The Saga of Lost Earths Read online

  Ilmar's eagle!

  Carl scrambled out of his tent with satanic curses quivering on his lips. The woman approached, smiling.

  “What in the hell are you doing here, Silia?” Carl ground his teeth and took a sword swipe at the hovering bird, out of mingled relief and rage.

  “Did you honestly believe that I would sit back there in that warm cave, knitting you socks and woolly tosselcaps?"

  Carl's heart hammered joy, but its admixture was alarm. The alarm bell was pure esp, a strong precog of danger for Silia. Close. Soon.

  “You've got to go back!"

  “How?"

  “The way you got here. That damned bird will show the way, like he trailed me here!"

  Silia pointed up at the dwindling speck, high in the mauve mist. “That damned bird is on his way back to Ilmar already."

  “Call him back!” Carl stormed.

  “You know I can't. Virokannas responds to Ilmar, nobody else. He was instructed to bring me to you, then come back at once.” Silia moved disturbingly close to Carl, so that he had to draw her to him. “You see, my hero, Lemminkainen, I happen to be in love with you. It's pretty deep. If you end up across the dark space-lake in Tuonela, changed—so will I. You had better face up to it, rakastaa."

  “Finnish ‘love’ sounds like crushing rocks."

  “That, too.” Silia nodded, rubbing her nose on his.

  Carl tried to push back the esp-alarm that clung like spider's webs to his mind; he tried by holding her fiercely to him, by admonishing, then by occupying himself with breakfast and pulling up stakes. He had slept some four hours; so had Silia, just out of his campsite. Four hours sleep ration, with six or seven hours of pushing on, were minimum adequate. Silia was all for pushing ahead.

  Carl decided not to tell Silia about his precog. The sword's point over his own head was a constant; Silia had decided and anchored her mind to the thought that whatever Hiisi and the Force represented, they must face them together.

  “Uncle left a letter for me, to be opened in case anything happened to him."

  “Why didn't you tell me before?"

  “I was saving it for a weapon to hold over your head. And speaking of weapons, here's something I worked out, taken from the hundreds of runic tapes Uncle and I have made over the years."

  Carl looked down at the gray oblong box that Silia revealed by unzipping the plastic case strapped around her shoulder. “A tape recorder."

  “With vibrations,” Silia told him. “It has recorded on this minitape over two hours of the most powerful runic incantations against evil we could find. And it's been rigged to repeat indefinitely."

  “Or until the power battery wears out,” Carl grunted.

  “How about credit where it's due?"

  Carl grinned. “First let's see if it keeps Hiisi away or not."

  When Silia was unable to hide her weariness well enough to persuade Carl that she wasn't beat, he sighted a likely if scanty wind-break on the tundra, and called a halt. He built a fire against the white wolves circling them on their trek, now voicing lonely ululations from time to time beyond the grayblue drifts. Or were they indeed creatures of Hiisi, like Kullervo, dedicated to his service?

  While they nibbled their frugal hardtack and sipped their soup, Silia read Carl the letter which Dr. Enoch had left in trusted hands for his niece. It was a hasty crabbed scrawl, but it pointed up what Carl already knew and added the scientist's remedial hints.

  “The Force is from outside our time and space, from outside anything we can humanly comprehend. I conceive of a great machine somewhere—alien beyond human thought—sending out tendrils like electrical impulses, with the Finnish Rare Earth as conductor. I believe that this present invasion was not the first. In the days of the Kalevalan heroes, actually before our present cycle of civilization began, the Force was thrust in on Earth and the ‘legendary’ heroes called the intruder Hiisi. Perhaps it occurred elsewhere. Who knows? Atlantis? Mu? Anyway, the Finnish heroes, with their songs and their preternatural beliefs, were able to push back the Force. Perhaps it was Vainomoinen, the Wizard, who sealed the rift between our space-time dimension and Hiisi's, with his own presence.

  “In any case all of the myths and songs are spawned out of cosmic truths. This is something Psych-Head will not admit. Nor will they admit that sonic vibration holds the key to everything. They refuse to believe these things, and belief is the strongest weapon we have!

