Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron Page 17

  Which was, as Elias said, no great surprise. The Finnish tongue was all very well for cowherds and shepherds. Village mothers sang to their children in Finnish—it was the mother tongue, yes, but once one left childhood behind, it was good for no greater purpose. What had their backward nation contributed to the world? If you could even call it an actual nation at all, after centuries of Swedish rule.

  “You’re wrong,” said his friend Johan. “Come to Doctor Becker’s lectures with us, and you’ll hear differently. Finnish was once the tongue of a people rich in culture, rich in legend, as rich as the Greeks—who were also cowherds and shepherds themselves, by the way.”

  “I’ll have to remember that, Johan,” Elias said sarcastically. “Hesiod’s Works and Days lauds the glories of Greek husbandry, and of course, Virgil went even further in his bucolic Eclogues. Excellent point, Johan—or should I call you Jukka, since that’s your Finnish name, isn’t it?”

  “Shut up,” said Johan.

  “The one your mother calls you, I mean?”

  “I said shut up, Elias.”

  “Seriously, though; if you’re such a champion of the Finnish tongue now, why do you still use a Swedish name?”

  “You both shut up,” grumbled Fredrik, whose week it was for the middle of the bed, so he was nice and toasty, and wanted to sleep. “Shut up or I’ll sing you into the swamp.”

  “Your voice is ugly enough to sing anyone into a swamp,” retorted Elias, just to have the last word.

  But he didn’t get it. “And where do you think that threat comes from?” Johan persisted. “To ‘sing someone into the swamp’? What does it even mean?”

  They were all speaking Finnish now, even Elias. “I just said: it’s to have a voice as bad as Fredrik’s.”

  “It’s spells,” said Johan solemnly. “Doctor Becker says that our ancestors sang spells they believed were so powerful they could change the world around them.”

  “Just by singing?” asked Ludvig, who loved music.

  “There were words, too, special words they chanted in a kind of singsong.”

  “Oh,” Ludvig said abruptly, and went quiet.

  “How do you sing someone into a swamp?” Fredrik demanded.

  Johan shivered. “By making him go where he doesn’t want to go, I guess.”

  Fredrik murmured: “By making the boggy, smelly, muddy waters rise up around him …”

  “That sounds useful.” Elias refused to be drawn into the delicious horror. “There’s a few people I’d like to try that out on.”

  The others chuckled. “If that’s an old Finnish spell,” Fredrik added, “too bad we’ve forgotten how it goes.”

  “Up in Kuhmo,” Ludvig said quietly, so quietly Elias could barely hear him, “in my village, there’s an old woman from Karelia province who sings when people get sick. She talks to things that aren’t there.”

  “She talks to diseases?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Do people get better?”

  “My brother,” Ludvig said. “I’m not saying it worked or anything, but—”

  “What happened?”

  “He was—Well, it was horrible. I can’t say. We thought he would die. And the old woman came in where he lay, and started chanting, sort of singing, sort of like telling a tale, only then it was like she was talking to someone … Pain Maiden, she called her; Pain Maiden of Pain Mountain. She asked her to take the pain from my brother and give it to the rocks of the mountain.”

  “And it worked?”

  “My brother married his sweetheart that spring; they have two children now.”

  “Aww.” Fredrik rumpled his friend’s hair. “You’re Uncle Ludvig!”

  “You should tell Doctor Becker,” Johan said seriously. “He’s always looking for people who know the old songs. He thinks they’re clues to our past.”

  “Our glorious past?” Elias mocked. “You mean the one with magical village witches? That’s pathetic, Johan—even at home in backward little Sammatti village, we don’t go in for stuff like that.”

  Johan grabbed Elias’s arm and twisted it behind his back. “Are you calling Doctor Becker an idiot?”

  “I’m saying this is the modern age.” Elias refused to struggle, although it hurt. He would not let them pull him down to their level. If they wanted to act like the Finnish cowherds they so admired, instead of like true scholars, let them. “We fight diseases with learning, not with singing and superstition.”

