The Stolen Sun Page 7

  "Your grandmother?" he asked.

  She nodded, eyes shining with tears. "I thought she might already be…" She let the fearful word wisp away.

  Wayne moved his chair closer, and watched Varjo spoon the thin gruel into a toothless inbent gap of mouth like a dark funnel. Rheumy eyes stared blankly up from a face so wrinkled and black that it looked like a monkey's face. Wayne repressed a shudder. This woman, besides being blind, could never have been even tolerable. She belonged deep in a forest. He thought about blind Loviatar…

  While she fed the old crone Varjo crooned to her as a mother sings nonsense to a baby, now and then pausing to stroke her limp mottled hands.

  "Since she can't see, or move any more, she likes me to talk and sing to her. I make up words."

  Good thing some snooping beldam from the village had not caught her performances, Wayne thought. The gibberish smacked of heathen incantation. "Tell me about you two," he said.

  Varjo poised spoon and sighed. "There isn't much to tell. We came from Ulappala ten or eleven summers ago—"

  "That's where Loviatar came from," Wayne mused. "What's it like up there?"

  "Wild," Varjo said. "Wild and beautiful. It is north and east of Imari, near to the land of the Norseman. Ulappala is on a fjord, with rugged cliffs on either side and the wind blows always and the sea smashes on the gray rocks. The ground yields a scant harvest and grazing for the herds is scant, too. Ai, Ulappala is a grim cold land but my first small memories of it are warm ones." She ended on a wistful note.

  "What about LoviatarF

  Varjo avoided his eyes. "I was very young. But I lived in the middle of the horror. I saw my mother and father die of the pestilence she brought. Mummu had the fever, too. It marked her. It made her ugly, and blinded her. That was one of Loviatar's pleasures: to make ugly, like herself, then die.

  "But Mummu didn't. She recovered; she fled with me down to the Lakes. I was her eyes. I was stupid and childish, but I learned fast because I had to. Every village we tried chased us away or tried to stone us. It was the fear. Loviatar had traveled from village to village, too, begging. Their fear of another brought them to the point of insanity. Especially when they saw Mummu's pocked face and staring eyes. One place they cast us in the lake to drown, but somehow we didn't. That frightened the villagers into a panic. As you know"—her voice dropped to a naive whisper— "water will not accept a true witch."

  Wayne swore. He rebelled fiercely at all this talk of curses and supernatural powers, this in spite of' the thousand-times-weirder quirks that alien evolution took in the deeps of space, in spite of Wainomoinen's grim lessons about Louhi and her brood. What he was seeing in graphic montages was a four year old girl leading her blind Mummu across the chill rocky tundras, through cattail fens and dark forests, seeking sanctuary. Being kicked out bodily, threatened with the fire, living lives of unrelieved terror. It would turn anybody into a creature of virulent hate for his kind.

  "Didn't you try Wainomoinen's village? Imari?" Surely the sorcerer himself, full of Otavan wisdom…

  Varjo nodded slowly. "Wainomoinen was gone. It was the time when he had journeyed in secret to seek out Loviatar and destroy her. She knew he had the power and she kept moving from fen to marsh, from cave to thicket. When he returned, it was barely in time to save Mummu and me from the flames. The faggots were already lighted, but Ukko sent a summer hail like great rocks of ice. Wainomoinen said it was a sign…"

  "Still they wouldn't take you in?"

  "No. Wainomoinen told us to stay until Lemminkainen could bring us back to Ulapalla. But Mummu was afraid and I, moreso. In the night we fled. Lost in this forest, we found the hut. Mummu was sick from the fire-terror. This was shelter, at least, and nobody would come near us. So this hut has kept us alive all these years, and the forest has fed us and clothed us."

  With your little night raids into the village for extras, Wayne added silently. He said, in a land of growl, "It was your grandmother they feared. If you had gone in alone, first, then gradually—"

  "Leave Mummu!" Her mouse eyes leaped. "How could I? She saved my life! They would wonder at seeing a child-"

  "Sure, sure. They'd ask questions and you'd have to answer. Vanhat children are respectful." He cracked a fist against the wall angrily and began to prowl the room, hearth to door and back. "These tilings are hard for me to swallow. Stonings! Drownings! What kind of people are youF'

  "Is it that where you come from they are all so wise and—"

  "Hell no!" He grimaced.

