The Merman's Children (23 page)

“No, I thank you, but we belong here,” Tauno replied. The Danish he knew was sufficiently close to the tongue of the colonists—closer, in fact, than to Hauau's dialect—that he expected no trouble in understanding. He smiled, and rolled around to let the Inuk see him better.

In looks he might well have been a Norseman, long and thick-muscled, save for beardlessness, amber eyes, and the tinge of green in his shoulder-length hair. But no earth-born man could have rested at ease, naked off Greenland in fall. A headband, a belt to hold a pair of obsidian knives, and a narrow roll of oiled leather strapped to his shoulders beneath a spear whose head was of bone were his whole clothing.

Eyjan was likewise outfitted. She also smiled, and dazzled the Inuk.

“You…are——” A protracted native word followed. It seemed to mean “creatures of magic.”

“We are your friends,” Tauno said in that language; it was his turn to speak haltingly. He gave the names of his sister and himself.

“This person is called Minik,” the young man responded. He was emboldened, more than his companions, who hovered nervously farther off. “Will you not come aboard the umiak and rest?”

“No——” protested somebody else.

“They are not of the Neighbors,” Minik said.

Reluctant, the rest yielded. Such inhospitality was unheard of among their race. It could not be due to fear of wizardry. They did live in a world of spirits which must forever be appeased, but here were simply two manlike beings who made no threat and could surely relate wonders. Something terrible must have happened between them and the Vestri Bygd. And yet——

Eyjan noticed first. “Tauno!” she exclaimed. “They've a white woman among them!”

He had been too alert to the harpoons to pay much heed to the boat he was approaching. Now he saw that about at its middle, staring dumfounded as the rest, knelt one who overtopped them; and above a thrown-back parka hood, her braids shone gold.

The merman's children climbed over the side, careful not to upset the craft, more careful to squat in the bows prepared for a leap. The hull was ladend and bloody with a catch of auks. Tauno and Eyjan aimed their awareness at the single man there, a passenger in the stern, grizzled, wrinkled, and snag-toothed. He made signs at them, gasped, yelped, then grew abruptly calm and called out: “These bear no ills for us that I can smell.” And to them: “This person is called Panigpak and said by some to be an angakok”—a shaman, sorcerer, familiar of ghosts and demons, healer, foreseer, and, at need, wreaker of harm upon foes. For all his modesty, customary among his people, and for all the shriveling that age had brought upon him, he had an air of wild-animal pride; Tauno thought of wolf and white bear.

The women squealed and chattered; a few cackled half terrified laughter; their eyes darted like black beetles above the high, wide cheekbones. There drifted from them a secnt of fleshly heat and, not unpleasantly, of smoke and oil and the urine wherein they washed their hair. The men crowded their own craft around. They held themselves a bit more reserved—just a bit.

The Norsewoman alone kept still. She wore the same skin coat and trousers and footgear as the rest, she was as greasy as they, but her gaze burned blue. That, her fair and cleanly molded face, her stature and slenderness, roused longings in Tauno which no Inuk woman could altogether quell. He draped a hand between his thighs to hide those thoughts, and took the word:

“Forgive how lamely somebody talks. We learned among a distant band of the People. With them we hunted, fished, feasted, swapped gifts, and became friends. Here we will not linger. We search for our family, and ask no more from you than whatever knowledge you may have of it.”

Wind blew, waves trundled, the boat swayed in shrill cold. But it was as if the blond girl spoke through silence, in her birth-tongue: “Who are you? What are you? Not true merfolk…I think. Your feet are not webbed.”

“Then you know of our kind?” Eyjan cried gladly.

“Through tales I heard at the fireside, most from the old country. Naught else.”

Eyjan sighed. “Well, you are right about our nature. But see how you bewilder us, even as we bewilder you.”

The woman hugged to her an infant that, like most of her fellow paddlers, she had along. Hers was towheaded. “Can we indeed talk freely?” she breathed.

A couple of men objected to this lingo they did not understand. Were things not uncanny enough already? She answered them more handily than the halflings could have done. These swimmers could best use Danish. Was it not wisest to let them, so that they might explain swiftly and rightly? Afterward she would make clear what they had told. She appealed to Minik and Panigipak. The angakok's jet eyes probed at the strangers. After a while he agreed.

Minik was her man, Tauno realized. How had that happened?

