Toomas & Elmi

[dreemyweird]

 

The flames of Jaan’s fire surged high. To the sound of laughter and jeers, she took off and ran.

They weren’t supposed to try to escape. It was a playful ritual; the chasing, an offer; the running, an invitation to catch. She knew that well.

She ran in earnest. So, too, did he. The heavy, rhythmic panting behind her was evidence enough that her pursuer was not a shy lover attempting to flirt.

Her heart beat with determination. Her muscles contracted with the regularity of a well-oiled machine, propelling her through wet grasses, through thorny bushes, across a stream. The skin on her ankles stung. She knew it’d get red and irritated later, the scratches from the dried spikelets of nurmikas like the bites of a hundred mosquitoes.

After the stream, she took a hard right towards the woodland. The grass here was tall enough that the crown of her head barely showed. Her grey linen dress and rye-brown braids would blend in.

Flinging herself into a hollow under the low-lying branches of a silver lime, she buried her head in her arms and lay still, carefully controlling her breathing. The smell of plant matter and wet earth filled her nostrils.

The heavy footfall grew louder; then quieter; then louder again. Finally, she heard a hearty swear and the sound of a match being lit. The wind carried a whiff of bitter tobacco smoke towards her.

He started walking back towards the camp. She waited a while; then she breathed easier. After some fifteen minutes, she judged it safe to get up and walk.

The fact that she ended up wandering towards Toomas’ house was hardly more than a coincidence. She wasn’t thinking about where she went. It was only important that it was away from the village festivities. Toomas, an unsociable crank that he was, made a point of living at the very edge of Sääsküla. It suited him fine. He was only nominally a part of the community; likewise, his house was only nominally a part of the village.

She sighed, nudged the stone porch with the tip of her straw shoe, and gave the cracked wooden door an impatient knock.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Toomas said, in his usual friendly manner, upon seeing her. Then he took in her dishevelled appearance. His sap-green eyes narrowed, the upper edge of a broad pink scar on his cheek creeping up. When he spoke again, his tone was a smidge kindlier. “Come on in then, Elmi.”

He didn’t have to ask twice. She all but barged into the house, retreating instantly to the little bench beside the oven and leaning her frame flush against the warm faience.

Toomas wasn’t the kind to ask. In fact, much like on any other day, he mostly just ignored her and resumed tinkering with some cast iron structure, hammering away at a crossbar between what looked like two miniature spigots.

Maybe it was that indifference that had drawn her there. She knew he would not take an interest in her affairs. In an odd sort of way, it was a relief.

“What’s that you’re working on?” she asked him, eventually. Her own voice sounded hoarse and weak to her, as if she’d been yelling at the top of her lungs.

“Lubrication supply system,” he said, and chewed contemplatively on a dry grass blade sticking out of the corner of his mouth. “You’ve seen those large kratts over yonder at the new railway station? I have to make a few dozen.”

“A kratt would finish them in an afternoon, you know.” It was familiar territory, taking lazy potshots at him and his idiosyncratic dislike of modern technology.

“Päh,” he said only, in a succinct expression of contempt.

She shouldn’t have startled so violently when there was another knock on the door. She may have told herself that ending up at Toomas’ place was chance; but she should’ve known better than that. They did - and, of course, they came to look.

Toomas slowly raised his head, looking away from his work. He seemed to be thinking about whether to open the door.

Don’t, don’t, don’t, said the panicked beating of her heart.

He turned towards her and made a sharp gesture. Scram, he mouthed, and for a terrible moment she was certain that he was telling her to leave. Then his meaning became clear; he was pointing behind the stove, at the sooty corner partially concealed from view by a pile of firewood.

Only after she hid there, sitting down on the floor and putting her head low, did he go to the doorstep and open up.

There were three of them - Edgar, Lembit, and Inna.

“You know who we’re here for,” Lembit said, sounding friendly enough.

“No idea,” said Toomas, indifference itself.

“Come, taat. We’re not here to make trouble for you. Where’s Elmi?”

Inna made a step forward in an attempt to get him to back away. Toomas didn’t react. They stood chest to chest, Inna haughtily surveying him from above.

On account of Toomas being below average height, they rather towered over him. But they were willowy, their limbs thin and long like a foal’s legs. He was all sinew and muscle, a lifetime of blacksmithing having forged his own body into iron.

“Haven’t seen her since the beginning of the leaf-month,” he said. His left shoulder slowly rolled under the coarse nettle-dyed fabric of his shirt. “Have you looked in the meister’s stables?”

