The Shortest Night

Illustration by John Stevens

Wistfully the tangomeister warbled. The tango combo twanged and plainted away on violin, guitar, and accordion. Cymbals provided a rippling punctuation. Music in a minor key, suitable for public courtship. Courtship, of a sort, was in progress in Momma Rakasta’s establishment as the black sailors and the white hostesses smooched around the dance floor or chatted at tables over barley-beers, blueberry liqueurs, glasses of spirit.

The decor was gilt and plush, the curtaining velvet. The glass shades of the oil lamps were multicolored mosaics. The tubby baritone vocalist and his bandsmen wore matching lace shirts and black breeches, with red ribbon rosettes on their knees. Chum-chum-chum, was the rhythm.

Words and music were maudlin in a deeply affecting way. This tango might have been caressing and gentling the sailors—proclaiming at them to moderate their behavior in case some drunken brawl threatened to trash the establishment or cause abuse to the young ladies.

Young Andrew, whom Bosco was keeping an eye on, had paired off with a willowy lass. Bosco’s own hostess, chosen after some deliberation, was a bit older than most of the girls. This appealed to Bosco since she would have some depth.

Astrid was tall and full figured, in her billowy white linen blouse and bountiful skirt of red and blue stripes. Her blue bodice, unbuttoned, exhibited blouse-clad tits which had form. Her long hair was a flaxen yellow.

“What is a Conga?” she asked Bosco. The Conga was the name of the four-master he sailed on.

“It’s a long file of dancers. Each claspin’ the waist of the one in front.” He mimed clutching her waist, though they were both sitting down. “It kind o’ suggests all the successive positions of our ship on the chart as she skips across the sea from one day to the next. Also, there’s a mighty river in old Africa away on Earth called the Conga.”

“Do you speak African at home down south in Pootara?”

“Naw, my darling. We mostly speak Anglo-lingo, just like the folks at the Earthkeep in Landfall, though we can all talk Kalevan too. Every immigrant imbibes Kalevan in their dreams on the way to this world, whether they’re whites destined for up here with its passions and manias, or blacks bound for the south and the life of sweet reason. Now the Conga, fine ship, she’s what we call a hermaphrodite schooner—meanin’ that she carries fore-and-aft an’ also square-rigged sails to make her fast and lean. I’m no hermaphrodite,” and he winked.

“I’m sure you aren’t.” Astrid played with her hair. “Do you sail to Tumio as well?”

That was the other deep-sea port, six hundred keys westward. Where the mana-bishop dwelled in his palace next to the baroque yellow-brick temple of magic. At Tumio, a major river spilled into a bay. This made commerce with the interior easier than at Portti, from which goods needed to be hauled onward by land and by lake.

“All black newcomers travel via Tumio, to gain passage across the isle-crowded ocean to Pootara where democracy and level-headedness prevail…” Bosco couldn’t resist a little boast.

“It must be lovely there,” she murmured. “In Pootara.”

“You aren’t from hereabouts, are you?” he asked, and she shook her head.

Maybe Bosco was moved by the sentimental tango music.

“I can’t help feeling that you’re a bit of a castaway here in Portti, Astrid. A castaway of the land rather than of the sea.”

“Cast a sway,” she sang softly. She sounded as though she was echoing him, but not really.

“Shall we go upstairs?” he proposed.

She wasn’t ready yet. “Another glass of blueberry, first?”

“Fine by me.”

“There’s no magic in Pootara at all?”

“No sways, no manias, no proclaimers bespeakin’ people, no shamans, no cuckoo birds. The way I see it, Astrid, we come to Kaleva courtesy of that living asteroid starship-thing that calls itself the Ukko. Now, Earth has built shuttle-ships to load the Ukko an’ unload it, but that Ukko has its own agenda involvin’ compellin’ folks to live out all sorts o’ colorful stories up here in the north for its amusement. I bet cuckoos are communicatin’ with Mother Ukko mentally all the time. Us blacks are in the south by way of ballast an’ stability, so that everyone don’t go nuts on this world. You white folks here in the north are sorta like the pets of the Ukko. As compensation, you get a whole land out here among the stars, wherever here is—and no ’stronomer’s ever been able to say for sure—”

Unaccountably, Astrid shuddered.

“—and mebbe it’s never-never-space the Ukko brings us to, not in the same universe as Earth at all.”

She nibbled at her lip. “What about the Isi snakes and their Juttie slaves? The snakes use their own Ukkos to reach here. They seem to know more than us.”

“Seem to; so people say. Mebbe the Ukkos use them alien snakes as different sorts of toys, to add spice to the pudding. Have you ever seen a Jut-tahat?”

“Yes…” She wouldn’t enlarge on this.

Astrid’s breasts did indeed have form. Her left breast also possessed something else.

Upstairs in one of the boudoirs, after transacting the first bout of business—over which we’ll draw a discreet blanket or silken sheet—Bosco reclined, studying her tattoo.

It was an elaborate one: of a cuckoo bird with a white milkcup flower in its beak.

Being situated within an inch of a nipple, which was just like a pink bub-berry, the milkcup bloom seemed well suited to its location. But a cuckoo? Plumes of verdigris and rust. Big snoopy yellow eyes. Eavesdropping feline ears.

One of the bird’s feet was crippled and twisted. This had to be an illustration of a specific cuckoo, not just a picture of cuckoos in general.

Northerners used cuckoos to send a message or brag about some great deed, after feeding a bird a dollop of offal and calling out to it, “Ukko-ukkoo, hark to the story and tell the tale!” Since all cuckoos (except for this one) looked much the same, you couldn’t be sure that the bird that harked was the same one that subsequently repeated the words, twenty or fifty keys away, next day or ten days later.

And you couldn’t ask the birds if they communicated telepathically, because they didn’t ever confide anything about themselves. As for coercing a bird to answer—or trapping one to fix an identity ring round its scrawny ankle—that was totally taboo. Captive cuckoo in a cage, puts all Kaleva in a rage. Awful woe would follow. The bird on Astrid’s left tit couldn’t have gotten its injury from any act of human pique or meddling.

