“It looks good, it smells sweet,” he said. “But the handsomest of people are sometimes rotten at heart, and the handsomest of cakes are sometimes unfit to be eaten.”
He took his hunting knife from the sheath that hung at his belt. It was but half a knife, the edge nicked deeply, the point broken off. But its temper was good, for it had been forged by a master smith in the days when men did honest work.
Kullervo cut through the upper crust of the cake, he cut through the wheaten layer at the top; but when the knife struck the stone in the centre it broke short off at the hilt and only the handle remained in his grasp. The slave looked at it, and as the blade fell to the ground he burst out weeping.
“Oh, sorrow upon sorrow!” he moaned. “This knife was my only friend. I had no one to love but this iron, so true, so ready to help. It was once my father’s knife, and well it served him in the chase and in the fight. And now it is broken by this cake of stone which Ilmarinen’s women have given me for food.”
He picked up the broken blade and tried to fit it in the handle. It was vain; both blade and [[266]]handle were useless. With a cry of despair he flung them far from him; with a cry of wrath he threw the stone-filled cake still farther, and it fell with a thud among the bushes. Then up flew a pair of ravens, one lighting upon a blasted pine and one taking shelter in a grove of oaks.
“Caw! caw!” cried the one in the pine. “What can ail the wretched slave boy?”
“He is angry,” answered the other. “His mistress has treated him badly. She has given him a stone for bread.”
“It is thus that the rich feed the poor,” said the one in the pine. “But what will the slave do about it?”
“If he is wise he will pay them well for their cruel jest,” cawed the one in the oak. “He will seek revenge, he will have it. Caw! caw! caw!”
Kullervo leaped up and stood upon the hummock. He stretched out his arms and shook his clenched fists in the face of the sky.