Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron Read online

  “And before that?”

  There was a gentle pressure on his leg. Something soft was being pressed there, moss, dried lichen, something. It was soaking up his blood like a sponge, but it couldn’t hold it all.

  “And before that?”

  “I—I don’t know.…” The world was black before his eyes.

  “Do you know the origins of things, boy? The deep origins of things eternal?”

  “I don’t know what you want me to know,” Elias whispered.

  “Listen, then. For without them is no power.”

  His mouth was so dry, his hands and feet so cold. But the old man’s singing came clearly into his head, filling him with his words:

  “I will sing the birth of iron. I will tell of its creation.”

  He was in a cave of fire. Iron was cutting his leg. Blood flowed like water.

  And the man was singing, his voice strong, his words clear:

  “Iron, born of three sky maidens, daughters of the great Creator. Iron lay still in the swamp, silent in the boggy waters.…”

  The swamp: a vast bog of swirling mists. He seemed to float among them. There was no day and night there, only time and years uncounted.

  “Then came noble Ilmarinen, smith he was, who knew the iron, knew its ways and spoke its language.”

  Elias saw a man—Elias was the man, a huge man with muscled arms, his skin pitted with the marks of firesparks from the anvil. His smith’s big hands reached into the swamp and brought out a living thing, its spirit glowing with colors no one had ever seen before or since. In his hands he held it, and he knew its purpose.

  “From the iron he drew a promise, never to harm any creature, never to draw blood from mortals. Only then would he take iron, turn it from its useless ways and make it into something solid. Iron promised. Iron promised.”

  Elias heard his own voice repeating the words: “Iron promised to draw no blood.” And then he was the smith again.

  “Ilmarinen raised his hammer, shaped the iron to his purpose.”

  His right arm hammered, his left arm held, and the iron took shape … a hoe, a plow, a kettle, a pot, a pair of scissors …

  “But the smith lacked one great thing there—lacked the thing to turn the iron from dark matter to bright steel. So he asked the bees for honey, liquid sweet to temper iron. He believed the bees brought honey, and he put it in the water, plunged the red-hot iron after.”

  Bees swarmed around Elias’s head, sweet honey-bearers—or were they hornets? Angry hornets, buzzing, shouting, making it hard for him to hear the singer’s words:

  “But it was poison tempered steel there, coldest poison in the water. Iron felt the stinging—cooling, yes, but burning, stinging lye that cooled the water.”

  White steam rose up from the water where the red-hot iron raged.

  “So the iron hissed in fury, turning deadly on its maker. Iron broke its vow in anger. Sharp to cut the flesh of mankind, iron turned to blade and ax head, hardened into sword and spear point, sharp and keen and fell and deadly.”

  Elias felt each of them in his own leg, now, the sharp steel piercing him, attacking him, full of rage, freed from its promise to the smith never to draw blood.

  “That’s the origin of iron, faithless, cursed, its word all broken.”

  Elias’s leg pulsed in pain to the old man’s chant, throbbing the life out of him.

  The singing grew louder: “Once it was of little value, having neither form nor beauty. Iron, are you grown so mighty, you, the breaker of your promise? You’re like a dog, now, without honor. Weep for shame, you faithless creature, you who have betrayed your maker.”

  Elias was weeping. He was alone now, alone and old in a room filled with the words of the dead. Pages of Greek and Latin fluttered all around him, impossible to read, impossible to catch, while outside his window forests burned. And he was going to die here, with nothing.

  “Come and view your wicked doings! See what your mistakes have cost you. See what your false vows have made you.”

  There were things he was supposed to do, but he hadn’t done them. Promises he’d made, and hopes that he had had. People he should have loved, songs he should have sung.… Dreams that he had dreamed, all gone, all come to nothing.

  Strong arms were around his shoulders. “Come, amend this flood of damage.”

