I gather up the basket again. “Let me clean these. Hopefully, there’s enough to make a stew out of.”

  “You need to cook tonight,” she says, nodding to the heap of washing left to do.

  Glancing over to the kitchen, I do not see our brother. “Why isn’t Pip helping you?”

  “He’s having one of his fits.” Her eyes dart to the pantry.

  Pulling back the curtain, I find Pip on the pantry floor. My brother looks ill, but in all honesty, he’s looked sick since the day he was born. He lifts his head, all red-rimmed eyes and running nose. Pale skin and thin limbs, but an oddly rounded belly. Not a stitch of clothing on him.

  “Where are your clothes?”

  “It’s too hot in here,” he says.

  “You’ll catch your death, you little idiot.” Mind you, if Pip caught a cold, none of us would know the difference. “Get dressed and help your sister.”

  He shrieks. A long, sustained note of ear-piercing pitch that does not stop until I draw the pantry curtain closed.

  I augur a finger into my ear to relieve the pain and look at Bryndis. “One of those days, I see.”

  A noise from the yard has Bryndis and me looking up. Father and Sligo are saying goodbye. Sligo, with his absurdly long arms and bulbous nose, makes a point to doff his cap to Bryndis before he goes out the gate. Father scowls to see us gawking from the kitchen.

  “Bryndis, come here,” he says. “We must talk.”

  My sister is abruptly pale. Her jaw clenches as she grits her teeth at what is to come. Then she lowers her head and does what she is told.

  ***

  The cutting block in the yard is a prehistoric tree stump tempered dark from the countless fish cleaned on it. Scales dot the surface, twinkling in the waning sunlight. Our home, the rectory, is set back from the church and screened behind a hedge. I slit the blackfish up the belly, mindful of its spikes, and remove its entrails. There is not a lot of meat on this stingy little fish.

  The slam of a door lifts my attention and I see my sister march into the yard in tears. She flops onto a log and buries her face in her hands. The bad news she has been dreading is here.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. Little comfort, that is. “Who is it to be?”

  She drags a sleeve across her nose. “Sligo.”

  At seventeen, Bryndis has managed to elude the fate of most girls in the village. No longer, the ax has fallen. Sligo has asked for her hand in marriage and Father consented. It is the way of things here. Sligo’s wife died this winter. Gerda had drowned in two feet of water in the old fountain. As a widower, it is Sligo’s privilege to choose any girl in the village for his bride. As a member of the council, it’s his right not to be refused. Father has no choice but to consent.

  “I’m sorry, Bryn.” I don’t know what else to say by way of condolence.

  My sister is level-headed and even-tempered. Already she is drying her eyes. She looks at me.

  “What am I to tell Calder?”

  Her sweetheart. Calder is a year older than Bryndis, a fisherman’s son who lives near the wharf. He is almost as penniless as we are. I like Calder. He has always been kind to me.

  “The truth,” I say. “He’ll understand. He’ll have to.”

  ***

  The stew turns out awful. A sour gruel with a strange taste that must have come from the blackfish. Bryndis grimaces while slurping it down and Pip won’t touch it, but Pip rarely eats anything at all. He sits slouched in his chair with his nose running into his soup.

  “Pip, wipe your nose,” my sister says with annoyance.

  Pip continues to stare at the wall in that absent way of his. He startles when I kick him under the table, and then stirs the spoon in his bowl.

  Father sits at the head of the table, lapping his stew up without comment. His eyes are on the open book before him. He only looks up to scold us to be quiet. Mealtimes are like this, these grim and silent affairs. It wasn’t always this way.

  Bryndis is tired, her hands raw from the day’s toil. She is heartbroken but hides it. Pip sits as thoughtless as a turnip. I remark how paltry the tithe from the fishermen is, but everyone has heard this complaint already. The Reverend Uriah continues to read and loudly slurp up his stew. Does he even taste it?

  Our small family is four in number, but a fifth place is always set at our table. An empty plate and the good spoon, the pewter one. Pip was the one who insisted we set a place for Mother in case she returns. My sister and I went along with it to keep him happy. We have tried to shield him from the gossip about mother’s disappearance as much as possible. Pip has been setting this fifth, empty plate for so long that it is simply routine, and we take little notice of it anymore.

