LAISKA, LAZY MOON - CHAPTER ONE

By Edward Reilly

Locals call their second moon Laiska, that is, ‘lazy’, as it takes a little less than a month short of three years to make its complete circuit.  The word laisko is used as a term of endearment for baby boys before they are herded off to Kindergarten, and the local calendar is rather complicated, especially as the inner moon, Suuri, is bigger and faster, taking only fortyone days to complete its orbit. Some of the old astronomical directories referred to the Kiuuto-Suuri Double Planetary System, but that has turned out to be an optical fantasy.  Even so, like the inhabitants of some cities where the weather and vagaries of the season are the primary subjects of polite conversation, in this neck of the woods and on the peninsular, most people will greet the day with a good look at the bedside calendar, check half-month lunar and tide tables, and only then go down to the bathroom before breakfast.

Linda had heard stories; how her father, when he was in his first year at college and eager to get off-world, wanting to see as much as he could before home and hearth pulled him back to the family hearth, had hitched a ride up there: all the way up there! How he had walked on Suuri and gazed down on this world, seventeen-twentieths of blue and green water, ice stretching from the poles as far as to the fortythird latitude, north and south, marvelled at its awkward lean against the solar plane. But it was boring up there, too many people, far too organised. And so his party had jumped across to Laiska, making observations, checking the monitor stations, drilling into the dirt to find, well, as he said over the kitchen table one night, more dirt, no diamonds, no gold.

-       Dirt! Dirt from Laiska!

Harro held up a glass tube against the evening light. Linda gazed intensely.

-       Does it glow in the dark?

-       No.

-       Make a sound?

-       No.

-       Dissolve in water?

-       No.  Does nothing.  It’s dirt.

Linda noticed that it was yellowish, rather than brown or charcoal.

-       No carbon traces?

-       None whatever.  Totally sterile.  Lifeless.

-       Poor Laiska.

She was thinking about the kitten that had died last winter.  But this morning was no different, as Linda announced herself for breakfast.

–      Tide’s up.  Three metres.  The conjunction is due in four days.

Of course, no one paid any attention, they’d read the calendar whilst she was clanging about in the back bathroom, yelling at her brother when he barged in for the second time this week. And as her mother served egg scramblies and apple juice Linda tried once more.

–      Three metres! Stampa’s skiff had better be secure.

She pouted at Allun, who was ever impervious to the idea of work, and guilt trips didn’t work on her father, either. If grandfather had asked for someone to help with the skiff, they would have done it, but then the old man knew how to take care of himself.

 Her father placed his empty coffee mug on the table, looked up from his newspaper.  It was damp around the edges from this morning’s dew. 

–      More like three and a half. We hauled most of the skiffs up last night, after you’d gone to bed, Princess. Snoring like a foghorn you were.

He smiled. Linda felt her left leg lengthening. His little game.

–      Now, when you two have finished out your mother’s pantry, I want you to come and help with the cows.

Allun looked up from his Physics text, one of the many he had been dragging around the house since the start of the school long break, trying to cram in more than enough to pass his Fourth Levels in the coming Autumn Examinations. It was either that or finding himself at the local technical college. 

-       What’s up?

-       Ah, the automon speaks!

-       Huh?

-       The cows. They go guuuo.

His father’s grin illuminated the kitchen, and was still smiling as he hefted himself towards the vestibule.

–      Move. We are shifting all the cows, and Granddad’s, to high ground. Don’t want them to get wet feet, already. No?

The children gave a collective gasp. The thought of Lopsi and her new calf getting bogged, or worse, was more than enough to set their feet scurrying. 

-       Three minutes, and counting!

By the time Linda had changed into her thickest sox, farm trousers and woollen kittel, and had sat on the back porch to pull on long boots, the men had started up the tractor, its diesel engine coughing and wheezing like old Herr Venson at Winter Assembly. Once ready, she ambled over and plonked herself on the trailer, in between hay bales. Aurso, their speckled hound pranced up and down the tray, barking at the wind, uselessly, as always. Still, he was amusing. Linda preferred Pomin, her black cat, who at least listened and understood everything, even if he grumbled. Allun sat with his father, trying to remember the controls, his feet and hands practicing their moves. Linda thought he looked like a blind clown. Mother came scurrying out, a basket tucked under harm. She handed it to Linda.

