The Saga of Lost Earths Page 6

  He thought, maybe I can find a cave. Shelter of some kind.

  Dragging his pack along, he made for the cliff; he prowled along it, ignoring another shrill admonition from Tapio's nagging offspring. He found no cave, but a kind of path zigzagging upcliff. There were places where the lichen had been scraped by the doe's nimble hooves.

  Carl swore. Then he hauled his pack up on his back, and followed the path up to the outjut. Of course the doe was no longer there. She was higher up, shaking her head at him and uttering that imperative scream.

  While he followed, inching his way from crevasse to crevasse, his reason for doing so changed. When they got up there he was going to artfully inveigle her close, then kW her with his pukko. She'd make a delightful change of diet from hardtack, wild berries, and vitamin pills.

  It got so he didn't dare look back down. It was some slim comfort to move up into the wet dark mists. He didn't want to see up or down, at this point. Miraculously, handholds—fissures, cracks into which he could force his numbed fingers, kept appearing. When shards gave way he screamed silent prayers and curses.

  The doe was gone. Hope was gone. He started to slide and slip down the wet lichen-slimed rock.

  He screamed and flailed a hand skyward.

  It hit something like a clammy rope. Roots. He hung from them, dangling his boots against the beetling rock. Dirt showered down on him but the root-ropes held. He inched his way around the projection of earth and rock by groping roots, then reedy grasses. He kept his face down in the wet dirt, so that he realized that he had made it only when his fingers curled around a six-inch trunk of tree and the world had become horizontal again. He lay there with his fingers gouged into the ground, greedily pulling air into his oxygen starved body.

  The plateau he had reached was haunted by skirling winds and clinging mists. Misshapen trees loomed among wild rock outcroppings. It was desolate, demon designed, unhuman. But there was no going back.

  Carl battled the sharp wind across the bleak tundra, wondering about the doe. Ilmatar had sent her, he decided, and, real or phantom, her task of guiding him out of the forest to this strange highland was finished.

  He found water in a natural bowl among the rocks; it was brackish, but he scooped it up and drank until he could hold no more.

  Pushing on, the tundra kept rising, and there were few trees now, and more rock. He wondered without caring much, so thick were the swirling mists, if he might not be traveling in a circle and suddenly plunge with any next step down that precipice. Pakkanen, the frost imp, nibbled at his fingers and numbed his nose and his cheeks.

  When he flopped on a knoll for a breather, his numbed ears thought they heard a buzzing chopping sound from above him in the mist. Carl refused to give it credence until it grew to be an angry demonic roar and moved right down at him.

  Itsu. The wind demon. Itsu lived up here, just off the end of the world, and Itsu resented human intrusion.

  Carl looked up and saw the dark shape whirling down on him, seeking him out. He screamed and pulled out his pukko. One of its odd blade-like wings sheared off the top of a dead tree: it blundered off with a hissing of wings and a dragon's roar, then swooped back, and landed below the knoll. There was a shriek of scraped rock, a sidewise skittering, then silence.

  Knife poised, Carl squinted into the driving mist. The wind pulled the tatters of cloud away from the demon, and now Carl saw that it seemed to be giving birth.

  A figure pulled out of the thing and started running and stumbling across the tundra, screaming, “Carl! Carl! Where are you?"

  * * *

  CHAPTER IX

  “SILIA!"

  He crumpled into a heap at her feet. Awareness left him for a while, then he kept waking up out of his faint of sheer exhaustion to the feel of her deft hands scraping and washing the clotted mud off of him and swabbing his torn hands and welts with unguents.

  “Drink!” She forced warm liquids between his lips.

  He groaned himself to full consciousness and found that Silia had dragged him down to the crashed copter and even set up a synthetics tent of sorts for a wind-break. Her emerald eyes watched him pull out from his total exhaustion with grave satisfaction.

  She had a small fire going, for warmth and to heat up the broth she kept poking into him. The yellow flames took careful account of her beautiful oval face, framed within that elfish green hood.

  Carl managed a grin.

