The Complete Compleat Enchanter
Page 48
Lemminkainen had picked up several of the long wing and tail feathers from the outsize grouse and was carefully smoothing them out. His face took on the expression of exaggerated foxiness it had worn once or twice before.
“In Pohjola they now surely know that the greatest of heroes and magicians approaches,” he said. “It is well to be prepared for all encounters with something that can be used.” He tucked the feathers in one of his capacious pockets, glanced at the fire, which was beginning to show brightly in the gathering dusk, and lumbered off to bed.
Bayard said, “It strikes me, Harold, that the magic in this continuum is quantitatively greater and qualitatively more potent than any you have reported before. And if Lemminkainen can turn you into a thousand swordsmen, can’t the other people do something like that? I should say it’s rather dangerous.”
“I was just thinking of that,” said Shea, and went to bed himself.
###
The next day was a repetition of the first, except that Brodsky and Bayard were so stiff they could barely drag themselves from their deerskin blankets to go through the sword exercises on which Lemminkainen insisted before breakfast. There was not much conversation in the sled, but when they assembled around the fire in the evening, Lemminkainen entertained them with a narrative of his exploits until Shea and Belphebe wandered off out of earshot.
It was followed by more of the same. On the fifth day, the single-stick practice at noon had progressed so far that Lemminkainen himself took a hand and promptly knocked Brodsky out. It appeared to improve relations all around; the detective took it in good part, and the hero was in the best of humor that evening.
But soon after the start the next morning, he began weaving his head from side to side with a peering expression and sniffing. “What’s the trouble?” asked Shea.
“I smell magic—the strong magic of Pohjola. Look sharp, Valtarpayart.”
They did not have to look very sharp. A glow soon became visible through the trees, which presently opened out to reveal a singular spectacle. Stretching down from the right and losing itself round a turn in the distance, came a depression like a dry riverbed. But instead of water this depression was filled with a fiery red shimmer, and the stones and sand of the bottom were glowing like red-hot metal. On the far side of this phenomenon rose a sharp peak of rock, where sat an eagle as big as a beach cottage.
As Shea shielded his face against the scorch, the eagle rotated its head and gazed speculatively at the party.
There was no necessity to rein in the Elk of Hiisi. Lemminkainen turned to Bayard. “What do you see, eyes of Ouhaiola?”
“A red-hot pavement that looks like the floor of Hell, and an eagle several times the size of a natural one. There’s a kind of shimmer—no, they’re both there, all right.”
The giant bird slowly stretched one wing. “Oh-oh,” said Shea. “You were right, Walter. This is . . .”
Belphebe leaped from the sled, tested the wind with an uplifted finger and began to string her bow; Brodsky looked round and round, pugnacious but helpless.
Lemminkainen said: “Save your arrows, dainty Pelviipi, I myself, the mighty wizard, know a trick worth two of this one.”
The monster eagle leaped into the air. Shea said, “I hope you know what you’re doing, Kauko,” and whipped out his épée, feeling how inadequate it was. It was no longer than one of the bird’s talons and nowhere near so thick.
The eagle soared, spiraled upward, and then began to come down on them in a prodigious power dive as Bayard gasped. But Lemminkainen left his own weapon hanging where it was, contenting himself with tossing into the air the feathers of the big grouse, chanting a little staccato ditty whose words Shea could not catch.
The feathers turned themselves into a flock of grouse, which shot off slantwise with a motorcycle whirr. The eagle, almost directly over them—Shea could see the little movements of its wingtips and tail feathers as it balanced itself on the air—gave a piercing shriek, flapped its wings, and shot off after the grouse. Soon it was out of sight beyond the treetops westward.
“Now it is to be seen that I am not less than the greatest of magicians,” said Lemminkainen, sticking out his chest. “But this spelling is wearisome work, and there lies before us this river of fire. Harol, you are a wizard. Do you make a spell against it while I restore myself with food.”
