The Merman's Children

I

The bishop of Viborg got Magnus Gregersen for his new archdeacon. This man was more learned than most, having studied in Paris, and he was upright and pious; but folk called him too strict, and said they liked no better to see him coming, with his long lean frame and his long sour face, than they liked to see any other black crow in their fields. The bishop felt one like that was needed, for laxity had set in during the years of strife that harried Denmark after King Valdemar the Victorious died.

Riding along the eastern Jutish coast as episcopal provost, Magnus came to Als, not the island but a hamlet of the same name. It was poor and lonely, deep woods behind it and Kongerslev Marsh to the north. Only two roads served it, one on the strand and one twisting southwesterly toward Hadsund. Each September and October its fishermen would join the hundreds that made catches in the Sound during the great herring run; otherwise their kind saw little of the outside world. They dragged their nets through the water and farmed their thin-soiled acres until time and toil broke them and they laid their bones to rest behind the small wooden church. Many old ways were still followed in steads like this. Magnus thought such doings pagan and bewailed to himself that there was no ready way to stop them.

Thus a baffled zeal grew double strong in him when he heard certain rumors about Als. None there would own to knowledge of what might have been happening since that day fourteen years ago when Agnete carne back out of the sea. Magnus got the priest alone and sternly demanded the truth. Father Knud was a gentle man, born in one of those tiny houses, who had long turned a blind eye on what he thought were minor sins that gave his flock some cheer in their bleak lives. But he was aged now, and feeble, and Magnus soon wrung from him the full tale.

The provost returned to Viborg with a holy flame in his gau. He went to the bishop and said: “My lord, in making my rounds through your diocese I found woefully many signs of the Devil’s work. But I had not looked to come upon himself—no, say rather a whole nest of his foulest, most dangerous fiends. Yet this I did in the strand-hamlet Als.”

“What mean you?” asked the bishop sharply; for he also dreaded a return of the old witchy gods.

“I mean that offshore is a town of merfolk!”

The bishop eased. “How interesting,” he said. “I knew not that any were left in Danish waters. They are not devils, my good Magnus. They lack souls, yes, like other beasts. But they do not imperil salvation as might the dwellers in an elfhill. Indeed, they seldom have aught to do with the tribe of Adam.”

“These are otherwise, my lord,” answered the archdeacon. “Listen to what I have learned. Two and twenty years ago lived near Als a maiden hight Agnete Einarsdatter. Her father was a yeoman, well-to-do by his neighbors’ reckoning, and she was very fair, so she ought to have made a good marriage. But one eventide when she walked alone on the beach, a merman came forth and wooed her. He lured her away with him, and she passed eight years in sin and godlessness beneath the sea.

“At last she happened to bring her newest babe up onto a skerry that it might drink sunlight. This was in earshot of the church bells, and while she sat rocking the cradle, they began to chime. Homesickness, if not repentance, awoke in her. She went to the merman and begged leave to go hear again the word of God. He gave unwilling consent and took her ashore. Beforehand he made her vow not to do three things—let down her long hair, as if she were unwedded; seek out her mother in the family pew; and bow down when the priest named the All Highest. But each of these she did: the first for pride, the second for love, the third for awe. Then divine grace drew the scales from her eyes and she stayed on land.

“Afterward the merman came in search of her. It was another holy day and he found her at Mass. When he walked into the church, the pictures and images turned their faces to the wall. None of the congregation dared lift hand against him, he was so huge and strong. He pleaded with her to return, and well might he have prevailed as aforetime. For this is not a hideous race with fish tails, my lord. Save that they have broad, webbed feet and big, slanting eyes, and the men among them are beardless, and some have green or blue hair—on the whole, they look like beautiful humans. His own locks were golden as hers. And he did not threaten, he spoke in tones of love and sorrow.

“Yet God strengthened Agnete. She refused him and he went back beneath the waters.

“Her father had the prudence, and the dowry, to get her wed inland. They say she was never cheerful, and before long she died.”

“If it was a Christian death,” the bishop said, “I cannot see that lasting harm was done.”

“But the merfolk are still there, my lord!” cried the provost. “Fishermen see them often, romping and laughing in the waves. Does that not make a poor toiler, who dwells in a wretched hut with an ugly wife, ill content, yes, even questioning of God’s justice? And when will another merman seduce another maiden, this time forever? That is the more likely now when those children of Agnete and her lover are grown. They come ashore almost as a habit, they have struck up friendships with some of the boys and young men—more than friendship, I heard tell, for the female among them.

“My lord, this is Satan’s work! If we let souls be lost that were in our charge, how shall we answer on the Last Day?”

The bishop frowned and rubbed his chin. “You have right. What shall we do, though? If the Alsmen already do what is forbidden, a further ban will hardly check them; I know those stiff-necked fisherfolk. And if we send to the King for knights and troopers, how shall they go beneath the sea?”

Magnus raised a finger. It blazed from him: “My lord, I have studied matters of this kind and know the cure. Those merfolk may not be demons, but the soulless must ever flee when God’s word is properly laid on them. Have I your leave to conduct an exorcism?”

“You do,” said the bishop shakenly, “and with it my blessing.”

So it came about that Magnus returned to Als. More men-at-arms than usual clattered behind him, lest the villagers make trouble. These watched, some eager for any newness, some surly, a few weeping, as the archdeacon had himself rowed out to a spot above the underwater town. And there, with bell, book, and candle, he solemnly cursed the sea people and bade them in God’s name forever be gone.

II

Tauno, oldest child of fair Agnete and the Liri king, had counted his twenty-first winter. There was great merrymaking in his honor, feast, song, dances that wove their flitting patterns north, east, west, south, up, down, and around, between the shells and mirrors and golden plates which flung back the seaflTe lighting the royal hall; there were gifts, cunningly wrought, not alone of gold and amber and narwhal ivory, but also of pearl and lacy rosy coral, brought from afar by travelers throughout the centuries; there were contests in swimming, wrestling, harpooning, music, and runecraft; there was lovemaking in dim rooms which had no roof because none was needed, and in the rippling gardens of red, green, purple, and brown weed where jellyfish drifted like white and blue blossoms and true fish darted like meteors.

Afterward Tauno went on a long hunt. Though the merfolk lived off the waters, he fared this time in sport, mostly to visit anew the grandeur of the Norway fjords. With him came the girls Rinna and Raxi, for his pleasure and their own. They had a joyful trip, which meant much to Tauno; he was often a sober one among his lighthearted kindred, and sometimes fell into dark broodings.

They were homebound, Liri was in sight, when the wrath struck them.

“Yonder it is!” Rinna called eagerly. She darted ahead. The green tresses streamed down her slim white back. Raxi stayed near Tauno. She swam laughing around and around him; as she passed below, she would stroke fingers over his face or loins. He grabbed for her with the same playfulness, but always she was out of reach. “Niaahr’ she taunted while blowing him bubbly kisses. He grinned and swam steadily on. Having inherited their mother’s shape of foot, the halfling children were less swift and deft in the water than their father’s race. Nevertheless, a landman would have gasped at their movement. And they got about more readily on shore than their cousins; and they had been born able to live undersea, without need for the spells that had kept their mother from death by drowning, salt, or chill; and the cool-fleshed merfolk liked to embrace their warmer bodies.

Above Tauno sun smote waves, making a roof of bright ripples that traced its pattern across the white sand beneath him. Around, the water reached in hues of emerald and amethyst until distance brought dusk. He felt it slide by, answering the play of his muscles with caresses like a lover’s. Kelp streamed upward from barnacled rocks, golden-brown, swaying to every current. A crab clanked over the seabed; a tunny glided farther off, blue and white and splendid. The water was never the same: here cold, there mild, here roiled, there calm, and a thousand different tastes and odors beyond the tang men smell on a strand; and it was full of sounds for those who could hear, cluckings, chucklings, croakings, chitterings, splashings, the hush-hush-hush where it lapped against land; and beneath each swirl and gurgle Tauno felt the huge slow striding of the tides.

Now Liri rose clear in his sight: houses that were hardly more than arbors of seaplants or frames of ivory and whale ribs, delicate and fantastically scrimshawed in this world of low weight, widespaced among gardens of weed and anemone; in the middle, the hall of his father the king, big, ancient, stone and coral in subtle hues, bedight with carven figures of fish and those beasts and fowl which belong to the sea. The posts of the main door were in the shapes of Lord Aegir and Lady Ran, the lintel was an albatross with wings spread for soaring. Above the walls lifted a dome of crystal, vented to the surface, which the king had built for Agnete, so that when she wished she might be dry, breathe air, sit by a fire among roses and what else his love could fetch her from the land.

The merfolk flitted about—gardeners, craftsmen, a hunter training a brace of young seals, an oyster gatherer buying a trident at a booth, a boy leading a girl by the hand toward some softly lighted cavern. Bronze bells, taken long ago from a wrecked ship, were being chimed; they pealed more clearly through water than ever through the air. .

“Harroo!” Tauno shouted. He plunged forward in a burst of speed. Rinna and Raxi fell in alongside him. The three broke into the “Song of Retumings” he had made for them: Here may I hail you, my homeland, my heartstrand.

Suddenly his companions screamed. They clapped hands to ears, their eyes were shut, they milled about blindly and wildly kicking till the water seethed.

Tauno watched the same craziness take all of Liri. “What is this?” he cried in horror. “What’s wrong?”

Rinna wailed her anguish. She could not see nor hear him. He caught her. She fought to break loose. His strength gripped her from behind with legs and one hand. His other hand closed on the silken tresses to hold tight her jerking head. He laid mouth to an ear and stammered, “Rinna, Rinna, it’s me, Tauno. I’m your friend. I want to help you.”

“Then let me go!” Her shriek was ragged with pain and fright. “The ringing fills the sea, it shakes me like a shark, my bones are coming apart—the light, the cruel blaze, blinding, burning, buming—the words—Let me go or I die!”

Tauno did, altogether bewildered. Rising several yards, he made out the shivering shadow of a fisher boat, and heard a bell. . . was a fire aboard too, and was a voice chanting in some tongue he knew not? No more than that. . . .

The houses of Liri rocked as in a quake. The crystal dome on the hall shattered and rained down in bright shards. The stones trembled and began to slide from each other. That crumbling, of what had stood here since the Great Ice melted, sent its shuddering through Tauno’s flesh.

Dimly he saw his father come forth, astride the orca which had its airspace in the hall and which no one else dared mount. Otherwise the king had naught but a trident; and he was clad in naught but his own majesty. Yet somehow his call was heard: “To me, my people, to me! Quickly, before we die! Seek not to save any treasure beyond your children—and weapons—come, come, come if you would livc!”

Tauno shook Rinna and Raxi back to a measure of sense, and led them to join the throng. His father, riding about rallying the terrified merfold, had time to say to him grimly: “You, half mortal, feel it no more than does this steed of mine. But to us, these waters are now banned. For us, the light will blaze and the bell will toll and the words will curse until the Weird of the World. We must flee while we still have strength, to seek a home far and away.”

“Where are my siblings?” Tauno asked.

“They were on an outing,” said the king. The tone that had trumpeted went flat and dead. “We cannot wait for them.”

“I can.”

The king gripped his son by both shoulders. “That heartens me. Yria and, aye, young Kennin need more than Eyjan to ward them. I know not where we are going. Maybe you can find us later—maybe—” He shook his sun-bright mane. His visage drew into a mask of torture. “Away!” he screamed.

Stunned, beaten, naked, most of them unarmed and without tools, the merfolk followed their lord. Tauno hung, fists clenched on harpoon, until they were out of sight. The last stones of the royal hall toppled, and Liri was a ruin.