“I’m thinkin’ there’s a strange story inscribed on your bosom, Astrid. Right next to your heart, you might say—”

He was aware that his hooded eyes lent him a drowsy look, inspiring confidence. Yet she drew away.

“It’s past and best forgotten.”

“How can you forget, when it’s pictured on your own skin?”

She wouldn’t answer.

Bosco had paid for a full night in the boudoir. He had advised Andrew likewise, lending him some silver marks and a golden or with the mad Queen’s head on it.

He dozed, as one does when sated; and woke around midnight. Astrid wasn’t abed. Silhouetted naked on a stool, she was gazing out of the little half-open window at the grey gloaming of the shortest night, which was still clear of clouds.

He watched her for a while, admiring and anticipating yet also aware that this nightwatch she was keeping held some deep meaning for her.

Presently, he slid himself out of bed. Softly he padded over to her. He could tell by Astrid’s breathing that she hoped he wouldn’t overwhelm this moment with hanky-panky. So he just hunkered down beside her. Out in town, bonfire lights were flickering. Distant noises of revelry drifted. Very likely some people would be settling old scores. Fueled by booze, the murder rate soared on this briefest night of the year.

The window faced north, away from the sky-sickle that spanned the southern horizon. From Portti, on account of the cliffs of its fjord, only the very top of that silver bridge was visible—that ring of debris from a long-since disintegrated moon that had come too close to the planet. From this window, the sickle wasn’t visible at all. Few stars pricked the luminous gloom where night and day were joining hands. The brightest body was the gas-giant world, like a tiny masthead lantern far away.

“There’s Otso,” he murmured.

Essentially the sky looked empty.

“All the stars have drowned in the sea,” he joked gently. “Us mariners like to see a few constellations.”

“I don’t.” Even though it was warm, Astrid shivered.

“The Archer and the Cow, the Harp… and the Cuckoo,” he hinted, “the Cuckoo.”

Of a sudden, she began to talk hauntedly. It was as if her tattoo was compelling her to tell the tale.

“I was at Castle Cammon, enthralled by Tycho the tyrant, when he commissioned a young astronomer called Jon Kelpo to redraw the map of the sky…”

Tycho Cammon the tyrant was notorious. Cuckoos cackled about him all over the continent.

Cammon’s realm was six or seven hundred keys away to the north-east of Portti. Thirty-odd keys further to the east of Castle Cammon was Kallio Keep, where Astrid’s dad, Lord Taito Kallio, held a small woodland domain.

Bosco has just been in bed with a minor lord’s daughter… Surely she rarely confides this to other clients at Momma Rakasta’s. Does even the Momma know?

The Kallio domain was noted for its kastanut and musktree groves, and for an unusually large number of precious ivorywood trees. The Kallios husbanded those ivorywoods on an ecologically sound basis, planting out new saplings to replace felled stock that was mainly destined for expensively crafted prestige furniture.

Some domains are huge, such as that of Tapper Kippan the Forest Lord, which includes Portti. Or Saari over in the east. Others are much smaller. The Cammon and Kallio land holdings and the others thereabouts were modest in scale. However, Ivan Cammon, Tycho’s father, had an acquisitive, predatory attitude to life. His marriage to Sophie Donner of Verinitty (just to the north) proved, as time went by, to have virtually united both domains under Cammon control. So Astrid’s dad was wary.

He was doubly and trebly wary as Ivan Cammon’s eldest son grew up.

The lad was well favored and gifted, but…

“Ukko-ukkoo,” a cuckoo would cackle, “a cocksure rooster crowed from its dunghill at young Tycho Cammon, and he bespoke it to burst itself. Feathers and flesh went flying in all directions.”

That was only the beginning. Before long Tycho was bespeaking farmers’ daughters to spread themselves for him or come home with him as his compliant toys. Woe betide any fathers or brothers who interfered.

One lad tried to intervene when Tycho called his girl away. Ruptured by Tycho’s brutal words, the boyfriend died lingeringly of peritonitis. The lass was obliged to enjoy herself pleasuring Tycho until he tired of her. A cruel streak, cruel.

Tycho’s power as a proclaimer was admirable when he used it against Unmen. Tycho’s father loved hunting fierce hervies in the woods to mount their racks of horns in his banqueting hall; but the son hunted more intelligent prey—servants of the alien snakes bent on spying and mischief and kidnap. What’s more, Tycho was soon traveling as his domain’s champion to the autumn galas in Yulistalax to pit himself against other proclaimers. Voice against voice. Sway against sway. Mana-wrestlers.

Although Tycho was handsome as well as clever and gifted, he also made abominable misuse of his talent. People began mumbling about his one minor disfigurement—a wart on his right cheek—as being his verrin’s nipple.

Verinitty, his mother’s home, had been pestered by the vicious carnivores until they were controlled by poison bait. The implication was that a verrin might have bitten Tycho’s cheek as a child, sucking on the wound and infecting him with its saliva.

“His father’s been somewhat of a check on Tycho’s excesses,” Taito Kallio told Astrid on the day when a cuckoo cried the news about the goring-to-death of Ivan Cammon by a bull hervy. “But what now—?”

Father and daughter were in Astrid’s chamber. It was the first day of June. The mullioned windows stood open, admitting a breath of musk, even though trees and riverside town were quite far below. The keep occupied a sheer little butte, a rare upthrust of rock. Access was by way of a steep winding path. Goods were usually winched upward vertically, but Astrid must have made her way up and down that path a few thousand times by now, with the result that her thighs and calves were muscular.

Tapestries of sun-dappled trees and lakes hung on the walls. At this time of year the pot-bellied stove was cold and dead, like a suit of armor for a fat dwarf. A cabinet held dozens of Pootaran wooden puzzles, which Astrid collected: artful assemblages of tiny notched rhombs and pyramids and such, in contrasting polished woods.

Astrid had recently celebrated her twenty-first birthday. Dismantled on a tray lay the pieces of a particularly complicated puzzle entirely made of ivorywood. Her dad had secretly commissioned the puzzle a whole year earlier through the Pootaran trade emporium and consulate in Landfall. Taito had supplied a block of ivorywood specially for the purpose.

“I hear a special cuckoo keeps watch on Tycho Cammon all the time,” she said.

