The Merman's Children (29 page)

He stiffened, then did. Side by side, flanks touching, they held out palms to the heat and gazed straight before them. Time blew by, over the clifftops.

“What will we do, waiting at Bornholm for news?” Eyjan finally asked.

Tauno shrugged. The movement passed his arm along hers, and he swallowed hard before he could say, “Take our ease, no doubt, apart from chasing food. We'll have earned that.”

Her bronzy tresses brushed him as she nodded. “Yes, we've done much, haven't we?…you and I.”

“And more is ahead.”

“We'll meet it together.”

Somehow their heads swung around, somehow they were breathing each other's breath, the clean smells of each other, and her mouth was an inch from his. They never knew which of them reached out first.

“Yes, yes,” she half sobbed when the kiss came to a pause. “Oh, yes, now!”

He pulled back. “Our mother——”

She threw herself against him. Behind softness, he felt a heart that slammed even faster than his. Laughter gasped in her throat. “Too long have we fretted about that. We're merfolk, Tauno, darling.” In firelit splendor she leaped to her feet, tugged at his hand. “Over there, on the turf, we have a bed…only now do I know how I yearned.”

“And I.” He stumbled up. She nearly dragged him along, and down.

——The moon was sunken behind the cliffs. Stars glistened small.

Eyjan raised herself to an elbow. “It's no use, is it?” she said bitterly. “Nothing is any use.”

Tauno threw an arm across his face where he lay. “Do you think I am glad?” he mumbled.

“No, of course not.” Eyjan beat fist on thigh. “The Christians can exorcise us,” she cried. “Why in the name of justice can we not exorcise the Christians?”

“There is no justice. I'm sorry.” Tauno rolled over so his back was to her.

She sat erect, regarded him, ran a hand along his side till it came to rest on his hip. “Scorn yourself not, brother mine,” she achieved saying. “There are worse curses. We both have a world for living in.”

He did not speak.

“We will remain comrades. Brothers in arms,” she said.

The toilsome journey behind him became merciful. He slept.

——He woke and saw different constellations. The fire had died, frost deepened, his body had been burning the food in it for warmth; hunger prodded him anew. He stretched and smiled. Memory washed back like a tide race. He snapped after air.

Shortly he noticed that Eyjan was absent. He frowned, rose, peered. She could not be hidden from him in this narrow space. Where, then? With Faerie perceptions, he cast about. She had not re-entered the water. Hence the footpath…aye, her spoor, faint but clarion-clear, thrilling through his blood.

There he paused. He guessed what she had gone for, but he could be mistaken, or she could meet danger in these Christian wilds. Decision hardened. He strapped on knife, took up harpoon, and started off.

The moon was down. Above the steeps, a ling-begrown slope descended toward moorland. Rime and patches of snow whitened its grayness. Tauno padded fast along the trail, which followed the coast until it bent south into a shallow dale. This sheltered a croft grubbed out of the heath: for a meager yield of oats and barley, but chiefly for sheep that ranged afar in summer. He saw their fold, the hayricks, a pair of huddled buildings. Beyond rose a Viking grave-mound and the snags of a Pictish keep.

The trail led thither. Tauno followed. As he approached, a couple of dogs came baying; and as ever, when they had winded him they whimpered and fled.

A softer noise caught his attention. He crouched, ghosted closer, till he could see through the open door of a shed. A woman—aged by toil, for all that she rocked a babe in her arms—stood within, weeping. Two half-grown daughters slumped at her feet. They shuddered with cold; none of the three wore aught but a shift, that must have been hastily thrown on.

Tauno proceded to the cottage. Under the low eaves of a peat roof, light glimmered past cracks in shutters. He laid his ear against a wall, strained his senses.

They told him that four human males were inside, loudly breathing; and Eyjan, who yowled like a cat. While he listened, one fellow shouted. Straightway she called, “You next, Roderick!”

Tauno's knuckles whitened around the harpoon shaft.

——Well, he thought long afterward, he had none but himself to thank, and what import had it anyhow? A chuckle rattled his gullet as he imagined what the crofter and the crofter's sons had felt when she came naked out of night and beat on their door. The amulet would make her able to purr whatever she chose to them: belike that she was indeed of elvenkind but no mortal threat to life or soul; she feared not the Cross, she could name the name of Christ. They had not questioned their luck any further.