III

In the eight years that she dwelt beneath the waters, fair Agnete bore seven children. This was less than a seawife would have done, and maybe the unspoken scorn of those females helped drive her back to land, even as the bells of the little church and the sight of little thatch-roofed timber houses had drawn her.

For though the merfolk, like others of Faerie, knew no aging (as if He Whose name they did not speak thus repaid them for lack of immortal souls), their way of life had its harsh side. Shark, orca, sperm whale, ray, sea serpent, a dozen kinds of killer fish hunted them; the creatures that they in turn hunted were often dangerous; tricks of wind and wave could be deadly; poison fangs and spines, cold, sickness, hunger carried many off. This was most true of their young; they must reckon with losing all but a few. The king had been lucky with those he got with his human mate. Behind his home were only three graves whereon the sea anemones had never been let die.

The four children who remained met in the wreckage of Liri. Round about were the heaped chaos of the hall, the farther-off bits and pieces of lesser homes, gardens already withering, fishflocks already scattered, broken scrimshaw, crabs and lobsters swarming through foodstocks like ravens over a corpse on shore. The meeting spot was where the main door had been. The albatross lay wingless; kindly Lord Aegir had fallen on his face; Lady Ran who takes men in her nets stood above, grinning. The water was chill and waves raised by a storm overhead could be heard mourning for Liri.

The merman’s children were unclad, as was usual undersea save at festival times. However, they had gotten knives, harpoons, tridents, and axes of stone and bone, to ward off those menaces which circled closer and closer beyond the rim of their sight. None of them looked wholly like merfolk. But the elder three shared the high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and male beardlessness of their father; and while they had learned the Danish tongue and some of the Danish ways, now it was as merfolk that they talked.

Eldest among them, Tauno took the word. “We must decide where to go. Hard it was to keep death at bay when everyone stayed here. We cannot do it long alone.”

He was likewise the biggest, tall, wide in the shoulders, mightily muscled from a lifetime’s swimming. His hair, caught by a beaded headband, fell to his collarbones, yellow with the least tinge of green; his eyes were amber, set well apart from the blunt nose, above the heavy mouth and jaw; because he had spent much time on the surface or ashore, his skin was brown.

“Why, shall we not follow our father and tribe?” asked Eyjan.

She had nineteen winters. She too was tall, for a woman, and strong with a strength that lay hidden beneath the full curves of breasts, hips, thighs, until she hugged a lover tight or drove a lance into a wallowing walrus. Hers was the whitest skin, for her hair was bronzy red, floating shoulder-length past a challenging gray gaze and cleanly molded face.

“We know not where they have gone,” Tauno reminded her. “It will have to be far, since these were the last good hunting grounds left to our kind around Denmark. And while such merfolk as dwell in the Baltic or along the Norway coast may help them on their way, there’s no room for as many more as Liri’s people are. The seas are very wide to search, my sister.”

“Oh, surely we can ask,” Kennin said impatiently. “They’ll leave traces. The dolphins are bound to know which way they headed.” A sparkle jumped in his eyes, making them more than ever summer-blue. “Haa, what a chance to gad about!”

He was of sixteen winters, had yet to fare far, and knew only youth’s eagerness to be off beyond the horizon. He had not gotten his full growth and would never be tailor broad. On the other hand, he was well-nigh as agile a swimmer as a full-blooded merman. His hair was greenish brown, his countenance round and freckled, his body painted in the loudest-colored patterns the dwellers had known. The rest bore no ornament; Tauno was in too stark a mood, Eyjan had always scoffed at the trouble it cost, and Yria was shy.

The last one whispered: “How can you joke when. . . when. . . everything is gone?” Her siblings moved closer in around her. To them she was still the babe, left in her crib by a mother whom she was coming more and more to look like. She was small, thin, her breasts just budding; her hair was golden, her eyes huge in the tip-tilted, lipparted face. She had stayed away from revelries as much as a king’s daughter might, had never gone off alone with a boy, had spent hours a day learning the womanly arts at which Eyjan jeered—more hours in the dome that had been Agnete’s, fondling the treasures that had been Agnete’s. Often she lay on the waves, staring at the greenhills and the houses ashore, listening to the chimes which called Christian folk to prayer. Of late she had been going there with one or another of her kin when these would allow, flitting along a twilit strand or behind a wind-gnarled tree or down into the ling like a timid shadow.

Eyjan gave her a quick, rough embrace. “You got too great a share of our mortal side,” declared the older sister.

Tauno scowled. “And that is a terrible truth,” said he. “Yria is not strong. She cannot swim fast, or far without rest and food. What if we’re set on by beasts? What if winter catches us away from the warm shallows, or what if the Liri outcasts move to the! Arctic? I do not see how we can take her on any journey.”

“Can’t we leave her with some foster?” asked Kennin.

Yria shrank into Eyjan’s arms. “Oh, no, no,” she begged. They could scarcely hear her.

Kennin reddened at his own foolishness. Tauno and Eyjan looked at each other across the hunched back of their little sister. Few were the merfolk who would take in a weakling, when the strong had trouble enough fending for themselves. Now and again one might; but he would do so out of desire. They had no true hope of finding a sea-man who would want this child as their father had wanted a certain grown maiden; nor would that be any kindness to the child.

Tauno must gather his will to speak it aloud: “I think, before we leave, we’d best take Yria to our mother’s people.

IV

The old priest Knud was wakened by a knocking. He climbed from his shut-bed and fumbled a robe on in the dark, for the banked hearthfire gave no real glow; and he felt his way to the door. His bones ached, his teeth clapped with chill. He wondered who might be near death. He had outlived every playmate. . . . “I come, in Jesu name, I come.”

A full moon had lately risen. It threw a quicksilver bridge on the Kattegat and made glint the dew on cottage roofs; but the two crossed streets of Als lay thick with shadow, and the land beyond had become a stalking ground for wolves and trolls. Strangely quiet were the dogs, as if they feared to bark; the whole night was cracklingly still; no, a sound somewhere, hollow, a hoof? The Hell Horse grazing among the graves?

Four stood in a cloud of their own breath, unseasonably cold as this night was. Father Knurl gasped and signed himself. He had never seen merfolk, besides the one who had come into his church—unless a glimpse in childhood had been more than a marvelous dream. What else could these be, though? He had heard enough accounts from those of his parishioners who met them now and again. The features of the man and woman were cast in that alien mold, the boy’s less clearly so, the girl-child’s hardly at all. But water dripped and shimmered from her too; she too wore a fishskin tunic and clutched a bone-headed spear.

“You, you, you were to have. . . been gone,” the priest said, hearing his voice thin in the frosty quiet.

“We are Agnete’s children,” said the tall man. He spoke Danish with a lilting accent that was indeed, Knud thought wildly, outlandish. “Because of her heritage, the spell did not touch us.”

“No spell—a holy exorcism—” Knud called on God in his mind and squared his narrow shoulders. “I pray you, be not wroth with my villagers. The thing was none of their doing or wish.”

“I know. We have asked. . . a friend. . . about what happened. Soon we shall go away. First we would give Yria into your care.”

The priest was somewhat eased by this, and likewise by seeing that his visitors’ bare feet were of human shape. He bade the four come in. They did, wrinkling their noses at the grime and smells in the single room which the parish house boasted. He stoked the fire, kindled a rushlight, set forth bread, salt, and beer, and, since the newcomers filled the bench, sat down on a stool to talk with them.

Long was that talk. It ended well after he had promised to do his best for the girl. Her three siblings would linger a while to make sure; he must let her go to the strand every dusk and meet them. Father Knud pleaded with them to stay ashore too, but this they would not. They kissed their sister and took their leave. She wept, noiselessly but hopelessly, until she fell asleep. The priest tucked her in and got what rest he could on the bench.

Next day, and more and more in the days of waxing summer which followed, Yria was in better spirits. At last she was quite cheerful. Agnete’s kin held aloof, afraid to admit she carried their blood, but Father Knud dealt with her as kindly as his meager means allowed. It helped that the other halflings brought gifts of food fresh-caught from the sea at their regular meetings: which quickly became brief ones. To her, the land was as new and wonderful as she was to the youngsters of the hamlet. Erelong she was daily the middle of a rollicking swarm. As for work, she knew nothing about human tasks but was willing to learn. Kirsten Pedersdatter tried her on the loom and said she could become uncommonly skillful.

Meanwhile the priest had sent a youth to Viborg, asking what should be done about the girl. Could a halfling be christened? He prayed this be so, for otherwise he knew not what would become of the poor darling. The messenger was gone for a pair of weeks; they must be ransacking their books at the bishopric. Finally he retumed, on horse this time, accompanied by guards, a clerical amanuensis, and the provost.

Knud had been giving Christian instruction to Yria, who listened wide-eyed and mostly silent. Now Archdeacon Magnus saw her in the parish house. “Do you truly believe in one God,” he barked, “the Father, the Son Who is Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost which proceeds from them?” She quailed before his sternness. “I do,” she whispered. “I do not understand it very well, but I do believe, good sir.”

After further questioning, Magnus told Knud privately: “There can be no harm in baptizing her. She is not an unreasoning brute, albeit badly in need of more careful teaching before she can be confirmed. If she be devils’ bait, the holy water should drive her hence; if she be merely soulless, God will hit upon some way to let us know.”

The christening was set for Sunday after Mass. The archdeacon gave Yria a white robe to wear and chose a saint’s name for her, Margrete. She grew less afraid of him and agreed to spend the Saturday night in prayer. Friday after sunset, full of eagerness, she wanted her siblings to come to the service—surely the priests would allow it, hoping to win them to(}—and she cried when they refused.

And so, on a morning of wind, scudding white clouds, dancing glittery waves, before the Alsfolk in the wooden church, beneath the ship model hung in the nave and Christ hung above the altar, she knelt, and Father Knud led her and the godparents through the rites, and signed her and said with joy, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

She shrieked. Her slight form crumpled. A hissing of breath, some screams and hoarse calls, sounded from the pews. The priest stooped, forgetting his stiffness in his haste, and gathered her to him. “Yria!” he cried. “What’s wrong?”

She looked about her, panting and with the eyes of one stunned. “I. . . am . . . Margrete,” she said. “Who are you?” Provost Magnus loomed over them. “Who are you?”

Knud cast his tear-streaming gaze up toward the archdeacon. “Is it that, that, that she is in truth soulless?”

Magnus pointed to the altar. “Margrete,” he said, with such iron in his tone that the whole rough congregation fell silent, “look yonder. Who is that?”

Her glance followed the knobbly finger. She raised herself to her knees and drew the Cross. “That is Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,” she said almost steadily.

Magnus lifted his arms. He likewise wept, but for glory. “Lo, a miracle!” he shouted. “I thank You, Almighty God, that You have let me, most miserable of sinners, witness this token of Your overflowing grace.” He swung on the folk. “Kneel! Praise Him! Praise Him!”

Later, alone with Knud, he explained more calmly: “The bishop and I thought something like this might happen. Your message did relate that the sacred pictures had not turned from her. Moreover, in the archives we found a few legends from the days of those apostles to the Danes, Ansgar and Poppo-apocryphal, yet now seen to have embodied some truth. Thus I can interpret what we have seen.

“Like their Faerie parents, halflings have indeed no souls, though doubtless their bodies also are ageless. Yet God is willing to receive even these, aye, even full-fledged beings of that kind. Upon Margrete’s baptism, He gave her a soul as He gives a soul to a quickening babe. She has become entirely human, mortal in the flesh, immortal in the spirit. We must see well to it that she loses not her salvation.”

“Why can she not remember?” Knud asked.

“She has been reborn. She keeps the Danish language, with what other terrestrial skills she has; but everything that is in any way linked to her former life has been cleansed from her. That must be Heaven’s mercy, lest Satan use homesickness to lure the ewe Iamb from the fold.”

