Poul Anderson - The Merman's Children

She entered the aftercastle. “Ah, Ingeborg,” she greeted, now sufficiently close to be heard. “I spied you clambering out-for a breath of air, however bitter, no?” She reached the woman and stopped. Through hands cupped between mouth and ear, her tones were more distinct. “Let me keep you company. It’s my watch, but I can as well sense danger from here-maybe better, without that cursed hail stinging me.”

Ingeborg lifted a palm from the tiller to screen her own voice: “Tauno, where has he gone?”

The cleanly molded visage starkened. “To ask the dolphins if they can find help for us.”

Ingeborg gasped. “God have mercy! Do we need it that much?”

Eyjan nodded. “We’re nigh to land. He and I have felt how the sea is shoaling when we’ve ventured into it. Its pulse-aye, we’ve caught the first echoes of surf. And the weather shows no sign of letting up.”

Ingeborg stared into the gray eyes. “At least, if we’re wrecked, he can live—” She realized she had whispered.

Perhaps Eyjan guessed. “Oh, poor dear!” she cried. “Can I give you comfort?” Her tall form stepped between the woman and the wind. She held out her arms. Ingeborg released the helm and stumbled into that embrace. It upbore her against lunge and roll, heat flowed from softness of breasts and live play of muscles, she could cling as if to the mother she half remembered.

Talk went easier, too. “Fear not, beloved friend,” Eyjan murmured. “If we see shipwreck before us, Tauno and I will take you and Niels on our backs, well clear of breakers. We’ll bring you ashore at a safe place, and afterward fetch aid from your own kind.”

“But the gold will be lost.” Ingeborg felt the grasp around her tighten. “He couldn’t likely get another ship, could he? Everything he fared after and staked his life for; everything it means to himand he could still die. Could he not? Eyjan, I beg you, don’t. . . you two. . . risk yourselves for us—”

Agnete’s daughter held her close and crooned to her while she wept.

Tauno came back with word that the dolphins were in search. They knew of a creature that might be able to help, could they find him. Little more had they said, because they themselves understood little. They were unsure whether the being would understand them in his turn or be willing.

That was all Tauno related, for he had barely returned when the forestay parted. The end of it, lashing back, passed an inch from Eyjan’s neck. Appalled, he chased after it, caught and fought it as if it were a bad beast, got it hitched to the mast: where he saw that that was beginning to crack. Eyjan resisted when he would bend on a new stay. He could fall down onto the deck, to death or the slower death of crippling. Let him pump instead, if he could not take a moment’s ease.

Night fell, the short light night of Northern summer gone tombblack and age-long.

Morning brought dusk again. Spindrift hazed the world; a wrack flew low overhead. The seas were massive as before, but choppier, foam-white, turbulence waxing in them as they neared the shallows and the rocks beyond. Anchor or no, the cog reeled like a man who has taken a sledgehammer in his temple.

Tauno and Eyjan had spent the darkest hours topside and we still on watch, a-strain after signs of ground. The gale had drained strength from them at last; they huddled in each other’s arms against its cold and violence. Once be wondered aloud if power remained for him to keep a mortal’s face above water.

“Maybe we cannot,” Eyjan replied through shrieks and rumbles. “If things come to swimming, do you take Ingeborg and I Niels.”

“Why?” Tauno asked, dully surprised. “He weighs more than she does.”

“That makes small difference afloat, you know,” she told him, “and if they must die, they would liefest it were thus.”

He did not pursue the question; and presently they both forgot it.

A shape had appeared alongside. Glimpsed among waves, whenever the cog dipped her larboard rail, it was that of a large gray seal. They had wondered why such an animal would accompany them. Afterward they believed that already they had snuffed an odor of strangeness, though the storm confused every sense too much for them to mark this at the time.

Suddenly Herning stood well-nigh on her beam ends. A wave climbed aboard. Upon it, amidst it, rode the seal. The ship rolled back and forth toward a more even keel. Water torrented through her scuppers. The seal stayed behind. He raised himself on front flippers... change boiled through his flesh... a man” crouched there.

He rose to confront the stupefied siblings. They saw he was huge, a head above Tauno, so broad and thick that he seemed squat. Hair and beard grew sleek over his head, gray in color, as was the woolliness which everywhere covered his otherwise naked form. The skin beneath was pale. He reeked of fish. His face was hideous, save for the eyes—Iow and cragged of brow, flat of nose, gape-mouthed, the heavy jaw chinless. Those eyes, though, shone between lashes a queen might envy: big, softly golden brown, without whites: unhuman. .

Tauno had clapped hand to knife. Stiffly, he let go the hilt and raised his arm. “Welcome, if you come in friendship,” he said in the Liri tongue.

The stranger answered with a deep, barking tone but with mortal words. “Dolphins tauld that wha’ drew me. Could be a woman here, to reck by their chatter. You’re no true woman or man, from your smell, nor true merfolk, from your looks. Wha’, then, and who?”

The speech he used was intelligible, akin to Danish. Norse settlers had come to the islands off Scotland in Viking times; most of those places remained under the Norse crown; the tongue of the ancestors lived on in a western version, side by side with Gaelic.

“We’re in sharp need,” Eyjan said. “Can you help us?”

The reply cut straight through every storm-noise: “Maybe, if I will. Small mercy ha’ I known for mysel’. Ha’ ye more aboard?”

“Yes.” Tauno lifted the nearest hatch and shouted a summons to Niels and Ingeborg, who slept.

They scrambled up within heartbeats, alarm stretching their countenances. When they saw the newcomer, they halted, drew breath, unthinkingly linked hands.

The were-seal’s glance fell on Ingeborg and stayed. Step by step, he crossed the deck toward her. She and Niels stood fast, apart from their struggle not to fall. She paled and the youth stiffened as his hairy fingers, with nails like claws, reached forth to stroke her cheek. The mark of desire rose before them.

And yet he was gentle, merely touched her, joined gazes only while his lips trembled upward in shyness. Thereupon he turned back to the siblings and said, “Aye, I’ll help, for her sake. Thank this lady, the three 0’ ye. Hoo could I let her droon?” Hauau, he named himself, and told that he dwelt on Sule Skerry. Few of his kind were left; maybe he was the last. (That was believable, since no one in Liri had ever heard of them.) From earliest days, men had hated the selkie race and hunted it down.

Hauau thought that might be because its members raided the nets of fishers, like their kin the true seals but with human skill and cunning. He was not sure, for he had been alone since he was a pup, with just a dim recollection of his mother and what she sang to him. He had escaped after men arrived in a boat, cornered her, and cut her apart. It seemed to him he had heard them calling on Odin; be that as it may, the thing happened long ago.

This came out in scattered words, as did the story of the travelers. Foremost was the toil of surviving. Herning could no more be let drift; lee shores were too close. Besides a stay snapped, with need for replacement, the mast was now badly cracked and must be reinforced. A pair of extra spars fetched from below, lashed tight, should serve. . . . ,