  Pip sometimes brings it up. He is absentminded, with a potato-shaped head that leaks things. He snaps out of his blank stare, sees the empty place setting, and asks when Mother is coming home. No one responds, eyes on our plates, and then Pip will remember and fall silent again.

  That first winter after she vanished, the three of us would tell one another stories about where she had gone. Pip said she had been snatched away by an albatross and dropped into a volcano where she lives with a family of giants. Bryndis spun a tale where Mother was swallowed by a whale. I preferred a story about the sea god, Nomos, sweeping her off to his undersea kingdom to be queen for one year. At the end of her reign, she will return with treasure chests gathered from sunken ships as her reward. Pip once asked if Mother prefers her undersea home now and that is why she hasn’t returned to us. Bryndis fled the room in tears hearing that.

  They were just fairy tales told to comfort and distract. Come spring that year, we stopped telling them. Pip, to this day, will try to entice us into retelling our stories, but neither Bryndis nor I have the stomach for it. Sometimes Pip recites the fairy tales to himself, sitting out on the cutting block in the yard, talking to the air.

  “Pip, wake up.”

  He has fallen asleep. He does this more and more these days, falling asleep while sitting up. Eyes half-closed, nose running. It is disturbing.

  Father looks up from his book. “Pitr,” he says, snapping the boy awake. “Eat.”

  Pip spoons the fish broth into his mouth and makes a strange clucking sound as he eats. He drops the spoon and claps his hands. “It’s Midsummer Eve!” he cries.

  Father scowls but keeps his eyes on his book.

  “Can we wrestle an octopus?” Pip asks. “Or roast a shark?”

  “No more talking,” Father replies. “Eat.”

  The good Reverend Uriah never liked the Midsummer Eve festivities here. Too pagan and too bawdy, he complained. He despised the vulgar rituals that honored the old sea gods and frowned on the tradition of the merry husbands who chose a different wife for the shortest night of the year. Last year, he forbade them outright, and so the day passes like any other. A little more sunlight, but that is all.

  Outside, the wind has picked up, rattling the precious glass in the window. I suddenly remember the warning from Agnet’s husband.

  “There’s a storm coming.”

  Father’s eyes never stray from his book. “It’s just the wind, Kaspar.”

  “Gunther says it’s going to be a squall.”

  The book is closed, my father out of his chair. A weather warning from the hero harpooner is not to be taken lightly.

  “On your feet, all of you,” Father says. “We need to seal the shutters before it lands.”

  4

  THE RAIN HITS before we seal all the windows. It comes down in a torrent that blinds us as we latch the shutters in the church. It’s whipped along by a wind so powerful it sweeps Pip, who weighs no more than a barncat, off his feet and sends him tumbling through the headstones in the churchyard. It is not necessarily a bad thing in his case, as Pip is always filthy. He refuses to bathe. The best any of us can manage is to toss a penny into the surf and make him fetch it.

  We are all drenched and steaming and very tired when we go up to bed. Father has the only proper bedroom in the house. It has a window that looks out onto the sea. The three of us share the rest of the space with cots lined up against the trunks and crates. Bryndis has fashioned a screen over her corner to provide a little privacy.

  Father snores the loudest, great thunder strokes cracking behind the bedroom door. My sister sounds like a cat. Pip sings in his sleep. Mostly sea shanties, the vulgar kind that the fishermen sing when deep in their cups.

  We peel out of our steaming clothes and hang them to dry on the railing. We say our prayers in the light of the candle. It is Pip’s turn to lead the prayer, and he prattles on, thanking the Almighty for our home and our food and each other. Then he goes on, grateful for stray kittens and seashells, termite hills and starfish. When he mentions toadstools and earwax, Bryndis interrupts.

  “That’s enough. Just say Amen.”

  “But I haven’t mentioned the sea monster’s bones.”

  “God knows you’re grateful for that. Into bed.”

  The wind whips at the house, tearing at the roof and rattling the doors. There aren’t enough pots to catch the rainwater leaking from the rafters. My brother thrusts out his tongue to catch the raindrops until our sisters tells him to stop.