The old man seemed more troubled than pleased. “Her sister and brothers will take this ill.”

“I know about them,” said Magnus. “Have the girl meet them on the strand in front of those seven trees which grow low and close together. Their branches will screen my men, who will have crossbows cocked—”

“No! Never! I will not have it!” Knud gulped, knowing how scant an authority was his. At length he persuaded Magnus not to ambush the halflings. They were leaving soon. And what might the effect be on Margrete’s new soul, that almost the first thing she would remember was a deed of blood?”

Therefore the priests told the men-at-arms to shoot only if ordered. All waited behind the trees, in a cold, blowing dusk. Margrete’s white robe fluttered dimly before them where she stood, puzzled but obedient, hands folded over a rosary.

A sound broke through the soughing of leaves and the clashing of whitecaps. Forth from the water waded the tall man, the tall woman, and the boy. It could just be seen that they were unclad. “Lewdness,” Magnus hissed angrily.

The man said something in an unknown tongue.

“Who are you?” Margrete replied in Danish. She shrank from them. “I can’t understand you. What do you want?”

“Yria—” The woman held out her wet arms. “Yria.” Her own Danish was agonized. “What have they done to you?”

“I am Margrete,” the girl said. “They told me. . . I must be brave. . . . Who are you? What are you?”

The boy snarled and sprang toward her. She raised the crucifix. “In Jesu name, begone!” she yelled, aghast. He did not obey, though he stopped when his brother caught him. The tall man made a strangled noise.

Margrete whirled and fled over the dunes toward the hamlet. Her siblings stood a while, talking in tones of bafflement and dismay, before they returned to their sea.

V

The island men call Laeso lies four leagues east of northern Jutland. Sand and ling, windswept from Skagerrak and Kattegat both, it holds few dwellers. Yet the small churches upon it forever banned merfolk from what was once their greatest gathering place—for then it was Hlesey, Hler’s Island, with Hler a name of Aegir. Early on, therefore, Christian priests exiled thence, with bell, book, and candle, all beings of heathendom.

But just below it, like a whale calf nigh to its mother, is the islet Hornfiskron: hardly more than a reef, half a league or so from end to end, though bearing a thin growth of heather. Nobody ever lived there or thought to ban unholiness. Enough of the sea god’s older power lingered that merfolk could approach from the south and go ashore.

Thither Vanimen, their king, had brought the Liri tribe, on a day when rain was blowing in from the west. It had taken them longer than a healthy adult would have needed, for many small ones were among them. Besides, that large a band could not well live off the waters as it fared, and hunger soon weakened everyone.

Wading to land, they felt the wind run bleak across their bodies, and the first stinging drops. It hooted, skirled, piped, while steely waves with flying manes chopped and growled beneath. Sand hissed white. Westward loomed a darkness where lightning scribbled runes; the eastern sky was hidden by a low wrack.

Vanimen climbed onto the highest dune close by—the grittiness hurt his footwebs—and waited for his followers to settle down. A goodly sight he gave them, standing trident in hand for a sign of majesty. He was bigger than most, sculptured with muscle below the snow-fair skin; the scars thereon reminded of how many centuries he had endured, how many frightful battles he had won. Golden hair hung wet past his shoulders, around a face much like that of his son Tauno, save that his eyes were sea-green. Calm rested there, strength, wisdom.

That was a mask he put on. Without hope, they were foredoomed. Shattered by what had happened, they looked out of their wretchedness to him alone.

Alone forsooth, he thought. The longer he lived, the lonelier he grew. Few merfolk reached his age; none else had done so in Liri; something took them, oftener soon than late, unless they had rare skill and luck. No friends of his boyhood remained, and his first sweetheart had been a dream these hundreds of years. For a short while he had dared believe that with Agnete he had found what mortals called happiness. Well had he known it could only last a blink of time, until her flesh withered and she went wherever humans did. He had imagined her children might keep a measure of joy for him. (Oh, bitterest of everything, maybe, was that he could no more tend the graves of the three who died.) Tauno, who carried his father’s bardic gift on to something higher; Eyjan’s healthy beauty; Kennin’s promise; Yria’s trustfulness, her likeness in looks to her mother—but the bearers were gone, left behind, and could they ever search the great seas enough to rejoin him?

He must not be weak, Vanimen remembered. As if with a bodily heave, he put grief aside and regarded his people.

They numbered about sevenscore, he saw. Belike it was the first time anyone had cared to count them, and even today, he the sole one who thought to do so. His long life, the ever-growing weight of experience and of reflection thereupon, had taken away the easygoing nature common to his race, given him a mind that could brood like a human’s.

More than half the gathering were children. (At that, several had died on the flight hither.) They clustered about their mothersa babe at a breast, a toddler whom she tried to shield from the weather, a bairn whose limbs were lengthening but who still clung to a lock of her hair while staring out of wide eyes at a world gone harsh and strange. . . . Grown males and unencumbered females stood apart from this huddle. Fatherhood among the merfolk was nearly always a matter of guesswork, and never of import. Offspring were raised loosely by their mothers, whatever lovers these chanced to have at the moment, female friends and their lovers, ultimately by the tribe.

Save for Agnete’s, of course. . . . How she had striven to build into them a sense of what she held to be right and decent. After she departed, Vanimen had given them what he could of their earthside heritage; after all, he had seen something of that over the centuries. Now he wondered if he had done them any service.

Well, but those haggard faces were turned his way. He must offer them more than the empty wail of the wind.

He filled his lungs till his voice could boom forth: “People of Liri that was, here we must decide our course. Wallowing blindly about, we will die. Yet every shore we ken that might nourish us is either forbidden to beings of Faerie—most of them are—or hold as many of our kind as can live there. Where then shall we seek?”

A quite young male called, with a lilt of eagerness: “Do we need a coast? I’ve kept myself for weeks in the open ocean.”

Vanimen shook his head. “You could not for years, Haiko. Where would you go for rest or refuge? Where would you raise a home, or find the very stuff you need for its making? The deeps we may enter for a short while, but we cannot stay in them; they are too cold, black, and barren; the ooze covers all that we dig from skerries and eyots and shoals. Without an abiding place, presently without tools or weapons, you would be no more than a beast, less fitted for life than the shark or orca which would hunt you down. And before you perished, the children would, the hope of our blood. No, we are like our cousins the seals, we need earth, and air as much as we need water.”

Fire, he thought, was kept for men.

Well, he had heard of the dwarfs, but the thought of living underground was shuddersome.

A lean female with blue tresses took the word: “Are you sure we can find no place nearby? I’ve cruised the Gulf of Finland. At the far end of it are rich fishing grounds which none of our sort inhabit.”

“Did you ever ask why, Meiiva?” Vanimen replied.

Surprised, she said, “I meant to, but always forgot.

“The careless way of Faerie,” he sighed. “I found out. It nearly cost me my life, and nightmares rode me for years afterward.”

Their looks at him sharpened. That was at least better than the dullness of despair. “The mortals there are Rus,” he told them, “a different folk from Danes, Norse, Swedes, Finns, Letts, Lapps, any in these parts. The halfworld beings that share their land with them are.. . different also: some friendly, but some weird and some altogether terrible. A vodianoi we might cope with, but a rousalka—” Memory bit him, colder than wind and thickening rain. “Each river seems to have a rousalka. She wears the form of a maiden, and is said to have been one until she drowned; but she lures men into the depths and takes them captive for frightful tortures. I too was lured, on a moonlit night in the tidewater, and what happened, what I saw—well, I escaped. But we cannot live along shores thus haunted.”

Silence fell, under the lash of the downpour. Color was gone, vision found naught save grays and darknesses. Lightning flared close; thunder went rolling down unseen heaven.

Finally an elder male—born when Harald Bluetooth reigned in Denmark—spoke: “I’ve given thought to this as we traveled. If we cannot enter as a group where our kind dwell, can we not by ones and twos, into the various domains? They could take us in piecemeal, I believe. They might even be glad of the newness we’d bring.”

“For some, that may be the answer,” Vanimen said unwillingly; he had awaited the idea. “Not for most of us, though. Remember how few nests of merfolk are left; we were the last on a Danish strand. I do not think they could, between them, add our whole number without suffering for it. Surely they would be loth to have our little ones, who must be fed for years before they can help bring in food.”

He straightened, to stand as tall as might be in the storm. “Also,” he called to them, “we are the Liri dwellers. We have our shared blood, ways, memories, all that makes us ourselves. Would you part from your friends and lovers, would you forget old songs and never quite learn any new, would you let Liri of your forebears—your forebears since the Great Ice withdrew—die as if it had never been?

“Shall we not aid each other? Shall we let it become true what the Christians say, that Faerie folk cannot love?”

They gaped at him through the rain. Several babies cried. At length Meiiva responded: “I know you, Vanimen. You have a plan. Let us judge it.”

A plan—He lacked power to decree. Liri had chosen him king after the last leader’s bones were found on a reef, a harpoon head between the ribs. He presided over infrequent folkmoots. He judged disputes, though naught save a wish to keep the general esteem could enforce his decisions upon the losers. He dealt on behalf of his people with communities elsewhere; this was seldom necessary. He led those rare undertakings that required their united effort. He was master of their festivals.

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 hadguested 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 stonn 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 munnured. “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: onemasted 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

Ingeborg 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. lngeborg, instead, got Red lens 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 horne, 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 II cold, misty twilight, fog asmoke until the laplapping 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, :

“I hoped . .” she breathed at last, “I hoped...”

He shoved her arms away, stood back, glared, and hefted the spear, “Where is my sister?” he snapped,

“Oh. She is—is well, Tauno. None will harm her. None would dare,” Ingeborg tried to draw him from the door. “Come, my unhappy dear, sit, have a stoup, be at ease with me,”

“First they reaved from her everything that was her life—”

Tauno must stop anew to cough, Ingeborg took the word. “It had to be,” she said, “Christian folk could not let her dwell unchristened among them, You can’t blame them, not even the priests. A higher might than theirs has been in this,” She shrugged, with her oft-seen one-sided grin. “For the price of her past, and of growing old, ugly, dead in less than a hundred years, she gains eternity in Paradise. You may live a long while, but when you die you’ll be done, a blown-out candle flame. Myself, I’ll live beyond my body, most likely in Hell. Which of us three is the luckiest?”

Still grim but somewhat calmed, Tauno leaned his weapon and sat down on the dais. The straw ticking rustled beneath him. The peat fire sputtered with small blue and yellow dancers; its smoke would have been pleasant if less thick. Shadows crouched in corners and under the roof, and leaped about, misshapen, on the log walls. The cold and dankness did not trouble him, unclad though he was. Ingeborg shivered where she stood. He peered at her through the murk, “I know that much,” he said. “There’s a young fellow in the hamlet that they hope to make a priest of, So he could tell my sister Eyjan about it when she Found him alone,” His chuckle rattled. “She says he’s not bad to lie with, save that the open air gives him sneezing fits,” Harshly igain: “Well, if that’s the way the world swims, naught can we jo but give room. However, yestre’en Kennin and I went in search of Yria, to make sure she wasn’t being mistreated. Ugh, the mud and filth in those wallows you call streets! Up and down we went, to every house, yes, to church and graveyard. We had IlOt spied her from afar, do you see, not for days, And we’d have known were she inside anything, be it cabin or coffin, She may be mortal now, our little Yria, but her body is still half her father’s, and that last night on the strand it had not lost its smell like daylit waves.” Fist thudded on knee. “Kennin and Eyjan raged, would have stonned shore and asked at harpoon point. I told them we’d only risk death, and how can the dead help Yria? Yet it was hard to wait till sunset, when I knew you’d be here, Ingeborg.”

She sat down against him, an arm around his waist, a hand on his thigh, cheek on shoulder. “I know,” she said most softly.

