Free Grendel by John Gardner Page B

panted for a long time, then rolled his eyes up, vaguely in my direction. In the darkness he couldn’t see me, though I could see him. He closed his hand on the sword hilt and jiggled the sword a little, too weak to raise it off the floor.
    “Unferth has come!” he said.
    I smiled. My mother moved back and forth like a bear behind me, stirred up by the smell.
    He crawled toward me, the sword noisily scraping on the cave’s rock floor. Then he gave out again. “It will besung,” he whispered, then paused again to get wind. “It will be sung year on year and age on age that Unferth went down through the burning lake—” he paused to pant “—and gave his life in battle with the world-rim monster.” He let his cheek fall to the floor and lay panting for a long time, saying nothing. It dawned on me that he was waiting for me to kill him. I did nothing. I sat down and put my elbows on my knees and my chin on my fists and merely watched. He lay with his eyes closed and began to get his breath back. He whispered: “It’s all very well to make a fool of me before my fellow thanes. All very well to talk about dignity and noble language and all the rest, as if heroism were a golden trinket, mere outward show, and hollow. But such is not the case, monster. That is to say—” He paused, seemed to grope; he’d lost his train of thought.
    I said nothing, merely waited, blocking my mother by stretching out an arm when she came near.
    “Even now you mock me,” Unferth whispered. I had an uneasy feeling he was close to tears. If he wept, I was not sure I could control myself. His pretensions to uncommon glory were one thing. If for even an instant he pretended to misery like mine …
    “You think me a witless fool,” he whispered. “Oh, I heard what you said. I caught your nasty insinuations. ‘I thought heroes were only in poetry,’ you said. Implying that what I’ve made of myself is mere fairytale stuff.” Heraised his head, trying to glare at me, but his blind stare was in the wrong direction, following my mother’s pacing. “Well, it’s not, let me tell you.” His lips trembled and I was certain he would cry, I would have to destroy him from pure disgust, but he held it. He let his head fall again and sucked for air. A little of his voice came back, so that he no longer had to whisper but could bring out his words in a slightly reedy whine. “Poetry’s trash, mere clouds of words, comfort to the hopeless. But this is no cloud, no syllabled phantom that stands here shaking its sword at you.”
    I let the slight exaggeration pass.
    But Unferth didn’t. “Or lies here,” he said. “A hero is not afraid to face cruel truth.” That reminded him, apparently, of what he’d meant to say before. “You talk of heroism as noble language, dignity. It’s more than that, as my coming here has proved. No man above us will ever know whether Unferth died here or fled to the hills like a coward. Only you and I and God will know the truth. That’s inner heroism.”
    “Hmm,” I said. It was not unusual, of course, to hear them contradict themselves, but I would have liked it if he’d stuck to one single version, either that they would know and sing his tragedy or that they wouldn’t. So it would have been in a poem, surely, if Unferth were a character, good or evil, heroic or not. But reality, alas, is essentially shoddy. I let out a sigh.
    He jerked his head up, shocked. “Does
nothing
have value in your horrible ruin of a brain?”
    I waited. The whole shit-ass scene was his idea, not mine.
    I saw the light dawning in his eyes. “I understand,” he said. I thought he would laugh at the bottomless stupidity of my cynicism, but while the laugh was still starting at the corners of his eyes, another look came, close to fright. “You think me deluded. Tricked by my own walking fairytale. You think I came without a hope of winning—came to escape indignity by suicide!” He did laugh now, not amused: sorrowful