“I had a wife like that once,” Hondshew says. He’s finished with the winch that lifts and lowers the crossbar and sits down on the floor near Beowulf. “But then a bear carried her off.”

“I thuh-thought it wuh-was a wuh-wuh-wolf,” says Olaf. “You suh-suh-”

“Yeah, fine. Wolf, bear, whichever. This woman, I tell you, she hated to hear anyone having a good time, singing, what have you. Used to put her in the foulest mood. Still, she was good in the sack. I have to give her that much. I think she was a Vandal.”

Beowulf opens one eye and glares doubtfully at Hondshew. “You freely admit to swifan about with some Vandal wildcat, and yet you get offended when poor old Olaf brings up the matter of sheep?”

“She might have been a Swede,” shrugs Hondshew.

“So,” says Wiglaf, “you lie there on the floor, naked as the day you were born, and we lot, we serenade this bastard Grendel, right, ’cause he hates the sound of merrymaking. And then he comes for us.”

“Absolutely,” says Beowulf. “Unless I’m wrong.”

“We won’t hold it against you, should that prove to be the case,” and then Wiglaf turns to face the other men. “You heard him. He wants us to sing.”

Thirteen sets of thoroughly confused eyes stare blankly back at Wiglaf, and nobody moves a muscle or says a word.

“So…sing!” shouts Wiglaf.

“And sound happy, while you’re at it,” says Beowulf. “Like you mean it. And remember, all of you, sing loud.”

“Right,” replies Wiglaf, “loudly enough to shame the clang of Thor’s hammer.” Wiglaf clears his throat and spits out a yellowish glob of snot onto the floor of the mead hall. “I’ll get it started then,” he says.

Beowulf shuts his eyes a third time and shifts about on the hard floorboards, trying to get comfortable should they be in for a long wait. The image of Lady Wealthow is waiting there behind his eyelids, unbidden, her milky skin and golden hair, the haughtiness of a queen and the careless beauty of a girl.

So, what would Wiglaf make of my focus? he wonders. But the singing has already begun, some horrid bit of doggerel of Hondshew’s invention, and Beowulf decides it’s better if Wiglaf believes there’s naught on his mind this night but gore and valor and slain monsters.

Olaf is busy murdering the first verse, but at least, thinks Beowulf, he doesn’t stutter when he sings.

And now all the thanes join in for the chorus, making up in sheer volume all that they lack in pitch and melodiousness.

“Damn good thing you can fight, Hondshew,” mumbles Beowulf, smiling at the awful lyrics and the memory of Lady Wealthow. “Because, by Odin’s long gray beard, you’d have starved by now as a scop.” And he lies there, listening to the rowdy rise and fall of the song, to the comforting crackle from the fire pit, and alert to every night sound beyond the walls of the horned hall.

“Well, come on,” he whispers, half to the luminous ghost of Wealthow floating there behind his eyes and half to unseen Grendel. “I don’t mean to wait all night…”

Grendel sits alone at the place where the old forest ends and the scrubby land slopes away toward the deep, rocky chasm dividing the moors from the walls and gates of Hrothgar’s fortifications. Overhead, the moon is playing a game of tag with stray shreds of cloud, but the creature has learned not to look to Máni for aid. There may yet be giant blood flowing somewhere in Grendel’s veins, but he is a gnarled and mongrel thing, a curse, impure, and time and again the Jötnar have shown they have no love for him. Never have they spoken to him or answered his pleas, never once have they deigned to offer the smallest deliverance from his torment. He crouches beneath the trees, clutching his aching head, his pounding ears, wishing there were any way to drive the ruinous noise of men from his skull and yet not break the covenant with his mother. But he has come this far already, pain-wracked and driven from the safety of his cave beyond the fell marches. He has come so near the mead hall and the homes of men that he can smell them, can almost taste them, and so has he not already broken his promise?

And here below boughs and boles grown as rough and knotted as himself, the change begins again. And perhaps this is all he’ll ever get from the giants, this hideous transformation that overtakes him when rage and hurt and hate are at last more than he can bear. No vow between mother and son the equal to a fury so great it can dissolve his will and warp muscle and reshape bone, so complete that it can finally make of him something yet more monstrous. A grotesque parody of his giant-kin, perhaps, some trollish joke between the gods who have warred always with the Jötnar.

“I would keep my word,” he groans, wishing his mother were there to hear, wishing she were there to help and lead him safely back to the cave and the edge of her pool. “I would be true, Modor. I would…” but then the pain has become so great he can no longer think clearly enough to fashion words. And still their song jabs and cuts and mocks him from that mismatched scatter of stone and thatch perched upon the high sea cliffs.

At the edge of the forest, Grendel gnashes his teeth and covers his ears as his skeleton creaks and his joints pop. The pain and rage fester inside him like pus beneath infected skin, and like an infection, his body bloats and swells, growing quickly to more than twice its size. Some magic he will never understand, some secret of his curse, and soon his head is scraping against the limbs that only a few minutes before hung so far above his head. If only it would not stop here, if only he might keep on growing until he stood so tall that he could snatch the disinterested moon from out the night sky and hurl it down upon the roof of Heorot. There would be silence then, silence that might last forever, as much of forever as he needs, and never again would the bright eye of the moon taunt him from its road between the clouds.

Very soon, the change is done with him, having made of Grendel something worthy of the fears and nightmares of the Danes, and he stands up straight, bruised and bleeding from the speed and violence with which he has assumed these new dimensions. He glances back toward home, his gray-blue eyes gone now all to a simmering, molten gold, and he peers through the highest branches and across the tops of trees. From this distance and through the mists, he cannot make out the entrance of his cave, but he knows well enough where it lies, where his mother sits coiled in her watery bed with eels and kelp to keep her company. And then Grendel turns back toward Heorot and the voices of the men and makes his way swiftly across the moors.

“Doesn’t someone know some other song?” asks Hondshew, wishing now he’d bothered to think up a few more verses. He’s seated at a bench with the other Geats, and though the singing has finally stopped, they’re all still smacking their fists or empty cups against the tabletop, making as much racket as they can.