  “I want a story.”

  “Not tonight, Pip,” Bryndis says. She looks tired.

  “Just one. The one about the pirates.”

  I push his head to the pillow. “Listen to your sister.”

  He frowns. “I can’t remember how mother told it. Was it pirates or lepers? The ones on the bottom of the sea? You remember.”

  Some of Mother’s bedtime stories took strange turns. This particular one was a favorite of Pip’s, an odd fable about the fate of pirates and how they are condemned to walk the floor of the sea to atone for their sins. They march in a never-ending parade until their feet are ground away by the sand, and they marched onward on bony stumps. Was it the fate of pirates or cruel men? I can’t remember. Is there a difference?

  I pat my brother’s bulbous head. “Go to sleep now.”

  He frowns, but closes his eyes. Bryn slips behind her screen to change into her nightshirt. In the pocket of my jacket are three daisies plucked from the hillside. They are soggy and most of the petals have fallen away. I set them out gently under my pillow.

  My sister steps out from behind the screen, her brow crinkling. “What are you doing?”

  “You put flowers under your pillow on Midsummer’s Eve to dream about the one you love,” I explain.

  “You can’t do that, Kaspar.”

  My sister and her rules. So bossy. “Why not?”

  “Only girls put flowers under their pillows at Midsummer.”

  “What do boys put under pillows?”

  “They don’t,” she says with a huff. “It’s not natural.”

  “I’m doing it, anyway.”

  I lay the pillow over the soggy daisies and climb into bed. Pip is already asleep and singing his sea shanties. This one is about a sailor who falls in love with an oyster and loses his pizzle on his wedding night.

  I watch my sister take something from the pocket of her apron and arrange it under her pillow.

  “Daisies?” I ask. “To dream about Calder?”

  She holds an object up to the light. A fishhook.

  I’m confused. “What kind of dreams do fishhooks bring?”

  “No dreams,” she says as she lays her head down. “Fishhooks snare wedding vows, killing them.”

  Her intended marriage to the great oaf, Sligo. I have not heard of this fishhook trick to spoil a marriage, but I admire my sister’s craftiness.

  I blow out the candle. “I hope it works.”

  “Goodnight, Kaspar.”

  Pip sings his shanty, getting to the part where the severed manhood is polished into a pearl inside the oyster’s shell. When he finally dozes off, I hear my sister crying herself to sleep.

  ***

  The storm is a rough one, with a wind that keeps us awake as it clatters the door and whistles down the chimney. The shutters hold, the windows survive. By morning, it is all over and the sun rises strong on the rain-drenched village. A boat moored on the pier has capsized and some of the cottages have lost a window or swaths of thatch from their roofs. Fish have been swept up out of the sea and flung right into the town square. I watch a crab scuttling over the roof of the blacksmith’s shop.

  The three of us are clearing storm debris from our yard, when Pip finds a starfish under the hedge. Bryndis tells him to toss it back into the sea, but Pip wants to keep it for a pet.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I tell him. “You can’t make a pet out of that.”

  “Why not? A starfish would be the perfect pet. I’m going to name him Goblin.”

  Pip runs to fill a pail from the rain barrel and places the creature in it. Freshwater, not sea water. The thing is dead within the hour.

  “Poor Goblin,” he sighs, looking into the pail.

  Everyone in the village is up and about by this time, sweeping up the mess left behind by the storm. The sun is bright, and neighbors wish one another a good morning. They chatter about the ferocity of the winds and how no one slept a wink.

  A sudden clamor hails out on the pier and we look up to see a fisherman running about, howling his fool head off. There is something in the water, he screams. He saw it with his own eyes, God help him.

  Pip holds the dead starfish in his hand. It is already beginning to stink. “What is he screaming about?”

  Bryndis shrugs. “He says there’s something in the bay.”

  The crazed fisherman is repeating one word over and over, and I crane my ear to catch it. “He says he saw a luremaid in the harbor.”

  Bryndis shields her eyes from the sun. “Is he drunk?”

  Pip’s face pinches. “What’s a luremaid?”

  My sister laughs. “A mermaid.”

