Poul Anderson - The Merman's Children

“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.

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.