The Oldest Curse

To paraphrase the Jew Book: Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll kvetch that the weather is never right for fishing.

Take Lemminkainen. Fucking Lemminkainen.

First off, the name. Sounds a bit like mine, huh? As to why, the ancient Finns were concerned with many things, not dying and finding a place to stick their dicks that wasn't filled with bees being chief among them. Language and writing, unfortunately, were not great skills of theirs. Historians go on and on about Phoenicia, with its alphabet, and Egypt, with its scribbled pictures, but I feel inclined to mention that neither of those places were invested with forest predators or prone to snowstorms that lasted for months. A hot sentence won't warm you when the boughs are fanged with ice, nor can you distract a bear from eating by drawing a man wearing eye-shadow with a basket on his head Still, in ancient Finnish the word for "ass" was "kolo" and the word for a hole in the ground was "kollo". So, it really is true what they say about the old Finns.

Either way, this lack of articulation led to some problems concerning me and Lemminkainen. To tell you the truth, people still get us confused. Which is unfortunate because we work in different parts of the company. He's in the heroic department, acquisitions and community service, and, like all bad guys, I work in HR. He's a god too, and a powerful one, though it wasn't always so. Trickery and conjuration, are his aspects. (A good god of trickery and an evil god of love. Fucking Finns, I tell you. Bunch of kolos.) Call him Lem. He's a nice enough chap, but he has a real sore spot when it comes to me. I think he's just spoiled.

The man had everything: good looks, wits, a hell of a way with the ladies. Was basically born to be a hero. Things were less democratic back then. Destiny and providence ruled the day, and guys like Lem arrived on fate's coattails with golden hair and pearly teeth and just expected the world to lick their balls. And the world, after a few good deeds, a glass of wine, and a nice foot-rub, typically complied. He got poems and songs, tales of his exploits and accomplishments. I got whispered rites in the woods involving dead animals and hard nipples. Still, it was a living.

Sure, he had some tough breaks. I take full-responsibility for that. He was a hero; I'm the god of evil. Heroes have struggles. I was just doing my part, holding up my end of the bargain. Personally, I'd like to think that I helped the fellow, toughened him up a bit. Any man can survive the loss of one true love, or even two. It's the third that really shows that they have the stones.

He didn't see it that way. Worked up a spicy beef with me over it. Even went so far as smashing up some shrines and crashing a few cult-ins, stuff that took real planning and precise scheduling to put together, especially back then. You couldn't just shoot your high priest a text in those days. You had to send a raven, appear in a dream, light a damn bush on fire. It was all portents and prophecy--exhausting stuff. Do you know the meteorology you have to get into to incite weather patterns that make crops fail ONLY in the regions where people have not built a secret dark altar in your honor? I spent most of the sixteenth century playing at being some evil Al Roker.

I was pissed. Straight-talk here: I had a bit of a temper in those days. I had this old crone send Lem and his buddy on a quest to kill and bring back a certain black swan that was particularly valued by a god that had even worse anger management problems than I. Long story short, Lem gets shot dead with an arrow and then ripped apart by the fierce currents of the blood-river of the underworld.

As ways to die go, that's probably not the best, but, hey, there are worse. Ask Prometheus. Turned me off from fried liver and onions for three hundred years.

Lem, though, with his Jim Morrison hair and easy charm, was too lucky even to die. His mum up and took a copper rake and fished him out of the river, pieces at a time, like skimming leaves out of a swimming pool, and glued him back together with honey from a sacred bee. Not only did that bullshit work, but he became a god--a full-fledged deity, just add insect vomit. I mean, hello, how fortunate can you get? Kids are dying from dysentery and malnutrition from a steady diet of pine cones, and he returns as big hero 2.0.

But does the he come back grateful? Does he come up to me and say, "Good show, Po, thanks for the dip in the death drink. Look at this shiny new immortality. Check out these godly powers." Of course not. He's ticked. Up and devotes his whole existence to opposing me in everything I do. Dedicates himself to my destruction. I try to tell him. Sit on the beach. Enjoy your peaches. But he won't have it. He's all jihad-or-bust.

Fucking humans.There's just no pleasing you sometimes.