  “Hiisi wants something from us. Perhaps something he and they need as desperately as a vampire needs blood to survive. That's what makes a vampire evil—the fact that it wants our blood. Perhaps discovering what Hiisi and the Pahaliset (to call them by the only name we know to call them) want will prove the answer, provide us with a weapon against the Force. The vibrations of patterned sonics keep back lurking evils out of nonspace; we know that. Perhaps it is the lack of belief in the efficacy of the runes that has enabled Hiisi to come back, after all these centuries.

  “My work is pitifully incomplete and inadequate, yet. Silia's child-like capacity for belief has helped. My mind is trained, perhaps overtrained, beyond belief in the incredible. Carl's 5h psych is even better, since it has within it all the cumulated beliefs of his ancestry. He showed this clearly when he actually saw Ilmatar, the rainbow goddess. So, Carl, believe. Believe in your gods and let them lead you to Hiisi. Find the machine that controls the Force. Destroy it, and close the rift. Believe as I cannot, and perhaps your believed-in gods will help you to find a way. And may Jumala protect you both!"

  It was after their third sleep that Carl saw the faces. They were nebulous shadows of pure color, color beyond the range of human knowledge, so he sensed. The shadows were like specks floating on his retina, yet when he lifted a mitten-edge and brushed them away, back they came, drifting against the perpetually dreary arch of sky.

  “What is it?” Silia asked once.

  “Nothing."

  “Please, Carl! I'm 3h, and it is strong in your direction. What is it?"

  “It's as if things were darting around us. Things in another dimension. Trying to get through. I know they're in my mind but they're there."

  Silia glanced fearfully around them. “I can't see anything but-"

  “They're pushing out their thoughts. That's it. They can't actually exist in our world. But they want to push their thoughts through. Still, to do that—” Carl broke off sharply.

  “They would have to make themselves felt in a way we could understand."

  “That's it, of course. They'd have to communicate on human terms. Fit themselves into a frame of reference which we can understand. So they used the Finnish legends! That was their gimmick!"

  Silia moved close to him; Carl felt a shiver and in his high esp-emp mind the girl said: I'm afraid. I would rather take the legends straight.

  They made camp at a woods’ edge; stunted pines they were, but the sight of their gnarled trunks and skimpy boughs shaking in the growling wind gave Carl a warm inner patch of happiness. No wonder the Lapps emped so closely with all living things, animal and vegetable. They were so few and far between up here.

  Silia felt it, too. Carl smiled at the way she hugged against a rough wind-bent trunk as she completed her night task of putting the runic tape into repetitive action.

  “Ouch!” she cried. “Dam! Caught my fingernail!"

  Carl squatted and took hold of her unmittened hand. He kissed it. “Better?"

  “Much.” She blew him a kiss and crawled into her own wind shelter attached to her sleep bag. “I can't keep my eyes open, I'm so exhausted. It's like when the old Louhi of Pohyola and all her guests had their eyelids pinned down by Vainomoinen's sleep-needles and..."

  Carl grinned. In the middle of her thoughts about the wizard and his magic, Utaino, dispenser of dreams, had cut her off. She lay like a child, fast asleep, the tape player clutched in her mittened hands, whispering its incantations against evil.

  In his own woolly cocoon some yards away, Carl put his hand
s behind his head and looked up between the dark pine needle clusters; he fancied he could see stars glinting faintly, when the gray tatters scattered in the wind. Yes, there it was—Otava. Carl's mind traced out the constellation of the Great Bear. Special to the Finns in some strange haunting way. Memory of a memory.

  Carl stared up at it; it was as if something tugged at some part of him, the part of him that belonged to Otava and to Ilmatar.

  The Great Bear and all the stars seemed to rush down on him suddenly. He saw. He relived.

  “Perkele!” raw-boned Ilmarinen blustered, tramping the log floor and spitting sparks of rage in every direction. “I built the old hag her Sampo, I accomplished all the heroic feats she flung into my teeth, to gain her daughter's hand. And now, here in our own country we starve, while Old Louhi's magic Sampo grinds out corn and barley and all she tells it to!” He dragged out his broadsword and chopped a threelegged stool into flying pieces.

