Yarns Without Threads 

In the eight years that she dwelt beneath the waters, fair Agnete bore seven children. ...

The four children who remained met in the wreckage of Liri. ... The water was chill and waves raised by a storm overhead could be heard mourning for Liri.

The merman's children were unclad, as was usual undersea save at festival times. However, they had gotten knives, harpoons, tridents, and axes of stone and bone, to ward off those menaces which circled closer and closer beyond the rim of their sight. None of them looked wholly like merfolk. But the elder three shared the high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and male beardlessness of their father; and while they had learned the Danish tongue and some of the Danish ways, now it was as merfolk that they talked.

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 Grib. A lickerish shout lifted from six of the eight men, at sight of Eyjan white in the sunlight, clad only in dagger belt and tossing bronze mane ...

The seventh was a lad of eighteen winters, ... he blinked away tears. "How beautiful she is." he whispered.

The eighth was the captain. He scowled and came down off the poopdeck that sheltered the man at the tiller. ...

Ranild went to the halflings, where they and Ingeborg stood on the port side watching Jutland's long hills slide by. ...

"You!" Ranild barked. "Make yourselves decent!"

... "Who are you to speak of decency?" Kennin snapped.

...

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

Tauno and Eyjan sprawled their big fair bodies naked on the planks. Ingeborg was likewise unclad, her filthy raiment soaking overside at the end of a line. So was Niels', but he kept a cloak tightly around himself, and would not sit. Whenever his glance touched the female forms, flame and snow chased each other through the down on his cheeks.

He placed himself on the poop deck, where he could stand lookout and shout commands to a crew that had gained a little skill. Naked for action, they scampered about or poised taut for the next duty. Much larger was the tale of females and young whom he sent below to avoid their becoming a hindrance. Those could have joined the swimmers, as a few like them had done; but most mothers feared what riptides and undertows might do to snatch their infants from them, among the rocks of these unknown shoals.

Another craft came over the vague horizon while the merfolk were making their preparations. She was a galley, lean, red-and-black painted, her sail furled and she spider-walking on oars. The figurehead glimmered gilt through spume, a winged lion. From this and her course, Vanimen guessed, out of his scanty information, that she was Venetian, homeward bound. ...

... Meiiva, who had been on watch in the bows, breasted the wind and joined him.

She tugged his elbow, pointed, and said above shrillness: "Look, will you? They're veering to meet us."

He saw she spoke truth. "When we've naught for hiding our nature!" he exlaimed. After a moment wherein he stood braced against more than rolling and pitching, he decided: "If we scurried to don clothes, it might well seem odder than if we stay as we are. Let's trust they'll suppose we've simply chosen to be unencumbered; we've seen sailors naked ourselves, you recall, since we passed the straits out of the ocean. ...

As the travelers entered, a girl put aside a crookbacked stringed instrument on which she had been accompanying a song. Her last notes seemed to linger for a space, less wild than wistful.

Folk sat crosslegged on ledges running around the floor, or on cushions by a low table. Present were Donya's six children, ranging from Zhano to three-year-old Valdevanya; Zhano's wife, staying here while he was away since thus far he was her sole husband; two of Donya's men, counting Kyrian, the other two being off on expeditions of their own; four unwedded kinswomen, aged, middle-aged, young, half-grown; and Donya herself. Faces and bodies declared that all belonged to the Rogaviki. Else they showed little in common-certainly not dress or hair style, save that in this warmth they went either scantily clad or nude.

Donya sprang from the platform where she had lain sprawled on a bearskin, to seize both Casiru's hands. On her way, she quickly and passionately embraced Kyrian. "Welcome, friend." ...

She'd not changed much since she visited Arvanneth and they met. At thirty-five, she remained straight, her movements flowed and strength pounced in her grip. He could well see that, since tonight she wore a cloth kilt for its pockets, a necklace of shells and teeth, and a good deal of skin paint in red and blue loops. She was fuller-figured than most Rogaviki women, but muscles underlay each curve. Her breasts swelled milk-heavy; a mother among the Northfolk often gave suck for years after she gave birth, not just to her latest child but to siblings,

Donya ceased work and trod closer. Nothing remained of last night's man-eating tigress, nor of the silent, relentlessly loping vixen afterward. A woman flowed toward him, clad in air of early summer, hair aflutter around her smile and above her breasts. By Dolphin! he exploded in his loins. I- Common sense closed fingers on him. She's not inviting me. And she has my knife.

She gave it back, though. Automatically, he sheathed it. ...

... The earliest who returned to camp were a young and thoroughly pregnant girl, accompanied by a mature woman. Both caught his attention. The first showed marks of tears, though she had won back some calm. That wasn't typical ... he believed. The second was still more striking. She was perhaps in her late thirties, a tall blonde who must often go nude as she did now, since her skin was everywhere a deep brown against which her hair stood nearly white. She was apparently unwed, for he noticed none of the silvery birth-scars which traced along Donya's thighs. But her walk was deliberate, her countenance grave, in a way he had never before seen hereabouts. Her right arm circled the girl's waist-comfortingly, not erotically-while her left hand swung a staff topped by a sunburst carved in walrus ivory from the Mother Ocean.

... An aged man, bald and blind, sat on a folding stool, plucked a snake-carved harp, and sang for the workers in a voice still powerful.

He stopped when the newcomers did, hearing the sudden change. For an instant silence spread outward, like waves when a rock is cast into a pool. Then a tall man raised himself from his iob. It was greasy, so he went nude. ...