The Merman's Children (33 page)

“Why, what harm, if he who is soulless couples with an elf?” Eyjan gibed.

“I'd not have my son lured beyond halidom. He might die before he's saved.” Andrei's look steadied upon her. “You might, my daughter.”

Eyjan was silent.

“What are your plans?” he inquired.

Unhappiness freighted her words: “I know not, the less when Tauno keeps apart from me. We promised our Danish friends we'll rejoin them when we're able. Thereafter—Greenland?”

“No fit place for you, who have seen far better.” Andrei hesitated. “Luka Subitj would be a forbearing husband.”

Eyjan grew taut. “I'll never wear the bonds they lay on women here!”

“Aye, you'd be freer in Denmark, and I like what you've told me of that Niels Jonsen. Get christened, wed him, be joyous.”

“Christened. Become…your sort?”

“Yes, age and die in a handful of years, and meanwhile live chaste and pious. But you will live in the blessing of God, and afterward in His very presence. Not until you've taken this bargain Christ offers, can you know how measurelessly generous it is.”

With eyes as well as tongue, Andrei pursued: “I understand. You dread the loss of your wild liberty, you think you'd liefer cease to be. I give you my oath—not by the Most High: not yet—by the love I bore for your mother and bear for you, Eyjan Agnetesdatter, I swear that in humanness you will win release. It will be like coming alone out of winter night into a firelit room where those whom you hold dearest are feasting.”

“And where I see no more stars, feel no more wind,” she protested.

“Faerie has had its splendors,” he replied. “But are you not wisest to give them up while they are in some part as you've known them? Oh, Eyjan, child, spare yourself the anguish of seeing the halfworld go down in wreck and feeling that same ruin in your own breast. For it will indeed perish, it will. What happened to Liri was but a foretaste of what must happen to all Faerie. Magic is dying out of Creation. A sage man showed me that, and I'd fain show you it, though each word scourges me too, if you'll stay here till I must return to the fleet.

“Do what is kindest, to those who care for you as well as yourself. Leave Faerie where you can find no happiness, whatever you do, wherever you range. Accept the divine love of Christ, the honest love of Niels and of the children you bear him; and one day we will all meet again in Heaven.”

His tone sank, he stared beyond her and every wall. “Agnete also,” he ended.

How much like Tauno he is, she thought

In summer, when trees gave shade against the sun, a vilja could move about by day. Nada danced through the forest in a swirl of tossing hair. Among shrubs she dodged, overleaped logs, sprang on high to grab a bough and swing from it for a moment before she sped onward. Her laughter chimed, “Come, come along, sluggard!” Her slenderness vanished into the green. Tauno stopped to pant and squint around after tracks of her. Suddenly her palms clapped over his eyes from behind, she kissed him between the shoulderblades, and was off again. Cool though her touch had been, it burned a long while in his awareness. He blundered on. Unseen, she sent breezes to fan him.

At last he could go no more. At a dark-brown, moss-lined pool he halted. Trees crowded around, huge oak, slim beech, murky juniper. They roofed off the sky, they made a verdant dusk bespeckled with sunflecks. Butterflies winged between them. It was warm here, the air heavy with odors of ripeness. A squirrel chattered and streaked aloft, then he was gone and the mighty silence of summer brooded anew.

“Hallo-o!” Tauno shouted. “You've galloped the breath out of me.” Leafy arches swallowed up his cry. He wiped off the sweat that stung his eyes and salted his lips, cast himself belly down, and drank. The pool was cold, iron-tinged.

He heard a giggle. “You have a shapely bottom,” Nada called. He rolled over and saw her perched on a limb above him, kicking her legs to and fro. They would catch a beam of light, which made them blaze gold, then return to being white in the shadows.

“Come here if you dare and I'll paddle yours for that,” he challenged.

“Nyah.” She made a face at him. “You wouldn't. I know you, you big fraud. I know what you'd really do.”

“What?”

“Why, cuddle me and pet me and kiss me—which is a better idea anyhow.” Nada floated, more nearly than jumped, to earth. Blackberries grew beneath the tree. She stopped to gather as many as her small hands could hold before she came to kneel by Tauno, who was now sitting.

