Read Online The Merman's Children by Poul Anderson - Free Book Online Page B

blade-pricked; she merely stood till I took the halter, and afterward she shambled along meek as if she’d been poleaxed.”
    â€œHo, ho, let me tell you about when we boys dressed a walrus in my father’s robe of state——”
    Eyjan would frequently join in the merriment. She did not follow ladylike ways, even in the slight degree that most mermaids did. She haggled her red locks off at the shoulders, wore no ring or necklace or golden gown save at festivals, would rather hunt or challenge the surf around a skerry than sit tame at home. On the whole, she scorned landfolk (in spite of which, she had prowled the woods with cries of delight for blossoms, birdsong, deer, squirrel, autumn’s fiery leaves and the snow and icicles that glittered after). But of some she was fond, Niels among them. Also, she did not lie with her brothers—a Christian law which Agnete had gotten well into her older children ere leaving them—and the mermen were gone to an unknown place and the lads of Als were far behind.
    Herning plowed through day and night, squall and breeze, until she raised what Tauno and Ranild agreed were the southern Orkney Islands. That was toward evening: mild weather, fair wind, clear summer night and a full moon due. They saw no reason not to push on through the narrows after sunset, the more so when the brothers offered to swim ahead as waterline lookouts. Eyjan wanted to do the same, but Tauno said one must stay back against possible disaster like a sudden onslaught of sharks; and when they drew lots, hers was the short straw. She cursed for minutes without repeating herself before she calmed down.
    Thus it happened that she stood alone on the main deck, near the forecastle. Another lookout was perched aloft, screened from her by the bellying sail, and a helmsman was under the poop, hidden in its shadow. The rest, who had learned to trust the halflings in watery matters, snored below.
    Save for Niels, who came back and found Eyjan there. The moonlight sparkled on her tunic, sheened on her face and breast and limbs, lost itself in her hair. It washed the deck clean, it built a shivering road from the horizon to the laciness of foam on small waves. They slapped very gently on the hull, those waves, and Niels, who was barefoot, could feel it, because the ship was heeled just enough that he became aware of standing. The sail, dull brown with leather crisscrossing by day, loomed overhead like a snow-peak. The rigging creaked, the wind lulled, the sea murmured. It was almost warm. Far, far above, in a dreamy half-darkness, glinted stars.
    â€œGood evening,” he said awkwardly.
    She smiled at the tall, frightened boy. “Welcome,” she said.
    â€œHave you…may I…may I join you?”
    â€œI wish you would.” Eyjan pointed to where the luminance picked out a couple of widely spaced roilings on the port and starboard quarters. “I long to be with them. Take my mind off it, Niels.”
    â€œYou—you—you do love your sea, no?”
    â€œWhat better thing to love? Tauno made a poem once—I cannot put it well into Danish—let me try: Above, she dances, clad in sun, in moon, in rain, in wind, strewing gulls and spindrift kisses. Below, she is green and gold, calm, all-caressing, she whose children are reckoned by shoals and herds and pods and flocks beyond knowing, giver and shelterer of the world. But farthest down she keeps what she will not ever let the light see, mystery and terror, the womb wherein she bears herself. Maiden, Mother, and Mistress of Mysteries, enfold at the end my weary bones! …No.” Eyjan shook her head. “That is not right. Maybe if you thought of your earth, the great wheel of its year, and that…Mary? …who wears a cloak colored like the sky, maybe then you could—I know not what I am trying to say.”
    â€œI can’t believe you’re soulless!” Niels cried softly.
    Eyjan shrugged.