“He’s such a source of tales, dear.”

“The same crippled cuckoo follows him everywhere, they say. Except, I suppose, when it sneaks off to pass its tattle on.”

“Now that Tycho’s the lord,” said her dad, “if he comes here I’m going to refuse to receive him. We’ll block the cliff-path. Rig deadfalls of rock. We’d better lay in more supplies than usual. We’ll simply sit up here until he goes away.”

“What about the town?”

Tycho might avenge himself for the insult.

“I know we’re responsible for their welfare down there,” agreed her dad, “but we can’t bring everyone up here for shelter, can we? I can’t face him down. I’m not a proclaimer. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”

Her dad had no mana-power. Anyone could be affected by mania, but to be able to affect other people was very much rarer. Nor was Taito assertive in a browbeating way, although he could be stubborn or subtle. Stroking his balding blond head, Astrid’s father brooded.

“If we managed to pick him off with a rifle bullet or crossbow quarrel, long distance—beyond the range of his voice—we’d have a feud on our hands, or a full-scale war. The twin-domain might gobble us up.”

“How about if we invite a proclaimer to be a permanent guest here? Pay him in ivorywood?”

“A hero in the house? Dashing and handsome, too? Trouncing Cammon, then whisking you off your feet, besotted with him?”

“That’s highly unlikely,” Astrid reassured her father.

“How would we come by this champion? Tell cuckoos to cackle about our requirements everywhere? We’d be advertising our anxiety and vulnerability. Our champion might fail. Where would we be then?”

Father and daughter saw eye to eye, although the town remained unavoidably exposed. Astrid rummaged in her puzzle tray, picked up two pieces and slotted them together.

“Fingers crossed,” she agreed.

How fond they were of one another. Astrid’s mum, Lady Kallio, was usually preoccupied with her embroidery, stitching flower-strewn fables with sublime skill, the floral decoration mattering more to her than the nakki-imps who peeped from her scenes. She would embroider a story of the fairy Si-si-dous drinking a dewdrop and singing to a spellbound fellow, who would be lucky to make his escape when Si-si-dous got hungry. Man and fairy would be inundated in apricot bellflowers and violet starflowers and jismin and heartbells.

Astrid herself was addicted to wooden puzzles. And she liked to stargaze from the tower of the keep—sometimes at the entire panorama, sometimes selectively using her dad’s spy-glass to home in on, say, Otso with its moon-cubs.

She also loved to roam the woods with a girlfriend from the town, Anniki Tamminen, supposedly collecting mushrooms or flowers for her mother. Astrid’s mania certainly wasn’t men, except perhaps for her devotion to her dad. She showed no signs of falling in love with any fellows.

Which might be just as well.

Astrid’s young brother Gustaf, who would inherit, was frail. A succession of chest complaints and digestive disorders plagued the lad, despite the best efforts of the town’s mana-priest and of its wise woman—who was, in fact, the mother of Astrid’s bosom-friend—and despite the occasional assistance of a grumpy shaman who lived in the ivorywoods.

“When Gustaf grows up and brings a bride here”—so her dad had said on a number of occasions; fingers crossed, and tilt a mirror so that any imp of sickness will slide off it—“if you’re still here you’ll be a guiding influence.”

Cuckoo-news arrived that Tycho Cammon was celebrating his accession to the lordship by setting out on horseback with a band of cronies to raid the territory of the snakes and their slaves to the northeast of Saari—the Velvet Isi area.

Quite an expedition, when he owned no sky-boat. Could Cammon have turned over a new leaf, aiming to be admirable rather than abominable? His route should take him far enough to the north of Kallio land.

Several weeks later, Cammon’s return was unheralded by any cackle, as if cuckoo-birds wished to see what would happen if he arrived unexpectedly…

A ginger fluff of fallen feathery blooms carpeted the musktree grove. Soft potpourri lay everywhere upon the ground, headily fragrant in decay. Above azure chimney-flowers, clouds of sizzleflies drifted like puffs of smoke as a heat-hazy sun climbed toward noon.

Astrid and Anniki lay side by side, nuzzling and touching tenderly. They must have been heedless. Could ginger fluff muffle hoofbeats so thoroughly? Maybe Cammon had stealthed the sound of his steed’s approach, and that of his crony’s, by proclaiming it so.

Suddenly: two horses, and their riders. Both piebald mounts were stocky and shaggy with long bushy fly-whisk tails. The travel-stained riders wore leathers and boots. Through slings strapped to the saddlebags: rifle and crossbow.

Reining in: “Now what do we have here?”

Astrid and Anniki were already scrambling up, adjusting their skirts.

“Enchanting! And deserving enchantment—”

The wart on the speaker’s right cheek! It was him.

Sensual lips—fat, self-indulgent lips. Heavy jowls. A narrow arc of beard. A high protuberant forehead, and tight fair curls. Handsome, but already with intimations of a brutal and libertine cast, which in time (and not a long time, either) would make his face heavy and oppressive. Such a muscular build.

“So ripely deserving—”

As the two men dismounted, Astrid and Anniki fled as fast as they could amidst the musktrees.

“Hark and hear,” Cammon’s voice bellowed. Running, Astrid stuck her fingers in her ears. She knew the routes. And the roots, which might trip. Anniki knew, as well. However, Anniki hadn’t climbed up and down that butte-path a few thousand times. Her legs weren’t as strong; her puff was less. She couldn’t sprint and also plug her ears.

When Cammon and his crony caught Anniki, and whirled her around, she would surely have cried out, “My mother’s the wise-woman. She’ll lay a spell on you.” At which, Cammon would have laughed.

That must have been how it was; or something similar.

“We need your lovely friend too! Where’s she hiding herself? Where’s she gone to?”

Seeking protection by association, Anniki would have burbled: “She’s the Lord’s daughter—!”

“Is she indeed? That maiden needs a man!”

From the roof of the tower, Lord Taito and his daughter took turns gazing through the spyglass at events transpiring down below in the little town of white-painted wooden houses and red tiled roofs.

The telescope was the work of a maker of glass and lenses in Niemi, southernmost of the three main towns of Saari. A Mr. Ruokokoski. His sign was engraved on the collapsible brass tube: an eyeball with wings.