-       Morning tea. Coffee for your father, and there’s Lemonade and some biscuits from the other day. Lunch an hour after noon, or whenever you get back.

-       Mmm.

That’s all Linda could utter as her father cranked up the engine, and then it lurched forward, jolting the trailer and scaring her mother so much she hopped back a step, and then another, waving as though this would be the last time ever she’d see her little flock. Not that it was a difficult task, getting the six cows and three calves to plod slowly out of their bottom field, through several gates and then two kilometres uphill. Their father drove ahead to open gates, Allun would stay until the last had made her way through, and then he’d swing the gate shut, and latch it, while Linda walked alongside Lopsi holding a rope she’d fashioned into a tether and swung over the calf’s head. In this way, the calf was free to wander just a little, but could be pulled back if it got to be too curious about a patch of grass or some succulent shrub.  It took an hour to reach high ground.

To Linda’s delight Linnma was sitting outside of the hut where the two laumapoisid, herdboys, would be staying until it was time to return to the low pastures. They sat and talked whilst Allun helped his father and the others settle the cattle, then spread out several large rugs waiting for the men to finish their jobs, then called them over. They all relaxed and partook of morning tea. Ilma’s small ration of biscuits was magnified by some of Linnma’s teacake, and extra coffee had been brewed for the men. At times like this Linnpa was usually a man of few words, rather like her mother, but as Linda was cleaning up he came over to her with.

-       Here, I thought you may like this.

Linda dried her hands on a teatowel, hung that up to dry by the stove, and took the proffered satchel in hand. It was heavy.

-       What’s inside?

-       It’s a mystery. Have a look.

She held the satchel, its leather gleaming with black polish, recent she could tell from the nutty aroma, and placed it on the table. The zip, also recently oiled, gleamed and invited her fingers to slide it across the bag’s top.

-       Books?

Linda gently eased them out and placed them side by side on the table.  She scryed the old printing on each book.

-       Maja ja Tala: Alamankka I.

Her grandfather ran his fingers under the gold lettering embossed onto the leather cover, its gold leaf still vibrant.

-       And, this one, Talumajapidamine.

Linda started to turn over the pages, sounding out some of the more difficult words.

-       Look!  There’s your name!

She was pointing to a jag of faded ink.

-       Viktor Linnman. And there’s a date. Old!

-       My great-grandfather.

-       The one who was killed?

-       Ja, for the sake of this very book.  See on the spine, a dark smudge.

-       His?

-       Blood.

Linda wanted to know more, but she sensed that this was not the time.  Her father and brother were clanging about by the tractor. It was time to go.

-       That’s so sad. Pappu’s calling! You can tell me later.

The old man nodded, and slid the two volumes back into the satchel. He zipped it shut and slipped it over Linda’s shoulder. He kissed her tenderly on the brow, then led her to the door.

-       Guard them.  They’re precious.  I have written in the line of ownership, with your name at the end, all on the back of the flyleaf.

Linda nodded, and as she turned to wave farewell Linnpa called out for the last time.

-       Your mother will tell you some of the stories!

 By the time they returned, the sun was well and truly high, and it was hot enough to contemplate a swim later in the day. Ilma had laid a red and blue chequered tablecloth over the old wooden table that had been standing under the mulberry tree. Linda and her father carried out the kitchen chairs whilst Allun helped his mother for years, and years. So, being almost Midsummer Eve, the days were long, almost too long, and with all the farmwork done for the time being, and the cattle safe from the expected high tides, there was little else to do than laze about, eat and drink. The luncheon looked suitable for the season. There was a choice of salted herring or ham on ryebread, tasty new tomatoes, a bean salad, pickles, and her mother’s lemonade to wash it all down. 

They took their time, and after the dishes had been cleared away and washed, Linda sat in the shade and riffled through the newspaper her father had been reading at breakfast. At least he had not made his usual stab at the crosswords, so she picked up a stylus and started at the easy one, speaking quite loudly to herself.

