GRENDEL

By John Gardner

And if the Babe is born a Boy

He's given to a Woman Old,

Who nails him down upon a rock,

Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.

--WILLIAM BLAKE

The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.

I blink. I stare in horror. "Scat!" I hiss. "Go back to your cave, go

back to your cowshed--whatever." He cocks his head like an elderly,

slow-witted king, considers the angles, decides to ignore me. I stamp.

I hammer the ground with my fists. I hurl a skull-size stone at him.

He will not budge. I shake my two hairy fists at the sky and I let out

a howl so unspeakable that the water at my feet turns sudden ice and

even I myself am left uneasy. But the ram stays; the season is upon

us. And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war.

The pain of it! The stupidity!

"Ah, well," I sigh, and shrug, trudge back to the trees.

Do not think my brains are squeezed shut, like the ram's, by the roots

of horns. Flanks atremble, eyes like stones, he stares at as much of

the world as he can see and feels it surging in him, filling his chest

as the melting snow fills dried-out creekbeds, tickling his gross,

lopsided balls and charging his brains with the same unrest that made

him suffer last year at this time, and the year before, and the year

before that. (He's forgotten them all.) His hindparts shiver with the

usual joyful, mindless ache to mount whatever happens near--the storm

piling up black towers to the west, some rotting, docile stump, some

spraddle-legged ewe. I cannot bear to look. "Why can't these creatures

discover a little dignity?" I ask the sky. The sky says nothing,

predictably. I make a face, uplift a defiant middle finger, I and give

an obscene little kick. The sky ignores me, forever unimpressed. Him

too I hate, the same as I hate these brainless budding trees, these

brattling birds.

Not, of course, that I fool myself with thoughts that I'm more noble.

Pointless, ridiculous monster crouched in the shadows, stinking of

dead men, murdered children, martyred cows. (I am neither proud nor

ashamed, understand. One more dull victim, leering at seasons that

never were meant to be observed.) "Ah, sad one, poor old freak!" I

cry, and hug myself, and laugh, letting out salt tears, he he! till I

fall down gasping and sobbing. (It's mostly fake.) The sun spins

mindlessly overhead, the shadows lengthen and shorten as if by plan.

Small birds, with a high-pitched yelp, lay eggs. The tender grasses

peek up, innocent yellow, through the ground: the children of the

dead. (It was just here, this shocking green, that once when the moon

was tombed in clouds, I tore off sly old Athelgard's head. Here, where

the startling tiny jaws of crocuses snap at the late-winter sun like

the heads of baby watersnakes, here I killed the old woman with the

irongray hair. She tasted of urine and spleen, which made me spit.

Sweet mulch for yellow blooms. Such are the tiresome memories of a

shadow-shooter, earth-rim-roamer, walker of the world's weird wall.)

"Waaah!" I cry, with another quick, nasty face at the sky, mournfully

observing the way it is, bitterly remembering the way it was, and

idiotically casting tomorrow's nets. "Aargh! Yaww!" I reel, smash

trees. Disfigured son of lunatics. The big-boled oaks gaze down at me

yellow with morning, beneath complexity. "No offense," I say, with a

terrible, sycophantish smile, and tip an imaginary hat.

It was not always like this, of course. On occasion it's been worse.

No matter, no matter.

The doe in the clearing goes stiff at sight of my horridness, then

remembers her legs and is gone. It makes me cross. "Blind prejudice!"

I bawl at the splintered sunlight where half a second ago she stood. I

wring my lingers, put on a long face. "Ah, the unfairness of

everything," I say, and shake my head. It is a matter of fact that I

have never killed a deer in all my life, and never will. Cows have

more meat and, locked up in pens, are easier to catch. It is true,

perhaps, that I feel some trifling dislike of deer, but no more

dislike than I feel for other natural things--discounting men. But

deer, like rabbits and bears and even men, can make, concerning my

race, no delicate distinctions. That is their happiness: they see all

life without observing it. They're buried in it like crabs in mud.

Except men, of course. I am not in a mood, just yet, to talk of men.

So it goes with me day by day and age by age, I tell myself. Locked in

the deadly progression of moon and stars. I shake my head, muttering

darkly on shaded paths, holding conversation with the only friend and

comfort this world affords, my shadow. Wild pigs clatter away through

brush. A baby bird falls feet-up in my path, squeaking. With a crabby

laugh, I let him lie, kind heaven's merciful bounty to some sick fox.

So it goes with me, age by age. (Talking, talking. Spinning a web of

words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.)

The first grim stirrings of springtime come (as I knew they must,

having seen the ram), and even under the ground where I live, where no

light breaks but the red of my fires and nothing stirs but the

flickering shadows on my wet rock walls, or scampering rats on my

piles of bones, or my mother's fat, foul bulk rolling over, restless

again--molested by nightmares, old memories--I am aware in my chest of

tuberstirrings in the blacksweet duff of the forest overhead. I feel

my anger coming back, building up like invisible fire, and at last,

when my soul can no longer resist, I go up--as mechanical as anything

else--fists clenched against my lack of will, my belly growling,

mindless as wind, for blood. I swim up through the firesnakes, hot

dark whalecocks prowling the luminous green of the mere, and I surface

with a gulp among churning waves and smoke. I crawl up onto the bank

and catch my breath.

It's good at first to be out in the night, naked to the cold mechanics

of the stars. Space hurls outward, falconswift, mounting like an

irreversible injustice, a final disease. The cold night air is reality

at last: indifferent to me as a stone face carved on a high cliff wall

to show that the world is abandoned. So childhood too feels good at

first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after

age. I lie there resting in the steaming grass, the old lake hissing

and gurgling behind me, whispering patterns of words my sanity

resists. At last, heavy as an ice-capped mountain, I rise and work my

way to the inner wall, beginning of wolfslopes, the edge of my realm.

I stand in the high wind balanced, blackening the night with my

stench, gazing down to cliffs that fall away to cliffs, and once again

I am aware of my potential: I could die. I cackle with rage and suck

in breath.

"Dark chasms!" I scream from the cliff-edge, "seize me! Seize me to

your foul black bowels and crush my bones!" I am terrified at the

sound of my own huge voice in the darkness. I stand there shaking from

head to foot, moved to the deep-sea depths of my being, like a

creature thrown into audience with thunder.

At the same time, I am secretly unfooled. The uproar is only my own

shriek, and chasms are, like all things vast, inanimate. They will not

snatch me in a thousand years, unless, in a lunatic fit of religion, I

jump.

I sigh, depressed, and grind my teeth. I toy with shouting some tidbit

more--some terrifying, unthinkable threat, some blackly fuliginous

riddling hex--but my heart's not in it. "Missed me!" I say with a coy

little jerk and a leer, to keep my spirits up. Then, with a sigh, a

kind of moan, I start very carefully down the cliffs that lead to the

fens and moors and Hrothgar's hall. Owls cross my path as silently as

raiding ships, and at the sound of my foot, lean wolves rise, glance

at me awkwardly, and, neat of step as lizards, sneak away. I used to

take some pride in that--the caution of owls when my shape looms in,

the alarm I stir in these giant northern wolves. I was younger then.

Still playing cat and mouse with the universe.

I move down through the darkness, burning with murderous lust, my

brains raging at the sickness I can observe in myself as objectively

as might a mind ten centuries away. Stars, spattered out through

lifeless night from end to end, like jewels scattered in a dead king's

grave, tease, torment my wits toward meaningful patterns that do not

exist. I can see for miles from these rock walls: thick forest

suddenly still at my coming-cowering stags, wolves, hedgehogs, boars,

submerged in their stifling, unmemorable fear; mute birds, pulsating,

thoughtless clay in hushed old trees, thick limbs interlocked to seal

drab secrets in.

I sigh, sink into the silence, and cross it like wind. Behind my back,

at the world's end, my pale slightly glowing fat mother sleeps on,

old, sick at heart, in our dingy underground room. Life-bloated,

baffled, long-suffering hag. Guilty, she imagines, of some

unremembered, perhaps ancestral crime. (She must have some human in

her.) Not that she thinks. Not that she dissects and ponders the dusty

mechanical bits of her miserable life's curse. She clutches at me in

her sleep as if to crush me. I break away. "Why are we here?" I used

to ask her. "Why do we stand this putrid, stinking hole ?" She

trembles at my words. Her fat lips shake. "Don't ask!" her wiggling

claws implore. (She never speaks.) "Don't ask!" It must be some

terrible secret, I used to think. I'd give her a crafty squint. She'll

tell me, in time, I thought. But she told me nothing. I waited on.

That was before the old dragon, calm as winter, unveiled the truth. He

was not a friend.

And so I come through trees and towns to the lights of Hrothgar's

meadhall. I am no stranger here. A respected guest. Eleven years now

and going on twelve I have come up this clean-mown central hill, dark

shadow out of the woods below, and have knocked politely on the high

oak door, bursting its hinges and sending the shock of my greeting

inward like a cold blast out of a cave. "Grendel!" they squeak, and I

smile like exploding spring. The old Shaper, a man I cannot help but

admire, goes out the back window with his harp at a single bound,

though blind as a bat. The drunkest of Hrothgar's thanes come reeling

and clanking down from their wall-hung beds, all shouting their meady,

outrageous boasts, their heavy swords aswirl like eagles' wings. "Woe,

woe, woe!" cries Hrothgar, hoary with winters, peeking in, wide-eyed,

from his bedroom in back. His wife, looking in behind him, makes a

scene. The thanes in the meadhall blow out the lights and cover the

wide stone fireplace with shields. I laugh, crumple over; I can't help

myself. In the darkness, I alone see clear as day. While they squeal

and screech and bump into each other, I silently sack up my dead and

withdraw to the woods. I eat and laugh and eat until I can barely

walk, my chest-hair matted with dribbled blood, and then the roosters

on the hill crow, and dawn comes over the roofs of the houses, and all

at once I am filled with gloom again.

