On the Shoulders of Otava

By Laura Mauro

Siiri Tuokkola takes up arms for the Women's Guard during Finland's 1918 Civil War along with her comrades. Stationed in a remote village outpost, rumours of strange things in the woods come to a head when Siiri's comrade Mirva goes missing in a blizzard. Determined to find her, Siiri braves the deep forest, where mysterious lights weave through the trees, and those who look upon them for too long may find themselves afflicted by a strange madness. But there are worse things in the forest than lights, and Siiri must face them if she is to find Mirva before it's too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Jul 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786362643

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

WHEN PETE AND NICKY CROWTHER OF PS asked me to head their new novella imprint, Absinthe Books, I was honoured to accept. They asked me to find three authors to launch the imprint, and Laura Mauro was one of the first names to spring to mind. Laura has garnered a well-deserved reputation in a relatively short time, and the short story she wrote for the Wonderland anthology co-edited by myself and my husband, Paul Kane, brought a very new spin to the Alice mythos—combining characters from the original novel with Japanese folklore to give a highly original tale.

In On the Shoulders of Otava, Laura has turned to Finnish folklore for inspiration, and has again written a highly original story, this time set during the Finnish Civil War of 1918 and focussing on a group of women serving in the Women’s Guard. The tale of Siiri and her band of compatriots (Ester, Annikki, Aune, to name a few) is a compelling one, and deals with the legend of being ‘ghostlit’; I won’t clarify what that is here, it would spoil the story for you, but I was delighted to find Laura has drawn an utterly realistic landscape that pulls you in completely. Then once you’re inside, everything shifts and nothing feels quite real anymore. Quite a feat, and one Laura pulls off seemingly with ease. I say ‘seemingly’, it takes hard work and real talent to make the telling of a tale such as On the Shoulders of Otava seem effortless.

So turn the page, enter Siiris’ world...But be careful where you look, it’s dangerous in there.

—Marie O’Regan

Derbyshire, 2020

1

Liekkiö

"Such the minds of merry maidens:

Like the early dawn of spring-time,

Like the rising Sun in summer

No such radiance awaits me,

With my young heart filled with terror"

—The Kalevala

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IN THE NIGHT, DRUNK MEN WITH BAYONETS STALK through the old churchyard wailing like trolls; a terrible, discordant sound which is supposed to be singing, but which reminds Siiri of the cries of dying men. Them, Ester mutters, pointing towards the window. "Men like them are the reason people think the Red Guard is full of inferior, worthless fools. And here we are, doing their goddamn jobs while they drink and whore like there’s not a fucking war on."

None of them are refined city girls, unaccustomed to profanity, but there are those like Ester who act like it is their imperative to swear; as though a sentence is not complete without at least one perkele or saatana. As though wearing men’s clothing means that one must act exactly like a man.

Siiri rolls onto her back. The floorboards are hard, and the night is cold, and they huddle for warmth like animals; side-by-side, back to back, the scent of musty uniforms, of unwashed skin. They are a small unit, but there is precious little room for the Women’s Guard, and so they find themselves crammed into a single room of this dusty parsonage while the men lodge inside a large, empty house on the outskirts of town. They are so underprepared, all of them; even the men are mostly farm boys, or else starry-eyed Trade Unionists, a motley assortment of shoemakers and tailors and stonemasons who have only ever read about war in books. Few of them had so much as touched a gun before the war broke out, and now, all of a sudden, they are soldiers.

Beside her, Elina shifts; dark eyes peer out from under her woollen cap. I heard gunfire this afternoon, she murmurs. She reminds Siiri of a hare; she is long-faced, flighty, and her eyes are perpetually watchful. Of all of them, she is the least suited to this life. She ought to have stayed a maidservant, Siiri thinks; a gentle soul like her was never meant to hold a gun. Over in the west. They’re coming, aren’t they? We can’t hold them off for much longer.

Of course they’re coming. Mirva, ever wakeful, her back pressed against the wall, cradling her rifle in her arms as tenderly as a child. You saw what happened in Markkula. Do you really think they’d spare us after that? Don’t be so naïve. She regards them with a lofty severity. She is only eighteen years old, but there is a hardness about her which suggests she has been an adult for a long time; that childhood passed her by, somehow. They attacked a goddamn hospital in Harmoinen. They shot men in their beds. They executed nurses. She shakes her head. "And they say we’re the butchers. We are the Bolshevik plague, and they will exterminate us, each and every one. Don’t think for a moment they’ll spare us because we’re women."

Markkula. Siiri rests her forearm over her eyes, and in that perfect darkness she can see it still. They’d stood in the yard, in perfect rows, those prisoners; they’d been unarmed, and still her comrades had mown them down like beasts. The terrible chatter of the Maxim gun; the stink of blood and shit and fear, sharp and glassy, and their eyes, wide and terrified, crying out as the Red Guard fired indiscriminately into the crowd. Blood in the snow, sparkling like rubies. Fragments of shattered bone. Some of the captured Whites had barely been twenty years old. Just boys, that was all. Just boys playing at being men.

She’d choked down her concern, her questions. She would not open herself to Ester’s mockery; don’t you have the stomach for war? You mustn’t be afraid to spill a little blood. Perhaps you should go back to the farm like a good girl. And in any case, Mirva was right: they were the enemy. They would do the same in a heartbeat.

Hey, who’s that? Ester, on her haunches, peering over the lip of the sill. Siiri sits up. It is March, and the sky is so clear and so black that Siiri imagines she could count every single star. At the apex of the window is Cassiopeia, who so enraged Poseidon that he cast her into the sky. And there, beneath her, is her daughter Andromeda, waiting in perpetuity for her hero Perseus to rescue her. In these stories, the women never rescue themselves.

There, out in the churchyard. A long shadow. A man, silhouetted against the trampled snow. In the dark, the churchyard is strange and eerie. Crumbling headstones like ruined teeth; the distant glimmer of church windows, arched and watchful. Siiri squints. He must be one of ours, she says, joining Ester at the window. A shaft of ice-bright moonlight embosses his profile in silver; he is sharp-faced, gazing at some indeterminate point in the distance, though the churchyard is empty, and the forest beyond is still.

Ah, it’s only Osku. Perhaps he’s so drunk he’s forgotten how to walk, Ester says, wryly. Here, Siiri. Open the window. I want to tell him what a useless shithead he is.

Osku? Aune, awake now, barging in with her great elbows; her breath coats the window in a fog of condensation. We grew up together. He’s not the type to drink heavily. He’s a goody-goody, didn’t you know? He’s got a pregnant wife back in Kuortti. Every penny he earns, he sends back to her.

Siiri frowns. She does not know if it really is Osku, but there is something odd in this man’s posture, the way he stands so perfectly still; a strange slackness, limbs heavy, as though he is a