-       1 across: slow at night. Ha! LAISKA. It fitted, but she had to figure out 2 down. Black grape.

At times, she’d seen her father work through the crosswords with his old dictionary, Sanad Kiria – about a hundred and ten years old – her mother had once opined – almost as old as him – as she slipped him another piece of torte and a cup of fresh coffee. Then it came to her. SYRAS. The blackish, red wine Linnpa had brought back from his last expedition to the South. Linda slowly worked through the rest of the clues. One bothered her, still.

-       17 down: bloody steel.

The hair on her nape prickled. Aurso looked up at her, and whining, moved to another shady spot, while Pomin’s tail twitched. But she did not move from Linda’s lap as she tried to find a link for the fifth column. It seemed even more ominous than the other clue, but she had to crack it.

-       21 across: nothing.

Linda had no dictionary with her, but at least she could recall something from her Maths. Class. A nothing was a null function, and at five letters, NULL** would do, for the time being. She chanced it.

-       So – she addressed Pomin – if it’s steel, and ends in N, it must be …

-       Hmmm

More of a grunt, than exultation.  Her memory was good.  She could grasp at little details, things said in an aside, the odd lipsmista, errant numbers, map coordinates, callsigns, all those things most of her friends consigned to the mind’s delete button.   STALI, plus NULL*S!  She was right of course, as the S was taken from 21 down, LIPSU, a banana inspired pratfall.

The afternoon sun chased Linda deeper into the mulberry’s shadows, where she spread the table rug and propped two cushions up against the cool trunk. Pomin, now too old and lazy to chase mice, let alone chickens, curled by her side, and so disposed she slid into sleep. Her dreams were of nets and cages, moving points with coordinates x, y & z, flashing, swirling objects she couldn’t name, cooing doves and magpies’ carols, fragments of a love song – tumbala, tumbala – waltzing across her lips. 

– Where did that come from? 

–       Aunt Gemma? Teacher?

–       What language? I don’t understand.

Then a new set of images floated into sight; planets spinning like tops, a troupe of dancers come to perform in the town square, drums beating a complicated rhythm that seemed to accommodate the dancers, how their torsos and feet seemed to have different cycles, dust rising from their boots and drifting towards the lake, piebald swans taking wing from the lake’s waters. In the meantime, a detached observer would have noted how her lower lip trembled and fingers seemed to be playing across a keyboard as her sighs rose and fell, how the cat would accommodate himself to her shifts and turns, skirt’s hem drifting higher on the knee.

An hour or so later, as the hens started their 6 o’clock chorus and resumed scratching, wanting their mistress to scatter new corn, Linda roused herself, and Pomin found refuge on one of the cushions. Hens dancing at her feet, the girl stumbled over to the feed bin and did as she was bid. The grain was cast as evenly as possible and so she stood back to watch how the hens disposed themselves across the grass, as far apart as possible, yet oddly enough kept in some order as they progressed. Linda wished she had some means of making a continuous record, other than paper and stylus. Perhaps she could get Allun to act as second recorder, but he’d lose interest after ten minutes. 

Hens sated, Linda piled her books and papers on the table and walked down to the long pond, where her father had repaired the sauna and small pier last autumn. The water was bitterly cold, and she kicked away from the reed bed towards the spring where a hot trickle steamed out of a channel lined with stones covered in yellowish slime. This part of the pond reeked of sulphurous minerals. One autumn, when the earth rumbled, there had been a great gush of hot stinkwater that chased the birds and frogs away, and the family had refrained from jumping into the pond after sauna. In a fortnight the rumbling had stopped and all fell quiet. Linda found a spot where the temperatures balanced, and floated, face turned up the sky, watching the long circles of a hunting falcon. Its gyrõ, a word she’d picked up from a poet’s premonition of social cataclysm, echoed the whirls and eddies of water as it drained out of a sink, or leaves as they were stirred up by late afternoon winds in autumn, traced a series of circles whose epicentre shifted slightly with each orbit. 

-       Kitomaa must move like that, gyring through the cosmos.