"This is some punishment sent us," I hear them bawling from the hill.

My head aches. Morning nails my eyes.

"Some god is angry," I hear a woman keen. "The people of Scyld and

Herogar and Hrothgar are mired in sin!"

My belly rumbles, sick on their sour meat. I crawl through

bloodstained leaves to the eaves of the forest, and there peak out.

The dogs fall silent at the edge of my spell, and where the king's

hall surmounts the town, the blind old Shaper, harp clutched tight to

his fragile chest, stares futilely down, straight at me. Otherwise

nothing. Pigs root dully at the posts of a wooden fence. A

rumple-horned ox lies chewing in dew and shade. A few men, lean,

wearing animal skins, look up at the gables of the king's hall, or at

the vultures circling casually beyond. Hrothgar says nothing,

hoarfrost-bearded, his features cracked and crazed. Inside, I hear the

people praying--whimpering, whining, mumbling, pleading--to their

numerous sticks and stones. He doesn't go in. The king has lofty

theories of his own.

"Theories," I whisper to the bloodstained ground. So the dragon once

spoke. ("They'd map out roads through Hell with their crackpot

theories!" I recall his laugh.)

Then the groaning and praying stop, and on the side of the hill the

dirge-slow shoveling begins. They throw up a mound for the funeral

pyre, for whatever arms or legs or heads my haste has left behind.

Meanwhile, up in the shattered hall, the builders are hammering,

replacing the door for (it must be) the fiftieth or sixtieth time,

industrious and witless as worker ants--except that they make small,

foolish changes, adding a few more iron pegs, more iron bands, with

tireless dogmatism.

Now fire. A few little lizard tongues, then healthy flames reaching up

through the tangled nest of sticks. (A feeble-minded crow could have

fashioned a neater nest.) A severed leg swells up and bursts, then an

arm, then another, and the red fire turns on the blackening flesh and

makes it sizzle, and it reaches higher, up and up into greasy smoke,

turning, turning like falcons at warplay, rushing like circling wolves

up into the swallowing, indifferent sky. And now, by some lunatic

theory, they throw on golden rings, old swords, and braided helmets.

They wail, the whole crowd, women and men, a kind of song, like a

single quavering voice. The song rings up like the greasy smoke and

their faces shine with sweat and something that looks like joy. The

song swells, pushes through woods and sky, and they're singing now as

if by some lunatic theory they had won. I shake with rage. The red sun

blinds me, churns up my belly to nausea, and the heat thrown out of

the bone-fire burns my skin. I cringe, clawing my flesh, and flee for

home.

Talking, talking, spinning a spell, pale skin of words that closes me

in like a coffin. Not in a language that anyone any longer

understands. Rushing, degenerate mutter of noises I send out before me

wherever I creep, like a dragon burning his way through vines and fog.

I used to play games when I was young--it might as well be a thousand

years ago. Explored our far-flung underground world in an endless

wargame of leaps onto nothing, ingenious twists into freedom or new

perplexity, quick whispered plottings with invisible friends, wild

cackles when vengeance was mine. I nosed out, in my childish games,

every last shark-toothed chamber and hall, every black tentacle of my

mother's cave, and so came at last, adventure by adventure, to the

pool of firesnakes. I stared, mouth gaping. They were gray as old

ashes; faceless, eyeless. They spread the surface of the water with

pure green flame. I knew--I seemed to have known all along--that the

snakes were there to guard something. Inevitably, after I'd stood

there a while, rolling my eyes back along the dark hallway, my ears

cocked for my mother's step, I screwed my nerve up and dove. The

firesnakes scattered as if my flesh were charmed. And so I discovered

the sunken door, and so I came up, for the first time, to moonlight.

I went no farther, that first night. But I came out again, inevitably.

I played my way farther out into the world, vast cavern aboveground,

cautiously darting from tree to tree challenging the terrible forces

of night on tiptoe. At dawn I fled back.

I lived those years, as do all young things, in a spell. Like a puppy

nipping, playfully growling preparing for battle with wolves. At times

the spell would be broken suddenly: on shelves or in hallways of my

mother's cave, large old shapes with smouldering eyes sat watching me.

A continuous grumble came out of their mouths'; their backs were

humped. Then little by little it dawned on me that the eyes that

seemed to bore into my body were in fact gazing through it, wearily

indifferent to my slight obstruction of the darkness. Of all the

creatures I knew, in those days, only my mother really looked at

me.--Stared at me as if to consume me, like a troll. She loved me, in

some mysterious sense I understood without her speaking it. I was her

creation. We were one thing, like the wall and the rock growing out

from it.--Or so I ardently, desperately affirmed. When her strange

eyes burned into me, it did not seem quite sure. I was intensely aware

of where I sat, the volume of darkness I displaced, the shiny-smooth

span of packed dirt between us, and the shocking separateness from me

in my mama's eyes. I would feel, all at once, alone and ugly,

almost--as if I'd dirtied myself--obscene. The cavern river rumbled

far below us. Being young, unable to face these things, I would bawl

and hurl myself at my mother and she would reach out her claws and

seize me, though I could see I alarmed her (I had teeth like a saw),

and she would smash me to her fat, limp breast as if to make me a part

of her flesh again. After that, comforted, I would gradually ease back

out into my games. Crafty-eyed, wicked as an elderly wolf, I would

scheme with or stalk my imaginary friends, projecting the self I meant

to become into every dark corner of the cave and the woods above.

Then all at once there they'd be again, the indifferent, burning eyes

of the strangers. Or my mother's eyes. Again my world would be

suddenly transformed, fixed like a rose with a nail through it, space

hurtling coldly out from me in all directions. But I didn't

understand.

One morning I caught my foot in the crack where two old treetrunks

joined. "Owp!" I yelled. "Mama! Waa!" I was out much later than I'd

meant to be. As a rule I was back in the cave by dawn, but that day

I'd been lured out farther than usual by the heavenly scent of newborn

calf--ah, sweeter than flowers, as sweet as my mama's milk. I looked

at the foot in anger and disbelief. It was wedged deep, as if the two

oak trees were eating it. Black sawdust--squirreldust--was spattered

up the leg almost to the thigh. I'm not sure now how the accident

happened. I must have pushed the two boles apart as I stepped up into

the place where they joined, and then when I stupidly let go again

they closed on my foot like a trap. Blood gushed from my ankle and

shin, and pain flew up through me like fire up the flue of a mountain.

I lost my head. I bellowed for help, so loudly it made the ground

shake. "Mama! Waa! Waaa!" I bellowed to the sky, the forest, the

cliffs, until I was so weak from loss of blood I could barely wave my

arms. "I'm going to die," I wailed. "Poor Grendel! Poor old Mama!" I

wept and sobbed. "Poor Grendel will hang here and starve to death," I

told myself, "and no one will ever even miss him!" The thought enraged

me. I hooted. I thought of my mother's foreign eyes, staring at me

from across the room: I thought of the cool, indifferent eyes of the

others. I shrieked in fear; still no one came.

The sun was up now, and even filtered as it was through the lacy young

leaves, it made my head hurt. I twisted around as far as I could,

hunting wildly for her shape on the cliffs, but there was nothing, or,

rather, there was everything but my mother. Thing after thing tried,

cynical and cruel, to foist itself off as my mama's shape--a black

rock balanced at the edge of the cliff, a dead tree casting a

long-armed shadow, a running stag, a cave entrance--each thing trying

to detach itself, lift itself out of the general meaningless scramble

of objects, but falling back, melting to the blank, infuriating

clutter of not-my-mother. My heart began to race. I seemed to see the

whole universe, even the sun and sky, leaping forward, then sinking

away again, decomposing. Everything was wreckage, putrefaction. If she

were there, the cliffs, the brightening sky, the trees, the stag, the

waterfall would suddenly snap into position around her, sane again,

well organized; but she was not, and the morning was crazy. Its green

brilliance jabbed at me, live needles.

"Please, Mama!" I sobbed as if heartbroken.

Then, some thirty feet away, there was a bull. He stood looking at me

with his head lowered, and the world snapped into position around him,

as if in league with him. I must have been closer to the calf than I

had guessed, since he'd arrived to protect it. Bulls do such things,

though they don't even know that the calves they defend are theirs. He

shook his horns at me, as if scornful. I trembled. On the ground, on

two good feet, I would have been more than a match for the bull, or if

not, I could have outrun him. But I was four or five feet up in the

air, trapped and weak. He could slam me right out of the tree with one

blow of that boned, square head, maybe tearing the foot off, and then

he could gore me to death at his leisure in the grass. He pawed the

ground, looking at me up-from-under, murderous. "Go away!" I said.

