“You will be seeking strange lands,” Panigpak said. “Their dwellers may speak tongues unknown to you. Whoever wears this amulet will understand whatever is heard, and can reply in the same tongue.”
Eyjan touched fingertips to it. “With such things, care is ever needful,” she murmured. “Your spells are not like ours. What should we know about it?”
“It is a deep magic,” the angakok told them as softly. “To make it taxed somebody’s poor powers to the uttermost. I must begin by opening my father’s cairn to,take a piece of his skull-oh, he is not angry; he feels dim pleasure among the shades because he could help. . . .
“The amulet links spirit to spirit. Beware of gazing long upon the sigil-yes, best wear it under clothing, or with the blank side outward-for a soul can be drawn in if it feels any wish to leave the world, and that is death.” He paused. “Should this happen, the trapped ghost can come out again, into whoever wears the amulet, if that person desires. But who might want to become half a stranger?”
Tauno hastily closed his hand on the thing.
Eyjan’s fingers plucked his open. She hung it around her neck
in the way Panigpak had advised. “Thank you,” she said, a bit unsteadily.
“It is nothing,” he answered. “It is only what an old fool can offer.”
When a few more words had passed, and the last embraces, the merman’s children took up their kayaks and walked outward. The ice broke under them, making a floe from which they lowered the boats. They got in, laced their coats fast, untied the paddles. With a wave and shout, they swung southward. The Inuit and Bengta watched until they were gone out of seeing.
II
ONCE while homebound, Tauno encountered a pod of Greenland whale on their way around the brow of the world, and heard their route song. Few merfolk had ever done that, for the lords of the great waters rarely came nigh land-and who would seek them out, what would he say to them in their majesty?
Tauno was hunting. Eyjan was elsewhere, towing his sealed Ikayak behind hers. They did this by turns, lest the craft, untended, drift unfindably far off course. When they eased cramped limbs with a frolic in the waves, they took care to stay close by; when they slept afloat, they tethered hulls and themselves together. It was troublesome, and certainly they could have hunted better as a team, but on the whole they were traveling faster and easier than Iif they had swum.
He had gone under, in hopes of a large fish. Lesser ones were hardly worth the killing to be the fuel bodies needed for warmth and work. Thus sound reached him far more readily than through air, and toned in thews, blood, bone as well as in ears. Through chill, sliding gray-green came a throb. Faint at flTSt, it made him veer in its direction. He continued after he knew what stroked and clove so resistlessly, for the passage would alarm many creatures and he could well seize prey among them. Then the whales began to sing.
Almost helpless, Tauno went on, mile after mile farther than he had intended, until at last he saw them—their backs that rose like skerries, their bellies and enormous, feeding mouths down below, each fin more big than a man, flukes raising swells and currents as they drove, steadily onward, forms which outbulked most ships. The slow thunder of that hundredfold movement rolled as a part of the music, which boomed and trilled, dived and soared through ranges no human could have heard. The song took him from within, made a vessel of him for itself, for its might and mystery.
He knew little of the language, and Eyjan had the sigil. None of his father’s breed were much wiser, because it was not a speech remotely akin to any humankind or Faerie. The sounds were not words but structures or events, each as full of meanings-none altogether utterable-as a library of books, or as a life looked back upon when death draws near. Tauno bore in his mind a double heritage, and he was a poet. Afterward he recreated a fragment of what he had heard. But he knew, with longing, that what he then had was the merest shard, chance-splintered off a whole to whose shape and purpose it gave never a clue.