He remained unbending. “Well? What’s happened, then?”

“Why, the provost took her off with him to Viborg town—Wait! No harm is meant. How could they dare harm a chalice of Heavenly grace?” Ingeborg said that matter-of-factly, and afterward she fleered. “You’ve come to the right place, Tauno. The provost had a scribe with him, and that one was here and I asked him about any plans for keeping our miracle fed. They’re not unkindly in Als, I told him, but neither are they rich. She has no more yarns to spin from undersea for their pleasure. Who wants a girl that must be taught afresh like a babe? Who wants a fosterdaughter to find a dowry for? Oh, she could get somethingpauper’s work, marriage to a deckhand, or that which I chose—but was this right for a miracle? The cleric said no, nor was it intended. They would bring her back with them and put her in Asmild Cloister near Viborg.”

“What’s that?” Tauno inquired.

Ingeborg did her best to explain. In the end she could say: “They’ll house Margrete and teach her. When she’s of the right age, she’ll take her vows. Then she’ll live there in purity, no doubt widely reverenced, till she dies, no doubt in an odor of sanctity. Or do you believe that the corpse of a saint does not stink as yours and mine will?”

Aghast, Tauno exclaimed, “But this is frightful!”

“Oh? Many would count it glorious good fortune.”

His eyes stabbed at hers. “Would you?”

“Well...no.”

“Locked among walls for all her days; shorn, heavily clad, illfed, droning through her nose at God while letting wither what God put between her legs; never to know love, children about her, the growth of home and kin, or even wanderings under apple trees in blossom time—”

“Tauno, it is the way to eternal bliss.”

“Hm. Rather would I have my bliss now, and then the dark. You too—in your heart—not so?—whether or not you’ve said you mean to repent on your deathbed. Your Christian Heaven seems to me a shabby place to spend forever.”

“Margrete may think otherwise.”

“Mar-aah. Yria.” He brooded a while, chin on fist, lips taut, breathing noisily in the smoke. “Well,” he said, “if that is what she truly wants, so be it.” Yet how can we know? How can she know? Will they let her imagine anything is real and right beyond their gloomy cloi—cloister? “I would not see my little sister cheated, Ingeborg.”

“You sent her ashore because you would not see her eaten by eels. Now what choice is there?”

“None?”

The despair of him who had always been strong was like a knife to her. “My dear, my dear.” She held him close. But instead of tears, the old fisher hardheadedness rose in her.

“One thing among men opens every road save to Heaven,” she said, “and that it does not necessarily bar. Money.”

A word in the mer-tongue burst from him. “Go on!” he said in Danish, and clutched her arm with bruising fingers. “To put it simplest: gold,” Ingeborg told him, not trying to break free. “Or whatever can be exchanged for gold, though the metal itself is best. See you, if she had a fortune, she could live where she wished—given enough, at the King’s court, or in some foreign land richer than Denmark. She’d command servants, menat-arms, warehouses, broad acres. She could take her pick among suitors. Then, if she chose to leave this and return to the nuns, that would be a free choice.”

“My folk had gold! We can dig it out of the ruins!”

“How much?”

There was more talk. The sea people had never thought to weigh up what was only a metal to them, too soft for most uses however handsome and unrusting it might be. At the end, Ingeborg shook her head. “Too scant, I fear,” she

sighed. “In the ordinary course of things, plenty. This is different. Here Asmild Cloister and Viborg Cathedral have a living miracle. She’ll draw pilgrims from everywhere. The Church is her guardian in law, and won’t let her go to a lay family for your few cups and plates.”

“What’s needed, then?”

“A whopping sum. Thousands of marks. See you, some must be bribed. Others, who can’t be bought, must be won over by grand gifts to the Church. And then enough must be left for Margrete to be wealthy. . . . Thousands of marks.”

“What weight?” Tauno fairly yelled, with a merman’s curse.

“I—I-how shall I, fisherman’s otphan and widow, who never held one mark at a time in this fist, how shall I guess?.. A boatful? Yes, I think a boatload would do.”

“A boatload!” Tauno sagged back. “And we have not even a boat.”

Ingeborg smiled sadly and ran fingers along his arm. “No man wins every game,” she murmured. “You’ve done what you could. Let your sister spend threescore years in denying her flesh, and afterward forever in unfolding her soul. She may remember us, when you are dust and I am burning.”

Tauno shook his head. His eyelids squinched together. “No. . . she bears the same blood as I... it’s not a restful blood. . . she’s shy and gentle, but she was born to the freedom of the world’s wide seas. . . if holiness curdles in her, during a lifetime among whisker-chinned crones, what of her chances at Heaven?”

“I know not, I know not..”

“An unforced choice, at least. To buy it, a boatload of gold. A couple of wretched tons, to buy Yria’s welfare.”

“Tons! Why—I hadn’t thought-less than that, surely. A few hundred pounds ought to be ample.” Eagerness touched Ingeborg. “Do you suppose you could find that much?”

“Hm. . . wait. Wait. Let me hark back—” Tauno sat bolt upright. “Yes!” he shouted. “I do know!”

“Where? How?”

With the mercury quickness of Faerie, he became a planner. “Long ago was a city of men on an island in midocean,” he said, not loud but shiveringly, while he stared into the shadows. “Great it was, and gorged with riches. Its god was a kraken. They cast down weighted offerings to him-treasure, that he cared not about, but with it kine, horses, condemned evildoers; and these the kraken could eat. He need not snatch aught else than a whale now and then—or a ship, to devour its crew, and over the centuries he and his priests had learned the signals which told him that such-andsuch vessels were unwanted at Averorn. . . . So the kraken grew sluggish, and appeared not for generations of men; nor was there any need, since outsiders dared no longer attack.

“In time the islanders themselves came to doubt he was more than a fable. Meanwhile a new folk had arisen on the mainland. Their traders came, bearing not goods alone, but gods who didn’t want costly sacrifices. The people of Averorn flocked to these new gods. The temple of the kraken stood empty, its fires burned out, its priests died and were not replaced. Finally the king of the city ordered an end to the rites that kept him fed.

“After one year, dreadful in his hunger, the kraken rose from the sea bottom; and he sank the harbored ships, and his arms reached inland to knock down toers and pluck forth prey. Belike he also had power over quake and volcano-for the island was whelmed, it foundered and is forgotten by all humankind.”

“Why, that is wonderful!” Ingeborg clapped her hands, not thinking at once of the small children who had gone down with the city. “Oh, I’m so glad!”

“It’s not that wonderful,” Tauno said. “The merfolk remember Averorn because the kraken lairs there yet. They give it a wide berth.”

“I—I see. You must, though, bear some hope if you—”

“Yes. Worth trying. Look you, woman: Men cannot go undersea. Merfolk have no ships, nor metal weapons that don’t soon corrode away. Never have the races worked together. If they didmaybe—”

Ingeborg was a long time quiet before she said, almost not to be heard, “And maybe you’d be slain.”

“Yes, yes. What is that? Everybody’s born fey. My people stand close—they must—and a single life is of no high account among us. How could I range off to the ends of the world, knowing I had not done what I might for my little sister Yria who looks like my mother?” Tauno gnawed his lip. “But the ship, how to get the ship and crew?”

They talked back and forth, she trying to steer him from his course, he growing more set in it. At last she gave in. “I may be able to show you what you want,” she said.

“What? How?”

“You understand the fishing craft of Als are too cockleshell for what you have in mind. Nor could you hire a ship from a respectable owner, you being soulless and your venture being mad. However, there is a cog, not large but still a cog, that works out of Hadsund, the town some miles hence at the end of Mariager Fjord. I go to Hadsund on market days, and thus have come to know her men. She’s a cargo tramp, has fared as widely north as Finland, east as Wendland, west as Iceland. In such outlying parts, the crew have not been above a bit of piracy when it looked safe. They’re a gang of ruffians, and their skipper, the owner, is the worst. He came of a good family near Heming, but his father chose the wrong side in the strife between kings’ sons, and thus Herr Ranild Grib has nothing left to him besides this ship. And he swears bitterly at the Hansa, whose fleets are pushing him out of what business he could formerly get.

“It may be he’s desperate enough to league with you.”

Tauno considered. “Maybe,” he said. “Um-m-m. . . we merfolk are not wont to betray and kill our own kind, as men with souls are. I can fight; I would not fear to meet anyone with any weapon or none; still, where it comes to haggling and to being wary of a shipmate, that might be hard for us three siblings.”

“I know,” Ingeborg said. “Best I go along, to dicker and keep an eye open on your behalf.”

He started. “Would you indeed?” After a moment: “You shall have a full share in the booty, dear friend. You too shall be free.”

“If we live; otherwise, what matter? But Tauno, Tauno, think not I offer this out of lust for wealth—”

“I must speak with Eyjan and Kennin, of course—we must plan—we must talk further with you-nonetheless—”

“Indeed, Tauno, indeed, indeed. Tomorrow, forever, you shall have what you will from me. Tonight, though, I ask one thing, that you stop this fretting, cast off that veil which covers your eyes, and let us be only Tauno and Ingeborg. See, I’ve drawn off my gown for you.”

VII

When the black cog Herning stood out of Mariager Fjord, she caught a wind that filled her sail and sent her northward at a good clip. On deck, Tauno, Eyjan, and Kennin shed the human clothes—foul, enclosing rags!-that had disguised them during their days of chaffer with Ranild Espensen Grib. A lickerish shout lifted from six of the eight men, at sight of Eyjan white in the sunlight, clad only in dagger belt and tossing bronze mane. They were a shaggy, flea-bitten lot, those men, scarred from fights, their leather jackets, wadmal shirts and breeks ripe with old grease stains.

The seventh was a lad of eighteen winters, Niels Jonsen. He had come to Hadsund a couple of years before, seeking deckhand work to help care for widowed mother and younger siblings on a tiny tenant farm. Not long ago, the ship whereon he served had been wrecked-by God’s mercy without loss of life—and he could get no other new berth than this. He was a good-looking boy, slender, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, with straightforwardly shaped fresh features. Now he blinked away tears. “How beautiful she is,” he whispered.

The eighth was the captain. He scowled and came down off the poopdeck that sheltered the man at the tiller. (There was also a deck over the bows, through which the forepost jutted. Below and between these reached the main deck, with mast, two hatches, tackle, cooking-hearth, and what cargo -was carried topside. Among this last were a red granite boulder, three feet through and about a ton in weight; and a dozen extra anchors; and much cable.)

Ranild went to the halflings, where they and Ingeborg stood on the port side watching Jutland’s long hills slide by. It was a clear day; the sun cast dazzling glitter across gray-green-blue whitecaps. Wind skirled, rigging thrummed, timbers creaked as the cog’s cutwater surged with a bone in its teeth. Overhead, gulls mewed and made a snowstorm of wings. A smell of salt and tar blew around.

“You!” Ranild barked. “Make yourselves decent!”

Kennin gave him a look of dislike. Those had been hard hours of bargaining, in a back room of an evil inn; and merfolk were not used to a tongue like Ranild’s, rougher than a lynx’s. “Who are you to speak of decency?” Kennin snapped.

“Ease off,” Tauno muttered. He regarded the skipper with no more love but somewhat more coolness. Not tall, Ranild was thick of chest and arm. Black hair, never washed and scanty on top, framed a coarse broken-nosed pale-eyed countenance; snag teeth showed through a beard that spilled halfway down the tub belly. He was dressed like his crew, save that he bore a short sword as well as a knife and floppy boots rather than shoes or bare feet.

“What’s the matter?” Tauno asked. “You, Ranild, may like to wear clothes till they rot off you. Why should we?”

“Herr Ranild, merman!” The shipmaster clapped hand on hilt. “My folk were Junkers when yours dwelt among the flatfish—I’m noble yet, the Fiend thunder me! It’s my vessel, I laid out the costs of this faring, you’ll by God’s bones do what I tell you or swing from the yardarm!”

