Grendel Read Online Free

not to mess with it.”
    They looked uneasy. There was a hairless, skinny one with eyes like two holes. He stood with his arms out, like a challenged bird, and he kept moving around in jerky little circles, bent forward, peering at everything, at the tree, at the woods around, up into my eyes. Now suddenly he nodded. “That’s it! King’s right! It’s a spirit!”
    “You think so?” they said. Their heads poked forward.
    “Sure of it,” he said.
    “Is it friendly, you think?” the king said.
    The hairless one peered up at me with the fingertips ofone hand in his mouth. The skinny elbow hung straight down, as if he were leaning on an invisible table while he thought the whole thing through. His black little eyes stared straight into mine, as if waiting for me to tell him something. I tried to speak. My mouth moved, but nothing would come out. The little man jerked back. “He’s hungry!” he said.
    “Hungry!” they all said. “What does he eat?”
    He looked at me again. His tiny eyes drilled into me and he was crouched as if he were thinking of trying to jump up into my brains. My heart thudded. I was so hungry I could eat a rock. He smiled suddenly, as if a holy vision had exploded in his head. “He eats
pig!”
he said. He looked doubtful. “Or maybe pigsmoke. He’s in a period of transition.”
    They all looked at me, thinking it over, then nodded.
    The king picked out six men. “Go get the thing some pigs,” he said. The six men said “Yes sir!” and got on their horses and rode off. It filled me with joy, though it was all crazy, and before I knew I could do it, I laughed. They jerked away and stood shaking, looking up.
    “The spirit’s angry,” one of them whispered.
    “It always has been,” another one said. “That’s why it’s killing the tree.”
    “No, no, you’re wrong,” the hairless one said. “It’s yelling for pig.”
    “Pig!” I tried to yell. It scared them.
    They all began shouting at each other. One of the horses neighed and reared up, and for some crazy reason they took it for a sign. The king snatched an ax from the man beside him and, without any warning, he hurled it at me. I twisted, letting out a howl, and it shot past my shoulder, just barely touching my skin. Blood trickled out.
    “You’re all crazy,” I tried to yell, but it came out a moan. I bellowed for my mother.
    “Surround him!” the king yelled, “Save the horses!”—and suddenly I knew I was dealing with no dull mechanical bull but with thinking creatures, pattern makers, the most dangerous things I’d ever met. I shrieked at them, trying to scare them off, but they merely ducked behind bushes and took long sticks from the saddles of their horses, bows and javelins. “You’re all crazy,” I bellowed, “you’re all insane!” I’d never howled more loudly in my life. Darts like hot coals went through my legs and arms and I howled more loudly still. And then, just when I was sure I was finished, a shriek ten times as loud as mine came blaring off the cliff. It was my mother! She came roaring down like thunder, screaming like a thousand hurricanes, eyes as bright as dragonfire, and before she was within a mile of us, the creatures had leaped to their horses and galloped away. Big trees shattered and fell from her path; the earth trembled. Then her smell poured in like bloodinto a silver cup, filling the moonlit clearing to the brim, and I felt the two trees that held me falling, and I was tumbling, free, into the grass.
    I woke up in the cave, warm firelight flickering on walls. My mother lay picking through the bone pile. When she heard me stir, she turned, wrinkling her forehead, and looked at me. There were no other shapes. I think I dimly understood even then that they’d gone deeper into darkness, away from men. I tried to tell her all that had happened, all that I’d come to understand: the meaningless objectness of the world, the universal bruteness. She only stared, troubled at my