Tauno returned to camp. When Eyjan arrived at dawn, he pretended he was asleep.

III

Now that the vodianoi was gone, winter had become for the vilja altogether a time of aloneness. There was nothing else in the water but fish, that never were company and in this time of year grew sluggish, seldom delighting her with their gleaming summer grace. Frogs did not croak in twilight, but slumbered deep in bottom mud. Swans, geese, ducks, pelicans were departed; what fowl stayed at the lake were not swimmers or divers, and their calls sounded thin over snow and leafless boughs.

The vilja floated, dreaming. White and slim she was in the dimness. Her hair made a pale cloud around her. Great eyes, the hue of the sky when it is barely hazed, never moved, never blinked, never took aim at anything that a living creature might have seen. Nor did the slight roundness of her bosom move.

Thus had she drifted for days, weeks, months—she reckoned it not; for her, time had ceased to be—when the water stirred with an advent. As the force of it waxed, she came to awareness. Her limbs reached out, took hold, sent her in an arc and a streak toward shore. Faint though the undulations were that she raised, the newcomer felt them and swam to meet her. At first a wavery shade, he swiftly became solid in the view. Warmth radiated from him, strength, life. His motion made streams, gurgles, caressing swirls; bubbles danced upward.

He and she halted a yard apart and lay free a while, regarding each other.

He was not naked like her; besides headband and knife belt, he had a cloth wrapped about his loins. Huge of stature, fair-skinned, golden-haired, green-eyed, he hardly differed from ordinary man save in his beardlessness, webbed feet, easy breathing under water. Yes, hardly: to one of the halfworld, the outward unlikenesses were little, set beside the blazing identity. In him was a human, Christian soul.

“Oh, welcome, be very welcome,” the vilja murmured when she had gathered courage. Her tones, which reached his merman's hearing clearly, were tremulous as her smile.

Sternness replied: “Why do you think I am here?”

She retreated. “You…are you not he…memory is like mist, but an autumn and an autumn ago—you drove the vodianoi hence?”

“That which then was me did so,” said the deep voice.

“You were frightened of me.” The vilja could not but giggle. “Of me! You!”

Mirth released joy. She cast her arms toward him wide apart for him. “You've learned I'd not hurt you? How that does gladden me. Let me gladden you.”

“Be still, foul spirit!” he roared.

Bewildered, she shrank back from his wrath. “But, but I
wouldn't
hurt you,” she stammered. “How could I? Why should I wish to, I who have no one for friend?”

“Tentacle of darkness——”

“We'd be happy together, in the summer greenwood, in the winter waters. I'd warm me at your breast, but you'd have me for your cool cascade, your moonlit leaf-crown——”

“Have done! You'd haul men down to Hell!”

The vilja shuddered and fell mute. If she wept, the lake drank her tears.

The other calmed. “Oh, you may not know yourself what you are,” he said. “Father Tomislav wonders whether Judas really knew what it was he did, until too late.”

He stopped, watchful. Seeing his fury abated, she eased in her quicksilver fashion, ventured the tiniest of smiles, and asked, “Judas? Should I know him?....Yes, maybe once I heard—but it is gone from me.”

“Father Tomislav,” he said like the stroke of an ax.

She shook her head. “No.” Frowning, finger to cheek: “I mean yes. Somebody dear, is it not? But remembering is hard down here. Everything is so quiet. Maybe if you told me——” She tautened. Her eyes grew yet more enormous. “No,” she cried, hands uplifted as if against a blow. “Please don't tell me!”

He sighed, as best he could underwater. “Poor wraith, I do believe you speak truth. I'll ask if I may pray for you.”

Resolution came back. “Just the same, today you are a lure unto damnation,” he said. “Men fishing the lake for the first time, this past year, would glimpse you flitting through dusk; some heard you call them, and sore it was to deny such sweetness. They will be coming in ever greater numbers. You must not snatch a single soul from among them. I have come to make sure of that.”

She quailed, for this was he who had prevailed over the vodianoi.

