Celtika Read Free

surely.’ The older, the wiser.
    ‘Well, yes. But fewer birds, more appetites.’ And more energy. Self-evident!
    I had been alive since before the land of the Pohjoli had grown from the great ice. But I still only flew two birds—a hawk and a raven, by the way, though I hadn’t seen them for a while; they weren’t my favourite companions—because it was more important to keep youth on my side. At least for the moment.
    My inquisitor thought about my reply for a moment, then asked me my business in Pohjola.
    ‘I’m going to swim in the Screaming Lake,’ I replied.
    He seemed astonished. ‘A terrible place. There are more dead men in the waters there than are living in the whole of the land of Kalevala. Why would you want to bother with a place like that?’
    ‘I’m looking for a sunken ship.’
    ‘There are a hundred ships at the bottom of that lake,’ the guardian said. ‘The old man of the water has built his palace from their timbers and the bones of the drowned. It’s a dreadful place to go.’
    ‘No water man will have touched the ship I’m looking for.’
    The man on the wall squeezed his nose as he thought about my words. ‘It seems unlikely. Enaaki is voracious. Anyway, the ice is a man’s height thick. Not even the voytazi can get through it.’
    The voytazi, I knew, were the water demons who snared men on the shore and dragged them down to a terrible death. The Pohjoli lived in terror of them.
    ‘I have a way of getting through it.’
    The reindeer rider laughed. ‘Anyone can get through it downwards. Digging down isn’t the problem. The lake is full of the song-chanters, bead-rattlers and drum-whackers who’ve done that. But the ice will close over your head. How will you get out?’
    ‘I may have a way of doing it,’ I bragged.
    ‘Then you have a secret,’ my host retorted, ‘which you must reveal before we can let you through.’
    I thought he was making a joke and laughed, then realised that he was quite serious. People in the Northland were hungry for ‘charms’, I remembered, and they were traded as easily as the Greeks traded olives and milk-white cheeses.
    I was getting irritated with this man. It was clear he wasn’t going to give way to just any young-looking grease-haired, long-bearded, crow-savaged, mule-packing, stinking stranger; not without trade. And though I suspected he had little time for enchanters themselves—the song-chanting, bead-rattling drum-whackers as he had dismissed them—I hazarded that he was greedy for those little devices of enchantment that in this country they called sedjas.
    ‘I’ll reveal nothing of such a secret, and you know it. But I have talismans to trade, and a cure for the Winter Bleak which I’ll show you later. Let me through. I must get to the lake.’
    ‘You have a cure for the Winter Bleak?’
    Every man, woman, child and wolf in this long-night wasteland dreamed of a cure for the misery that affected them as frost crept from tree branch to their own hearts. I had long ago discovered that the best cure for it was to believe there was a cure for it.
    Reindeer man squeezed the ice from his nose again. ‘What’s your business with the ship?’
    Exasperated, impatient, I said more than I wanted to. ‘I believe I know her name. I once sailed with her captain. He’s still with her. I hope to throw flowers on his grave.’
    Reindeer man grunted, then looked about him at the totem trunks.
    ‘I don’t understand. But it looks to me as if the rajathuks have accepted you.’ He thought hard for a moment, then shrugged. ‘So you may pass through.’
    I took time to look in turn at each guardian tree—each rajathuk —and thank it.
    The gate had been dragged back. I quickly crossed into the territory of Pohjola, tugging on the tethers of my reluctant horses, then watched as the tangled mass of thorn and wicker was returned to its place between the towering wooden idols.
    I was introduced to each of the riders who were waiting for me,