So I say, "Fuck it. Let's dance, new kid." And we do. We still are. A bloody little tango that has lasted the last millenium. At this point, I'm not even into it. I'm just going through the steps. One, two, stab-stab-stab, three, four, kill-kill-kill. I just want to hit the punch bowl and grab a breather. I've tried to end it and so has he. In all honesty, I don't think either of us know how. This murderous little ditty of vengeance and retribution is all we know. Much as we hate to admit it, even gods need routine. Particularly gods.

So I found myself, sitting on my old throne in the middle of the empty dance floor, thinking of Veera, tapping out a beat on the wood of the armrest, waiting for the latest dance to start. I cracked my neck, once, twice. My death toll was beyond counting, my name spoken in the frightened whispers of a dozen languages for over a thousand years. Few beings made me nervous. Lem was one of them. I hated him more for that than for anything else.

Focusing on the double doors that led into the room, I waited. I could sense him. He was allowing me that anxiety. As a trickster, he could cloud any senses, even those of a god. If I could feel him coming, it was because he wanted me to. I could feel his presence building, coming closer and closer, one of the overhead lights, still dimmed from the ritual, grew bright and then burst in a shower of sparks. So dramatic. Once a hero, always a hero. Fucking Lem.

Right on time, the doors flew open and in he strode, dragging a large trunk behind him. Moose trailed just behind him, his face, as always, a mask of determined stupidity. My enemy walked quickly, with purpose and devoid of fear, his face a study in rage, until he was just at the edge of the dance floor and then, using only one arm, hurled the trunk, which must have weighed well over three hundred pounds, so that it skidded and spun across the floor toward me. With the speed it was travelling and how heavy it was, the trunk would have crushed a normal man, sent him and the throne hurling across the room in a storm of skin and splinters. I wasn't a normal man. With a calmness and deliberateness that directly contrasted his agitation, I slowly extended my right leg, heel out, and stopped the trunk with my foot. The impact was so great that it tore several tiles loose from the dance floor, but neither I nor the throne budged an inch.

I gave my friendliest smile and nodded my head curtly, acknowledging his entrance as if it had been the picture of politeness.

Moose didn't miss a beat, whether due to his familiarity with the ways of immortals or because of his deeply lacking intelligence. It was hard to be sure with him. He casually walked in front of Lem, right in the path where he had hurled the truck, and announced him. "Master Lempo, Dread Lord of the Forest, Father of Evil, Head of Demons, Piercer of the Great Heart that is Love, may I present the Greatest Hero of the Kalevala, Wooer of The Northern Maiden, He Who Has Tasted the Black River and Lived, God of Trickery, High Wizard of Conjuration, Mage of Misdirection, Lemminkainen.".

Nice introduction. Good projection. Would have instilled fear in most. Lemminkainen, didn't scare so easily, hower.

"Who approaches these dark woods in black times?" I spoke the traditional greeting.

"A traveller seeking shade and nothing more," he said, answering in the prescribed way, if a tad angrily. Lem was tall, far taller than me, at least, but he was still almost a foot shorter than Moose. He showed no sign of intimidation, though, and well he shouldn't have. Standing there, dressed unassumingly in a ragged Mudhoney t-shirt and worn jeans, he could have taken the massive bodyguard apart with a snap of his fingers. No piru could approach the power of the hero-god. Then again, I wasn't a piru. I was Paapiru.

"Walk beneath these leaves, but do not tary overlong, lest the shade seek you." Then, in a cordial, less formal manner. "Good to see you, Lem. To what do I owe the pleasure? Come to try one of our famous Long Islands?" I motioned my hand toward the bar that sat in the corner.

"Always peddling some poison or another, aren't you, Wormwood?" Ah, the old nicknames. I hadn't heard that one in a while.

"The people thirst," I said simply.

"And you just can't wait to fill them with toxin and sully the world with your sacrilege." Sanctimonious upstart. If he stood any straighter or puffed his chest out further, I was afraid he was going to crack a rib.

"InBev can't have all the fun." Tapping my toes on the large trunk, I asked, "Did you come here just to compliment me? Is this a token of your undying affection? You shouldn't have. My feast-day isn't until autumn."

"I will gift you with oblivion if you don't mind your forked tongue!"

"Rumor and hearsay. My tongue is no more spectacular than the next gentleman's. Though I daresay your mother disagreed." I gave him a wink.

