The girls listened to the song, mesmerized. They had heard it before, but the Mother’s voice was different and it carried them through these stormy events. It made the girls forget their excitement and fear for a moment, and they let the tale take them somewhere else, to another place and time in the distant past. Finally, the song died down, allowing the girls to wake up and return to reality.
After singing, the old woman stood up from beside the fire and continued.
“Remember this song and sing it to your children by fire, like your mothers have surely sung to you. Now we shall see what kind of women you really are.”
She approached them, first Aure and then Vierra, and examined them roughly from head to toe, grunting occasionally with approval.
“You will both make good mothers, but only one can be the chieftain. Aure, you are the chieftain’s daughter. Vierra is the chieftain’s niece, and not unworthy to the task. However, the ruler is not chosen by her bloodline but rather by her actions. Here you are equal.”
Her gaze gained cold determination as she continued.
“If you, Aure, become the leader, our kind will prosper at first, but people in surrounding areas will eventually come, and the Kainu shall disappear forever. If you, Vierra, are chosen, our people will suffer greatly but shall be preserved for as long as my eyes can see. In this, I have a serious decision, because if Aure comes back from here alive, she will become the leader. Those of us who have survived have always been tough and resilient, and I say now to fight until only one is left. The survivor will be the chieftain after Aure’s mother passes.”
This cruel suggestion was left hanging in the air, and the girls stared at each other, trying to read intentions. Aure jumped up, drawing the stone blade from her belt, and approached Vierra with a grim look on her face. She wouldn’t let anything come between her and her prize, no more Vierra than the Mother’s predictions. Vierra got up nimbly and backed away from her cousin’s knife. Their eyes met briefly over the gloom of the campfires. In their stare was something new, something that hadn’t been there even in their worst quarrels. Something that could not be found in the eyes of a child.
They started a round of a dangerous game in the blaze of the fires. There was not much space to move about: falling from the edge would mean a plunge downwards in the dark to the waiting rocks below. Vierra backed away for a while but had to finally let her cousin close for fear of falling down. They grabbed each other, weapons in hand, and were soon rolling on the rocky cliff top, wrestling for their lives. They tumbled over Vierra’s fire, spewing flames and a high spout of sparks as the burning wood moved violently. Both had wrestled almost as long as they had breathed, and they were equally matched in skill. Still, Aure’s sturdiness gave her an edge, and she managed to push her cousin’s knife hand to the ground as they struggled on the edge of the cliff. Aure’s knife was slowly approaching Vierra’s throat, inch by inch, until the jagged edge almost touched the glistening, sweaty skin. Shaking, they were both frozen to this position for a brief moment, and neither one seemed to be able to move forward.
Vierra swooped Aure off from on top of her in one swift motion, causing Aure to fall headfirst over the cliff’s edge. Before Aure plunged down into her death, Vierra grabbed her by the arm. Aure’s stone knife slipped from her grasp and clattered onto the rocks below, as she dangled in midair, held by her cousin. The girls gazed at each other, their eyes flashing with lightning in the dark. From the background came the eerie voice of the Mother.
“Let her go, Vierra. You will be the chieftain, and our people will live forever.”
For a brief moment, Vierra could not reach a decision. She looked into her cousin’s eyes and remembered their friendship, the runs through the forests while the village men nodded their approval, saying to one another, “Such great women they will be, but which one will lead?” She remembered how their differences and disputes had grown when they got older. Aure had tried to bend Vierra to her will, as she had bent all the other children of the tribe. Like a small chieftain, she had given orders in their games and chores as the adults watched from the side, amused. But Vierra hadn’t approved of her rule and hadn’t given in an inch. And when the spirits had taken Vierra’s parents to them, one after another, and Aure’s mother had taken the orphan girl under her wing, the competition had risen to a completely new level. Besides the authority, they now also had a common mother from whom they both wanted admiration and attention.
