The Star Mill Read online

  "Why do you keep calling me 'Cousin Toivo'?"

  "Because you are. But if you don't want the Mistress to know you've come back, I won't tell."

  "Thank you, Koko." As they moved toward the bams and the circular rear courtyard of the Castle, Ilmar said lightly, "Then you know where I came from?"

  "Sure, Cousin Toivo. Everybody in the Castle knows that. You were hiding in the caves behind Turtle Mountain, with all the other slaves who ran off eight years ago. The Mistress posted her best archers at the top of the mountain, to pick off the rebels whenever any of them poked his nose out to find food. You were just a boy when you joined the slave-rebels, so my Mistress said not to kill you. That's what she told Karina. She said it was all right for you to come back. And here you arel"

  "Here I am," Ilmar echoed.

  They moved around the bams and across the flagged court to the bake-house, next to the kitchen. A girl wearing a dark blue skirt and white apron, with a white kerchief framing her flour-daubed face, was in the act of pulling great round rye breads out of the great stone-and-clay bake oven with a long wooden spatula and adding them to the neat rows on a nearby table. Ilmar sniffed hungrily at the savory odor of the fresh loaves.

  Koko hopped in, babbling excitedly. The girl gave him a swift side-glance while she kept at her task. In the doorway, Ilmar saw that Karina was pretty but not artfully pretty. She was healthy-pretty, with her womanly breasts heaving a little beneath the drawstring blouse that lopped down over one sturdy shoulder. Dark hair clung to her beaded forehead, strayed from under the kerchief; her round cheeks were rosy under the flour-smears, from her bristling activity.

  "Tell our Mistress she will have to wait for her special milk-cakes," she snapped. "You're early, and besides—"

  "Karinal" Koko shrilled, plucking her skirt "Look who's with mel I found him sitting on a rock near the forest!"

  "I haven't time for nonsense, Koko. Can't you see that I-"

  When her hazel eyes swept over Koko's pointed head, she saw Ilmar. Her scowl vanished. She stared, wide-eyed.

  "Who—who are you?"

  Koko danced up and down, tittering, bells tinkling. "Don't you know your own Cousin?"

  The girl's red hps tightened; her green-brown eyes flicked over Ilmar's green synthetics tunic to his copper-red beard and froze on his deep blue eyes.

  "You are not Toivol" she blurted.

  Ilmar went over to her and kissed her cheek. "That's no wonder, Karina. Toivo was only a boy eight years ago. Living on mushrooms and roots—" His fingers squeezed her hand while he went on improvising, cutting off further protest

  Karina gasped, blinking away tears. There was something rare and strange in the redbeard's eyes; she must not say the wrong thing. She grabbed up a wooden bucket and handed it to Koko.

  "Be a good boy and fetch some water from the well. Pump it fresh."

  "But the trough in the corner is full!" he grumbled.

  "Fresh water. For our virras."

  "He's no virras. He's Cousin Toivo from—"

  "Scoot! And on the way back stop at the kitchen for a pitcher of warm milk But not a word about Toivo, understand?"

  Koko accepted the chore with a grimace. Ilmar watched him hop-skip down the stone flagging in thei direction of the central well; other servants in drab) homespun of primitive cut were yawning about their morning tasks. Karina closed the door briskly, pointing Ilmar to seat himself at the uncluttered end of the long worktable. While she talked she finished unloading the great stone and mud-brick ovens.

  "He won't be able to keep his mouth shut for long, I'm afraid." She faced him wistfully. "Cousin Toivo, I just can't believe you're here. The Mistress promised to spare you, but I still can't believe ..."

  "Listen, Karina—believe. Believe that I am Cousin Toivo, at least for now. But don't think about it too hard. Tell me things I must know."

  When she handed him a loaf and a kitchen pukko to cut it with, along with a wedge of yellow cheese, her hand trembled.

  "Eat, Toivo. You look starved." Back at her morning chore, she added, with a rush, "The Mistress' powers are dim this early. Her body is sluggish until she re-fortifies" her magic. It will be expected that I should hide my cousin from her as long as possible."

  "Koko?"

  "He will not betray you, but he loves to talk. His race is land but simple. They have a great need to be loved and admired. He will not be able to restrain himself from babbling about you when he brings Louhi her morning cakes."

