Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (21 page)

Mariarta gazed at him, uncomprehending. The rider shook his head. “The Northern gods told their worshippers what to do,” the rider said, “but the gods were bound by the saying as well. One out of ten of
them
had to go find a new home too. The lot fell on me. At least I was able to borrow this lad to keep me company.” He patted the big grey horse. “As well for him, maybe, for shortly he wasn’t needed there any more.” He shrugged once more, and the light of the hammer glittered in his eyes: a deadly light, but humorous with the capricious humor of the lightning bolt. “You, though,” he said, those eyes bearing down on Mariarta, “should know about this, for I feel the breath of another of the Old Ones about you. Not one of my nearest kindred, but some sister from  over mountain. East of here, or west: east by the mitred city, or west by the lakes. One of those two—”

His voice was getting fainter, just as he was. Mariarta realized abruptly that the sky was paling, and the rider with it. “Sister!” Mariarta said desperately. “Is she someone—is she a goddess who shoots?”

She found she was talking to nothing but air filled with the colorless radiance of approaching dawn; and down the valley, toward Talia, a cock crowed.

•

It was a long walk back to Mustér, but Mariarta did it by noon. In the villages above Curaglia, every door was bolted and every window barred, though Mariarta felt eyes peering at her from the other side of knotholes in window-planks and doors.
Yes,
  she thought, 
they passed this way, all right.

In Mustér the story was more confusing. Mariarta went to Il Cucu and was descended on by everyone but Bab Stoffel. He, when she met him by the fire, took Mariarta’s hands and told her that about dawn, Flisch had awakened suddenly and asked where he was. Mariarta thanked him, and God, and told Bab Stoffel and the circle of eager listeners of what she had seen—though she did not mention much of her conversation with the big rider with the hammer. She described him, though. Bab Stoffel crossed himself and frowned, but would say nothing more on the subject.

On the business of what had happened in Mustér that night, there was argument. Some had seen shadowy riders, some had heard only a great wind: some had heard horns blowing, bells ringing. No one could agree. Bab Stoffel, though, said, “The Frisian Ride, it’s called past the northern lakes. The country people there know to build their houses or sheds with doors that can be left open for the Ride to pass: it always passes without harm. I wouldn’t have thought that the Frisian folk ever came so far south, though. This must be recorded.” And Bab Stoffel took himself off to the Abbey to write it all down.

Mariarta laughed, and went to bed. When she rose, fairly late that night, she was haled off  to the common room and given food enough for even her appetite, and enough drink to have swum in. Every kitchen girl came out and flirted with her, though not Turté, who Mariarta understood quite well was busy elsewhere. Her, and Flisch, Mariarta saw the next day, when she was leaving.

“Where to this time?” Turté said, shyly. “A brave fellow like you can surely go anywhere you like—”

Mariarta shook her head and laughed, taking Catsch’s reins from Flisch, smiling at them both. “East,” she said, “to the mitred city. I will sell my skins to the Bishop of Chur.”

And Mariarta walked off down the eastward road, whistling: the carefree hunter, with money in her pocket and no one to please but herself. Yet all the while there were mountains on her mind—the mountains above Chur being close. Under one of them or another was a goddess in hiding. Mariarta meant to find her...along with answers to questions that had spent a long time borne on the wind.

A bishop of Chur must have three

qualifications. He must be a man,

and a Christian, and from Chur. But

some of these qualifications are

less important than others. We’ll

settle for a Saracen woman Bishop

—
as long as she’s from Chur.

(Churer saying, c. 1000 AD)

It was late summer when Mariarta came to Chur at last: for, mystery or no mystery, one must have bread. An empty belly drives away curiosity, and having had one hard winter, Mariarta was determined not to have another.

Mariarta took the main road which leads northeastward along Val Tavetsch, meandering through the broad valley until it begins to pinch in on itself again. In those eastward parts, the finger-and-space arrangement of the mountains begins to tangle, more like fingers interlaced, with fewer valleys running north to south, more running east-west. These cross-valleys south of the great Rein are paradises for the hunter. Sheltered both from the north wind and the fury of the
föhn
, their lower slopes seem to go green of themselves. The chamois grazing there get fat as cows—for many a lush and hidden alp has no village anywhere near.

It was exactly the country Mariarta wanted. She ambled south from Ilanz, following the road that runs south past Piz Mundaun, and struck eastward where there was no road but the rocky gorge up Uaul da Sax. Right to Crap Grisch she went, and down the other side into the Safiental, that peculiarly straight valley in a land where so few things are straight. She did not linger, despite the greenness of the grass, but went through the east-side peaks toward Thusis, in a valley not nearly so straight but just as green. There, in the crags above Vaz, she shot eighteen chamois and dry-cured their skins. Then she felt she could safely go north to Chur (a big town, and, she had been warned, expensive). But she could not resist hunting on the other side of the Alvula river: and that was where the trouble started.

