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.Loviatar’s Hollow.They feared theresidue of the plague-bringer; the very air she had breathed waspolluted by her evil.No.The evil Louhi had planted here wasn’tdead.Not quite.Some drainage of human soul was feeding it,nursing it back to full strength.The lambent fungus was the sign.And Loviatar’s hut was tenanted again.The numbness in his upheld hand, the throbbing in his arm, and akind of stubborn compulsion, pulled him in a stumbling rush, downto the hut.“Varjo! Let me in, witch!”When, finally, the door cracked open, Wayne rammed a boot inso that she could not close it again.A heavy jolt of shoulder and hewas in.One fast look took in the lot.One miserable room, immaculate,like the village huts, and with the usual open hearth fire, cookingpot athwart; a mean pine table set with cracked earthen dishes anda thick tallow candle to soot up the low ceiling and cast shadowsalong the stark bare walls to the bunk bed in one comer and apine-needle pallet in another.He turned to Varjo.Without the furs she was sapling slim, child-young in one simplegarment like a limp bleached rag.Her feet were bare.Her triangularface, with those enormous deep gray eyes, showed defiant fear.Desperation, too.The way her little calloused hands curled into fistsas she faced him suggested a wild forest thing who had been fed oncurses and crusts all of its days.Wayne gave a gesture indicating peace, so that she would relaxand not breathe so hard.He smiled wryly.If Varjo was a witch,then the witch business wasn’t what it used to be.“I’m not going to kill you, you little thief,” he told her.He held uphis left arm.“Look what you did!”“Nün! Serves you well, No-Beard!” she flared.From a slip of a girl “No-Beard” was an insult.It impugned hismanhood.The Vanhat, like the ancient Chinese, deferred to age, nothothead youth.Years brought wisdom and experience and largereindeer herds; “no-beards” were unsure scatterwits.Wayne hadattempted to fall in with the beard fetish but it itched him andbothered him, so, in spite of the howls of the elder heroes, eachmorning he scraped his face clean with his pukko.He countered her implication with a wide grin.“You know better,witch.One moment more in that snowbank and—”Her scarlet face stopped him.“Ai!” she clucked, lifting his limptourniqueted arm.“How deep!”“Had I known you were that hungry I’d have given you themeasly rabbit.” His glance roved to the hearth, where hung theemaciated white life-fragment, dripping its last blood into thecooking pot.“Sit,” Varjo said.She whisked about the pitiful mishmash of belongings, selectingan undergarment from a box of neatly folded rags for a bandageand a sung.First an herb poultice that stung like fire and set Wayneto coughing with its gaseous pungency.The wand-lithe warmth ofher nearness made his heart hammer.Varjo, in spite of her firmbreasts and womanly thighs, couldn’t possibly be more thansixteen, yet her teaching was of the forest; she had seen the animalsmate and give birth.She was a child of nature, her life one ofself-denial and dedication to her ancient grandmother; her wilinesswas a fox’s; cunning and craft were concommitants of life itself.Her lank chestnut hair showed auburn glints in the firelight andfell gracefully about her bare neck and throbbing throat.Thethree-cornered pixie’s face with the dimpled chin and thoseincredibly large liquid gray eyes—like a field mouse—began to get toWayne.Here was a girl who had had nothing, or next to it, all ofher life.Who expected nothing.Blows, perhaps, Or a fire of faggots.Who nibbled at the grainhouse stores like a mouse, stealing onlywhat she and her grandmother needed to survive, then fleeing intothe night like a shadow.Wayne watched her intent face as she dressed his arm, the deftmovements of her strong hands; he saw no witch.Others might.Not he.It was impossible that this mouse-eyed creature of thewoods could be evil.She had defended herself from chastisementor-and rape the best way she could.He couldn’t very well blame herfor that!A weird moan from the pine bunk startled him out of his reverie.Varjo moved across the room anxiously.She bent down andstroked the amorphous lump under the dark homespun blanket.Shecrooned to it softly.Then, unmindful of Wayne now, she took abowl from the table and filled it with broth from the steaming firepot.She knelt by the bed with it.“Your grandmother?” he asked.She nodded, eyes shining with tears.“I thought she mightalready be…” She let the fearful word wisp away.Wayne moved his chair closer, and watched Varjo spoon the thingruel into a toothless inbent gap of mouth like a dark funnel.Rheumy eyes stared blankly up from a face so wrinkled and blackthat it looked like a monkey’s face.Wayne repressed a shudder.Thiswoman, besides being blind, could never have been even tolerable.She belonged deep in a forest.He thought about blind Loviatar…While she fed the old crone Varjo crooned to her as a mother singsnonsense to a baby, now and then pausing to stroke her limpmottled hands.“Since she can’t see, or move any more, she likes me to talk andsing to her.I make up words.”Good thing some snooping beldam from the village had notcaught her performances, Wayne thought.The gibberish smacked ofheathen incantation.“Tell me about you two,” he said.Varjo poised spoon and sighed.“There isn’t much to tell.Wecame from Ulappala ten or eleven summers ago—”“That’s where Loviatar came from,” Wayne mused.“What’s itlike up there?”“Wild,” Varjo said.“Wild and beautiful.It is north and east ofImari, near to the land of the Norseman.Ulappala is on a fjord,with rugged cliffs on either side and the wind blows always and thesea smashes on the gray rocks.The ground yields a scant harvestand grazing for the herds is scant, too.Ai, Ulappala is a grim coldland but my first small memories of it are warm ones.” She ended ona wistful note.“What about Loviatar?”Varjo avoided his eyes.“I was very young.But I lived in themiddle of the horror.I saw my mother and father die of thepestilence she brought.Mummu had the fever, too.It marked her.Itmade her ugly, and blinded her.That was one of Loviatar’spleasures: to make ugly, like herself, then die.“But Mummu didn’t.She recovered; she fled with me down to theLakes.I was her eyes.I was stupid and childish, but I learned fastbecause I had to.Every village we tried chased us away or tried tostone us.It was the fear.Loviatar had traveled from village tovillage, too, begging.Their fear of another brought them to the pointof insanity [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]