He drew his knife and held it by the blade before her, to make a cross of sorts. “For the sake of the man who baptized me, I would not willingly destroy you,” his words tolled. “It may be that somehow even you can be saved. Yet certain is that none must be damned…on your account.

“No more luring of Christians, Nada. No more wanton tricks, either, raising a wind to flap a wife's washing off the grass, or stealing her babe on its cradleboard while she naps at harvest noon——”

“I only cuddle them for a while,” she whispered. “Soon I give them back. I've no milk for them.”

He did not heed, but went on: “No more singing in human earshot; it rouses dreams best left asleep. Vanish from our ken. Be to the children of Adam—born or adopted—as though you had never been.

“Else I myself will hunt you down. I will carry the wormwood you cannot bear the scent of, and scourge you with it, once and twice. Upon the third time you offend, I will come bearing a priestly blessing on me, and holy water for sending you into Hell.

“In Hell you will burn, you thing of leaves and mists and streams. Fire will consume you without ending, and never a dewdrop, never a snowflake will reach you in your torment.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she screamed, and fled.

He hung where he was until he had lost all sight and sound of her, until it was indeed as if she had faded into nothingness.

IV

E
ARLIER
in spring than skippers liked to fare—before the very equinox—a ship left Copenhagen for Bornholm. After a rough crossing through the Baltic Sea, she docked at Sandvig on the north end of the island, where it rises in cliffs to the stronghold called Hammer House. Her crew got shore leave. Those who had engaged her hired horses and rode to a certain unpeopled cove.

Gray whitecaps blew in, beneath a pale, whistling sky. When they withdrew, the rattle of pebbles sounded like a huge quern. Gulls flew about, mewing. On the sands were strewn brown tangles of kelp, that smelt of the deeps and had small bladders which popped when trodden on. Beyond those dunes and harsh grass was a moor, with wide heathery reaches and a bauta stone raised by folk long forgotten.

The merman's children waded ashore to greet their guests. They were unclad save for their weapons, talisman, and what remained of their aureate arm rings. Tauno's wet hair hung greenish-gold, Eyjan's bronze-red with the same faint seaweed undertint.

Ingeborg and Niels sped into their embrace. “Mercy of God, it's been long,” the young man quavered, while the woman could merely cling tight and cry.

When a measure of calm had returned, Tauno stepped off a pace, holding Ingeborg by the upper arms, and looked her over with care. “I see you've done well,” he said. “Not just good clothing and the marks of hardship gone. You have a kind of peace within you, am I right?”

“Now that you are here,” she answered unevenly.

He shook his head. “No, I mean that hugging you, I feel you no more being always ready for the world to smite you. Have you prospered, then?”

She nodded. “Thanks to Niels.”

“Hm,” Tauno said. “I've an idea Niels has much to thank you for.”

Ingeborg had been studying him more closely still than he her. “It's been worse for you, hasn't it?” she murmured. “You're haggard…and
I
felt you shiver. Have you failed in your quest?”

“We have not finished it. But here is a resting place.” Again he gathered her in. “I've missed you, I have.”

She gripped him so the blood went out of her nails.

Meanwhile they had not quite ignored what passed between Eyjan and Niels. The merman's daughter had kissed fondly enough, but thereafter asked: “How fares it with Yria?”

“Margrete,” Niels replied, wincing. “She is none but Margrete any more.” He searched for words. “We got her share safely to her. Not easy; the hangman's shadow lay over us after the Junkers sniffed gold, until we found us a haven. We did, though, and this day she dwells in a house that'll see to her well-being. But——She is not ungrateful to you…but more pious than most. Do you understand? She's happy, but best you not seek her yourselves.”

Eyjan sighed. “We expected naught else. That pain is leached out of us. We've done what we can for Yria; henceforward let her in truth be Margrete.”

She considered him, where he stood in the bleak air with his locks fluttering, before she inquired further: “What's your place in the world these days? What plans for the morrow do you nourish?”

“I'm doing well,” he told her. “If your own search is not ended—if I can help you in that, or aught else—you need but tell me.” His voice cracked: “Even if it means bidding you farewell forever.”