  Ilmar frowned.

  "There is a way to stop him from babbling." Karina turned, fearful. "You wouldn't kill Kokol"

  "No. Simply hypnotism. I will remove all knowledge about me from his mind.''

  The girl wagged her head and clucked her tongue. "Well, you must do what you must. To have come to this terrible place without being made captive is a hero's act. Something tells me you want to help and if I can do anything that—"

  Koko burst in, slopping water on the stone floor, giggling pleasure at having done a good thing. While Koko devoured his milk and cakes, I knar put him under simple hypnosis and removed the whole sequence of their meeting in the meadow and the rest of it from his low-caliber mind. He had met nobody on his morning ramble. Cousin Toivo hadn't come back. There would be nothing beyond everyday memories to tempt his magpie's tongue when he hopped back to the Castle with the Witch's breakfast cakes.

  Karina found him a loose woolen slave's garment to wear over his Vanhat tunic; she also found him a nest in the barn loft, where he could sleep in safety among the hay sheaves. He dare not be seen by the housekeeper, a raw-boned hellion, or by any of Louhi's shrunken army of castle warriors. While Louhi's olden magic, a perversion of the Vanhat all-power, kept Pohyola on the move in the direction of Terra, she must depend for menials and defensive warriors on the progeny of those who were entrapped with her when the Black Storm first began to pour out its venom. Despair and bad treatment had reduced her armies of servitors. The lush days of the Sampo in full flower were ancient history now. Eil These were bad days for the Mistress of All Evil!

  Ilmar lay back on his clasped hands, wishing that Karina's multiplicity of duties had permitted him time for more questions. But any divergence of routine would only tempt trouble. She would come back after the long day's work was finished and they could talk more, and plan. Karina would be his hands and his eyes until the time for action came. True, Louhi could not remove herself from the black web she had created; yet, within the confines of Pohyola itself her magic was as strong as ever.

  The high loft was accessible only by ladder; everywhere, besides the small square trapdoor in the center, the loft was stacked rafter-high with sheaves of hay for the long winter snows. Louhi had created her perambulating hell's island out of terran earth and creatured it with terran creatures; it must follow that terran ways must obtain, since even the blood in the Witch's deathless body was terran in origin. Like many older Vanhat, Louhi despised Ussi technology and would have none of it. Simple cosmic evil was good enough for her.

  Busy with such ponderings, Ilmar found Utamo reluctant to give him sleep; so he burrowed his way between the drying sheaves to a knothole in the ancient pine wall. Through this knothole he obtained a reasonably inclusive view of the kitchen courtyard, the stone-rimmed well with its cross-legged animal troughs, the slaves' quarters, and Karina's bake-house. He watched the slaves move dispiritedly about their tasks. Once in a while a brute-faced warrior would swagger across the packed earth court, slapping his brief leather-fringed skirt with a well-used whip. These were unsavory remnants of Louhi's plundering armies and defenders of the Castle; lack of professional exercise had reduced them to sadistic lackwits who found some outlet for their fight-trained muscles in baiting the Castle's servants.

  One of these types, bigger and uglier than the rest and sporting a longer, stouter whip, made his appearance. Ilmar found himself wondering why this warrior's stocky legs were encased in thick leather boots, hip-high, and why he wore shoulder-le
ngth leather gloves. He wondered, too, why the slaves fled in all directions. Even the spindly slinker at his heels, who toted a large basket on his toil-crooked back, dropped the basket hastily when the leather-clad figure stopped, and loped like a coyote for some hole to crawl into.

  The giant in leather unhatched the lock on a sheet-iron length of fence with a heavily wired top. Ilmar couldn't see what was caged behind that sheet-iron fence, but at the giant's shrill whistle and the seeming of routine daily procedure, he heard. And what he heard turned his blood to ice.

  Yelping in a quasi-intelligent fashion, the demon hounds leaped out of their iron kennels. Their deep-throated screams were ululations of pure unadulterated hate; Louhi had traded these fanged horrors from their own relatives—star-demons out of the Black Nebula-removed certain of their powers to chain them to her and triple their blood-lust. They were black, Loubi's demon dogs. Black and gigantic, with muscles that quivered for the kill; with eyes like crimson swords, and fangs that could tear the heart out of a man in one great bite, after those yellow-black talons had stripped away his muscles.