Eyjan’s dagger whipped out, to gleam near his gullet. “Unless we hang you by those louse-nest whiskers,” she said.

The sailors reached for knives and belaying pins. Ingeborg pushed between Eyjan and Ranild. “What are we doing?” she cried. “At each other’s throats already? You’ll not get the gold without the merfolk, Herr Ranild, nor they get it without your help. Hold back, in Jesu name!”

They withdrew a little on either side, still glowering. Ingeborg went on quietly: “I think I know what’s wrong. Herr Ranild, these children of the clean sea have been rubbed raw by days in a town where hogs root in the streets, by nights in a room full of stink and bedbugs. Nevertheless, you, Tauno, Eyjan, Kennin, should’ve listened to a rede well meant if not so well spoken.”

“What is that?” Tauno asked.

Ingeborg flushed; her eyes dropped and her fingers wrestled. She said quieter yet: “Remember the agreement. Herr Ranild wanted you, Eyjan, to go below for him and his men. You would not. I said I. . . would do that, and thus we came to terms. Now you are very fair, Eyjan, fairer than any mortal girl can be. It’s not right for you to tlaunt your loveliness before those who may only stare. Our voyage is into deadly danger. We can’t afford strife.”

The haltling bit her lip. “I had not thought of that,” she admitted. Flaring: “But rather than wear those barn-rug rags when we’ve no need of disguise, I’ll kill the crew and we four will man this ship ourselves.”

Ranild opened his mouth. Tauno forestalled him: “That’s empty talk, sister mine. See here, we can stand the horrible thiqgs till we pass Als. There we’ll dive down to where Liri was, fetch garments fit to use—and cleanse the filth of these off us on the way.”

Thus peace was made. Men kept leering at Eyjan, for the rainbow-hued tunic of three-ply fishskin that she donned after going underwater showed cleft of breasts and hardly reached past her hips. But they had Ingeborg to take below.

The human clothes had been from that woman, who walked alone through rover-haunted woods to Hadsund, got Ranild interested, and met the siblings on the shore of Mariager Fjord to guide them to him. Once the bargain was handselled, he had to persuade his men to go along. Gaunt, surly, ash-pale Oluv Ovesen, the second in command, had not hesitated; greed ruled his life. Torben and Lave said they had faced edged steel erenow and looked at the end to face nooses; therefore, why not a kraken? Palle, Tyge, and Sivard had let themselves be talked over. But the last deckhand quit, which was why young Niels Jonsen was taken on.

No one asked Ranild what had become of his former crewman. Secrecy was important, lest priest forbid or noble thrust into the undertaking. Aslak was simply never seen again.

That first day Herning passed the broad beaches and thunderous surf of the Skaw, and from the Skagerrak entered the North Sea. She must round Scotland, then work southwest to a locality well beyond Ireland. In spite of being a good sailer, she would need Godsend winds to make it in less than two weeks—which in truth was how long the time became.

Since she was traveling in ballast, there was ample room below decks, and that was where the men slept. The haltlings disdained such a gloomy, dirty, rat-scuttering, roach-crawling cave, and took their rest above. They used no bags or blankets, only straw ticks. Often they would spring overboard, frolic about the ship, maybe vanish beneath the waves for an hour or two.

Ingeborg told Tauno once that she would have liked to stay topside with them; however, Ranild had ordered her to spend the nights in the hold, ready for whoever might want her. Tauno shook his head. “Humans are a nasty lot,” he remarked.

“Your small sister has become human,” she answered. “And have you forgotten your mother, Father Knud, your friends in Als?”

“N-n-no. Nor you, Ingeborg. After we’re back home—but of course I’ll be leaving Denmark.”

“Yes.” She glanced away. “We have another good fellow aboard. The boy Niels.”

He was the sole crewman who did not use her, and yet who was always cheerful and polite toward her. (Tauno and Kennin likewise stayed clear of that pallet in the hold; those who now shared her were not honest yeomen and fishers, and for themselves they had billows to tumble in, seal and dolphin to play with, flowing green depths to enter.) Mostly Niels followed Eyjan about with his eyes and, shyly when off watch, himself.

The rest of the crew had no more to do with the halflings than they must. They took the fresh fish brought aboard, but would not speak with the bringers while it was eaten. To Ingeborg they grumbled words like, “Damned heathen... uppity. . . talking beasts... worse than Jews. . . we’d be forgiven many sins if we cut their throats, wouldn’t we?. . well, before I put my knife in that bare-legged wench, I’ve something else... .” Ranild kept his own counsel. He too stayed aloof from the three after his few tries at friendliness were rebuffed. Tauno had sought to respond; but the skipper’s talk bored when it did not disgust him, and he had never learned to dissemble.

He did like Niels. They seldom had converse, though, for Tauno was close-mouthed save when chanting a poem. Moreover, in age Niels was nearer to Kennin, and those two found a deal of memories and jokes to swap. Among other jobs, hours a day were spent in weaving the extra cable into a great net. Niels and Kennin would sit together at this work, paying no heed to the sullen men around, and laugh and chatter: “—I swear that was one time an oyster showed surprise!”

“Hm, I mind me of years back when I was a sprat. We kept a few cows, and I was leading one of ’em to a kinsman’s bull. By the road was a gristmill with a waterwheel, and from afar I saw it begin work. A cow has dimmer eyes than a human; this lovesick creature knew only that something big stood in the offing and bellowed. Away she went, me galloping after and yelling till the halter was yanked from my hand. But I soon caught her, oh yes. When she found it was no bull, she stopped, she looked like a blown-up bladder that’s been blade-pricked; she merely stood till I took the halter, and afterward she shambled along meek as if she’d been poleaxed.”

“Ho, ho, let me tell you about when we boys dressed a walrus in my father’s robe of state—”

Eyjan would frequently join in the merriment. She did not follow ladylike ways, even in the slight degree that most mermaids did. She haggled her red locks off at the shoulders, wore no ring or necklace or golden gown save at festivals, would rather hunt or challenge the surf around a skerry than sit tame at home. On the whole, she scorned landfolk (in spite of which, she had prowled the woods with cries of delight for blossoms, birdsong, deer, squirrel, autumn’s fiery leaves and the snow and icicles that glittered after). But of some she was fond, Niels among them. Also, she did not lie with her brothers—a Christian law which Agnete had gotten well into her older children ere leaving them—and the mermen were gone to an unknown place and the lads of Als were far behind.

Herning plowed through day and night, squall and breeze, until she raised what Tauno and Ranild agreed were the southern Orkney Islands. That was toward evening: mild weather, fair wind, cleat: summer night and a full moon due. They saw no reason not to push on through the narrows after sunset, the more so when the brothers offered to swim ahead as waterline lookouts. Eyjan wanted to do the same, but Tauno said one must stay back against possible disaster like a sudden onslaught of sharks; and when they drew lots, hers was the short straw. She cursed for minutes without repeating herself before she calmed down.

Thus it happened that she stood alone on the main deck, near the forecastle. Another lookout was perched aloft, screened from her by the bellying sail, and a helmsman was under the poop, hidden in its shadow. The rest, who had leamed to trust the halflings in watery matters, snored below.

Save for Niels, who came back and found Eyjan there. The moonlight sparkled on her tunic, sheened on her face and breast and limbs, lost itself in her hair. It washed the deck clean, it built a shivering road from the horizon to the laciness of foam on small waves. They slapped very gently on the hull, those waves, and Niels, who was barefoot, could feel it, because the ship was heeled just enough that he became aware of standing. The sail, dull brown with leather crisscrossing by day, loomed overhead like a snowc peak. The rigging creaked, the wind lulled, the sea murmured. It was almost warm. Far, far above, in a dreamy half-darkness, glinted stars.

“Good evening,” he said awkwardly.

She smiled at the tall, frightened boy. “Welcome,” she said.

“Have you...may I...may I join you?”

“I wish you would.” Eyjan pointed to where the luminance picked out a couple of widely spaced roilings on the port and starboard quarters. “I long to be with them. Take my mind off it, Niels.”

“You-you-you do love your sea, no?”

“What better thing to love? Tauno made a poem once—I cannot put it well into Danish-let me try: Above, she dances, clad in sun, in moon, in rain, in wind, strewing gulls and spindrift kisses. Below, she is green and gold, calm, all-caressing, she whose children are reckoned by shoals and herds and pods and flocks beyond knowing, giver and shelterer of the world. But farthest down she keeps what she will not ever let the light see, mystery and terror, the womb wherein she bears herself. Maiden, Mother, and Mistress of Mysteries, enfold at the end my weary bones!. . . No.” Eyjan shook her head. “That is not right. Maybe if you thought of your earth, the great wheel of its year, and that... Mary? . . . who wears a cloak colored like the sky, maybe then you could—I know not what I am trying to say.”

“I can’t believe you’re soulless!” Niels cried softly.

Eyjan shrugged. Her mood had shifted. “They tell me our kind was friendly with the old gods, and with older gods before them. Yet never have we made offering or worship. I’ve tried and failed to understand such things. Does a god need flesh or gold? Does it matter to him how you live? Does it swerve him if you grovel and whimper? Does he care whether you care about him? “I can’t bear to think you’ll someday be nothing. I beg you, get christened.”

“Ho! Likelier would you come undersea. Not that I could bring you myself, My father knows the magic for that; we three don’t.” She laid a hand over his, where he gripped the rail till his fingers hurt: “Yet I would fain take you, Niels,” she said low, “Only for a while, only to share what I love with you,”

“You are too, . . too kind,” He started to go. She drew him back.

“Come,” she smiled, “Under the foredeck are darkness and my bed,”

“What?” He could not at once comprehend, “But you but—”

Her chuckle cuddled him, “Fear not, We sea-wives do know the spell that keeps us from conceiving unless we wish it,”

“But—only for sport—with you—”

“For sharing of more than pleasure, Niels,” However gentle, the pull of her hand on his arm became overwhelming,

Tauno and Kennin did not swim watch for naught. They called up warning of a rock, and alter of a drifting boat, perhaps broken loose from a ship that was towing it, These were trafficked waters this time of year, Ranild felt cordial toward the brothers when they came aboard at dawn,

“God’s stones!” he bawled, laying hand on Kennin’s shoulder. “Your breed could turn a pretty penny in royal fleet or merchant marine,”

The boy slipped free. “I fear the penny must be prettier than any they own,” he laughed, “to make me stand in an outhouse breath like yours,”

Ranild cuffed after him, Tauno stepped between. “No more,” the oldest halfling rapped, “We know what work is to be done and how the gains are to be shared. Best not overtread-from either side,”

Ranild stamped from them with a spit and an oath, His men growled,

Soon afterward Niels found himself circled by four off watch, up on the poop, They cackled and nudged him, and when he would not answer them they drew knives and spoke of cutting him till he did. Later they were to say it was not really meant, But that was then. At the time, Niels broke through, tumbled down the ladder, and ran forward.

The merman’s children lay asleep beneath the forecastle. It was a blue day of blithe winds; a couple of sails were on the horizon, and gull wings betokened the nearness of land.

The slumberers woke with animal quickness. “What’s wrong now?” asked Eyjan, placing herself beside the human youth. She drew the steel dagger that, like her brothers, she had gotten Ingeborg to buy for her with a bit of Liri gold. Tauno and Kennin flanked them, harpoons in hand.

“They-oh—they—” Red and white flew over Niels’ cheeks. The tongue locked in his mouth.

Oluv Ovesen shambled ahead of Torben, Faile, and Tyge. (Ranild and Ingeborg slept below; Lave was at the helm, Sivard on lookout in the crow’s nest; these last watched with drool and catcalls.) The mate kept blinking his white lashes and peeling lips back from his yellow teeth. “Well, well,” he hailed, “who’s next, good slut?”