  “If you’re so modern, Elias, why are you so in love with ancient Greek?”

  “Because it is the origin of all that makes us what we are today.”

  “Tales of long-dead heroes?”

  “The glories of the world,” Elias growled through clenched teeth. “You could learn a lot from them.”

  “It’s all just singing, Lönnrot—admit it. Even The Aeneid starts with ‘Arms and the man I sing.… ’ ”

  “Speaking of singing,” said Ludvig, who loved music and peace, and thought it was time for both, “who’s for singing with me out in the Square tomorrow?”

  They did that, the poor students of Turku: they sang in the street for passersby, hats out collecting money to buy a meal. If singing didn’t bring money, the next step was begging, going house to house for scraps from a kindly pot—and nobody wanted to do that unless they really had to.

  But that winter they did have to. Even Elias—especially Elias, whose family had used up all they had just to send him to school in Turku to feed his hunger for learning. He went with Ludvig and Johan and Fredrik, and his hollow cheeks and burning eyes often spoke louder than his friends’ attempts at charm with the serving maids and the daughters of the house.

  They were all glad when spring came. It was a warm spring; the green shoots of the birches budded early, and the birch forests to the east of the city were like slender white women dancing with ribbons in their hair.

  Eastward was the way Elias went, the day after he took his final exam on The Odyssey, the story of a man’s long voyage home. He wasn’t going home, though, and he wasn’t going to beg; he was going to make his living earning next year’s tuition in the way his father had shown him: as a tailor, stitching together what others could not.

  The first day was the hardest. He’d grown unused to walking country roads. His feet were sore, his shoulder ached under his satchel, his neck itched under his collar, and he was incredibly bored with nothing to read. He wasn’t looking forward to the next few weeks, either: camping in farmsteads and little villages with people who wouldn’t know a book if it bit them on the rear, taking their orders and mending their rough old garments, all the while listening to them yattering away in their clicketyclackety rustic Finnish on such fascinating subjects as taxes and sheep. Or maybe barley and sheep. Or, if he was lucky, sheep and taxes and barley and rye. At least they’d have food. Elias sighed, and tugged at his satchel strap.

  That’s when it began to rain.

  Elias looked around him up and down the road, and then from side to side. Nothing but trees, trees, and more trees, with probably a lake beyond them. He turned up his collar, and plodded on.

  Suddenly, ahead of him, he heard something: A voice, raised in a song of sorts—but not the sort of song he knew. It was monotonous, repetitive, more of a chant, really; lines promising a story that never quite ended or began.

  He couldn’t make out the words.

  Around the bend he saw a cart, drawn by a tired old horse. Elias lifted his hand. “Hold up!” he called in simple Finnish. “Hold up a moment!”

  The cart slowed and stopped in the middle of the road. The driver was an old man, but large and hale, his great hands energetic on the reins. A long white beard covered as much of his chest as you could see above the old-fashioned cloak that enfolded him, and his face was shadowed by a broad-brimmed hat.

  “What is it, lad?” He spoke with a heavy Karelian accent. An easterner, then, from the far provinces bordering Russia, a land whose folk sent pine tar and huge
pine tree trunks down their sweeping rivers to the shipyards and harbors of the south.

  “Where did you just come from?” Elias asked him. “What’s up ahead?”

  “Nothing you need, lad, nothing you want.”

  Elias hadn’t eaten all day. He was wet and cold, and not in the mood for games. “You don’t know what I want. Just tell me, how far is the next village? Or is there an inn or steading where I could take shelter?”

  “Young man,” the driver said, “I’m just an old peddler. I’ve come a long way, and I’ve a long way to go. My cart is full of whatever people want to buy. If you don’t want what I’ve got, my lad, then stand aside and let me pass. For it’s raining, if you hadn’t noticed, and night comes on whether we like it or not.”

  “You’ll make it to Turku well before nightfall.”

  “Who said I’m going to Turku?”

  “You’re on the road to Turku.”

  The old man drew his cloak around him. “A lot you know.”