  They hated everything they saw. Everything represented captivity away from a planet where such monsters were routine, and had to be to survive others as bad or worse. Everything feared them. Every mouse, every wood animal burrowing into the farmyard hopeful of foodscraps, every human. When their leaps for the warrior's throat failed they loped the circumference of the courtyard in search of live kill. Finding none, they settled down with the basketful of dripping flesh-and-bones and the giant's curses for sauce.

  Ilmar shivered. He knew the demon hounds; for it was they, on their night-prowls, who had thwarted his first rash attempt to find the perverted Star Mill.

  XII

  Furtive taps on the loft's trapdoor tore apart the umbilicus between Ilmar and sleep. It was pitch-dark. Not a hint of light spun through his peephole. Pohyola's ever-fog and the Black Storm above it held back starshine and, had it not been for Louhi's witchery, would have held back the light of the alien sun as well.

  Stifling a sneeze from the hay dust, Ilmar crawled through the tunnels he had fashioned to the trap. Again the knock; Karina's prearranged signal.

  He lifted the trap and helped the breathless girl up. She melted against him for a long moment after he had replaced the square on the ladder-hole. Ilmar felt the wild beating of her heart under her full round breasts, with a rush of virile passion. He eased her away gently, understanding. Karina, like little Koko, suffered from an excess of love and passion and she had no peg on which to hang it. Even Toivo was gone and, Ilmar secretly thought, for good. Witch Louhi had never been one to keep her promises, nor did her vindictive spirit ever forgive. No, like the other last-ditch rebels, Toivo was long since wolf meat on the far side of Turtle Mountain. As for Karina's fellow-slaves, generations of servitude had turned them into vegetables. That last thrust for freedom had been the ultimate spark of manhood. They would never escape; even the Witch had not yet found a way to.

  Yet, while despair bred stagnation, Karma was an ata-vist. Some fierce genetic urge within her strong well-curved body demanded resistance. She resisted the only way she could, by hard work and by making her talents indispensable to the greedy hag. To Karina, Ilmar was her Toivo still, but he must not take advantage. There was Aino to think of, and his prodigious task.

  "Shall I try a light?" he asked, while they crouched among the prickling sheaves, Karina still clinging to his arm.

  "Better not. All this hay." "Where are the others?"

  "At the night-sing. They're allowed one hour, so we don't have much time. Then the dogs are set free to guard the Castle." He felt her whole body shiver.

  "Were you able to find out anything?"

  "Nobody among the slaves has ever heard of the Sampo."

  Ilmar scowled. "I'm not surprised. Where does Louhi spend most of her time these days?"

  "In the Tower. She is working on a way to free herself from the island, Koko told me. He even got me up there once, so that I could plead for Toivo's life. First she only gave me that fiend's cackle, then she said that her archers would spare him, if the animals didn't get him, but he would have to make it back on his own." Her grip tightened. "Ilmar—do you think—"

  He held her closer, in the curve of his arm. "Don't hope too much, Karina. It's been eight years and Louhi gloats on tortures of all lands."

  She sobbed against him for a long moment. "What— what can I do? She wants to breed me with one of her warriors, as she breeds her livestock. So far I've managed to lie about my age and keep her happy with the goodies I cook—"

  Ilmar kissed her cheek. "Around the sing-fires they tell of a beautiful land of blue lakes and forests, of happy things, of heroes—of free choice!"

  "These things are only dreams."

  "No, Karina. They're real and I promise you one thing. If I find and destroy the Sampo I will take you back with me to taste freedom and to marry whomever you want to."

  "How can you, Ilmar? How can you outwit her?"

  "I've got to. Listen! You said the hag spends all her time in the Tower. She wouldn't keep the Star Mill far from her. It must be up there somewhere. I've got to get up there!"

  "How can you, Ilmar!" she wailed. "It's guarded by a hundred warriors who will use any excuse to kill one of us. And in only a few minutes—the dogs!"

  When she gasped back her fear for him, Ilmar heard an eager eldritch baying from the darkness below. Like the warriors, the demon hounds would find Ilmar a tasty tidbit. His long fingers tightened over Karina's hand.

  "We must find another way up to the hag's Tower!"