Nobody would blame Vierra if she allowed Aure to fall to her death. The Mother was outright demanding it of her. She would get everything that Aure now had. She would be chieftain, and the Kainu would be preserved forever. Aure would definitely not save her, if it was the other way around.
Vierra yanked Aure back up to the surface with both hands and shouted,
“This is enough! I won’t kill my cousin, no matter who tells me to do so, not even if it is you, Mother. In the morning I will leave with or without your blessing.”
The night air was cut with a rising, low-pitched laughter from the Mother’s throat.
“The chieftain’s blood truly runs in your veins. You both will have my blessing, of course. You have brought honor both to yourselves and to your people. Never again shall you enter the children’s hut.”
The Mother went silent, and neither of the girls said anything either. Aure drew a heavy breath and avoided Vierra’s gaze, a rare, secluded look on her face. They revived their fires as the burdens of the day started to slowly take their toll. Both tried to stay awake, but finally sleep took over. The last thing Vierra saw with her sleepy eyes was the Mother, poking the fire with a gentle smile on her wrinkly face.
The first and the last
Vierra winced awake and noticed she was lying on an opening that led inside the cliff. Underneath her, she could feel the cold surface of the rock, and behind her twinkled the bare, star-filled sky. Forward, somewhere in the depths of the corridor, she could see a fluttery gleam of light. Vierra got up and approached it cautiously. Soon the corridor opened up into a big cave. In the middle was a fire, and behind the flames was the Mother. She stood facing the wall, away from Vierra, painting the wall with a color as red as blood. The huge walls of the cave were covered in pictures of men, animals, and life. There were the deer, the salmon, and the moose, the most important game for the Kainu. Amid them were the gallant wolf, bear, and wolverine. The entire history of the tribe was painted on the walls. Somewhere they hunted, somewhere they loved, here and there the children ran around playfully. The gloom of the fire made the wall paintings flicker and overlap. Some showed battles against men or beasts, in which the red paint looked the most like blood. The changing light made one picture disappear, only to reveal another one beneath it. In turn, this one also disappeared and made way for a third. The movement of the lively flame made Vierra doubt her eyes, and she blinked furiously to clear them.
Extending her hearing, Vierra could discern the low voices. The pictures were alive! People were talking and animals grunting. Here and there, children laughed or cried. As Vierra kept looking, the voices became louder and more numerous until they completely filled her head and she had to close her eyes.
The Mother turned towards Vierra, and her wrinkled face was full of surprise.
“What are you doing here? It is not your time yet.”
“I don’t know. I must be dreaming.”
“A dream this is not. There must be a reason that you are here, though. You must know because you are the last.”
“The last what?”
“The last of the Kainu, the last Mother. The greatest of us all, and yet still so small and powerless. Everybody else I will paint to this wall, but in time, you will paint yourself. Then our story will have been told in its entirety, and we will all meet by the fires of the underworld. You will paint it there,” said the Mother, pointing at the only empty spot in the cave wall. Around it were only pictures of women. There were noble young women armed with spears and bows. There
were wrinkly old women sitting by their campfires. Others were giving birth, bringing new life to this world. Some dried fish in the strong winds in between winter and spring.
“What do I have to do?” asked Vierra. The fate of their tribe was making her uneasy. She could feel how tiny and insignificant she was in the middle of these majestic walls that surrounded her. “Why isn’t Aure here? Isn’t it she who will be the chieftain?”
“I do not know,” said the Mother, laughing in a tone that was not at all encouraging. “And even if I did, it is not my place to say. Your cousin’s path is not yours to travel.”
“And why did you take my father and mother? Why didn’t you take anything from Aure?”
“The Fargoer does not have a mother, the Wanderer does not have a father. When you have to decide, decide well. When you can’t affect things, bear them. When you do well, do not stop and rejoice because the next challenge will come soon and pass you by. You will perform great deeds, but your path will also be filled with great pain and sorrow. Songs are not sung of such deeds in Kainu campfires, but it doesn’t make them meaningless.”
