“I’ll try,” she answered. “But oh, Tauno, I’ll think of you the whole while! If only we went together this day!”
They looked into each other’s eyes as they voiced the “Song of Farewells”:
He kissed her again, and she him. He got up and went outside.
Eleven ablebodied men and lads came along. They could handle two of the three skiffs that Haakon had from of old. Jonas had wanted to send for more from neighboring farms. “If we fail and perish,” he said, “this house is stripped of strength.”
Haakon denied him: “If we fail, everybody will perish. A fleet of boats could not overcome the tupilak. That was tried, you know. Three got away while it was wrecking the rest. Our main hope this time is our merman, and he’s single. Also”-for an instant, glory flickered through his starkness-“I bear the name of king’s reeve for this shire, not to risk lives but to ward them. Let us win as we are, and we will live in sagas as long as men live in Greenland.”
While the hulls were launched, Tauno stripped and bathed. He would not get weapons until the onslaught came. Most of the crew dreaded him too much, nearly as much as they did the monster. Well had they struck him down and bound him, but he stayed eldritch, and maybe no will less unbendable than Haakon’s could have made them venture forth in his company.
Silent, they took their seats. Oars creaked in tholes, splashed in water, which clucked back against planks and made the skiffs pitch. Spindrift spread salt on lips. Meadows of home fell away aft; the fjord broadened, dark and foam-streaked, between sheer cliffs. Against the overcast wheeled a flock of black guillemot. Their cries were lost in the sinister singing of wind. The sun was a dull and heatless wheel, barely above the mountains; it was as if cold radiated from their snows and the glacier beyond.
Each man had an oar, Tauno also. He sat by Haakon in the bows. Before him were Jonas and Steinkil; the remaining pair in this craft were grubby drawfs whose names he did not know or care about. The second boat paced them, several fathoms to starboard. He leaned into his work, glad of the chance to limber and warm up, dismal though the task was. Erelong Haakon said, “Go easier, Tauno. You’re outpulling us.”
“Strong as a bear, ha?” Steinkil flung over his shoulder. “Well, could be I’d liefer have a bear aboard.”
“Tease him not,” said Jonas unexpectedly. “Tauno, I. . . I’m sorry. Believe we’ll keep troth with you. My father is a man of honor. I try to be.”
“As with my sister last night?” gibed the halfling.
Haakon missed a stroke. “What’s this?”
Jonas cast Tauno a pleading glance. The latter took swift thought and said, “Oh, anybody could see how he hankered.” He felt no real anger at the attempted ravishment. Such matters meant little to him or Eyjan; if she’d had fewer partners than he, it was because she was two years younger; she knew the small spell that kept her from conceiving against her wish. He himself would happily tumble Jonas’ sister Bengta, should that unlikely chance come—the more so when he and his own sister had had ever worse trouble holding back from each other on their long journey, for the sake of their mother who had abhorred that. . . . Besides, they could lose naught by his making the younker look pitifully grateful.
“Mortal sin,” Haakon growled. “Put that desire from you, boy. Confess and-ask lax Sira Sigurd to set you a real penance.”
“Blame him not,” Steinkil urged. “She’s the fairest sight I’ve ever seen, and brazenly clad.”
“A vessel of Hell.” Haakon’s words came ragged. “Beware, beware. We’re losing our Faith in our loneliness. I shudder to think where our descendants will end, unless we- When we’ve finished with the tupilak-when we have, I say—I will go after my daughter What made her do it?” he almost screamed. “Forsake God-her blood, her kind-aye, a house around her, woven clothes on her back, white man’s food and drink and tools and ways, everything we’ve fought through lifetimes to keepplay whore to the wild man who violated her, huddle in a snow hut and devour raw meat- What power of Satan could make her do it?”
He saw how they stared from the other skiff, clamped his lips, and rowed.
They had been an hour under way, and begun to hear thunder where open sea surfed on headlands, when their enemy found them.
A man in the next boat howled. Tauno saw foam around a huge brown bulk. It struck yonder hull, which boomed and lurched. “Fend it off!” Haakon bellowed. “Use your spears! Pull, you cravens! Get us over there!”
He and Tauno shipped their oars and crouched on their feet. The halfling reached low, took from the bilge a belt bearing three sheath knives which he had asked for, and buckled it on. Not yet did he go overboard. He watched what they neared, his eyesight gone diamond sharp, ears keen to every splash and bang and curse and prayer, nostrils drinking deep of the wind to feed lungs and slugging heart. His will shrank at what he saw, until Eyjan’s image made him rally.
The tupilak had hooked a flipper, whereon were a bear’s claws, across a rail. Its weight was less than a live animal’s, but the boat was still canted so that men must struggle to keep afoot and aboard. Two shafts were stuck in the wrinkled hide—they wagged in horrible foolishness—and the broken halves of two more from earlier combats. No blood ran thence. At the end of a long, whipping neck, the head of a shark gaped and glassily glared. The limb jerked, the boat rocked, a man fell against the jaws, they sheared. Now blood spurted and bowels trailed. The wind blew away the steam off their warmth.
A rower aft in Haakon’s boat yammered his terror. Steinkil leaned to cuff him, then doggedly returned to his oar. They closed from behind. Haakon braced his legs wide and hacked with a bill. Tauno knew he sought to tear the walrus skin, let out the stuffing of hay and rotten corpses—
The flukes of a killer whale lashed back, up from roiled water, down on the prow. Wood splintered. Haakon tumbled. Tauno dived.
He needed a split minute to empty his lungs, let in the brine, and change his body over to undersea breathing. The icy green currents around him dimmed and shortened vision-he saw churned chaos above and ahead-battle clamor crashed blow after blow on his eardrums. The currents were tainted by the iron smell and taste of human gore. The dead man sank past, slowly twirling on his way to the eels.
“We’ll Keep the thing busy as long as we can, while you hit from below,” Haakon had said. “That won’t be very long.”
Ready, Tauno gripped a blade between his teeth and surged forward. Attacking, he lost both fear and self. There was no Tauno, no tupilak, no band of men; there was a fight.
The hulls were shadows, breaking and re-forming, on the splintery bright ceiling of his green world. Clearer was the tupilak, the curve of its paunch. . . he saw how thongs stitched it together, he caught an ooze of mildew and moldered flesh. Claws scythed on the rear flippers. Tauno swooped inward.
The knife was now in his. hand. His legs drove him past as he cut. A long gap in the seam followed the blade. He swung beyond reach of a foot that swatted at him.
Arcing back in a stream of bubbles, he saw some bones of sailors drop out. Mindless, the tupilak raged yet against the Norse.
He glimpsed how the tail battered, and the noise shook him. In again-hold underwater breath against graveyard foulness, slice away from the seam, grab that comer, heave the flap of skin wide—a slash caught him along the ribs, he lost his knife, he barely kicked free.