"Hssst!" It had no effect. I bellowed at him. He jerked his head as if

the sound were a boulder I'd thrown at him, but then he merely stood

considering, and, after a minute, he pawed the ground again. Again I

bellowed. This time he hardly noticed it. He snorted through his nose

and pawed more deeply, spattering grass and black earth at his sharp

rear hooves. As if time had slowed down as it does for the dying, I

watched him loll his weight forward, sliding into an easy lope, head

tilted, coming toward me in a casual arc. He picked up speed, throwing

his weight onto his huge front shoulders, crooked tail lifted behind

him like a flag. When I screamed, he didn't even flick an ear but came

on, driving like an avalanche now, thunder booming from his hooves

across the cliffs. The same instant he struck my tree he jerked his

head and flame shot up my leg. The tip of one horn had torn me to the

knee.

But that was all. The tree shuddered as he banged it with his skull,

and he pivoted around it, stumbling. He gave his head a jerk, as if

clearing his brains, then turned and loped back to where he'd charged

me from before. He'd struck too low, and even in my terror I

understood that he would always strike too low: he fought by instinct,

blind mechanism ages old. He'd have fought the same way against an

earthquake or an eagle: I had nothing to fear from his wrath but that

twisting horn. The next time he charged I kept my eye on it, watched

that horn with as much concentration as I'd have watched the rims of a

crevasse I was leaping, and at just the right instant I flinched.

Nothing touched me but the breeze as the horn flipped past.

I laughed. My ankle was numb now; my leg was on fire to the hip. I

twisted to search the cliffwalls again, but still my mother wasn't

there, and my laughter grew fierce. All at once, as if by sudden

vision, I understood the emptiness in the eyes of those humpbacked

shapes back in the cave. (Were they my brothers, my uncles, those

creatures shuffling brimstone-eyed from room to room, or sitting

separate, isolated, muttering forever like underground rivers, each in

his private, inviolable gloom?)

I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual,

brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I

understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest,

I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly--as

blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. I create the whole

universe, blink by blink.--An ugly god pitifully dying in a tree!

The bull struck again. I flinched from the horntip and bellowed with

rage and pain. The limbs overhead, stretching out through the clearing

like hungry snakes reaching up from their nest, would be clubs if I

had them in my two hands, or barricades, piled between me and my cave,

or kindling down in the room where my mother and I slept. Where they

were, above me, they were--what? Kind shade? I laughed. A tearful

howl.

The bull kept on charging. Sometimes after he hit he'd fall down and

lie panting. I grew limp with my anarchistic laughter. I no longer

bothered to jerk back my leg. Sometimes the horntip tore it, sometimes

not. I clung to the treetrunk that slanted 0H to my right, and I

almost slept. Perhaps I did sleep, I don't know. I must have. Nothing

mattered. Sometime in the middle of the afternoon I opened my eyes and

discovered that the bull was gone.

I slept again, I think. When I woke up this time and looked up through

the leaves overhead, there were vultures. I sighed, indifferent. I was

growing used to the pain, or it had lessened. Unimportant. I tried to

see myself from the vultures' viewpoint. I saw, instead, my mother's

eyes. Consuming. I was suddenly her focus of the general

meaninglessness--not for myself, not for any quality of my large,

shaggy body or my sly, unnatural mind. I was, in her eyes, some

meaning I myself could never know and might not care to know: an

alien, the rock broken free of the wall. I slept again.

That night, for the first time, I saw men.

It was dark when I awakened--or when I came to, if it was that. I was

aware at once that there was something wrong. There was no sound, not

even the honk of a frog or the chirp of a cricket. There was a smell,

a fire very different from ours, pungent, painful as thistles to the

nose. I opened my eyes and everything was blurry, as though

underwater. There were lights all around me, like some weird

creature's eyes. They jerked back as I looked. Then voices, speaking

words. The sounds were foreign at first, but when I calmed myself,

concentrating, I found I understood them: it was my own language, but

spoken in a strange way, as if the sounds were made by brittle sticks,

dried spindles, flaking bits of shale. My vision cleared and I saw

them, mounted on horses, holding torches up. Some of them had shiny

domes (as it seemed to me then) with horns coming out, like the

bull's. They were small, these creatures, with dead-looking eyes and

gray-white faces, and yet in some ways they were like us, except

ridiculous and, at the same time, mysteriously irritating, like rats.

Their movements were stiff and regular, as if figured by logic. They

had skinny, naked hands that moved by clicks. When I first became

aware of them, they were all speaking at the same time. I tried to

move, but my body was rigid; only one hand gave a jerk. They all

stopped speaking at the same instant, like sparrows. We stared at each

other.

One of them said--a tall one with a long black beard--"It moves

independent of the tree."

They nodded.

The tall one said, "It's a growth of some kind, that's my opinion.

Some beastlike fungus." .

They all looked up into the branches.

A short, fat one with a tangled white beard pointed up into the tree

with an ax. "Those branches on the northern side are all dead there.

No doubt the whole tree'll be dead before midsummer. It's always the

north side goes first when there ain't enough sap."

They nodded, and another one said, "See there where it grows up out of

the trunk? Sap running all over."

They leaned over the sides of their horses to look, pushing the

torches toward me. The horses' eyes glittered.

"Have to close that up if we're going to save this tree," the tall one

said. The others grunted, and the tall one looked up at my eyes,

uneasy. I couldn't move. He stepped down off the horse and came over

to me, so close I could have swung my hand and smashed his head if I

could make my muscles move. "It's like blood," he said, and made a

face.

Two of the others got down and came over to pull at their noses and

look.

"I say that tree's a goner," one of them said.

They all nodded, except the tall one. "We can't just leave it rot," he

said. "Start letting the place go to ruin and you know what the

upshot'll be."

They nodded. The others got down off their horses and came over. The

one with the tangled white beard said, "Maybe we could chop the fungus

out."

They thought about it. After a while the tall one shook his head. "I

don't know. Could be it's some kind of a oaktree spirit. Better not to

mess with it."

They looked uneasy. There was a hairless, skinny one with eyes like

two holes. He stood with his arms out, like a challenged bird, and he

kept moving around in jerky little circles, bent forward, peering at

everything, at the tree, at the woods around, up into my eyes. Now

suddenly he nodded. "That's it! King's right! It's a spirit!"

"You think so?" they said. Their heads poked forward.

"Sure of it," he said.

"Is it friendly, you think?" the king said.

The hairless one peered up at me with the fingertips of one hand in

his mouth. The skinny elbow hung straight down, as if he were leaning

on an invisible table while he thought the whole thing through. His

black little eyes stared straight into mine, as if waiting for me to

tell him something. I tried to speak. My mouth moved, but nothing

would come out. The little man jerked back. "He's hungry!" he said.

"Hungry!" they all said. "What does he eat?"

He looked at me again. His tiny eyes drilled into me and he was

crouched as if he were thinking of trying to jump up into my brains.

My heart thudded. I was so hungry I could eat a rock. He smiled

suddenly, as if a holy vision had exploded in his head. "He eats pig!"

he said. He looked doubtful. "Or maybe pigsmoke. He's in a period of

transition."

They all looked at me, thinking it over, then nodded.

The king picked out six men. "Go get the thing some pigs," he said.

The six men said "Yes sir!" and got on their horses and rode off. It

filled me with joy, though it was all crazy, and before I knew I could

do it, I laughed. They jerked away and stood shaking, looking up.

"The spirit's angry," one of them whispered.

"It always has been," another one said. "That's why it's killing the

tree."

"No, no, you're wrong," the hairless one said. "It's' yelling for

pig."

"Pig!" I tried to yell. It scared them.

They all began shouting at each other. One of the horses neighed and

reared up, and for some crazy reason they took it for a sign. The king

snatched an ax from the man beside him and, without any warning, he

hurled it at me. I twisted, letting out a howl, and it shot past my

shoulder, just barely touching my skin. Blood trickled out.

"You're all crazy," I tried to yell, but it came out a moan. I

bellowed for my mother.

"Surround him!" the king yelled, "Save the horses!"--and suddenly I

knew I was dealing with no dull mechanical bull but with thinking

creatures, pattern makers, the most dangerous things I'd ever met. I

shrieked at them, trying to scare them off, but they merely ducked

behind bushes and took long sticks from the saddles of their horses,

bows and javelins. "You're all crazy," I bellowed, "you're all

insane!" I'd never howled more loudly in my life. Darts like hot coals

went through my legs and arms and I howled more loudly still. And

then, just when I was sure I was finished, a shriek ten times as loud

as mine came blaring off the cliff. It was my mother! She came roaring

down like thunder, screaming like a thousand hurricanes, eyes as

bright as dragonfire, and before she was within a mile of us, the

creatures had leaped to their horses and galloped away. Big trees

shattered and fell from her path; the earth trembled. Then her smell

poured in like blood into a silver cup, filling the moonlit clearing

to the brim, and I felt the two trees that held me falling, and I was

tumbling, free, into the grass.

I woke up in the cave, warm firelight flickering on walls. My mother

lay picking through the bone pile. When she heard me stir, she turned,

wrinkling her forehead, and looked at me. There were no other shapes.

I think I dimly understood even then that they'd gone deeper into

darkness, away from men. I tried to tell her all that had happened,

all that I'd come to understand: the meaningless objectness of the

world, the universal bruteness. She only stared, troubled at my 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 all

fours, 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 the wolf-roads at 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. At

times 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 of flames 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 would hear the Shaper

telling of the glorious deeds of dead kings--how they'd split certain

heads, snuck away with certain precious swords and necklaces--his harp

mimicking the rush of swords, clanging boldly with the noble speeches,

sighing behind the heroes' dying words. Whenever he stopped, thinking

up formulas for what to say next, the people would all shout and thump

each other and drink to the Shaper's long life. In the shadow of the

hall and by the outbuildings,

men sat whistling or humming to themselves, repairing weapons: winding

bronze bands around gray ashspears, treating their swordblades with

snake's venom, watching the goldworker decorate the handles of

battle-axes. (The goldworkers had an honored place. I remember one of

them especially: a lean, aloof, superior man of middle age. He never

spoke to the others except to laugh sometimes--"Nyeh heh heh.")

