Jonas sprang to his feet. “Have they taken her soul out of the body they took?” he shrieked through a hubbub.
Did Haakon groan? He gave no other sign of his wound. “Be still!” he required. The uproar waxed. He rose, drew his sword, brandished it and said flatly: “Sit down. Hold your mouths. Whoever does not will soon be one less to feed through the winter.”
Quiet fell, save for the wind piping around walls and snuffing at the door. Haakon sheathed blade and lowered his spare frame. “I have an offer for you two,” he said, word by word. “A fair trade. You’ve told us you’re half human, but can breathe underwater as well as a real merman, and swim almost as well. By your weapons, I ween you can fight there too.”
Tauno nodded.
“And you ought not to fear sorcery, being of the Outworld yourselves,” Haakon went on.
Eyjan stiffened. Jonas said in haste, “Oh, he doesn’t mean you are evil.”
“No,” Haakon agreed. “In truth, I’ve a bargain to strike with you.” He leaned forward. “See here. There is indeed. . . a flock of what must be merfolk. . . around an island to the west. I saw them shortly before, before our woes began. I was out fishing. Sturli and Mikkel were along,” he added to the astounded household, “but you remember that the tupilak got them afterward. We were. . . alarmed at what we saw, unsure what Christian men should do, and felt we’d best hold our peace till we could ask a priest. I mean a wise priest, not Sira Sigurd of this parish, who can’t read a line and who garbles the Mass. I know he does; I’ve been to church in the Ostri Bygd and heeded what was done and sung. And surely he’s failed to pray us free of the tupilak. Folk around here are sliding fast into ignorance, cut off as we mostly have been—” His features writhed. .. Aye, sliding into heathendom.”
He needed a minute to regain his calm. “Well,” he said. “We meant to seek counsel from the bishop at Gardar, and meanwhile keep still about the sight lest we stampede somebody into foolishness or worse. But then the tupilak came, and we—I never had the chance to go.” He caught the eyes of his guests. “Of course, I can’t swear those beings are your kin. But they are latecomers, so it seems reasonable, no? I doubt you could find the island by yourselves. The waters are vast between here and Markland. You’d at least have a long, perilous search, twice perilous because of the tupilak. I can steer by stars and sunstone and take you straight there. But. . . none from the Vestri Bygd can put to sea and live, unless the tupilak be destroyed.”
“Tell us,” Eyjan urged from the bottom of her throat.
Haakon sat back, tossed off his beer, signaled for more all around, and spoke rapidly:
“Best I begin at the beginning. The beginning, when men first found and settled Greenland. They went farther on in those daysfailed to abide in Vinland, good though that was said to be, but for a long time afterward would voyage to Markland and fetch timber for this nearly treeless country of ours. And each year ships came from abroad to barter iron and linen and such-like wares for our skins, furs, eiderdown, whalebone, walrus ivory, narwhal tusk—”
Tauno could not entirely quench a grin. He had seen that last sold in Europe as a unicorn’s horn.
Haakon frowned but continued: “We Greenlanders were never wealthy, but we flourished, our numbers waxed, until the landhungry moved north and started this third of our settlements. But then the weather worsened, slowly at first, afterward ever fastersummer’s cold and autumn’s hail letting us garner scant harvest any more; storms, fogs, and icebergs at sea. Fewer and fewer ships arrived, because of the danger and because of upheavals at home. Now years may well go by between two cargoes from outside. Without that which we must have to live and work, and cannot win from our home-acres, we grow more poor, more backward, less able to cope. And. . . the Skraelings are moving in.”
“They’re peaceful, are they not?” Eyjan asked softly.
Haakon spat an oath, Jonas onto the floor. “They’re troll-sly,” the older one growled. “By their witchcraft they can live where Christians cannot; but it brings God’s anger down on Greenland.”
“How can you speak well of a breed so hideous, a lovely girl like you?” Jonas added. He tried a smile in her direction.
Haakon’s palm chopped the air. “As for my house,” he said, “the tale is quickly told. For twenty-odd years, a Skraeling pack has camped, hunted, and fished a short ways north of the Bygd. They would come to trade with us, and Norsemen would less often visit them. I thought ill of this, but had no way to forbid it, when they offered what we needed. Yet they were luring our folk into sin-foremost our young men, for their women have no shame, will spread legs for anybody with their husbands’ knowledge and consent. . . and some youths also sought to learn Skraeling tricks of the chase, Skraeling arts like making huts of snow and training dogs to pull sleds—”
Pain sawed in his tone: “Four years ago, I married my daughter off to Sven Egilsson. He was a likely lad, and they-abode happily together, I suppose, though his holding was meager, out at the very edge of the Bygd, closer to Skraelings than to any but one or two Christian families. They had two children who lived, a boy and girl, and a carl to help with the work.
“Last summer, want smote us in earnest. Hay harvest failed, we must butcher most of our livestock, and nevertheless would have starved save for what we could draw from the sea. A frightful winter followed. Mter a blizzard which raged for days—no, for an ungues sable part of the nearly sunless night which is winter here—I could not but lead men north to see how Bengta fared. We found Sven, my grandson Dag, and the carl dead, under skimpy cairns, for the earth was frozen too hard to dig a grave in. Bengta and little Hallfrid were gone. The place was bare of fuel. Traces-sled tracks, dog droppings-bespoke a Skraeling who had come and taken them. ,
“Mad with grief and wrath, I led my men to the stone huts where those creatures den in winter. We found most were away, hunting, gadding about, I know not what. Bengta too. Those who were left said she had come of her free will, bringing her live child-come with a male of theirs, come to his vile couch, though he already had a mate- We slaughtered them. We spared a single crone to pass word that in spring we’d hunt down the rest like the vermin they are, did they not return our stolen girls.”
Shadows closed in as the fife waned. Dank chill gnawed and gnawed. Eyjan asked mutedly, into Haakon’s labored breathing:
“Did you never think they might have spoken truth? There were no marks of violence on the bodies, were there? I’d say hunger and cold, when supplies gave out, were the murderers, or else an illness such as your sort brings on itself by living in filth. Then Minik—the Inuk, the man-he went yonder, anxious about her, and she took refuge with him. I daresay they’d long been friends.”
“Aye,” Haakon confessed. “She was ever much taken by the Skraelings, prattled words of theirs as early as she did Norse, hearkened to their tales when they came here, the dear, trusting lass. . . . Well, he could have brought her to me, couldn’t he? I’d have rewarded him. No, he must have borne her off by might. Later-what you heard in the boat is proof-that damned old witch-man cast a spell on her. God have mercy! She’s as lost and enwebbed as any traveler lured into an elthill-lost from her kin, lost from her salvation, she and my granddaughter both-unless we can regain them—”
“What happened next?” Tauno asked in a while.
“They abandoned that ground, of course, and shifted to somewhere else in the wilderness. Early this spring, hunters of ours came on one of theirs and fetched him bound to me. I hung him over a slow fife to make him tell where they were, but he would not. So I let him go free-save for an eye, to prove I meant what I said—and bade him tell them that unless they sent me my daughter and granddaughter, and for my justice the nithings who defiled her, no man in the Bygd will rest until every last troll of them is slain; for all of us have women to ward. “A few days afterward, the tupilak came.”