And directions were indeed gotten, more and more exact as the ship drew nearer. Yes, a bad place, said Fishgrabber, a kraken lair, ah, steer clear... it is true that krakens, like other coldblooded things, can lie long unfed; however, this one must be ravenous after centuries with naught but stray whales. . . he stays there, said Sheerfin, because he still thinks it is his Averom, he broods on its drowned treasures and towers and the bones that once worshipped him. . . he has grown, I hear tell, until his arms reach from end to end of the ruined main square. . . well, for old times’ sake we’ll guide you thither, said Spraybow, seeing as how the moon wanes toward the half, which is when he goes to sleep, though he is readily aroused. . . but no, give you more than guidance, no, we have too many darlings to think about. . . .
In this wise did Herning at last reach that spot in the ocean beneath which lay sunken Averom.
VIII
The dolphins took hasty leave. Their finned gray backs were rainbowed by the morning sun, in mist off the froth cast up by their flukes. Tauno felt sure they would go no farther than to the nearest edge of safety; that was an unslakably curious and gossipy breed.
He had laid a course to bring the cog here at this time, giving a full day’s light for work. Now she lay hove to and the broadbeamed hull hardly rocked at rest. For it was a calm day, with the least of breezes in an almost cloudless heaven. Waves went small and chuckling, scant foam aswirl on their tops. Looking overside, Tauno marveled, as he had done throughout his life, at how intricately and beautifully wrinkled each wave was, no two alike, no one ever the same as its past self. And how warmly the sunbeams washed over his skin, how coolly the salt air blessed him! He had not broken his fast, that being unwise before diving to the uttermost deeps, and was thus aware of his belly, and this too was good, like every awareness.
“Well,” he said, “soonest begun, soonest done.”
The sailors goggled at him. They had brought out pikes, which they clutched as if trying to keep afloat on them. Behind suntan, dirt, and hair, five of those faces were terrified; Adam’s apples bobbed in gullets. Ranild stood stoutly, a crossbow cocked on his left arm. And while Niels was pale, he burned and trembled with the eagerness of a lad too young to really know that young lads can also die.
“Get busy, you lubbers,” jerred Kennin. “We’re doing the work that counts. Can’t you tum a windlass?”
“I give the orders, boy,” said Ranild with unwonted calm. “Still, he’s right. Hop to it.”
Sivard wet his lips. “Skipper,” he said hoarsely, “I. . . I think best we put about.”
“After coming this far?” Ranild grinned. “Had I known you’re a woman, I could have gotten some use out of you.”
“What’s gold to an eaten man? Shipmates, think. The kraken can haul us undersea the way we haul up a hooked flounder. We—”
Sivard spoke no more. Ranild decked him with a blow that brought nosebleed. “Man the tackle, you whoresons,” the captain rasped, “or Satan fart me out if I don’t send you to the kraken myself!”
They scurried to obey. “He does not lack courage,” Eyjan said in the mer-tongue.
“Nor does he lack treachery,” Tauno warned. “Turn never your back on any of that scurvy lot.”
“Save Niels and Ingeborg,” she said.
“Oh, you’d not want to turn your back on him, nor I mine on her,” Kennin laughed. He likewise felt no fear, he was wild to be off.
Using a crane they had fitted together and braced against the mast, the sailors raised that which had been readied while under way. A large piece of iron had been hammered into the boulder till it stood fast; thereafter the outthrusting half was ground and whetted to a barbed spearhead. Elsewhere in the rock were rings, and the huge net was secured to these at its middle. Along the outer edges of the net were bent the twelve ship-anchors. All this made a sort of bundle lashed below a raft whose right size had been learned by trial and error. The crane arm dangled it over the starboard bulwark, tilting the cog.
“Let’s go,” said Tauno. He himself was unafraid, though at the back of his head he did think on the fact that this world-that entered him and that he entered through senses triply heightened by danger-might soon crack to an end, not only in its present and future but in its very past.
The siblings took off their clothes, save for the headbands and dagger belts. Each slung a pair of harpoons across the shoulders. They stood for a moment at the rail, their sea ablaze behind them, tall Tauno, lithe Kennin, Eyjan of the white skin and the comely breasts.
To them came Niels. He wrung their hands, he kissed the girl, he wept because he could not go with them. Meanwhile Ingeborg held hands and eyes with Tauno. She had braided her hair, but a stray brown lock fluttered across her brow. Upon her snubnosed, full-mouthed, freckled face had come a grave loneliness he had never known before, not ever among the merfolk.
“It may be I will not see you again, Tauno,” she said, too low for others to listen, “and sure it is that I cannot and must not speak what is in my heart. Yet I’ll pray for this, that if you go to your death, on your errand for a sister’s sake, God give you in your last moment the pure soul you have earned.”
“Oh. . . you are kind, but-well, I fully mean to come back.”
“I drew a bucket of sea water ere dawn,” she whispered, “and washed myself clean. Will you kiss me farewell?”
He did. Her pretense of dislike was no longer needful, he supposed; his alliance could guard her, as well as each other, on the homeward voyage. “Overboard!” he shouted, and plunged.
Six feet beneath, the sea took him with a joyful splash. It sheathed him in aliveness. He savored the taste and coolness for a whole minute before he called, “Lower away.”
The sailors cranked down the laden raft. It floated awash, weight exactly upheld. Tauno cast it loose. The humans crowded to the rail. The halflings waved-not to them but to wind and. sun—and went under.
The first breath of sea was always easier than the first of air. One simply blew out, then stretched wide the lips and chest. Water came in, tingling through mouth, nostrils, throat, lungs, stomach, guts, blood, to the last nail and hair. That dear shock threw the body over to merfolk way; subtle humors decomposed the fluid element itself to get the stuff which sustains fish, fowl, flesh, and fire alike; salt was sieved from the tissues; interior furnaces stoked themselves high against the lamprey chill.
That was a reason why merfolk were scarce. They required more food afloat than men do ashore. A bad catch or a murrain among the shellfish might make an entire tribe starve to death. The sea gives; the sea takes.
Vanimen’s children placed themselves to manhandle their clumsy load and swam downward.
As first the light was like new leaves and old amber. Soon it grew murky, soon afterward blackness ate the last of it. No matter their state, the siblings felt cold. Silence hemmed them in. They were bound for depths below any in Kattegat or Baltic; this was the Ocean. “Hold,” Tauno said, in the dialect of the mer-tongue that was used underwater, a language of many hums, clicks, and smacks. “Is she riding steady? Can you keep her here?”
“Aye,” answered Eyjan and Kennin.
“Good. Let this be where you wait.”
They made no bold protests. They had worked out their plan and now abode by it, as those must who dare the great deep. Tauno, strongest and most skilled, was to scout ahead.
Strapped on the left forearm, each of them carried a lanthorn from Liri. This was a hollowed crystal globe, plated with varnished silver on one half and shaped into a lens on the other half, filled with that living seafire which lit the homes of the merfolk. A hole, covered with mesh too fine for those animalcules to escape, let them be fed and let water go in and out. The ball rested in a box of carven bone, shuttered in front. None of the lanthorns had been opened.