Authors: Gwynn Jones
Exhaustion made Sigrun sleep deeply, but at some point in the middle of the night, she was jolted awake. The cobwebs of sleep cleared quickly enough, blasted away by an awful bloodcurdling noise, but she struggled to understand what she was hearing.
She finally realized that it was howling. A terrible howling sound coming from the hall, a sound of pure pain and anguish, that made her hair stand on end. Was it Grendel? What had happened to him? She stood up. She hesitated. Grendel was dangerous. Could it be a trick? Or was he hurt? Or was he angry? Was it something else?
The howl was growing weaker. What if someone needed her help? She regretted that she had not already changed into her dragonskin attire. It would have afforded her more protection. With her skirts pulled up in one hand and her sword held in the other, she slipped from the room and moved cautiously toward the hall.
She stopped in the shadow of the doorframe, afraid to walk into any surprises. The howling had died down into eerie silence. She couldn't see anyone from here. She could see the pool and the puddles of wetness from someone's recent emergence. The wet spots were dark, though. Very dark. And there was a great deal of wetness. It did not look like water. It looked like something else.
Sigrun shuddered. It looked like blood. And more of it than Grendel had ever brought back on him before. There was a trail of it leading toward the hearth, but from her vantage she could not see where it ended. Part of her wanted to slink away, to creep quietly back to her room. But this hall was her exit. She would have to come back through here if she wanted to leave. There was nothing to be done about it. She took a deep breath and stepped into the hall, sword raised.
First making sure that Grendel was not lying in wait for her on either side of the doorway, she turned her attention to the hearth. The gruesome sight that met her eyes made her grip fail and sent her sword clattering to the floor.
Grendel sat slumped against the wall in a pool of his own blood. She gasped and choked back a sob. Grendel, so impervious to any and all weapons ever used against him, seemed entirely unwounded, not a bruise or a scratch on him, with the sole, ghastly exception that one of his arms was completely gone. It looked like it had been pulled from the socket. Blood continued to seep from the hole, and Sigrun shuddered at the thought of how far Grendel must have come, bleeding so profusely from such an injury. This was not the doing of the sea dragons. No beasts in the woods could have hurt him so. No, this must have happened at Heorot.
She must stop the bleeding. She grabbed up her blade and thrust it into the fire. The flames flared up white and green and silver at the touch of the sword, but she barely noticed. She needed to heat the metal to cauterize the wound. Grendel's breath was shallow, rasping. He had not even lifted his head at her approach. She straddled him, pressing her arm against his chest to try to hold him still. It would be excruciating when he felt the burn of the hot steel.
"Grendel." She felt tears sliding down her cheeks. "Grendel, my sweet, I must help you, I must stop the bleeding." His flesh hissed when she applied the blade, and the acrid smell of burnt hair and seared skin and blood stung her nostrils and made her stomach turn, but she continued until she had sealed the wound. He howled again with pain, but she did not need to hold him down. He was too weak to move, and this realization made her tears run afresh.
She dropped the sword to the floor and wrapped her arms around his chest. He had lost so much blood. He felt cold. His heartbeat, always so strong and steady, was slow and faint. She must warm him. She pressed herself against him, willing her own warmth into him. He lifted his hand and ran his claws through her hair.
"Hmm... Beautiful." His voice was a low growl, barely a whisper.
"Rest, my dear thing. You'll be fine. You just need to rest."
But he was dying, and she knew it. She kissed his cheeks, caressed his brow, held him tightly while he continued to fade. She continued holding him long after his heartbeat became too faint to feel, long after he sighed out his last breath. She held him while his body grew cold and stiff. She soaked his chest with her tears.
When she finally roused herself, her thoughts were reeling. She had known that his violent turn would end badly. She had thought that it would end in him killing her, or her killing him. She had not imagined that anyone or anything else could have done him in. Certainly no one at Heorot. Hrothgar did not deserve this victory. Hrothgar should have left long, long ago, and none of this ever would have happened. Her sorrow turned into rage. Her need to escape was replaced by a burning need for revenge.