Accompanying Tycho Cammon were a dozen armed men. Fourteen horses. And one Unman, black-skinned, sable-liveried, a prisoner.

Prisoner of words, very likely, rather than of manacles. Cammon had posed the Juttahat in the town square for folk to gawp at, if they wished. The alien stood utterly motionless.

Some desultory looting was in progress; not really much more than replenishment of supplies. At Mrs. Tamminen’s house there seemed to be a commotion. Was she being evicted?

Halfway through the afternoon, a leather-clad envoy set foot on the butte-path. He waved a white kerchief on a stick. Cammon watched from a safe distance, a horse between himself and the keep. Taito and Astrid were out of earshot of Cammon, even if he roared. Taito’s retainers wore wax plugs in their ears, melted from candles. Their instructions were simple enough. Release those boulders if Cammon ascends in person.

Admittedly, a great proclaimer could bespeak hard soil into quicksand, and such tricks—and soil has no ears nor knowledge of words. Yet Cammon wouldn’t want to strain himself and drain his energy.

“If only I could fasten this spyglass to a rifle,” Taito mused. “He’s in range, if I fired downward.” It was a vain hope. At best, the horse would be hit. Cammon would scurry away.

Once the envoy had recovered his breath, he bawled upward faintly, “Lord Tycho Cammon—invites Lord Taito’s daughter—to dine with him.”

Fat chance of that.

Next morning—after what sort of night for Anniki?—that cuckoo with the crippled foot had alighted on the tower top. The lookout had summoned Taito, along with Astrid.

The bird blinked, groggily. Its feathers were ruffled. In its beak it held a white flower—a milkcup—which it dropped.

“Hark and hear,” the bird squawked, “a milkcup for the maiden, but for her unfriendly father a soulflower of death—

“Death,” cackled the cuckoo, “by heart-sickness. Lord Tycho yearns in his heart for your daughter. Your own heart will squeeze itself unless you yield her. This is spoken.”

Taito’s intake of breath was agonized.

“Daddy—!”

How, how had Tycho Cammon compelled a cuckoo to convey a woe? To act a proclaimer’s vehicle, as his ventriloquist’s dummy—! The words the bird repeated were imbued with Tycho’s own power, although the bird itself seemed distressed or outraged.

“You have until midday,” it squawked. Having delivered its message, the cuckoo threw itself from the tower, with what seemed like suicidal clumsiness. Down it plummeted. It contrived to glide. Next it was fluttering frantically, veering away from the town, as if its precipitate dive had snapped some string that controlled it, and now it was escaping.

White-faced, her father clutched his chest.

“No,” he gasped. “No.”

The regular squeezes of pain persuaded her father less than Astrid’s pleas that he let her save him. Where would she be without him? And Gustaf was still too young.

She might not be gone too long. To validate this hope, all she took with her at noon was the ivorywood puzzle in a little leather pouch slung round her neck by its drawstring.

Tycho Cammon greeted Astrid jovially in the town square, as pleased as a lad receiving a present. An entourage of three louts were keeping an eye out, clustering round the alien who stood so still.

Astrid demanded, “Is my father safe now?”

Cammon scanned the sky, which was clouding over.

“Right as rain,” he assured her. “You have my word for it.” Near the mouth of a lane, Astrid spied a man’s body lying face down. His head was twisted at an impossible angle.

“Murderer,” she accused.

Cammon followed her gaze. “Him? Oh, he shook his head at our activities.” Putting on a childish lisp: “He shook it and he shook it so much—”

Shuddering, Astrid stared at the motionless Unman instead.

A silver hieroglyph was appliquéd on one shoulder of the alien’s velvety bodysuit that was as black as its skin, but scuffed and soiled. Empty pouches hung from clips. White scabs crusted gland-slits on the alien’s jutting chin, below a prim cupid mouth. Its nostrils slowly opened and shut as it breathed, which was its only activity. Such hurt showed in the close-set ambery eyes.

Despite her aversion to the alien, sympathy percolated—fellow feeling.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“With it? It’s a him. Oh, I have a use for him all right.”

She imagined herself and the alien compelled to mate, to amuse Cammon the spectator. Surely he was too covetous of Astrid to dream up such a humiliation. Cammon the violator would seem just as alien to her.

She had no other audience except for Cammon and his louts, unless nearby residents were peeping. Townsfolk were keeping to their houses. Just then she heard a distant wail of protest, and recalled the presence of other cronies.

“Actually, my splendid chick,” Cammon said graciously, “this town square of yours seemed to lack a focal point until now. It needed a statue.”

“He looks very sad,” she said. “Tormented.”

“Dear me. Of course!” Cammon snapped his fingers. “Blink, Juttie, blink for the lady.”

Membranes glazed the alien’s eyes, sliding to and fro. Tears poured forth.

“I quite forgot they need to blink. Jig a bit, there’s a good statue. Jig on the spot.”

Jerkily the Juttie capered—and fell over. In the dust of the square it writhed, arms and legs spasming.

“Guess he got cramp,” said Cammon. “Relax, statue. Lie at ease!” And the alien lolled. “You must remind me, Astrid Kallio, not to use him up too quickly.”

“You’re cruel…” Not a wise thing to say.

“What do you want him for?”

This might also be unwise. Yet Cammon treated her question with the utmost seriousness.

“The truth is, I need him to tell me the names and the meanings of the stars and the constellations in the Isi tongue, and also of their own home stars and constellations.”

“Whatever for?”

“The sky presides over us,” he replied. “And over them.”

“What if he doesn’t know? Does a scullery lad know the words for embroidery?”

“Snakes’ voices speak in the Jutties’ heads—informing them of all sorts of things.”

“7 watch the sky at night.” She hoped to forge—no, not a bond—but some affinity.

He chortled. “What a fine hen you are. And a hen must be plucked.”

“I came to you voluntarily, Tycho Cammon. You didn’t call me down here with your voice. Don’t bespeak me now.”

“If I don’t, summerbright, how will you enjoy yourself?”

