Father Knud implored her to mend her life. “Can you find me better work than this?” she laughed. He must needs ban her from Communion, if not the Mass; and she seldom went to the latter, since women hissed her in the street and might throw a fishhead or a bone at her. The men, easier-going on the whole, did agree she could not be allowed to dwell among them, if only because of their goodwives’ tongues.
She had a cabin built, a shack on the strand several furlongs north of Als. Most of the unwed young men came to her, and the crews of vessels that stopped in, and the rare chapman, and husbands after dark. Had they no coppers, she would take pay in kind, wherefore she got the name Cod-Ingeborg. Between whiles she was alone, and often strolled far along the shore or into the woods. She had no fear of rovers—they would not likely kill her, and what else mattered?—and little of trolls.
On a winter evening some five years past, when Tauno was just beginning to explore the land, he knocked on her door. After she let him in, he explained who he was. He had been watching from afar, seen men slink in and swagger out; he was trying to learn the ways of his lost mother’s folk; would she tell him what this was about? He ended with spending the night. Since, he had many times done so. She was different from the mermaids, warmer somehow in heart as well as flesh; her trade meant naught to him, whose undersea fellows knew no more of marriage than of any other sacrament; he could learn much from her, and tell her much, murmured lip to lip as they lay beneath the coverlet; he liked her for her kindliness and toughness and wry mirth.
For her part, she would take no pay from him, and few gifts. “I do not think ill of most men,” she said. “Some, yes, like that cruel old 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?”
“No, 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?”
“Well,” 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 II cold, misty twilight, fog asmoke until the laplapping 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.”
“Why. . . 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.”
“Go home. Stay there.”
“Tauno, you know me, we’ve talked, played ball, you’ve come aboard when I was out by myself in the jollyboat, I’m Stig—”
“Must 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 have been princesses less well-favored than Cod-Ingeborg. He did not like the smell of old sweat in her gown, any more than he liked any of the stenches of humankind; but underneath it he caught a sunny odor of woman, :
“I hoped . .” she breathed at last, “I hoped...”
He shoved her arms away, stood back, glared, and hefted the spear, “Where is my sister?” he snapped,
“Oh. She is—is well, Tauno. None will harm her. None would dare,” Ingeborg tried to draw him from the door. “Come, my unhappy dear, sit, have a stoup, be at ease with me,”
“First they reaved from her everything that was her life—”
Tauno must stop anew to cough, Ingeborg took the word. “It had to be,” she said, “Christian folk could not let her dwell unchristened among them, You can’t blame them, not even the priests. A higher might than theirs has been in this,” She shrugged, with her oft-seen one-sided grin. “For the price of her past, and of growing old, ugly, dead in less than a hundred years, she gains eternity in Paradise. You may live a long while, but when you die you’ll be done, a blown-out candle flame. Myself, I’ll live beyond my body, most likely in Hell. Which of us three is the luckiest?”
Still grim but somewhat calmed, Tauno leaned his weapon and sat down on the dais. The straw ticking rustled beneath him. The peat fire sputtered with small blue and yellow dancers; its smoke would have been pleasant if less thick. Shadows crouched in corners and under the roof, and leaped about, misshapen, on the log walls. The cold and dankness did not trouble him, unclad though he was. Ingeborg shivered where she stood. He peered at her through the murk, “I know that much,” he said. “There’s a young fellow in the hamlet that they hope to make a priest of, So he could tell my sister Eyjan about it when she Found him alone,” His chuckle rattled. “She says he’s not bad to lie with, save that the open air gives him sneezing fits,” Harshly igain: “Well, if that’s the way the world swims, naught can we jo but give room. However, yestre’en Kennin and I went in search of Yria, to make sure she wasn’t being mistreated. Ugh, the mud and filth in those wallows you call streets! Up and down we went, to every house, yes, to church and graveyard. We had IlOt spied her from afar, do you see, not for days, And we’d have known were she inside anything, be it cabin or coffin, She may be mortal now, our little Yria, but her body is still half her father’s, and that last night on the strand it had not lost its smell like daylit waves.” Fist thudded on knee. “Kennin and Eyjan raged, would have stonned shore and asked at harpoon point. I told them we’d only risk death, and how can the dead help Yria? Yet it was hard to wait till sunset, when I knew you’d be here, Ingeborg.”