The Stolen Sun Page 5

  "Tulla!"

  Wayne's veins heated up from his run. He looked around him at a ring of feral flint-white eyes. At the tall man's shout the shaggy gray animals groped up on their feet, their bellies dangling with balls of snow and ice. Without conversation (which the yowling wind made impossible in any case) the brown-beard fetched out a parka from the wooden sledge parked in the knoll's deepest shadow against the storm. Wayne stared at the ornately carved troika while the tall man rehitched the eight wolf-dogs to the reins. Gratefully, he slipped the eimme-trirnmed parka over his dark space uniform.

  "Get in," the bearded one advised. "I will run alongside for a time. Well do better if the dogs have not so much to draw."

  He waved away Wayne's ornamental demur and Wayne climbed in among the furs. The cold still gnawed at his bones; his feet were already numb from it. Even his mind seemed to be congealing. A scream at the dogs, a whip-crack, a straining of harness, and a lurch of runners that jolted Wayne's cold-locked jaws loose, and they were off, southward, with the demonaic wind of the north at their back to lash them out of its frozen domain.

  The rhythm of the iron strips gliding and sparking fire on the blue crust, the snug warmth of the shaggy white bear furs, and Wayne slept. Slept like one demented by exhaustion. It was as though the torment of his years as a Destroyer and the nightmare of Chuck Sotomeyer's death were only dreams and this a quixotic waking to reality. Not a reality spun from childish illusions where all is warm contentment and pleasure. No. Rather a cold, bitter-cruel reality, yet nevertheless of dignity and satisfaction in striving, as against cynical all-kill. The dog's ululations, knowing that the next stop was home and food, the crack of the whip, even the harsh song of the wind, all of this formed a kind of compulsive lullaby. A remembered thing. Yes, His cells remembered it. It was within him, deep. Buried in the time-thread of his ancestry.

  Only once did he wake. The sledge had stopped and overhead the sky pulsed with strange asolar light. He jerked up in the furs and turned. The north sky was cracked open with cascading splinters of blue-white brilliance. While he stared in awe at this spectacle and at the silhouetted figure standing twenty feet to the rear of the halted sledge, arms outstretched, face uplifted, he heard the brown-beard call out:

  "Ukko! I have found him! I have found he whom you sent to us in a lightning bolt, to help us in our great need! Kittos, Ukko, kittos!"

  A mittened slap on his shoulder brought him awake. The strange nightride across the bleak wastes was over. The bearded one waited only until Wayne moved and sat before he strode across the dark snowpath toward a rime-driven log house with a steep slanted roof and high chimneys of stone. Light like pale lemons splashed out onto the corniced porch. Wayne saw dark figures emerge from somewhere in the rear of the building to loose the dog team from harness. The dogs growled their impatience for their well-earned food and warm sleep.

  Wayne jerked himself quickly out of his fur cocoon. His feet burned like fire but, now, at least they were alive. He hurried to the open door where the brown-beard waited for him in the flickering oil-lamp's outsplash. He gestured Wayne inside while glancing back critically to see if the dogs were being taken care of properly. Something displeased him; he brushed by Wayne and vanished into the dark, muttering.

  Pulled by a primitive's need for warmth, Wayne sought the stone flagging of the high-leaping log fire. He removed his steaming parka and squatted, oblivious to the prickling fires in his hands and feet, to everything but the flaming warmth. It was a while before he stood up and took account of the rest of the room.

  Somehow, already he knew that this was the common-house of the village. In the main it was one long room with long cross-legged tables and benches to seat two hundred. Ornaments were few. There were some colorful handwoven rugs on the oiled pine floor; lamps backed by tin reflectors gave life to the log walls and shone upon a tattered banner at the head of the master table, a space-blue flag set with a familiar dipper-pattern of silver stars.

  When the great front door slapped shut to hold back the blast of icy wind, Wayne turned. The tall man with the brown beard tramped to the fire, first, and as if ritualistical-ly, removed his outer clothing and ice-dangled leggings. He took no notice of Wayne for now.

  "Elmi!" he shouted in the direction of what must be the kitchens. "Perkele! Where is the hag! Elmi!"

  A fat bundle of a woman appeared.

  "Kallia, woman! Food! Must a man starve in his house?"