Astrid glanced up at the keep, as if her look might leap her back to safety. The air was becoming hazy, faintly moist. Mizzle was dulling the outlines of the keep. Upon the tower: a tiny figure. Surely her dad, with his spyglass. She waved, to reassure.

Coming down the lane past the corpse, led by a man in leathers, was… Anniki, in a cloak. Anniki looked utterly dulled and comphant. From the man’s holster jutted the butt of a light-pistol. Nobody would be obstructing him. The escort halted Anniki.

“See,” said Cammon, “your friend’s right as rain as well.”

The two women’s gazes met, across empty space. It was as if Astrid had betrayed Anniki by making a temporary get-away to the keep—while Anniki in turn had betrayed Astrid by revealing her identity.

Cammon was severing Astrid’s ties with home.

Astrid had half hoped—and half feared—that Cammon would take her to the Tamminens’ vacated house, full of wholesome herbs and dried mushrooms and roots.

That wasn’t to be. Accompanied by the trio of bodyguards, Cammon led her instead to the candlemaker’s home. To Mr. Kintilar’s. Kintilar and family had been temporarily dispossessed. All of his candles remained.

She knew the house and its smells from childhood: the odors of paraffin wax distilled from yellover wood and muskwood and kastawood, and also from bituminous shale; the aroma of scent oils.

Downstairs were Mr. Kintilar’s double boilers and pouring pitchers and tin molds. Bowls of baking powder to extinguish any wax that might catch alight. Bowls of fatty acid crystals to render wax opaque and slower burning. Spools of braided yarn, tin molds, weights for wicks. Everywhere, everywhere, finished candles were tied in clumps or hung in pairs from nails.

Everywhere, hundreds of cock-candles.

All the way up the staircase, and in the main bedroom too.

The louts stayed downstairs to drink ale filched from the larder and snack on squeaky cheesebread and cold greasy goose. If only they weren’t down below, where the creak of floorboards and bed would be audible!

In the main bedroom, hundreds of candles crowded shelves and furniture…

“What illumination we’ll see,” enthused Cammon, “if all the wicks are ht! Maybe the house’ll burn down…

“All the wax will melt,” she retorted. “It’ll become so soft!” As if she could proclaim at him.

He concentrated, summoning his power. “Wicks a-light, Burn bright, Such a sight!” he proclaimed.

“Five, six, Hot wicks, Pricks and chicks! Burn bright, Wicks a-light—!”

It was as if phosphorbugs were invading the room, each settling on a candle tip. How could it be so dark outside? Could black rainclouds have arrived so quickly in the wake of what had hardly even been drizzle? As a hundred candles breathed out little flames, and as the window framed only deep gloom, so at once there was privacy… and imminent revelation.

Deeply scared, Astrid loosened her blue bodice sacrificially.

“Don’t bespeak me…”

Yet he did. He was a petulant child indulging in a tantrum—yet his was a channeled tantrum.

He chanted:

Faster and faster he chanted. A sway to sweep her from her feet, from her rootedness in her own self.

To try to divert the sway, to give it a different channel down which to run, a drain to take it away, she shrieked, “I love my father!”

In vain. The sheer force in Tycho Cammon. Such a torrent. Astrid’s hair streamed in a gale, baring her brow. Candle flames danced.

Everywhere, swaying lights. Music wailed in her mind. Blood-rhythm pounded. She was undressing, wrenching garments off—as was he. She was dancing naked in a clearing—the room’s walls were reeking musk-trees. She was capering in front of a great candle-mushroom. She must leap and bestride—so that spores would gush from its gills, so that sticky spawn would spout.

Soon, she deflowered herself, gasping and crying out.

Just as had been bespoken.

Looking back, Astrid’s time at Castle Cammon—until the coming of the astronomer—was spent in a state of semi-trance. Hers was a sick addiction to a euphoric drug, namely Tycho himself. As time went by, Tycho tormented her by withholding this drug progressively so that she craved in vain, losing all focus.

His castle of pink granite occupied a rocky island around which a river divided. Twin towers soared, linked at their penultimate stories by a high bridge of tammywood. A similar bridge spanned the river, to lead to the smoky little town of miners and smelters and smiths. The prevailing breeze almost always blew haze away over pastures beyond. Visibility from the tower tops was rarely impaired.

On top of the western tower, the Juttie was kept in a cage. Slim numbered bars imposed a grid upon the heavens. On clear nights a scribe (who was also a draftsman) copied down by candlelight upon charts the alien names of stars and star groups. He filled a ledger with annotations—not only regarding Kaleva’s sky, but also the sky of the alien’s home world, wherever that might be. A little rooftop hut gave the scribe storage and shelter from squalls. During balmy weather he even took to sleeping there by day.

The Juttie was one of those who could make himself understood to humans, in that strange eternal-present style of speech, accompanied by clicks and hisses. Otherwise, Tycho would hardly have brought him. Astrid sat in on some of these sessions of interrogation, to watch the stars for herself and to compare the alien’s submissive captivity with her own.

“Star being the Egg-k-Tooth of the Precioussss One who wassss dreamingk the taming and raising-to-reason of the Two-Legsss,” she would hear.

The scribe would grunt and squint and scribble the enigmatic words, which few in the castle or the town were able to read—least of all Tycho, otherwise his own spoken words would be gelded of power.

The same scribe penned Astrid’s intermittent messages to her father, which Tycho insisted on her sending. These could hardly be sent by cuckoo, or they might be cackled in any marketplace.

By now, Tycho wanted Astrid as his bride—freely granted by her father, so that Tycho could start claiming some control over Kallio land. The knowledge that Astrid was a hostage must have been anguish for her dad. But he was holding out for Gustaf’s sake. After the defection of the crippled cuckoo, Tycho couldn’t reach Taito with his voice to speak a woe at him a second time.

Astrid must send pleas to her father, which she half-believed or even believed passionately after Tycho bespoke her to do so—until nausea or apathy set in. Daddy, I must wed Tycho. He is my life now…

Her father wasn’t a fool.

Tycho had already enjoyed the goods. He could do so whenever he chose. She was a commodity. As witness: her commemorative tattoo, which Tycho had an artist from town impose on her breast as a brand of ownership, though less painfully than a branding.

