Grendel Read Online Free Page A

noise. She’d forgotten all language long ago, or maybe had never known any. I’d never heard her speak to the other shapes. (How I myself learned to speak I can’t remember; it was a long, long time ago.) But I talked on, trying to smash through the walls of her unconsciousness. “The world resists me and I resist the world,” I said. “That’s all there is. The mountains are what I define them as.” Ah, monstrous stupidity of childhood, unreasonable hope! I waken with a start and see it over again (in my cave, out walking, or sitting by the mere), the memory rising as if it has been pursuing me. The fire in my mother’s eyes brightens and she reaches out as if some current is tearing us apart. “The world is all pointless accident,” I say. Shouting now, my fists clenched. “I exist, nothing else.” Her face works. She gets up on allfours, brushing dry bits of bone from her path, and, with a look of terror, rising as if by unnatural power, she hurls herself across the void and buries me in her bristly fur and fat. I sicken with fear. “My mother’s fur is bristly,” I say to myself. “Her flesh is loose.” Buried under my mother I cannot see. She smells of wild pig and fish. “My mother smells of wild pig and fish,” I say. What I see I inspire with usefulness, I think, trying to suck in breath, and all that I do not see is useless, void. I observe myself observing what I observe. It startles me. “Then I am not that which observes!” I am
lack. Alack!
No thread, no frailest hair between myself and the universal clutter! I listen to the underground river. I have never seen it.
    Talking, talking, spinning a skin, a skin …
    I can’t breathe, and I claw to get free. She struggles. I smell my mama’s blood and, alarmed, I hear from the walls and floor of the cave the booming, booming, of her heart.

It wasn’t because he threw that battle-ax that I turned on Hrothgar. That was mere midnight foolishness. I dismissed it, thought of it afterward only as you remember a tree that fell on you or an adder you stepped on by accident, except of course that Hrothgar was more to be feared than a tree or snake. It wasn’t until later, when I was full-grown and Hrothgar was an old, old man, that I settled my soul on destroying him—slowly and cruelly. Except for his thanes’ occasional stories of seeing my footprints, he’d probably forgotten by then that I existed.
    He’d been busy. I’d watched it all from the eaves of the forest, mostly from up off the ground, in the branches.
    In the beginning there were various groups of them: ragged little bands that roamed the forest on foot or horseback, crafty-witted killers that worked in teams, hunting through the summer, shivering in caves or little huts in the winter, occasionally wandering out into the snow to plow through it slowly, clumsily, after more meat. Ice clung to their eyebrows and beards and eyelashes, and I’d hear them whining and groaning as they walked. When two hunters from different bands came together in the woods, they would fight until the snow was slushy with blood, then crawl back, gasping and crying, to their separate camps to tell wild tales of what happened.
    As the bands grew larger, they would seize and clear a hill and, with the trees they’d cut, would set up shacks, and on the crown of the hill a large, shaggy house with a steeply pitched roof and a wide stone hearth, where they’d all go at night for protection from other bands of men. The inside walls would be beautifully painted and hung with tapestries, and every cross-timber or falcon’s perch was carved and gewgawed with toads, snakes, dragon shapes, deer, cows, pigs, trees, trolls. At the first sign of spring they would set out their shrines and scatter seeds on the sides of the hill, below the shacks, and would put up wooden fences to pen their pigs and cows. The women worked the ground and milked and fed the animals while the men hunted, and when the men came in from