Hrothgar must pay.
Sigrun had thought that she would never return to Heorot. She scowled at it now from the edge of the woods, marking the pattern of the watchmen who circled the perimeter. Hrothgar's fabled hall was only the centerpiece of a larger compound, a stronghold on an elevated ring, circled by thick, sloping turf walls which were themselves surrounded and topped by fences of sharply pointed wooden stakes. The high fence was a newer addition, a futile measure against Grendel. What a shame, she thought, remembering long hours spent staring out the small window of her turf prison-hut; the newest fortifications surely blocked the view of the woods.
There were few guards on watch, and Sigrun could hear sounds of merrymaking coming from the hall. She had followed the trail of Grendel's blood to confirm that this was where he had suffered that terrible, life-ending wound; the denizens of Heorot probably thought they had no further need for vigilance, now that the monster was beaten. She gritted her teeth at their celebrations. She would show them that they were not safe yet.
Her dragon skin garb blended with the shadows, and she had smeared her face with dark soil. She had braided and wrapped her bright, silver-white hair, so that other than the flash of her eyes and the faint metallic glint of her helmet, she was nearly invisible if she kept out of the light. She easily vaulted over the perimeter fence, scaled the steep turf slope, and pulled herself up and over the interior wall. Her physical abilities had long since surpassed those of any mere human. Whatever it was that she had become as Grendel's bride, she was not one to be repelled by the puny safety measures of common men. She kept to the shadows of the outbuildings, but the compound seemed almost deserted. Clearly everyone had gathered in the hall.
As she drew near the mead hall, she stifled a sob. Grendel's arm had been nailed up on the wall above the front entrance door. Her rage surged.
Thick, slanted beams extended from the heavily shingled golden roof all the way to the ground, creating a sort of shaded gallery along the sides of the mead hall. Sigrun darted across the open space to the shelter of the beams and moved from there along the wall to the entrance vestibule. There was little need to be quiet, since the music and laughter within would have obscured even the noisiest of intrusions, but she did not want to be seen. She slipped into the vestibule and was relieved to find it empty. From here, she thought she could pull herself up into the roof beams and get a view of the interior hall. The revelers were unlikely to be peering too intently into the shadows above their heads.
Lurking in those shadows, she drank in the scene and quickly gathered all the information she required. Of course Hrothgar could never have defeated Grendel on his own. No, word of his sorry plight had spread, and a hero had come to prove his own glory by cleansing Heorot of its monstrous plague. She glared down at the man who had done it. They called him Beowulf. Some nobleman's son from across the sea, with some old family debt to repay, a favor for a favor, for good old Hrothgar. She gritted her teeth again to hear them singing one another's praises. Apparently, news of Hrothgar's ruthless bride-sacrificing stratagem had not spread so widely. He had revised his tale to leave that part out. And here he had another queen already by his side, another Wealhtheow, for just in case.
But Sigrun could see that Hrothgar had been affected by Grendel's attacks. He had changed since the time when Sigrun had gone by that name. He was feebler, weaker. He had a tendency to whine. His wife, on the other hand, had apparently recognized her opportunity and was asserting herself, even politicking on behalf of her young stepsons, whose favor she would surely want to secure. And yet Sigrun noticed this Wealhtheow's eyes on Hrothgar's nephew as well, the son of the brother Hrothgar deposed long ago in order to seize the crown for himself. Clever thing! It did not take long for Sigrun to realize that Heorot was doomed to fall. The web of political complications and animosities was too tight; Hrothgar's monument to his own success would not outlive him, and he might even live, too enfeebled to keep his enemies at bay, to see it fall. She couldn't suppress a grin. But Grendel still required his vengeance. She was not done here yet.
She spotted Unferth, her former jailer and lover, sitting in his usual spot at Hrothgar's feet. Unferth also looked the worse for wear. His face was lined and gray, his eyes dull. He was staring sullenly at Beowulf. She turned her attention to the hero.
