruts cutting a wide dirty swath toward the east.

The young king came out, well armed, leading a bear and six retainers.

You’re crafty, lord of the Helmings. A king shrewd with words can mount a great army on promises.

Her smooth long hair was as red as fire and soft as the ruddy sheen on dragon’s gold.

I could see myself leaping from my high tree and running on all fours through the crowd to her, howling, whimpering, throwing myself down, drooling and groveling at her small, fur-booted feet.

For several days both sides made speeches, long-winded, tediously poetic, all lies, and then, with much soft weeping and sniffling, the Scyldings loaded up Wealtheow and the lesser beauties, made a few last touching observations, and went home.

So the lady below would give, had given, her life for those she loved. So would any simpering, eyelash-batting female in her court, given the proper setup, the minimal conditions.

Hrothgar went back to his high, carved chair, relinquishing the bowl to the noblest of his thanes, and sat like an old man listening inside his mind to the voices of his childhood.

I would kill her and teach them reality. Grendel the truth-teacher, phantasm-tester!

Its dappled, high-crowned roadways make
safe homes for birds; quick squirrels run
the veins of its treasure-giving hand;
but the ground below is dead.

She touches my hair and smiles, kind,
trusting the rhetoric of love: Give
and get.

Murder and mayhem are the life and soul of revolution.

The old serf laughed.

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.

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?

The civilization he meant to build has transmogrified to a forest thick with traps.

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.

I have thought up a horrible dream to impute to Hrothgar.

A black tree with a double trunk—two trees
Grown into one—throws up its blurred branches.

The two trunks in their infinitesimal dance of growth
Have turned completely about one another, their join
A slowly twisted scar.