It Came from the North

by Carita Forsgren

  I’m certain that mom squeezes his hand with pride then. I’m certain that the knowledge gives them joy and comforts them and that it’s helping them get better. Maybe already tomorrow they’ll get out of bed and continue what’s most important in the world: nurturing new life.

  The Gift Boy

  Sari Peltoniemi

  Translated by Liisa Rantalaiho

  Sari Peltoniemi is the author of many books for children and young readers, along with a number of science fiction and fantasy stories. In 2002, her novel Elk (Hirvi, 2001) won the Kuvastaja prize for the best Finnish fantasy novel; her novels have twice been shortlisted for the Finlandia Junior Prize, an award for the best Finnish novel for children or young adults. Peltoniemi, a former rock star herself, has also penned the lyrics to numerous rock songs. Her work is highly influenced by Finnish folklore and mythology, and her stories often delve into the experiences of those marginalized by society; the weakest and most vulnerable, who may be first to notice the intrusion of the fantastic and supernatural on their daily lives. “The Gift Boy” is the story of an unusual tattoo artist, who discovers strength, sorrow, and a strange kind of love in her life at society’s edge . . .

  That spring I turned fifty and received a helper as gift from Heron Hannusson. I made no fuss about my age and had invited nobody to celebrate, but Heron, he knew me. He knew I’d be waiting, anyway, that I would wake up early on my birthday morning and start watching for a visitor at my door. He also knew well enough that if no gifts came, I’d sulk for a long time and take a lot of trouble to invent some malice I could cover up as innocent and unintentional.

  The gift boy Heron sent was much to my liking. He had a man’s build already, strong and much taller than me, but his face was a child’s face. He had shorn his hair off and let Heron ornament one arm all over with colorful tattoos. When he arrived, he kept swaggering and smoking an aromatic pipe, but his hand was trembling.

  “What am I to do with you?” I asked, when he explained that he’d been sent by Heron.

  He smiled, embarrassed, and drew on his tobacco.

  “Heron has taught me to make tattoos. Look! I’ve made them myself.” He bared his other leg from ankle to knee, and I saw that, too, was covered with vine ornaments.

  “You need not make your figures yourself, anymore,” he boasted, and smiled so I could not help but smile back.

  “Do you wish to stay with me?” I asked. I asked it in a friendly, dispassionate manner. I hid my own appetites, carefully.

  The boy nodded.

  “Heron did not force me. I have come to learn from you and help you.” He measured me with his eyes, though he tried to do it without my notice.

  “You are free to leave any time you wish,” I promised gently, though I already had decided not to let this boy leave me. He knew, too, that I was able to bind him to myself if I so wished. Still, he stepped in my house mannishly and self-assured, and promised: “I will bring much joy to you.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Peregrine,” he said, blushing. Which meant he most likely was called Jon or Kip or Mats, but I promised to call him Peregrine. Indeed he brought me much joy that spring, but I did not get that joy for free. I kept asking myself, Why would Heron give him to me—what had Heron been thinking about?

  Often I secretly watched Peregrine while he was chopping wood without a shirt on, tumbling with the dog in the yard, or tattooing a mark on a customer’s skin. Often when I turned my eyes to him, he looked at me expectantly and then illuminated our room with his smile. Sometimes, in the presence of a customer, he used a word in his speech that secretly pointed to the preceding night, and I blushed like a girl.

  Heron would have laughed his ears off had he seen me like that. I did not grant him the pleasure. All that summer I never invited him to visit me, even though I supposed he was expecting it.

  I also knew very well that my happiness would be short-lived. Peregrine was not the kind of humble boy who serves his Mistress unselfishly and endlessly loyal.

  When the eldest daughter of the manor came to seek my advice and to ask for the woman’s mark on her breast, I already knew to expect trouble.

  She had just turned eighteen and wished to know what I would see on her path. According to that, we would choose her woman’s mark and then prick it visible underneath the hollow of her throat. I saw nothing special in her, neither great passion nor sudden death. I chose the lily as her mark, and with that she was very pleased. She kept asking about love, as girls always do, and I promised her a handsome and wealthy man—which was how the merchant’s sturdy son could generously be described—but gave her no exact information, of course.

  She’d been eying Peregrine all the while, and neither had the boy been shy about his glances. Both showed their disappointment when I took out the bit and the mallet.

  “Doesn’t your apprentice do the tattoo? I’d heard he’s the one doing it nowadays for you,” the girl moaned.

  And Peregrine: “Why don’t you let me do the mark?” The girl was opening the laces on her bosom and Peregrine hovered restlessly around behind me.

  “All right then,” I promised. “But you have to be very sharp and careful so you won’t smudge the girl’s skin and her future.”

  “I know how to do it,” Peregrine bragged, and I well knew it was so. Yes, he did; he was sure of hand and sharp of eye.

  I realized they wished me to absent myself from the room, but I did not leave. The tattooing took a long time, Peregrine was delaying it on purpose, but I did not leave.

  When finally the girl had paid and gone, Peregrine said:

  “We have to please them so as to get good pay. When they speak well of us in the village, there’ll be more and more coming to you. You wish, don’t you, that . . . ”

  “Did I ask you something?”