“Poor love, you
are
tired,” she said. “Wet all over, and surely weak in the knees. Here, let me feed some strength back into you.”

Herself she was dry-skinned, unwinded, ready to soar off at any instant. She would not sleep when he did, nor did she share the fruits she placed in his mouth. The dead have no such needs.

“Those were delicious, thank you,” he said when she was through. “But if I'm to stay out here much longer, I'll require food more stout. Fish from the lake; or, if you'll help me quest, a deer.”

She winced. “I hate it when you kill.”

“I must.”

“Yes.” She brightened. “Like the great beautiful lynx you are.”

She stroked fingers across him. He touched her in turn, caresses which wandered everywhere. They could never be strong, those gestures. She was too insubstantial. He felt rounded softnesses, which moved in response to him, but they had no heat and always he got a sense of thistledown delicacy.

What had formed her, he knew not, nor she. The bones of Nada, Tomislav's daughter, rested in a Shibenik churchyard. Her soul dwelt in an image of that body, formed out of…moonlight and water, maybe. It was a gentle damnation.

Damnation nonetheless, he reflected: for him as well.

“You hurt yourself,” she exclaimed. “Oh, don't.”

He wrenched his glance from her. “Forgive me,” he said in a rusty voice. “I know my bad moods distress you. Maybe you should go for a run till I've eased.”

“And leave you alone?” She drew close against him. “No.” After a space: “Besides, I'm selfish. You lift
my
aloneness off me.”

“The trouble is just that…I desire you…and found you too late.”

“And I desire you, Tauno, beloved.”

What did that mean to her? he wondered. She had died a maiden. Of course, she had known, from seeing beasts if naught else, what the way of a man with a woman is; but had she ever truly understood? Afterward she was not one to ponder, she was a spirit of wood and water, her heart gone airy; and what might be the desires which reigned in her? Did any?

Beyond the wish for his company—was that what had captured him, her own swift adoration? She was so utterly unlike Eyjan, perhaps he had unwittingly fled to her. Yet other women lent refuge likewise, and they could quiet his loins and give him comradeship which endured, not this haring about with a ghost. Ingeborg——

Tauno and Nada laid arms around waists. Her head rested on his muscles; he could barely feel the tresses. It restored his calm, the pain-tinctured joy he found with her. Surely this could not go on without end, but let him not fret about the future. Forethought was no part of his Faerie heritage, and he had disowned the human half. In the presence of Nada, beauty, frolic, muteness together in awe below the stars, he lost himself, he almost became at peace with everything that was, this side of Heaven.

“You're wearied,” she said at length. “Lie down. Have a nap. I'll sing you a lullabye.”

He obeyed. The simple melody, which her mother had belike never sung to her, washed over him like a brooklet and bore away care.

He was content. Let flesh and blood wait until some later time. The vilja would never betray him.

Summer descended toward autumn. At first the fields were crowded with peasants stooped above sickles, or following to rake, bind, shock, cart off, and glean. They labored from before dawn till after sunset, lest a rainstorm rob them, and tumbled into sleep. The work was still less merciful than usual, because all signs portended a winter early and harsh. When at last the garnering was done, everybody celebrated titanically. Meanwhile, each night the stars came forth seeming more remote than ever through air that quickly grew chill.

In one such darkness, Tauno and Eyjan walked along the riverbank. She had insisted that they have a real talk. He yielded, grudgingly, but said he felt too trapped between walls.

A glow above eastern peaks portended moonrise. Erelong it would be the harvest moon that lifted. Carl's Wain loomed immense, as low as it glittered in the Dalmatian sky; higher blinked the Pole Star, to show Northern folk their way home. Frogs and crickets were silenced, only the purling stream had voice. Unseasonable hoarfrost lay upon sere grass. Tauno felt it under his feet, for he had shucked his clothes once out of sight of Skradin. Eyjan had not; hooded cloak and flowing gown did what they were able to hide the fullness of her.

After a mile or two, she took the word: “Captain Asbern sought me out while I was in Shibenik. He warned that if
Brynhild
doesn't start back soon, she'll have to lie over till spring. Already there are few masters who'd embark on so long a voyage.”

