BOOK 2
SELKIE
I
VANIMEN, who had been the Liri king and was now the captain of a nameless ship-since he had thought Pretiosissimus Sanguis boded ill-bound for an unknown shore, stood in her bows and peered. Folk aboard saw how his great fonD was stiff and his face grim.
Aft of him the sail rattled, spilling wind. The hull creaked aloud, yawed in the waves that already had it rolling and pitching, took a sheet of spray across the main deck. The passengers who crowded there, mostly females and young, jostled together. Angry cries rose from among them.
Vanimen ignored that. His gaze swept around the waters. Those ran gray as iron, white as sleet, in ever higher crests, beneath tattered, murky clouds. The wind hooted, shrilled in rigging, strained, smote, struck icicle fangs into flesh. Rain-squalls walked the horizon. Ahead, a cavern of purple-black had swallowed the afternoon sun. Gaping wider by the minute, it flared with light-nings, whose thunders toned across leagues.
Sensing trouble on its way, the travelers who were in the sea made haste to return. The ship could not hold them all, but their help might be needed. Vanimen saw them glimpsewise, fair fOnDS among billows that fought them. Nearby lifted the backfin of his orca, loyal beast.
Meiiva climbed the ladder to join him. Braided, her blue mane did not fly wildly as did his golden, and she had wrapped a cloak from a clothes chest around her slenderness. She must bring her lips against his ear to say: “The helmsman asked me to tell you he fears he can’t keep her head to the waves as you ordered, once the real blow sets in. The tiller is like an eel in his hands. Could we do something to the sail?”
“Reef it,” Vanimen decided. “Run before the stonn,” “But that’s from. . . northwest. . . . Haven’t we had woe aplenty with foul winds, calms, and contrary currents since we left the Shetlands behind us, not to lose the distance we’ve made?”
“Better that than lose the ship. Oh, a human skipper might well broach a wiser scheme. We, though, we’ve gained a little seamanship in these over-many days, but indeed it is little. I can only guess at what might work to save us.”
He laid palm above brow to squint into the blast. “This I need not guess at,” he added. “I’ve known too many weathers through the centuries. That is no gale which will exhaust itself overnight. No, it’s a monster out of Greenland and the boreal ice beyond.
We’ll be in its jaws for longer than I want to think of.”
“This is not the season for such. . . is it?”
“No, not commonly, though I’ve watched a gathering cold
breed ever more bergs and floes and storms during the past few hundred years. Call this a freak, and us unlucky.”
Within himself, Vanimen wondered. The watchman he slew to gain his vessel, a man who deserved no such fate, had cursed him first. . . and called on the Most High and his own saint. . . . The king had never told anyone. He did not believe he ever would.
If they sank- His glance went to the main deck and lingered. Most of them would die, the lovely mermaids who gave and took so much joy, the children who had yet to learn what joy truly was. He himself might win to some alien shore, but what use in that? Enough. Let him do whatever was in his might. No matter how long a life you might win for yourself, who in the end escaped the nets of Ran?
Vanimen sent a boy to summon the strongest males up the Jacob’s ladder. Meanwhile he rehearsed in his mind what com-mands to give. At least his tribe had learned quick obedience to their captain, a thing altogether new in the history of the race. But they had not learned many mariner skills. His own were scarcely superior.
The call for help was none too soon. Shortening sail proved a wild battle in the swiftly rising wind. Cloth and lines flayed blood out of crew while the hulk staggered prey to surge after surge. No few passengers were washed overside. One babe per-ished, skull smashed against a bollard. While death was familiar to the merfolk, Vanimen would not soon forget that sight, or the mother’s face as she gathered the ruin in her arms and plunged into a sea that might be kindlier.