Lem's handsome features knotted with anger, and runes of light lit up on his skin, arcane patterns of green and blue bleeding together, growing in intensity, dancing across him like the northern auroras. Breaking from him, they traveled out into the room, surrounding us, balls of light that shimmered and danced, then started to condense, flickering, growing and shrinking, into forms that were nearly solid. Spectral soldiers--thirteen of them, one for each trial that their master had endured, for every hardship I had inflicted on him in his quest for love--dressed in ancient armor, still sporting their death wounds, gashes and holes that seeped blue ectoplasmic blood that dripped and poured but vanished before hitting the floor.

"Do you take me for some hedge wizard, Lempo? To be disrespected so? The dead heed my call, great warriors laid low by your machinations. Their thirsts for vengeance as just and true as my own." As he spoke, spears materialized in the hands of the apparitions, sharp and tipped with heads that I knew were quite dangerous, even to someone like me.

Moose flinched noticeably. Always superstitious, he had quite a fear of the undead. Heights, too. What a lummox. It was hard to find good help. What use was a bodyguard that went weak-kneed at the sight of a few angry spirits? I guess he might be useful if I were ever attacked by the cast of Jersey Shore.

"Lem, old sport, you should know by now that I don't spook." I raised one finger from the armrest and twirled it slightly. The sound of rushing of wind filled the room, slight at first, but growing, nipped with cold and loud with the sound of rustling leaves, but not a paper moved.

The ghostly soldiers charged. Moose, showing his great worth and unquestionable bravery, actually took a few steps back, until he was not quite cowering behind the god of conjuration. Raising their spears, the dead made ready a unified attack.

Say what you want about the ineffectiveness of the old ways, but synchronization is a lost art in warfare. The business of killing used to be a violent ballet. Now, it's all remote-controlled drones and land mines. No flair in an IED.

These warriors, however, were old-school. As one, their weapons thrust out, aimed at my heart, not a second separating the timing of any of them. The spears were only about a half a foot away from my lapel when they met the barrier. It held the tips lightly at first, causing them to bob noticeably, as if caught in a fall breeze. I spun my finger faster, and the bobbing increased. Soon, the breeze became a gust that tore at the buckles in their armor and ruffled the beards on their ancient faces.

Something as mundane as a tornado, just an accidental mix of pressures and fronts, can take a straw--plain old, harmless straw--and put it through a telephone pole. What then can a god do with a leaf?

Though they were invisible, you could hear them now, crackling like the wings of a thousand locusts, spinning out from me, each a tiny scythe in that fell wind. At the beginning, it was a nick or two, a thin cut on the cheek of one or two of the warriors that seeped blue--nothing compared to the wounds they had already suffered. Then another, and another, before, finally, like a maelstrom, it struck, a storm of razors, sharp and relentless. Skin flayed, armor shredded under the assault of innumerable invisible, perfectly-sharpened razors.

Fools will tell you that the dead have no fear, that they feel no pain. Balls. The dead know fear like no other, and pain, as well, because they have experienced enough of both to truly understand. After life, there is death. After death, there is nothing.

Even the honor-bound can know panic. A few of the soldiers tried to flee the obliterating wind. Too late they discovered that the same wind that held their spears now enveloped them, trapped them against my spell. Soon, they no longer even resembled men. Before it was done, before I let the rustling quiet, they were little more than a collection of shrapnel and ooze.

The room was quiet once the spectral wind died down. Nothing had been disturbed. Lem's face darkened even further into fury. Moose peeked out, as much as he could manage being larger than the person he was hiding behind. Big idiot had the audacity to grin and give me a thumbs up.

"What fun, Lem. I do so enjoy your visits. Tell me, have we time to play Pin the Tail on the Donkey?" I allowed myself a smirk. Truthfully, I was more nervous than I showed. I'd meant to stop them a good foot earlier than I had.

My rival took another aggressive step forward. In response, I raised my finger once more and gave it a lazy twirl. His shirt rippled. With a clenched jaw, he stared balefully at me, but no more runes lit up his tanned skin. "Aren't you even going to open it?" he said, referencing the trunk once more.

"Isn't it in bad taste to open a gift in front of a guest. Egg on my face, I didn't get you anything, old sport." I had no need to open it. I was fully aware of what was inside. I had sent it originally.

"Make an exception." Moose, who had just now managed to return to his proper position at Lem's side, shot an anxious sideways glanced at the smaller man due to the anger in the demand.

