The Stolen Sun Read online

  Lemminkainen leaped to his feet, crashing his fist against the table. "Perkele! If that is so, then we are lostl For no man can change the pattern which the Creatrix of the Universe has woven!"

  The wizard stroked his long beard carefully. "I am not so sure. You are Ilmatar's beautiful Golden Apple. She would not easily see you destroyed, nor could she lightly be tricked by the Hag of the Rock."

  Wayne's mind floundered for other answers. Could it be that Louhi had at her disposal forces and sciences unknown to the far-flung Terran Empire, as yet? Was it that he—Wayne Panu of the Destroyer Fleet—possessed some spark of scorned Ussi knowledge that could thwart the witch before Terra became a frozen lifeless ball? Was that why Wainomoinen of the Copper Boat had guided him here? Whatever, he told himself, he would move whichever part of heaven and Earth it was in his power to move, to save the Vanhat and the planet. He would risk any danger, give his life gladly. This he vowed, and he would tell the three heroes this, not in words, but in his every action from this moment on.

  "How—how long—?" he struggled out thickly.

  "We don^t know. This is the time of all-dark, but this year there will be no Spring thaw, no green buds to peep out of the black soil, no fish leaping in the mountain streams, Tapiola's birds will not sing. There will be no Midsummer's all-sun festival of singing and dancing. Ei. Only the storms and the ice creeping down from the top of the world and the bottom of the world until the two ice floes crash. By this time everything on our small green world will be dead. All of its waking dreams, its struggles out of the sea and into the forests, will have been for naught. The shaggy ones to the south of our Northland may burrow themselves in their caves deep as they can, but Louhi's cold will find them and slay them. Soon, all too soon, this world and all of our sun's worlds will be only cold blue ice stones flinging themselves around a sun whose power to give life has been stripped away by star-demon's sorcery!"

  Wayne roved his chilled mind back to his boyish vid-lessons of Terra. Yes! He saw it all again; he felt the clutching terror that those spurious pictures, dramatically contrived to tug an offworlder boy's heart. First the bubbling masses. Then the creatures moving within the depths of the warm oceans. Then the shambling, stalking lizards, Tyrannus Rex with his slavering razor-tooth jaws. Then the cold. The creeping cold. Just as Wainomoinen said. The great glaciers moving relentlessly down toward the equator. The monsters were shaggy mamoths now, and soon they, too, would vanish with the rest.

  The Ages of Ice! Unexplained. Mysterious. A whimpering exodus into eternity…

  Louhi! Louhi of Pohyola!

  "But-"

  "Yes, son?"

  "It didn't happen!" he cried fiercely. "It didn't!"

  "No? Tell this to the starving villagers. Go outside and cry out into the sky that the light is still there, that the dark is not upon us!"

  Wayne flushed, winced. "Don't you see? Don't any of you understand? I'm here—from far in the future! Terrcfs future! Our world didn't die. It survived. It went on and on—greater and greater—until it splashed far out into the stars!"

  The heroes exchanged glances. Wayne saw that they needed convincing and lots of it. He painted a lively picture of an Earth beyond their imagining; of the hundreds of Levels, of the Deep Fleet, of the thousand star colonies wrested by force and All-Kill, of the technical supremacy that made Terra top-dog in all the galaxy, until the Mephi-ti___

  It was the copper-beard, Ilmarinen, who silenced him with a wrathful bear-growl. "Enough! We will hear no more of this Hüsi's blasphemy. I for one do not believe a word of it."

  "Nor I," agreed Lemminkainen. "Louhi could take lessons from such a world."

  Wayne groaned and gave up. They refused to understand. They were stupid primitives, for all their giant's muscles and heroic posturings. He turned to find Wainomoi-nen's blue eyes studying him sharply.

  "Ei. It is you who does not understand, son's son. Your mind has known so much of machinery that it is a machine itself, incapable of admitting what does not click into each proper slot." He silenced Wayne's bursting protest with an uplifted hand and a furrowed scowl. "I know that you are pained by what you are forced to do in your world. But has it occurred to you that this is because you are young? You will come around to the general mode of thought, presently. You will." He nodded and sighed.

  "Nol"

  "Yes." There was sudden sadness in the kingly planes, replaced as quickly by a thoughtful frown. "Perhaps, after all, that is why Ukko sent you to help us!"

