Flashing Swords! #1 by Lin Carter (ed.)

Author:Lin Carter (ed.)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dell Books
Published: 1973-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

6

When the black cog Herning stood out of Mariager Fjord, she caught a wind that filled her sail and sent her northward at a good clip. On deck, Tauno, Eyjan, and Kennin shed the human clothes—foul, enclosing rags!—that had disguised them during their days of chaffer with Ranild Espensen. A lickerish shout lifted from six of the eight men, at sight of Eyjan white in the sunlight, clad only in tossing coppery-bronze tresses. They were a shaggy, flea-bitten lot, those men, scarred from fights, their leather doublets, wadmal shirts and breeks ripe with old grease stains.

The seventh was a lad of seventeen winters, Nils Jonsen. He had lately come to Hadsund seeking deckhand work to help care for widowed mother and younger siblings, and could get no other berth than this. He was a good-looking boy, slender, flaxenhaired, fresh-faced. His eyes filled with tears. “How beautiful she is,” he whispered.

The eighth was the skipper. He scowled and came down off the poopdeck that sheltered the man at the tiller. (There was also a deck over the bows, through which the forepost jutted. Below and between these reached the main deck, with mast, two hatches, tackle, cooking-hearth, and what cargo was carried topside. Among this last were a red granite boulder, three feet through and about a ton in weight; and a dozen extra anchors; and much cable.)

Ranild went to the halflings, where they and Ingeborg stood on the port side watching Jutland’s long hills slide by. It was a clear day; the sun cast dazzling glitter across gray-green-blue whitecaps. Wind skirled, rigging thrummed, timbers creaked as the cog’s cutwater surged with a bone in its teeth. Overhead, gulls mewed and made a snowstorm of wings. A smell of salt and tar blew around.

“You!” Ranild barked. “God’s blood! Make yourselves decent.”

Kennin gave him a look of dislike. Those had been hard hours of bargaining, in a back room of an evil inn; and merfolk were not used to a tongue like Ranild’s, rougher than a lynx’s. “Who are you to speak of decency?” Kennin snapped.

“Ease off,” Tauno muttered. He regarded the skipper with no more love but somewhat more coolness. Not tall, Ranild was thick of chest and arm. Black hair, never washed and scanty on top, framed a coarse broken-nosed pale-eyed countenance; snag teeth showed through a beard that spilled halfway down the tub belly. He was dressed like his crew, save that he bore a short sword as well as a knife and floppy boots rather than shoes or bare feet.

“What’s the matter?” Tauno asked. “You, Ranild, may like to wear clothes till they rot off you. Why should we?”

“Herr Ranild, merman!” The skipper clapped hand on hilt. “My folk were Junkers when yours dwelt among the flatfish—I’m noble yet, Fiend thunder me! It’s my ship, I laid out the costs of this faring, you’ll by God’s bones do what I tell you or swing from the yardarm!”

Eyjan’s dagger whipped out, to gleam near his gullet. “Unless we hang you by those louse-nest whiskers,” she said.

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