Then suddenly the birds below me in the tree would fall silent, and

beyond the meadhall clearing I'd hear the creak of harness-leather.

The watchmen and their dogs would stand stock-still, as if

lightning-struck; then the dogs would bark, and the next instant the

door would bang open and men would come tumbling, looking crazy, from

the meadhall. The enemies' horses would thunder up into the clearing,

leaping the pig-fences, sending the cows and the pigs away mooing and

squealing, and the two bands of men would charge. Twenty feet apart

they would slide to a stop and stand screaming at each other with

raised swords. The leaders on both sides held their javelins high in

both hands and shook them, howling their lungs out. Terrible threats,

from the few words I could catch. Things about their fathers and their

fathers' fathers, things about justice and honor and lawful

revenge--their throats swollen, their eyes rolling like a newborn

colt's, sweat running down their shoulders. Then they would fight.

Spears flying, swords whonking, arrows raining from the windows and

doors of the meadhall and the edge of the woods. Horses reared and

fell over screaming, ravens flew, crazy as bats in a {ire, men

staggered, gesturing wildly, making speeches, dying or sometimes

pretending to be dying, sneaking off. Sometimes the attackers would be

driven back, sometimes they'd win and burn the meadhall down,

sometimes they'd capture the king of the meadhall and make his people

give weapons and gold rings and cows.

It was confusing and frightening, not in a way I could untangle. I was

safe in my tree, and the men who fought were nothing to me, except of

course that they talked in something akin to my language, which meant

that we were, incredibly, related. I was sickened, if only at the

waste of it: all they killed--cows, horses, men--they left to rot or

burn. I sacked all I could and tried to store it, but my mother would

growl and make faces because of the stink.

The fighting went on all that summer and began again the next and

again the next. Sometimes when a meadhall burned, the survivors would

go to another meadhall and, stretching out their hands, would crawl

unarmed up the strangers' hill and would beg to be taken in. They

would give the strangers whatever weapons or pigs or cattle they'd

saved from destruction, and the strangers would give them an

outbuilding, the worst of their food, and some straw. The two groups

would Fight as allies after that, except that now and then they

betrayed each other, one shooting the other from behind for some

reason, or stealing the other group's gold, some midnight, or sneaking

into bed with the other group's wives and daughters.

I watched it, season after season. Sometimes I watched from the high

cliff wall, where I could look out and see all the meadhall lights on

the various hills across the countryside, glowing like candles,

reflected stars. With luck, I might see, on a soft summer night, as

many as three halls burning down at once. That was rare, of course. It

grew rarer as the pattern of their warring changed. Hrothgar, who'd

begun hardly stronger than the others, began to outstrip the rest.

He'd worked out a theory about what fighting was for, and now he no

longer fought with his six closest neighbors. He'd shown them the

strength of his organization, and now, instead of making war on them,

he sent men to them every three months or so, with heavy wagons and

back-slings, to gather their tribute to his greatness. They piled his

wagons high with gold and leather and weapons, and they kneeled to his

messengers and made long speeches and promised to defend him against

any foolhardy outlaw that dared to attack him. Hrothgar's A messengers

answered with friendly words and praise of the man they'd just

plundered, as if the whole thing had been his idea, then whipped up

the oxen, pulled up their loaded back-slings, and started home. It was

a hard trip. The tall, silky grass of the meadows and the paths along

the forest would clog the heavy wagon spokes and snarl the oxen's

hooves; wagon wheels sunk in the rich black earth that only the wind

had ever yet seeded or harvested. The oxen rolled their eyes,

floundering, and mooed. Men swore. They pushed at the wheels with long

oak poles and slashed at the oxen till their backs were crosshatched

with bleeding welts and their noses ran pink foam. Sometimes with one

terrific heave, an ox would break free of the traces and plunge into

the brush. A man on a horse would go after it, slashed by branches,

cutting through tangles of hazel and hawthorn, his horse balking at

the pain of thorns, and sometimes when the man found the ox he would

fill it with arrows and leave it to the wolves. Sometimes he merely

sat, when he found the ox, and met its stupid, gloomy eyes and wept.

Sometimes a horse, mired to the waist, would give up and merely stand,

head hanging, as if waiting for death, and the men would howl at it

and cut it with whips, or throw stones, or club it with heavy limbs,

until finally one of them came to his senses and calmed the others,

and they would winch out the horse with ropes and wagon wheels, if

they could, or else abandon the horse or kill it--first stripping off

the saddle and bridle and the handsomely decorated harness. At times,

when a wagon was hopelessly mired, the men would

walk back to Hrothgar's hall for help. When they returned, the wagon

would be emptied of all its gold and burned, sometimes by people of

Hrothgar's own tribe, though usually by others, and the oxen and

horses would be dead.

Hrothgar met with his council for many nights and days, and they drank

and talked and prayed to their curious carved-out creatures and

finally came to a decision. They built roads. The kings from whom

they'd taken tributes of treasure they now asked for tributes of men.

Then Hrothgar and his neighbors, loaded like ants on a long march,

pushed foot by foot and day by day around the marshes and over the

moors and through the woods, pressing flat rocks into the soft ground

and grass, and packing smaller stones around the rocks' sides, until,

from my watch on the wall of the cliff, Hrothgar's whole realm was

like a wobbly, lopsided wheel with spokes of stone.

And now when enemies from farther out struck at kings who called

themselves Hrothgar's friends, a messenger would slip out and ride

through the night to the tribute-taker, and in half an hour, while the

enemy bands were still shouting at each other, still waving their

ashspears and saying what horrible things they would do, the forest

would rumble with the sound of Hrothgar's horsemen. He would overcome

them: his band had grown large, and for the treasures Hrothgar could

afford now to give them in sign of his thanks, his warriors became

hornets. New roads snaked out. New meadhalls gave tribute. His

treasure-hoard grew till his meadhall was piled to the rafters with

brightly painted shields and ornamented swords and boar's-head helmets

and coils of gold, and they had to abandon the meadhall and sleep in

the outbuildings. Meanwhile, those who paid tribute to him were forced

to strike at more distant halls to gather the gold they paid to

Hrothgar--and a little on the side for themselves. His power overran

the world, from the foot of my cliff to the northern sea to the

impenetrable forests south and east. They hacked down trees in

widening rings around their central halls and blistered the land with

peasant huts and pigpen fences till the forest looked like an old dog

dying of mange. They thinned out the game, killed birds for sport, set

accidental fires that would burn for days. Their sheep killed hedges,

snipped valleys bare, and their pigs nosed up the very roots of what

might have grown. Hrothgar's tribe made boats to drive farther north

and west. There was nothing to stop the advance of man. Huge boars

fled at the click of a harness. Wolves would cower in the glens like

foxes when they caught that deadly scent. I was filled with a

wordless, obscurely murderous unrest.

One night, inevitably, a blind man turned up at Hrothgar's temporary

meadhall. He was carrying a harp. I watched from the shadow of a

cowshed, since on that hill there were no trees. The guards at the

door crossed their axes in front of him. He waited, smiling foolishly,

while a messenger went inside. A few minutes later the messenger

returned, gave the old man a grunt, and--cautiously, feeling ahead of

himself with his crooked bare toes like a man engaged in some strange,

pious dance, the foolish smile still fixed on his face--the blind old

man went in. A boy darted up from the weeds at the foot of the hill,

the harper's companion. He too was shown in.

The hall became quiet, and after a moment Hrothgar spoke, tones low

and measured--of necessity, from too much shouting on midnight raids.

The harper gave him back some answer, and Hrothgar spoke again. I

glanced at the watchdogs. They still sat silent as treestumps, locked

in my spell. I crept closer to the hall to hear. The people were noisy

for a time, yelling to the harper, offering him mead, making jokes,

and then again King Hrothgar spoke, white-bearded. The hall became

still.

The silence expanded. People coughed. As if all by itself, then, the

harp made a curious run of sounds, almost words, and then a moment

later, arresting as a voice from a hollow tree, the harper began to

chant:

Lo, we have heard the honor of the Speardanes,

nation-kings, in days now gone,

how those battle-lords brought themselves glory.

Oft Scyld Shefing shattered the forces

of kinsman-marauders, dragged away their

meadhall-benches, terrified earls--after first men found him

castaway. (He got recompense for that!)

He grew up under the clouds, won glory of men

till all his enemies sitting around him

heard across the whaleroads his demands and gave

him tribute. That was a good king!

So he sang--or intoned, with the harp behind him--twisting together

like sailors' ropes the bits and pieces of the best old songs. The

people were hushed. Even the surrounding hills were hushed, as if

brought low by language. He knew his art. He was king of the Shapers,

harpstring scratchers (oakmoss-bearded, inspired by winds). That was

what had brought him over wilderness, down blindman's alleys of time

and space, to Hrothgar's famous hall. He would sing the glory of

Hrothgar's line and gild his wisdom and stir up his men to more daring

deeds, for a price.