  When Varjo brought the spoon close to the lipless gap once more; the gap clamped shut, resisting her feeding. Varjo let the bald monkey's head fall gently onto the pine-needle pillow. It seemed to Wayne that the twisted jaws had set forever, while the eyes took on a new film of emptiness.

  Varjo saw it, too. She bent down to kiss the shrunken face, sobbed one bird-cry of heartbreak, then straightened to face him with those lustrous huge eyes of hers.

  "Perhaps you, too, will known the depth of true fear, Outlander. When you hear the Mistress of Pohyola cackling on the rocky headland and feel her talons ripping out your soul."

  VII

  Mummu died so quickly, so silently, it was as if somehow she had only been waiting for Varjo to find one friend among a world of enemies; now she could let go. Varjo wept without sound when they buried her; not in the Hollow itself, but at the rim, where the earth was flint-hard digging but honest dirt.

  Varjo picked up her small bundle of clothes and, when she hesitated at following him into the dark forest, Wayne put his good arm around her, tight and insistent. The villagers would accept Varjo now. Damned if they wouldn't! They had feared her Mummu because she was blind and ugly, like Loviatar herself. But all that was passed now, and who could fear this fragile mouse-eyed woods waif?

  The Imari dogs met them on the snowtraiL baying and yelping. Wan lamplight flickered from the oiled skin windows of the huts. The dogs sniffed Varjo and found her toista; when a couple of them tried furtive nips they got a taste of Wayne's hard boot instead.

  "Hüsi lapset!" he stormed at them. "You're next in the stewpot, don't worry!"

  Varjo's ask-nothing defenselessness had won him completely.

  Wainomoinen's worried scowl for Wayne's safety vanished when he saw who was with him. His face became a stone.

  "Perkele!" Lemminkainen dropped his snowshoes out of astonishment and Ilmarinen's mouth gaped within that bronze bush.

  "What is this you have caught in your snares?" the wizard greeted them, with an air of lightness that rang false.

  "Perhaps Waino would allow me to relieve him of such a burden," Lemminkainen grinned and bowed low.

  "Off to your task!" Wainomoinen told them. "You and Umar have a long day's trek, and many more, ahead of you. There is no time for wenching, nor energy to spare."

  Reluctantly, glancing back again and again, Lemminkainen followed Ilmarinen's lead into the dark. They were, Wayne knew, to cover the halfmoon fringe of villages sprawled along the northern edge of the great Lake, to help the other communes where and when they could. For, in spite of the constant wailing of the children for bread and the imminent threat of cannibalism when sanity would begin to blur, Imari itself fared better than most of the communal farm and fishing communities. Thanks to Ukko and to Wainomoinen's sagacity.

  The wizard studied Varjo casually but keenly while the two were fed.

  "So this is the Shadow that robs our traps and nibbles at our barley bags."

  Varjo seemed to shrink every time those blade-like eyes sought hers. Wayne patted her arm and gestured her to make the most of their allotted rations.

  "How are you so sure it was she every time?" Wayne asked "Might some enterprising villager not take advantage of these tales of the 'Shadow'?"

  "That's Ussi talk!" Wainomoinen bellowed severly. "We Vanhat are not like that and well you know it."

  "Forgive me, Father. I spoke out of pique." He glanced at Vaijo's humbled head, and frowned. "Why must we
all pick on the child? Call her 'witch'? Despise her?"

  Wainomoinen sighed deep. "We do not expect you to understand these things. You have not seen."

  Wayne shrugged and pushed away his plate. "I don't want to see people cast into water or burned. If the water or the fire accepts them, they're innocent. They are not witches. Great!"

  The wizard smiled for the first time. "Tell me, Varjo," he asked gently. "You do not take salt?"

  "When she has something to sprinkle it on she does," Wayne snorted.

  "Kulla." Wainomoinen remained patient. "Now perhaps you will tell me…"

  "Gladly," Wayne said.

  He went into a rapid-fire recital of how he followed Varjo to the Hollow, of the story she had told him, of her fanatical devotion to her Mummu, leaving nothing out. Elaborating on the suffering and deprivation, as Varjo had not, conscious of the fact that he was coloring the pathos, doing it deliberately, anxious to win Wainomoinen over. Wayne was all too aware of how deep-sunk were the fearful super-stitions of the Vanhat, and Wainominen, by his very position as Elder Wizard among them, was no exception.

  "Was I expected to leave her there to starve, alone?" he demanded.

