Free Grendel by John Gardner

squeals, they threw their legs over the sides to stumble toward me. Someone yelled, “Remember this hour, ye thanes of Hrothgar, the boasts you made as the meadbowl passed! Remember our good kings gift of rings and pay him with all your might for his many kindnesses!”
    Damned pompous fools. I hurled a bench at the closest. They all cowered back. I stood waiting, bent forward withmy feet apart, flat-footed, till they ended their interminable orations. I was hunched like a wrestler, moving my head from side to side, making sure no sneak slipped up on me. I was afraid of them from habit, and as the four or five drunkest of the thanes came toward me, shaking their weapons and shouting at me, my idiotic fear of them mounted. But I held my ground. Then, with a howl, one plunged at me, sword above his head in both fists. I let it come. The charm held good. I closed my hand on the blade and snatched it from the drunken thane’s hand and hurled it the length of the hall. It clattered on the fireplace stones and fell to the stone floor, ringing. I seized him and crushed him. Another one came at me, gloating in his blear-eyed heroism, maniacally joyful because he had bragged that he would die for his king and he was doing it. He did it. Another one came, reeling and whooping, trying to make his eyes focus.
    I laughed. It was outrageous: they came, they fell, howling insanity about brothers, fathers, glorious Hrothgar, and God. But though I laughed, I felt trapped, as hollow as a rotten tree. The meadhall seemed to stretch for miles, out to the edges of time and space, and I saw myself killing them, on and on and on, as if mechanically, without contest. I saw myself swelling like bellows on their blood, a meaningless smudge in a universe dead as old wind over bones, abandoned except for the burnt-blood scent of thedragon. All at once I began to smash things—benches, tables, hanging beds—a rage as meaningless and terrible as everything else.
    Then—as a crowning absurdity, my salvation that moment—came the man the thanes called Unferth.
    He stood across the hall from me, youthful, intense, cold sober. He was taller than the others; he stood out among his fellow thanes like a horse in a herd of cows. His nose was as porous and dark as volcanic rock. His light beard grew in patches.
    “Stand back,” he said.
    The drunken little men around me backed away. The hallfloor between us, Unferth and myself, lay open.
    “Monster, prepare to die!” he said. Very righteous. The wings of his nostrils flared and quivered like an outraged priest’s.
    I laughed. “Aargh!” I said. I spit bits of bone.
    He glanced behind him, making sure he knew exactly where the window was. “Are you right with your god?” he said.
    I laughed somewhat more fiercely. He was one of those.
    He took a tentative step toward me, then paused, holding his sword out and shaking it. “Tell them in Hell that Unferth, son of Ecglaf sent you, known far and wide in these Scanian lands as a hero among the Scyldings.” He took a few sidesteps, like one wrestler circling another,except that he was thirty feet away; the maneuver was ridiculous.
    “Come, come,” I said. “Let me tell them I was sent by Sideways-Walker.”
    He frowned, trying to puzzle out my speech. I said it again, louder and slower, and a startled look came over him. Even now he didn’t know what I was saying, but it was clear to him, I think, that I was speaking words. He got a cunning look, as if getting ready to offer a deal—the look men have when they fight with men instead of poor stupid animals.
    He was shaken, and to get back his nerve he spoke some more. “For many months, unsightly monster, you’ve murdered men as you pleased in Hrothgar’s hall. Unless you can murder me as you’ve murdered lesser men, I give you my word those days are done forever! The king has given me splendid gifts. He will see tonight that his gifts have not gone for nothing! Prepare to fall, foul thing! This