He did not pursue the question; and presently they both forgot it.
A shape had appeared alongside. Glimpsed among waves, whenever the cog dipped her larboard rail, it was that of a large gray seal. They had wondered why such an animal would accom-pany them. Afterward they believed that already they had snuffed an odor of strangeness, though the storm confused every sense too much for them to mark this at the time.
Suddenly Herning stood well-nigh on her beam ends. A wave climbed aboard. Upon it, amidst it, rode the seal. The ship rolled back and forth toward a more even keel. Water torrented through her scuppers. The seal stayed behind. He raised himself on front flippers… change boiled through his flesh… a man” crouched there.
He rose to confront the stupefied siblings. They saw he was huge, a head above Tauno, so broad and thick that he seemed squat. Hair and beard grew sleek over his head, gray in color, as was the woolliness which everywhere covered his otherwise naked form. The skin beneath was pale. He reeked of fish. His face was hideous, save for the eyes—Iow and cragged of brow, flat of nose, gape-mouthed, the heavy jaw chinless. Those eyes, though, shone between lashes a queen might envy: big, softly golden brown, without whites: unhuman. .
Tauno had clapped hand to knife. Stiffly, he let go the hilt and raised his arm. “Welcome, if you come in friendship,” he said in the Liri tongue.
The stranger answered with a deep, barking tone but with mortal words. “Dolphins tauld that wha’ drew me. Could be a woman here, to reck by their chatter. You’re no true woman or man, from your smell, nor true merfolk, from your looks. Wha’, then, and who?”
The speech he used was intelligible, akin to Danish. Norse settlers had come to the islands off Scotland in Viking times; most of those places remained under the Norse crown; the tongue of the ancestors lived on in a western version, side by side with Gaelic.
“We’re in sharp need,” Eyjan said. “Can you help us?”
The reply cut straight through every storm-noise: “Maybe, if
I will. Small mercy ha’ I known for mysel’. Ha’ ye more aboard?”
“Yes.” Tauno lifted the nearest hatch and shouted a summons to Niels and Ingeborg, who slept.
They scrambled up within heartbeats, alarm stretching their countenances. When they saw the newcomer, they halted, drew breath, unthinkingly linked hands.
The were-seal’s glance fell on Ingeborg and stayed. Step by step, he crossed the deck toward her. She and Niels stood fast, apart from their struggle not to fall. She paled and the youth stiffened as his hairy fingers, with nails like claws, reached forth to stroke her cheek. The mark of desire rose before them.
And yet he was gentle, merely touched her, joined gazes only while his lips trembled upward in shyness. Thereupon he turned back to the siblings and said, “Aye, I’ll help, for her sake. Thank this lady, the three 0’ ye. Hoo could I let her droon?” Hauau, he named himself, and told that he dwelt on Sule Skerry. Few of his kind were left; maybe he was the last. (That was believable, since no one in Liri had ever heard of them.) From earliest days, men had hated the selkie race and hunted it down.
Hauau thought that might be because its members raided the nets of fishers, like their kin the true seals but with human skill and cunning. He was not sure, for he had been alone since he was a pup, with just a dim recollection of his mother and what she sang to him. He had escaped after men arrived in a boat, cornered her, and cut her apart. It seemed to him he had heard them calling on Odin; be that as it may, the thing happened long ago.
This came out in scattered words, as did the story of the trav-
elers. Foremost was the toil of surviving. Herning could no more
be let drift; lee shores were too close. Besides a stay snapped,
with need for replacement, the mast was now badly cracked and
must be reinforced. A pair of extra spars fetched from below,