Grendel Read Online Free Page B

the wolf-roadsat dusk, the women would cook the game they’d caught while the men went inside and drank mead. Then they’d all eat, the men first, then the women and children, the men still drinking, getting louder and braver, talking about what they were going to do to the bands on the other hills. I would huddle, listening to their noise in the darkness, my eyebrows lifted, my lips pursed, the hair on the back of my neck standing up like pigs’ bristles. All the bands did the same thing. In time I began to be more amused than revolted by what they threatened. It didn’t matter to me what they did to each other. It was slightly ominous because of its strangeness—no wolf was so vicious to other wolves—but I half believed they weren’t serious.
    They would listen to each other at the meadhall tables, their pinched, cunning rats’ faces picking like needles at the boaster’s words, the warfalcons gazing down, black, from the rafters, and when one of them finished his raving threats, another would stand up and lift up his ram’s horn, or draw his sword, or sometimes both if he was very drunk, and he’d tell them what
he
planned to do. Now and then some trivial argument would break out, and one of them would kill another one, and all the others would detach themselves from the killer as neatly as blood clotting, and they’d consider the case and they’d either excuse him, for some reason, or else send him out to the forest to live by stealing from their outlying pens like a wounded fox. Attimes I would try to befriend the exile, at other times I would try to ignore him, but they were treacherous. In the end, I had to eat them. As a rule, though, that wasn’t how all their drinking turned out. Normally the men would howl out their daring, and the evening would get merrier, louder and louder, the king praising this one, criticizing that one, no one getting hurt except maybe some female who was asking for it, and eventually they’d all fall asleep on each other like lizards, and I’d steal a cow.
    But the threats were serious. Darting unseen from camp to camp, I observed a change come over their drunken boasts. It was late spring. Food was plentiful. Every sheep and goat had its wobbly twins, the forest was teeming, and the first crops of the hillsides were coming into fruit. A man would roar, “I’ll steal their gold and burn their meadhall!” shaking his sword as if the tip were afire, and a man with eyes like two pins would say, “Do it now, Cowface! I think you’re not even the man your father was!” The people would laugh. I would back away into the darkness, furious at my stupid need to spy on them, and I would glide to the next camp of men, and I’d hear the same.
    Then once, around midnight, I came to a hall in ruins. The cows in their pens lay burbling blood through their nostrils, with javelin holes in their necks. None had been eaten. The watchdogs lay like dark wet stones, with their heads cut off, teeth bared. The fallen hall was a square offlames and acrid smoke, and the people inside (none of them had been eaten either) were burned black, small, like dwarfs turned dark and crisp. The sky opened like a hole where the gables had loomed before, and the wooden benches, the trestle tables, the beds that had hung on the meadhall walls were scattered to the edge of the forest, shining charcoal. There was no sign of the gold they’d kept—not so much as a melted hilt.
    Then the wars began, and the war songs, and the weapon making. If the songs were true, as I suppose at least one or two of them were, there had always been wars, and what I’d seen was merely a period of mutual exhaustion.
    I’d be watching a meadhall from high in a tree, nightbirds singing in the limbs below me, the moon’s face hidden in a tower of clouds, and nothing would be stirring except leaves moving in the light spring breeze and, down by the pigpens, two men walking with their battle-axes and their dogs. Inside the hall I