That was a new word, gyrõmassa, she decided, making a verbal participle out of something foreign. She would need to remind herself to write it into her exercise book, and then check with her teacher if it really was a new word. 

-       I could be famous. Linda Tulka, inventress of new words!

She felt a cold eddy swirl across her legs, and so kicked back into the warmer water. The falcon’s orbit had taken him over the marshland to the south, and as she watched, head arched back into the steamy waters, he suddenly plummeted and fell out of sight behind a screen of low pines. She waited awhile, then glimpsed its slow rise and hard beating wings as it lufted a still-mewling jäniksenpoika towards a waiting nest.

-       Some must die that other may live!

And with that aphorism in her still innocent mind, she twisted and kicked deep into waters, savouring the sudden change from warm to cool, stroking slowly towards the pier.

The Petersons had joined them for supper and evening swim in the pond, and had invited Allun to spend the long weekend at their beach house. After he’d left with them, chatting loudly with his mates, and her parents had called it a night, Linda was left to her own devices. She curled up on the long couch by the long window overlooking the pond and sweep of their fields down to the boglands and dunes. Scattered clouds obscured the moons and stars, and some the town lights could still be seen in the far corner. Nothing stirred. Quiet had descended. 

Linda settled into a couch by the hearth. She drew out the second volume, sounding out the long title, Talumajapidamine, wondering how her forebears had wrestled with the task of establishing a viable farm on such a strange and harsh land. Plans ran from the basic, a one-bedroom hut with an adjoining byre and twenty-metre stockyard, to the most elaborate, almost a palace: five bedrooms, four water closets, a bathroom with sauna attached, drying rooms for clothes, a double barn and five stockyards. The Petersons had a farmstead a step down from that, and had called it Nelidtalu after their four bedrooms, or was it their four children? Her parents were happy with the arrangements at Ilmatalu, three main bedrooms, her attic room nestled under the high hipped roof, spare rooms for storage and guests, and the outside sauna, making for interesting excursions in winter. Everything had to be rebuilt when her parents took up the farm, and only in the last year or so had the row of birches lining the road up to the main house and three plantations come to maturity. 

She liked almost everything about her parents’ farmlet, the house, barn, chicken coop, the pond and open fields where she took long, forgetful walks. The one place she avoided was the slaughter shed, tucked well behind beech stand, where old Koid, the butcher, would come in from town to prepare the family’s winter meat stock. She’d been warned off more than once, and had stayed away, not so much because of what she knew the fates of calves and piglets, she’d seen her mother take one of the unluckier hens to the chopping block and had then to pluck out the feathers before it was dressed and prepared for the oven, but the smell repelled her. Even Aurso stayed away.

Looking back to the book, she spotted an entry, Telling Time, and began to read aloud. This she liked doing because it both nettled Allun, who did little more than mumble, and because grandmother Linnma had such an exquisite voice. She’d been an actress once.

-       For those without a reliable timepiece – she read slowly, finger under the old-fashioned lettering – erect a pole standing at least four metres from the ground, in the middle of a cleared field.

The article continued, giving detailed instructions on how to set out a ring of white stones at the same radius as the pole’s height, where to stand so as to spot the sun when it was at its highest to give noontide, and so on. The seasons’ passage was remarked on, and then how the pole could be used to keep track of the two moons, how to predict tides. And there were illustrations. In one, she spotted how one farmer had set a loop, cut out of quartzite, at the top of his pole, and would use a small telescope to look at the sun’s spots, the light being projected through the eyepiece onto a card. How old poles were taken and placed in a village square for the Maidag cleebrations.

Her mother slipped into the kitchen, looking for a glass of water, when she spotted Linda fallen asleep on the couch, Aurso curled up on the carpet beneath her feet, the cat nowhere to be seen. The dog was resettled onto the back porch, and then Ilma lifted her daughter upright, whispered that she ought go to bed, and gently led her upstairs. Window half ajar, curtains stirring in the night breeze, Linda’s chest rose and fell as she slipped deeper and deeper into dreamless sleep.

Stay tuned for the next chapter.