Emil Hering stood at the door, his hand raised, to knock. He had rehearsed many times what he would say, but none of it stayed in his mind. He didn’t quite know just what he would say when she opens the door. Taking her to where the meer-maids sing is out of the question, under no circumstances. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t, for her, or for him. It’s better that way.
As soon as his hand fell upon the door, it opened, but behind it stood not the girl, but a giant Amur tiger.
Laohu said, “Wilhelmina’s gone. She’s taken her Mongol bow and arrows, and of course she always has on her her throwing daggers. She and the firefox Huohu, they’ve hired the pirate Störtebeker to take them beyond the Vineta reef, to search for the meer-maids and where they sing.”
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Aboard the Lord of the Seven Seas, Klaus Störtebeker stood personally before the cast-iron caboose-stove on deck to make Huohu, Wilhelmina Wang, and himself East Frisian tea. Inside the canister was what Europeans called black tea, for the color of the curled up, dried leaves. But East Asians called it red tea, for the color of the beautiful liquid inside the cup when it is drunk.
Wilhelmina, in the East Asian fashion, took no sugar, and used no strainer or tea sieve. Instead she drank her red tea pure, tasting the tannins, and gently blowing the floating leaves away with her breath.
Störtebeker, dropped a cube of rock kandi into his empty cup, poured the tea over it, and listened to the characteristic crackling of the sugar crystals in hot water, before coaxing in a spoonful of cream and watching the cloud of cream bloom and swirl. He drank it East Frisian style.
The ship’s cook had brought up a plate of potato pancakes from the galley, which he had grated with onion and fried up over his gimballed stove this morning. The three, Huohu included, tucked into the potato-puffers with sea buckthorn marmelade and drank or lapped their teas from white gold Meißen porcelain.
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Emil Hering pulled out a small, beautifully made and maintained sailing boat from its berth, and invited Janosch A. Prufrock onto it. Alongside the sailboat was painted the name Undine.
“Like your villa,” said Prufrock in recognition.
“Like my mother,” thought Emil Hering in perturbation.