The Breach of Pälli
My name is Yrjö Kirves, and I'll take your "knowledge" from you.
It's unavoidable, really, short of you turning around and leaving right away. People have
so many prejudices that fly in the face of reality that I just keep running into them as a conversation continues, and I'm sorry, but I can't help trying to correct them. It usually starts the moment I mention that I'm with the Finnish Navy, which, in most, conjures images of a seasoned sailor with a patience to match the weeks-long doldrums his captain accidentally brought the ship into; then, I specify that I'm posted to operate the
lock of Pälli, and everyone suddenly "remembers" how the
Saimaa Canal, in spite of others means of travel than by ship, was always considered a busy bottleneck in ancient times.
The Rash has essentially turned that completely around, you see. These days, ship crews cannot get into the next safe harbor fast enough, and while the Saimaa Canal now is the
only connection between the Southeastern part of our nation and the rest of the Known World, the Navy would probably reduce the lock crews to just
one guy each if it weren't necessary that people out there watch
each other's backs. Good thing that traffic is relatively low, I must add, because if ships were waiting in line to pass the locks like they did before the Rash, the canal would attract grosslings from all over the place to the point that the entire Doomed Army of Kastrup couldn't hold a single one of the locks.
Speaking of the crews of two, I'm teamed with Ritva here. Don't expect him to contribute much to the smalltalk, he chooses to speak every once in a blue moon;
somehow, every task in our daily worklife that requires talking magically falls to me. Not that I mind, but occasionally, I wonder whether my family made some non-Finnish contribution to my ancestry into a bit
too much of a family secret for me to know about it.
Yes, I'm serious about the canal not being overly busy a place anymore. As a matter of fact, we used to have a rowboat that we kept
right in the lock's chamber, thus blocking part of the clear width, and nobody ever suggested that we move it out of the way.
"What do you do with a rowboat in a canal everyone zips through as fast as their engines permit," I hear you ask, which takes us straight to another common prejudice. People traveling on the canal see us sitting in our
fortified control towers, a showcase of up-to-date defense technology condensed into a ten-or-so meters radius, bristling with pikes, barbed wire, and stuff that I'm not allowed to talk about, and promptly think that
that has got to be the safest place for miles around, any day. It isn't, for the simple reason that the days where you
do see a troll or something of that size run up to impale itself are quite rare. Vermin beasts are far more common, and since it is
only ten-or-so meters from the perimeter to the tower, even our bunch of ever-vigilant cats does not offer you a guarantee that you won't wake up as one of those nabs your feet and tries to turn you into a
Swede. An
infected Swede if they could help it, but of course everyone working out there is required to be immune.
So what we did whenever one of us
really needed a good night's sleep was to lower the water level as much as we can, the guy would attach the rowboat with lines to four anchors in the corners of the chamber, his colleague would up the water level again, and hey presto, rowboat not moving an inch from the center of the chamber, with four meters of open water on all sides;
that's what keeps the creepy munchies away from you. Man, I would really like if we could get another boat, but Vellamo knows where Ritva even got the half-rotten one we had ...
How we managed to lose it? Oh. Oh,
now you've done it. Because
that happened thanks to the king of prejudices, the guy who would boldly make assumptions where no man had dared to assume before, Leif, the "vile-ling exterminator" from Norway, as he calls himself.
... yes, yes, I've heard the "Leif and Death" moniker; from his very own mouth, in fact. He told us that it was the media and the storytellers who graced him with that name, and I'm under the impression that he's not really happy to share his fame with an imaginary partner, so I'd rather avoid calling him that to his face.
Anyway, the day he barreled into our lives saw a ship arriving at our lock from Saimaa, and as soon as we had closed the upstream gate behind them, Vihainen and Kummituskaiku offered us a little afternoon concert.
... what?? No, of course not! Who in his right mind would call a
ship "The Angry One" or "Ghost Echo"!? No, we're talking about the two most important resident grosslings of our area at the time. Their
philosophical discussions tended to turn to the loud side every now and then.
Of course, it is drilled into the head of every crewman what the proper procedures are in that kind of situation: Everyone goes to a safe area, in case you aren't already like you should, batten down the hatches, and the lock crew raises the water level in the chamber as fast as they can and keep the fingers on the buttons for the upstream gate, the sirens, and the blinkenlights.
... well,
three reasons for the water level, actually. First, the ship rises along with it; no need to allow a grossling appearing at the chamber edge to jump
down onto the deck when you can force it to clamber
up instead. Second, should there be an attacker who can bust the downstream gate, the water and the ship will come crashing down on it. Third, should it get to work on the
upstream gate instead, you don't want the water to come crashing down onto the
ship. And the buttons part is in case something on the level of a giant comes a-knocking; in
that situation, the ship has a better chance of survival if it makes a run for it while the lock crew distracts the giant and gets steamrollered by it. Even if the ship has to go full speed
astern all the way.
