Beowulf Read Free Page B

I’ll have my soldiers guard it.” He smiled grimly, wheeling his horse about. “I shan’t say they’ll keep it safe for you until you come back, because I doubt very much whether you will come back, any of you, if it’s really Grendel you’re after.”
    Beowulf’s men wore coats of mail. Their helmets had golden boar-crests on them. They carried swords and ash spears tipped with iron. Armor and equipment proved heavy in the midday sun. They clanked along, uncomplaining, the sweat pouring down their faces, in single file behind the coastguard’s horse. Beowulf looked about him as he marched, taking everything in, tall cliffs and deep valleys,each tumbling stream and pebble winking brightly in the sun. His head moved on his shoulders like a bird’s: alert, inquisitive, shrewd.
    Before long they came in sight of Heorot. The shining of the place astonished them. It stood like a tower of solid gold. Beyond it, shrouded in mist even on a day like this, lay the fen.
    To Beowulf—perhaps because of his short sight—hall Heorot appeared even brighter than it was, and the badlands darker. He stood on a grassy mound gazing down at the gold and the black for a long while, until his men began to grow restless and the coastguard’s horse flared its nostrils wide, impatient to be back within smelling distance of the sea.
    Then Beowulf thanked the coastguard for showing them the way, and led his men along the winding stone road to Heorot. The coastguard watched them go, thinking how brave and doomed they looked, until they were so far away that he could no longer hear the clinking of their armor. He saw that Beowulf had left his sword stuck in the top of the mound. It shone in the sunlight like a cross.

V
N INE S EA -M ONSTERS
    Hrothgar’s hair, once red as fire, had turned white with worry about Grendel. His heart was sickened by slaughter. So many men had waited in hall Heorot to face the fiend, and been eaten for their courage, that the king had come to think he was being punished for his pride in building such a magnificence. He rested his jutting jaw on his hand, and welcomed Beowulf without much confidence.
    “I knew your father,” he said, after they had exchanged salutes. “He was a tall, strong man, with an eye like a hawk’s.”
    Beowulf blinked and smiled. “Great Hrothgar,” he said politely, “I am not tall, as you see, and my enemies liken my eyes to the bat’s. But the bat knows well enough where he is going in the night, and so do I.”
    Hrothgar shook his head slowly, as though it buzzed with sorrow. “I suppose you havecome to fight Grendel,” he muttered. “Please go home again. There’s nothing anyone can do.”
    Beowulf sat down on the steps by the king’s throne. His manner was relaxed and easy. Hrothgar could not help liking this plain young man—there was such an air of simplicity about him. He shuddered and touched the scars on his own face—livid marks made by Grendel’s claws—as he thought what the monster would do to that simplicity.
    Beowulf was eating an apple. He bit into it with cheerful determination. The tips of his fingers were square. Hrothgar noticed how strong his wrists were.
    Beowulf said: “These apples are good. Do you want one?”
    “Where do they grow?”
    “In the valley on the other side of the hill. I had my men pick a sackful as we marched past.” Beowulf nodded to one of his followers. The man chose an apple from a huge bag he had been carrying on his back, and brought it to the king. Hrothgar balanced it on the palm of his hand and considered it doubtfully.
    “That grove is witch-work,” he said, looking at Beowulf as though he expected him to be turned into a pig any minute.
    Unferth, slouched over a cup, rich mead sticky in his whiskers, grinned agreement. “An old witch spat her teeth out there,” he muttered. “They were bad teeth—green and red and rotting. They grew into apple trees. Nobody in his right mind would eat fruit like