  His head was against the old man’s chest. “Blood, now cease your furious flowing,” the old man murmured in his ear. “If you must course like a river, flow back through this young man’s heart, flow forever in a circle through his muscles, bones, and liver, giving strength to this young hero.”

  He felt it, then, felt the stillness within and without. And his blood beat slow, slow but steady, steady like a heartbeat at the center of the world.

  There was a cup at his lips; Elias drank water cool and clear.

  “That’s the origin of iron. Know my song, my son, and learn it. Learn to hear a million stories; learn to tell a million more such. To conquer something, you must know it, know and name it, all its truths to its beginnings.”

  Through the fine summer rain, Elias smelled something like ice, like the tang of distant winter. He opened his eyes. The old man’s back was to him, bending over a fire, where a pot steamed.

  Above him, pine branches made a shelter, with a hole in the roof for the smoke to pass through.

  Elias lay exhausted, as though he’d traveled to the end of a very long road. He didn’t know if he had strength yet for the journey back. His legs ached, oh, how his legs ached—especially the left one. He was afraid to touch it, afraid to feel a gaping wound. But it hurt so much.…

  “Hush, now, boy, and still your weeping.”

  He hadn’t known he was weeping. He tried to be still.

  The old man dipped a cloth into the pot, and wrung it out, and brought it to where Elias lay. He pulled back the cloak that covered him and pressed the cloth to his leg, where the mark of the iron was still angry and red. Elias hissed in pain.

  The old man handed him the cup again, and Elias drank.

  The old man said, “I will go now to Pain Mountain. This journey I must make alone. You have traveled far already, long and far for such a young one. Rest now, sleep now, my young scholar.”

  The cup was taken from his lips, but still he heard the voice, followed it like a thread in the darkness:

  “I will ask of the Pain Maiden if she’ll do you one good favor: if she’ll take your pain and give it back to the grinding rocks and stones there. Rock and stone can better bear it than a man-child of my people. Rocks don’t groan about their anguish; stones don’t feel the pain that steel wields.”

  The smell of wild herbs, of yarrow and oak leaves and aspen, filled the shelter. And much as Elias strove to stay awake through the old man’s singing, strove to follow him in his strange words and chanting, in the end he slept.

  In the morning of that night, or maybe the next one, Elias woke with his leg healed. The flesh around the dark pink scar was clear, and the ache was dull, not sharp as stone and iron. The old peddler sat by the fire, stirring it to life.

  “You’ve returned,” Elias said.

  “How, returned? I’ve been here with you all along, and a weary watch it’s been.”

  “From Pain Mountain,” Elias said.

  The old man turned around. “You remember that, do you? You’re a quick study, my young scholar.”

  “Can you tell me of the journey? Can you show the path to get there?”

  “That is not your journey, scholar. Many years of study you’d need before you dared make that crossing, to cross safely there and back here, traveling the Threefold World.”

  “The Threefold World? What’s that?”

  “You live in it, lad.”

  Elias thought. “I only live in part of it.”

  “The middle world, aye; the land of the living. But the spirit travels between life and death, between present and past, between truth and told, between knowing and known.”


  “I’m young,” Elias said. “I can learn.”

  The old man sighed. “I told you, that is not your journey.”

  “I know the origins of iron. I remember Ilmarinen Smith, and the treachery.…”

  “Well, you’ve made a good beginning. Ask me now a different question.”

  Elias shifted on his bed of moss, feeling alive and feverish and eager. “All right. Can you really sing someone into a swamp?”

  The old man’s laugh shook the branches of the roof. “If you knew the answer, you would not be so quick to ask the question.”

  “But tell me,” Elias insisted; “what does it mean, precisely? How does it work? How do you do it?”

  The old man crouched at his side. He smelled of wild herbs, of yarrow and oak leaves and aspen. “There’s a story, old in telling, of a brash young man who thought he knew better than everyone around him. He, who was called Joukahainen, met wise old Väinämöinen on the road, Väinämöinen rich in craft and runelore. The young man challenged him to a singing contest, to test his knowledge, not once but many times—until, in great annoyance, old Väinämöinen lost his temper and sang runes of power, runes that brought the young man up to his chin in swamp water.”

