The Merman's Children (9 page)

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. Averorn 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 everywhere, 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 corners 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 lanthorn. 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 swerve 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 lanthorn. 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 hurt?” 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 came to grab the anchors on the rim of that net and make them fast in the ruins of Averorn.

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.

But bind him they did. And they swam to where his huge head throbbed and jerked, his beak snapped at the imprisoning strands, his arms squirmed like a snakepit under the mesh. Through the murk-mists they looked into those wide, conscious eyes. The kraken stopped his clamor. They heard only a rush of current, in and out of his gills. He glared unflinchingly at them.

“Brave have you been,” said Tauno, “a fellow dweller in the sea. Therefore know that you are not being killed for gain.”

He took the right eye, Kennin the left. They thrust their harpoons in to the shaft ends. When that did not halt the strugglings which followed, they used their second pair, and both of Eyjan's. Kraken blood and kraken anguish drove them off.

After a while it was over. Some of their weapons must have worked into the brain and slashed it.

The siblings fled from Averorn to the sunlight. They sprang into air and saw the cog wallowing in billows that the fight in the deeps had raised. Tauno and Eyjan did not bother to unload their-lungs, though air-breathing they would be lighter than the water. They kept afloat with gentle paddling, let the ocean soothe and croon to their aching bodies, and drank draught upon draught of being alive. It was young Kennin who shouted to those clustered white-faced at the bulwarks: “We did it! We slew the kraken! The treasure is ours!”

At that, Niels ran up the ratlines, crowing like a cock, and Ingeborg burst into tears. The other sailors gave a cheer that was oddly short; thereafter they kept attention mainly on Ranild.

Through the waves leaped the dolphins, twoscore of them, to hear the tale.

Work remained. When the swimmers signed that they had rested enough, Ranild cast them a long weighted line with a sack and a hook at the end. They took it back under.

Already the ghost-fish he had been too slow to catch were nibbling on the kraken. “Let's do our task and be away from here as fast as we can,” said Tauno. His companions agreed. They liked not poking around a tomb.

Yet for Margrete who had been Yria they did. Over and over they filled the bag with coin, plate, rings, crowns, ingots; over and over they hung on the hook a golden chest or horn or candelabrum or god. A signal would not travel well along this length of rope; the crew simply hauled it in about every half hour. Tauno discovered he had better attach his lanthorn, for, although the sea above had quieted,
Herning
did drift around and the line never descended to the same place. Between times the merman's children searched for new objects, or took a little ease, or fed themselves off the cheese and stockfish Ingeborg had laid in the sack.

Until Tauno said wearily: “We were told several hundred pounds would be ample, and I swear we've lifted a ton. A greedy man is an unlucky man. Shall we begone?”

“Oh, yes, oh, yes.” Eyjan peered into the glooms that bulked around their sphere of weak light. She shivered and huddled close to her elder brother. Rarely before had he seen her daunted.

Kennin was not. “I begin to know why the landfolk are so fond of looting,” he said with a grin. “There's fun in an endlessness of baubles as in an endlessness of ale or women.”

“Not truly endless,” Tauno answered in his sober fashion.

“Why, is it not endlessness if you have more of something than you can finish off in your lifetime, gold to spend, ale to drink, women——?” Kennin laughed.

“Bear with him,” Eyjan said into Tauno's ear. “He's a boy. All Creation is opening for him.”

“I'm no oldster myself,” Tauno replied, “though the trolls know I feel like a mortal one.”

They rid themselves of the remaining lanthoms, putting these in the last bagful. It would rise faster than was wise for them. Tauno gestured salute to unseen Averorn. “Sleep well,” he murmured; “may your rest be unbroken till the Weird of the World.”

From cold, dark, and death, they passed into light and thence into air. The sun cast nearly level beams out of the west, whose sky was greenish; eastward, amidst royal blue, stood forth a white planet. Waves ran purple and black, filigreed with foam, though the breeze had stopped. Their rush and squelp were the lone sounds in that coolness, save for what was made by the lolloping dolphins.

These wanted at once to know everything, but the siblings were too tired. They promised full news tomorrow, coughed the water from their lungs, and made for the cog. None waited at the rail save Herr Ranild. A rope ladder dangled down amidships.

Tauno came first aboard. He stood dripping, shuddering a bit from exhaustion, and looked around. Ranild bore crossbow in crook of arm; his men gripped their pikes near the mast——The kraken was dead. Why this tautness among them? Where were Ingeborg and Niels?