The village hadn’t had a meister in a few decades now, but Toomas’ generation still called parts of the old manor by the names they’d got used to. The stables were one of her favourite haunts, not least because some of the cows and horses the village still had a use for were kept there.

Inna spat on the ground. “Don’t push your luck, Tom,” she said, and turned on her heel. Edgar and Lembit followed her, although Edgar threw Toomas one last pointed dirty look, as if to make sure Toomas knew that this was not the end of it.

Evidently unbothered by this, he carefully closed the door behind them, threw the latch, and turned back towards Elmi.

“Thank you,” she said, quietly, without raising her head.

“Ai, don’t talk nonsense,” said he, looking suddenly tired. “What was I going to do, turn you over to them?”

Yes, she had the smarts not to say. Instead, she rose and started dusting soot off the ends of her braids.

“If you don’t clean your floor, you’ll end up dying from black lung,” she told him.

“Feel free to criticise my workplace and my taste in room decor while you’re at it,” he shot back.

“I’ve thanked you already, taat.”

She instantly regretted calling him that - regretted sounding like Inna and Lembit. But if it bothered Toomas, he didn’t let it show.

He walked over to a light wooden cupboard in the corner and, after some rummaging through it, proffered a beetroot-purple quilted blanket. She accepted it automatically. It was heavy and smelled of dampness and dried yarrow. Elmi reflected briefly that she wouldn’t have taken Toomas for the kind of person who scents their linen with herbs - it didn’t mesh with the image of a curmudgeonly bachelor.

“Nice blanket,” she said, uncertainly.

“You should stay here for the night,” he elaborated. “They’re not going to leave it like that.”

She wrinkled her nose. “They will leave Lembit as the lookout. I can fight Lembit.”

He stood with his back to her, but somehow the very set of his shoulders expressed exasperation.

“And what good would that be?”

Elmi thought about it for a while. “All right,” she said, finally, and began wrapping herself in the blanket.

“What, you’re already going to sleep? It’s barely dusk.”

“Work tomorrow,” she explained.

It was that, and the excruciating awkwardness of having to make small talk. Toomas would hardly understand. She doubted anyone had ever expected mindless chit-chat out of him.

He looked a little nonplussed, but in the end he only shrugged and said, “Take the stove, at least. I don’t mind sleeping on the floor.”

That was a welcome offer. When she climbed on the stove and stretched out on the warm bricks, the heat enveloped her every muscle and joint. It was bliss to hide her head under the blanket and perceive nothing but the smell of drying fabric and herbs.

Maybe she was tired, after all.

“What is it they want with you?” he asked, on the edge of hearing. She slipped the blanket off and peered at him, her eyes half-closed, his figure blurry through her fuzzy red eyelashes. 

His tone was odd. Less like a question and more like a lament.

“When I was younger, they used to tell me I was a troll-child,” she muttered. “You know the story. The troll mother took the human child and left her own. And when her child was beaten and abused, so was the human baby. When her child was fed bread and butter, the baby would be offered snakes and burrs… You know the story, Toomas.”

“Yes,” he said, and his voice sounded stranger still.

He had to be expecting something from her. And suddenly, with a shiver, she understood what it must be.

Nothing comes without a price. As the troll-child’s treatment was repaid in the story, she, too, would have to pay her saviour in kind.

“Good night, Elmi,” Toomas said, and turned away.

So he wanted her to come to him. She could do that.

Could she?

Elmi thought of Toomas - his broad shoulders, his blacksmith’s hands, his scar. He wasn’t repulsive. Other women would be pleased with him. Other men, too. But she-

Her stomach churned at the thought. Somehow the whole idea felt unnatural. Someone touching her body, the most private of her possessions, the one thing in the world that had been always and only hers - it seemed like a violation, whether coming from Lembit or from Toomas.

No matter. He had done what he could for her, and she would do what she could for him. It was only fair.

She lay there silently in the warmth of the stove, biding her time. Toomas exited the house a couple of times; at one point she heard him mutter something as he bent over a pile of books in the flickering light of a gas lamp; once it almost seemed as if he were humming a tune. The air smelled like heated stones, and then like wet meadow-flowers.

Finally, there was a clicking sound of the gas being turned off, and then a creak of the floorboards. He was settling down to sleep.

Elmi gave it another five minutes, twisted out of the warm cocoon of her blanket, and carefully slid down from the stove. She could see very little; her main sensation was the sudden cold against the skin of her bare feet.

