The four children who remained met in the wreckage of Liri. Round about were the heaped chaos of the hall, the farther-off bits and pieces of lesser homes, gardens already withering, fishflocks already scattered, broken scrimshaw, crabs and lobsters swarming through foodstocks like ravens over a corpse on shore. The meeting spot was where the main door had been. The albatross lay wingless; kindly Lord Aegir had fallen on his face; Lady Ran who takes men in her nets stood above, grinning. The water was chill and waves raised by a storm overhead could be heard mourning for Liri.
The merman’s children were unclad, as was usual undersea save at festival times. However, they had gotten knives, harpoons, tridents, and axes of stone and bone, to ward off those menaces which circled closer and closer beyond the rim of their sight. None of them looked wholly like merfolk. But the elder three shared the high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and male beardlessness of their father; and while they had learned the Danish tongue and some of the Danish ways, now it was as merfolk that they talked.
Eldest among them, Tauno took the word. “We must decide where to go. Hard it was to keep death at bay when everyone stayed here. We cannot do it long alone.”
He was likewise the biggest, tall, wide in the shoulders, might-ily muscled from a lifetime’s swimming. His hair, caught by a beaded headband, fell to his collarbones, yellow with the least tinge of green; his eyes were amber, set well apart from the blunt nose, above the heavy mouth and jaw; because he had spent much time on the surface or ashore, his skin was brown.
“Why, shall we not follow our father and tribe?” asked Eyjan.
She had nineteen winters. She too was tall, for a woman, and
strong with a strength that lay hidden beneath the full curves of breasts, hips, thighs, until she hugged a lover tight or drove a lance into a wallowing walrus. Hers was the whitest skin, for her hair was bronzy red, floating shoulder-length past a challenging gray gaze and cleanly molded face.
“We know not where they have gone,” Tauno reminded her. “It will have to be far, since these were the last good hunting grounds left to our kind around Denmark. And while such merfolk as dwell in the Baltic or along the Norway coast may help them on their way, there’s no room for as many more as Liri’s people are. The seas are very wide to search, my sister.”
“Oh, surely we can ask,” Kennin said impatiently. “They’ll leave traces. The dolphins are bound to know which way they headed.” A sparkle jumped in his eyes, making them more than ever summer-blue. “Haa, what a chance to gad about!”
He was of sixteen winters, had yet to fare far, and knew only youth’s eagerness to be off beyond the horizon. He had not gotten his full growth and would never be tailor broad. On the other hand, he was well-nigh as agile a swimmer as a full-blooded mennan. His hair was greenish brown, his countenance round and freckled, his body painted in the loudest-colored patterns the dwellers had known. The rest bore no ornament; Tauno was in too stark a mood, Eyjan had always scoffed at the trouble it cost, and Yria was shy.
The last one whispered: “How can you joke when. . . when. . . everything is gone?”
Her siblings moved closer in around her. To them she was still the babe, left in her crib by a mother whom she was coming more and more to look like. She was small, thin, her breasts just bud-ding; her hair was golden, her eyes huge in the tip-tilted, lip-parted face. She had stayed away from revelries as much as a king’s daughter might, had never gone off alone with a boy, had spent hours a day learning the womanly arts at which Eyjan jeered-more hours in the dome that had been Agnete’s, fondling the treasures that had been Agnete’s. Often she lay on the waves, staring at the greenhills and the houses ashore, listening to the chimes which called Christian folk to prayer. Of late she had been going there with one or another of her kin when these would allow, flitting along a twilit strand or behind a wind-gnarled tree or down into the ling like a timid shadow.