“Do you honestly feel this can be done?” Meiiva asked.
“Yes,” the king declared. “I’ve told you how I’ve been on the
prowl about that harbor, again and again, the latest time not long ago. We may have to lurk, watching for our chance. However, at this season 1 expect that will be no great while; the town does much trade. Nobody will dare pursue us at night, and by dawn we should be well away, unfindable.”
“Do you know how to handle a ship?” she pounced. “That’s something which didn’t get talked about today.”
“Well, only a little, from what I’ve seen for myself or garnered from men-1 have had friends among them once in a while, you recall,” Vanimen said. “But we can learn. There should be no big danger in it if we keep plenty of sea room. Nor should there be any haste.” His tone quickened. “For we will have our island. Able to rest on it by turns, we’ll need far less food; thus we can sustain ourselves by hunting. And, of course, we needn’t fret about fresh water as humans must. And we can find our way more readily than they can. The simple surety that we have a land to steer for, and not an edge where the seas roar down to the nether gulf-that alone should make the difference which saves us.”
He gazed from sand and scrub, to the glimmer of sunset upon the western horizon. “I know not whether to pity or envy the children of Adam,” he munnured. “I know not at all.” Meiiva took his hand. “You’re strangely drawn to them,” she said.
He nodded. “Aye, more and more as the years flow onward. I do not speak of it, for who would understand? Yet I feel. . . I know not. . . more is in Creation than this glittering, tricksy Faerie of ours. No matter that humans have immortal souls. We’ve always reckoned that too Iowa price for being landbound. But I have wondered”-his free hand clenched, his visage worked-“what do they have in this life, here and now, amidst every misery, what do they glimpse, that we are forever blind to?”
Stavanger, in the south of Norway, dreamed beneath a waning moon. That light made a broken bridge across the fjord, where holms rose darkling, silvered the thatch and shingle of roofs, softened the stone of the cathedral and came alive in its windows, turned the streets below the house galleries into even deeper guts of blackness. It touched the figureheads and masts of vessels at the wharf. . . .
Candle-glow through thin-scraped horn shone on the aftercastle of a particular ship. She was from the Hansa city of Danzig: one-masted like a cog but longer, beamier, of the new sort that were known as hulks. Day would have shown her clinker-built hull bright red, with white and yellow trim.
Moon-ripples trailed the stealthily swimming mennen. They felt no chill, no fear; they were after quarry.
Vanimen led them to his goal. The freeboard was more than he could overleap, but he had earlier gone ashore and stolen what he would need. A flung hook caught the rail amidships. From it dangled a Jacob’s ladder up which he climbed.
Quiet though he sought to be, his noise reached the watchman. (The crew were visiting the inns and stews.) That fellow came down from the poop bearing his lanthorn and pike. Dull gleams went off the steel, and off the gray streaks in his beard; he was no young man, but portly and slow. “Who goes?” he challenged in German; and as he saw what confronted him, a howl of terror:
“Ach, Jesus, help me! Help, help—“
He could not be let rouse the harbor. V animen unslung the
trident from his shoulders and gave it him in the belly. a full thrust
that shocked back through the mennan’s own muscles while it
skewered the liver. Blood spurted forth. The guard fell to the
deck. He writhed about. “Johanna, Peter, Maria, Friedrich,” he
gasped-the names of wife and children? His look swirled to
Vanimen. He half raised a hand. “God curse you for this,” came
from him. “St. Michael, my namesake, warrior angel,