Poul Anderson - The Merman's Children

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.

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.”