  “How in the name of Ukko did you-"

  Silia laughed. “I swiped the copter. Bet you didn't realize I was that resourceful! When I didn't hear from my uncle I knew something dreadful had happened. I jetted to Helsinki, found out about the sauna getting burned. You had vanished. The local authorities had logical explanations for everything—Psych-Head took no responsibility, as they warned you—but I knew. I followed you to Lake Imari. That part was easy; my uncle and I had been there before, years ago. They told me you were headed for Ilmarinen, so-"

  “In this eggcrate!” Carl growled. “You know why these areas are shunned by all sensible aircraft. The cross currents and sudden storms are almost certain death. That's why-"

  “Never mind the lecture. I made it. I had to!"

  “Total belief,” Carl scowled. “Just like your uncle."

  “Exactly like my uncle.” Tears welled up in her eyes; she brushed them away with a stoic shake. “Now what?"

  Carl gave her a rundown on what had happened. Silia nodded. “Even before the Third War our scientists were grudgingly beginning to admit and study preternatural phenomena such as anti-matter, a time all-dimension, and the fantastic powers of total belief. But Psych-Head stifled almost everything in their anxiety to create a bland, strife-free world. Oh, they admit of esp and so on, but refuse to take the large, sweeping view of tapping cosmic energies, and so on. Safety, they feel, lies in limiting the human mind, not expanding it. They are wrong. Uncle knew that. There are forces beyond our dreaming, thrusting in on us, whether we believe in them or not."

  “The Finns believe."

  “Because they intuitively know. Still, they hold this in leash, protect themselves by sonic vibrations, by incantations and runes."

  Carl wondered grimly, “How about us? And the rest of the world, for that matter? We know the song-magic works, but it's limited. The Finns believed their gods and heroes into existence, tapping cosmic energies to create them, but destructive forces are stronger because they exist.” He stroked the blonde fuzz sprouting into a beard on his chin. “Perhaps B. Mar has answers."

  * * * *

  Festival of Midsummer's Night was near, but here at the end of the world only the savage wind danced and cavorted. Packing what they could carry and needed most from among the wrecked copter's supplies, they took up their journey. Silia clung to Carl, and Carl stroked the silver buckle with the runic symbols on it, against the whispering Unseen who darted nearer, just out of human sight, the further they advanced.

  There was nothing to guide their path now, only a kind of extra-sensory tug Carl felt whenever his boots took a wrong step. The dreary misted tundra seemed to have no end, but finally they found themselves facing a wild series of uprearing crags fashioned in terms of some alien geometry. There were patches of snow; the wind was space cold.

  When Silia collapsed, sobbing, Carl lifted her gently but stubbornly to her feet; now he half-carried her with a dogged strength that coursed up into his muscles and veins out of sheer unreasonable self-demand.

  She melted against him. “Let me die here,” she begged.

  “Shut up!"

  He kissed her frostbitten cheeks and forehead roughly, forcing her stumbling feet on. Every breath became a raw scream for life; he mumbled idiot prayers to any god who might happen to be listening.

  There was a dark blink of shadow ahead of them in the wind-ripped clouds. A patch.

  “A cave!” Carl shouted. “Ilmar!"

  He half-dragged the girl into the ragged interruption in the rock, then allowed her to sink to the gro
und.

  “Ilmar!” he yelled into the dark hole, then fell.

  The apparition moving suddenly out toward them carried a pitchy torch; uneasy flame lighted up a hollow-cheeked face with fierce blue eyes. The creased parchment of skin was surrounded by wild reddish tangle, hair and beard blended.

  Without a word, the seven-foot cave giant picked them both up and hauled them back into the cave where warmth radiated from a forge carved into the rock. An eagle, perched up in a narrow niche above the forge, fluttered down for a look at the weird event of visitors in this hermitage.

  “Back, Virokannas!” Ilmar brushed the bird off his shoulder and set about defrosting and feeding his guests.

  Warm food put Carl's mind and senses in order, but the girl's exhaustion resisted any waking. Carl sought out the old man and found him, wearing a leather apron, busy with a glowing strip of metal at his forge. When the eagle spoke to Ilmar, in a warning screech, the smith thrust the sword he was forging down into a cauldron. Steam hissed up and around his hair-matted chest.

  “You are Ilmarinen?” Carl demanded. “The wondersmith?"