He told how Scyld by the cunning of arms had rebuilt the old Danish

kingdom from ashes, lordless a long time before he came, and the prey

of every passing band, and how Scyld's son by the strength of his wits

had increased their power, a man who fully understood men's need, from

lust to love, and knew how to use it to fashion a mile-wide list of

chain-locked steel. He sang of battles and marriages, of funerals and

hangings, the whimperings of beaten enemies, of splendid hunts and

harvests. He sang of Hrothgar, hoarfrost white, magnificent of mind.

When he finished, the hall was as quiet as a mound. I too was silent,

my ear pressed tight against the timbers. Even to me, incredibly, he

had made it all seem true and very fine. Now a little, now more, a

great roar began, an exhalation of breath that swelled to a rumble of

voices and then to the howling and clapping and stomping of men gone

mad on art. They would seize the oceans, the farthest stars, the

deepest secret rivers in Hrothgar's name! Men wept like children:

children sat stunned. It went on and on, a fire more dread than any

visible fire.

Only one man in the kingdom seemed cast down: the man who'd been

Hrothgar's harper before the blind man came to make his bid. The

former harper crept out into the darkness, unnoticed by the rest. He

slipped away through fields and forests, his precious old instrument

under his arm, to seek out refuge in the hall of some lesser marauder.

I too crept away, my mind aswim in ringing phrases, magnificent,

golden, and all of them, incredibly, lies.

What was he? The man had changed the world, had A torn up the past by

its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and they, who knew the

truth, remembered it his way--and so did I.

I crossed the moors in a queer panic, like a creature half insane. I

knew the truth. It was late spring. Every sheep and goat had its

wobbly twins. A man said, "I'll steal their gold and barn their

meadhall!" and another man said, "Do it now!" I remembered the ragged

men fighting each other till the snow was red slush, whining in

winter, the shriek of people and animals burning, the whip-slashed

oxen in the mire, the scattered battle-leavings: wolf-torn corpses,

falcons fat with blood. Yet I also remembered, as if it had happened,

great Scyld, of whose kingdom no trace remained, and his farsighted

son, of whose greater kingdom no trace remained. And the stars

overhead were alive with the promise of Hrothgar's vast power, his

universal peace. The moors their axes had stripped of trees glowed

silver in the moonlight, and the yellow lights of peasant huts were

like scattered jewels on the ravendark cloak of a king. I was so

filled with sorrow and tenderness I could hardly have found it in my

heart to snatch a pig!

Thus I fled, ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry--crawling,

whimpering, streaming tears, across the world like a two-headed beast,

like mixed-up lamb and kid at the tail of a baffled, indifferent

ewe--and I gnashed my teeth and clutched the sides of my head as if to

heal the split, but I couldn't.

There was a Scyld, once, who ruled the Danes; and other men ruled

after him, that much was true. And the rest?

At the top of the cliffwall I turned and looked down, and I saw all

the lights of Hrothgar's realm and the realms beyond that, that would

soon be his, and to clear my mind, I sucked in wind and screamed. The

sound went out, violent, to the rims of the world, and after a moment

it bounced back up at me—harsh and ungodly against the sigh of the

remembered harp--like a thousand tortured rat-squeals crying: Lost!

I clamped my palms to my ears and stretched up my lips and shrieked

again: a stab at truth, a snatch at apocalyptic glee. Then I ran on

all fours, chest pounding, to the smoky mere.

He sings to a heavier harpsong now, old heart-string scratcher, memory

scraper, Of the richest of kings made sick of soul by the scattered

bones of thanes. By late afternoon the fire dies down and the column

of smoke is white, no longer greasy. There will be others this year,

they know; yet they hang on. The sun backs away from the world like a

crab and the days grow shorter, the nights grow longer, more dark and

dangerous. I smile, angry in the thickening dusk, and feast my eyes on

the greatest of meadhalls, unsatisfied.

His pride. The torch of kingdoms. Hart.

The Shaper remains, though now there are nobler courts where he might

sing. The pride of creation. He built this

hall by the power of his songs: created with casual words its grave

mor(t)ality. The boy observes him, tall and solemn, twelve years older

than the night he first crept in with his stone-eyed master. He knows

no art but tragedy--a moving singer. The credit is wholly mine.

Inspired by winds (or whatever you please), the old man sang of a

glorious meadhall whose light would shine to the ends of the ragged

world. The thought took seed in Hrothgar's mind. It grew. He called

all his people together and told them his daring scheme. He would

build a magnificent meadhall high on a hill, with a view of the

western sea, a victory-seat near the giants' work, old ruined fortress

from the world's first war, to stand forever as a sign of the glory

and justice of Hrothgar's Danes. There he would sit and give treasures

out, all wealth but the lives of men and the people's land. And so his

sons would do after him, and his sons' sons, to the final generation.

I listened, huddled in the darkness, tormented, mistrustful. I knew

them, had watched them; yet the things he said seemed true. He sent to

far kingdoms for woodsmen, carpenters, metalsmiths, goldsmiths--also

carters, victualers, clothiers to attend to the workmen--and for weeks

their uproar filled the days and nights. I watched from the vines and

boulders of the giants' ruin, two miles off. Then word went out to the

races of men that Hrothgar's hall was finished. He gave it its name.

From neighboring realms and from across the sea came men to the great

celebration. The harper sang.

I listened, felt myself swept up. I knew very well that all he said

was ridiculous, not light for their darkness but flattery, illusion, a

vortex pulling them from sunlight to heat, a kind of midsummer

burgeoning, waltz to the sickle. Yet I was swept up. "Ridiculous!" I

hissed in the black of the forest. I snatched up a snake from beside

my foot and whispered to it, "I knew him when!" But I couldn't bring

out a wicked cackle, as I'd meant to do. My heart was light with

Hrothgar's goodness, and leaden with grief at my own bloodthirsty

ways. I backed away, crablike, further into darkness--like a crab

retreating in pain when you strike two stones at the mouth of his

underwater den. I backed away till the honeysweet lure of the harp I

no longer mocked me. Yet even now my mind was tormented by images.

Thanes filled the hall and a great silent crowd of them spilled out

over the surrounding hill, smiling, peaceable, hearing the harper as

if not a man in all that lot had ever twisted a knife in his

neighbor's chest.

"Well then he's changed them," I said, and stumbled and fell on the

root of a tree. "Why not?"

Why not? the forest whispered back--yet not the forest, something

deeper, an impression from another mind, some live thing old and

terrible.

I listened, tensed.

Not a sound.

"He reshapes the world," I whispered, belligerent. "So his name

implies. He stares strange-eyed at the mindless world and turns dry

sticks to gold."

A little poetic, I would readily admit. His manner of speaking was

infecting me, making me pompous. "Nevertheless," I whispered

crossly--but I couldn't go on, too conscious all at once of my

whispering, my eternal posturing, always transforming the world with

words--changing nothing. I still had the snake in my fist. I set it

down. It fled.

"He takes what he finds," I said stubbornly, trying again. "And by

changing men's minds he makes the best of it. Why not?" But it sounded

petulant; and it wasn't true, I knew. He sang for pay, for the praise

of women--one in particular--and for the honor of a famous king's hand

on his arm. If the ideas of art were beautiful, that was art's fault,

not the Shaper's. A blind selector, almost mindless: a bird. Did they

murder each other more gently because in the woods sweet songbirds

sang?

Yet I wasn't satisfied. His fingers picked infallibly, as if moved by

something beyond his power, and the words stitched together out of

ancient songs, the scenes interwoven out of dreary tales, made a

vision without seams, an image of himself yet not-himself, beyond the

need of any shaggy old gold-friend's pay: the projected possible.

"Why not?" I whispered, jerking forward, struggling to make my eyes

sear through the dark trunks and vines.

I could feel it all around me, that invisible presence, chilly as the

first intimation of death, the dusty unblinking eyes of a thousand

snakes. There was no sound. I touched a fat, slick loop of vine,

prepared to leap back in horror, but it was only vine, no worse. And

still no sound, no movement. I got up on my feet, bent over,

squinting, and edged back through the trees toward the town. It

followed me--whatever it was. I was as sure of that as I'd ever been

of anything. And then, in one instant, as if it had all been my mind,

the thing was gone. In the hall they were laughing.

Men and women stood talking in the light of the meadhall door and on

the narrow streets below; on the lower hillside boys and girls played

near the sheep pens, shyly holding hands. A few lay touching each

other in the forest eaves. I thought how they'd shriek if I suddenly

showed my face, and it made me smile, but I held myself back. They

talked nothing, stupidities, their soft voices groping like hands. I

felt myself tightening, cross, growing restless for no clear reason,

and I made myself move more slowly. Then, circling the clearing, I

stepped on something fleshy, and jerked away. It was a man. They'd cut

his throat. His clothes had been stolen. I stared up at the hall,

baffled, beginning to shake. They went on talking softly, touching

hands, their hair full of light. I lifted up the body and slung it

across my shoulder.

Then the harp began to play. The crowd grew still.

The harp sighed, the old man sang, as sweet-voiced as a child.

He told how the earth was first built, long ago: said that the

greatest of gods made the world, every wonder-bright plain and the

turning seas, and set out as signs of his victory the sun and moon,

great lamps for light to land-dwellers, kingdom torches, and adorned

the fields with all colors and shapes, made limbs and leaves and gave

life to the every creature that moves on land.

