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.