  “And how did the young man get out of it?”

  “Did I say he did?”

  “Did he?”

  “He promised Väinämöinen the thing he wanted most.”

  Elias felt himself drifting off to a sleep of utter weakness, a sleep of healing. “What do you want?” he managed to say.

  “I want you to sleep now,” the old man said, and he did.

  The next time Elias woke, yellow sunlight poured in the smoke hole and wove its way between the pine fringe of the roof.

  The old man was crouched by the door to the little shelter, his cloak wrapped around himself, a bundle at his side. Next to Elias, on a broad leaf, sat a cup of water and some thick brown bread.

  “Well, I’m off,” the old man said. “I’ve got a cartful of things to unload, and no time to waste.”

  “Wait.” Elias propped himself up on his elbows.

  The old man said, “I’ve waited long enough.”

  “Take me with you,” said Elias.

  The peddler shook his head. “You’re right off the Turku road; you’ll find your way.”

  Elias struggled to rise. “I want to go with you. I want to know what you know.”

  “What I know? That’s many lifetimes of men and women.”

  “No, wait—”

  If he could just keep him talking, delay his departure, ask the right question …

  “You’ve your own journey to make, young scholar. And already you’ve begun it.”

  And then Elias realized he’d just been given the answer.

  “Many lifetimes of men and women.” Elias repeated the traveler’s words. “We have that knowledge already. Written in books.”

  “My book has not yet been written.”

  “Then I shall write it,” Elias said.

  The old man turned at last and smiled. Even in the shelter’s dimness, his eyes were very blue and clear. “There’s the Threefold Path, my young one. There’s the way between the worlds: worlds of telling, worlds of hearing, worlds of knowing, worlds of truth.”

  “But if I do write it down—all the stories, all the singing—will that make it … Won’t it ruin it somehow?”

  “How can writing ruin singing? How can stories ruin truth?”

  Elias nodded slowly.

  “Stitch together what’s been lost, young tailor.”

  “The origins of our people—it’s all still out there, isn’t it? Like the Greeks, and the Romans, even—it’s our story, and we must tell it. That’s a different kind of magic.” For the first time he used the word, and hardly even noticed he was using it. “But it’s all the same, isn’t it?”

  Outside, a horse snorted and whinnied impatiently. The old man gathered up his bundle.

  “Wait,” said Elias. The man turned his head to him. “Will I see you again?”

  “Head far eastward when you seek me. Ask for tales of Väinämöinen when you go among the old ones. Ask the women by the hearth fires. Ask the healers, ask for runelore. Ask and listen, write and listen … Travel far, and travel farther. Stitch together what’s been lost.”

  Elias worked all summer, going from village to village, making and mending for the money he needed to pay for school. And at summer’s end, he walked the dusty roads back to Turku. His friends were glad to see him—and they were wise enough to hide their surprise when, in addition to his Greek and Latin studies, Elias began sitting next to them on the benches of Doctor Becker’s classes. He listened silently as Becker lectured on the Finnish language. He said nothing as Becker discussed the strange traditions of the Karelian peasants, and what hidden truths might lie buried in the fragments of song that the women sang to soothe their children’s fevers, the teasing games the girls played in the fields, and the long stories that bearded men sang to each other by the winter’s fires, clasping hands across from one another as they chanted legends of half-remembered heroes.

  It took Elias years to earn enough to see himself through university, and his debts were heavy when he left. He went to work for the government up north in the gray town of Kajaani, serving as a physician among poor and ignorant people ravaged by disease and epidemics. But the eastern lands of Karelia were not so far from there. And when summer came, he set out by boat and by horse to find out how far east he could go, and what the people there knew, and remembered.

