The Merman's Children

by Poul Anderson

  “They-oh-they-“ Red and white flew over Niels’ cheeks. The tongue locked in his mouth.

  Oluv Ovesen shambled ahead of Torben, Faile, and Tyge. (Ranild and Ingeborg slept below; Lave was at the helm, Sivard on lookout in the crow’s nest; these last watched with drool and catcalls.) The mate kept blinking his white lashes and peeling lips back from his yellow teeth. “Well, well,” he hailed, “who’s next, good slut?”

  Eyjan’s eyes were flint gray, storm gray. “What mean you,” she answered, “if ever a yapping cur means anything?”

  Oluv stopped two ells short of those threatening spears. An-grily, he said: “Tyge was at the tiller last night and Torben at the masthead. They saw you go beneath the foredeck with this milksop boy. They heard you two whispering, thrashing, thumping, and moaning.”

  “And what has my sister to do with you?” Kennin bristled.

  Oluv wagged a finger. “This,” he said: “that we went along

  as honest men with leaving her alone; but if she spreads her legs for one, she does for all.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because we’re all in this together, you. And anyway,

  what right has a sea cow to give herself airs and pick and choose?” Oluv sniggered. “Me fIrst, Eyjan. You’ll have more fun with a real man, I promise you.”

  “Go away,” said the girl, shaking with fury.

  “There’s three of them,” Oluv told his crewfolk. “I don’t count

  little Niels. Lave, lash the tiller. Hallohoi, Sivard, come on down!”

  “What do you intend?” Tauno asked in a level voice.

  Oluv picked his teeth with a fingernail. “Oh, nothing much,

  fish-man, if you and your brother are sensible. We’ll hogtie you for a while, no more. Else-Easy with that lance. We’ve pikes and crossbows we can fetch, remember, and we’re six against you.” He laughed. “Six! Your sister’ II soon be thanking us.”

  Eyjan yelled like a cat. Kennin snarled, “I’ll see you in the Black Ooze first!” Niels groaned, tears breaking loose; one hand drew his knife, the other reached for Eyjan. Tauno waved them back. His mer-face was quite still within the wind-blown locks.

  “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, wheel-ing, 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 half-lings 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 hag-gard 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 dolphins-not 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 cold-blooded 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 guid-ance, 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.

  VIII

  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 broad-beamed 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.

  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 snub-nosed, 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 every-where, 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 sw
erve 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 hurtT’ 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.

  And now the merman’s children carne to grab the anchors on the rim of that net and make them fast in the ruins of A verom.

  Desperate was their work, with the giant shape threshing, the giant arms flailing and clutching. Cast-up ooze and vomited ink blinded eyes, choked lungs, in stinking clouds; cables whipped, tangled, and snapped; walls broke under blows that sent Doomsday thunders through the water; the hootings beat on skulls and clawed at eardrums; the attackers were hit, cast bruisingly aside, scraped by barnacled skin until their own blood added iron taste to the acid of the kraken’s; they were a battered three who finally pegged him down.