The harp turned solemn. He told of an ancient feud between two

brothers which split all the world between darkness and light. And I,

Grendel, was the dark side, he said in effect. The terrible race God

cursed.

I believed him. Such was the power of the Shaper's harp! Stood

wriggling my face, letting tears down my nose, grinding my fists into

my streaming eyes, even though to do it I had to squeeze with my elbow

the corpse of the proof that both of us were cursed, or neither, that

the brothers had never lived, nor the god who judged them. "Waaa!" I

bawled.

Oh what a conversion!

I staggered out into the open and up toward the hall with my burden,

groaning out, "Mercy! Peace!" The harper broke off, the people

screamed. (They have their own versions, but this is the truth.)

Drunken men rushed me with battle-axes. I sank to my knees, crying,

"Friend! Friend!" They hacked at me, yipping like dogs. I held up the

body for protection. Their spears came through it and one of them

nicked me, a tiny scratch high on my left breast, but I knew by the

sting it had venom on it and I understood, as shocked as I'd been the

first time, that they could kill me--eventually would if I gave them a

chance. I struck at them, holding the body as a shield, and two fell

bleeding from my nails at the first little swipe. The others backed

off. I crushed the body in my hug, then hurled it in their faces,

turned, and fled. They didn't follow.

I ran to the center of the forest and fell down panting. My mind was

wild. "Pity," I moaned, "O pity! pity!" I wept--strong monster with

teeth like a shark's--and I slammed the earth with such force that a

seam split open twelve feet long. "Bastards!" I roared. "Sons of

bitches! Fuckers!" Words I'd picked up from men in their rages. I

wasn't even sure what they meant, though I had an idea: defiance,

rejection of the gods that, for my part, I'd known all along to be

lifeless sticks. I roared with laughter, still sobbing. We, the

accursed, didn't even have words for swearing in! "AAARGH!" I whooped,

then covered my ears and hushed. It sounded silly.

My sudden awareness of my foolishness made me calm.

I looked up through the treetops, ludicrously hopeful. I think I was

half prepared, in my dark, demented state, to see God, bearded and

gray as geometry, scowling down at me, shaking his bloodless finger.

"Why can't I have someone to talk to?" I said. The stars said nothing,

but I pretended to ignore the rudeness. "The Shaper has people to talk

to," I said. I wrung my fingers. "Hrothgar has people to talk to."

I thought about it.

Perhaps it wasn't true.

As a matter of fact, if the Shaper's vision of goodness and peace was

a part of himself, not idle rhymes, then no one understood him at all,

not even Hrothgar. And as for Hrothgar, if he was serious about his

idea of glory--sons and sons' sons giving out treasure--I had news for

him. If he had sons, they wouldn't hear his words. They would weigh

his silver and gold in their minds. I've watched the generations. I've

seen their weasel eyes.

I fought down my smile.

"That could change," I said, shaking my Finger as if at an audience.

"The Shaper may yet improve men's minds, bring peace to the miserable

Danes."

But they were doomed, I knew, and I was glad. No denying it. Let them

wander the fogroads of Hell.

* * *

Two nights later I went back. I was addicted. The Shaper was singing

the glorious deeds of the dead men, praising war. He sang how they'd

fought me. It was all lies. The sly harp rasped like snakes in

cattails, glorifying death. I snatched a guard and smashed him on a

tree, but my stomach turned at the thought of eating him. "Woe to the

man," the Shaper sang, "who shall through wicked hostilities shove his

soul down into the fire's hug! Let him hope for no change: he can

never turn away! But lucky the man who, after his deathday, shall seek

the Prince, Find peace in his father's embrace!"

"Bullshit!" I whispered through clenched teeth. How was it that he

could enrage me so?

Why not? the darkness hissed around me. Why not? Why not? Teasing,

tormenting, as cold as a dead hand closing on my wrist.

Imagination, I knew. Some evil inside myself pushed out into the

trees. I knew what I knew, the mindless, mechanical bruteness of

things, and when the harper's lure drew my mind away to hopeful

dreams, the dark of what was and always was reached out and snatched

my feet.

And yet I'd be surprised, I had to admit, if anything in myself could

be as cold, as dark, as centuries old as the presence I felt around

me. I touched a vine to reassure myself. It was a snake. I snapped

back in terror.

Then I calmed myself again. The fangs hadn't hit. It came to me that

the presence was still there, somewhere deeper, much deeper, in the

night. I had a feeling that if I let myself I could fall toward it,

that it was pulling me, pulling the whole world in like a whirlpool.

Craziness, of course. I got up, though the feeling was as strong as

ever, and felt my way back through the forest and over to the

cliffwall and back to the mere and to my cave. I lay there listening

to the indistinct memory of the Shaper's songs. My mother picked

through the bone pile, sullen. I'd brought no food.

"Ridiculous," I whispered.

She looked at me.

It was a cold-blooded lie that a god had lovingly made the world and

set out the sun and moon as lights to land-dwellers, that brothers had

fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed. Yet he, the

old Shaper, might make it true, by the sweetness of his harp, his

cunning trickery. It came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it.

As they did too, though vicious animals, cunning, cracked with

theories. I wanted it, yes! Even if I must be the outcast, cursed by

the rules of his hideous fable.

She whimpered, scratched at the nipple I had not sucked in years. She

was pitiful, foul, her smile a jagged white tear in the firelight:

waste.

She whimpered one sound: Dool-dool! dool-dool!, scratching at her

bosom, a ghastly attempt to climb back up to speech.

I clamped my eyes shut, listened to the river, and after a time I

slept.

I sat up with a jerk.

The thing was all around me, now, like a thunder charge.

"Who is it?" I said.

No answer. Darkness.

My mother was asleep; she was as deadlooking as a red-gray old

sea-elephant stretched on the shore of a summer day.

I got up and silently left the cave. I went to the cliffwall, then

down to the moor.

Still nothing.

I made my mind a blank and fell, sank away like a stone through earth

and sea, toward the dragon.

No use of a growl, a whoop, a roar, in the presence of that beast!

Vast, red-golden, huge tail coiled, limbs sprawled over his

treasure-hoard, eyes not firey but cold as the memory of family

deaths. Vanishing away across invisible floors, there were things of

gold, gems, jewels, silver vessels the color of blood in the undulant,

dragon-red light. Arching above him the ceiling and upper walls of his

cave were alive with bats. The color of his sharp scales darkened and

brightened as the dragon inhaled and exhaled slowly, drawing new air

across his vast internal furnace; his razorsharp tusks gleamed and

glinted as if they too, like the mountain beneath him, were formed of

precious stones and metals.

My heart shook. His eyes stared straight at me. My knees and insides

were so weak I had to drop down on all fours. His mouth opened

slightly. Bits of flame escaped.

"Ah, Grendel!" he said. "You've come." The voice was startling. No

rolling boom, as I would have expected, but a voice that might have

come from an old, old man. Louder, of course, but not much louder.

"We've been expecting you," he said. He gave a nervous laugh, like a

miser caught at his counting. His eyes were heavy-lidded, minutely

veined, wrinkled like an elderly mead-drinker's. "Stand around the

side, if you don't mind, boy," he said. "I get a cough sometimes, and

it's terrible straight out front." The high dead eyelids wrinkled

more, the corners of his mouth snaked up as he chuckled, sly, hardly

hiding his malice. I quickly ducked around to the side.

"Good boy," he said. He tipped his head, lowering an eye toward me.

"Smart boy! He he he!" He lifted a wrinkled paw with man-length talons

for nails and held it over my head as if to crush me with it, but he

merely brought it down lightly, once, twice, three times, patting my

head.

"Well, speak, boy," he said. "Say 'Hello there, Mr. Dragon!'" He

cackled.

My throat convulsed and I tried to get my breath to speak, but I

couldn't.

The dragon smiled. Horrible, debauched, mouth limp and cracked, loose

against the teeth as an ancient dog's. "Now you know how they feel

when they see you, eh? Scared enough to pee in their pants! He he!" He

looked startled by an unpleasant thought, then cross. "You didn't, did

you ?"

I shook my head.

"Good," he said. "That's valuable stuff you're standing on. Boobies,

hemorrhoids, boils, slaver (nyeh heh heh)... Now." He moved his head

as if adjusting his flaking neck to a tight metal collar and put on

what looked like, for him, a sober expression, like an old drunk

preparing a solemn face for court. Then, as if involuntarily, he

cackled again. It was horrible, horrible! Obscene! He couldn't stop

himself. He cackled so hard a brilliant tear like a giant diamond

rolled down his cheek. And still he couldn't stop. He raised up the

taloned paw and pointed at me. His head tipped back, laughing, blowing

fire out his mouth and nostrils. He tried to say something, but the

laughing got worse. He rolled over on his side, stretching up one

vast, wrinkled wing for balance, covering his eyes with one claw,

still pointing with the other, roaring with laughter and kicking a

little with his two back feet. I felt cross all at once, though I

didn't dare show it. "Like a rabbit!" he brought out. "Nyee he he he!

When you're scared, you look--nyee he he he--exactly... (gasp!)

exactly..."

I scowled and, realizing I had my hands out in front of me like a

rabbit sitting up, I jerked them behind my back. My scowl of rage

nearly finished him. He hooted, gasped, sobbed, began to choke with

laughter. I forgot myself completely. I snatched up an emerald the

size of a Est and pulled it back to throw it at him. He was sober

instantly. "Put it down!" he said. He drew in breath and turned his

huge head straight at me. I dropped it and fought to keep my bowels

from moving down.

