“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.