Eyjan’s eyes were flint gray, storm gray. “What mean you,” she answered, “if ever a yapping cur means anything?”

Oluv stopped two ells short of those threatening spears. Angrily, he said: “Tyge was at the tiller last night and Torben at the masthead. They saw you go beneath the foredeck with this milksop boy. They heard you two whispering, thrashing, thumping, and moaning.”

“And what has my sister to do with you?” Kennin bristled.

Oluv wagged a finger. “This,” he said: “that we went along as honest men with leaving her alone; but if she spreads her legs for one, she does for all.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because we’re all in this together, you. And anyway, what right has a sea cow to give herself airs and pick and choose?” Oluv sniggered. “Me first, Eyjan. You’ll have more fun with a real man, I promise you.”

“Go away,” said the girl, shaking with fury.

“There’s three of them,” Oluv told his crewfolk. “I don’t count little Niels. Lave, lash the tiller. Hallohoi, Sivard, come on down!”

“What do you intend?” Tauno asked in a level voice.

Oluv picked his teeth with a fingernail. “Oh, nothing much, fish-man, if you and your brother are sensible. We’ll hogtie you for a while, no more. Else-Easy with that lance. We’ve pikes and crossbows we can fetch, remember, and we’re six against you.” He laughed. “Six! Your sister’ II soon be thanking us.”

Eyjan yelled like a cat. Kennin snarled, “I’ll see you in the Black Ooze first!” Niels groaned, tears breaking loose; one hand drew his knife, the other reached for Eyjan. Tauno waved them back. His mer-face was quite still within the wind-blown locks.

“Is this your unbreakable will?” he asked tonelessly.

“It is,” Oluv replied.

“I see.”

“You, she... soulless. . . two-legged beasts. Beasts have no rights.”

“Oh, but they do. However, turds do not. Enjoy yourself, Oluv.” And Tauno launched his harpoon.

The mate screamed when those barbs entered his guts. He fell and lay flopping on the deck, spouting blood, yammering and yammering. Tauno leaped to snatch the now loosened shaft. Wielding it like a quarterstaff, he waded into the crewmen. His siblings and Niels came behind. “Don’t kill them!” Tauno roared.

“We need their hands!”

Niels got no chance to fight. His comrades were too swift. Kennin drove stiffened fingers into Torben’s midriff and, wheeling, kneed Palle in the groin. Tauno’s shaft laid Tyge flat. Eyjan bounded to meet Lave, who was running at her from aft; she stopped when they had almost met, caught his body on her hip, and sent him flying to crack his pate against the foredeck ladder. Sivard scrambled back aloft. And that was that.

Ranild came howling from the hold. Confronted by three halflings and a strong lad, he must needs agree, no matter how sulkily, that Oluv Ovesen had fallen on his own deeds. Ingeborg helped by reminding everyone that this meant fewer to share the booty. A kind of truce was patched together, and Oluv’s corpse sent overs ide with a rock from the ballast lashed to his ankles so he would not bring bad luck by rising to look at his shipmates.

Thereafter Ranild and his men spoke no unnecessary word to the merman’schildren—or to Niels, who slept with the latter lest he get a knife in the kidneys. Given such close quarters, the boy could do nothing to Eyjan save adore her. She would smile and pat his cheek, but absently; her mind was elsewhere, and often her body.

Ingeborg sought out Tauno in the bows and warned him that the crew did not mean for those they hated to live many days past the time the gold was aboard. She got them to talk by herself pretending loathing for the Liri folk, claiming to have befriended these in the same spirit as one might lure an ermine into a trap for its pelt.

“Your word is no surprise,” Tauno said. “We’ll stand watch and watch, the whole way home.” He considered her. “How haggard you’ve grown.”

“Easier was it among the fishermen,.. she sighed.

He took her chin in his palm. “When we get back, if we do,” he said, “you’ll have the freedom of the world. If we don’t, you’ll have peace.”

“Or Hell,” she said tiredly. “I did not come along either for freedom or for peace. Now best we stay apart, Tauno, so they won’t think we’re of the same heart.”

What kept Eyjan busy, and her brothers, was the search for lost Averom. Merfolk always knew where they were; but the halflings did not know where their goal was, within two or three hundred sea-miles. They swam out to ask of passing dolphinsnot in just that way, for those beings did not use language of the same kind; yet merfolk had means for getting help from creatures they believed to be their cousins.

And directions were indeed gotten, more and more exact as the ship drew nearer. Yes, a bad place, said Fishgrabber, a kraken lair, ah, steer clear... it is true that krakens, like other coldblooded things, can lie long unfed; however, this one must be ravenous after centuries with naught but stray whales. . . he stays there, said Sheerfin, because he still thinks it is his Averom, he broods on its drowned treasures and towers and the bones that once worshipped him. . . he has grown, I hear tell, until his arms reach from end to end of the ruined main square. . . well, for old times’ sake we’ll guide you thither, said Spraybow, seeing as how the moon wanes toward the half, which is when he goes to sleep, though he is readily aroused. . . but no, give you more than guidance, no, we have too many darlings to think about. . . .

In this wise did Herning at last reach that spot in the ocean beneath which lay sunken Averom.

VIII

The dolphins took hasty leave. Their finned gray backs were rainbowed by the morning sun, in mist off the froth cast up by their flukes. Tauno felt sure they would go no farther than to the nearest edge of safety; that was an unslakably curious and gossipy breed.

He had laid a course to bring the cog here at this time, giving a full day’s light for work. Now she lay hove to and the broadbeamed hull hardly rocked at rest. For it was a calm day, with the least of breezes in an almost cloudless heaven. Waves went small and chuckling, scant foam aswirl on their tops. Looking overside, Tauno marveled, as he had done throughout his life, at how intricately and beautifully wrinkled each wave was, no two alike, no one ever the same as its past self. And how warmly the sunbeams washed over his skin, how coolly the salt air blessed him! He had not broken his fast, that being unwise before diving to the uttermost deeps, and was thus aware of his belly, and this too was good, like every awareness.

“Well,” he said, “soonest begun, soonest done.”

The sailors goggled at him. They had brought out pikes, which they clutched as if trying to keep afloat on them. Behind suntan, dirt, and hair, five of those faces were terrified; Adam’s apples bobbed in gullets. Ranild stood stoutly, a crossbow cocked on his left arm. And while Niels was pale, he burned and trembled with the eagerness of a lad too young to really know that young lads can also die.

“Get busy, you lubbers,” jerred Kennin. “We’re doing the work that counts. Can’t you tum a windlass?”

“I give the orders, boy,” said Ranild with unwonted calm. “Still, he’s right. Hop to it.”

Sivard wet his lips. “Skipper,” he said hoarsely, “I. . . I think best we put about.”

“After coming this far?” Ranild grinned. “Had I known you’re a woman, I could have gotten some use out of you.”

“What’s gold to an eaten man? Shipmates, think. The kraken can haul us undersea the way we haul up a hooked flounder. We—”

Sivard spoke no more. Ranild decked him with a blow that brought nosebleed. “Man the tackle, you whoresons,” the captain rasped, “or Satan fart me out if I don’t send you to the kraken myself!”

They scurried to obey. “He does not lack courage,” Eyjan said in the mer-tongue.

“Nor does he lack treachery,” Tauno warned. “Turn never your back on any of that scurvy lot.”

“Save Niels and Ingeborg,” she said.

“Oh, you’d not want to turn your back on him, nor I mine on her,” Kennin laughed. He likewise felt no fear, he was wild to be off.

Using a crane they had fitted together and braced against the mast, the sailors raised that which had been readied while under way. A large piece of iron had been hammered into the boulder till it stood fast; thereafter the outthrusting half was ground and whetted to a barbed spearhead. Elsewhere in the rock were rings, and the huge net was secured to these at its middle. Along the outer edges of the net were bent the twelve ship-anchors. All this made a sort of bundle lashed below a raft whose right size had been learned by trial and error. The crane arm dangled it over the starboard bulwark, tilting the cog.

“Let’s go,” said Tauno. He himself was unafraid, though at the back of his head he did think on the fact that this world-that entered him and that he entered through senses triply heightened by danger-might soon crack to an end, not only in its present and future but in its very past.

The siblings took off their clothes, save for the headbands and dagger belts. Each slung a pair of harpoons across the shoulders. They stood for a moment at the rail, their sea ablaze behind them, tall Tauno, lithe Kennin, Eyjan of the white skin and the comely breasts.

To them came Niels. He wrung their hands, he kissed the girl, he wept because he could not go with them. Meanwhile Ingeborg held hands and eyes with Tauno. She had braided her hair, but a stray brown lock fluttered across her brow. Upon her snubnosed, full-mouthed, freckled face had come a grave loneliness he had never known before, not ever among the merfolk.

“It may be I will not see you again, Tauno,” she said, too low for others to listen, “and sure it is that I cannot and must not speak what is in my heart. Yet I’ll pray for this, that if you go to your death, on your errand for a sister’s sake, God give you in your last moment the pure soul you have earned.”

“Oh. . . you are kind, but-well, I fully mean to come back.”

“I drew a bucket of sea water ere dawn,” she whispered, “and washed myself clean. Will you kiss me farewell?”

He did. Her pretense of dislike was no longer needful, he supposed; his alliance could guard her, as well as each other, on the homeward voyage. “Overboard!” he shouted, and plunged.

Six feet beneath, the sea took him with a joyful splash. It sheathed him in aliveness. He savored the taste and coolness for a whole minute before he called, “Lower away.”

The sailors cranked down the laden raft. It floated awash, weight exactly upheld. Tauno cast it loose. The humans crowded to the rail. The halflings waved-not to them but to wind and. sun—and went under.

The first breath of sea was always easier than the first of air. One simply blew out, then stretched wide the lips and chest. Water came in, tingling through mouth, nostrils, throat, lungs, stomach, guts, blood, to the last nail and hair. That dear shock threw the body over to merfolk way; subtle humors decomposed the fluid element itself to get the stuff which sustains fish, fowl, flesh, and fire alike; salt was sieved from the tissues; interior furnaces stoked themselves high against the lamprey chill.

That was a reason why merfolk were scarce. They required more food afloat than men do ashore. A bad catch or a murrain among the shellfish might make an entire tribe starve to death. The sea gives; the sea takes.

Vanimen’s children placed themselves to manhandle their clumsy load and swam downward.

As first the light was like new leaves and old amber. Soon it grew murky, soon afterward blackness ate the last of it. No matter their state, the siblings felt cold. Silence hemmed them in. They were bound for depths below any in Kattegat or Baltic; this was the Ocean. “Hold,” Tauno said, in the dialect of the mer-tongue that was used underwater, a language of many hums, clicks, and smacks. “Is she riding steady? Can you keep her here?”

“Aye,” answered Eyjan and Kennin.

“Good. Let this be where you wait.”

They made no bold protests. They had worked out their plan and now abode by it, as those must who dare the great deep. Tauno, strongest and most skilled, was to scout ahead.

Strapped on the left forearm, each of them carried a lanthorn from Liri. This was a hollowed crystal globe, plated with varnished silver on one half and shaped into a lens on the other half, filled with that living seafire which lit the homes of the merfolk. A hole, covered with mesh too fine for those animalcules to escape, let them be fed and let water go in and out. The ball rested in a box of carven bone, shuttered in front. None of the lanthorns had been opened.

“Fare you lucky,” said Eyjan. The three embraced in the dark. Tauno departed. Down he swam and down. He had not thought his world could grow blacker, bleaker, stiller, but it did. Again and yet again he worked muscles in chest and belly to help inside pressure become the same as outside. Nevertheless it was as if the weight of every foot he sank were loaded on him.