The man had certainly sacrificed his comfort for hers, and she felt a twinge of - gratitude? Sympathy?

Whatever it was, she had to fan that little flame. It would help her do what her heart could not.

The blanket he slept under was made out of rough wool. She lifted it slightly and slipped under the covers, not quite touching him yet.

His body radiated heat; she was surprised, in a silly kind of way, by how warm he was. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected him to feel like. Cold and angular, maybe, like one of the kratts he’d built.

There was a momentary flutter of doubt. Was this really what Toomas wanted from her?

But then - what else had she to offer?.. What was her gratitude good for, other than this?

She put out her hand and found the angle of his jaw, rough with stubble. There was a moment’s delay in his reaction; then, she felt him tense and flinch so violently that it sent a tremble through her fingers.

His hand came up and seized her wrist, rather painfully at first. Then he seemed to register that he was in no danger, and his grip relaxed.

“What on earth are you doing?” he whispered, his voice almost comically high-pitched.

“I thought- I thought you expected it from me,” she whispered back, rather lamely.

“Why did you think that?” There was a sense of urgency to the question. A gust of wind blew open one of the window-blinds. She could suddenly see his face in the silvery light of the crescent moon. Toomas - gruff, unflappable, tight-lipped Toomas - looked scared, and oddly young.

“Elmi,” he said, and made as if to reach out to her before remembering himself and jerking back. “Has anyone ever- has anyone made you believe that you owe them this?”

She didn’t answer for a few moments, and he repeated her name with even greater urgency. It seemed dreadfully important to him.

“No,” she replied, quietly.

It was the truth. Not the whole truth, but close enough to it.

“I don’t ever want you to think that I would- that you have to-” 

He was stammering. They lay facing each other in a twisted imitation of a pillow talk, and for the first time in her life she saw him vulnerable and shaken; all because of one small touch.

Where there was previously trepidation and reluctance, now she didn’t quite know what she felt. Pity, perhaps. A distant sort of amusement. And something else, a heavy, uncomfortable sensation just beneath her ribcage.

***

“You’ve been spending time with Toomas Finkelmeyer again,” said Lina, with a tinge of disapproval.

Elmi nestled a loop of cornflower-blue ribbon between two handfuls of coarse white hairs. The improbably huge mare whose mane she was tending to, named Viisakas - Polite - sighed and shifted her weight.

“What of it,” Elmi said, not quite a question. She patted the mare’s warm neck, feeling the pulse of her blood in the jugular vein. “Kuss, Viisi. All good. I’ll be done shortly.”

Lina shrugged. “Nothing. Only I don’t think he’s quite well - he’s not been in his right mind since his deportation.”

Elmi’s fingers froze mid-knot. “Deportation? He’s never said. You’ve never said, either-”

“I didn’t know, did I?” Lina turned to look Elmi in the eye. “Granny only told me last Sunday. But it explains why he’s such a kook.”

Elmi paid her no heed. That word, deportation, was still sending icy tendrils of discomfort through her belly.

She remembered very little of the war. Perhaps her mind had mercifully shielded her from things her elders could not. There were only tall green shadows in her mind and shouts of, go, go, go, they’re shelling the station -

And then the enormous figures of kratts on the horizon, advancing slowly but surely past them, the yellow light from their eyes illuminating the rye fields with an eerie, dreamlike starkness.

“Edgar, Inna, and Lembit have been after me again,” she said, finally. “Toomas helped.”

Lina’s gaze softened. “Oh, Elmike, I am so sorry. I didn’t realise. C’mere.”

She was one of the few people whose touch didn’t make Elmi uncomfortable. Normally hugging was too much for her - even as a child, she dodged attempted embraces and wasn’t above biting the occasional adult if they persisted in their affections - but Lina’s arms around her neck were so soft and familiar they barely registered as foreign.

“Do you want me to see you home?” Lina asked.

“It’s okay,” said Elmi, her nose pressed into the rough blue cotton of Lina’s dress. “I’ll take Viisi. She’ll keep me safe.”

Lina’s shoulder shook as she barked out a laugh. “She’s the gentlest girl in the village, Elmike. What’s she going to do, lick your bullies to death?”

“She is swift when she wants to be,” Elmi objected. “Swift and strong. I know how to handle her around them.”

As if in an answer to that, the mare turned her anvil-sized head and nuzzled Elmi’s flank. Why’d you stop? she seemed to be asking.