  “I’m telling you, I’ve just come from there this morning. On foot. With your horse cart, you’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

  “What would I be doing in great Turku, lad?”

  “What you do anywhere. Sell things! You’re a peddler, aren’t you?”

  “What I have, in great Turku they don’t want.”

  “Perhaps so. There are, after all, fine shops in Turku,” Elias said rudely. “And what’s for sale there under your canvas? Pots and pans for farmwives, dried fish from the coast, ribbons and kettles, tobacco and soap. Maybe you’re better off turning around and going back the way you came.”

  “With you up beside me, to spare your tender feet?” The old man laughed. The rain dripped from his hat. And rain dripped down Elias’s neck. He was beginning to be sorry he’d been so rude. A ride on a cart, even with this ignorant Karelian, seemed more and more attractive.

  “I just meant—I mean, you might find more business if you go down a side road to a smaller town.”

  “Maybe so.” The man leaned out over his horse. “Come closer, lad, and tell me what you do out on the Turku road this day.”

  Elias held his head up proudly, feeling the weight of his satchel, half of it books in there, well wrapped in oilcloth. “I am a scholar.”

  “A scholar! That’s a fine way to make a living. Are you off to teach your learning somewhere?”

  “I know many things,” Elias said, unwilling to tell the truth, but strangely unwilling to lie to the bright blue eyes beneath the dripping hat brim. “I’ll gladly speak to those who care to listen.”

  “Well, that’s a start. Hop up, then, lad, and let’s see where all this is going.”

  Elias scrambled up onto the cart next to the old man, who shifted his cloak to reveal a dry patch of wood for him to sit on. From his perch on the cart, he saw two narrow roads branching off to the left and right ahead—roads he must have passed without seeing them, for hadn’t he just come from there?

  “Now, where away?” the man said softly to himself. And, softly, he began to sing. Elias waited. Singing, the man’s accent was even heavier, the words incomprehensible.

  “If we—” Elias said, and the man stopped singing and nodded.

  “Very well, then,” the peddler said. He clucked to the horses, and the cart lumbered forward and off to the northward track.

  Under the thick pine trees there was even less light, but they barely felt the rain, though it still whispered above them on the uppermost branches.

  “So, my young scholar,” the old man said, “tell me what you know.”

  Elias thought. What could interest a rustic Karelian peddler, and pay for his ride to the next town? “Well,” he began: “In Turku there are great buildings, some four stories high, as tall as that pine tree.”

  “Trees grow, and then they fall, and so must your great buildings someday.”

  “In Turku market square, hundreds of people gather every day to buy and sell.”

  “In Tuonela of the Dead, the hundreds gather in their hundreds, and there is no end to their days.”

  “To Turku harbor, great four-masted ships sail from every corner of the world.”

  “And when they have no one to sing wind into their sails, they are as still as earth.”

  Elias sighed. “If Turku holds no interest, shall I tell you of the Fall of Troy?”

  “Since it fell, what use is it to you or me?”

  The old man started singing under his breath again. Elias caught some of the words: Golden friend … dearest brother …

  in my mouth the words are melting … Northland … Sampo … Kalevala …

  “What’s that you’re singing?”

  “Oh, lad … Don’t you know your own people’s stories? I sing the origins of things. Once they were on everyone’s lips, the tales of Ilmarinen Blacksmith; of Mielikki, forest goddess, healer, far more lovely than the moonlight; and of wise old Väinämöinen. Sisters sang them at the well, and the water ran sweet. Mothers sang them in the night, and their children slept safe. Uncles sang them by the fire, and the fire burned bright. Wise men sang them at the hearth, and illness fled the house. Now, even children know neither the words nor the tunes. And in this evil age, time is running out.”

  “Time ran out long ago,” said Elias Lönnrot sadly.

  “Do you believe that?” the old man asked. “You who are so young and full of a young man’s strength?”