  "How could such a frightful regimen of kill-training help?" Ilmarinen asked.

  "Because that is what the Witch of Pohyola understands. Her rovings in the loom of time, her dealings with strange creatures beyond space, have put her out of our reach."

  Wayne nodded, gratified. "With Ilmarinen's help I can make the Vanhat some terrible weapons which—"

  "No," Wainomoinen said. "Ussi artifacts are useless against such evil as Louhi's. No. It isn't with his destructive machines that young Waino will help us. It is rather—" He broke off brusquely, touching his forehead then his heart in an odd gesture.

  Wayne read the gesture and felt a chill of self-contempt skitter along his spine. When Lemminkainen and Ilmarinen both turned cool stony looks on him he knew that they understood his part in the witch-battle, too. Not blasters. Not gaseous clouds of all-kill. No. Rather, the cynical cunning of the prowler through trackless space, the predator, the world-killer. Wayne had come among them to fight fire with fire, evil with evil. He must circumvent Louhi the Witch-Hag the way these three heroes could not, with the corruption in his mind…

  Wayne fell into the village life, damped as it was under a sunless sky, as a hand slips into a well-worn glove. In spite of his alleged super-sophistication, he felt that he belonged. He welcomed the scant meals, the foraging, the burrowing through icy drifts to distribute provisions and do what could be done for the sick, the endless numbing cold— like a flagellant welcomes the knotted whip. Wainomoinen's patient teachings of wizardry that might save him in a crisis, Lemminkainen's trips with him into the nearby forest for food and fuel, Ilmarinen's instructions in supernal smith-ery, all of this made him forget his gnawing belly and, for a time, the doom that had overtaken the planet.

  "I still don't understand," he told his chief mentor, on one of their rounds to parcel out meager amounts of grain and smoked fish. "How can it happen?" he demanded. "It didn't happen! The Earth did not die!"

  "Did it not?" Wainomoinen countered wryly. "Is it that you have seen the whole of Ilmatar's weaving? Is it that the pattern cannot be changed—or that there is only one pattern, after all? Not an infinite number, at the Creatrix's mood and whim?"

  Wayne gaped. "Many patterns! Worlds of if!"

  "Nün." Wainomoinen stopped to caress an emaciated child with eyes like saucers and a middle puffed by hunger. "And if it did not happen in our pattern here, did not someone with hero's blood prevent it? Things do not just "happen* nor do they 'not happen,' son's son. The causes and effects, the near-misses, all of this is a subtle part of Ilmatar's weaving."

  The stores in the Greathouse granery and in the smokehouse diminished along with hope itself. Occasionally the young men's numbing patience, ice-fishing on the lake's middle, where holes could be hacked out still, would be rewarded with a powan or a salmon; once a brace of Tapiola hunters came whooping triumphantly into the Greathouse to announce a bear kill. The hibernating animal had been discovered quite by happy accident, half-frozen already and, in any case, destined to sleep forever. But one winter-thinned bruin did not go far among two hundred. Tapio's forest was dying. The reindeer herds had long since been slaughtered because there was no hay left and the hanks of dried meat dwindled on the wooden pegs attached to each rafter.

  The men became gaunt-eyed ghosts, halving their own rations so that the sick and the young would survive; ghosts, floundering the deep snows for trace of game. One day, checking his line of copper snares on a frowning ridge above the wide lake, Wayne int
errupted a muffled figure kneeling down at one of his all but invisible circles. The figure was crying out in moaning ecstasy, while loosening the noose from the neck of a skinny white rabbit.

  "Hey!" Wayne yelled.

  The furred figure jerked, startled. Then, cramming the beast in its parka, it rose up with a leap and ran. Wayne yelled out and galloped after. He was furious. Share and share alike was the law; every shred of food was to be brought first to Wainomoinen at the Greathouse. Even the grubs children sought like bear cubs in rotted logs.

  He caught up where the valley's floor met the rise, where a thinness of drift crust broke the flying figure's pace. Wayne hurtled himself, belly-flop, down the iced drop, at a tangent that carried him onto the dark flounderer. They clashed in a crust-smashing roll. With an animal's grunt, Wayne brought the halt with him on top. The lack of fight when he spreadeagled the trapline thief surprised him a little, but not much. There wasn't much fight left in any of the villagers by this time. As a top manship pilot, Wayne had always eaten well and his farmboy stamina was still there in spite of the hunger-pains.