  Peregrine smiled with his little boy’s face, but defiance sparkled in his eyes.

  “You did your work well,” I said, and turned my back.

  After that one, a swarm of other girls came, and then, matrons. Everyone wanted to see my Peregrine and be treated by him. Those who had already received their woman’s mark asked for something else. One wanted an auspicious blue ring, another wanted a sun-figure to grant male children, a third just wanted a decoration for her revelries. I was present to give power to the figures, but it was Peregrine who made them. I wondered constantly why I did not bind him to myself, since I could have done it easily, and even in a way in which he’d never notice anything, except that he felt good beside me.

  During the years I’d gotten used to loneliness. Whenever I yet yearned for a man’s embrace, I could always have gone to Heron. I had never felt a need to glance obliquely pained at the mirror and grieve over my aging. That matter had been as natural as the year’s turn, and as little had I tried to meddle in it as in the autumn’s rains or the snow’s melting. Now I was spreading my face with unguents every morning. When I walked around in the cottage I drew in my sagging stomach. And once again I asked: Why had Heron sent that boy? Had I ever tormented him . . . badly, anyway?

  I chanced to hear the talk of two maidens close to my cottage. When I noticed the girls I hid myself from them and walked by their side within the cover of the forest, so I could listen closely to everything they talked about.

  “You must demand that Peregrine makes the figure,” said one of the girls and the other answered:

  “Yes, of course. Everybody is talking about Peregrine and his soft hands.”

  “Yes, but that’s not the only reason. Now listen to what my mother said—and my aunts agreed with it. They said there is no power anymore in the figures that Thistel is making. Thistel is old and barren.”

  “—and Peregrine is anything but!”

  For their age, the girls laughed lewdly. Then the other asked:

  “Why then must we go to Thistel? Doesn’t Peregrine make the figures for her anyway?”

  The other one shook her head.

  “For sure
, Thistel has given him some magic potion to drink; otherwise Peregrine would have gone away already. But believe me; Peregrine will wake up from the spell once he gets stronger.”

  “And what will happen then?”

  “You’ll see!” And again they giggled so unashamedly I almost showed myself and chased them off. Yet I allowed Peregrine to make pretty figures for both of them and let him strut around the girls, so naively manly I’d have laughed, if only my mouth would have twisted to a smile.

  That night I wanted—once again—to deny Peregrine access to my bed.

  “Sleep on the floor,” I said, when he sat on my bedside and drew off his shirt. His tattoos seemed to glow in the twilight. Surely they did glow, at least those made by Heron. I’d often heard talk about how figures made by Heron nowadays were visible in darkness. It was only a matter of time before Heron would reveal to me the secret ingredient producing a glow like that. But now Peregrine was sitting on the edge of my bed, his back towards me and his shoulders hunched up. Surely they had grown to a man’s shoulders only shortly before his arrival to me. Their breadth and angularity made my eyes water. I drew him close to me before he even had time to ask. That’s what happened every time.

  If I’d had a female friend I could have asked for advice. Had there been anyone who knew me better than I knew myself, I could have asked why I kept behaving like this. Why did I demean myself? It was not love, neither was it pure lust. What was it, then?

  What about the men, the boys—the candidates for husbands and fiancés? They, too, visited me sometimes, though most preferred to go to Heron. What would happen once they came to notice the game Peregrine kept having with their women? It seemed likely my falcon would get a proper hiding. I was waiting for it.

  But even in this matter the boy had it easy. He charmed the men, too. Of course he did not surpass me in bestowing power to his figures or in seeing the things to come. I doubted whether he had any secret powers at all. Perhaps it was just that he had something I knew that I lacked, myself: he needed other people and was comfortable with them. He had a good word to say to every person, even to me. But I was nothing more than one among them all. Heron had spoken to me about it, that I was indifferent to the people I tattooed, in contrast to him. Not that it would have been necessary for the work itself. Heron just did not understand why I actually bothered making figures and putting my powers into them; why did I not support myself in some other way, since I was not able to love the people I gave my mark to.

  “Why don’t you gather berries and mushrooms, keep a little poultry and some cows. Or if you really wish to be a shaman, be one. Come and be my apprentice,” Heron used to repeat. As if I’d have need of his teaching—a man who wept in my sight whenever he’d been drinking enough beer, and didn’t even know enough to be ashamed afterwards. Sometimes he was extraordinarily tiresome and simple-minded indeed.

  With the same tiresome simple-mindedness, Peregrine charmed the men of the village. He could prate on half a day with any farmhand about thoroughly trifling matters.

  With the young men, he whispered out of my hearing, and sometimes he made them figures that were so indecent I couldn’t even look at them.

  “I did not tell you to make them like that,” I said. “I won’t put my power into those.”

  “Those figures are powerful enough in themselves,” he said, and the young men did not even consider themselves swindled, they just laughed and paid the same as ever. And the older ones acted nearly as stupidly.

  As time went on, I came to understand that if I didn’t send Peregrine away very soon, I’d lose my authority altogether. But how could I have sent away my own puppy? I had to find some other way, and I did. It would not be well done, but it was the only way possible.

