“They-oh-they-“ Red and white flew over Niels’ cheeks. The tongue locked in his mouth.
Oluv Ovesen shambled ahead of Torben, Faile, and Tyge. (Ranild and Ingeborg slept below; Lave was at the helm, Sivard on lookout in the crow’s nest; these last watched with drool and catcalls.) The mate kept blinking his white lashes and peeling lips back from his yellow teeth. “Well, well,” he hailed, “who’s next, good slut?”
Eyjan’s eyes were flint gray, storm gray. “What mean you,” she answered, “if ever a yapping cur means anything?”
Oluv stopped two ells short of those threatening spears. An-grily, he said: “Tyge was at the tiller last night and Torben at the masthead. They saw you go beneath the foredeck with this milksop boy. They heard you two whispering, thrashing, thumping, and moaning.”
“And what has my sister to do with you?” Kennin bristled.
Oluv wagged a finger. “This,” he said: “that we went along
as honest men with leaving her alone; but if she spreads her legs for one, she does for all.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because we’re all in this together, you. And anyway,
what right has a sea cow to give herself airs and pick and choose?” Oluv sniggered. “Me fIrst, Eyjan. You’ll have more fun with a real man, I promise you.”
“Go away,” said the girl, shaking with fury.
“There’s three of them,” Oluv told his crewfolk. “I don’t count
little Niels. Lave, lash the tiller. Hallohoi, Sivard, come on down!”
“What do you intend?” Tauno asked in a level voice.
Oluv picked his teeth with a fingernail. “Oh, nothing much,
fish-man, if you and your brother are sensible. We’ll hogtie you for a while, no more. Else-Easy with that lance. We’ve pikes and crossbows we can fetch, remember, and we’re six against you.” He laughed. “Six! Your sister’ II soon be thanking us.”
Eyjan yelled like a cat. Kennin snarled, “I’ll see you in the Black Ooze first!” Niels groaned, tears breaking loose; one hand drew his knife, the other reached for Eyjan. Tauno waved them back. His mer-face was quite still within the wind-blown locks.
“Is this your unbreakable will?” he asked tonelessly.
“It is,” Oluv replied.
“I see.”
“You, she… soulless. . . two-legged beasts. Beasts have no
rights.”
“Oh, but they do. However, turds do not. Enjoy yourself, Oluv.” And Tauno launched his harpoon.
The mate screamed when those barbs entered his guts. He fell and lay flopping on the deck, spouting blood, yammering and yammering. Tauno leaped to snatch the now loosened shaft. Wielding it like a quarterstaff, he waded into the crewmen. His siblings and Niels came behind. “Don’t kill them!” Tauno roared.
“We need their hands!”
Niels got no chance to fight. His comrades were too swift.
Kennin drove stiffened fingers into Torben’s midriff and, wheel-ing, kneed Palle in the groin. Tauno’s shaft laid Tyge flat. Eyjan bounded to meet Lave, who was running at her from aft; she stopped when they had almost met, caught his body on her hip, and sent him flying to crack his pate against the foredeck ladder. Sivard scrambled back aloft. And that was that.
Ranild came howling from the hold. Confronted by three half-lings and a strong lad, he must needs agree, no matter how sulkily, that Oluv Ovesen had fallen on his own deeds. Ingeborg helped by reminding everyone that this meant fewer to share the booty. A kind of truce was patched together, and Oluv’s corpse sent overs ide with a rock from the ballast lashed to his ankles so he would not bring bad luck by rising to look at his shipmates.
Thereafter Ranild and his men spoke no unnecessary word to the merman’schildren—or to Niels, who slept with the latter lest he get a knife in the kidneys. Given such close quarters, the boy could do nothing to Eyjan save adore her. She would smile and pat his cheek, but absently; her mind was elsewhere, and often her body.
Ingeborg sought out Tauno in the bows and warned him that the crew did not mean for those they hated to live many days past the time the gold was aboard. She got them to talk by herself pretending loathing for the Liri folk, claiming to have befriended these in the same spirit as one might lure an ermine into a trap for its pelt.