  The apple-cheeked apparition vanished, appearing a moment after with an enormous pitcher of foaming brew and huge mugs to go with it. Behind her a girl of fifteen or sixteen, slat-thin and slag-eyed, moved like her satellite, bearing a tray of food. The brown-beard tramped to the table, beckoning for Wayne to follow suit.

  "Drink!" he cried. "Eat! The others will be here soon to gawk at what Ukko has sent us." He raised his beer mug.

  ''You will have little of peace presently. And precious little food. Make the most of it, my son's son!"

  Wayne fell to. The great slabs of dark bread, the wedges of yellow cheese, the meat porridge laced with forest mushrooms and herbs, with the dark kallia to wash it all down-were an animal joy such as Wayne had not known since boyhood on his Proxima farm after a muscle-pounding twelve hour stint during harvest. He devoured and drank with relish and forgot even his questions and his wonder at being here. He was here; in some fantastic way he belonged here: it was enough.

  Through the delicious diffusion of hattia, when his belly could hold no more, he stared openly at the tall man with the long brown beard. There was cosmic virility to this man. He had the look of the forest, too. A stag's tawny mane. A bear's muscular stamina. An eagle's sharp cunning. Yet there was more. Much more. What, it would be hard to put into words, but it came from deep behind those lambent blue eyes. A kind of godlike majesty. Dressed like a primitive, on a primitive world, this man was not. Standing before the High Terran Council, who decided the fate of worlds, this man would not flicker so much as an eyelash. His glance compelled. His carelessly flung suggestion was a lesser man's soul-strained command.

  "Why do you look at me, my son?" He showed strong white teeth when he laughed over the brim of his mug. "As if you did not know me at all!"

  Wayne set down his mug, still staring.

  "I don't."

  The brown-beard roared to his feet. "You don't know me! ME!" He whirled wrathfully toward the kitchens. "Elmi! My robe!"

  The old woman had been drowsing, head bent to her prodigious bosoms, by the kitchen door. She blinked up, then snapped her fingers into the hallway; moments later her daughter floated in among the folds of a magnificent garment of finespun goat's hair. It was dyed a brilliant blue and figured everywhere with cabalistic patterns made from purest silver. They were like panoramic constellations; Wayne thought while the brown-beard permitted Elmi and her daughter to assist him into the robe that if he allowed his eyes to follow the patterns those silver stars made something would happen to him, something wildly wondrous.

  Now, with the dignity of a star-king, he faced Wayne. "You know me—now?" he thundered.

  "Only that I saw you first in an Astro dive, playing some kind of harp—"

  "My kantele. Jo. But what is this dive?"

  Wayne made an effort to explain. "You told me I must follow you, then you vanished. Later, in your copper boat—"

  "Boat? Boat?" The blue eyes sparked sun-fire. "Ah! I

  have pondered me on the idea of one day roving the stars and—a copper boat with Otava-rainbow oars, you say?"

  While he paced he stroked his dark beard. "Yet," he rumbled presently, "you have the impudence to pretend not to know who it was called you down from behind our lost sun?"

  Wayne managed an apologetic grin. From behind them came a blast of wind when the door was flung open and shut, then a sly boyish chuckle.

  Turning, Wayne saw that two equally extraordinary figures had burst in on them out of the storm. His eyes took in first the chuckler. He was young, quite young,
dapper in skin-dose fawnhide. His shoulders were wide almost to the point of abnormality, his waist, under a wide serpent's skin belt, flat and narrow. His face was a young god's, bronzed perfection, and the golden curls that caught the oil-lamps' light were carelessly long, so that they splashed sunlight over his flat-to-head ears and his wide forehead. His blue eyes were merry with devil-care; his wide passionate mouth alive with good humor.

  With a dancing swash he moved, somewhat theatrically one might say, into the brighter light; he whipped around the harp strung on his back and gave Wayne a wink while he sang:

  "Know you not our greatest wizard? He who charms the moon to dancing? He who bested Iko-Turso? He who fought the giant Vipunen? Who alone returned from Tuonela? Know you not our Wainomoinen?"

  "Silence, Lemminkainenr But the robed wizard was unable to hold onto his scowl and smiled wide before he laughed to ring the rafters. "As you can see, this no-beard youth fancies himself a minstrel. When he is not seeking a sword fight he is making up songs for the maidens. He imagines that his crow's throat might even one day equal my own mellifluous song-magic."