Beowulf. The bee-wolf, the bear. And he was built like a bear, a huge man with a shaggy head of hair. He stood a good head taller than anyone else in the room. Grendel still would have dwarfed him, but one look at his thick, rippling arms told her that this man-beyond-mere-men, this bear-man, had the strength to do what he had done. Grendel was used to attacking and destroying, used to weapons bouncing off of him. If this man had grabbed him by the arm and held on, braced himself against something, Grendel might well have panicked. She sighed. Grendel had probably contributed to his own demise, tearing off his arm as he tried to pull away from the grip of his foe. Poor dear beast.
Very well. She would not kill this hero, Beowulf. Hrothgar was still the one to blame. Hrothgar would pay. Not with his life, but with something he held dear. But what? She pondered the possibilities as the celebrations wound down. Beowulf retired to one of the outbuildings. Hrothgar left the hall, accompanied by a favored retainer, Aeschere. Unferth escorted Wealhtheow from the hall. Curious, she slipped down from her hiding place and followed them.
This Wealhtheow was not housed in the same small turf mound that had been Sigrun's home. This one had a finer building for herself. Sigrun slipped into the vestibule and crouched at the door to the inner chamber, setting her eye to a good-sized chink in the wood. Sure enough, for all that he had professed his love for her, for all that he had declared that Sigrun was special, different, a woman whom he would never forget, Unferth had not ceased in his role as lover to the queen. This did not bother her. She had never truly trusted him, and therefore she had never loved him. She had always known that he was the enemy and that accepting his advances would bring her nothing but a distraction from her inescapable end. She had known not to seek hope from him, and when Unferth had failed to save her from her fate, all of her assumptions had been confirmed. But she watched now with a small measure of morbid fascination as Unferth and the new queen
—
small, compact, vigorous and apparently voracious
—
disrobed and set to business.
She jumped into his arms and then pushed him down onto the bed, covering his chest with kisses on her way down his belly and to his pelvis. His penis was not yet erect, but Wealhtheow pounced on it, popping the whole thing into her mouth and eliciting a small gasp from her lover. She worked at it, sucking and pulling, mouthing and teasing it until it grew stiff. He groaned softly as she dragged her tongue up the shaft, circling the head before pulling the whole thing into her mouth again. She caressed his balls with one hand, sometimes leaving off from her cock-sucking to take them into her mouth, as well. He grew ever harder from her attentions. His breathing became heavy, and he reached down to plunge his fingers into her hair. She swatted his hand away. Pulling away again from his now-rigid rod, she stuck two fingers into her mouth, wetting them with saliva. Returning her mouth to his cock, lifting and squeezing his sac with the one hand, she buried the other, with glistening fingers, underneath him. Judging by the movements of her hand and the gasp that escaped Unferth's lips, Sigrun guessed that the naughty queen was probing his ass. She had to admire the woman's coordination, finger-fucking, ball-fondling, and looking for all the world like she meant to swallow his entire cock whole while he twitched and thrusted beneath her.
His back arched, and his groans were increasing in pitch. It looked like he was about to come, when Wealhtheow suddenly disengaged completely. He grunted as she yanked her hand free and dropped his prick from her mouth. Her lips were red and sloppy with saliva. She wiped them with the back of her hand, wiped her fingers on the bed-furs, and giggled. He began to sit up, began to say something, but she pushed him back down. She climbed onto him, straddling him, grabbing his cock and shoving it inside her. He grabbed her hips and began thrusting, but she reached for his nipples and gave them a nasty twist. He yelped.
"Don't you dare come yet," she scolded. She slapped his cheek and then bent to give it a kiss. Then she rode him so hard, so furiously, a lather of sweat coated her back. He looked like he might be in pain, whether from holding off his own orgasm or from being ridden so roughly, Sigrun couldn't tell. Wealhtheow came several times, it seemed. Her moans raised in pitch and became gasps and cries. Finally, spent, she collapsed onto his chest. After a few silent moments, she giggled again.
"Okay, warrior, it's your turn. Fuck me more. Do as I bid."
