Poul Anderson - The Merman's Children

He stopped and stood swaying, “I love you,” heaved out of him.

“I know,” she said with infinite tenderness. “And I love you.”

“I didn’t mean harm. I just wanted us to be together, truly together, the one time—if else we must be sundered forever.”

“There is a third way.” Calm had come upon her; she smiled. “You’ve told me about this thing. I’ll enter it, and you can have me with you always.”

“Nada, no!”

“Could I hope for more happiness than to lie on your heart? And maybe someday—” She broke off. “Stand where you are, Tauno,” she begged. “Let me see you while I can, and that be the wedding gift you give me.”

He could not even weep.

At first she did look at him as much as she did at the piece of a dead man’s skull which she held. But slowly the bird of the Otherworld possessed her, until at last she gazed only upon it as it winged across the new moon. Tauno saw how her form of a maiden grew ever more ghostly, until he could spy the wilderness through her, until she was the faintest glimmer in gathering darkness. And then she was gone. The talisman fell to earth.

He stayed in place for the quarter of an hour before he could go pick it up, kiss it, and hang it back where it belonged.

On their homeward voyage, the crew of Brynhild marked how changed Lady Sigrid was. Had the decision of her brother Herr Carolus to stay in Croatia brought that about? Two or three sailors still believed that she slipped overboard of nights to disport herself in the waves. There was no eyewitness evidence, however, and most denied it. They bespoke her piety; now she did join the rest in prayer, where she was the most ardent person aboard, and she spent hours on her knees before the image of the Virgin at the aftercastle, often with tears streaming down her cheeks. At the same time, she was no longer curt and aloof, but quickly made herself beloved by her mild ways and her readiness to listen to the humblest among them. She became almost a mother confessor to several.

Captain Asbern had been doubtful about setting sail this late in the year. He went cautiously, as near the coasts as was prudent, running for haven at the first sign of a hard blow. Thus he did not reach Denmark until shortly before Christmas. But the passage was free of peril, with no more hardship than seamen should endure.

About midday on the feast of Adam, Brynhild lay alongside a Copenhagen dock. After learning whose she was, the harbormaster dispatched a boy to tell the owner.

Snowflakes drifted thinly out of a sky already dusking. The air was mild and damp. Scant traffic moved between walls and arcades, beneath overhanging galleries; yet light from windows, smoke from roofholes, savory odors, sounds of bustle and laughter and song, told how folk indoors were making ready to honor the birth of Our Lord. Those twelve days would be like a giant candle in the middle of that cavern which was winter. Slush plopped under the hoofs of the mules which man and woman rode. Ahead of them, high-booted against muck, went a pair of armed linkbearers. The flames flared and sparked, casting short-lived stars out among the snowflakes.

“We’ve only time for a few more barebones words ere we reach your house,” she reminded. “The whole tale will be days in the telling.” She thought. “No, years or a lifespan-for the understanding of it.”

“We will have that lifespan, we twain,” said Niels happily.

She clenched a hand tighter than needful around the reins. “It will not be easy. First, this same eventide—I dread- How. . . what. . . shall I tell Ingeborg? Help me think what may wound her the least.”

He flinched. “I was forgetting.”

“Blame not yourself. Joy can so easily be selfish. Once I would have forgotten.”

“Eyjan—”

“I am Dagmar.”

He crossed himself. “Could I forget your own miracle? God forgive!”

“It will not be easy for us,” she repeated. “You must needs bear with me more than most men with their wives: I who in flesh and mind am half a mermaid.”

“And the other half a saint,” Niels answered. A bit of his olden grin flashed forth. “That will prove hard on me.”

“No, never say such things,” Dagmar beseeched. “You’ll likeliest find me stubborn, quick-tempered, no real womanly meekness in me, strive though I will for it.” She reached toward him. “But oh, Niels, never will I fail in my love for you.”

He became grave, took her clasp, observed her through snowfall and dim yellow light. Finally he asked low, “Do you indeed love me, Dagmar? You care for me, yes, I know that, and I’ve no right to crave more. Yet—”

“I give you myself, since you will have me,” she told him in utter honesty. “My inmost heart you have still to win, but my prayer is that you may; and in that quest also, I will fare at your side.”

Ingeborg Hjalmarsdatter was a Jutish woman of about thirty winters. Early one spring she arrived at Hornbaek, a fisher hamlet on the north coast of Zealand, a day’s ride by the shore road from Copenhagen. The men who had gone before her, found a cottage for sale, and comfortably furnished it, had explained that she was a widow of means who wanted a place where she could take refuge, when she desired, from city life, among common people such as she herself had been before making a good marriage.

The dwellers gave her an awkward welcome but were soon at ease. She put on no airs; rather, she was soft-spoken in her funny dialect, and ever ready to help when a need was real, whether for a bit of money or for hours of toil. However, nobody came truly to know her, and unwed men presently stopped paying court. She did not seek out her neighbors, nor invite them oftener than behooved her, nor gossip, nor say much of anything about her past. Alone in her home, she did housekeeping, kitchen gardening, and marketgoing for herself. Each day when weather allowed, she would walk miles along the beach or into the woods. That was not as reckless as it would have been formerly; the King’s peace prevailed anew, for a while, in these parts. Nevertheless, no other I woman would have dared. When the parish priest counseled her’ against it, she told him with a smile, the sadness of which matched aught he had ever seen, that she had nothing left to fear.

Time passed. Raw winds and lashing rains gave way to blossoms, plowing and seeding of what fields the villagers held, boats bound forth to reap the waters. Blossoms fell, apples budded, furrows wore a tender green, forest filled with birdsong. On the roof of Einar Brandsen had long been fastened an old cartwheel whereon a family of storks nested, summer after summer. They were thought to be lucky for everyone thereabouts, and indeed the months wending past saw births, confirmations, weddings, large catches, merry holidays. But of course they also saw illness, death, burial, a drowned man wash up on this his own strand.

So time went as it ever had, until a new stranger arrived.

He came westward from the Sound, belike from Copenhagen, since his horse was of the best and his clothes, while sturdy for traveling, were too. He was very big and appeared young, beardless, hair yellow with a peculiar underwater tint, though the foreign-looking face was haggard. The lordliness of his bearing scarcely fitted with the absence of servant or bodyguard.

Nearing midsummer, the sun was yet above the Kattegat, over which it threw a bridge of molten gold. Eastward across the channel its low-flying rays glowed on clouds piled like mountains above Scania, which rested blue on the edge of sight. Elsewhere heaven stood clear, crossed and recrossed by wings. Far out, a few vessels lay becalmed, toylike, their sails also catching the light. Lulling of gentle surf and mewing of gulls were almost the only sounds adrift through coolness. Tang of sea and kelp mingled with odors from plowland and common on the rider’s left, and the woods which made a darkling wall beyond them.