Grendel Read Free Page B

not. I clung to the treetrunk that slanted off to my right, and I almost slept. Perhaps I did sleep, I don’t know. I must have. Nothing mattered. Sometime in the middle of the afternoon I opened my eyes and discovered that the bull was gone.
    I slept again, I think. When I woke up this time and looked up through the leaves overhead, there were vultures. I sighed, indifferent. I was growing used to the pain,or it had lessened. Unimportant. I tried to see myself from the vultures’ viewpoint. I saw, instead, my mother’s eyes. Consuming. I was suddenly her focus of the general meaninglessness—not for myself, not for any quality of my large, shaggy body or my sly, unnatural mind. I was, in her eyes, some meaning I myself could never know and might not care to know: an alien, the rock broken free of the wall. I slept again.
    That night, for the first time, I saw men.
    It was dark when I awakened—or when I came to, if it was that. I was aware at once that there was something wrong. There was no sound, not even the honk of a frog or the chirp of a cricket. There was a smell, a fire very different from ours, pungent, painful as thistles to the nose. I opened my eyes and everything was blurry, as though underwater. There were lights all around me, like some weird creature’s eyes. They jerked back as I looked. Then voices, speaking words. The sounds were foreign at first, but when I calmed myself, concentrating, I found I understood them: it was my own language, but spoken in a strange way, as if the sounds were made by brittle sticks, dried spindles, flaking bits of shale. My vision cleared and I saw them, mounted on horses, holding torches up. Some of them had shiny domes (as it seemed to me then) with horns coming out, like the bull’s. They were small, these creatures, with dead-looking eyes and gray-white faces, andyet in some ways they were like us, except ridiculous and, at the same time, mysteriously irritating, like rats. Their movements were stiff and regular, as if figured by logic. They had skinny, naked hands that moved by clicks. When I first became aware of them, they were all speaking at the same time. I tried to move, but my body was rigid; only one hand gave a jerk. They all stopped speaking at the same instant, like sparrows. We stared at each other.
    One of them said—a tall one with a long black beard—“It moves independent of the tree.”
    They nodded.
    The tall one said, “It’s a growth of some kind, that’s my opinion. Some beastlike fungus.”
    They all looked up into the branches.
    A short, fat one with a tangled white beard pointed up into the tree with an ax. “Those branches on the northern side are all dead there. No doubt the whole tree’ll be dead before midsummer. It’s always the north side goes first when there ain’t enough sap.”
    They nodded, and another one said, “See there where it grows up out of the trunk? Sap running all over.”
    They leaned over the sides of their horses to look, pushing the torches toward me. The horses’ eyes glittered.
    “Have to close that up if we’re going to save this tree,” the tall one said. The others grunted, and the tall one looked up at my eyes, uneasy. I couldn’t move. He steppeddown off the horse and came over to me, so close I could have swung my hand and smashed his head if I could make my muscles move. “It’s like blood,” he said, and made a face.
    Two of the others got down and came over to pull at their noses and look.
    “I say that tree’s a goner,” one of them said.
    They all nodded, except the tall one. “We can’t just leave it rot,” he said. “Start letting the place go to ruin and you know what the upshot’ll be.”
    They nodded. The others got down off their horses and came over. The one with the tangled white beard said, “Maybe we could chop the fungus out.”
    They thought about it. After a while the tall one shook his head. “I don’t know. Could be it’s some kind of a oak-tree spirit. Better