"Don't touch," he said. The old-man voice was as terrible now as the

eyes. It was as if he'd been dead for a thousand years. "Never never

never touch my things, " he said. Flame came out with the words and

singed the hair on my belly and legs. I nodded, trembling all over.

"Good," he said. He stared at me a moment longer, then slowly, slowly

turned his head away. Then, old womanish, as if he were, though still

spiteful, slightly embarrassed, he got back up onto his treasure pile,

stretched out his wings, and settled.

He was in the foulest of moods. I doubted that I could learn anything

from him now. I'd be lucky to get away alive. I thought all at once

about what he'd said: "Now you know how they feel when they see you."

He had a point. From now on I'd stay clear of them. It was one thing

to eat one from time to time--that was only natural: kept them from

overpopulating, maybe starving to death, come winter--but it was

another thing to scare them, give them heart attacks, fill their

nights with nightmares, just for sport.

"Fiddlesticks," the dragon said.

I blinked.

"Fiddlesticks, that's what I said," he repeated. "Why not frighten

them? Creature, I could tell you things..." He rolled his eyes up

under the heavy lids and made a noise, "Glaagh." He remained that way,

breathing hard with peevish anger. "Stupid, stupid, stupid!" he

hissed. "The whole damned kit and caboodle. Why did you come here? Why

do you bother me ?--Don't answer!" he added quickly, stopping me. "I

know what's in your mind. I know everything. That's what makes me so

sick and old and tired."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Be still!" he screamed. Flame shot clear to the cave-mouth. "I know

you're sorry. For right now, that is. For this one frail, foolish

flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity. I'm unimpressed--No

no! Be still!" His eye burst open like a hole, to hush me. I closed my

mouth. The eye was terrible, lowering toward me. I felt as if I were

tumbling down into it--dropping endlessly down through a soundless

void. He let me fall, down and down toward ,a black sun and spiders,

though he knew I was beginning to die. Nothing could have been more

disinterested: serpent to the core.

But then he spoke after all, or rather laughed, and reality snapped

back. Laughed, spoke, and broke my fall not as a kindness to me but

because of his cold pleasure in knowing what he knew. I was in the

cave again, and his horrible smile was snaking up his wrinkled cheek

and his eye was once more half-closed. "You want the word," he said.

"That's what you've come for. My advice is, don't ask! Do as I do!

Seek out gold--but not my gold--and guard it!"

"Why?" I said.

"BE STILL!" The cave went white with his fire, and the rock walls

roared the echo back. Bats flew like dust in a granary, then returned

to their places, a few at a time, until all was still again,

motionless, as if lifeless. His wings, which had stretched out

slightly, relaxed and settled.

I waited for what seemed hours, huddling, my fingers protecting my

head.

Then: "You want to know about the Shaper."

I nodded.

"Illusion," he said. He half smiled, then let it go as if infinitely

weary, sick of Time. "I know everything, you see," the old voice

wheedled. "The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now,

you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher

faculties than memory and perception. But dragons, my boy, have a

whole different kind of mind." He stretched his mouth in a kind of

smile, no trace of pleasure in it. "We see from the mountaintop: all

time, all space. We see in one instant the passionate vision and the

blowout. Not that we cause things to fail, you understand." He was

testy all at once, as if answering an argument that had been put to

him so often he was sick of it. "Dragons don't mess with your piddling

free will. Pah! Listen to me, boy." The dead eye brightened. "If you

with your knowledge of present and past recall that a certain man

slipped on, say, a banana peel, or fell off his chair, or drowned in a

river, that recollection does not mean that you caused him to slip, or

fall, or drown. Correct? Of course it's correct! It happened, and you

know it, but knowledge is not cause. Of course! Anyone who argues

otherwise is a stupid ignoramus. Well, so with me. My knowledge of the

future does not cause the future. It merely sees it, exactly as

creatures at your low level recall things past. And even if, say, I

interfere--burn up somebody's meadhall, for instance, whether because

I just feel like it or because some supplicant asked me to--even then

I do not change the future, I merely do what I saw from the beginning.

That's obvious, surely. Let's say it's settled then. So much for free

will and intercession!"

The dragon's eye closed to a slit. "Grendel!"

I jumped.

"Don't look so bored," he said. He scowled, black as midnight. "Think

how I must feel," he said.

I almost said "I'm sorry," but caught myself.

"Man," he said, then left a long pause, letting scorn build up in the

cave like the venom in his breath. "I can see you understand them.

Counters, measurers, theory-makers.

All pigs eat cheese.

Old Snuggle is a pig.

If Snuggle is sick and refuses to eat, try cheese.

Games, games, games!" He snorted fire. "They only think they think. No

total vision, total system, merely schemes with a vague family

resemblance, no more identity than bridges and, say, spiderwebs. But

they rush across chasms on spiderwebs, and sometimes they make it, and

that, they think, settles that! I could tell you a thousand tiresome

stories of their absurdity. They'd map out roads through Hell with

their crackpot theories, their here-to-the-moon and-back lists of

paltry facts. Insanity--the simplest insanity ever devised! Simple

facts in isolation, and facts to connect them--ands and buts--are the

sine qua non of all their glorious achievement. But there are no such

facts. Connectedness is the essence of everything. It doesn't stop

them, of course. They build the whole world out of teeth deprived of

bodies to chew or be chewed on.

"They sense that, of course, from time to time; have uneasy feelings

that all they live by is nonsense. They have dim apprehensions that

such propositions as 'God does not exist' are somewhat dubious at

least in comparison with statements like 'All carnivorous cows eat

meat.' That's where the Shaper saves them. Provides an illusion of

reality--puts together all their facts with a gluey whine of

connectedness. Mere tripe, believe me. Mere sleight-of-wits. He knows

no more than they do about total reality--less, if anything: works

with the same old clutter of atoms, the givens of his time and place

and tongue. But he spins it all together with harp runs and hoots, and

they think what they think is alive, think Heaven loves them. It keeps

them going--for what that's worth. As for myself, I can hardly bear to

look."

"I see," I said. It was to some extent untrue.

The dragon smiled, seemed almost friendly for an instant. "You've been

very attentive and thoughtful," he said, "all things considered. So I

will tell you about Time and Space."

"Thank you," I said, as heartily as I could manage. I had more than

enough to think about, it seemed to me.

He scowled, and I said no more. He took a deep breath, shifted his

forelegs to a position more comfortable, and, after a moment's

thought, began:

"In all discussions of Nature, we must try to remember the differences

of scale, and in particular the differences of time-span. We (by which

I mean you, not us) are apt to take modes of observable functioning in

our own bodies as setting an absolute scale. But as a matter of fact,

it's extremely rash to extend conclusions derived from observation far

beyond the scale of magnitude to which the observation was confined.

For example, the apparent absence of change within a second of time

tells nothing as to the change within a thousand years. Also, no

appearance of change within a thousand years tells anything concerning

what might happen in, say, a million years; and no apparent change

within a million years tells anything about a million million years.

We can extend this progression indefinitely; there is no absolute

standard of magnitude. Any term in this progression is large compared

to its predecessor and small compared to its successor.

"Again, all special studies presuppose certain fundamental types of

things. (Here I am using the word 'thing,' notice, in its most

general sense, which can include activities, colors, and all other

sense, also values.) As lower minds function, study, or 'science,' is

concerned with a limited set of various types of things. There is

thus, in the first place, this variety of types. In the second place,

there is the determination as to what types are exhibited in any

indicated situation. For example, there is the singular

proposition--'This is green'--and there is the more general

proposition--'All those things are green.' This type of inquiry is

what your usual reasoning takes care of. Undoubtedly such inquiries

are essential in the initial stage of any study, for lower minds. But

every such study must strive to get beyond it. Unfortunately--"

He glanced at me, suspicious. "You're not paying attention."

"I am!" I said, clasping my hands to show my seriousness.

But he shook his head slowly. "Nothing interests you but excitement,

violence."

"That's not true!" I said.

His eye opened wider, his body brightened from end to end. "You tell

me what's true?" he said.

"I'm trying to follow. I do my best," I said. "You should be

reasonable. What do you expect?"

The dragon thought about it, breathing slowly, full of wrath. At last

he closed his eyes. "Let us try starting somewhere else," he said.

"It's damned hard, you understand, confining myself to concepts

familiar to a creature of the Dark Ages. Not that one age is darker

than another. Technical jargon from another dark age." He scowled as

if hardly capable of forcing himself on. Then, after a long moment:

"The essence of life is to be found in the frustrations of established

order. The universe refuses the I deadening influence of complete

conformity. And yet in its refusal, it passes toward novel order as a

primary requisite for important experience. We have to explain the aim

at forms of order, and the aim at novelty of order, and the measure of

success, and the measure of failure. Apart from some understanding,

however dim-witted, of these characteristics of historic process..."

His voice trailed off.

After another long pause, he said: "Approach it this way. Let us take

this jug." He picked up a golden vessel and held it toward me, not

letting me touch it. In spite of himself, as it seemed, he looked

hostile and suspicious, as if he thought I might perhaps be so stupid

as to snatch the thing and run. "How does this jug differ from

something animate?" He drew it back out of reach. "By organization!

