"On the summit of each birch-tree
Sits a golden cuckoo calling,
[….]
He that "Love! O Love!" is calling,
Calls three moons and calls unceasing,
For the love-rejecting maiden
Sleeping in the deep sea-castles." – The Kalevala
The cuckoos woke Aino the morning her brother returned. The slopes of the mountain were fragrant with wildflowers and she ran barefoot from the house, pausing only long enough for her mother to put in her hands a thick slice of the dark rye bread she had helped to bake the day before. Outside she played fearlessly, twirling underneath the clear blue sky, imagining herself a great sorceress. She filled the wide pockets of her apron with mushrooms, thinking how happy they would make her mother, and crowned her yellow hair with the bell-like blooms of lingonberry plants. They were soft, and tickled the edge of her ear.
A cuckoo sang out, perhaps, the same one that had woken her. Laughing, she called back at it, fitting her voice to the bird's high cry. If I was a little songbird, she thought, I could be no happier than I am now, since the summer has come and I can run and play as much as I like.
She stayed outside till her stomach began to ache for her mother's warm midday soup, and then she headed back to the cottage. She recognized her brother's horse tied at the door and rushed inside, eager to greet him. But he was seated at the broad kitchen table, back slouched and eyes downcast. When she came through the door singing out his name like a songbird he did not grin at the sight of her, as he always had, and whirl her in arms. Instead, he flinched, and looked away, as though the sight of her yellow hair pained him.
Her mother rose, and came to Aino. "Your brother brings us joyous news," she said, gently picking the lingonberry blossoms from Aino's hair, "you are to be wed to the great lord, wise Vänämöinen."
Aino shrank away from her mother's touch, "What do you mean?" she asked, taking back the flowers from her mother's hands, holding them to her before they could be discarded.
"The agreement has been made. He will come soon to fetch you and take you home with him and make you a great lady." Aino's mother smoothed the kerchief over her own hair, long since turned gray, and straightened her skirt. "He is a great bard and an honored hero. We could have hoped for no better husband for you."
"I'll have to leave?" Aino asked, wishing that her mother's words would erase, reverse themselves, turn a senseless as the cuckoos' chatter, "I'll have to marry, soon?"
Her mother gave her a stern, careful, smile. "You have been old enough to marry for close on a year now. You have become a very pretty girl, Aino."
Slowly, Aino recalled all she knew of Vänämöinen. "He is old," she cried out, sudden, piercing, "he's an old man, isn't he?"
Her mother's tone turned harsh, scolding, "Don't be so proud, my girl," she said, "he is a great lord who will bestow on you honor and respect. You should be grateful to him –"
And with a sharp sob Aino ran from the house, back into the woods, and curled herself into the roots of her favorite tree, one she had grown up with. This was her home, and she would not leave it, ever, not even if it meant she had to leave hidden in the woods and surviving on mushrooms and berries, she didn't care, she wouldn't, couldn't leave.
Her brother found her, after close to an hour. "I'm sorry, Aino," he told her, "I never wanted this for you."
"Why did you do it?" she asked him, her eyes still red with tears and her nose running, "Why did you promise me to him?"
"I didn't intend to," he said, "I was arrogant, and dueled magic with him. He won, and sang me into a marsh. I would have drowned if he didn't let me out. I promised him everything – my boats, my stallions, father's gold, but he wanted nothing except you. I'm sorry, my sister. If I could have chosen a husband for you he would have been young and handsome and lighthearted as you are. I'm sorry."
"I don't want any husband at all," she said, and he put his arms around her and held her as she cried.
When finally her brother persuaded her to go home, it was time for supper. Her mother served boiled fish with rare, precious dill, and after the meal a loaf of pitko, Aino's favorite sweetbread, braided and studded through with raisins. All throughout the supper Aino's mother talked of nothing but the wealth Aino would receive as Vänämöinen's wife, the honor, the respect she would gain. Aino said nothing and went to sleep early, her meal hardly touched.
The next morning, she woke early as was her habit, but if the birds sang, she did not notice them. Her mother made her put on her best gown, all of blue, stiff with lack of use, before going out into the forest to collect birch twigs for a new broom. She felt she could not move in the gown, and with her yellow hair tied up as her mother had put it. This is what being married will be like, she said to herself, except that then I shall not even be allowed to wander alone in the forest.