  The face of brown crags and noble planes seemed to pale with a prodigious weariness. "I will try to put wisdom into your head, young Waino, son's son. You think us ignorant primitives, next to savages, because we cast our seines in Ahto's waters for fish and beg from Tapio and his Mielikld the hunter's boon; because we dig our hands into the rich soil of the world we have grown to love as if it were Otava itself—for these things and others of our simple lives, you term us ignorant and what you call superstitious."

  When Wayne opened his mouth to protest, the Wizard interrupted. "No! I see it in your thoughts as in a clean mountain pool. Remember what I told you of Otava, of the Valmis. Our less advanced branch of the Otavat chose to remain simple—we chose to ignore the potential for creating machines and cruel mindless cities. Simplicity is our blessing and we cherish it. The clean fields of stars are the same as the round drops of water rushing down Kaatrakoski's cliff-side. All is all, beginning and ending with the smallest flecks of Creation. Jumala and Ukko are infinitely small as they are infinitely large. It is the same thing. All is part of Ilmatar's weaving."

  "You told me about Otava and the Valmis," Wayne said, a little abrupt in his anxiety for Varjo. "What has all this to do with the girl?"

  "It has to do with Louhi. Louhi is a perversion in the tapestry, an evil thread. All that lives with Louhi and surrenders to her will, through weakness or ignorance or whatever, partakes of that evil."

  "They tried to burn Varjo and Mummu, right here in Imaril" Wayne's voice blazed with indignation.

  "Had you seen the seven horrors, your sword of wrath would be two-edged. Many children died in agaony. Many Mummus. Every household felt the dark hand of death." His fierce eyes took on a supernal glaze. Wayne caught half of his inward mutter, more by esp than by ear, before the wizard remembered he was there and cut it off. "I should have done it long ago. 1 should have—"

  "Should have what?"

  "Never mind." Wainomoinen rose and clapped his hands together sharply to bring old Elmi bustling in out of the kitchen. "Elmi, find a place for this—this child to sleep."

  "Jo. The Koski hut is empty since—"

  "No. Not in the village. Here. The small lean-to near the stores-room is about empty, since there are no fur pelts these black days. Yes. Fix a cot for her. See that she has what she needs."

  "Yes, master." Elmi's fixed stare when the girl slipped out of the huge chair was not friendly. She would do as she was told but she would not like it. Herding the mouse-girl toward the kitchen hall, tight-mouthed and bristling, she whipped her round body about on its axis at the Wizard's sharp, "And Elmi I"

  "Jo, master."

  "Tell no one. Not just yet. Understand?"

  "Jo, master."

  "The lean-to door has a lock on it, has it not?"

  "Jo. And a stout one."

  Wainomoinen nodded; the flicker in his blue eyes meant nothing and much. Elmi bobbed her head vigorously and bundled out, careful not to touch her new charge.

  Wayne found that his cheeks were burning. This byplay disturbed him. The people of the village were not to know of Varjo's presence among them. The prejudice and the fear was not dead, not yet. Louhi's newest and most shattering outrage, taken with the driving cold and gnawing hunger, had made the Vanhat vulnerable to violent mob action. Since they could not reach Louhi herself, someone closer to hand might do, to release crazing emotions.

  "What did you mean?" he asked Wainomoinen as sharply as he dared. "You ought have done something long ago? What ought you have done?"

  "Nothing, Waino."

  "Tell me." Wayne got up and faced the wizard full.

  "All right, thenL I ought to have burned Loviatar's hut to the ground. I ought to have furrowed the Hollow ten spans deep and then sowed the Hüsi's cup waist-high with sea salt and powdered grains of silver."

  The days dragged by. The dark deepened. The killing ice moved down from the boreals. The planet began to die. Even the shaggy mammoths took their place under the moving death, in blue glassy showcases as if on display. Tapio's children died. The hairy Norsemen and the builders of the Great Circle of Stones died. Only the Vanhat, by some perverse Otavan magic deep within their cellular structure, some Ukko's fire, kept stubbornly alive. -They had special words for it. Vakisten. Vdkisten ja sisu. In spite of the unreasonableness of it. To spite Louhi. To demonstrate a depth of stamina under impossible odds. They lived when there was no sense to it. No sense at all. They should be dead with the rest, but they rejected the inevitable. They just would not die; they would not give Louhi the satisfaction.

  Wayne cursed them for not giving up and wept in "Secret. Lemminkainen and Ilmarinen did not return. Wainomoinen sought the Silences daily, entreating Ukko for a sign, for a smokelike wisp of hope in a black storm of desolation.

