Poul Anderson - The Merman's Children

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.