I rapped my knuckles on the armrest. No sense dragging it out. With a kick of my foot, I crushed the lock. Within seconds, the heavy lip sprang open and out crawled a diminutive creature, sporting green, mucus-covered skin dotted with pus-filled sores, leathery wings with thin veiny membranes, and a grotesque oversized phallus that was almost as large as it was.

Paha.

With bulging eyes the color of skim milk the creature looked about the room in confusion, even the dim light of the club hurting his sensitive eyes. When his gaze settle on Lemminkainen, he hissed, revealing teeth small and pointed, like those of a piranha. "Sneaking, hiding, finding...hurting. Binding. Darkness. Screaming."

While Hisi was the embodiment of the grand impulses that led to evil--desire, ambition, wrath, hubris--Paha was the petty things: jealousy, greed, selfishness, lechery, perversion. As such, unlike the rest of us, he had never evolved. He was as he had been nearly a thousand years ago, small, squat, hideous, able to communicate only in bursts of emotion and crude description. Most people found him revolting. Most people hated the part of themselves that was Paha. If Hisi were the gorgeous mistress seducing the wealthy married man in the bedroom of his lavish home, Paha was the teenage son watching from the closet with a handful of jizz.

Lem, showing his human upbringing, shrugged his shoulders aggressively at the little, slimey god and feigned a step forward, which caused Paha to retreat instantly to safety of my throne, where he hugged himself tightly against my leg. I could feel his huge cock down the length of my shin. "Brother Po, Paha scared. Shaking, trembling, fearing, peeing."

An unsteady, wet trickle against my ankle let me know that he was indeed doing all of those things. I slapped him across the face and shook him from my leg with a kick. He bounced hard against the trunk before skittering around to the side, leaving Lem and I on either side. The repulsive deity wasn't keen to turn his back on either of us. Paha was smarter than he looked. I wasn't pleased and Lem, I'm sure, would have liked nothing better than to make a hat out of him.

Lem shared why he was so angry. "Honestly, Po, you send this cretin to my abode. Have you no better assassins in your retaining? You had faith that this mongrel creature could end me?"

"Of course not," I said. "I have faith in nothing. I had hope, and little enough of that. Still, I figured that at worst, you would kill him and save me the irritation of his company." Paha hissed. I stuck my tongue out at him, and then curled it and touched my nose with the tip. "It looks like I had bad luck all-around. Good thing I didn't go to the track today."

"You would sacrifice your own brother so callously? Your dishonor knows no bounds, fiend!" It was a wonder Lem could balance at all, propped up as he was on his high horse which seemed to constantly sit on a soapbox.

"He's more like a dog, really. And not a very good one, at that." I indicated my urine soaked pant leg. "Not even housebroken. And at his age? Thought it might be time to put him down. Thought you might do me the kindness of the coup de grace. You know me, I'm all heart. Can't even finish Old Yeller."

"Brother Po is cruel. Sharp-mouthed and dull-hearted!" Paha dug his sharp claws across the trunk, leaving deep trenches in the wood. He would have loved to throttle both Lem and I, but knew he was overmatched. At least for the moment.

Paha was an odd creature, at the mercy of his feelings. In truth, his physical form was little more than a slimey membrane through which emotion passed. The more he felt, the more the filter soaked up, and the bigger he got. Even now, I could see his shoulders straining, the framework of his leathery wings cracking and expanding under his anger. He had grown almost four inches during the course of the conversation. I would need to assuage him. It wouldn't do to have him get into a tizzy and busting the ceiling again.

"Paha, dearest, sweetest, Paha, come to your brother. You know how I like to tease. I am so glad that you are well. I feared constantly for your safety." He looked at me skeptically. Paha was dumb, but not stupid. He then looked to Lem. One of us was pain wrapped in roses. The other was only thorns. He chose the sweeter scent and bounded over to me on all fours to sit at my feet. I rewarded him by scratching under his chin. His muscles ceased their swelling with just that touch. "That's a good Paha! Bother Po, won't let the mean man hurt you anymore."

The little god twisted his head to look back at Lem and felt brave enough to give a horrid chuckle. "Trickster all out of tricks. Po here. Po protect." He nuzzled my knee. I could smell the infection coming from the open sores on his skin, and fought the urge to kick him away once more.