Darkness drives day away when it is scarcely in sight. Land is white except for cliffs or crags. Sheet ice stretches to the grey, choppy, noisy sea. Stinging wind blows low clouds. When the ice breaks into a floe beneath Tauno and Eyjan, they lower their kayaks. (Three senses.)
I paraphrase Poul Anderson's description which is as vivid as ever but unfortunately brief here, making my paraphrase even briefer.
When the shaman hesitates to impart information to the merfolk:
"Silence lengthened.
"Eyjan lost patience..." (p. 193)
We expect the wind to underline the conversational silence but, for this once, it does not!
Tauno and Eyjan depart from the Greenland Inuit and return to Europe. The plot advances and the merman's children will reunite. The shaman has given them a magical amulet which will have repercussions and which reminds us that what we are reading in this volume is historical fantasy. Anderson also gives us heroic fantasy, historical fiction, historical fiction with a fantasy element, historical science fiction, science fiction, science fiction future history, just about everything, in fact.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Anderson also gave readers several mystery stories and three novels in that genre. I think the best of those novels was MURDER IN BLACK LETTER.
He also wrote a fair amount of non-fiction, such as THERMONUCLEAR WARFARE, which I wished he had revised and updated in the 1990's.
Ad astra! Sean
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