The Saga of Lost Earths Read online

  “You don't think that they-"

  “No! Quite the opposite. In their own way they are fighting the intruders. You have read the Kalevala, of course. How the metals of the Earth possess a strange sentience of their own: Vainomoinen's strange battle to tame iron; Ilmarinen, the wondersmith, wrestling terran elements into submission with his forge and mystic songs."

  Dr. Enoch grimaced.

  “Here I go again. This is the kind of talk that gets me booted out of P-H. In 1944-that long ago-Dr. H. S. Burr and co-workers at Yale University experimented for decades and came to the conclusion that an electrical aura of their creation surrounds all living things, that life is connected electrically to the whole pattern of the universe itself! Carl, everything that exists is vibration, the same magnetic principle that causes gravitation, chemical affinities, in macrocosm and microcosm, controls our galaxy and the galaxies beyond it. Time, itself!"

  Carl scowled this over. “Now you're leaning too far in the other direction. Okay, matter is vibration, energy is matter. Whatever you say. But...” he stopped to move down to the next pineboard shelf, “where does all this lead to? Where do the Finns and their legends come in?"

  “Thomas Edison said, ‘Ideas come from space.’ Dr. Richard Bucke declared that the power in our own minds, which is cosmic in origin, can create ‘brilliant white light.’ Don't you see, Carl? Everything is possible to the human mind because it possesses a direct wire to the all-power of the infinite cosmos.

  “Somehow or other, the Finns knew this. It spilled out in their legends, all of which have their basis in elemental natural forces. The Finns, through infinite centuries, here and perhaps elsewhere, caused their legend to become real by the power of their combined and implicit belief!"

  Carl whistled.

  “Then the heroes of the Kalevala do exist?"

  “Somewhere, yes. Some mindwhere. It is the tapping of the cosmic force allied to the mind that made these things happen before, and will again. We, in our stagnant, womb like cities, have almost lost the most important source of power there is."

  “And?"

  “The latent power of the human mind. The power which, combined with the implicit belief such as the Finns possessed (many have, of course, lost it by now) can create whole solar systems and universes. Control of the sonic-vibratory secrets within their songs can cause anything to exist. Beneficent or evil. Anything!"

  Dr. Enoch's eyes glowed. Carl allowed his mind to whittle on all this while they beat each other vigorously with branches of fresh birch, then doused each other with buckets of cold water.

  While Carl put on the Lappish costume of colorful handwoven wools, he asked, “What about the Rare Earths and the suicides? Seems like we've wandered off into left field."

  “No, Carl. What I've been doing is preparing your mind to accept what you must accept to discover the truth. Even Professor Graves would agree with me here. Your 5h mind potential must reach a peak which you can't even imagine yet, if you are to succeed in your task. Your unconscious mind must already be working, accepting fantastic new concepts, preparing you for incredible surprises and shocks!"

  Carl went over to the rough table and finished off his now tepid mug of kallia. “But you'll be with me, Doctor?"

  Dr. Enoch's face, roseate from the scrubbing, was a study in desperate hope. “I will try. But I don't possess the latent mind-power that you have, Carl. This makes me vulnerable."

  “And I?"

  “You must become a true hero. Like Lemminkainen. Like Vainomoinen. All modesty and self-effacing must be sloughed off. You must believe and trust the power inside of that head of yours, with all the ancestral cumulative belief in your blood and bones to back it up."

  Carl reached down and picked up one of the packs Dr. Enoch had prepared. He set it down again abruptly when he caught a strange intense look on the little doctor's face. It was a look infinitely sad.

  “You've been avoiding the issue, Doctor. Putting my unconscious mind to work, maybe. But still, you've been beating around the bush. What about the Force—the Thing I was sent up here to find?"

  He faced Dr. Enoch squarely; Kullervo, skulking in his corner, gave an odd, wolfs growl.

  Carl's mind burst into pyrotechnics of alarm. Something was among them. Something had been listening, absorbing, waiting to pounce.

  Outside, Ukko, God of Thunder, let fly a clap of sonics, to shred the very planets.