“That means nothing,” Vierra replied. She tried to keep her anger at bay out of respect to the walls rather than the Mother.
“That is true. Luckily, your life’s troubles are not my troubles. Sleep now, but remember everything, especially this cave. You will know when it is time.” And Vierra’s eyes closed, and no dream reached her again that night.
The girls awoke to the flies buzzing. The fires had gone out a good while ago and the sun had risen to the cloudless sky, boding another hot day. However, there was a dark front of thunder far on the horizon like a huge, steep line of mountains. The girls got up and quickly readied themselves for their journey home. Both had wide smiles across their faces. Like any children, they quickly forgot the bad things they had suffered and nurtured the good things in their minds. They would be considered adults now, and would soon be celebrated by the hut fires of their people. Their child minds couldn’t yet anticipate what adulthood would bring with it. As they climbed down the cliff towards the strand, their eyes met and their smiles faded. They both knew that the events of the previous evening would be kept a secret.
What had happened on that island had changed them irreversibly, and the joys of childhood had now slipped from their grasp, forever gone.
Autumn Flames
The deer-skinned drum boomed in even rhythm. The sound was held tight by the damp autumn air and didn’t reach far outside the camp. Dreary morning rain loosened dying leaves from the trees and spread them out in a carpet, where they waited silently to decay.
The drum boomed the sound of death, the death of a chieftain. A tough woman when in her prime, the chieftain had driven the Turyans and the Vikings from their lands, and kept the southern trappers in order. Still, even she was not immune to the inevitable touch of time. Chronically sick over the summer, she had eventually lapsed to living on the floor of her hut by the time fall arrived.
The tribe’s witch Eera had been pounding the drum in the dying chieftain’s hut since early morning. It would help her journey to the other side, and once started the witch would not cease until the chieftain was either dead or had regained her health.
Few were allowed in the chieftain’s hut during this time. Only the chieftain’s daughter Aure, the witch herself, and Eera’s apprentice Rika were there. The others in the tribe were not able to carry out their deeds and chores as they should have. Preparations for the upcoming deer hunt, which took place every fall, would have to wait. The time to move to the winter dwellings drew closer every day. Everything was up in the air, though, hanging on the weakening string of life of the suffering chieftain. Whether her condition went one way or the other, it would free the tribe’s few dozen men and women to continue their lives. But as long as the drum boomed over the land, nothing would happen.
Vierra didn’t listen to the drum. She was anguished over the deathwatch, so she left the camp and her tribe and went on her way alone. Not even the restless rain delayed her departure, the storm dropping water from the skies like a river. “There goes the Fargoer,” the other tribe members whispered. Over the last two summers, the now grown-up Vierra had started to enjoy her solitude. In the winter camps she was silent, and often went to ski and hunt for meat even if it was not needed. In the summertime she disappeared, sometimes for weeks, only to return with as much fish as she could carry on her small figure. She was the best hunter in the tribe, but the others kept their distance. “She is different, the Fargoer,” the hags whispered around the evening fire. And she had taken that name as her own, as if it was hers to begin with.
On that rainy morning, Vierra didn’t go far. She checked the traps she had set the day before. The catch was not good: just a small, skinny fox that was caught in a wooden fox-trap. She finished it off with one well-aimed hit of a club and skinned the animal. It wouldn’t taste good, so she gave the skinned carcass to the folk of the earth, setting it on a big anthill. At the same time, she sang:
For the men who live below
Under forest, grassy field
Take this gift from uphill servant
Counter evil with your shield
She finished checking the remaining traps, and the gray day was not yet halfway done. Vierra didn’t want to go back to camp, so she did what she had done the day before. Alongside a small forest stream, she had built a rainproof lean-to out of twigs, sprigs, and skins greased with animal fat. There, in her small nest, she kept a fire and did her chores. Now and then, her hand reached to check a line that ended in a wormed hook made of bone -- a perfect lure for trouts. The stream gave her a couple of fatty treats, which she scorched in the fire on the end of a stick and ate with ravenous appetite.
