The Merman's Children (5 page)

His highest duties lay outside of tradition. He was supposed to be the vessel of wisdom, a counselor to the young and the troubled, a preserver and teacher of lore. Keeper of talismans, knower of spells, he guarded the welfare of Liri against monsters, evil magic, and the human world. He interceded with the Powers…aye, he had guested Ran herself…

His rewards were to dwell in a hall, rather than the simple home of an ordinary merman; to have his needs provided for when he did not choose to do his own hunting; to have splendid things brought him as gifts (though he in his turn was expected to be hospitable and openhanded); to be highly respected by a tribe not otherwise prone to reverence.

The rewards were gone, save perhaps the last, and it a heavy part of the duty which remained.

He said: “This is not the whole universe. In my youth I wandered widely, as a few of our breed have done sometimes. Westward I came as far as Greenland, where I heard from both merfolk and men of countries beyond. No living member of either race had ever visited there, but the knowledge was certain; dolphins confirmed it for me. Many of you will remember my bespeaking this now and then. Those appear to be wonderful shoals and shores, that Christendom hardly is aware of and has no dominion in. If we went thither, we would have them to ourselves—vastness, life, and beauty to grow into, free and at peace.”

Astonishment replied in a babble. Haiko was the first to exclaim above it: “You've just avowed we can't stay in midocean. Can we—our young, indeed, and most of us who are grown—can we outlive that long a swim? There's the reason why nobody like us dwells yonder!”

“True, true.” The king lifted his trident. A hush fell. “But hear me,” he said. “I too have been thinking. We could make the passage with scant losses or none, were islands along the way for rest, refuge, and refurbishing. Not so? Well, what of a floating island that came with us? Such is called a ship.

“Men owe us for the harm they have done us, who never harmed them. I say: let us seize a ship of theirs and steer for the western lands—the new world!”

By eventide, the storm had gone away. Likewise had the storm among the people; after hours of dispute, they were agreed. For the main part they sought sleep against the morrow, curled up behind dunes, though a number went out after game to keep alive on.

Vanimen paced with Meiiva, around and around the islet. They were close to each other, often lovers before and after Agnete. Less flighty, more feeling than most, she could frequently cheer him.

Eastward the sky was a violet-blue chalice for the earliest stars. Westward it fountained in red, purple, and hot gold. The waters moved luminous and lulling. The air was quiet and faintly softer than hitherto; it smelled of kelp and distances. A person could set aside hunger, weariness, woe, to enjoy an hour's hope.

“Do you honestly feel this can be done?” Meiiva asked.

“Yes,” the king declared. “I've told you how I've been on the prowl about that harbor, again and again, the latest time not long ago. We may have to lurk, watching for our chance. However, at this season I expect that will be no great while; the town does much trade. Nobody will dare pursue us at night, and by dawn we should be well away, unfindable.”

“Do you know how to handle a ship?” she pounced. “That's something which didn't get talked about today.”

“Well, only a little, from what I've seen for myself or garnered from men—I have had friends among them once in a while, you recall,” Vanimen said. “But we can learn. There should be no big danger in it if we keep plenty of sea room. Nor should there be any haste.” His tone quickened. “For we
will
have our island. Able to rest on it by turns, we'll need far less food; thus we can sustain ourselves by hunting. And, of course, we needn't fret about fresh water as humans must. And we can find our way more readily than they can. The simple surety that we have a land to steer for, and not an edge where the seas roar down to the nether gulf—that alone should make the difference which saves us.”

He gazed from sand and scrub, to the glimmer of sunset upon the western horizon. “I know not whether to pity or envy the children of Adam,” he murmured. “I know not at all.”

Meiiva took his hand. “You're strangely drawn to them,” she said.

He nodded. “Aye, more and more as the years flow onward. I do not speak of it, for who would understand? Yet I feel…I know not…more is in Creation than this glittering, tricksy Faerie of ours. No matter that humans have immortal souls. We've always reckoned that too low a price for being landbound. But I have wondered”—his free hand clenched, his visage worked—“what do they have in this life, here and now, amidst every misery, what do they glimpse, that we are forever blind to?”