  “The glories of the world are long, long past,” Elias said, staring out at the trees and the rain. “Mighty Hector died at Troy, and Achilles dragged his body round the walls. Aeneas, who carried his noble father Anchises on his back to safe haven from burning Troy, who loved Dido at Carthage and founded Rome—”

  “Those names and heroes are not for you, my boy. Not you.”

  “Oh no?” Elias nearly fell off the cart, so quickly did he turn and face the speaker. “That is where you are wrong. For haven’t I spent every minute God sends in reading and study? And don’t I know the Greek and the Latin of the ancient heroes, and the stories that go with them? Noble verses, noble lines full of—” He slapped his hand on the cart’s side. “Oh, there’s not even any word in this miserable Finnish for the beauty, the—the—fineness, the grace—”

  “Tell me,” the old man said.

  “Tell you what? You think I’m just some stupid jumped-up peasant boy with ideas above his station, is that it? You think I’m not fit to know things my fathers didn’t know. Not to raise my head above the dirt, not to know what the wise men of the world know—”

  “What you know …” The man sighed. “What you know are children’s tales. What you lack is understanding.”

  “Are you saying that my scholarship is worth nothing?”

  “Can you tell the origins of true things? Can you mend a horse’s leg, or a horseshoe, with it? Or a broken bone, or a broken heart?”

  “No one can mend a broken heart. But I can mend what I can mend.” And Elias took from his bag his sewing kit. “You think me a useless fellow. You may not like my stories. But my hands are not useless. That raveled tear at the hem of your cloak, I can mend that as good as new, with a good, strong patch so you’ll never even know it was there. How’s that for payment for the ride?”

  “Did I ask for any payment, lad?”

  “You don’t like my stories,” Elias said stiffly. “Don’t leave me with useless hands.”

  The old man shrugged. “Very well, then. Show me what you can do.”

  In the little space on the seat between them, Elias laid out his tools: his bone needle case, his card of threads, his good iron scissors, a parcel of pins, and scraps of cloth still good enough for patches.

  “You’ll be careful with all that,” the man said. “There’s ruts in the road.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  Carefully Elias chose the best patch to match the peddler’s cloak (though in the dim light, he could not be perfectly sure of the exact color, for sometimes the cloak seemed gre
en, sometimes gray, and sometimes brown, like the forest itself); he threaded the needle and stuck it in his jacket lapel for safekeeping. Then he took the raveled hem of the peddler’s cloak, and folded the scrap around it, and took up the iron scissors to trim it to just the right size.

  That’s when it happened. Elias felt the horse stumble, felt the iron slip in his hand. He felt the point of the scissors dig deep into his leg, skating down into his thigh. He saw the blood spurt out—and then, in the next moment, he felt it, too.

  “Ptruuu!” He heard the man call to the horse to stop. Elias had his hand closed over his thigh, but the blood was coming through. It was as if his body was a river that couldn’t stop flowing. He saw it pooling on the floor of the cart by his feet. He stared stupidly; he didn’t know what to do.

  “The iron, boy—give me the iron!”

  Elias was still clutching the scissors, holding them in hands slippery with blood. In his right hand, the cold iron was pressed against the wound. He was afraid to let go, afraid to stop holding.

  “Open,” the man’s voice said. “Open once, then close.”

  The scissors slid from his grasp, like a knife from a wound.

  “Now tell me, boy, and tell me if you can, the origin of iron?”

  Why was that important? He was feeling dizzy, now, dizzy and sick. But the man’s question sounded urgent. “A blacksmith hammers it,” Elias managed to say.

  “And before that?”

  “He melts it. In a fire.” He closed his eyes against the dizziness.

  “And before that?”

  The question rang in his ears, over and over. He couldn’t ignore it, though he barely had strength to speak. He had to say something. He searched the darkness for an answer. “Uh … mined. Dug. Out of the earth.”

  “And before that?”

  What did the old man want of him? This wasn’t a schoolroom. Couldn’t he see that Elias was bleeding to death, here on the forest road? Or was it the forest? Where was the cart? He smelled wood smoke, and felt soft bracken beneath him. No rain was falling on him now. He tried to open his eyes, but the darkness swam in front of them.