  The fierce blue eyes pinched under wild eyebrow thatch. “I am Ilmar,” he admitted.

  Carl cast a look around. Silia was sleeping back in an alcove on a bed of bearskins; the cave was redolent of pine pitch and stranger smells; near the smith were great iron cauldrons bubbling yellow and blue and bloody crimson.

  “You are creating a magic thing?” he wondered.

  “A sword,” Ilmar said. “For Lemminkainen."

  “The Lapps call me Lemminkainen."

  The tall hermit shrugged. “That is for you to decide.” He tapped his forehead. “Each man is who he wishes to be. The greater the wish, the stronger must be the belief."

  “Then I will become Lemminkainen if, and when I want to badly enough?"

  The smith seemed to nod.

  “And you are Ilmarinen when you wish it to be?"

  “I am of my ancestors in All-Time as you are of yours."

  Carl asked, “Do you know why I have come to you?"

  Ilmar gave off working his handfashioned bellows. “I know. You wish help for your world. Help in destroying Hiisi and the Pahaliset."

  “Will you do it? Will you help?"

  Ilmar stared around him at the rock walls and the flame shadows. “I have nothing to do with your world. I am of myself. Virokannas is my only friend."

  “Ilmarinen fought Hiisi. He was a great hero, friend to the wizard Vainomoinen and Lemminkainen."

  Ilmar sighed and allowed the eagle to perch on his shoulder. “The rocks in my cave are shot with silver. Silver protects against Hiisi and his evil."

  “And that silver sword you are singing into being will destroy Hiisi?"

  Ilmar shook his head. “Not destroy. Protect, no more. This is the most I can do for Lemminkainen. If you are Lemminkainen, the sword is for you."

  * * * *

  It was time to leave the warmth of Ilmar's silver-safe cave. Silia's green eyes were wistful.

  “You are welcome to remain here, daughter,” Ilmar told her. His smile was clouded, as if he saw something in her eyes that worried him.

  “Of course she'll stay here!” Carl cried.

  “Of course I will come with you,” Silia said, gently but adamantly.

  It was their last meal with the smith. Black rounds of cakes, fresh venison, cranberries sweetened with honey.

  Carl appealed to Ilmar. “She must stay here until I return."

  The smith's face was a hollow mask. “Silia is like Kyllikki. Of her bent. She will remain if she wishes to remain; if forbidden to go with you, she will follow."

  Silia nodded, like a curtain closing.

  “'Where, exactly, are we going?” she demanded, while they donned cleaned garments and Carl sheathed the silver sword Ilmar had created out of the elements and his secret songs.

  Carl scowled and flung out angry words of protest; Silia just smiled faintly and put on her pack.

  “I will seek out Vainomoinen,” Carl said. “He was the greatest of all heroes and the wisest. Not so, Ilmar?"

  Ilmar's shaggy head nodded dourly. “You will not find Vainomoinen here in any world you know. Even the mind of a wizard cannot soar back among the living from Tuonela."

  “Across the dark water where the black swan mourns the death of heroes.” Carl closed his eyes in ponderous thought. “That's the legend. But what else is Tuonela? Some dark dimension outside of time and space? Is the intruder in the Rare Earth, Hiisi?"

  They looked at Ilmar, standing behind his forge with the flame shadows licking the caves in his cheeks, making his curling red beard redder, his eyes polished flint.

  “I am a worker of metals; I know naught of your Cities. But we Finns here at the top of the world live close to the things that are of nature. We understand the songs the trees and grasses sing, and the very ring of my hammer against a shaft of pure silver is its heartbeat, its shout of joy at being released from bondage within rock. We know these things; we are one with them. When we plant our rye we whisper to it ‘Grow tall and beautiful!’ And it does, because we are one. Vieras do not understand."

  “Some do,” Silia murmured. “I've read old books of the farmers who talked to their crops and were rewarded with lush harvests, who read the signs on the moon; of children who lived with animals and shared their emotions. Father believed implicitly that from the microcosm to the macrocosm there exists an affinity which most minds can't begin to accept. Our civilization rejects it wholesale; only primitives accept the Oneness of everything that exists in our world, from a grain of sand at the bottom of the ocean to the universe itself. And time-"

  “Time is an illusion,” Ilmar said. “To those Outside, Onetime is Alltime.” He scowled fiercely. “Hiisi and the Pahaliset are different. They are not made of the substances we are made of."