  “It's no use,” Dr. Enoch said, his face ash-gray. “I ... I'm old, and besides, I don't have the power to fight.” His gnarled frame shuddered as he gave a quick look around, as if waiting. “The dark is closing in."

  Carl grinned and went to the table. “'Men, we must light the lamp."

  “Don't touch it!” Dr. Enoch's voice was a shriek.

  He stumbled and half fell before he could reach the metal-base oil lamp and sweep it out of Carl's reach.

  The storm darkness thickened. Carl heard a malevolent alien chuckle spill out of Dr. Enoch's lips, where he lay on the log floor, surrounded by hungry little tongues of yellow flame. The lamp was crushed under him.

  “Go!"

  The gurgled word was Dr. Enoch's last prodigious effort. By the time Carl had groped out a hand torch from one of the packs, while Kullervo tramped on the oil flames with heavy boots, there was nothing on the floor but the bent lamp base and a thousand crystalline shards of glass.

  Dr. Enoch was a black shattered thing in the ring of torchlight, then only ashes.

  While he stood gaping, ravished by sorrow, Carl heard a voice, a deep cold voice, from the occult areas of his mind.

  “I am Hiisi,” the voice said. “Dr. Enoch went too far. Take warning."

  * * *

  PART TWO

  OF ILMARINEN

  “For ‘twas he who forged the heavens,

  And the vault of the air he hammered

  Ere the air had yet beginning,

  Or a trace of aught was present..."

  Kalevala: Runo X

  * * *

  CHAPTER VI

  THE SLEDGE, hand-carved and decorated with intertwined marshberry flowers, moved swiftly across the ever-twilight. The six elkhounds pulling it sought out the places where the springtime snow was patched most liberally. The wide tundra seemed never-ending.

  By turns, Carl and Kullervo would run alongside, cracking the reindeer-hide whip over the heads of the yelping animals.

  Now it was Kullervo's turn with the muscular dogs, whose thick gray pelts left harness-chafed bits in the sledge-wake, fur tufts of their summer shedding.

  Carl lay back in the sledge and tried for sleep. But Utamo, chieftain of all dreams, was not in a good humor and sleep would not come. Carl stared up at the arch of cobalt sky and thought.

  He thought how, at a thick forest's edge—he had looked back at the old sauna by the lake as the June-dry logs went up in a pillar of flame, sending sparks skyward to a grumbling Mo. Dr. Enoch was gone, victim of his ambition to learn cosmic secrets. “The thing I feared has come upon me.” What Enoch had wrested from out of the consciousness of the Infinite had taught him to fear, and his fear had given Hiisi the opportunity he needed.

  Hiisi.

  That soul-chilling voice had revealed itself. Hiisi, The Evil, master of all the Pahaliset. Of all whose desires are destructive and needful for fear beyond death.

  “Want me to spell you off?” Carl shouted to Kullervo, whose bandied, stunted legs propelled him somewhat ludicrously alongside the lean, rangy elk dogs.

  “Presently, Lemminkainen."

  “Why do you call me that?"

  Kullervo cursed and cracked his whip.

  Carl turned his attention to a worn copy of the W. F. Kirby translation of the Kalevala, which Dr. Enoch had included in his pack of concentrate foods, sleeping bag, and utilitarian tools. The frayed volume had been wrapped in a wide leather belt with a silver buckle that had runic symbols scratched on it. For some reason Carl had donned the belt, slipping his pukko sheath onto it as w
ell.

  The book opened to an underscored passage:

  “Quick he sped upon his journey,

  To the great smith Ilmarinen,

  He the great primeval craftsman.

  It would seem that Dr. Enoch was urging Carl to find the wondersmith, first. But where could he find a hero out of legend?

  He turned his puzzlement in the direction of Kullervo. According to legend, the misshapen Calibanish youth had been born to evil. As a baby he kicked his cradle to bits and turned his swaddlings into rags. The wily crones of his village tried to drown him; the water would not take him. They tried burning; the fire rejected him, as well. They hanged him but the oak tree shook him off. Finally his own father sold the ill-staffed, ill-natured youth into slavery. It was shortly after that, in his meanderings, that he committed the unspeakable. Like Oedipus, Kullervo was destined for tragedy.