The chamois were bold there. Mariarta shot two from behind a boulder that sat in the middle of the green slope running down from Crap la Pala.  She was finishing skinning the second one when a third come bounding  from la Pala. Mariarta picked up her bow.
They told me the inns in Chur are pricy,
  she thought, 
and anyway, winter’s coming—
  She sighted, the wind poured past her toward the distant, softly-beating target of the heart; she shot, and the chamois fell.

Mariarta laid the second hide over the rock to stiffen, and went off to see about the third chamois. It had fallen in a slight depression, a spot where the ground was gently curved, as if someone had set a heavy stone bowl there. The ground squished under her feet with wetness from the last rain; white anemones, which like the wet, were sprinkled around. Sprawled on them was the chamois, the upward eye staring sightlessly at a single anemone. Mariarta felt the ridges on one horn, judged its thickness.
Three years old. The horns on this one will be worth something to a knifemaker. I’ll keep the head.

She hauled the chamois off to one side, stuck its throat to bleed it. A high-pitched cry from above got her attention: she saw two tschéssas circling, gazing at the other two carcasses, which she had purposely pulled aside to keep them away from the hides. Mariarta already had taken what meat she wanted from them: it was hanging at Catsch’s pack, and the mountain vultures would not trouble it while carcasses awaited their attention.

She turned her attention back to her skinning, starting the difficult work of cutting the hoofs free. She had to sharpen the knife twice, sweating in the sun, while behind her the first of the tschéssas landed on one of the skinned carcasses, shrieking at another that was trying to land too.

The first two hoofs came off relatively easily. The third appeared to be held on with sinews of iron; it took two more sharpenings to get it off, and she almost cut herself twice, her hands slippery with blood and sweat. Mariarta stared at the fourth hoof.
I wouldn’t mind something to eat before going on with this.
She stabbed her knife into the ground beside her.

And she stared as it stood there quivering in the turf: for something had stopped it, and the sound was not that of a knife hitting stone.

Mariarta pulled the knife out, put it in again, more carefully. That sound again. Definitely not stone.
Metal?

She took the knife and slid it into the turf, diagonally this time, prying upward. A fibrous mat of grass and roots came up in a piece.  It was as she had expected, for in places where an alp ran close to a scree- slope, the turf was rarely more than years’ worth of roots, the dead ones decaying at the bottom and feeding the live turf above them.

Mariarta put the knife aside, pulled the mat of grass and root-fibers up. It resisted at first, then gave way. Something lumpy and wet came with it, buried just beneath the surface: a hen could have pecked it up, as the saying was. A metal thing, a foot or so long—

She pulled the clinging roots off with difficulty. The thing was oblong, with pieces sticking out. It took some minutes’ cleaning for Mariarta to see that it was a statue: two arms, both broken at the ends, two legs, one of them broken off short, the other attached to a round pedestal. The statue was probably bronze; it was all crusted in green.

With handfuls of dry grass, Mariarta rubbed the dirt and wet off the statue. Everything seemed to have gotten still: even the tschessas were quiet.

The statue was of a woman. She had on a long gown with a short-sleeved shift underneath. The gown itself was loose and draped, tied once underneath her breasts, with the skirt pulled up and belted at her waist, leaving her legs bare. Her hair was tied on top of her head in a braid coiled into a bun. Her face, as all the rest of her, was worn and pitted by her time under the ground: but it was clear enough to be made out. The expression was cool, detached—the face of someone choosing a target. One of the woman’s arms was stretched out before her: the other reached behind her head, its elbow bent. There were no hands, but Mariarta knew what they had been doing. One would have held a bow, not a crossbow but the plain arched kind that she had once seen a picture of. The other hand reached back to a quiver, about to string and draw.

One of the tschéssas behind her screamed. The wind was still.
It’s her—
The picture in the young
scolar
’s book could have been drawn from this: the only thing missing was the
cervin
, the horned stag.

Mariarta could not get rid of the idea that the statue was looking at her—the same sort of cool look she had felt on the back of her neck, the back of her mind, so many times before.
This is her. Whoever she is. Who are you?

No answer came. Mariarta put the statue aside, went back to work on the chamois. And all the while, the statue looked at her....

Turning it on its face seemed rude. Mariarta took it to Catsch’s pack, where she rummaged until she found a piece of chamois leather kept for cleaning her gear. She wrapped the statue in it carefully, stowing it in the inside-opening pack. That gave her some relief from the feeling of being watched. Still, nervous as she felt—and that was odd, too—Mariarta felt elated as she walked back to the third chamois, glancing from it to the mountains to the east.
I’m on the right track,
  she thought.
I’m going to find out....

•

Mariarta kept on going eastward, following the Alvula into the next valley over. The Rein turned northward, running with the main road to a tiny hamlet called Parpan, by a lake which the townspeople had named, in an access of imagination, Igl Lai. Mariarta passed “the lake” on her left, looking rightward at another mountain, the Parpan Redhorn, which was forested halfway up its height and dissolved into a maze of folded cliffs. The early evening sun rested rosy-red on it, and the eaves of the forest seemed welcoming.
There’s no inn there. I may as well spend the night on the mountainside. It looks like there are caves. Even if there aren’t, we won’t get wet under those trees.

