Beowulf's Children Read Free Page B

and one huge old horsemane very near the water. The lake monster spent most of her time in the water offshore, but when the woods were wet they could shield her too. Grendel spawn could turn to grendels anywhere in the lake, and their surprise could be brief and intense when the lake monster burst from the trees.
    Here: she could see muddy river and know the food beneath. The river would bring bottom feeders. She could eat now... and the lake monster would taste her anywhere in the lake, and know she was here. If she had seen patterns then, she would not have come here.
    But she saw another pattern now.
    The grendel bore her hunger. She watched the woods and the water. Of prey she saw no sign, and no sign of the lake monster. The silver spear of light failed to rise, but the strangeness of her world did not go away.
    And so a day passed, and a night.
    At midmorning of the following day, the grendel began to walk toward one great horsemane isolated on the mud.
    No sign of the lake monster.
    At a moment that was nothing but guesswork, the grendel began to run.
    This was the first puzzle she had ever solved, and she had no faith in it at all. She ran, but she was not on speed. When a wave moved where no wave should be, terror and vindication surged and then she was on speed. She was skating on slick mud, her legs a blur, homing on the one isolated tree in a plume of mud and gravel.
    The lake monster came out of the water, screamed challenge, and was on speed.
    The grendel veered right and dug in. She'd pass the tree on the right. If the lake monster came straight at her, hit her broadside, she would be torn, smashed, dead. She could see, feel her own death in the pattern! But a notch more speed changed that, pulled her ahead, and now the lake monster would hit the tree.
    The lake monster saw it. Veered left. She'd strike the grendel after she passed the tree.
    Hah! The grendel veered left. She missed the tree by a toenail's width, just behind the lake monster's spiked tail. The lake monster was turning in a spew of gravel and dust, but falling behind for all that.
    It slowed her for only a moment. She had been eating while sickness melted the flesh from her daughter.
    There was dust blowing out of the tangle forest as the grendel swept past them, burning inside, her enemy far too close behind her. But the lake monster swept through the dust, and the dust followed her like a comet tail.
    Enough! The grendel veered out over the water. She could run on water if she ran fast enough, but the speed was broiling her from inside. She looked back once, and saw what she had hoped for. She ducked, and smashed into the water, and sank, cooling.
    She lifted her snorkel. Then, cautiously, her eyes.
    The lake monster was a comet of dust running straight at her across the water.
    If the lake monster dived now she'd be free of the fog and the heat within, but the grendel would have her. The lake monster didn't dive. Probably she never thought of it. When she stopped, she was invisible in a restless dark cloud.
    The cloud drifted away. Red bones sank through water. The grendel gnawed at them, and was still hungry. Hungry and triumphant. Now she would hunt the shoreline where the lake monster no longer ruled.
     
     

PART 1
    ICE ON THEIR MINDS
    Youth holds no society with grief.
    EURIPIDES
     

Chapter 1
     
    THE RETURN
    The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
    JAMES BRANCH CABELL, The Silver Stallion
     
    "What in the hell is that?"
    Jessica Weyland heard the words without recognizing the voice. It originated just outside the stone walls of the Hold's guest bathroom, where she was scrubbing her cheeks with ice-cold water piped from the Amazon Creek.
    The bath was part of the Hold's guest suite, attached to a guest bedroom that had been hers before she built her own place at Surf's Up. Toshiro Tanaka, her previous evening's entertainment, still sprawled unconscious across the