  “Anti-matter?” Carl wondered. “Something in reverse to our chemistry, with the rarest of the Rare Earths the only connecting link? They can't enter our dimension because—Ilmar said it—they aren't of our substance. But they did manage to poke in a Force that operates only through the molecular structure of the Lake Imari Rare Earth."

  “What do they want from us?"

  “To destroy,” Ilmar said, “They are pure evil."

  Carl shrugged. “Somehow I don't quite buy that. To us they are evil, sure. I still think they want something. I think the key to it is in the way the victims react when-"

  “You mean the unbearable terror, then ecstasy?"

  Carl nodded. “As if their souls were about to be transported to some dreamed-of Nirvana."

  The eagle fluttered noisily down from his perch, clawing a perch behind the bubbling cauldrons. Virokannas beat his mighty pens and screamed, “Hiisi! Hiisi!"

  “The bird is right,” Ilmar nodded grimly. “Tuonela is no paradise of flowers and singing birds. It is dark and wholly evil. Somehow Hiisi managed to trap Vainomoinen's soul and to carry it across the black lake in space and time; and greatest of wizards as Vaino is, singer of ‘the most powerful magic, he can never return.” His blue steel eyes dug deep holes in Carl's brain. “You are bold indeed, Lemminkainen, to attempt to do what Vainomoinen could not!"

  Carl fought off the icy shudder that meshed through him from head to foot. “Someone must stop what is happening to our world. I was elected to try."

  Ilmar turned to Silia and his eyes softened. “You, my daughter?"

  “She'll stay here!” Carl decreed.

  “But-"

  “Right here!” he gritted. “For once in your life do what you are told.” Carl picked up the snowshoes Kauppi had strung for him. “Wait here for me. I'll pick you up on my way back.” He managed a grin, over the thick in his throat when he met her eyes.

  Silia stood like carved ice. Virokannas, the eagle, flapped his wings over Carl and hissed a benediction. Ilmar's oaktough palm rested on his shoulder. “Your silver sword is the best magic which I have to give you. It was fash
ioned with love and muscle and songs, powerful runic songs. It will defeat anything human.” His face darkened. “Go, Lemminkainen. But whatever happens, do not let yourself be caught in Hiisi's net. Those who are carried over the dark lake are forever changed. Like metal wrenched from the earth and blasted by the forge's flames, you will be recast so that you can no longer live among men."

  * * *

  CHAPTER X

  ILMAR had no sledge, no dogs, no horses to offer Carl. Trudging the frozen wastes, with the northwind whipping the evermists into a blue-gray porridge, Carl comforted himself with the knowledge that Silia was safe, at least. Ilmar's warm cave was surrounded by silver ore, and it seemed that Hiisi's Force was stopped cold by the molecular structure of silver.

  Still, he frowned, he had expected her to put up more of a battle, at the last minute. Well, he shrugged, maybe some of the old-world, virtually legendary acceptance of male dominance had rubbed off on her.

  Time to make night camp, he set up his light, neat windbreak on the leeside of a jagged outcrop of rock. He heated his brick of vitaminized soup plus clean snow on the autostove and spooned it down, before insinuating his flagged body into the sleep bag.

  Wild demoniac shrilling stabbed his dreams.

  He lay there, stiff as dead, his blood congealing. The wild skirting noise came again; it swooped down out of the sky. Something clawed the tied-down flap of his minitent. Some wind demon sent by Hiisi?

  Carl managed to move his right hand muscles, then his arm. It sneaked down to where Ilmar's silver sword was sheathed, across him within the thermal sleep bag. His finger curled around the rune-carved hilt.

  The unearthly screaming hiss came again; claws beat at the tent flap. There was something vaguely familiar. “Who is it?"

  The thought enabled Carl to bolt up, unzipping himself as he did so. He yanked the sword free and reached it across the dark; with its tip he nipped open the two places where it was knotted. Limned against the muddied twilight of sky was a shadowy figure, like a woman wearing Lappish woolens. Above her flapped great wings.