Carefully she led Catsch among them. They went silently: the ground was feet thick with pine needles in places. Twilight fell early, the late afternoon light blocked away by the close-growing pines. Mariarta found a spot that was completely dry, indicating that recent rains had not touched it. She took Catsch’s bundles off, put the donkey on a long tether; he promptly threw himself  on the ground, rolling and squirming, getting himself tangled, and braying in annoyance.

Mariarta sighed, hauled him to his feet and started undoing him, while Catsch went on braying. “You’re a nuisance,” she said, “a good-for-nothing—”

Something rustled behind her. Mariarta whirled and saw a brown blot shuffling toward them, brushing low pine branches as it went.

Mariarta snatched up the bow and spanned it faster than she ever had. She pulled a quarrel out of her shirt-neck, slapped it in the groove, aimed, the wind began to pour past her, she saw the beating of the beast’s heart down the tunnel of air—

“No!” someone shouted. The shock of it made her loose. Too late, the shaft was gone—

It missed. The shaft whipped past the bear’s ear and buried itself in a nearby pine. The bear turned to stare at it, then sat back on its haunches and bawled like a calf.

Mariarta stood there with her mouth open.
I missed! But I
can’t
miss—

“Now what did you do that for?” demanded the voice. She turned and saw a little old man. Little was the word: he was so bent with age that it seemed a miracle he could stand or walk. He was dressed in what might have been a cassock, the black of it faded to a smudgy charcoal. The man’s face was almost all one wrinkle, like an apple left drying too long; but the wrinkle was a smiling one. The man went to the bear and clouted it on the head. “Now stop that,” the man shouted, “or I’ll give you something to cry about!”

Mariarta, shocked as she was, started to feel like smiling too. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but all I saw was a bear coming at us. It didn’t occur to me that it might belong to somebody.”

“Don’t know about ‘belong’,” the man said, “but I’ve been stuck with him for a while, that’s certain.” He clouted the bear again, more affectionately this time. It stopped bawling and merely sat and sniveled.

Mariarta unstrung her bow. “Who are you?”

“I’m the hermit of the mountain,” the man said, as if this were as much a nuisance as the bear, which was nuzzling him like a lamb looking for a teat. “Always been a hermit here, probably since there was a mountain. Stop that, you dim creature, I don’t have any more apples!” The hermit whacked the bear’s snout away. It moaned, then got up and ambled off into the woods.

“Well, I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” Mariarta said. “I’ll find somewhere else to camp—”

“Don’t be silly, you stay right here,” the hermit said. “And what’s a fine young woman like you doing running around in the back of nowhere shooting at things?  You ought to be married.”

Why does everyone think this except me?
  Mariarta thought. Then the shock set in again. “Excuse me,” she said, “but—”

The hermit eyed her. “It’s not obvious, if that’s what you’re worrying about. Never mind, we don’t see many people here, you come along on up the hill and stay with us.”

“I thought that was the point of being a hermit,” Mariarta said: “not seeing a lot of people.”

“You can have too much of a good thing,” the hermit said, turning his back on her and heading upwards through the trees. “You come on up.”

Mariarta reloaded Catsch and followed.

The way the hermit led her wound back and forth across the face of the mountain; the path was rarely more than a ledge several feet wide. Quite suddenly, after the path’s third turn northward on the mountainface, it broadened, and the opening of a cave showed on the right-hand side. “There’s plenty of room for him inside,” the hermit said. “Emerita, we’ve got company!”

Mariarta followed him in, finding the cave high-ceilinged once she was past the curving doorway. It was large, the size of a house: stars of lamps burned against the walls or on stones on the floor. Great icicles of stone hung  from the cracked ceiling. Under one of those cracks a fire burned brightly on the stone floor, the smoke venting itself through the cracks. “Yes,” the hermit said, seeing Mariarta’s glance as she unloaded Catsch again, “we get a nice draft through here—might as well be living in a fireplace. But rain is a problem, puts the fire out half the time. Emerita!”

“Oh, hush your shouting.” A woman came out from the back of the cave. She looked better kept than the hermit, though her clothes were easily as old: all dark too, except for the dingy white of the old-fashioned wimple. The bear brushed against the woman, who patted it, then turned to Mariarta. “Welcome, my dear: sit down and I’ll bring you a drink. Just water of the mountain, but it tastes good enough.”

“Thank you,” Mariarta said, seating herself on a flat stone, looking about her in interest. The cave was far from empty. Pots and kettles sat against the stone wall nearest the fire. Various dark lumps piled against other walls were bags. Provisions, perhaps: Mariarta thought she smelled dried fruit.

“Here you are,” the woman said, coming back with a wooden cup. Mariarta took it and drank gratefully. “I’m Emerita. Luzius you’ve met. I’ll bring you something nice to eat, and then you can tell us what you’re doing here. Do you like wheat porridge?  Good. Luzius, is that last batch of mead ready yet?”