  “Perkele!” Kullervo's harsh voice cursed the straining hounds. ‘Mennd! Mennd!"

  It was three days and nights, not by the sun now in midsummer, but by Carl's chronometer and his belly, that cried out for fresh meat and fresh bread, when they sighted Lake Imari. Village dogs heard their sledgehounds bay and gave answer, long before the mining village around the ice-edged lake, with the great beetle-brow of cliff hanging over it, came bluely in view.

  The hospitality of the solemn faced villagers was marred by their anxiety about the sealed mouths of the Rare Earth mines.

  Over a dinner of fresh round loaves baked in outdoor ovens, of reindeer steaks and a compote made of marsh cherries and cranberries, the village spokesman, a rawboned Lapp with bramble bushes for eyebrows, spoke up.

  “You have come to open the mines, yes?"

  Carl watched an ancient witch-crone drive Kullervo out from the main communal eating room, but made no comment. Truly, there was something about the youth that repelled, and this breed of soumalinen peasants was quick to sense it. Their honesty forbade hypocrisy.

  “Eat scraps with the dogs!” Carl heard her croak, rapping her apron after him. “Offspring of misfortune! Son of Pahalainen!"

  Carl turned back to his platter of food.

  “These have been bitter times for us,” Tuuri, the Lapp, grunted. “The winters have been long, with little game to be found. Even the lake perch have hidden themselves from our seines. The mines have been a great boon to this village and to others around the lake."

  The ring of grave-faced villagers behind him nodded.

  Carl sighed and pushed away the platter. Life was hard in these northernmost villages; they had given him their best, out of politeness to a veiras.

  “The mines were closed because there is something evil in the rocks you take from it,” Carl told them. “Haven't your miners noticed anything peculiar?"

  Tuuri's head hung down to avoid Carl's sharp look; some of the others exchanged glances. During the ensuing silence, Carl could hear the white-haired crone keening to herself in the darkest corner.

  “We worked hard. Everyone in our village worked. We hauled out the rocks from deep under the ground, and loaded it onto the fly-things the veiras brought. They wanted the ore from our mine and we gave it to them. That is all."

  “Have there been any ... any deaths among the miners?"

  Tuuri shrugged.

  “There are always accidents. Jumala does not always have time for everybody. We sing the old songs every day, when we work in the mines."

  Carl sighed. The old songs. The old Words that protected by their sonic vibrations. Rhythmic shields against Hiisi and his crew. The old crone was singing one of the old never-to-be-forgotten songs right now. Against whom? Kullervo?

  “You could go down to The Cities,” Carl suggested. “There you would never know hunger or want."

  Tuuri snorted and crashed his great fist down on the table, slopping the pitcher of goat's milk. “Cities! We are of the Yanhat! We stay here where we belong. We must live and sing our songs and dance our dances under the clean sky. How can we live in cages?"

  A sun-freckled youth with blonde braids to his waist and a yew bow slung across his shoulder, stepped forward. His wide smile was frank and infectious.

  “Tuuri,” he said. “Have I your permission to speak?"

  Tuuri nodded dourly. “Speak, Hunter Kauppi."

  The youth in buckskin bobbed his wheat-blonde head. “Perhaps it is that Lemminkainen has journeyed so far to our village for another reason. To find and destroy the evil of which he speaks."

  Carl stood up and gripped the youth's hand, hard.

  “You have said it, Kauppi. Our Cities are not protected from the evil in your mine metals by ancient songs. Bad things are happening everywhere.” He explained his mission, briefly, omitting technicalities. After all, he was among Believers now—Believers such as Dr. Enoch had told him of humans who lived simply, yet who possessed fragments of cosmically linked mind power that could shake the world.

  He sympathized with them for their yearning hunger of Tapiola, the forest magic; of Otava, the constellation they called Great Bear or Great Father; of Ahava, the wind, and Ahto, the thundering seas that battered their northern shores. And why not? This was what Carl had always wanted, a want spilling up from the very atomic structure of his being.

  “You call me Lemminkainen,” he told Kauppi.

  The hunter screwed up his blue eyes. “You look like Lemminkainen. With those muscles, I shall be damned if you cannot be as great a fighter!"