Vierra’s gaze wandered to the rainy forest, and she felt a familiar sting of longing in her heart. Life was circling around and around on the same trail, the route she knew all too well. The old people said that she should have taken a man by now, or maybe two or more because she was such a good hunter. She had been approached with offers of marriage many times in the winter camps, but she had turned down all of them. Because her mother was dead, according to an old law, nobody could force her to take a man, and so she remained alone. This made her a unique, if frowned-upon, member of the tribe. As such, she had earned another name. Nobody dared to call her “The Frozen Fargoer” openly, but naturally, Vierra found it out. She could not care less. Why raise a family just to fit into the tribe? Everything would eventually be lost, anyway. She often remembered the things told to her by the First Mother, and those things made her no less freezing and no less a Fargoer.
While listening to the rain coming down on her grim thoughts, Vierra heard a sound that broke her out of the gloomy prison of her mind. There was a racket coming from the woods, as if something big was moving through the forest. It could not be any of her tribe; even Rika, who was the worst hunter, did not move so clumsily. Vierra went through the options in her mind. Maybe a bear or a moose? An autumn-bear would have a lot of fat under its skin, but killing it all by herself would be another matter entirely. Even if she succeeded, the bear spirit would also have to be appeased properly or misfortunes and accidents would be sure to follow. And Eera, who knew the words of appeasing best, was far away in the tribe’s camp hitting the death-drums, and wouldn’t leave to sing to spirits while this work was unfinished.
It was no bear, as Vierra soon saw while peering between the twigs, but a man: a man tall and slender, with hair yellow as swampweed burned by summer sun. He looked strange to Vierra, not sturdy like the Vikings although nearly as tall. He staggered towards her, stumbling along the uneven path. When he came closer, Vierra noticed the reason: a black-quilled arrow had gone through his thigh, its tip protruding viciously from the front. Finally, a large tree root tripped the staggering man, and he fell headlong into the bushes. Vierra realized that the man was completely spent and could not continue his swaying trek through the forest.
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Before she could decide what to do, she heard another sound and realized why the man had tried to run through the bushes wounded and exhausted. An older man followed, one who moved with a light step. This one was cast from a different mold than the man he was following: short, black-haired, and of good strength. When he saw the man he was pursuing, he drew from his waist a sharp-looking blade, as long as an arm. The blade was black and ended in a hook-like, nail-sharp point. Only a few steps separated him from his prey, and all signs were promising the yellow-haired man a quick trip to the fires of the underworld.
Why Vierra then took part in the showdown between these two unknown men completely escaped her. She would ponder that very thing during the following days, but at that moment, she did not hesitate. She pulled an arrow and armed her bow in one smooth, fast movement. In the blink of an eye, she let go the beak of death and it struck the pursuing man in the shoulder. It stuck out grotesquely, and the blade slipped from the man’s grip. His face was distorted by pain and amazement, and he fell on his knees to the damp heather.
“One more step, and the next will go through your heart,” yelled Vierra, as if her opponent could have continued the battle. Vierra was dazzled with the surprising situation as much as her own, explosive actions. The dark-haired man started a flood of foreign words, which Vierra knew to be Turyan.
Turyans lived in the north, even though sometimes they wandered in the forests close to the Kainu’s heartlands. Every Kainu knew stories of the Turyan people. Most of them painted the picture of feared Turyan witches and their grudges and blood feuds that lasted for generations. True to their image, this wounded Turyan gathered strength from somewhere. He got up, took the blade from the ground, and turned away. As he left and slowly vanished into the forest, his voice could still be heard, swearing and cursing in a multitude of languages. The yells echoed in Vierra’s ears long after he had disappeared among the trees.
Fargoer Page 2