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

miser Kristoffer into whose hands I would have fallen had I not chosen this way. My skin crawls when he comes smirking.” She spat on the clay floor, then sighed. “He has the coin, though.…No, mainly they are not bad, those rough-bearded men; and sometimes a lad gives me joy.” She rumpled his hair. “You give me more, without fail, Tauno. Can you not see, that’s why it would be wrong for you to hire me?”
    â€œNo, I cannot,” he answered in honesty. “I have things you say men reckon precious, amber, pearls, pieces of gold. If they will help you, why should you not have them?”
    â€œWell,” she said, “among other reasons, word would come to the lords around Hadsund, that Cod-Ingeborg was peddling such wares. They’d want to know how I got them. I do not wish my last man to wear a hood.” She kissed him. “Oh, let us say what’s better, that your tales of your undersea wonderland give me more than any hand-graspable wealth may buy.”
    She dropped a number of hints that she longed to be taken away as was fair Agnete. He was deaf to them, and she gave up. Why should he want a barren burden?
    When Provost Magnus exorcised the merfolk, Ingeborg would see no person for a week. Her eyes were red for a long time afterward.
    Finally Tauno sought her again. He came from the water, naked save for the headband that caught his locks and the sharp flint dagger belted at his hip. In his right hand he carried a barbed spear. It was a cold, misty twilight, fog asmoke until the lap-lapping wavelets were blurred and the stars withheld. There was a scent of kelp, fish, and from inland of damp earth. The sand gritted beneath his feet, the dune grass scratched his ankles.
    A pair of fisher youths were nearing the hut, with a flaming link to show the way. Tauno saw farther in the dark than they could. Under the wadmal sameness of cowl, smock, and hose, he knew who they were. He trod into their path. “No,” he said. “Not this night.”
    â€œWhy…why, Tauno,” said one with a foolish grin. “You’d not bar your chums from their bit of fun, would you, or her from this fine big flounder? We won’t be long, if you’re so eager.”
    â€œGo home. Stay there.”
    â€œTauno, you know me, we’ve talked, played ball, you’ve come aboard when I was out by myself in the jollyboat, I’m Stig——”
    â€œMust I kill you?” asked Tauno without raising his voice.
    They looked at him by the guttering link-flare, towering over them, hugely thewed, armed, hair wet as a strand-washer’s and faintly green under its fairness, the mer-face and the yellow eyes chill as northlights. They turned and walked hastily back. Through the fog drifted Stig’s shout: “They were right about you, you’re soulless, you damned thing ——”
    Tauno smote the door of the shack. It was a sagging box of logs weathered gray, peat-roofed, windowless, though a glow straggled outward and air inward where the chinking moss had shriveled. Ingeborg opened for him and closed behind them both. Besides a blubber lamp, she had a low fire going. Monstrous shadows crawled on the double-width sleeping dais, the stool and table, the few cooking and sewing tools, clothes chest, sausage and stockfish hung from the rafters, and those poles across the rafters which skewered rounds of hardtack. On a night like this, smoke hardly rose from hearthstone to roofhole.
    Tauno’s lungs always burned for a minute after he had come ashore and emptied them in that single heave which merfolk used. The air was so thin, so dry (and he felt half deafened among its muffled noises, though to be sure he saw better). The reek here was worse. He must cough ere he could speak.
    Ingeborg held him, wordlessly. She was short and buxom, snub-nosed, freckled, with a big gentle mouth. Her hair and eyes were dark brown, her voice high but sweet. There