“I, I hight Bengta Haakonsdatter,” she stammered. A pause, a clouding over. “I was Bengta Haakonsdatter. I am Atitak. And my daughter”—she held the one-year-old very close—“she was Hallfrid, but we call her Aloqisaq for Minik's grandmother, who died on a floe soon before we came to him.”

“Were you stolen away?” Eyjan asked low-voiced.

“No!” Bengta's free hand snatched over the side, caught Minik's shoulder, and clung fast. He flushed, embarrassed at a show the Inuit did not put on; but he let her hand upon him remain. “Tell me of yourselves,” she begged.

Eyjan shrugged. “My brother and I are half human,” she said, and went on to relate briefly what had happened. She finished in a tone not quite steady: “Have you heard aught of merfolk arriving?”

“No,” Bengta mumbled. “Though I may well not have, the way my life has gone of late.”

“Speak to your comrades, dear. Tell them merfolk are not their enemies. Rather, sea dwellers and air breathers together could do what neither alone is able to.”

The singing language went back and forth. Often Panigpak put a question straight to the halflings, aided at need by the Norsewoman. The facts emerged piecemeal. No, these Inuit knew nothing of any advent. However, they spent most of their time ashore, hunting, and seldom went far out at sea—never as far as the white men, who in days gone by had sailed beyond the horizon to fetch lumber (Bengta spoke of a place she called Markland) and were still wont to take their skiffs on recklessly long journeys in summer. (They huddled at home throughout the winter, which was when the Inuit traveled—by dog-hauled sleds, overland or across the ice along the coasts.) Hence they in the Bygd might have ken of happenings on some island of which poor ignorant people in kayaks could say naught. Were that so, surely Bengta's father would know, he being the mightiest man in the settlement.

Tauno and Eyjan could not miss the horror wherewith the name of Haakon Arnorsson was uttered. His own daughter flinched, and her voice harshened.

Just the same——“Well, we had better go to see him,” Eyjan murmured. “Shall we carry a message from you, Bengta?”

The girl's will broke. Tears burst forth. “Bring him my curse!” she screamed. “Tell him…all of them…leave this land…before the tupilak dooms them…that our angakok put on them …for
his
misdeeds!”

Minik clutched his harpoon. Panigpak crouched deeper, secretive, into his furs. Women and kayaks edged back from the two in the bows. Infants sensed unease and wailed. “I think we'd best get out of here,” Tauno said at the corner of his mouth. Eyjan nodded. In twin arcs, the merman's children dived over the side of the umiak and vanished beneath restless bitter waters.

VIII

T
HE
talk had revealed where Haakon's garth lay on the great bight that sheltered the Vestri Bygd. The short gray day had turned to dusk when the halflings found it. That gloom hid them while they donned the garb rolled into their packs. It would hardly disguise what they were. Instead of cloth, which dampness would soon have rotted, the stuff was three-ply fishskin, rainbow-scaled, from Liri. Though brief, those tunics would not offend Christians as badly as nakedness did. Out of waterproof envelopes they took steel knives; however, they did not lay aside their rustfree weapons of stone and bone, and they bore their spears in their hands.

Thereafter they walked to the steading. Wind whined sharp-toothed; waves ground together the stones of the beach. Faerie sight brought more out of the murk than a human could see; but the view between hunchbacked hills was everywhere desolate. The settlement was not a town, it was homes scattered across many wild miles: for brief bleak summers made this land a niggard. Since grain often failed, grass, as pasture and hay for livestock, was the only crop the dwellers dared count on raising. Stubble, thin beneath their bare feet, told the wayfarers how scant the latest harvest had been. A paddock, fenced by bleached whale ribs, was large, must formerly have kept a fair number of beasts, but now held a few scrawny sheep and a couple of likewise wretched cows. A small inlet ended here, and three boats lay drawn aground. They were six-man skiffs, well-built, well suited to this country of countless winding fjords; but beneath the pungent tar that blackened them Tauno descried how old their timbers were.

Ahead loomed the buildings, a house, a barn, and two sheds ringing a dirt courtyard. They were of dry-laid rock, moss-chinked, turf-decked, barely fit for the poorest fishermen in Denmark. Peat-fire smoke drifted out of a roofhole. Gleams trickled through cracks in warped ancient shutters. Four hounds bounded clamorous from the door. They were big animals, wolf blood in them, and their leanness made them appear twice frightful. But when they caught the scent of the halflings, they tucked down their tails and slunk aside.