“Sorry, sorry!” Elmi let go of Lina and turned back to her work. “Nearly done now.”

Her friend watched in amusement as she hurriedly tied off the last couple of bows and finally reached over to undo Viisakas’ halter. Viisakas moved her head this way and that way, testing her newfound freedom, and then turned her entire bulk around and trotted out of the stable.

“Before you go,” said Lina, “come with me. I want to show you something.”

They made their way around the main building, constructed from red brick with quoins at the corners - evidence of the last meister’s vain ambition towards architectural good taste - and through a growth of fresh nettles. There, sitting at the edge of the property, was a small tool shed. And in it, once Lina managed to pry the cracked wooden door open, Elmi saw a kratt.

It was only a small one. Constructed out of twisted wood and wire, it had round glass eyes that looked eerily like an old man’s pair of spectacles.

It was nothing like the war machines of her childhood; and yet she was acutely aware that like any kratt, it could kill. Here, in the middle of nowhere, evidently bound to nothing and deprived of its owner - what was it doing, waiting for them so calmly, rather than banging on the door and demanding a new task to sate its never-ending desire for labour?

Elmi gave her nettle-stung ankle above the edge of a woollen stocking a scratch and took a step into the twilight of the shed.

“Can you hear me, kratt?” she asked.

She felt Lina flinch and shrink back behind her. The kratt, meanwhile, slowly turned around. The light of its eyes was dim through the dusty glass. There was an odd sort of deliberation to its movements, a depth of alien intelligence she was unaccustomed to seeing in constructs. Nevertheless, it remained silent.

“It’s been here for a few days,” Lina commented, her voice subdued. “I doubt it’s going to talk to you.”

You’re not its master, she didn’t say. But Elmi understood well enough. The sensation of being examined and found lacking made the little hairs on her skin stand on end. Without a tie of blood, she was nothing to this creature.

Her gaze remained stubbornly fixed on the kratt. But there was no winning a staring contest with an opponent who had no need of blinking, nor any sense of embarrassment; she might’ve as well attempted to unnerve a pickle-jar. At length, she had to retreat to the doorstep, feeling her way in the dark, careful not to turn her back on the thing.

She firmly shut the door behind her. “We should bring the little creep to Toomas.”

Lina, clearly relieved to have the kratt locked back up, gave a short, catlike snort. “Toomas again. Are there no other smiths in the maakond? What do you see in him, anyway?”

“He’s good at what he does.”

“And that’s why you spend so much time around him,” Lina muttered sceptically. “Because he’s good with a hammer.”

A quick flare of irritation like a flame-tongue searing her sternum. “It’s none of your business where I do and do not spend my time, Lina.”

Lina’s shocked silence spoke for itself. It was rare that Elmi talked to her that way, and Elmi felt an answering pang of nauseating discomfort at the realisation.

She couldn’t bring herself to apologise.

“I only meant that I’m worried for you.” Lina’s voice was quiet. “As I said, I don’t think he’s quite well.”

“I appreciate the concern.” Elmi thought she did a workmanlike job of softening her tone; but then she was a terrible judge of such things.

They walked back to the stables in silence. Wet, fluffy blue-buttons brushed against the hem of their dresses, leaving smatterings of their miniature petals on the gold-thread embroidery. Only a few decades ago, such embroidery would’ve been luxury, worn only by the lady of the manor; now, it was nothing - less than nothing - cheaper than a bowl of pea soup. All the noblewomen of the past must’ve been spinning in their graves and grinding their teeth to dust to know that the likes of Elmi now pranced around in their Sunday garments.

Kratts had changed many things, for good and for ill.

Viisakas was waiting for them near the gates. She had been grazing on the blossoming white clover covering the front yard of the stables. At Elmi and Lina’s approach, she flicked her ear and turned her head a little to peer at them with one wet dark eye.

“Good girl,” Elmi muttered distractedly, patting her neck. Then, to Lina: “See you later.”

There was that twinge of nausea again.

Elmi wasn’t sure other people felt things the way she did. Empirical evidence suggested that they did not. Her friends and her enemies alike seemed to know and name their moods without having to give it much thought. To her, most of it was a confusing tangle of physical sensation, an expanse of colours so varied she couldn’t bear to look.

She’d tried to explain it to her family, once.

She’d never had to explain it to Toomas.

What do you see in him?