  Gray-bearded Vainomoinen hid a laugh under his voluminous scarlet sleeve.

  “And where is your beautiful bride? How is it that you return alone, friend Ilmarinen? I set up this project for you, knowing that only the wondersmith could create the Sampo. Even I, with wizard's songs capable of conjuring storms that tear the stars out of their sockets-"

  “Don't brag, old one!” the smith grunted, flinging himself down on one end of the long plank table so roughly that the beer mugs danced and slopped over. “Why didn't you give the task to Lemminkainen, here? He is the youngest and his golden hair delights the maidens so that he counts his conquests by the hundreds. Perhaps he could have handled the vixen!"

  “What happened?” Carl heard himself demand, with a low chuckle. “You had the maiden safely in your sledge. The vows and feastings were over. Nothing remained but for you and the Daughter of Pohyola to return to your house and-"

  “She wept and cajoled, repenting her bargain! I was too old for her; she was only a child, she said. I, Ilmarinen, whose arms are bands of pure steel! Too old!"

  “You were drunk,” Vainomoinen placated. “Perhaps that was the trouble."

  “Yo.” The smith's brass-red shag of beard and hair whipped in a shrug of self-contempt. “That was part of it. Weary of persuasions, I fell asleep. And the girl ran off and cuckolded me!"

  His two friends shouted their disbelief.

  “To be cuckolded on a man's wedding night,” the Wizard clucked. “That is the ultimate disgrace!"

  “What did you do? Beat her?"

  Ilmarinen pulled down a great flagon of dark beer before he could answer. It was plain that his mind was a torment of mingled anger, shame, and dismay.

  “I ... I could have killed them with these two hands!” he grated, staring down at his snaky callused fingers. “But no. That was too easy for her. I was determined to sing the vixen into something suitable to her evil nature. I should have realized—spawn of such a mother as Old Louhi!"

  “Well?"

  “I took her down to the cliff where the cold sea pounds against the crags. Here I sang her into a bird, a seamew."

  “Mere was a deep hush over the great raftered hall, outside the storm pushed snow against the door; a wolf howled hungrily on the highland.

  Carl could hear the unfortunate Daughter of Pohyola screaming, like a lost soul.

  His mind seemed to splinter into pieces.

  He flung out of his sleep tent and ran to Silia's. While he had been dreaming of old friends and old lives Hiisi had been busy! Silia, moving in restless sleep, had knocked the tapemachine over, so that it jammed to a stop. Now it lay there in front of him on the empty sleep bag, crushed as if by a heavy careless boot.

  Silia had vanished.

  * * *

  PART THREE

  OF LEMMINKAINEN

  “O my mother who hast home me,

  Bring me here my war-shirt quickly,

  Bring me, too, my mail for combat,

  For my inclination leads me

  Hence to drink the beer of battle."

  Kalevala: Runo XXVIII

  * * *

  CHAPTER XI

  WHEN THE grief-mists cleared away, Lemminkainen put his hand to his silver swordhilt, turning his grim face resolutely toward the fog-blurred north horizon. That way was Pohyola. Who but the wily crone herself would have engineered such a strangeness. While he, hero Lemminkainen, lay sleeping and dreaming preposterous longwinded dreams of fantastic Cities and wall-machines that blinked lights, and streets that moved in colored bands, then had the Mistress of Pohyola torn his beloved away! Some eldritch wizardry had dazzled him down the labyrinths of Utamo's chambers of sleep.

  They had taken Kyllikki.

  “I will find you!” he shouted into the wind. “Whether in the realms of Iku-Turso, in the form of a green-eyed pike under the ocean or in the foul land off the world's edge, called Pohyola. I will find you! Even to Tuonela, the Land of Black Shadows beyond the endless black sea."

  He cried out lavish prayers to Ilmatar, spinning out new planets and suns on her golden shuttle. But Ilmatar, Creatrix of the Universe, was busy weaving new worlds.

  Some small voice urged him to fumble his hands among the strange artifacts he saw about him in the camp where he woke from his long sleep. Mostly he touched nonsense things which he rung away with contempt, then, deep inside one of the packs he discovered a round silvery tube. He squinted down at it clutched in his mittened fist.