Astrid’s relations with the fat Dowager Lady Cammon were as slight as with Tycho’s two younger brothers. The Dowager’s mania was cookery, and the lads, who had none of Tycho’s talent, spent their time running wild, hunting soarfowl in the reeds and scampery leppis in the woods, and keeping out of the way.

In spite of straw and a brazier in the cage and a big canvas cover with a smoke-hole—like some cloth tossed over a birdcage—and despite a sheepskin coat, toward the end of the first winter the Juttie succumbed at last. Worn out. Used up. Chilled to death. Astrid could hardly feel that she had lost a companion.

Her real companion was her ivorywood puzzle. Tycho sometimes teased her cruelly that he might send pieces of it to accompany each message as a token of authenticity and sincerity.

On other occasions Tycho was almost vulnerable—scaringly so. Once, he wept in Astrid’s arms at the way he felt increasingly compelled to compel others. He was scared of losing absolute control, so that his gift became his governor.

The Dowager’s delicious meddlings in the castle kitchens might have been to blame for her son’s increase in girth. Spending her days with scullions was somewhat infra dig, but Tycho could hardly bespeak his mother not to do so. The Dowager made sublime fish stock—she wouldn’t become a laughingstock as well. Any sniggerers would end up hanging by their fingertips from the high tower-bridge.

To Astrid’s delight, which she kept secret, one day she discovered that the ivorywood puzzle had two quite different solutions. One route assembled the pieces into the quadratic prism. That was the shape the puzzle had first been in when she unwrapped her birthday gift. The other route, even more difficult to achieve, fitted them all together as a star. Her name-sign!

Those Pootaran puzzle-makers way across the sea had certainly been ingenious. Her dad must have known about the double solution all along. If it hadn’t been for the abduction, he would have tipped her the wink after a few weeks. Now Astrid had discovered belatedly, by intuition. Because Tycho might be jealous of a shared secret, she didn’t send any message to her dad that she had found out about the wooden star.

As for stars of a heavenly sort, in spite of the demise of the Juttie informant and the cryptic rigmaroles that had resulted, Tycho hadn’t lost interest.

Come the springtime, he commissioned a telescope from the same Mr. Ruokokoski of Niemi who had ground the lenses for Taito Kallio’s spyglass. By midsummer, hardly the best time for stargazing, the brass telescope had arrived, complete with wooden tripod. It was installed on the observatory tower beside the now-empty cage and the hut, which could shelter the instrument when not in use.

The novelty comforted Astrid. When nights became a little longer she stared at gassy Otso, even at ringed Surma out beyond Otso, although Surma is the emblem of death.

During leaf-fall later that year, Tycho traveled to the gala at Yulistalax to be famous, and he triumphed, even though his verbal victories over rival proclaimers were violent ones, causing pain and injury and humiliation.

When he returned, it was with Jon Kelpo, who might have been naive to accept the tyrant’s invitation, but who hankered for patronage and access to those alien star charts.

Names are often destiny. People are compelled to act out roles, though perhaps in an altered guise.

This became plain during the welcoming feast for the young astronomer, held a couple of weeks after his arrival. Tycho’s mother had insisted on a delay so as to consider her menus.

Tapestries of hunting scenes and of fictitious raging battles with Unmen cloaked the granite of the walls in the banqueting hall, in between tall windows too slim for any intruder to climb through—the panes could be pivoted to let in air. Sharp-pronged horns of hervies jutted from plaques fixed to those tapestries—like eruptions of violence into the hall. Stoves were squat armored sentries. Dozens of candles burned in wall-sconces and in chandeliers high above the long table. Guests from town drank their fill but behaved themselves.

Oh there was black blood soup and cold poached fish and fish stew in broth and roe on ice. There was simmered veal and pigs’ trotters, and lambleg with golden potatoes baked in a hollow log. Finally, there were to be sausage pancakes heaped with pink valleyberry and also colostrum pudding made from the first immuno-laden milk given by a cow after calving.

Jon Kelpo was short and skinny, with a thin intent face. His hair was nut-brown. His hazel eyes were wonderfully expressive. Over a white silk shirt tucked in his breeches he wore a striped scarlet waistcoat. The waistcoat was scuffed and less splendid than Tycho’s finery; just as well.

Servants scurried. The fat Dowager fussed. Townsfolk crammed themselves with food in case she accused them of being picky. Equally, they must not seem to be gluttonous. Talk was scientific and over the heads of many guests, but they pretended deep interest—as did Arvid, the elder of Tycho’s two junior brothers. The other brother was Armas. Both brothers were spruced for the occasion. The mana-priest from town contributed his best. Astrid, in a sky-blue gown, was genuinely interested.

Tycho was presenting himself as a patron of science.

“My name prompts me,” he explained grandly to his audience. “There was once a famous astronomer on Earth named Tycho.”

Jon Kelpo nodded. “I know, sir. We mentioned this in Yulistalax. He was a noble, like yourself. I’ve read—”

“You’re obliged to read, whereas I’m obliged not to. Carry on. What did you read about him?”

“He was a genius, with wonderful eyesight and accuracy.”

Tycho smiled. Not having had Kelpo’s advantage—or disadvantage—of literacy, maybe he expected further flattery in the same vein.

“What else do you know about this noble genius?” he prompted.

Kelpo clammed up.

Tycho banged his pot of dark beer on the table. “Tell me. I bespeak you to.” He did not exert too much power.

The young astronomer’s vocal chords seemed in conflict. Tycho frowned, but then forced a smile.

“Be utterly frank,” he reassured Kelpo. “You are my fool-of-reason—my rational shaman.”

For a moment Astrid had difficulty understanding this. Then it came to her that, in Tycho’s mind, an important motive for inviting the astronomer to Castle Cammon must be that Jon Kelpo was a man of science, not of mana-magic. Kelpo’s presence might serve to counterpoise Tycho’s fear of losing control to his impulses.

If Tycho had invited a shaman into his keep, instead, that would have been like attaching a lightning rod to one’s head.