Exactly! This jug is an absolute democracy of atoms. It has

importance, or thereness, so to speak, but no Expression, or, loosely,

ah-ha!-ness. Importance is primarily monistic in its reference to the

universe. Limited to a finite individual occasion, importance ceases

to be important. In some sense or other--we can skip the details--

importance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite.

Expression, however--listen closely now--expression is founded on the

finite occasion. It is the activity of finitude impressing itself on

its environment. Importance passes from the world as one to the world

as many, whereas expression is the gift from the world as many to the

world as one. The laws of nature are large average effects which reign

impersonally. But there is nothing average about expression: it is

essentially individual. Consider one definite molecule--"

"A what?" I said.

The closed eyes squeezed tight. He let out a long, cross sigh of

red-orange fire.

"Put it this way," he said. His voice had grown feeble, as if he were

losing hope. "In the case of vegetables, we find expressive bodily

organizations which lack any one center of experience with a higher

complexity either of expressions received or of inborn data. Another

democracy, but with qualifications, as we shall see. An animal, on the

other hand, is dominated by one or more centers of experience. If the

dominant activity be severed from the rest of the body--if, for

example, we cut off the head--the whole coordination collapses, and

the animal dies. Whereas in the case of the vegetable, the democracy

can be subdivided into minor democracies which easily survive without

much apparent loss of functional expression." He paused. "You at least

follow that?"

"I think so."

He sighed. "Listen. Listen closely! An angry man does not usually

shake his fist at the universe in general. He makes a selection and

knocks his neighbor down. A piece of rock, on the other hand,

impartially attracts the universe according to the law of gravitation.

You grant there's a difference ?"

He waited, furious with impatience. I met his eye as long as I could,

then shook my head. It was unfair. For all I knew he might be telling

me gibberish on purpose. I sat down. Let him babble. Let him burn me

alive. The hell with it.

After a long, long time, he said, "It was stupid of you to come."

I nodded, sulking.

He stretched his wings--it was like a huge, irascible yawn--then

settled again. "Things come and go," he said. "That's the gist of it.

In a billion billion billion years, everything will have come and gone

several times, in various forms. Even I will be gone. A certain man

will absurdly kill me. A terrible pity--loss of a remarkable form of

life. Conservationists will howl." He chuckled. "Meaningless, however.

These jugs and pebbles, everything, these too will go. Poof! Boobies,

hemorrhoids, boils, slaver..."

"You don't know that!" I said.

He smiled, showing all his teeth, and I knew he knew it.

"A swirl in the stream of time. A temporary gathering of bits, a few

random dust specks, so to speak--pure metaphor, you understand--then

by chance a vast floating cloud of dustspecks, an expanding

universe--" He shrugged. "Complexities: green dust as well as the

regular kind. Purple dust. Gold. Additional refinements: sensitive

dust, copulating dust, worshipful dust!" He laughed, hollow as the

cavern around him. "New laws for each new form, of course. New lines

of potential. Complexity beyond complexity, accident on accident,

until--" His leer was like icy wind.

"Go on," I said.

He closed his eyes, still smiling. "Pick an apocalypse, any

apocalypse. A sea of black oil and dead things. No wind. No light.

Nothing stirring, not even an ant, a spider. A silent universe. Such

is the end of the flicker of time, the brief, hot fuse of events and

ideas set off, accidentally, and snuffed out, accidentally, by man.

Not a real ending of course, nor even a beginning. Mere ripple in

Time's stream."

I squinted. "That really could happen?"

"It has happened," he said--and smiled as if it pleased him--"in the

future. I am the witness."

I thought about it for a while, remembering the harp, then shook my

head. "I don't believe you."

"It will come."

I went on squinting at him, hand on my mouth. He could lie. He was

evil enough.

He shook his ponderous head. "Ah, man's cunning mind!" he said, and

cackled. "Merely a new complexity, a new event, new set of

nonce-rules generating further nonce-rules, down and down and down.

Things lock on, you know. The Devonian fish, the juxtaposed thumb, the

fontanel, technology--click click, click click..."

"I think you're lying," I said, confused again, aswirl in words.

"I noticed that. You'll never know. It must be very frustrating to be

caged like a Chinaman's cricket a limited mind." His cackle lacked

spirit, this time. He was growing very weary of my presence. .

"You said 'Fiddlesticks,'" I said. "Why is it fiddlesticks if I stop

giving people heart attacks over nothing? Why shouldn't one change

one's ways, improve one's character ?" I must have been an interesting

sight, that instant, big shaggy monster intense and earnest, bent like

a priest at his prayers.

He shrugged. "Whatever you like. Do as you think best."

"But why?"

"'Why? Why?' Ridiculous question! Why anything? My advice to you--"

I clenched my fists, though it was absurd, of course. One does not

swing at dragons. "No, why?"

The dragon tipped up his great tusked head, stretched his neck, sighed

fire. "Ah, Grendel!" he said. He seemed that instant almost to rise

to pity. "You improve them, my boy! Can't you see that yourself? You

stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to

poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as

long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which

they learn to define themselves. The exile, captivity, death they

shrink from--the blunt facts of their mortality, their

abandonment--that's what you make them recognize, embrace! You are

mankind, or man's condition: inseparable as the mountain-climber and

the mountain. If you withdraw, you'll instantly be replaced. Brute

existents, you know, are a dime a dozen. No sentimental trash, then.

If man's the irrelevance that interests you, stick with him! Scare him

to glory! It's all the same in the end, matter and motion, simple or

complex. No difference, finally. Death, transfiguration. Ashes to

ashes and slime to slime, amen."

I was sure he was lying. Or anyway half-sure. Flattering me into

tormenting them because he, in his sullen hole, loved viciousness. I

said, "Let them find some other 'brute existent,' whatever that is. I

refuse."

"Do!" he said leering scornfully. "Do something else, by all means!

Alter the future! Make the world a better place in which to live! Help

the poor! Feed the hungry. Be kind to idiots! What a challenge!"

He no longer looked at me, no longer made any pretense of telling the

truth. "Personally," he said, "my great ambition is to count all

this"--he waved vaguely at the treasure around him--"and possibly sort

it into piles. 'Know thyself,' that's my dictum. Know how much you've

got, and beware of strangers!"

I scraped away rubies and emeralds with the side of my foot. "Let me

tell you what the Shaper said."

"Spare me, I beg you!" He covered his ears with his claws, gave a

hideous grin.

But I was stubborn. "He said that the greatest of gods made the world,

every wonder-bright plain and the turning seas. He said--"

"Ridiculous."

"Why?"

"What god? Where? Life-force, you mean? The principle of process? God

as the history of Chance?"

In some way that I couldn't explain, I knew that his scorn of my

childish credulity was right.

"Nevertheless, something will come of all this," I said.

"Nothing," he said. "A brief pulsation in the black hole of eternity.

My advice to you--"

"Wait and see," I said.

He shook his head. "My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek

out gold and sit on it."

Nothing was changed, everything was changed, by my having seen the

dragon. It's one thing to listen, full of scorn and doubt, to poets'

versions of time past and visions of time to come; it's another to

know, as coldly and simply as my mother knows her pile of bones, what

is. Whatever I may have understood or misunderstood in the dragon's

talk, something much deeper stayed with me, became my aura. F utility,

doom, became a smell in the air, pervasive and acrid as the dead smell

after a forest fire--my scent and the world's, the scent of trees,

rocks, waterways wherever I went.

But there was one thing worse. I discovered that the dragon had put a

charm on me: no weapon could cut me. I could walk up to the meadhall

whenever I pleased, and they were powerless. My heart became darker

because of that. Though I scorned them, sometimes hated them, there

had been something between myself and men when we could fight. Now,

invulnerable, I was as solitary as one live tree in a vast landscape

of coal.

Needless to say, I misunderstood in the beginning: I thought it an

advantage.

It was the height of summer, harvest season in the first year of what

I have come to call my war with Hrothgar. The night air was filled

with the smell of apples and shocked grain, and I could hear the noise

in the meadhall from a mile away. I moved toward it, drawn as always,

as if by some kind of curse. I meant not to be seen that night. For

all the dragon's talk, I had no intention of terrifying Hrothgar's

thanes for nothing. (I had not begun, at that time, my systematic

raids. In fact I hadn't yet admitted to myself that it was war. I

killed stragglers now and then--with a certain grim pleasure very

different from that which I got from cracking a cow's skull--but I'd

never yet struck at the hall, hadn't even revealed myself

there--except on that one ridiculous night when I walked up and tried

to join them.) I hunkered down at the edge of the forest, looking up

the long hill at the meadhall lights. I could hear the Shaper's song.

I no longer remember exactly what he sang. I know only that it had a

strange effect on me: it no longer filled me with doubt and distress,

loneliness, shame. It enraged me. It was their confidence,

maybe--their blissful, swinish ignorance, their bumptious

self-satisfaction, and, worst of all, their hope. I went closer,

darting from cowshed to cowshed and finally up to the wall. I found a

crack and peeked in. I do remember what he said, now that I think

about it. Or some of it. He spoke of how God had been kind to the

Scyldings, sending so rich a harvest. The people sat beaming,

bleary-eyed and fat, nodding their approval of God. He spoke of God's

great generosity in sending them so wise a king. They all raised their

cups to God and Hrothgar, and Hrothgar smiled, bits of food in his

beard. The Shaper talked of how God had vanquished their enemies and

filled up their houses with precious treasure, how they were the

richest, most powerful people on earth, how here and here alone in all

the world men were free an