  "I—I have heard there is one. I'll try to find out from the slaves who do the cleaning. Then—"

  "I'll meet you at the bake-house, just before dawn. When the Witch's powers are at their lowest ebb and the dogs have been returned to their kennels."

  The trapdoor slid back into place behind the girl; Ilmar eased himself back for a night of fitful dozing and the dark wait. He thought about the other slaves, listening to their shuffling movements from out of the meadow and their hour's release from bondage in the old heroic songs, back to their long bunkhouses before the dogs were unleashed.

  He thought about Kaleva and Nyyrikki, of Lokka— and of Aino. Waiting. Begging Ukko and the star-powers for the boon of Ilmar back with them, alive. He thought about Captain Grant, about Joe and Brooks, and the untold thousands of starmen who had been trapped by the perverted Star Mill.

  His harassed thoughts were whipped away by the alien screams of the demon dogs. Worry for Karina nagged him. Demand for action washed across his nerves, his muscles, compelling him. What time was it? He dared not sleep. Farms like Louhi's came to life when it was still half-night. He moved. He descended into the pungent barn odors and the chopping sounds of animal hooves. Vague light sifted across the hay-strewn planks, from under the double doors. He moved swiftly toward it, and cracked one side open. The alien moon was a blurred cat's eye.

  He took a fast look across the wide circular yard, from the iron kennels to the stone wall, to the smoke-house and Karina's bake-house next to a double row of cord-wood. Across the yard, further left, were the long shale-roofed sleep quarters.

  Yes, there were plenty of black pools for the fiend-dogs to lurk in wait. But there was no sound at all. . . .

  He had one weapon, a razor-sharp pukko—the triangular-blade knife all Finns once wore for hunting, fishing, eating. Such was his hurry that he had neglected to bring along a grip-gun; anyway, guns were useless against Louhi.

  Vanhat spies were trained for animal cunning and the tracking instincts of his ancestors were retaught from deep in his genes. He moved. From shadow to shadow, with a noiseless breath-stop in between moves. Bam to shed, shed to well-trough. Here he crouched, sucking in gulps of thin night air. The woodpile was next. He would wait at the womens' quarters' door for Karina.

  A low snuffling growl iced his nerves. Then he saw the two giant hounds, loping along the well-stac
ked pine wood, one nuzzling the other's flank. Right where he was headedl

  He pulled in a silent preparatory breath. They stopped. He saw four baleful eyes turn his way. It was as if they heard him. Or scented him, although there was no telltale wind. Not a breath. Not a scratch from a night-scavenging rodent. Those eight hounds discouraged every living thing from revealing its existence while they prowled. Ilmar saw the huge slavering jaws bare long fangs, eyes blazing at him like red hellflames. He must have made a sound for sure, now. Because now, with low clucking growls they leaped toward him like two black demons.

  Ilmar's pukko struck the first one's heart in one lightning downstroke. Overconfident, it ran right into his knife. Its fangs raked his arm before it reared up, yelping surprised agony and wrath, then collapsed in a scramble of flailing legs.

  Its bitch companion, out of some animal deference, had held back. Now her anger, seeing her night's partner writhing in his own hot blood, knew no bounds. She was on Ilmar with raping claws and snarling fanged mouth. He tried to leap behind the trough. He didn't quite make it. Her ravening nails hit his back. He fell, holding back a raw scream.

  Somehow he managed to flip, to hold off the fangs at arm's length. But now his pukko leaped from his hand, was lost in the shadow under the long trough. Ilmar screamed silent prayers as he felt the sideswipes the fangs made at his arms. Agony and sheer need pulled him half up on his feet.

  He kicked out at the bitch's underbelly. When, momentarily, she moved back in agony, he leaped up on the trough. Her heavy leap rocked the trough and sent Ilmar plunging backwards. He half-turned in midair, then, with an agonized groan of tortured muscles, he contrived to dump the trough. On the hell-bitch.

  The ice-cold dousing did what the kick had started. She slunk away, whining and shivering.

  But now, it seemed, his night's work with Louhi's mindless killers was only well started. Flaming eyes and exultant baying voices converged on the well-trough from all directions.

  Ilmar staggered back, conscious of bleeding pain from many portions of his anatomy. And of a quiet nagging despair, rising acid and sour in his throat.