But nothing of that happened on that day. Instead, one of the fortified ship doors flew open with a BANG, a guy with an oversized rifle in his hands jumped on deck, and started to look around with wild eyes, apparently in search for something to use the gun on. Not being satisfied with the selection, he jumped off the ship and on terra firma and vanished into the forests before the ship crew could grab him and pull him back inside.
To give credit where credit is due, Leif is no stranger to seeing his errors
after the fact, or making fast decisions, which is to say that he gave up his search and returned to the lock while Vihainen and Kummituskaiku were still in concert, and the ship still kept safely-ish between the closed gates. But of course that didn't help him any, because once again, the protocols were perfectly clear: Having ventured into the Silent Lands, Leif was to go to quarantine. And since neither the ship nor the lock complex had any facilities to that effect, it naturally fell to the side with the 100% immunity rate - unlike the ship with its
passengers - to dig him a nice pit or whatever.
"I don't understand why I wasn't able to locate that grossling," was the first thing he complained about after he was finished griping about the ship leaving him behind.
"That's because there were
two of them," I replied, "they're called Vihainen and Kummituskaiku. They stay apart, but frequently keep responding to each other's growling for quite a while."
"
Two of them? Well, that explains why I kept running in circles following their calls. What kind of critter are they?"
"Vihainen is a beastified bear. It seems to live in the woods near this lock, or at least that's the only place it's ever been heard calling; it stays out of our sight, so we don't have much of an idea what it does at other times."
"... wait, if you've never seen it, how do you know ... ?"
"
We have never seen it. High command is worried that one day, they might have to do repairs or a rescue operation or somesuch that cannot be done entirely through the canal itself, so every now and then, they send a scout to check on the ancient roads and bridges that still offer access to the canal by land. It's those scouts that investigated when they heard Vihainen sing, and also named both of them."
"And the other, Kummi...kaiju, wasn't it, what kind of beast is it?"
"We have no idea."
"... why? Were the scouts unable to track it, like with ... uh ...
Helluvanäkki, for example?"
"No ... Kummituskaiku keeps its distance from us, due East, while the canal continues to the South, and later Southwest. Scouting the canal is not exactly a
popular assignment, the scouts will have a peek at Vihainen when they have an opportunity, but not go all the extra miles to meet with Kummituskaiku."
"Hm. So the nearby one is a bear beast ..."
Little did I know how much I would rue this little exchange.
Leif's quarantine crawled by uneventfully, the biggest surprise being that he would ask a ship back into Saimaa to pick him up, rather than continue in the direction of the ship he had jumped from. We thought that he wanted to first replace his luggage, rather than trying to chase down the one that went to see the Known World without him before he would run out of donated underwear, but a couple months later, we received orders from high command to prepare to have an expedition set up base camp at our lock and support them in whatever way necessary. The commander of that expedition being no other than Leif.
Another week later, a ship from Saimaa made a mysterious request that we should wait for their OK before lowering the water level in the chamber. We knew that the expedition had arrived when there was another BANG and Leif appeared on the deck, looking a little less trigger-happy than the last time.
Not that he was in a particularly
good mood, mind, because apparently everyone he had asked to join his expedition had preferred to leave all the glory to its courageous leader alone, making the "expedition" into a one-man field trip. He was so enraged, or so we thought, that he started to haul boxes and crates out of and off the ship without asking anyone for help, lifting some of them around as if they weighed pretty much nothing.
"Those are what the ancients called 'loudspeakers'. There actually is mostly air inside."
"Ah ... so you intend to have stern words with Vihainen?"
"Heheh, in a fashion. It won't be hearing
me, though. This ancient equipment is able to make a recording of sounds and play
that back, amplified, through the loudspeakers."
"... you want Vihainen to chide
itself?"
"No, I'm going to make a recording of ... that
other guy and give Vihainen the impression that its old rival has waltzed in to call it a pushover to its
face. Vihainen won't even know that it's dealing with
humans until I can safely make the shot, so what could go wrong?"
The fact that he stopped talking so that his mouth could instead showcase an ear-to-ear grin told me that this guy
meant what he just had said, as amazing as this might sound.
"... say, you wouldn't happen to be from Dalsnes, would you ... ?"
We were granted a couple days off serving the expedition - to make our last will and testament, we suspected - as Leif distributed the "loudspeakers" in the lock's surroundings, running and burying cables from each to a control unit he put into our tower. Then he prepared a smaller but heavier box, calling it the "recorder", and continued to do ... nothing. "I need Vihainen and his friend to have another 'concert', as you put it," he explained, "no use being out and about with the recorder when there's nothing to record." It turned out that ticket sales were rather slow, and several weeks passed before the artists were heard to warm up for their performance. Leif grabbed his recorder and shot out and into the woods even faster than the first time, which is to say that there was another BANG and we were in quite a hurry to get that damn door
closed again before anything would get the idea to investigate the noise.
By the way, a bunch of cats that just cannot get their heads wrapped around what that suicidal two-legs just did looks absolutely
adorable.The concert lasted into the early afternoon, and Leif, who obviously had ran toward Kummituskaiku for as long as he could hear it, did not return until after dark. That's how we found out that he's not afraid of the dark at all, either; good for him, as it was only his incautiously calling out for us as he approached the lock that kept Ritva from giving him a literal shot in the dark.
