Gardner, Grendel

I watch the burning head burst, bare of visions, dark blood dripping from the corner of the mouth and ear. End of an epoch, I could tell the king.

Only in a world where everything is patently being lost can a priest stir men's hearts as a poet would by maintaining that nothing is in vain.

The stranger was no player of games. And yet he was shrewd, you had to grant.

They watch with mindless, indifferent eyes, as calm and midnight black as the chasm below me.

"No offense," I say, with a terrible, sycophantish smile, and tip an imaginary hat.

Then the groaning and praying stop, and on the side of the hill the dirge-slow shoveling begins.

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.

"Woe, woe, woe!" cries Hrothgar, hoary with winters, peeking in, wide-eyed, from his bedroom in back.

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.

I seemed to see the whole universe, even the sun and sky, leaping forward, then sinking away again, decomposing. Everything was wreckage, putrefaction.

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?

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.

There was a smell, a fire very different from ours, pungent, painful as thistles to the nose.

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.

It was their confidence, maybe--their blissful, swinish ignorance, their bumptious self-satisfaction, and, worst of all, their hope.

I caught your nasty insinuations.

He looked hurt and slightly indignant.

A glorious moment was coming, my chest insisted, and even the fact that I myself would have no part in it--a member of the race God cursed, according to the Shaper's tale--was trifling.

They'd map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories, their here-to-the-moon-and-back lists of paltry facts.

'Know thyself,' that's my dictum.

In some way that I couldn't explain, I knew that his scorn of my childish credulity was right.

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.

The civilization he meant to build has transmogrified to a forest thick with traps.

The priests approach them, carrying torches, their shaggy heads bent, obsequious.

He mumbles a few inchoate phrases to someone who is not there.