title: Hrolf Kraki's Saga
author: Poul Anderson
description: Fantasy novel from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.
zlib_text:                       Poul Anderson
                     The Merman’s Children
                             1979
    
    
                           Prologue
    
    
   THE coast of Dalmatia rises steeply. A bare league inland, Shibenik town stands high on a hill above the
  river Krka and sees mountain peaks in the east. Here the water forms a broad basin, which narrows as it
  moves on to the sea. Upstream, however, it tumbles in ringing cascades out of the lake which it and
  others have made.
   In the days when the Angevin Charles Robert became boy-king of Croats and Magyars, the land along
  those falls was mostly wildwood. Likewise it was around much of the lake, save where the Krka empties
  into this. There folk had long since cleared it and laid it under the plow. A little farther up the river, about
  where the Chikola flows into it, Skradin village clustered by the stronghold of its lord, the zhupan.
   Nevertheless, even within castle walls, the wilderness came a-haunting. Not only might one hear wolv