  Poking at it awkwardly, he pressed his thumb against a small stud on its shiny surface. When he did this a circle of light sprayed across the wood.

  Lemminkainen grunted satisfaction as he slipped it in his tunic, and hefted the pack to his broad back. “It will serve well in the dark land of Pohyola."

  Shreds of memory guided him to the banks of a wide lake where a few birches and cattails braved the blasting chill. He peered sharply across the dark, wind-chopped water. The far shore was shrouded in purple-black gloom, but Lemminkainen's animal-keen sense of orientation said to him that here was the land he sought.

  “I must build a boat,” he told the otters playing and scooting across the icy lake's edge.

  He flung off his pack and went to work. The old skills moved his sinewy muscles at familiar tasks; with his sharp pukko and the odd hatchet-like tool he discovered in his pack Lemminkainen had his boat well begun. While he worked he sang. His words told the boat what it must be: strong, light, swift. The ancient thought-magic would weave itself into his craft and make it so.

  A night and a day Lemminkainen worked, while far on the horizon the sun kept its summer vigil.

  He scorned the firemaking sticks in the pack; whether it was the flint and dry shavings and leaves or something he had learned from Vainomoinen about pushing his mind into the kindling, the tuhi sprouted into merry flames. In the cookpan he heated up pine pitch to seal up the cracks of his boat.

  Only then did he allow himself a meal of lake perch he sang into his improvised net, and stretched his long body out for an exhausted sleep.

  The sail he hoisted, made from the small tent, caught the north wind. Frowning over the hand rudder, with the dark water chopping nervously around him, Lemminkainen lifted his handsome face skyward. The song he sang, like the others, gushed up from some deep Time well inside his brain:

  “Wind, O Etelatar, thou southwind!

  Wind of summer drive my vessel,

  Onward drive my boat of birchwood,

  Forward to the misty island,

  Louhi's nameless promontory!"

  Subtly the wind changed. The northwind vied with Etelatar in taking possession of the canvas sail; the boat skittered like a crab atop the blue-black surface, while little eddies flung spray to the hero's face. Lemminkainen's wide mouth showed his teeth in a grin when he heard Etelatar's musical laughter echo across the white-capped water. Her lips seemed to caress his brown cheek as she whispered:

  “Who can fail to hear young Kauko?

  Thou, most beautiful of heroes?"

  Still it was a constant st
ruggle to keep the frail bark from capsizing when the growling bully from the North slapped the canvas back and scudded Lemminkainen first to westward, then east. Lemminkainen twisted the rudder, alternately singing and swearing. So it went, across the sun's watery path.

  Now, finally, the great wild crags whereupon Old Louhi, Witch Mistress of Pohyola, kept her lookout with the great thunderhorn to warn of any attempt at invasion into her realm beyond the world's end. The dark cliffs stood like the walls of a high castle, brooding, timeless, and strange, among the elements.

  Lemminkainen shaded his eyes, then sent the boat sidling toward a dark crevasse where the cliffline was broken. He shouted and stood up, splashing icy water into the boat, as he drew near the sand strewn cove that spilled out from the break in the rock. Beyond the sand, on a mossy ledge, were three maidens, maidens unbelievably beautiful, laughing and dancing.

  Lemminkainen's blood pounded his temples to see them. He called out:

  “Is there room upon this island,

  On the surface of Pohyola,

  Where my boat may moor upon it?"

  The maidens laughed and sang back:

  “There is room upon this island,

  Space where you may sing your ballads,

  And intone your splendid verses,

  Join us in our summer revels!"

  Lover Lemminkainen needed no second invitation. Quickly he maneuvered his birch boat onto the white sand, where otters played and curlews mourned. He jumped from the boat, grinning. Boastfully, while he swaggered toward the mossy cliff shelf, he sang:

  “Know thou three enchanting maidens,

  I am hero Lemminkainen,

  Swordsman rash, and eager lover,

  One thousand damsels have I taken!

  One thousand heroes have I conquered!"

  So saying, he rushed with pounding blood, to embrace the dancers. The revels of Midsummer were more wild and pagan than anywhere in this unholy island, floating through the mists of unnatural time and space.