  The golden youth, Lemminkainen, grimaced and twanged a raw chord on the strings of his kantele. "The hundred maidens of Saari did not complain of my 'crow's throat' when I sang to them on their island!"

  "That was because you were the only singer they had ever heard."

  "Jo. And the only man. Nor did they complain of aught else when I made my rounds." Memories of those darkless midsummer nights brought back his lusty good humor. "Another time, after I had slain the serpents of Syojatar and lopped off the head of Pohjola's Master in fair fight, escaping by the hair on my teeth from the hundred warriors of the Black Crone—"

  "A little less bragging would suit me well," said the second newcomer. His voice was low-pitched, its intent somberly purposeful rather than scornful.

  When he stepped forward, Wayne took him in, from the black boots pooling melted ice onto the pine slabs, up the long dark-clad shanks, the black pukko belt, the near-black jerkin opened at the throat and showing a burnt umber V of strong throat and a large Adam's apple, to the fierce red beard like fine spun bronze. His face was long, gaunt, haggard almost, except that the indominitable valiance and heroic poise of head and sharpness of deepset eye well matched the others.

  "Well spoken, friend Ilmarinen of the Magic Forge!" Wainomoinen gave his ceremonial wizard's robe a toss and flashed the golden-haired Lemminkainen a look so thunder-browed that it would have floored a lesser man. As for Lemminkainen, the Beautiful, he merely grinned.

  "I meant only to instruct our young visitor. There are many things he must know if he is to be of any help."

  "Nün," Wainomoinen nodded. "There is much to be said before we seek our rest in the chambers of Utamo." He beckoned them all back to the master's table. "We may as well drink and be comfortable about it. Standing here weeping like women will not bring back that which is lost."

  Even grim Ilmarinen of the copper beard permitted a small smile to leak out when the wizard raised his kallia mug for the toast of comradeship to outlast the stars.

  Lemminkainen stroked his kantele as if it were one of his innumerable conquests while he sang:

  " 'Dearest friends and much-loved brothers, Best beloved of all companions, Come and let us drink together, Since at length we meet together From two widely sundered regions.'"

  Wayne sipped, thinking that these three strangely familiar men of heroic cast could scarcely dream how "widely sundered" the regions were…

  VI

  And so it was, while the wind-demon howled and pounded at the log walls of the village of the Vanhat, Wayne Panu —whose destiny had been to serve the Terran Fleet in its latter day matrix of All-Kill—listened with mounting wonder to the incredible tale of the Stolen Sun…

  "Nün." Wainomoinen put down his empty mug with a crash, then wiped the foam off his moustaches with a dainty movement that ill-matched the lightning in his eyes and the thunder in his scowl. "The Hag of Pohyola has always hated the Vanhat, and the decades and centuries have only served to whet her perverted desires for vengeance."

  "Why? Why does she hate your

  Wainomoinen's shrug was to cast off an incubus weight from his broad shoulders. "Many reasons: The Sampo H-marinen forged for her. The Star Mill of endless resource. We stole it back from the greedy, devious crone out of famine and great need, and in the great sea battle that ensued the Sampo was shattered into small pieces. We thought it was lost until it fell out that she perverted it to destructive evil. Ei. I have seen all of this on the great loom where Ilmatar forever weaves that which has been, is, and shall be. In my visions and my dreams I am permitted, being near to Valmis."

  "Valmisr

  "Those of the Otava folk who are ready to be called. To become a part of all that exists. To shred themselves

  Kfi as did our more worthy ancestors before we left the Bear; to fling the smallest parts of their beings into the stars and become truly one with everything that vibrates and holds the sky together; to know aU there is to know of what II-matar weaves."

  The light in his fierce blue eyes was so bright, suddenly, so rich with a transcendental ecstasy, that Wayne dared not look long on it. He turned sharply. The others experienced it, too. Even Lemminkainen was silent, abashed. Wayne thought his question, only. You mean, to die? You are saying that the Valmis are the dead, gone into Tieva?