He pushed her off of him. He was flushed, his cock still hard, glistening from her juices and throbbing with the need for release. She rolled onto the furs, smirking. He flipped her over and pulled her up onto her knees. Without a word, he sank his prick into her gaping snatch. Grasping her hips, he pounded her, hard. She let out rhythmic grunts and squeals as he fucked her as relentlessly as she had just fucked him. Sigrun's stomach turned a bit at the joylessness of this encounter. Wealhtheow was in the throes of orgasm when Unferth pulled out of her pussy and plunged his slippery rod into her ass. She shrieked, but she also pressed herself back against him, shuddering and moaning. He fucked her ass the same as he had fucked her pussy, hard and relentless, and she seemed to like it that way. They were both drenched with sweat. When he reached his climax, he pulled out, flipped her back over and came all over her stomach and chest. He collapsed beside her, his chest heaving, his face set in a grimace. Sigrun shook her head and slipped away from this lovers' nest.
She made her way to Hrothgar's chambers, pondering whether she should simply kill the old king. But then he would not live to see his kingdom crumble, and that seemed like the preferable fate for the vile tyrant. When she peeked into his room -- maybe she could maim him a bit -- she found that he was not alone. Aeschere, naked, was climbing out of the bed, bending to give the king a kiss and running his hand gently through Hrothgar's silver hair. Well, this explained the king's lack of interest in his wives, and Unferth's role as the lover. Once he had ensured his line with a safe number of heirs, he had probably dispensed with marital duties altogether. He murmured something to Aeschere, took his hand and pressed it to his lips. Aeschere. She had had little to do with him when she was the queen, but he had never treated her with better than disdain. Yes. No reason to show mercy for Aeschere. She had her plan.
She slipped out of the king's quarters. She had a few minutes before Aeschere would be finished dressing. She ran to the mead hall and with a running jump launched herself onto the roof of the vestibule. Hanging from the eaves, she reached down and pulled Grendel's arm off of the wall. They would not keep this trophy. Keeping her eyes on Hrothgar's outbuilding and having secured the arm on her back, she climbed up onto the main roof and let out a bloodcurdling, bone-rattling shriek. She ran the length of the rooftop, tearing off its golden shingles as she went. She heard the cries of alarm, the warriors rousing themselves in terror and confusion. She had let out some of her braids, and with her silver hair streaming, her horned helmet, her blackened face and flashing eyes, and Grendel's claws at her shoulder, she was sure to look a fright. Unferth stumbled out, half-dressed. He froze at the sight of her.
Aeschere stepped out into the yard, his sword drawn. This was what she was waiting for. Dagger in hand, she leaped off the roof. Landing neatly a few feet from Aeschere, she dropped, rolled, and came up slashing, cutting his sword hand off at the wrist. She plunged her dagger up and under his ribs and into his heart and caught him as he fell. Slinging the body over her shoulder, she ran, vaulting over the battlements and disappearing into the woods. Most of the warriors, including their mighty visiting hero, barely had time to register her presence before she was gone. She did not need to kill them all. This one was enough.
Sigrun made sure to leave plenty of pieces of Aeschere's corpse along the way, closely following Grendel's trail of blood back to the lake, so that there would be no doubt of the connection. She tore off his head and left it on the cliff top, dumping the remainder of the body to feed the fishes below. Hrothgar's warriors would follow the trail and find the head. Would any of them realize that Grendel's lair was below the surface? Would any be brave enough to dare the waters, to attempt an attack? Perhaps that Beowulf. Anyone brave enough to wrestle a monster like Grendel was probably brave enough to try just about anything. She would wait and watch.
Some time after dawn, she heard the sound of men and horses at the cliff top. She heard their noises of sorrow and consternation, heard them making their way to the path that led down the rock face to the lake. She slipped into the water and swam back to her lair. It would be best to watch from below if she did not want to be seen. She returned Grendel's poor lost arm to his body. What should she do with him? But now was not yet the time. She had to wait, to see this through. She stepped back into the water and swam out to the mouth of the cave.