  "Hey!" Something odd about the figure when it sobbed and made a feeble try at loosing the grip on its wrists. About the sound of that sob and the resentment of the torso-to-torso propiquity. Wayne let go a wrist and flipped back the parka hood.

  Eternal dark had about given him cat's eyes by now, and what he saw made him swear a choice oath. A pale triangle of scared face set with enormous gray eyes, surrounded by a sunburst of brown hair tinged with auburn fire."

  "Perkele! A vixen!"

  "Let me go, coward!" When he didn't, she spit full in his face.

  Wayne slapped her down, frowning. "You aren't from the village. I've cased all the girls, much good it had done me. You're the metsa creature! The one they call Varjo the Witch!"

  "Just because we live in the forest," she said bitterly.

  "We?"

  "My grandmother's blind." This explained something.

  "So?"

  She writhed again, fiercely. Beard!"

  "Get off me, you—you No-

  Wayne grinned and kissed her red lips. "Not just yet. I kind of like it here. It's been a hell of a long time."

  When he shifted his long legs between hers, the girl burst into a passion of sobs. Startled, Wayne lifted slightly.

  Slightly was enough. Varjo arched forward with her full lithe strength; her teeth sank into his bare wrist so hard they almost met. Wayne gave a bleating yell of surprised agony. He jerked to his knees, blinking at the dark smear of his blood on the girl's mouth before she dragged herself free. He stared down at the spurting blood guttering the dark snow. He couldn't afford to lose much, damn it! What with the scarcity of red meat. Damn her! He vised his right grip above the wounded wrist for a stauncher, lifting shakily up on his feet.

  "Hüsi vampire!" He snarled after her, as the village night-robber they called Shadow melted into the pines.

  It would be a smart move to get back to the village, have the bite treated. Human bites were well-known to be as virulent as any dog's, and who said Varjo was human, anyway? Wainomoinen or fat Elmi would know the herbs to use for coagulating and preventing infection. But hell. He was mad. Too damn made to do what was sensible. He'd follow the vixen's trail before Itsu, the wind-demon, covered it up forever.

  Moving into the black lumped shadows of Tapiola, its vegetation iced into immobile phantoms, he used his pukko to nub off branches of scrub; his face-scarf and these twigs served to fashion of tourniquet of sorts. It was too dark to actually see Varjo's snowprints among the tall hoary ghost trees, but a stubborn fury driving him, and a release of esper-power, kept him moving. He switched aside low branches, endured their indignant backlash; he nosed the drifts like a wolf on a spoor; all the while he cursed Varjo with every variation of space-oath he could remember, inventing a few of his own.

  Now there were occasional whiffs of wind-flung wood-smoke to tantalize him deeper into the forest where, the villagers and even Wainomoinen had warned him, one did not venture. He began to notice now how the terrain dropped stealthily, how the tall evergreens turned into gaunt skeletal bracken, then how the snow itself thinned and finally disappeared altogether.

  When he reached the Hollow itself, he stopped, his fast-paced pant gurgling off into a gasp of unbelief. He stared. The Hollow below him was a snowless, treeless, verdureless bowl—a deep cup gouged out of the Earth, as if an island had at one time lifted off here and taken unholy wings. From the lip on which he stood, for all the wide circular circumference of Loviatar's Hollow, was nothing but pall black ash, the abominable lees of a patch of the planet that had died. This nether place of Pohyola, the inimical flown Time Island, did not even possess the wicked vitality of the befogged witch-farm. In destroying Loviatar, the hideous blind plague-bringer, Wainomoinen had killed her home base, too. Killed it beyond recovery.

  Yet-look!

  Here and there, thrusting through the soot-black, were unnatural heads, inverted cone-shape heads of leprous fungi. The toadstools were taller toward the heart of the Hollow, their tilted heads purpler, and here they glowed with an eerie transfulgence like devil's foxfire.

  And here was Loviatar's hut. It squatted like some gray animal that lurks in seeming humble innocuity, yet broods, waiting until its victim is totally off guard before pouncing…

  The smoke rising from the hut's chimney went straight up. Straight as a gray thread. There was no wind. Not a whisper of sound. Not one animal nor one bird sought this snowless sanctuary.