At last he felt-as a man at night may feel a wall in front of him-that he neared bottom. And he caught an odor. . . a taste ... a sense... of rank flesh; and through the water pulsed the slow in—and-out of the kraken’s gills.

He uncovered the lanthorn. Its beam was pale and did not straggle far; but it served his Faerie eyes. Awe crawled along his backbone.

Below him reached acres of ruin. A verorn had been large, and built throughout of stone. Most had toppled to formless masses in the silt. But here stood a tower, like a last snag tooth in a dead man’s jaw; there a temple only partly fallen, gracious colonnades around a god who sat behind his altar and stared blind into eternity; yonder the mighty wreck of a castle, its battlements patrolled by spookily glowing fish; that way the harbor, marked off by mounds that were buried piers and city walls, still crowded with galleons; this way a house, roof gone to show the skeleton of a man forever trying to shield the skeletons of a woman and child; and everywhere, everywhere burst-open vaults and warehouses, the upward twinkle of gold and gems on the seabed!

And sprawled at the middle was the kraken. Eight of his darkly gleaming arms reached into the comers of the eight-sided plaza that bore his mosaic image. His remaining two arms, the longest, twice the length of Herning, were curled around a pillar at the north side which bore on top the triskeled disc of that god he had conquered. His terrible finned head sagged loosely over them; Tauno could just glimpse the hook beak and a swart lidless eye.

The halfling snapped back the shutter and started to rise in lightlessness. A throbbing went through the ocean, into his bones. It was as if the world shook. He cast a beam downward. The kraken was stirring. He had awakened him. Tauno clenched his teeth. Wildly he dug hands and feet into that frigid thick water; he ignored the pain of pressure too hastily lifted; yet icily with merfolk senses he noted which way he moved. It rumbled below him. The kraken had stretched and gaped, a portico had been knocked to pieces.

At the verge of daylight, Tauno halted. He hung afloat and blinked with his lanthom. A vast shadowiness swelled beneath.

Now, till Kennin and Eyjan got here, he must stay alive-yes. hold the monster in play so it would not go elsewhere.

In the middle of that rising stormcloud body, he saw a baleful sheen of eyes. The beak clapped. An arm coiled out at him. Upon it were suckers that could strip the ribs of a whale. Barely did he swerve aside from its snatching. It came back, loop after loop of it. He drove his knife in to the hilt. The blood which smoked forth when he withdrew the blade tasted like strong vinegar. The arm struck him and he rolled off end over end, in pain and his head awhirl.

Another arm and another closed in. He wondered dazedly who he was to fight a god. Somehow he unslung a harpoon. Before the crushing grip had him, he swam downward with all his speed. Maybe he could get a stab Into that mouth.

A shattering scream blasted him from his wits.

He came to a minute later. His brow ached, his ears tolled.. Around him the water had gone wild. Eyjan and Kennin were at his sides, upholding him. He glanced blurrily bottomward and saw a shrinking inkiness. The kraken hooted and threshed as it sank. “Look, oh, look!” Kennin jubilated. He pointed with his own lanthom. Through blood, sepia, and seething, the wan ray picked out the kraken in his torment.

Brother and sister had towed their weapon above him. They had cut it free of its raft. The spear, with a ton of rock behind it, had pierced the body of the kraken.

“Are you hurt?” Eyjan asked Tauno. Her voice wavered through the uproar. “My dear, my dear, can you get about?”

“I’d better be able to,” he mumbled. Shaking his head seemed to clear away some of the fog.

The kraken sank back into the city he had murdered. The spear wound, while grievous, had not ended his cold life, nor was the weight of the boulder more than he could lift. However, around’ him was the outsize net.

And now the merman’s children carne to grab the anchors on the rim of that net and make them fast in the ruins of A verom.

Desperate was their work, with the giant shape threshing, the giant arms flailing and clutching. Cast-up ooze and vomited ink blinded eyes, choked lungs, in stinking clouds; cables whipped, tangled, and snapped; walls broke under blows that sent Doomsday thunders through the water; the hootings beat on skulls and clawed at eardrums; the attackers were hit, cast bruisingly aside, scraped by barnacled skin until their own blood added iron taste to the acid of the kraken’s; they were a battered three who finally pegged him down.

But bind him they did. And they swarn to where his huge head throbbed and jerked, his beak snapped at the imprisoning strands, his arms squirmed like a snakepit under the mesh. Through the murk-mists they looked into those wide, conscious eyes. The kraken stopped his clamor. They heard only a rush of current, in and out of his gills. He glared unflinchingly at them.

“Brave have you been,” said Tauno, “a fellow dweller in the sea. Therefore know that you are not being killed for gain.”

He took the right eye, Kennin the left. They thrust their harpoons in to the shaft ends. When that did not halt the strugglings which followed, they used their second pair, and both of Eyjan’s. Kraken blood and kraken anguish drove them off.

After a while it was over. Some of their weapons must have worked into the brain and slashed it. The siblings fled from A verorn to the sunlight. They sprang into air and saw the cog wallowing in billows that the fight in the deeps had raised. Tauno and Eyjan did not bother to unload their lungs, though air-breathing they would be lighter than the water. They kept afloat with gentle paddling, let the ocean soothe and croon to their aching bodies, and drank draught upon draught of being alive. It was young Kennin who shouted to those clustered white-faced at the bulwarks: “We did it! We slew the kraken! The treasure is ours!”

At that, Niels ran up the ratlines, crowing like a cock, and Ingeborg burst into tears. The other sailors gave a cheer that was oddly short; thereafter they kept attention mainly on Ranild. Through the waves leaped the dolphins, twoscore of them, to hear the tale.

Work remained. When the swimmers signed that they had rested enough, Ranild cast them a long weighted line with a sack and a hook at the end. They took it back under.

Already the ghost-fish he had been too slow to catch were nibbling on the kraken. “Let’s do our task and be away from here as fast as we can,” said Tauno. His companions agreed. They liked not poking around a tomb.

Yet for Margrete who had been Yria they did. Over and over they filled the bag with coin, plate, rings, crowns, ingots; over and over they hung on the hook a golden chest or horn or candelabrum or god. A signal would not travel well along this length of rope; the crew simply hauled it in about every half hour. Tauno discovered he had better attach his lanthorn, for, although the sea above had quieted, Berning did drift around and the line never descended to the same place. Between times the merman’s children searched for new objects, or took a little ease, or fed themselves off the cheese and stockfish Ingeborg had laid in the sack.

Until Tauno said wearily: “We were told several hundred pounds would be ample, and I swear we’ve lifted a ton. A greedy man is an unlucky man. Shall we begone?”

“Oh, yes, oh, yes.” Eyjan peered into the glooms that bulked around their sphere of weak light. She shivered and huddled close to her elder brother. Rarely before had he seen her daunted.

Kennin was not. “I begin to know why the landfolk are so fond of looting,” he said with a grin. “There’s fun in an endlessness of baubles as in an endlessness of ale or women.”

“Not truly endless,” Tauno answered in his sober fashion.

“Why, is it not endlessness if you have more of something than you can finish off in your lifetime, gold to spend, ale to drink, women-?” Kennin laughed.

“Bear with him,” Eyjan said into Tauno’s ear. “He’s a boy. All Creation is opening for him.”

“I’m no oldster myself,” Tauno replied, “though the trolls know I feel like a mortal one.”

They rid themselves of the remaining lanthorns, putting these in the last bagful. It would rise faster than was wise for them. Tauno gestured salute to unseen Averorn. “Sleep well,” he murmured; “May your rest be unbroken till the Weird of the World.”

From cold, dark, and death, they passed into light and thence into air. The sun cast nearly level beams out of the west, whose sky was greenish; eastward, amidst royal blue, stood forth a white planet. Waves ran purple and black, filigreed with foam, though the breeze had stopped. Their rush and squelp were the lone sounds in that coolness, save for what was made by the lolloping dolphins.

These wanted at once to know everything, but the siblings were too tired. They promised full news tomorrow, coughed the water from their lungs, and made for the cog. None waited at the rail save Herr Ranild. A rope ladder dangled down amidships.

Tauno came first aboard. He stood dripping, shuddering a bit from exhaustion, and looked around. Ranild bore crossbow in crook of arm; his men gripped their pikes near the mast- The kraken was dead. Why this tautness among them? Where were Ingeborg and Niels?

“Um-m-m . . . you’re satisfied?” Ranild rumbled in his whiskers.

“We have plenty for our sister, and to make the lot of you rich,” Tauno said. His flesh dragged at him, chilled, bruised, worn out. The same ache and dullness were in his head. He felt he ought to be chanting his victory; no, that could wait, let him only rest now, only sleep.

Eyjan climbed over the side. “Niels?” she called.

A glance across the six who stood there sent the knife hissing from her scabbard. “Treachery-this soon?”

“Kill them!” Ranild shouted.

Kennin had just come off the ladder. He was still poised on the rail. As the sailors and their pikes surged forward, he yelled and pounced to the deck. None among those clumsy shafts had swiftness to halt him. Straight at Ranild’s throat he flew, blade burning in the sunset glow. ,

Ranild lifted the crossbow and shot. Kennin crashed at his feet. The quarrel had gone through breastbone, heart, and back. Blood poured across the planks.

It stabbed in Tauno: Ingeborg had warned of betrayal, but Ranild was too shrewd for her. He must have plotted with man after single man, in secret comers of the hold. The moment the swimmers went after their booty, he gave the word to seize her and Niels. And slay them? No, that might leave traces; bind them, gag them, lay them below decks, until the trusting halflings had returned.

Eyjan’s quick understanding, Kennin’s ready action had upset the plan. The onrush of sailors was shaken and slowed. There was time for Eyjan and Tauno to dive overboard.

A couple of pikes arced harmlessly after them. Ranild loomed at the rail, black across the evening. His guffaw boomed forth: “Maybe this’ll buy your passage home from the sharks!” And down to them he cast the body of Kennin.

IX

The dolphins gathered.

With them, after the manner of merfolk, Tauno and Eyjan left their brother. They had closed the eyes, folded the hands, and taken the knife-steel beginning to rust-that it might go on in use as something that had known him. Now it was right that he should make the last gift which was his to give, not to the conger eels but to those who had been his friends.

The halflings withdrew a ways while the long blue-gray shapes surrounded Kennin-very quietly, very gently—and they sang across the sunset ocean that farewell which ends:

“But oh, Tauno, Tauno!” Eyjan wept. “He was so young!”

He held her close. The low waves rocked them. “Stark are the Noms,” Tauno said. “He made a good departure.”

A dolphin came to them and asked in dolphin wise what more help they wished. It would not be hard to keep the ship hereabouts, as by smashing the rudder. Presently thirst would wreak justice.

Tauno glanced at the cog, becalmed on the horizon, sail furled. “No,” he said, “they hold hostages. Nevertheless, something must be done.”

“I’ll cut open Herr Ranild’s belly,” Eyjan said, “And tie the end of his gut to the mast, and chase him around the mast till he’s lashed to it.”

“I hardly think him worth that much trouble,” Tauno replied. “Dangerous is he, though. To attack the ship herself, with the dolphins or by swimming beneath and prying strake from strake, is no trick. To seize her, on the other hand, may be impossible. Yet must we try, for Yria, Ingeborg, and Niels. Come, we’d better take food—our cousins will catch us some—and rest. Our strength has been spent.”

—A while after midnight he awoke refreshed. Grief had not drained from him; however, the keenness for rescue and revenge filled most of his being.

Eyjan slept on, awash in a cloud of her hair. Strange how innocent, almost childlike her face had become, lips half parted and long lashes down over cheekbones. Around her were the guardian dolphins. Tauno kissed her in the hollow where throat met breast, and swam softly away.