In a strangled tone Kelpo said, “The original Tycho fought with everyone. He was very quarrelsome with his equals. He was harsh with his underlings—”

“And I know how the original astronomer died,” Tycho interrupted. “My father told me, as a warning. It happened at the court of the genius’s royal patron. By etiquette nobody could leave the table until the king retired. The king liked to sit up late boozing. One night the astronomer indulged in far too much wine. His bladder became bloated. He couldn’t leave.”

Guests were exchanging nervous glances. Sweat was breaking out.

“Is this a suitable topic to be talking about during dinner?” demanded the Dowager, her feathers ruffled.

Tycho moderated himself. Very mildly he continued, “Finally, the astronomer’s bladder burst. Poisoning set in. A few days later he died in agony. Enough, enough, I agree, Mother!”

Kelpo rallied. “The astronomer Tycho also had a pupil, named Kepler. Almost my own name, sir.”

“So here you are, my rational shaman, as circumstances require.”

In fact, Kelpo’s name signified brave. Well, in coming here he was either intrepid or rash.

As the banquet progressed, it became clear that Tycho’s motives in sponsoring astronomy were mixed and numerous. He also wished Jon Kelpo to create a new map of the Kalevan sky—to design new constellations to supersede the harp and the cuckoo, the archer and the imp perched on a mushroom.

If the Isi snakes link up the local stars in different patterns to those that human beings had come to perceive, why not a whole sky in honor of the Cammon family?

Of course, a constellation must be dedicated to Queen Lucky. But mainly there’d be: a hervy’s horns, in honor of Tycho’s dad. A cooking pot, for his mother. Speaker’s lips, for himself and for all other proclaimers—the new constellations ought to appeal to everyone in the country. More plausible, more serviceable, more relevant! Oh, there must still be a cuckoo, but in this case a crippled cuckoo with a flower in its beak, which made Astrid flinch.

Megalomania…

Astrid’s relationship with Jon Kelpo grew only gradually—paralleling her own weaning from that verrin’s nipple, Tycho. It was as if some transfer of focus occurred.

At first, Kelpo begrudged the claim that Astrid sometimes made on the telescope. Did this young woman—whose status at Castle Cammon was questionable—imagine that she was a fellow scientist? However, as regards the task of redrawing the constellations, a telescope wasn’t much use at all. The naked eye was best. To be sure, a telescope could reveal distant constellations too dim and tiny to notice ordinarily. What use was there in mapping those? Should he tell Tycho, “My lord, I’ve just found your very face hidden behind the Saucepan! Alas, no one can see it unaided.”

Consequently Kelpo tolerated some stargazing by Astrid, maybe for silent company on the tower top.

When winter came and night spilled into the day, after each new snowfall a servant would dig and sweep the rooftop clear. The river below was ice-bound under a thick white blanket. Wooden stakes marking the road toward town were half-swallowed. Yet the roof remained merely ice-glazed and crisp, instead of engulfed. There was always the brazier to warm one’s mitts at, plus resort to the castle saunas when chill reached the bones; she to the women’s, Jon Kelpo to the men’s.

He was a strangely private person, with an inner intensity which found its outlet in the sky. Attempts to broach his personal history would bring a polite rebuff.

Until…

Winter had come and gone. Buds were bursting open. Snow was melting, splish-splash. On some nights the snow would crust again and the drippings would become icicles. In a restless fever, sweethearts would be carving their names in the bark of trees.

Up on the tower, the night was fairly mild. Showers of actual hquid rain had fallen during the afternoon. Stratus clouds were now breaking up into strato-cumulus as comparatively warm currents rose. Stars gleamed through rifts. Those rifts were on the move, frustrating observation.

“What do you keep in that little pouch you wear round your neck?” Kelpo asked Astrid, as though at long last he had fully noticed her. “There’s no smell of any pomander ball. I suppose no pomander or mustoreum can ward Lord Cammon off.”

This might have seemed an indelicate and insensitive remark. In fact, he was heeding her as an individual.

“I keep my puzzle in it, Jon.”

She must show him.

She did so, by lantern light in the hut.

Ordinarily, Kelpo might have scorned such fiddling with wooden puzzles. He might still have done so, if Astrid had not felt an impulse to confide her secret—that this particular puzzle had two quite different solutions, one of which was a wooden star-shape. Kelpo seemed riveted. He asked to handle the pieces himself.

Twist and pivot the pieces as he might, he couldn’t arrive at either result. She demonstrated. Still he couldn’t copy what her hands were doing. To do so seemed suddenly important to him.

The next night was full of stars. Jon Kelpo couldn’t concentrate on them.

Finally, he exclaimed to Astrid, “To see in two different possible ways! To see alternative connections: that’s what Cammon wants me to do. Instead of an archer and a harp, a saucepan and a crippled cuckoo… He doesn’t know the half.”

He confessed his own secret.

When he was just a baby, a cuckoo had flown into his room—so his mother had assured him. The bird had perched on the head of his cradle. It had cackled, then shat in his eyes. Specifically, upon his nose so that the splash went in both directions. How Baby Jon had squealed. Quickly his mother had cleaned him. She called in a wise-woman to examine his eyes and a mana-priest to diagnose the meaning of the event.

“It’s an omen of great things,” the mana-priest had decided, after a trance. “Yet following upon those great things maybe your son will experience some shit.”

When Jon reached puberty, he became able to see in a different way from other people. At first, the experience was spasmodic and inadvertent—scary. As time passed, he found he could summon the phenomenon by concentration.

“The stars are bright tonight,” he said to Astrid. “The sky is black. But if I focus myself”—and he seemed to do so—“the sky becomes white and the stars are black dots. This is so useful for pinpointing stars, like grains of peppercorn spilled upon a linen tablecloth. Everything’s reversed. Your fair face and hair are dark, as well.”

“If I’m different,” Astrid sang out, “then I’m somebody else—and somebody else is no longer Tycho’s possession.”

“My hand is black…” Jon held his hand out, reversed, toward her cheek, softly to touch, to stroke with his knuckles, with the backs of his fingers.

“Oh, but I feel I’m still swayed to seek the love of men,” sighed Astrid. “Can you show me what you see? Can you sway me to see?”

“I’m no proclaimer—I can’t tell someone to do something.”