  I thought I understood now what Heron had intended. He had sent Peregrine to me to teach me a lesson. Heron would be disappointed, and punished, too. I would find a way to humiliate him so badly he would not quickly forget it.

  I let my thoughts mature. Carefully I chose the ingredients I was going to use when the time was ripe. I let Peregrine make ever more figures and withdrew myself completely ever more often. My conscience troubled me somewhat in the evenings when Peregrine crept to my side, smiling, and in every other way tried to please me, whenever he had time off from other people. I appeased myself with the thought that perhaps it would not be necessary for me to carry out my plan at all—perhaps people would notice that there was no power in Peregrine’s figures and would again turn to me.

  But as I could have guessed, Peregrine first managed to go too far. Had he actually thought I wouldn’t wake up as he got up from the bed in the small hours of the night and crept outside? Even he couldn’t have been naïve enough not to realize I’d guess where he went and from whence he returned, hands and face so permeated with woman-smell that a quick wash in the spring couldn’t possibly hide it.

  “I prepared new colors for you,” I told him, when he sat himself at the breakfast table, stroking his brow.

  “The old ones would have done, yet,” he smiled. “You know how to make colors that do not dry or fade.”

  “They’d lost their former brightness, anyway. We cannot afford to make mistakes, my boy. You know that, don’t you?”

  I unintentionally raised my voice and the boy startled. I quickly set the pot of gruel down in front of him.

  “I went to the spring,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  “You do as you wish and go where you want,” I snapped, again unintentionally, and he looked at me like a child who has stolen a piece of bread from the cupboard.

  “Eat now,” I said, more calmly, and touched his neck lightly. “There’ll be a lot of people coming today. Your fame has grown. I suppose hardly anyone goes to Heron any longer.”

  The familiar proud smile appeared on his face again. He groped at me, but I withdrew.

  “It’s going to be a busy day. Warm up some water and wash yourself.”

  I kept observing him during the day, when he started using the new colors. He dipped his needle happily and without worry as always. And why should he have suspected anything?

  He never learned of my plan, although I’d done everything with the utmost care, and in a way where the results would be as plain and disastrous as possible. Each tattooing color included plenty of poison. Not lethal, but otherwise as nasty as possible: the red produced difficulty of breathing, the blue filled the whole body with many-colored blisters, the black made nails drop off from fingers and toes, the green raised a fever.

  None of the poisons had any effect. All the evening I was filled with horror and eagerness, waiting for some word from the village. I would stand up for the boy; I would not give him up to be punished. Instead I’d give an antidote to the villagers and the promise that Peregrine would never again touch any one of them with his needle. But no one arrived; not that evening, neither the next one. Little by little Peregrine used up all the colors. I did not get time to prepare new and even stronger colors, for Peregrine left me.

  He left in the night, secretly, as he had done before. This time, however, he hung back a while. I thought I heard him give a sob at the door, but when I lifted up my head, the cottage was already empty.

  So how long did I listen to the voice of my pride? The voice that clearly let me understand I’d be the laughingstock of the whole village if I ran after a youngling along the village street? Not for very long. How long does it take to string up the moccasins on your feet and snatch a cape to cover yourself? I knew to direct my steps towards the manor.

  I ran like a black storm cloud. My skirts billowed while I ran and my tears fell on the wayside moss.

  “My gift boy, my falcon . . . he was given to me and to no one else.”

  Only then did I stop, breathless, when I already saw the manor house shining on the hill. In the morning light the building in its whiteness looked almost like a noble palace, like a place of wise and important people, no clumsy peasants.

>   I thought of the manor women and my hate actually made me stop and think. By force I would not get Peregrine to return.

  Woe for me. My feet turned back to the woods by themselves. My mind spiraled towards the marsh and I started running again. Bloody saliva was collecting in my throat, and I saved and filled my mouth with it, but now my steps were lighter. I ran with increasing swiftness and force; I closed my eyes and looked at the image of the marsh.

  I pushed my way far into the marsh and then I spit my blood into the bog.

  “Come,” I cried, but I could hear no answer.

  Only now did I feel fear, but only for a passing moment. Then I cried even louder:

  “Come! I, Thistel, tell you to come!”

  I cried a third time. Now I realized my heart was thumping so hard that my whole body kept twitching. Even so, I opened my mouth to cry once more, but then I heard quiet laughter and a mocking voice repeating:

  “I, Thistel, tell you to come!” The voice went on: “Why do you think you can tell me to do things?”

  “You have always obeyed me. My powers are . . . ”

  “Your powers? You have asked and I have given. Why shouldn’t I, when you have treated me well? But now you are telling me, little one.”

  Again I heard laughter and now it had a sound that made me quickly say:

  “I’m asking again. Please come with me.”

  The laughter stopped, and there was nothing to be heard save the sounds of animals and the soft whisper of wind farther off.

  I waited some time, but finally there was nothing to it, I had to get up and walk away. I had always got everything I needed from the marsh, and brought my own little gifts to it. My eyes started to water again when I thought that now I’d perhaps lost even this—the source of my powers—because of Peregrine. No, perish the thought.