It was a light night of Northern summer. Overhead, heaven stood aglow, a twilight wherein the stars looked small and tender. The waters glimmered, barely moving, a lap-lap-lap of wavelets above the deeper half-heard march of the tide. The air was hushed, cool, and damp.

Tauno came to Berning. He circled her with the stealthiness of a shark. Nobody seemed to be at the helm, but a man stood at either side of the main deck, pike agleam, and a third was in the crow’s nest. Lanthorns were left dark so as not to dazzle their eyes. That meant three below. They were standing watch and watch. Ranild was taking no chances with his foes.

Or was he? The rail amidships lay scarcely more than a fathom above the water. One might find means to climb—And maybe kill a man or two before the racket fetched everybody else. Useless, that. Vanimen’s children had beaten the whole crew erenow; but that had been when no sailor carried more than a knife, and none really looked for a battle, and anyhow—once

Oluv was out of the way-it had been no death-fight. Also, Kennin was gone.

With naught save his upper countenance raised forth, Tauno waited for whatever might happen.

At length he heard a footfall, and the man who blotted the starboard sky called, “Well, well, do you pant for us already?”

“You’re on watch, remember,” came Ingeborg’s voice—how dragging, how utterly empty! “I could grit my teeth and seduce you if I thought the skipper would flog you for leaving your post; but so such luck. No, I left that sty in the hold for a breath of air, forgetting that here also are horrible swine.”

“Have a care, harlot. You know we can’t risk you alive for a witness, but there are ways and ways to die.”

“And if you get too saucy, we may not keep you till the last night out,” said the man on the larboard side. “That gold’ll buy me more whores than I can handle, so why bother with Cod-Ingeborg?”

“Aye, piss on her,” said the man aloft, and tried to. She fled weeping under the poop. Laughter bayed at her heels.

Tauno stiffened for a moment. Then, ducking silently below, he swam to the rudder. Its barnacles were rough and its weeds were slimy in his grasp. He lifted himself with more slowness and care than he had used in scouting the kraken’s den. Because of sheer the tiller was about eight feet overhead, in that cavern made by the upper deck. Tauno caught the post with both hands, curved his chine, and got toes in between post and hull, resting on a bracket. In a smooth motion, not stopping to wince as the bronze dug into his flesh, he rose to where he could crook fingers on the after rail; and thus he chinned himself up.

“What was that?” cried a sailor on the twilit main deck.

Tauno waited. The water dripped off him no louder than wavelets patted the hull. It felt cold.

“Ah, a damned dolphin or something,” said another man. “Beard of Christ, I’ll be glad to leave this creepy spot!”

“What’s the second thing you’ll do ashore?” A coarse threeway gabbing began. Tauno reached Ingeborg. She had drawn one breath when she saw him athwart silvery-dark heaven. Afterward she stood most quiet, save for the wild flutterings of her heart.

He caught her to him in the lightlessness under the poop. Even then he marked the rounded firmness of her, the warm fragrance, the hair that tickled his lips laid close to her ear. But he whispered merely: “How goes it on board? Is Niels alive?”

“Until tomorrow.” She could not respond with quite the steadiness that Eyjan would have shown; but she did well. “They tied and gagged us both, you know. Me they’ll keep a while-did you hear? They’re not so vile that Niels has any use for them. He lies bound yet, of course. They talked about what to do with him while he listened. Finally they decided the best sport would be to watch him sprattle from the yardarm tomorrow morning.” Her nails dug into his arm. “Were I not a Christian woman, how good to spring overboard into your sea!”

He missed her meaning. “Don’t. I couldn’t help you; if naught else, you’d die of chill. . . . Let me think, let me think. . . . Ah.”

“What?” He could sense how she warned herself not to hope.

“Can you pass a word to Njels?”

“Maybe when he’s hilled forth. They’ll surely make me come along.”

“Well. . . if you can without being overheard, tell him to lift his heart and be ready to fight.” Tauno pondered a minute. “We need to pull eyes away from the water. When they’re about to put the rope around Niels’ neck, let him struggle as much as he’s able. And you too: rush in, scratch, bite, kick, scream.”

“Do you think-do you believe-really-Anything, I’ll do anything. God is merciful, that He. . . He lets me die in battle at your side, Tauno.”

“Not that! Don’t risk yourself. If a knife is drawn at you, yield, beg to be spared. And take shelter from the fighting. I don’t need your corpse, Ingeborg. I need you.”

“Tauno, Tauno.” Her mouth sought his.

“I must go,” he breathed in her ear. “Until tomorrow.”

He went back to the sea as cautiously as he had left it. Because his embrace had wet her ragged gown, Ingeborg thought best to stay where she was while it dried. She wouldn’t be getting to sleep anyway. She fell on her knees. “Glory to God in the highest,” she stammered. “Hail, Mary, full of grace—oh, you’re a woman, you’ll understand—the Lord is with you—”

“Hey, in there!” a sailor shouted. “Stow that jabber! Think you’re a nun?”

“How’d you like me for a divine bridegroom?” called the masthead lookout.

Ingeborg’s voice fell silent; her soul did not. And erelong the watchers’ heed went elsewhere. Dolphins came to the ship, a couple of dozen, and circled and circled. In the pale night their wake boiled after them, eerily quiet; their backfins stood forth like sharp weapons; the beaks grinned, the little eyes rolled with a wicked mirth.

The men called Ranild from his bunk. He scowled and tugged his beard. “I like this not,” he mumbled. “Cock of Peter, how I wish we’d skewered those last two fishfolk! They plot evil, be sure of that. . . . Well, I doubt they’ll try sinking the cog, for how then shall they carry the gold? Not to speak of their friend the bitch.”

“Should we maybe keep Niels too?” Sivard wondered.

“Um-m-m. . . no. Show the bastards we’re in earnest. Cry over the waters that Cod-Ingeborg can look for worse than hanging if they plague us further.” Ranild licked and lifted a finger. “I feel a breath of wind,” he said. “We can belike start off about dawn, when Niels is finished with the yardarm.” He drew his shortsword and shook it at the moving ring of dolphins. “Do you hear? Skulk back into your sea-caves, soulless things! A Christian man is bound for home!”

—The night wore on. The dolphins did nothing more than patrol around the ship. At last Ranild decided they could do no more, that his foes had sent them in the hollow hope they might learn something, or in hollower spite.

The breeze freshened. Waves grew choppy and smote louder against the hull, which rocked. Across the wan stars, inexplicable, passed a flight of wild swans.

Those stars faded out at the early summer daybreak. Eastward the sky turned white; westward it remained silver-blue, bearing a ghostly moon. The crests of waves ran molten with light; their troughs were purple and black; the sea overall shimmered and sparkled in a green like the green of certain alchemical flames. It whooshed and cast spray. Wind whittered through the shrouds.

Up the forward ladder from the hold, men prodded Niels at pike point. His hands were tied behind him, which made the climbing hard. Twice he fell, to their blustery glee. His garments were foul and bloodstained, but his blowing hair and downy beard caught the shiningness of the still unseen sun. He braced legs wide against the role of the ship and drank deep of the wet wild air.

Torben and Palle kept watch at the bulwarks, Sivard aloft. Lave and Tyge guarded the prisoner. Ingeborg stood aside, her face blank, her eyes smoldering. Niels looked squarely at Ranild, who bore the noose of a rope passed over the yardarm. “Since we have no priest,” the boy asked, “will you let me say one more Our Father?”

“Why?” the skipper drawled. ,

Ingeborg trod near. “Maybe I can shrive you,” she said.

“Hey?” Ranild was startled. After a moment, he and his men snickered. “Why, indeed, indeed.”

He waved Lave and Tyge back, and himself withdrew toward the bows. Niels stood hurt and astounded. “Go on,” Ranild called through the wind and wave-rush. “Let’s see a good show. You’ll live as long as you can play-act it, Niels.”

“No!” the captive shouted. “Ingeborg, how could you?”

She caught him by the forelock, drew his countenance down to hers in spite of his withstanding, and whispered. They saw him grow taut, they saw how he kindled. “What’d you say?” Ranild demanded.

“Keep me alive and I might tell you,” Ingeborg answered merrily. She and Niels mocked the last rites as best they were able, while the sailors yelped laughter.

“Pax vobiscum,” she said finally, who had known clerics. “Dominus vobiscum.” She signed the kneeling youth. It gave her a chance to murmur to him: “God forgive us this, and forgive me that He is not the lord on whom I called. Niels, if we ever see each other beyond today, fare you well.”

“And you, Ingeborg.” He rose to his feet. “I am ready,” he said.

Ranild, puzzled, more than a bit uneasy, came toward him carrying the noose. And suddenly Ingeborg shrieked. “Ya—a—a—a-ah!” Her nails raked at Lave’s eyes. He lurched. “What the Devil?” he choked. Ingeborg clung to him, clawing, biting, yelling. Tyge dashed to help. Niels lowered his head, charged, and butted Ranild in the stomach. The captain went down on his arse. Niels kicked him in the ribs. Torben and Palle sprang from the bulwarks to grab the boy. Sivard gaped from above.

The dolphins had been swimming in their ring for so many hours in order that the crew might come to think no trouble was to be expected from the water and stop watching for it. Too late, the man in the crow’s nest cried warning.

Out from under the poopdeck burst Eyjan. Her knife flared in her grasp. Up from the sea came Tauno. He had emptied his lungs while he clung to the barnacled hull, hidden by the forecastle bulge. Now a dolphin rose beneath him. With fingers and toes, Tauno gripped the backfin, and the leap carried him halfway from water to gunwale. He caught the rail and vaulted inboard.

Palle started to turn around. The merman’s son snatched the pikeshaft lefthanded; his right hand slid dagger into Palle, who fell on the deck screaming and pumping blood like any slaughtered hog. Tauno rammed the butt of the pike into Torben’s midriff. The sailor staggered back.

Tauno slashed the rope on Niels’ wrists. He drew the second of the knives he carried. “Here,” he said. “This was Kennin’s.” Niels uttered a single yell of thanks to the Lord God of Hosts, and bounded after Torben.

Lave was having trouble yet with Ingeborg. Eyjan came from behind and drove her own blade in at the base of the skull. Before she could free the steel, Tyge jabbed his pike at her. With scornful ease, she ducked the thrust, got in beneath his guard and to him. What happened next does not bear telling. The merfolk did not make war, but they knew how to take an enemy apart.

At the masthead Sivard befouled himself and wailed for mercy.

Stunned though Torben was, Niels failed to dispatch him at once, making several passes before he could sink knife in gut; and then Torben did not die, he threshed bleeding and howling until Eyjan got around to cutting his throat; and Niels was sick. Meanwhile Ranild had regained his feet. His sword flew free; the cold light ran along it. He and Tauno moved about, searching for an opening.

“Whatever you do,” Tauno said to him, “you are a dead man.”

“If I die in the flesh,” Ranild gibed, “I will live without end while you’re naught but dung.”

Tauno stopped and raked fingers through his hair. “I don’t understand why that should be so,” he said. “Maybe your kind has more need of eternity.”

Ranild thought he saw a chance. He rushed in. Thus he took Tauno’s lure. He stabbed. The halfling was not there, had simply swayed aside from the point. Tauno chopped down on Ranild’s wrist with the edge of his left hand. The sword clattered loose. Tauno’s right hand struck home the knife. Ranild fell to the deck. The sun rose and all blood shone an impossibly bright red. Ranild’s wound was not mortal. He stared at Tauno above him and gasped, “Let me. . . confess to God. . . let me escape Hell.”

“Why should I?” Tauno said. “I have no soul.” He lifted the feebly struggling body and threw it overboard for the dogfish. Eyjan swarmed up the ratlines to make an end of Sivard’s noise.