  5

  THE SAILOR ISN’T DRUNK, and he isn’t delusional. Out there, far into the bay, is a woman bobbing on the sea.

  The three of us run to the wharf. Everyone in the village has the same idea, and we all elbow one another for a closer look.

  “Did someone fall in?” says a woman on my left.

  “Who is it?” croaks an old man on my right. “Is it my Lilja? She can’t swim.”

  “God help her, she won’t last another minute in that cold.”

  Whoever uttered that is right. Even in high summer, the water is freezing. And yet the woman out there in the bay does not appear distressed or drowning. She hovers on the ripples for a moment and then we all gasp as she slips below the waves. Agrippa and Bjarni have already launched their boats, rowing like mad toward the damsel’s position.

  A boy cries out, points. “Look, there!”

  And there she is, two leagues from where she’d gone under. No one can swim that fast. The waves dapple the sunlight back at us in blinding flashes. It must have tricked our eyes.

  The briny sailor who started all the fuss is still shrieking about a mermaid. Someone tries to calm him, but he shoves them away and leaps into his dory.

  “I’ll catch her!” he sings, dipping his oars into the water. “She’ll make a pretty wife!”

  Shielding my eyes from the sun, I scan the bay but cannot locate the drowning woman. I look to Bryndis. “Where did she go?”

  “She went under again. Dear God, preserve the poor woman.”

  Someone else shouts and points and we all turn to see a head bob to the surface. Much closer to the pier this time. A pale face with dark locks. Is her hair really green or is it another trick of the light?

  She swims toward us, and every voice dies as she cuts the dark water, moving with an undulating rhythm not unlike that of a whale. That’s when we see it, all of us popping our eyes in disbelief. The tail. Enormous and long, more like that of a serpent than a fish. Hand over my heart, the woman has a tail where her legs should be.

  Someone utters a prayer. An old man drops to his knees and weeps. The woman in the water, this mermaid of fairy tales, watches us with cold eyes as she glides along the length of the wharf. Then she dives, that great tail arcing as it breaks the surface of the water. She is gone. It is gone, whatever it is.

  The townsfolk shake their heads and rub their eyes as if waking from a dream. Calamity immediately follows. People shout and run about. The women race for dry land, herding their children before them, while the men all scramble to their skiffs. Nets are readied, harpoons raised, as they all row out into the bay. In the eyes of each man is a mad look as they prepare to hunt the thing they have seen. Something about this creature has them gnashing their teeth, driving them on to spear this fabled luremaid of the depths. Her brazen freedom offends them somehow.

  One sloop remains tethered to the dock. Gunther’s fine vessel. The skipper is roaring at a boy on the pier, demanding to know where Brom is. His fishing mate and oarsmen. The boy crushes his hat in his hand and explains that his father is unwell.

  “You mean drunk!” Gunther bellows.

  His face is red as he stomps the hull of his boat. The boy jumps and quivers all the more. The scarred harpooner casts his eyes about the chaos on the quay and, of all people, locks onto me.

  “Kaspar! Get in the boat! Now!”

  I shake my head vigorously. “I’m no whaler.”

  “I don’t need a whaler, lad. I need someone to row!”

  His powerful arm shoots out and plants me onto the slat bench of his boat. Row, he insists. So I row.

  “Faster, lad,” Gunther howls as he lashes the end of the spooled rope to his great harpoon. “Starboard now! That’s it.”

  The bay becomes a choppy stew of boats and yammering fishermen, each chasing this thing from a storybook tale. Nets are spun into the waves and harpoons fly and miss. To a man, they all seem crazed with the idea of spearing this fabled creature of the depths. An armada of madmen, fishing for folk tales.

  I catch only a glimpse of the woman in the water. Astern, her head bobs for a moment, only to appear a heartbeat later on the port side. She eludes the spears and nets like it’s a game.

  Gunther keeps barking directions at me. Port five degrees, he says. Starboard now, ten degrees. Twenty. I twist about to see where he is aiming and catch sight of the woman in the water. Gunther is tracking the creature’s movements, closing the distance quickly. The harpoon in his hand rises high, ready to strike.

 

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