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.

“Double knots now!” he growls. “Row, boy! Row like your soul’s at stake!”

I see him throw just as the mermaid breaks the surface again. The needle strikes its target, and the strange fish-woman spins around and around in the water, churning the waves into foam with her fury. Ulric, in the nearest skiff, casts his net, only to see it twist around the thrashing thing.

The tether rope on the harpoon unspools crazily out of the boat as its target swims away. The boat pitches forward violently, washing waves into the hull. Gunther almost crushes me in his fall. The man weighs a bloody ton.

“The chase is on!” Gunther cries as the vessel skims the waves, pulled along at frightening speed by the thing he has speared. Dry land vanishes behind us fast and I become seasick. The chop pounds the hull so hard I fear the boat will split apart.

In a flash, it is over. The line snaps and the boat settles into a gentle bob. Gunther roars a string of obscenities that hovers over the bay while I lurch over the stern to spill my stomach into the sea.

I wipe my mouth and look across to the skipper. Gunther sits on the gunwale, lighting his long-stemmed pipe. The leering grin on his scarred face makes me turn green all over again.

“Damndest thing I ever saw,” he says. He flings the match out to sea and regards me for a long moment with the smoke billowing across his face. Taking the pipe from his teeth, he points the stem at me. “Valiant effort, Kaspar. You’re stronger than you look. You can be my oarsman any day.”

When I retch a second time, he laughs and orders me to lay down and be still. Clamping the pipe in his teeth, he takes the oars and rows for home.

***

Gunther is given a hero’s welcome when we dock, the other fishermen clapping him on the back and praising the strength of his arm. Questions buzz through the crowd like blowflies on a carcass. Did Gunther kill the creature? Is it truly a mermaid? Where did it come from? Why is it here?

I crawl out of the boat and collapse like a dirty dishclout on the stone pier, still green around the gills. The throng moves on, circling their hero.

One person stops to ask if I am all right. Agnet, of course. She bends low to flatten a palm over my brow.

“That was quite the ride it gave you,” she says. “Are you going to be sick?”