  "No," Wainomoinen said softly, in a moment. "The Valmis are not dead. They are alive as we can never be. They are within every marshflower that dances on the Spring wind, of every wandering mote that rides the sunbeams that seek out the small barn cracks where the grain is stored; they are within every fire-leaping sun…**

  For a moment, when Wayne blinked up, it seemed as if the wizard's strong-etched face blurred. He could almost see the wall's logs and the sealing gray mud between them right through the diminished molecular matter that was Wizard, Chieftain, and Mentor for all of the communal Vanhat villages. He knew why. It was because Wainomoinen was near-Valmis, near to the Becoming Of All—and because he, Wayne Panu, was blessed or cursed with the powers of the esper and of empathic transference. He gasped without sound, held his breath, stared, waited.

  Across the table, Ilmarinen the Smith gave a low animal growl deep in his throat. His long muscle-strung arm reached across to take hold of the wizard's robed arm, as if to hold him from vanishing by primitive force.

  "Let us talk further of Louhi and of our stolen sun," he said in that low rumble of words. "There will be time for the Mysteries of Otava and the Valmis later."

  Wainomoinen's face came back clear-cut and filled with resolve. "Jo. Forgive me, my sons, my comrades. We have a task and a frightful one." He whipped toward Wayne, speaking in crisp monosyllables. "Louhi of Pohyola hates us. Each one of us has dared to defy her. Lemminkainen slew her human consort, before she moved her island into the sky by her Hüsi's magic. I, too. Nün."

  "Where does her power come from?"

  "It has been carefully garnered, sifted out of All-Things as the Valmis sift out good. Louhi has, in her endless life, consorted blatantly with the most evil creatures and demons from the darkest comers of the sky. Creatures so unnatural and cunnning that even your Ussi, with their fantastic machines, have not even detected their presence in the black stars. Her delight in wickedness has sucked evil to her befogged island outside of time and space for so long that now Pohyola is naught but one great sponge of horror."

  "What form does it take? I mean—"

  "We know what you mean, No-beard. Before stealing our sun Louhi flung seven plagues upon us. Seven deadly plagues to blight our crops and poison the milk in our mothers' breasts. What form, you ask? Hails of iron from out of the heavens. Needles that prick children in their beds, so that they shrivel into gnome-things and die. The worst of the Seven Plagues was the last and it was brought on us by Louhi's demon-sired daughter, Loviatar."

  "Loviatar seemed to be harmless, living in her hut in the Hol
low," Lemminkainen put in, out of impatience with inaction. "Ugly, she was. And one pitied her, shambling and weaving all the way from Ulappala with only a crooked rowan stick to serve her as eyes. Ai. Loviatar was blind and hideous, so that each of the villages through which she passed fed her their best and the children sang her songs and brought her wood-flowers to smell, since she could not see them. Only every village she passed was stricken down and every child at whom she pointed her crooked hag's-rowan died with convulsive fits. It was not until Waino-moinen caught her away from the foxfire-lit Hollow, which was bound to Pohyola and Louhi with some unspeakable bond, that he was able to call her by her true name and end her malignant business."

  There was a black silence, now, then Wainomoinen bawled for fat Elmi to bring more kattia. They drank the brackish brew somberly and without song or mirth. Witch Louhi's malignant, unending vengeance swore upon the roving offshoot of Otava hung over them like the everdark storm that prowled the wastes. The wind in the eaves-cracks was the Crone herself, cackling.

  "How could she steal our sun?" Wayne blurted. "How could even such a witch do this?"

  "Not she herself, perhaps," Wainomoinen sighed darkly. "Those she frolics with in a manner I prefer not to know."

  "But to take away a star around which nine planets revolve! It can't be done without upsetting the whole balance of-"

  "We do not have Ussi knowledge of. these written down and computed matters," Ilmarinen admonished tartly. "We know what we know and what we see. When we look up and do not see the Sun we know that it is no longer there."

  Sol, like any star, is composed of hot gases, Wayne told himself, wisely silent about it. Gases which produce a fantastic amount of energy. Now, if Louhi had the perverted wisdom to snuff out the light and energy, at the same time leaving the mass intact…

  "Jo." Wainomoinene nodded gravely, as if he had read Wayne's thoughts. "Suns are born and suns die. Perhaps it is that Louhi has reached forward into Ilmatar's loom and killed our Sun prematurely."