Shea stood gazing at the redness and pondered. The glowing flicker had a hypnotic effect, like a dying woodfire. A good downpour ought to do the trick; he began recalling a rain spell he and Chalmers had been working up, in the hope of putting down the flaming barrier around Castle Carena during their adventures in the world of the Orlando Furioso.
He muttered his spell and made the passes. Nothing happened.
“Well?” said Lemminkainen, with his mouth full of bread and cheese. “When does the spell begin?”
“I tried,” said Shea, puzzled, “but . . .”
“Fool of Ouhaiola! Must I teach you your business? How do you expect a spell to work when you do not sing it?”
That’s right, thought Shea. He had forgotten that in this Kalevalan magic, song was an indispensable feature. With his own ability at versification, the passes Lemminkainen did not know how to make, and singing, this spell ought to be a humdinger. He lifted his arms for the passes again and sang at the top of his voice.
The spell was a humdinger. As he finished it, something black seemed to loom overhead, and the landscape was instantly blotted out by a shower of soot lumps as heavy and tenacious as snowflakes. Shea hastily cancelled the spell.
“Truly, a wonderful wizard!” cried Lemminkainen, coughing and trying to slap the clinging stuff from his clothes. “Now that he has shown us how to make soot of the river of fire, perhaps he will tell us how to bring fog to Pohjolal”
“Nay,” said Belphebe, “you shall not be so graceless to my lord. I do declare him an approved sorcerer—but not if he must sing, for he cannot carry one note beyond the next.” She reached out one hand comfortingly.
Brodsky said, “If I could flag down a right croaker to fix my schnozz, maybe we could work something together.”
“I must even do it myself then,” said Lemminkainen. He tossed soot-contaminated beer from his mug, drew a fresh fill from the keg, took a prodigious swig, leaned back, meditated a moment, and sang:
“Ice of Sariola’s mountains,
Ice of ten years’ snows compacted,
Forged into Turja’s glaciers,
Glaciers ever downward flowing,
In the sea with thunder breaking . . .”
For a while it was not clear what he was driving at. Then a shimmering something appeared in the air over the fiery trench, and gradually hardened with a sparkle of color. A bridge of ice!
But just as Lemminkainen reached the climax of his song which should have materialized the ice and welded it into a solid structure, there was a slip. Down into the trench roared the bridge of ice in fragments, to shatter and hiss and fill the landscape with vapor.
Lemminkainen looked sour and started again. Everyone else held his breath, watching. This time the bridge melted and vanished even before it was completed.
With a yell of rage, Lemminkainen hurled his cap on the ground and danced on it. Bayard laughed.
“You mock me!” screamed the wizard. “Outland filth!” He snatched up his beer mug from where he had put it and flung the contents in Bayard’s face. There was less than an inch of beer remaining, but even so it was enough to produce a lively display of suds.
“No!” cried Shea, reaching for his épée as Belphebe grabbed her bow.
But instead of leaping up in anger, instead of even wiping the beer from his face, Bayard was staring fixedly at the trench of fire, blinking and knitting his eyebrows. At last he said: “It’s an illusion after all! There isn’t anything there but a row of little peat fires made to look big and only burning in spots. But I don’t see how I came to miss it before.”
Shea said, “Must be
the alcohol in the beer. The illusion was so strong that you couldn’t see through it until you got the stuff in your eyes. That happened to me once in the continuum of the Norse gods.”
“The spells of Pohjola grow stronger as we approach their stronghold,” said Lemminkainen, his anger forgotten. “But what counsel shall we take now? For I am too undone with spell-working to undertake the labor of breaking so powerful a magic.”
“We could wait till tomorrow when you’d have your punch back,” suggested Shea.
Lemminkainen shook his head. “They of Pohjola will surely know what has happened here, and if we are checked by one magic, another and stronger will grow behind, so that at each step the way becomes more impassible. But if now we break through, then their magic becomes weaker.”
“Look here,” said Bayard. “I think I can resolve this. If you’ll give me some beer for eyewash, I can lead the way through. There’s plenty of space, even for the sled.”