It was then, as though in response to her thoughts, that she heard footsteps crunching over the twigs behind her. A man stood there, his beard long and white as cloud, dressed in a minstrel's bright garb, a harp over his shoulder. "Beauty of the northland," he said to her, "you must be Aino, sister of Joukahainen."
"I am," she said, arms filled with bundles of birch twigs.
He bowed to her. "I am the bard Vänämöinen, honored to be your intended."
She did not move, did not know what to say. His eyes were bright and laughing. His hands, though veined with age, danced, eloquent, in a conjurer's gestures, so nimble she could hardly follow them. "Oh, lovely maiden, will you deck yourself in gold and pearls for my sake?"
Mute, she shook her head.
He laughed, without malice, and in a single turn of his palm he held a strand of pearls. "Let me put this around your swan-white neck."
She did not move as he fastened the cold length of river pearls at her throat. The touch of his wizened fingers made her shudder. Oh, he will touch me like this, she thought to herself, he will touch me and touch me and touch me and I will be able to go nowhere, do nothing. He will bring me to his great empty hall and cover me with gold so heavy I cannot move and talk until I cannot hear my thoughts and touch me and touch me where no one can ever see.
He must have misunderstood her shudder, for he smiled again, so good-naturedly. "Only for me, my dear girl," he said, "will you wear these fineries for me alone?"
Her horror freed her from her stillness, and she let the birch twigs fall and ripped the pearls from her neck, letting them scatter over the forest floor. "No," she cried to him, "no. I will not wear gold and pearls for your sake, I will not wear them for you alone. I will live in my father's house and wear flowers in my hair and laugh and dance and you will not have me." And she ran from him, ran through the forest farther and farther until she was back at her own little house, weeping as though the birds had gone silent in the trees.
When her mother and farther and sister and brother heard the sound of her weeping they came to her, and to all of them she told of her meeting in the woods with Vänämöinen, of how she had ripped his pearls from her neck and refused his promises. But her mother and father and sister laughed at her. "How foolish you are," her mother said, "Come inside, and I will give you sweet butter and cloudberry jam and all other good things to fill your belly. Calm your childish panic and you will begin to appreciate your future more and more."
"Just imagine," her sister said, "the silken ribbons he will give you for your hair, the golden girdles, the gowns of purest linen! Imagine how high the ceilings of his hall must be, how heavy the fur of his bed-covering! Your life, my little sister Aino, will be so blessed at his side."
And imagine she did – she imagined his old hands stroking her hair like that of a treasured lapdog, her bright clear forehead bent in deference and submission, his troubled cough waking her late at night. For riches and respect her life was to be bartered away, caught off from air and sunshine, bound up to the comfort of an aged man. "I would rather," she told her assembled family, "be a salmon in the cold sea than marry him."
They were furious with her then, all but her brother. Their angry words were harsh against her ears, filled with the hard sounds of disrespect and duty and gratitude. Her mother, cheeks red with indignation, stood as lectured and Aino thought she would strike her. As she had the day before, Aino ran from the cottage, but this time she did not stop in the forest of her childhood. She ran and ran, though she could hear no footsteps behind her, ran as the wind against her cheeks stole her tears from her, ran under she could hear the sea's soft keening as a faint, distant echo.
For days and nights she wandered, sleeping under the open sky, under at last she came to seashore. There she stopped, wavering, dizzy from hunger and fear and loneliness. The wind and waves seemed to sing her own sorrow, and Aino looked at the gray-green ocean and thought of what it would be to be the water itself, ever moving, uncontained and uncontainable. Her most terrible childhood nightmares had been the ones in which she had been bound or held or weighted down. From those only her brother could wake her, and unwind the blankets from her legs, and calm her till the sun rose and the world expanded again.
Now – no ending to that nightmare if she submitted to her family's will, no morning to wake to. Aino gazed into the water until her tired eyes saw in its depths the flicker of light on human skin, the wavering movement of long, trailing hair like sea-grass. Within the waves Aino saw girls her own age, hair untrammeled, bodies at ease in the water as though their skin's boundaries blurred. Join us, their silent lips seemed to call, bare legs whirling and dancing beneath the sea's billows.
"Yes," Aino consented, as she had not to Vänämöinen, and under the sun she untied her sunshine-bright hair, and stripped her body of her clothes like chains, and dived into the water to join them.