Her hand rose to grasp his.

“I’m not speaking about telling someone—”

In the hut, there still remained the camp bed which the scribe had used. Light the lantern, look at one another.

“What if somebody comes?”

“Shut the hatch to the stairs. Drag the chart box over it.”

When Jon returned, he said:

“Your breasts are black, Astrid. Your belly is black, and your legs. The shadows are bright.” He must find her, almost, by feel.

In the subsequent moment of climax she saw—for just a moment—his body as black, and her own body likewise.

Why should Tycho bother to climb all those stairs?

Over the next few weeks, as their bodies grew accustomed to one another’s rhythms, Astrid could see the reversal for five to ten seconds.

As the days grew longer, dark windows of opportunity shrank and shrank. Astrid yearned for autumn, though not for winter when the hut would be too cold, and a brazier lit inside would only make the icy air foul to breathe.

Tycho never discovered about the reversal of vision. He never realized that there was that secret to find. What he found, mounting on impulse to the tower top one night early the following spring, and hurling the hatch open by force of words and muscle, was Astrid and Jon together inside the hut, hastening to dress—and rage clouded any insight Tycho might have had.

The weather had suddenly turned mild. Much snow remained to melt from the countryside. This had been the first love-making for months.

Throughout the winter Jon had shown his patron progress on the new map of the constellations. Jon was forever amending, making alterations, even beginning again from scratch. This didn’t vex Tycho. The continuing presence of a dedicated man of science was a moderating factor in the castle.

Two lovers in disarray were quite a different matter.

Astrid must watch Jon stand stock-still and stare from the parapet into the night. And stare.

Jon needed those eyes of his; or else he would be nothing.

And now they bulged and swelled—

—until they burst.

Tycho released him from the sway. Jon collapsed screaming, more liquid upon his cheeks than any tears could have brought.

Tycho bespoke Jon to leave, to stumble down stairs and more stairs—wood, then stone—and to find his way by memory to the gate. The tyrant stalked him, whistling mischievous directions and misdirections as though Jon was a dog.

Astrid had followed part of the way downstairs. Now she fled back again up to the top of the tower. She took the oil lantern and set fire to all those charts—as if this brief beacon might somehow guide Jon away from Castle Cammon and through the town.

She contemplated the plunge, to ease her own anguish, and maybe forestall Tycho from forcing her to hang by her fingers from the bridge between the towers for as long as she could.

Two things saved her. One was that when Cammon came for her, to haul her downstairs, he was as distraught as if he had thrown an amulet of sanity into the river and had just realized what he had done.

The other was the Dowager Dame. A servant had told her maid what was happening; the maid told her mistress.

“So our astronomer’s gone away!” declared the Dowager Lady. “If I’d known, I’d have packed a fish and fat pork pastie for him, and some clabbered milk—”

It was as if the loss of Jon Kelpo’s eyes was of less consequence than him setting out on a journey without any food.

Tycho gaped at his mother. He howled. He fled to his own chamber, leaving Astrid alone with the Dowager.

“Would you like a pastie?” Tycho’s mother asked Astrid. “I don’t think you’re very welcome here now! You’d better go to the tinsmith’s in town. Mr. Lindblad. He’s an easy sort of man. Then start walking home tomorrow—if you can. I’m sure I don’t know if you can. You can always try to force yourself. Lindblad’ll give you a pastie, although it won’t be a patch on mine. Kallio Keep’s quite a way. Go as you are. Don’t dare take any gifts my son has given you.”

The one gift Astrid cared about remained in the hut: her birthday puzzle in its pouch. It would be sheer madness to climb the tower again. She must catch up with Jon. She must find him.

The Dowager’s word was enough to allow Astrid through the gate.

Melting snow was a mess of jumbled distorted footprints of people and animals. Search as she might, halloo as she might, Astrid couldn’t come across her lover on the road to town or anywhere in the town. Jon might have missed his way and tumbled blindly into the river, treacherous with ice rushing by, bobbing on spate. He may have circled round deliberately and drowned himself.

It must have been two in the morning when Astrid found her way to the tinsmith’s house, shivering convulsively and escorted by a night watchman, who banged on the door with his cudgel.

She knew she wouldn’t go back to Kallio Keep. Wouldn’t, couldn’t. She felt in her bones and her waters that if she did so she would act like a whore in her dad’s town, and that Anniki would spit in her face.

“So you came here instead,” Bosco said to Astrid, “where at least your problem gives you an occupation. A livin’, you might say.”

The naked woman, perched on the stool, turned to him. Daylight was already reasserting itself.

“The man-sway has faded,” she whispered. “The sway to love men: I felt it fade while I was telling you.”

She had unburdened herself. The cuckoo on her breast had cackled, and the pressure was gone.

“Did you see me as white, earlier on tonight?” Bosco asked her. “Do you see all your sailors as white?”

“I saw them all as Jon,” she whispered.

“I felt responsible,” Bosco told young Andrew, who lay in the upper bunk, propped on his elbow. Other sailors in the fo’c’sle were all ears, of course. The four-masted hermaphrodite schooner rolled gently as it sailed through a luminous night that was so easy on the men of the watch up on deck. The Conga’s creaks and groans were as familiar and friendly as the chirping of crickets in a clove field back home.

An incredulous voice said, “That’s why you paid for her ticket? Her, with all that nest egg she bin earning!”

“Ah. I forgot to mention. What she didn’t need for immediate use she bin sendin’ to her home town as charity for the mana-priest to dole out. Sort of in recompense for herself and her dad shuttin’ themselves up in their keep while Tycho Cammon made free.”

“An’ you seriously don’t plan on sneakin’ into that little cubby-cabin of hers?”

“She don’t need that now. She wouldn’t want it. After we dock, I’m goin’ to fix her a job in a puzzle workshop. She’ll learn how to make really neat puzzles to take northerners’ minds off more dangerous manias. An’ I hope she might find herself a girlfriend among all them nimble-fingered puzzle-makers.”

“What a soft touch you are, Bosco! Sounds as though you’ve been bespoken, yourself.”

“Mebbe I have been,” admitted Bosco. “Just a bit, on the shortest night.”