  Wayne pinched his eyes downward, hesitating. This, then, was what the villagers still feared. Loviatar's Hollow. They feared the residue of the plague-bringer; the very air she had breathed was polluted by her evil. No. The evil Louhi had planted here wasn't dead. Not quite. Some drainage of human soul was feeding it, nursing it back to full strength. The lambent fungus was the sign.

  And Loviatafs hut was tenanted again.

  The numbness in his upheld hand, the throbbing in his arm, and a kind of stubborn compulsion, pulled him in a stumbling rush, down to the hut.

  "Varjo! Let me in, witch!"

  When, finally, the door cracked open, Wayne rammed a boot in so that she could not close it again. A heavy jolt of shoulder and he was in.

  One fast look took in the lot. One miserable room, immaculate, like the village huts, and with the usual open hearth fire, cooking pot athwart; a mean pine table set with cracked earthen dishes and a thick tallow candle to soot up the low ceiling and cast shadows along the stark bare walls to the bunk bed in one comer and a pine-needle pallet in another.

  He turned to Varjo.

  Without the furs she was sapling slim, child-young in one simple garment like a limp bleached rag. Her feet were bare. Her triangular face, with those enormous deep gray eyes, showed defiant fear. Desperation, too. The way her little calloused hands curled into fists as she faced him suggested a wild forest thing who had been fed on curses and crusts all of its days.

  Wayne gave a gesture indicating peace, so that she would relax and not breathe so hard. He smiled wryly. If Varjo was a witch, then the witch business wasn't what it used to be.

  "I'm not going to kill you, you little thief," he told her. He held up his left arm. "Look what you did!"

  "Nün! Serves you well, No-Beard!" she flared.

  From a slip of a girl "No-Beard" was an insult. It im-pugned his manhood. The Vanhat, like the ancient Chinese, deferred to age, not hothead youth. Years brought wisdom and experience and large reindeer herds; "no-beards" were unsure scatterwits. Wayne had attempted to fall in with the beard fetish but it itched him and bothered him, so, in spite of the howls of the elder heroes, each morning he scraped his face clean with his pukko.

  He countered her implication with a wide grin. "You know better, witch. One moment more in that snowbank and—"

  Her scarlet face stopped him. "Ai!" she clucked, lifting his limp tourniqueted arm. "How deep!"

  "Had I known you were that hungry I'd
have given you the measly rabbit." His glance roved to the hearth, where hung the emaciated white life-fragment, dripping its last blood into the cooking pot.

  "Sit," Varjo said.

  She whisked about the pitiful mishmash of belongings, selecting an undergarment from a box of neatly folded rags for a bandage and a sung. First an herb poultice that stung like fire and set Wayne to coughing with its gaseous pungency. The wand-lithe warmth of her nearness made his heart hammer. Varjo, in spite of her firm breasts and womanly thighs, couldn't possibly be more than sixteen, yet her teaching was of the forest; she had seen the animals mate and give birth. She was a child of nature, her life one of self-denial and dedication to her ancient grandmother; her wiliness was a fox's; cunning and craft were concommitants of life itself.

  Her lank chestnut hair showed auburn glints in the firelight and fell gracefully about her bare neck and throbbing throat. The three-comered pixie's face with the dimpled chin and those incredibly large liquid gray eyes—like a field mouse—began to get to Wayne. Here was a girl who had had nothing, or next to it, all of her life. Who expected nothing. Blows, perhaps, Or a fire of faggots. Who nibbled at the grainhouse stores like a mouse, stealing only what she and her grandmother needed to survive, then fleeing into the night like a shadow.

  Wayne watched her intent face as she dressed his arm, the deft movements of her strong hands; he saw no witch. Others might. Not he. It was impossible that this mouse-eyed creature of the woods could be evil. She had defended herself from chastisement or-and rape the best way she could. He couldn't very well blame her for that!

  A weird moan from the pine bunk startled him out of his reverie.

  Varjo moved across the room anxiously. She bent down and stroked the amorphous lump under the dark homespun blanket. She crooned to it softly. Then, unmindful of Wayne now, she took a bowl from the table and filled it with broth from the steaming fire pot. She knelt by the bed with it.