“Um-m-m…you're satisfied?” Ranild rumbled in his whiskers.

“We have plenty for our sister, and to make the lot of you rich,” Tauno said. His flesh dragged at him, chilled, bruised, worn out. The same ache and dullness were in his head. He felt he ought to be chanting his victory; no, that could wait, let him only rest now, only sleep.

Eyjan climbed over the side. “Niels?” she called.

A glance across the six who stood there sent the knife hissing from her scabbard. “Treachery—this soon?”

“Kill them!” Ranild shouted.

Kennin had just come off the ladder. He was still poised on the rail. As the sailors and their pikes surged forward, he yelled and pounced to the deck. None among those clumsy shafts had swiftness to halt him. Straight at Ranild's throat he flew, blade burning in the sunset glow.

Ranild lifted the crossbow and shot. Kennin crashed at his feet. The quarrel had gone through breastbone, heart, and back. Blood poured across the planks.

It stabbed in Tauno: Ingeborg had warned of betrayal, but Ranild was too shrewd for her. He must have plotted with man after single man, in secret corners of the hold. The moment the swimmers went after their booty, he gave the word to seize her and Niels. And slay them? No, that might leave traces; bind them, gag them, lay them below decks, until the trusting halflings had returned.

Eyjan's quick understanding, Kennin's ready action had upset the plan. The onrush of sailors was shaken and slowed. There was time for Eyjan and Tauno to dive overboard.

A couple of pikes arced harmlessly after them. Ranild loomed at the rail, black across the evening. His guffaw boomed forth: “Maybe this'll buy your passage home from the sharks!” And down to them he cast the body of Kennin.

IX

T
HE
dolphins gathered.

With them, after the manner of merfolk, Tauno and Eyjan left their brother. They had closed the eyes, folded the hands, and taken the knife—steel beginning to rust—that it might go on in use as something that had known him. Now it was right that he should make the last gift which was his to give, not to the conger eels but to those who had been his friends.

The halflings withdrew a ways while the long blue-gray shapes surrounded Kennin—very quietly, very gently—and they sang across the sunset ocean that farewell which ends:

Wide shall you wander, at one with the world,

Ever the all of you eagerly errant:

Spirit in sunlight and spindrift and sea-surge,

Flesh in the fleetness of fish and of fowl,

Back to the Bearer your bone and your blood-salt.

Beloved:

The sky take you.

The sea take you.

And we will remember you in the wind.

“But oh, Tauno, Tauno!” Eyjan wept. “He was so young!”

He held her close. The low waves rocked them. “Stark are the Norns,” Tauno said. “He made a good departure.”

A dolphin came to them and asked in dolphin wise what more help they wished. It would not be hard to keep the ship hereabouts, as by smashing the rudder. Presently thirst would wreak justice.

Tauno glanced at the cog, becalmed on the horizon, sail furled. “No,” he said, “they hold hostages. Nevertheless, something must be done.”

“I'll cut open Herr Ranild's belly,” Eyjan said, “And tie the end of his gut to the mast, and chase him around the mast till he's lashed to it.”

“I hardly think him worth that much trouble,” Tauno replied. “Dangerous is he, though. To attack the ship herself, with the dolphins or by swimming beneath and prying strake from strake, is no trick. To seize her, on the other hand, may be impossible. Yet must we try, for Yria, Ingeborg, and Niels. Come, we'd better take food—our cousins will catch us some—and rest. Our strength has been spent.”

——A while after midnight he awoke refreshed. Grief had not drained from him; however, the keenness for rescue and revenge filled most of his being.

Eyjan slept on, awash in a cloud of her hair. Strange how innocent, almost childlike her face had become, lips half parted and long lashes down over cheekbones. Around her were the guardian dolphins. Tauno kissed her in the hollow where throat met breast, and swam softly away.

It was a light night of Northern summer. Overhead, heaven stood aglow, a twilight wherein the stars looked small and tender. The waters glimmered, barely moving, a lap-lap-lap of wavelets above the deeper half-heard march of the tide. The air was hushed, cool, and damp.

Tauno came to
Herning
. He circled her with the stealthiness of a shark. Nobody seemed to be at the helm, but a man stood at either side of the main deck, pike agleam, and a third was in the crow's nest. Lanthorns were left dark so as not to dazzle their eyes. That meant three below. They were standing watch and watch. Ranild was taking no chances with his foes.