The Elk of Hiisi snorted and balked, but Lemminkainen was firm with him as Bayard walked ahead, dipping his handkerchief in a mug of beer and applying it to his eyes. Shea found that although he was uncomfortably warm, he was not being cooked as he expected; nor did the sled show any signs of taking fire.
On the far side, they went up a little slope and halted. Bayard started back towards the sled and then halted, pointing at a tall dead pine. “That’s a man!” he cried.
Lemminkainen leaped clumsily from the sled, tugging at his sword, Shea and Brodsky right behind him. As they approached the pine, its branches seemed to collapse with a gentle swoosh; then they were looking at a stocky man of about Lemminkainen’s own proportions, his face wearing an expression of sullen bitterness.
“I had thought there must be someone near us for illusion-making,” roared Lemminkainen, happily. “Bow your head, magician of Pohjola.”
The man looked around quickly and desperately. “I am Vuohinen the champion, and I challenge,” he said.
“What does he mean?” asked Shea.
“A true champion may always challenge, even in another’s house,” said Lemminkainen. “Whoever wins they take off the head of the other or make him his serf. Which of us do you challenge?”
Vuohinen the champion looked from one to the other and pointed to Bayard. “This one. What is his art?”
“No,” said Lemminkainen, “for his art is the seeing eye that penetrates all magics, and if you challenge him, you have already lost, since he penetrated your disguise. You may have Harol here, with the point-sword—or the shield-maiden Pelviipi with the bow, or Piit in wrestle, or myself with the broadsword.” He grinned.
Vuohinen looked from one to the other. “Of the point-sword I know nothing,” he said, “and while there is doubtless no bowman in the world half as good as myself, I have other uses for women than slaying them. I choose Piit in open wrestle.”
“And not the lively Kaukomieli!” said Lemminkainen with a laugh. “You think you have chosen safely. But you shall see what unusual arts lie among the outland friends of Kalevala. Will you wrestle with him, Piit?”
“Okay,” said Brodsky, and began shucking his shirt. Vuohinen already had his off.
They circled, swinging their arms like a pair of indifferently educated apes. Shea noticed that Vuohinen’s arms reminded him of the tires of a semi-trailer truck, and the detective looked puny beside him. Then Vuohinen jumped and grabbed. Brodsky caught him by the shoulders and threw himself backwards, placing the sole of his foot against Vuohinen’s midriff and shoving upwards as he fell, so that his antagonist flew over him and landed heavily on his back.
Lemminkainen gave a bellow of laughter. “I will make a song about this!” he shouted.
Vuohinen got up somewhat slowly and scowling. This time he came in more cautiously, then when at arm’s length from Brodsky, suddenly threw himself at the detective, the fingers of his left hand spread straight for the other’s eyes. Shea heard Belphebe gasp, but even as she gasped, Brodsky jerked his head back, and with a quickness wonderful to behold, seized the thumb of the clawing hand in one of his, the little finger in the other and, bracing himself, twisted powerfully.
There was a crack; Vuohinen pinwheeled through the air and came down on his side, then sat up, his face contorted with pain, feeling with the other hand of a wrist and fingers that hung limp.
“There was a creep in Chi tried to pull that rat caper on me once,” said Brodsky pleasantly. “Want anymore, or have you got the chill?”
“It was a trick,” Vuohinen bleated. “With a sword . . .”
Lemminkainen stepped forward cheerfully. “Do you wish his head as trophy or himself to serve you daily?”
“Aw,” said Brodsky, “I suppose he ain’t much use as a patsy with that busted duke, but let’s let him score for the break. The pastor would put the run on me if I hit him with the lily.” He walked over to Vuohinen and kicked him deliberately. “That’s for the rat caper. Get up!”
###
Vuohinen made the sled more crowded than ever and, as Brodsky had said, was of no great value as a servant; but he did make lighter the job of collecting firewood in the evening. Moreover, Brodsky’s victory had improved relations with Lemminkainen. He still insisted that Bayard practice daily with the detective—they were at the point where they used real swords now—but now the hero himself practiced jujitsu falls and holds and tumbles almost daily. He was an apt pupil, too.