"So, you're going to give Vihainen a
da capo now?", I asked with clear dislike in my voice. Leif had put our rowboat into its "sound sleep" position, but had insisted that none of us should sleep in it or even be outside the control tower until his mission was accomplished, and Ritva and I were on the brink of a somewhat irritable state even
without Leif waking us in the middle of the night.
"No, not
now," he replied, "I still have to
shoot Vihainen to kill it, and neither darkness nor the risk of being blinded by a low sun are conducive to that." And with that, he managed to drop into a seat and be fast asleep faster than ourselves.
Once the sun had risen over the imaginary yardarm, Leif connected the recorder to his control panel, sat down at it and, Odin help me, flexed his fingers as if he was preparing to play an organ. Before long, we heard a single bellow of Kummituskaiku emanate from a bush in the opposite direction of where Vihainen would usually be. "I want it to travel at a low angle across the lock complex and be well audible where Vihainen will hopefully be," Leif explained. After a second replay, a half confused, half irate reply from Vihainen revealed that it was indeed roughly in the place Leif had expected it to be, near the stage it had used for its last appearance. Leif continued to impersonate Kummituskaiku, occasionally switching to a different loudspeaker "so as not to give Vihainen the idea that its rival is sitting in a fixed spot it can storm into, just in case it might make such a bold move."
Again, I must grant Leif the honor of unexpected aptitude, this time in the form of keeping up the rusical for several hours without Vihainen getting the idea that it was being played like a fiddle - or a contrabass, rather. Finally, we could discern something moving in the shadows off our North. "Bad line of approach," Leif muttered, and the next loudspeaker to have its solo was one in the Southeast, the direction where Kummituskaiku would
usually be heard from. Vihainen obliged and disappeared into the woods again, until its footfalls were heard due East, the lock chamber being a broad obstacle if it would turn WSW. And sure enough, the next tempting aria Leif unleashed was a particularly defiant-sounding one out of a loudspeaker he had put on the other side of the canal.
A deafening roar revealed that Vihainen finally accepted as fact that his rival had actually crept into the middle of his territory, and the fast-approaching sound of branches cracking as something
large bent them out of its way made it clear which kind of action it planned to take against that. Which, as I mentioned, had it run right up to the side of the lock chamber.
From the descriptions of Vihainen that the scouts had delivered, we had an idea how large it was, but its speed and how far it would be able to jump were still unknowns. I'm pretty sure that it would have been able to jump clean across the chamber - a distance of about fifteen meters -, but why would it if there was a perfectly well-positioned stepstone in the very center?
And
that is how we lost our rowboat, reduced to splinters as a beastified bear crashed clean through it and dove into about ten meters of water in the chamber; of course Leif hadn't filled it all the way to the upstream level, but had the surface remain about three meters below the edge of the chamber, lest Vihainen would simply climb out.
Needless to say, that was the moment when Leif would come storming out of our tower, wielding an even larger gun than the one he carried way-back-when, and proceeded to make holes into what was
not only water anymore. Not as unceremonious as shooting fish in a barrel, as there were ladder rungs and other things in the chamber walls that Vihainen
possibly could have gotten a hold on as it tried to get out, but the outcome was still quite easy to predict.
Well, unless you're a cat, I suppose. Still, they were a
really adorable clowder that day.
The deed having been done, and with the cats having realized that the foolish hyooman had
actually managed to kill the Big Bad, the three of us stood by the chamber's side to have a closer look at what remained of Vihainen. I'm pretty sure that only one of us was
not musing what it would take to get the entire chamber disinfected before we could allow the next ship to enter it, but flowing water is a pretty good tool to at least get started with that. Leif was more concerned about how to get at least a sizeable chunk of Vihainen out of the chamber and into the sunlight to allow for it to be made into a trophy, of course. But all in all, we were in a pretty good mood - until another sound made us stop our chatter abruptly. Well, with the exception of Ritva.
"... did you leave your loudspeakers running?", I asked in a hushed voice, because it had sounded very much like an amplified Kummituskaiku.
"No, of course not," Leif replied. "But you said that it keeps its distance, didn't you?"
"It
used to, I'm afraid," I offered while pointing a finger to the East, which we had turned our backs to to peer into the chamber.
We all immediately knew
what it was, of course. Apart from maybe the Icelanders, every grown-up in the Known World knows what an elk antler looks like; almost all of them have held a dropped one in their hands at some point, after all. Seeing a double pair of deformed ones isn't enough to render them unrecognizable, it clarifies that you're looking at an elk that will likely far exceed its natural lifespan and/or cut yours short, though.
I'm pretty sure that few people have seen such a quadruple float by
above the treetops and heading straight into Saimaa, though. Or accompanied by a fanfare that suddenly had an unmistakably
triumphant undertone.
"Guess I can put my finger on it
now," Ritva suddenly spoke up. "The problematic part of your plan is where you kill the monster on
our side
first."