  “How do you know what Lemminkainen looks like?” Carl demanded.

  Kauppi only laughed and tapped his forehead. Surely it was obvious how he knew. Being who and what he was, this man from the Cities must understand.

  Carl turned to Tuuri as the village leader. “Can any among your people help me find this Evil Force?"

  The villagers shrugged and shook their heads.

  “We know how to protect ourselves,” Tuuri said slowly. “We see the Gods sometimes, dimly, as in a dream. But you must seek elsewhere for an answer to this problem.” He hesitated, massaging his bony knuckles. “Further to the north, perhaps. It is dangerous, this path you have taken, yet-"

  “What about Ilmarinen?"

  The hag muttering among the hanging deer meat and laurel branches rolled out of her corner like a bundle of gray rags. “Ilmar is there, at the topmost crag of the great cliffs! I have seen him standing at the mouth of his cave, his long red beard tossing in the north wind!"

  Carl turned to the others. All of them shook their heads. What had not this crazy old mummu seen while gathering her magic herbs and potions at the far end of lake?

  Kauppi, the hunter, spoke up. “I know where that wall of rock is. I will take you there, Lemminkainen."

  “When?"

  “After one sleep. I will give you and your servant snowshoes for the snow that never melts. I am the greatest of all builders of snowshoes!"

  Carl grinned and nodded. Somehow, he knew this was true.

  All of the village was there to wish the three safe journey and safe return. Among them was the bent witch with her rowan stick brandished. Bells jangled on the sledge as the dogs leaped ahead.

  But all that Carl could hear was the crone's cracked crooning, vibrating on his eardrums over the jangling, the shouting, the yelping:

  “Thus did Lemminkainen perish,

  Perished thus the dauntless lover,

  Down in Tuoni's murky river,

  Down in Manala's abysses..."

  * * *

  CHAPTER VII

  KAUPPI knew all the best ways of avoiding the treacherous bogs along the scalloped western rim of the lake; his laughing good nature was good company for Carl, too, after those long days of Kullervo's sullen silences broken by sky-hurled curses, presumably aimed at the dogs.

  Carl found his webbed snowshoes awkward for the first hour or so and himself, at times, left far behind the sledge, which then became a small black patch bobbing in and out of sight as it traversed the blue-white snowdunes.

  “Ai!” he yelled
at last, “Olkaa hyvd!” The crusted drifts glinted silver under a sombre sky, and, together with a mournful nag of the north wind, suggested that they were racing timeward, too, into the chill of Arctic winter.

  Gulping the wine-sweet air into his lungs, Carl loped over the crest of a pine-dotted dune to find Kauppi among panting dogs, feeding them, while snow melted over a primitive oil burner for a human bracer of bark-tea. Kullervo crouched, toad-like, among the sledge furs, arms akimbo, eyes veiled, grim.

  Kauppi greeted Carl with a shout and a nod that flopped his tasseled blue toque from side to side. Carl dropped easily on the side of a snowbank and accepted his tin cup of barktea with a grinned, “Kiittaa.” Kauppi gulped his own tea fast, then went back to checking the elk-hounds’ harnesses for sore spots and a paw which the lead dog seemed to favor.

  “I imagine that up here you establish a close relationship with your sled dogs,” Carl commented.

  “Yes. Not to fondle them too much, for they are not pets. Take Musti, our lead. We are fast friends already. He would fight off a pack of wolves to the death for me. I was worried he might have picked up a hawthorn spine. Not so."

  “How long to the escarpment where the witch said she saw Ilmar?"

  “Three days. Two and a night with luck, and if—” The Lapp grinned down at Carl's snowshoes, which were staked into the snow before him like twin grave markers. “If you keep up better."

  “I will,” Carl vowed wryly. “Let's get mushing."

  Kauppi's lively conversation, as they took up their journey, made Carl forget to be awkward; his Cities-bred psych marveled at the fund of woods lore Kauppi spilled out with boyish flair. Carl learned the best way to take a bull elk, and how to set out copper snares, and where, for the small furbearing Sons of Tapio, the God of the Forest.