Around the travelers the air was colder; plumes of vapor appeared at their nostrils and those of the reindeer. The sun never seemed to break through the overcast anymore. The trees became sparser and stunted, growing scattered among little grassy hillocks. Sometimes Belphebe brought home no game at all in the evening. More often than not, it would be two or three rabbits, which sent Lemminkainen back to the stored provisions after he had eaten his share.
Still the sled bumped and slid along the muddy track northward, until one afternoon, as they came over a little hill from behind a group of trees, Lemminkainen cried, “Great Jumala! Look at that!”
Before them, stretching out of sight in both directions a prodigious fence ran across the valley. A row of palings, less than a foot apart and reaching almost to the low cloud canopy; but it was the sight of the horizontal members that really made Shea’s scalp prickle. For the palings were bound together by an immense mass of snakes, wound together in and out, though whether they got that way because they wanted to or because someone had tied them in that grotesque fashion, it was impossible to tell.
As the sled slid up, the reindeer shying and trembling, the snakes turned their heads towards the party and began hissing like a thousand teakettles.
“It must be an illusion,” said Bayard, “though at present I can’t see anything but that mass of serpents. Give me some beer.”
Lemminkainen drew some of the fluid from the cask. Vuohinen’s face held a sneer of triumph. The reason was apparent as soon as Bayard dabbed the liquid in his eyes, stared at the remarkable fence again, and shook his head.
“They still look like serpents to me,” he said. “I know it can’t be true, but there they are.”
Shea said, “Couldn’t we just assume they’re fakes and cut our way through?”
Lemminkainen shook his head. “Learn, O Harol of Ouhaio, that within this field of magic everything has all the powers of its seeming unless its true name be known.”
“I see. And we’re now right into Pohjola, where their magic is really strong. You couldn’t try a spell yourself to take this one off, whatever it is?”
“Not unless I know the real name beneath this false seeming,” said the hero.
“Maybe we can play it straight,” said Shea, and turning to Belphebe, “How about trying a shot with your bow at one of those beasties? The way I understand it, if you killed one, it would have to return to its proper form.”
“Not so, O Harolainen,” said Lemminkainen. “It would be a dead serpent merely until we learned its true form. And there are thousands.”
Suddenly Pete Brodsky said, “Hey! I got an idea.”
“What is it?” asked Shea.
Brodsky jerked a thumb towards Vuohinen. “This gummy belongs to me, don’t he?”
“Under the laws of this country, I believe that’s right,” said Shea, and “He is your serf,” said Lemminkainen.
“And he’s on this magic lay in this joint?”
Shea said, “Why, so he is, now that you mention it. He must have been the one who worked the river of fire and the eagle.”
Brodsky reached a hand out and grabbed Vuohinen by the collar. “All right, punk! What’s the right name for them potato-water dreams out there?”
“Awk!” said Vuohinen. “Never will I be a traitor . . .”
“Bag your head on that stuff! Come across with the right dope, or I’ll have shorty here let you have it.” He pointed significantly to the sword that hung at Lemminkainen’s side.
“Awk!” said Vuohinen again, as the hand twisted in his collar. “They are—made from lingonberries.”
Walter Bayard said, “Why, so they are!” He walked across to the hissing, snarling barrier, reached out his hand, twisted the head off one of the serpents, and ate it.
Lemminkainen laughed. “Now there will be a removing of spells, and then we shall have lingonberry dessert to our meal. I thank you, friend Piit.”
Seven
The lingonberry wall came down to a tangled mat of vegetation under Lemminkainen’s ministrations and they camped just beyond. The hero was in hilarious humor, making a series of jokes which nobody but Brodsky found diverting and shouting with laughter over his own sallies, until Shea said: “For the love of Mike, Kauko, what’s got into you tonight? You sound as though you had just won the first prize.”
“And have I not, Harol? For I know well that we are through the last barrier that Louhi can throw against us, and tomorrow we shall arrive at Pohjola’s hall—perhaps to fight.”