Viisi’s round flank was smoother than a length of velvet, but Elmi was sure of herself. She placed her palms flush against the mare’s withers and pulled herself up in one fluid movement. Her knees found easy purchase against Viisakas’ ribs.

“Nõõ, Viisi,” she murmured, and the mare startled into a trot.

Sometimes Toomas would forget to hide the little six-pointed star he wore around his left cuff. It was sharp and blackened, fashioned out of iron by someone only just learning to handle a pair of pliers. In the middle, suspended on a length of wire, was a shard of rough blue stone.

He’s not been in his right mind since his deportation, Lina’s voice whispered into her ear. Elmi remembered Toomas’ shocked expression when she’d touched him. He’d been scared of her.

He’d been scared for her.

“Nõõ,” she repeated, and her ride transitioned to an easy canter.

The soles of her feet buzzed from hours of standing up on the factory floor. It was pleasant to relieve that pressure now. Viisakas had a smooth, comfortable step. The braids they had plaited her mane into were too heavy for the wind to flutter them; this allowed Elmi to have a clear view of what lay ahead.

The mare did not need steering: she knew her way. So Elmi held the reins loosely and let her thoughts drift.

At the bend of the road where it entered Sääsküla proper, next to a vivid-green growth of young hemlock, stood a man. The sight of him made Elmi tense up; she’d recognise that long purple shirt anywhere. Lembit’s tastes in clothes were ostentatious, as if he were hoping to make up for all the 1100 years of their ancestors’ poverty and then some.

But he was alone. And for a moment, even though she knew better, she thought that bloodstains would look inconspicuous against that bright purple.

And what good would that be?

Lembit put out one arm, lightly touching Viisakas’ chest. The mare stopped like the good, stupid girl she was.

“Lembit,” Elmi acknowledged, wrinkling her nose. From her position on Viisi’s back, he looked small, his long arms pathetically bony. “You ever get tired of being a nuisance? Must be like a full-time job to you. If you speak to Märt Tammaru, maybe he’ll let you join the union.”

Lembit sneered in response, brushing his straw-coloured fringe away from his eyes. “Where have you been? Did Finkelmeyer hide you, after all? Figures. You and he are birds of a feather. Did he want you, troll-girl? - Agh!”

Something in Elmi snapped. She drew her knee forward, as if to spur Viisakas on, and then kicked, driving the heel of her shoe directly into the bridge of Lembit’s nose. She thought, with satisfaction, that the criss-cross pattern of the weaved bast would probably leave a mirroring scar.

Lembit staggered and howled, hands clutching his face.

“Bitch!” he cried, sounding almost bewildered. “You little raisk! You- you-”

Elmi pushed herself off Viisi’s back, landing on the ground in front of him. She seized him by the neck and cracked his head against her knee, hard. There was another crunch from his nasal bones, this one wetter than the first. The sound that came from Lembit’s throat was barely human. He dropped to the ground, writhing in agony; the cloud of dust raised by their scuffle settled on the lush fabric of his fancy shirt in misshapen flakes.

The soft spot between his lower ribs and the upper lip of his pelvis was temptingly exposed, the muscles of his back twitching with each shuddering breath. She looked at it as one might look at a cut of tender meat in a market.

While a kick with a bast shoe did not pack quite the same oomph as a kick with a boot, especially of the steel-toed military variety, it would not save Lembit if Elmi decided to make use of this opening. There was something vital there, barely protected by a layer of flesh and fat, that she could damage permanently. Possibly to a point incompatible with life, if old Märt’s war stories were anything to go by.

Lembit was sobbing now. She couldn’t see his face, but a puddle of apple-red blood was spreading rapidly from under his head, looking oddly pure against the dirty road.

What would Lembit’s family think if she made him an invalid? What would their friends Pätses think, or their friends Arros?

The village had taken long enough to accept her when she’d come there as a child. They would not suffer a transgression of this magnitude; not from her.

Elmi spat on him. Then she turned around and walked back to Viisakas, who, bless her heart, was still waiting for her human companion to be done with whatever odd thing she’d got up to.

“Good girl, Viisi,” Elmi murmured, getting astride once more.

She did spur Viisakas now, just a little. The mare didn’t bother trotting; she merely walked faster. Elmi judged that sufficient.

When she looked down, she saw that her clothes were unsalvageable. While the red stains may have blended into the purple of Lembit’s shirt, the same could not be said of her own undyed dress. The rough linen looked as though she’d fallen to her knees in a river of blood.

 

No matter.