Stavanger, in the south of Norway, dreamed beneath a waning moon. That light made a broken bridge across the fjord, where holms rose darkling, silvered the thatch and shingle of roofs, softened the stone of the cathedral and came alive in its windows, turned the streets below the house galleries into even deeper guts of blackness. It touched the figureheads and masts of vessels at the wharf.…

Candle-glow through thin-scraped horn shone on the aftercastle of a particular ship. She was from the Hansa city of Danzig: one-masted like a cog but longer, beamier, of the new sort that were known as hulks. Day would have shown her clinker-built hull bright red, with white and yellow trim.

Moon-ripples trailed the stealthily swimming mermen. They felt no chill, no fear; they were after quarry.

Vanimen led them to his goal. The freeboard was more than he could overleap, but he had earlier gone ashore and stolen what he would need. A flung hook caught the rail amidships. From it dangled a Jacob's ladder up which he climbed.

Quiet though he sought to be, his noise reached the watchman. (The crew were visiting the inns and stews.) That fellow came down from the poop bearing his lanthorn and pike. Dull gleams went off the steel, and off the gray streaks in his beard; he was no young man, but portly and slow. “Who goes?” he challenged in German; and as he saw what confronted him, a howl of terror: “Ach, Jesus, help me! Help, help——”

He could not be let rouse the harbor. Vanimen unslung the trident from his shoulders and gave it him in the belly, a full thrust that shocked back through the merman's own muscles while it skewered the liver. Blood spurted forth. The guard fell to the deck. He writhed about. “Johanna, Peter, Maria, Friedrich,” he gasped—the names of wife and children? His look swirled to Vanimen. He half raised a hand. “God curse you for this,” came from him. “St. Michael, my namesake, warrior angel, avenge——”

Vanimen put a tine through an eye, straight into the brain, and the watchman grew still. Mermen were swarming up the ladder. They paid scant heed; none but their king knew German. He stood for a moment, heartsick at what he had done, before he pitched the corpse out and took command of the ship.

That was no easy task, when his followers were quite ignorant of her use. Surely their awkwardness and gropings about reached ears on land. They were ready to fight if they must. But no more humans appeared. It was unwise for a common person to seek after a racket heard in the night, and whatever burgher guard was in Stavanger doubtless decided that nothing untoward was likely going on—a brawl, maybe, or a drunken revel.

The mooring lines were slipped. The sail, unfurled, caught the land breeze for which Vanimen had waited until this late hour. There was ample light for Faerie vision to steer by. The hulk stole down the bay. As she passed an island, the mermaids and children started coming aboard.

By dawn she had left Norway well behind her.

VI

I
NGEBORG
Hjalmarsdatter was an Alswoman of about thirty winters. She had been orphaned early and married off to the first younger son who would have her. When she proved barren and he went down with the boat whereon he worked, leaving her nothing, no other man made an offer. The parish cared for its paupers by binding them over for a year at a time to whoever would take them. Such householders knew well how to squeeze out their money's worth in toil, without spending unduly on food or clothes for their charges. Ingeborg, instead, got Red Jens to give her passage on his craft to the herring run. She plied what trade she could among the booths on shore, and came back with some shillings. Thereafter she made the trip yearly. Otherwise she stayed home, save when she walked the woodland road to Hadsund for market days.

Father Knud implored her to mend her life. “Can you find me better work than this?” she laughed. He must needs ban her from Communion, if not the Mass; and she seldom went to the latter, since women hissed her in the street and might throw a fishhead or a bone at her. The men, easier-going on the whole, did agree she could not be allowed to dwell among them, if only because of their goodwives' tongues.

She had a cabin built, a shack on the strand several furlongs north of Als. Most of the unwed young men came to her, and the crews of vessels that stopped in, and the rare chapman, and husbands after dark. Had they no coppers, she would take pay in kind, wherefore she got the name Cod-Ingeborg. Between whiles she was alone, and often strolled far along the shore or into the woods. She had no fear of rovers—they would not likely kill her, and what else mattered?—and little of trolls.

