The Sotka

There is a version of the beginning where a god speaks and the world appears, tidy and on schedule. This is not that version.

In this one there was air, and in the air a woman named Ilmatar, and nothing whatsoever to do. She endured it as long as she could stand it, which was a very long time, and then she let herself down into the sea, on the theory that water is at least something.

The sea was worse. But the wind found her there, and the waves found her, and by the time she understood what had happened she was carrying a child and had nowhere to put him down. There was no land. There was not even a rumor of land. She floated for seven hundred years, which is long enough for any reasonable person to give up on the concept of a floor.

Then a duck came by.

Not a swan. Not an eagle. Nothing with a reputation. A goldeneye. A sotka. A small black-and-white diving duck with a yellow eye and a problem, and the problem was that she was heavy with eggs and there was not one dry twig in the entire universe to build a nest on.

She quartered the water looking. Ilmatar, floating, watched her go back and forth, and eventually did the only kind thing available, which was to lift one knee out of the sea.

The duck saw a green island rise from the water.

It was not an island. It was a knee. The duck did not investigate further, because when you are that far along you take the first solid thing you are offered and you ask your questions in the spring.

She built her nest there. She laid six eggs of gold and a seventh of iron, and she settled down on them, and she brooded.

Here is the part nobody warns the duck about. A knee is not an island. A knee is attached to a woman, and the woman is alive, and the eggs get warm, and then they get hot, and then they get hot enough that the skin underneath begins to cook.

Ilmatar held still as long as she could. By all accounts this was a serious effort. But there is a limit to what anyone will take from a duck, and she reached it, and she twitched.

The nest went into the sea.

Now, in a properly run universe, that is the end of the story. Seven eggs, one duck, one very sorry morning. Instead the pieces did not sink, and did not simply drift. They changed on the way down.

The lower half of one shell became the earth underneath everything. The upper half became the vault of the sky. The yolk went up as the sun. The white went up as the moon. The speckled bits became the stars and the dark bits became the clouds, and every one of them stayed exactly where the accident had put it.

Nobody planned this. Nobody was consulted. The world we are standing on is what happened when a bird made a bad real estate decision and a tired woman moved her leg.

Ilmatar, to her credit, took it in stride. Having accidentally produced a floor, she set about the rest of it. Where she reached out a hand, a headland rose. Where she turned on her side, a bay opened. She scooped the fjords with her feet and left islands wherever she stopped to rest. She spent a very long time on the coastline. It shows.

Her son was born considerably later, and by then he was already an old man, and already annoyed. But that is a different story.

The duck is not mentioned again. She gets one scene, she gets no name, she loses every egg she had, and she builds the world.

This village is called Sotkajärvi. Goldeneye Lake. Now you know why.