Eyjan noticed ftrst. “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 stem, 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 hriveling that age had brought upon him, he had an air of wildnimal pride; Tauno thought of wolf and white bear.
The women squealed and chattered; a few cackled half terrified aughter; their eyes darted like black beetles above the high, wide heekbones. There drifted from them a secnt of fleshly heat and, lot unpleasantly, of smoke and oil and the urine wherein they vashed their hair. The men crowded their own craft around. They leld themselves a bit more reserved-just a bit.
The Norsewoman alone kept still. She wore the same skin coat md trousers and footgear as the rest, she was as greasy as they, but her gaze burned blue. That, her fair and cleanly molded face, ler stature and slenderness, roused longings in Tauno which no nuk woman could altogether quell. He draped a hand between lis thighs to hide those thoughts, and took the word:
“Forgive how lamely somebody talks. We learned among a listant 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. I Jut it was as if the blond girl spoke through silence, in her birth- ongue: “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 ellow paddlers, she had along. Hers was towheaded. “Can we ndeed talk freely?” she breathed.
A couple of men objected to this lingo they did not understand. “Here things not uncanny enough already? She answered them Dore handily than the halflings could have done. These swimmers could best use Danish. Was it not wisest to let them, so that they night explain swiftly and rightly? Afterward she would make clear what they had told. She appealed to Minik and Panigipak. The mgakok’s jet eyes probed at the strangers. After a while he agreed.
Minik was her man, Tauno realized. How had that happened?
“I, I bight 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 he! 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 Amorsson 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 comer 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
The 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 envilopes 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 sharptoothed; 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, mosschinked, 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.