On a winter evening some five years past, when Tauno was just beginning to explore the land, he knocked on her door. After she let him in, he explained who he was. He had been watching from afar, seen men slink in and swagger out; he was trying to learn the ways of his lost mother's folk; would she tell him what this was about? He ended with spending the night. Since, he had many times done so. She was different from the mermaids, warmer somehow in heart as well as flesh; her trade meant naught to him, whose undersea fellows knew no more of marriage than of any other sacrament; he could learn much from her, and tell her much, murmured lip to lip as they lay beneath the coverlet; he liked her for her kindliness and toughness and wry mirth.

For her part, she would take no pay from him, and few gifts. “I do not think ill of most men,” she said. “Some, yes, like that cruel old miser Kristoffer into whose hands I would have fallen had I not chosen this way. My skin crawls when he comes smirking.” She spat on the clay floor, then sighed. “He has the coin, though.…No, mainly they are not bad, those rough-bearded men; and sometimes a lad gives me joy.” She rumpled his hair. “You give me more, without fail, Tauno. Can you not see, that's why it would be wrong for you to hire me?”

“No, I cannot,” he answered in honesty. “I have things you say men reckon precious, amber, pearls, pieces of gold. If they will help you, why should you not have them?”

“Well,” she said, “among other reasons, word would come to the lords around Hadsund, that Cod-Ingeborg was peddling such wares. They'd want to know how I got them. I do not wish my last man to wear a hood.” She kissed him. “Oh, let us say what's better, that your tales of your undersea wonderland give me more than any hand-graspable wealth may buy.”

She dropped a number of hints that she longed to be taken away as was fair Agnete. He was deaf to them, and she gave up. Why should he want a barren burden?

When Provost Magnus exorcised the merfolk, Ingeborg would see no person for a week. Her eyes were red for a long time afterward.

Finally Tauno sought her again. He came from the water, naked save for the headband that caught his locks and the sharp flint dagger belted at his hip. In his right hand he carried a barbed spear. It was a cold, misty twilight, fog asmoke until the lap-lapping wavelets were blurred and the stars withheld. There was a scent of kelp, fish, and from inland of damp earth. The sand gritted beneath his feet, the dune grass scratched his ankles.

A pair of fisher youths were nearing the hut, with a flaming link to show the way. Tauno saw farther in the dark than they could. Under the wadmal sameness of cowl, smock, and hose, he knew who they were. He trod into their path. “No,” he said. “Not this night.”

“Why…why, Tauno,” said one with a foolish grin. “You'd not bar your chums from their bit of fun, would you, or her from this fine big flounder? We won't be long, if you're so eager.”

“Go home. Stay there.”

“Tauno, you know me, we've talked, played ball, you've come aboard when I was out by myself in the jollyboat, I'm Stig——”

“Must I kill you?” asked Tauno without raising his voice.

They looked at him by the guttering link-flare, towering over them, hugely thewed, armed, hair wet as a strand-washer's and faintly green under its fairness, the mer-face and the yellow eyes chill as northlights. They turned and walked hastily back. Through the fog drifted Stig's shout: “They were right about you, you're soulless, you damned
thing
——”

Tauno smote the door of the shack. It was a sagging box of logs weathered gray, peat-roofed, windowless, though a glow straggled outward and air inward where the chinking moss had shriveled. Ingeborg opened for him and closed behind them both. Besides a blubber lamp, she had a low fire going. Monstrous shadows crawled on the double-width sleeping dais, the stool and table, the few cooking and sewing tools, clothes chest, sausage and stockfish hung from the rafters, and those poles across the rafters which skewered rounds of hardtack. On a night like this, smoke hardly rose from hearthstone to roofhole.

Tauno's lungs always burned for a minute after he had come ashore and emptied them in that single heave which merfolk used. The air was so thin, so dry (and he felt half deafened among its muffled noises, though to be sure he saw better). The reek here was worse. He must cough ere he could speak.

Ingeborg held him, wordlessly. She was short and buxom, snub-nosed, freckled, with a big gentle mouth. Her hair and eyes were dark brown, her voice high but sweet. There have been princesses less well-favored than Cod-Ingeborg. He did not like the smell of old sweat in her gown, any more than he liked any of the stenches of humankind; but underneath it he caught a sunny odor of woman.