Caitlin Kiernan - Beowulf

Give me a child, Beowulf. Enter me now and give me a beautiful, beautiful son.

You have a fine son, my king.

“I am Beowulf,” the Lord of the Ring-Danes says again.

“You are shit ,” replies the golden man. Those three words bite at Beowulf’s heart like the iron heads of an archer’s shaft.

“Who,” begins Beowulf, then stops and swallows, his mouth gone dry as dust. “ What are you?”

The golden man, wreathed all in flame yet unburning, smiles a vicious smile. “I’m only something you left behind…Father.”

Beowulf feels a weakness in his knees, and his heart begins to race and skips a beat.

“ Here ,” he says, holding out the golden horn. “Take back your damned, precious bauble. The man who stole it has been punished. Have it, demon, and leave my land in peace.” And with those words, Beowulf hurls the drinking horn toward the golden man and the fiery tunnel entrance. It lands at his feet with an audible splash, but also does not sink into the water as it should. The golden man looks down at the horn and shakes his head.

“It is much too late for that,” he says, and raises one bare foot and gently presses it down upon the horn, crushing it flat against the water in an instant. Where the horn had been, there is only a bubbling puddle of molten metal. It floats on the steaming water for a second or two, then Beowulf watches in disbelief as it flows up over the foot and ankle that crushed it, melding seamlessly with the golden man’s skin.

“How will you hurt me, Father?” he asks, stepping through a curtain of flame to stand on the stone floor of the cave, between Beowulf and the altar ledge. “With your fingers, your teeth…your bare hands ?”

Beowulf licks his parched lips, and he can feel the heat from the flames against his face.

“Where is your mother?” he asks. “Where is she hiding?” And then, shouting toward the cave’s ceiling. “Show yourself, bitch!”

The golden man laughs, a sound like rain and a handful of coins scattered across cobbles. “Nobody ever sees my mother,” he tells Beowulf. “Unless, of course, she wishes. Not even me.”

“This is madness,” mutters Beowulf.

“You have a wonderful land, my Father,” the golden man says and takes another step toward Beowulf. “A beautiful home. Oh, and women . Such beautiful, frail women. When I came and listened at windows, sometimes they spoke of your women. Your wise Queen Wealthow. Your pretty bed warmer, Ursula. I wonder—which of them do you think I should kill first?”

“Why? Tell me, please, why are you doing this?”

The golden man raises a shimmering eyebrow and pretends not to understand the question. “Why am I offering you a choice?” he asks Beowulf.

“No, you bastard,” snarls Beowulf. “Why would you harm either of them?”

The golden man nods his pretty head, and the smile returns to his face. “Oh, I see. Because you love them both so much, Father. And because I hate you.”

“Your mother, she asked me for a son. I only gave her what she asked for.”

Now the golden man is striding confidently toward Beowulf, trailing a mantle of flame in his wake. And with each step he takes, he seems to grow larger. At first Beowulf thinks it’s only some other enchantment or guile of the cavern, but then he remembers how he watched the mortally wounded Grendel grow smaller .

“And she gave you a kingdom and crown,” the golden man says. “And you have them still, your lands and your treasure…your glory and your women. But what have I , dear Father? Where do I fit in your grand scheme?”

“You are your mother’s son,” Beowulf replies. “She never asked —”

“Never asked? Haven’t you ever wondered ? You, an old man without an heir to his throne, have you never lain awake in the stillness of the night and wondered about the son whom you used to barter for power and riches? That he might have dreams and aspirations, that he might wish to be something more than a phantom and a bad memory?”

“My heir? You are an abomination .”

The golden man, taller than Beowulf now by a head, is standing only ten or twenty feet away, and he smirks and glances at the ground.

“An abomination,” says the golden man. “Like poor Grendel, you mean? Grendel, the ill-made and misbegotten son of good King Hrothgar—”

“The son of Hrothgar?” asks Beowulf, disbelieving. “Can you speak nothing but lies?”

“You did not know ? Did you truly think you were my mother’s first dalliance with a son of Odin? Your Queen Wealthow knew, even before you met her—”

“I did not know it, and I do not know it now, for there is naught in you but bitter guile and deception.”

“Say what you will, Father. My skin is thick, and you cannot make me hate you any more than I already do. Indeed, if you were to engrave my hatred on every star in the sky, upon every grain of sand on every beach from now until the end of time, you would still not possess the smallest inkling of just how much I hate you.”

“How could I have known?” asks Beowulf.

“What matter? I am, as you say, an abomination , a demon born of an abominable union and unfit to sit upon your throne or upon any throne of man.”

And now the golden man, the son of Beowulf, has grown to such a great height that he stands easily twice as tall as his father, almost as tall as the monster Grendel. And his gleaming body has begun another and far more terrible sort of transformation, that smooth metallic skin suddenly becoming rough and scaled. The flourishes and whorls of the curled leather strapwork he was wearing have vanished, leaving only their intricate patterns behind, spirals of buff and amber on his gilded hide. From his face and skull, an assortment of horns and other bony nodules and excrescences have begun to sprout. Where a moment before towered a man of unearthly, incomparable beauty, now there stands some equally unearthly but hideous creature, neither quite reptile nor man.

“How will you kill me, Father?” the thing asks, but its dulcet voice has become an ugly, guttural rumble as lips and cheeks fold back and shrink away, tissue retracting to reveal a mouthful of uneven yellowed fangs and a purplish forked tongue. Its thick saliva drips to the cavern floor and spatters across the stones where it instantly flashes to puddles of blue-white flame. “ Crush my arm in a door and tear it off? Do you think that will be enough? Or will you cut off my head and take it back to your pretty women as a trophy?”

Beowulf draws his sword, and the creature sneers and laughs at him. Its hands have become talons, and its arms have grown so long they reach the ground.

“Last night, you visited unspeakable suffering upon my people,” Beowulf says, holding the blade out before him, horrified by the metamorphosis he is witnessing, but incapable of looking away. “You have murdered —women and children, old men in their sleep. You are as much a coward as was your foul half brother, Grendel. You rain death upon those you despise and never do you look them in the face.”

“I am looking you in the face, Father.” But its bristling, venomous mouth is no longer suited to human speech, and Beowulf can only just make out the slurred and garbled words.

“Then fight me and leave the others be, for they have never done you harm.”

“But you love them, Father. Or so you profess , so you would have them believe . And I do hate you, so what better way might I ever harm you than by harming them? How better to take my vengeance?” More fire leaks from its jaws and spreads across the cobbles; Beowulf takes a quick step backward to avoid the flames.