“Yes, we knew that,” he replied.

“But did you, at least, think about it?” Eyjan paused, except for her footfalls, before she continued. “I've learned about human ways of late, maybe more than you've condescended to do. It would be costly for Niels to have ship and crew a year or more agone. And that wretched war—Father back at the siege of Zadar, where he could be killed without ever having seen you.…Well, I've been told our documents may not protect us from the Venetians. A commerce raider of theirs may decide the King of Denmark and his bishops are too far off to be a threat. The later we depart, the worse our chances.”

“Why, then, we can let the ship sail,” he told her. “But what's in Denmark for us?”

Alarm replied: “What's for us here?” She caught his hand. They stopped in midstride. “Tauno, what is it that keeps you in the wildwood?”

He answered the first question. “Well, true, we found our kin and they're merely another lot of mortals. You must indeed be weary of the lady's role. So leave if you wish.”

She searched his countenance. It was visor-blank, though hers quivered. “Not you?”

“I think not yet. But go you, and give Ingeborg and Niels my greetings.”

“You promised you'd return to her for at least a while.”

“I will, I will, when the time is right,” he snapped.

“You've changed, Tauno—in a way, more than anyone else from Liri.”

“Unless what I am now was ready within me, like a thaw in a frozen pond. Enough. I care not for chatter about myself.”

As he watched her, his mood softened. “Aye, do hail Ingeborg from me, if you return,” he said. “Tell her I've not forgotten loyalty, wise counsel, patient helpfulness, and, yes, how dear she was when we joined. I could wish it were in me to love a mortal woman as Father did Mother.” He sighed. “It isn't.”

She looked away, but did not ask whom it was he could love.

“What of yourself, though?” he went on. “After you've spent a few weeks or months with Niels, where will you go?”

She braced herself. “I may go no farther at all,” she said.

“Hoy?” he barked, astounded. After a minute: “Well, yes, his leman while he remains young. I can see where that would be pleasant. He'd leave you your freedom; and after he grows old——”

“I would grow old with him.”

Stubbornly, against his stupefaction, she urged: “You should listen to Father. He's right, the Faith is
true
, and we're not condemned, it's just a matter of choosing to take what it promises…and Faerie is doomed, Tauno….I wanted to be sure we two spoke together this night, because tomorrow I fare to Father Tomislav in his parish and pray him to tell me more. Won't you come along?”

“No!” he roared, yanked loose from her grasp and made a fist against Heaven. “Eyjan, you can't mean that——”

“I'm not quite sure, but——”

“Crawling before a God Who twists and breaks what He made——At least Odin never claimed to be just.”

Her own strength rose to straighten her back and level her gaze. “Be glad that God is not just,” she said. “He is merciful.”

“Where was the mercy for Nada?” He whirled about and ran. She started to follow, then stood where she was.

Far in the west, the moon still made the lake tremble with radiance; but the east was whitening, stars above yonder treetops were gone, and up there, like a gleam of bronze, an early hawk was at hover. On earth lay a frosty silence.

Tauno and Nada stood side by side on the shore. The vilja's mood was more grave than formerly. “You are always good to me,” she murmured, “but oh, at this meeting, somehow, kindness has glowed from you. I felt it, I feel it yet, as once I felt sunshine.”

“How could I be other than kind, to you?” His tone was harsh.

In her pensiveness she did not notice, simply squeezed the fingers he had intertwined with hers. “You make me remember things like sunshine,” she told him. “With you by me, I'm no longer afraid to remember. I know you'll take away the hurt.”

“You, you help me forget.”

“What? But you'd not want to forget, would you? Your wonderful sea, that I never weary of hearing about. I, though, I was no more than a silly girl who stumbled into such woe that she drowned herself. Yes, I did; today I dare know it, though I can't understand how I ever got that bewildered.” She smiled. “And over a boy, a mere boy. You are a man.”

“A merman.”

“Well, whatever, Tauno, dearest. Do you know what's become of Mihajlo? I hope he's cheery, wherever he is.”

“Yes, I hear he's doing well.”

Her look upon him grew disturbed, for he was grimly staring out across the water. “You've been wounded by something new,” she said. “Can I help? How I wish I can.”