  Year after year he went out seeking, writing and collecting as he went. He learned the songs of these far people, who remembered tales the rest of their country had forgotten. He wrote them down, he sang them himself … and when bits were missing, he walked the paths of the Threefold World and found what he needed. Then he wrote down what he heard there, in the places inside himself where the truth of the songs lived, to complete the tales.

  And when he felt he had the whole story, the missing pieces of his people, he stitched it all together into a book he called The Kalevala: Old Karelian Runes from the Finnish People’s Ancient Times.

  Now the Finnish people had their story, and stood as a nation among other nations. Soon their language became the language of scholars, and even of judges, banks, and politicians. Great composers took the legends, made them into famous pieces loved by people the world over. Artists painted Väinämöinen, sculpted the young Joukahainen. Children studied Elias Lönnrot’s book he called The Kalevala.

  When he was an old man, honored by his countrymen and foreign scholars alike, Elias Lönnrot was still a humble person.

  Everyone knew what he was, though.

  But these were modern times, times of steel and iron. Men rode iron engines on steel rails from city to city. They fought their wars with iron guns, bound their ships with iron keels, sent messages by steel wires that sang across the ocean.

  But Elias Lönnrot had descended through the world of struggle and the world of loss, to find the meaning at the heart of things, to find the origins of creation, the origins of his own people.

  And so everyone called Elias Lönnrot a poet, a writer, a scholar.

  And no one ever said: Elias is a witch.

  THE WITCH IN THE WOOD

  DELIA SHERMAN

  WHEN I FIRST saw my true love, he was lying by a brook at the foot of a bog oak. One foot trailed in the water, his eyes were closed, his nostrils flared with his panting, and his branching horns tangled among the roots of the oak. An arrow was buried deep in his haunch, fouling his pelt with blood.

  The arrow was mine.

  I did not know then that he was my true love. I thought he was a winter cloak, a pair of mittens, meat for my larder, fat for my fire, bones for needles and spoons and buttons and combs. I thought he was an eight-point stag.

  I’d been chasing him for some time; the sun, which had been above the mountain when I’d shot him, had sunk into the western valley. In my forest,
it was already dusk, but I saw him clearly enough, his tawny coat pale against the dark moss. As I crept nearer, my knife ready to slit his throat, the sky flared crimson as the sun set. The air shivered; I blinked. When I opened my eyes, the deer was a man, his long dark hair braided with twigs and small, polished stones, naked and bleeding, with my arrow in his thigh.

  Living in the forest, I was used to transformations. Caterpillars become butterflies, blossoms become berries, tadpoles become frogs with the turning of each season. Deer becoming men, however, was beyond my experience. Before I could recover myself, he had seized the shaft of the arrow and pulled it from his leg with a hiss of pain.

  It was a brave thing to do, but not a wise one. Blood welled from the wound in a mortal stream that I knew would soon drain him. I crashed through the undergrowth that separated us and dug my knife into the moss, cutting out a handful to pack into the hole my arrow had made. I pressed against the moss to hold it firm, feeling the prickling in my hands that would stem the flow. Only when I knew the blood had clotted did I remove my hands and rip the sleeve from my linen shirt to make a bandage.

  Neither of us said a word.

  Very conscious of his eyes on me, I dug a fire pit and lined it with rocks and wood, then took up a dry stick and told it to burn. As it bloomed into flame, he gasped—the first sound he’d made since drawing my arrow from his thigh.

  “Witch,” he said.

  “No. Mildryth.”

  He huffed—a very deerlike noise. “I mean, you are a witch.”

  I wasn’t about to admit I didn’t know the word. He was a man, after all, and although I’d never actually spoken to a man before, my mother had always told me men respected only those stronger than they. So, “That’s as may be,” I said.

  “I cannot stay here, witch. You must heal me.”

  I have never liked the word must, even when said in a voice as sweet as birdsong. “I must do as I think best. I’ve stopped the bleeding, but the wound has to heal at its own pace. I’d like it best if I could get you under a roof, but here will do until you’re fit to walk.”