The door opened. A tall man stood outlined black between the posts, a spear of his own at the ready. Several more gathered at his back. “Who comes?” he called distrustfully.

“Two of us,” Tauno answered from the dark. “Fear not if we look eerie. Our will toward you is good.”

A gasp arose as he and Eyjan stepped into the fireglow, oaths, maybe a hurried prayer. The tall man crossed himself. “In Jesu name, say what you are,” he demanded, shaken but undaunted.

“We are not mortals,” Eyjan told him. The admission always scared less when it came from her sweetly curved lips. “Yet we can speak the name of Jesu Kristi as well as you, and mean no harm. We may even help, in return for an easy favor we hope you can grant us.”

The man drew a loud breath, sank his weapon, and trod forward. He was as gaunt as his dogs, and had never been stout; but his hands were large and strong. His face was thin too, in cheeks, straight nose, tightly held mouth, plowshare chin, faded blue eyes, framed by gray hair and cropped gray beard. Beneath a long, plain woolen coat with hood thrown back could be seen stockings and sealskin shoon; nothing smelled well. A sword, which he must have belted on when he heard the noise, hung at his waist. To judge from the shape, it had been forged for a viking. Were they truly that backward here, or could they afford nothing new?

“Will you give us your names too, and name your tribe?” he ordered more than asked. Defiantly: “I am Haakon Arnorsson, and this is my steading Ulfsgaard.”

“We knew that,” Eyjan said, “since we inquired who the chief man is in these parts.” In about the same words as she had used to his daughter, she told of the quest up to yesterday—save for merely relating that Liri had become barren, not that the cause of the flight therefrom was an exorcism. Meanwhile the men of the household got courage to shuffle nigh, and the women and children to jam the doorway. Most were younger than Haakon, and stunted by a lifetime of ill feeding; some hobbled on bowed legs or in unmistakable pain from rheumatism and deformed bones. The night made them shiver in their patched garments. A stench welled from the house which the eye-smarting smoke could not altogether blanket, sourness of bathless bodies that must live packed in a narrow space.

“Can you tell us anything?” Eyjan finished. “We will pay…not gold off these rings of ours, unless you wish it, but more fish and sea-game than I think you'd catch for yourselves.”

Haakon brooded. The wind moaned, the folk whispered and made signs in the air, not all of the Cross. At last he flung his head on high and snapped: “Where did you learn of me? From the Skraelings, no?”

“The what?”

“The Skraelings. Our ugly, stumpy heathen, who've been drifting into Greenland from the west these past hundred years.” A snarl: “Drifting in together with frosty summers, smitten fields, God's curse on us—that I think their own warlocks brought down!”

Tauno braced muscles and mind. “Aye,” he answered. “We met a party of them, and your daughter Bengta, Haakon. Will you trade your knowledge for news of how she is?”

An outcry lifted. Haakon showed teeth in his beard and sucked air in between them. Then he stamped spearbutt on earth and roared, “Enough! Be still, you whelps!” When he had his silence, he said quietly, “Come within and we'll talk.”

Eyjan plucked Tauno's elbow. “Should we?” she questioned in the mer-language. “Outdoors, we can escape from an onset. Between walls, they can trap us.”

“A needful risk,” her brother decided. To Haakon: “Do you bid us be your guests? Will you hold us peace-holy while we are beneath your roof?”

Haakon traced the Cross. “By God and St. Olaf I swear that, if you plight your own harmlessness.”

“On our honor, we do,” they said, the nearest thing to an oath that Faerie folk knew. They had found that Christians took it as mockery if soulless beings like them called on the sacred.

Haakon led them over his threshold. Eyjan well-nigh gagged at the full stink, and Tauno wrinkled his nose. The Inuit were not dainty, but the ripeness in their quarters betokened health and abundance. Here——

A miserly peat fire, in a pit on the clay floor, gave the sole light until Haakon commanded that a few soapstone lamps be filled with blubber and kindled. Thereafter his poverty became clear. The house had but a single room. People had been readying for sleep; straw pallets were spread on the platform benches which lined the walls, in a shut-bed that must be the master's, and on the ground for the lowly. The entire number was about thirty. So must they lie among each other's snores, after listening to whatever hasty lovemaking any couple had strength for. An end of the chamber held a rude kitchen. Smoked meat and stockfish hung from the rafters, flatbread on poles in between, and were gruesomely little when the wind was blowing winter in.