  Doom took hold of the planet and squeezed.

  When the last of the barley and rye were gone and the people were living on pine bark and pithy roots, Wayne prowled the triple circle from hut to hut twice in each sunless sun's span; he didn't need Wainomoinen to tell him what he was to check for. Now that the dogs had been eaten, the storehouse was empty, there was only one source of food left. Themselves. They must eat one another, so that some would survive. The idea was not even repulsive any more, rather it was simple logic. Yet this must not be, Wainomoinen decreed. It must not happen.

  One day, on his weakening rounds, Wayne heard a sharp bleating wail. A child's scream in pain. It tore across the dark path between the curve of huts. A childl Yes, that would be first. One has given it birth and nursed it, so that it does not quite seem— "No!"

  He wheeled about, zigzagged, sniffed the low wind, found the hut. His boot, with the full strength of thigh and buttock behind it, ripped off the inner wood trip-lock. Banked fireglow gave him only tenebrous crimson light, but after the pitch black it was enough. Something grayish white moved in the shadows of the room's single bunk. Wayne reached it in three strides. He stared down and it was few seconds before he could choke back his horror and move. It wasn't the baby. The baby was there, puddling its tiny hands in the blood that gushed from the young Kar-kenen widow's torn throat. The woman was trying to quiet the baby's screams, trying to caress it, trying to gurgle out soothing sounds from her dying throat. Her eyes were wild with a primal fear.

  A furtive sound from the foot of the bed swung him sharply. A thing, a gray-brown thing, was gliding like oiled silk from bed to floor to table to window. When the creature turned, before it vanished through the ragged hole in the stretched deerhide window, Wayne saw its eyes. They were large and liquid, and they blazed deep red in the fireglow.

  He picked up the blood-smeared baby crawling on the dead woman, hiding its face against him.

  "Kettu!" he muttered. An aboriginal's panic in the face of the dark unknown crawled along his
spine.

  Kettu. The fox. The fox from hell.

  "Kettu."

  Wainomoinen stared into nothing with angry eyes, while Wayne handed the blanketed bundle over to Elmi, who said "Voi, voi!" and snatched it away from Wayne with an accusing glance, clucking away at a trot. Somehow Wayne got the idea that he was to blame. He turned, frowning his questions at Wainomoinen.

  "Yes. Kettu is the slyest of Tapio's creatures."

  "Somehow this one managed to survive, came into the village out of a desperate urge to find food and—"

  Wainomoinen muttered unknowns in his beard, closing his eyes and shaking his head slowly. Wayne stopped short, waited.

  "Ei, ei. I was fearful, yet I hoped…"

  "What are you talking about?" Wayne blared.

  Wainomoinen looked at him critically hard, then his deep eyes gentled. "You don't know, do you?"

  Wayne shrugged, scowling. This was no time for the wizard's esoteric riddles!

  "Elmi has many duties, too many to care for Widow Karkenen's baby besides. And her daughter is, as you have seen, not bright."

  "So?"

  "Would you go and fetch Varjo for me? Perhaps Varjo would take to herself the chore of minding and nursing this motherless infant." His thick dark brows quirked oddly. "Varjo has kept to her room, out of sight, but we must all do our share if we wish to share what food there is left. Go."

  Wayne went, with a sour taste boiling in his craw.

  He returned alone, white to the lips; he tried to say something, but his tongue was glued to the top of his mouth.

  Wainomoinen said it for him. It was as if the wizard had been there and seen.

  "She is deep in sleep," he said. "Not sated, perhaps, yet not hungry. Blood is Me. Had you not interrupted her feast, there would have been less blood to stain the baby's clothes and yours." He went on flatly. "You could not waken her to ask why Varjo's mouth was rusty with dried blood. Lempo's evil mists are still on her."

  Varjo's eyes leaped when she woke to find herself bound tight to the low bed with raw deerhide thongs. She whimpered when Wainomoinen bent and wiped the telltale blotches of oxidized iron-red from her face and her throat, where the blood had dripped. Her fawn's terror sought Wayne's eyes. All Wayne could see was that pale triangle of face and small dimpled chin changing—metamorphosing—the middle of it thrusting out until it became a sharp furred snout, the mouth widening, the rabbit's teeth now fangs, the large liquid eyes glowing with crimson flecks like the fungoid phosphorescence in the Hollow…