Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (10 page)

The first night’s journey was the easiest. They stayed in Surrein, the next hamlet west, and spent an enjoyable evening with Sao Moser and the other two Surrein farmers, gossiping about the neighbors in Selva. The next day’s travel, though, was more interesting. Several hours of working their way down the Surrein pass road, length after length of stone-choked switchback, was nervewracking business even in summer. At last they came to the bottom of the hill, and in the valley before them lay Ursera.

It was a great town. The first time Mariarta had seen it, last year, she had thought that Roma must be like this—house after house, nearly a hundred of them, built of stone instead of wood, roofed in slate, and with streets paved with stone in two tracks, a
binario
, as wide apart as a cart’s wheels. Those streets were full of hundreds of people. They were rich, to judge by the houses—three, even four storeys high. It was three hours past noon when they rode in, and the town market was still in session: twenty traders, at least, were there. Mariarta saw great bolts of linens and colored wools, even silks; grain, and fruits of the northlands; meat in incredible amount and variety, poultry and pork and game and venison, even beef. That in particular still astonished her. To kill and eat a perfectly good cow that might have given you milk, or could have sired more that did—you might as well eat coin money.

They made their way, as they had before, to the Treis Retgs, which stood next to the banks of the Reuss, by the bridge leading to the upper part of town where the finest houses were. As Mariarta helped her father unload the horses for the waiting groom, she caught him looking up the street, past the bridge.

“
Tgei, bab?
”

“Nothing. Oh, well—”

  He pointed with his chin. “See that white one there?”

She looked. The third house in the street was a fine high one, four stories, its windows all shuttered. “So?”

“That’s Reiskeipf’s.”

Mariarta raised her eyebrows. “It must be trouble to keep clean. All those stairs.”

“He has three
fumegls
for that.”

“Good for him, then. No,
bab,
I’ll take that,” she said hurriedly, and got her bag off the horse before he could. “There, is that the last one?”

Her father was looking at her sidewise, a sort of approving expression. “You said, not so long ago, that you would marry him.”

Mariarta frowned at him, right there out in front of everybody, as the groom took the horses away. “I said I would do what you wanted,” she said. “What do you want,
bab?
”

He grinned at her then. “
Su,
not even your mother seems able to get that out of me these days.” He glanced at the high white house, shook his head. “Come on,
buobetta,
let’s go see about some food.”

•

They went up the stone steps into the big slate-floored common room of the inn, and bespoke the innkeeper for beds and a roast hen, since he had such things. Mariarta’s mouth watered. At home no one would eat a chicken until it was literally on its last legs—what would you do for eggs, otherwise?  But she had had one the last time, and the luxury had delighted her. Now she sat in a corner at one of the scrubbed, scarred wooden tables, with a clay cup of wine that one of the kitchen people poured her, gazing at the low sun shining from the white plaster of the walls, while her father stood talking to the innkeeper. More people were sitting in this one room than lived in all of Tschamut. It was unnerving, until you got used to it—all those eyes looking at you. Many of those eyes, among the men, dwelt on her at some length. Mariarta stared back with a slight frown, as her mother had advised her, until they dropped.

Her father came back to her after a few minutes. “Well, there’s only one of the councilors hasn’t left yet—that’s old Theo dil Cardinas from Realp. He caught a flux and won’t leave until tomorrow. Good enough for us: three in company’s better than two.”

For a pleasant hour Mariarta and her father sat talking with people at adjoining tables, and drank wine. At the end of the hour their chicken arrived, and (not coincidentally, Mariarta suspected) so did Theo dil Cardinas, who sat with them and accepted a chicken leg, and began gossiping as if he had known them all his life. He was small, bald and thin, with a brown, incredibly wrinkled face and small bright eyes; a man dressed in sagging woolens that were surely too hot for this weather, and smelled it. His voice sounded like a chough’s creaking, and his laugh (which came often) sounded like a saw in a log. He seemed to have had a lot of wine, to judge by his breath as he leaned toward Mariarta to greet her, and she wondered if his prolonged stay here had more to do with the Treis Retgs’ cellar than any flux. But she was polite to him, for her father had let her know that this was one of the wisest men in Ursera when the mood struck him.

“Nothing new from your part of the world?  Thought not,” said Theo, his eyes sharp on Mariarta’s father’s face as he said it. “Bad business, that.”

“Very bad. What news out by you?”

“Nothing much. Some trouble getting the hay harvest in—had a
buttatsch
running around by the Lieg alp. Caused no end of trouble.”

“Really?” her father said.
Buttatschs
were not as common as, say, chamois, but more common than brown bear. Some people claimed they were
striadira
done by annoyed gypsies or Tyrolians, others that they were roving spirits in bondage, looking for someone to say Masses for them. Whatever, they resembled a cowskin without the cow—a rolling, flapping bundle of flayed hide and udders. Some
buttatschs
glowed in the dark, and made weird threatening noises, or spoke you in strange languages. People had died of the shock of seeing them, or had killed themselves running away. There were two kinds of
buttatschs
, the ordinary kind and the worse one, the
buttatsch con egls
, covered with glaring eyes as well as udders. Mariarta didn’t particularly want to see either.

“Yes indeed. Thing started showing up in the evenings, when people were walking home from the field-meal. Pretty soon no one wanted to go haying, and the weather was about to turn, we could have lost the whole crop—”

“What did you do?” Mariarta said.

“Got the priest in from Hospental, that’s what; these things, they don’t like the three holy Names. Bab Vintgegn, he went there with his cross and whatnot, and took three other men with him, with spades. He told ‘em the cold iron would do for it if the church-magic didn’t. They saw the thing come rolling and glowing and howling along, and didn’t poor Gion di Plan just run straight off down the hill to hide under his bed, took donna Eulscha half the night to get him out again.” Theo laughed, drank again, and said, “Bab Vintgegn, he throws holy water at the
buttatsch
, says a strong saying and the three Names, and
juhe!
the thing lets out a howl and flops down on the ground, all the voices and life gone out of it. He wouldn’t let ‘em touch it, made ‘em dig a hole for it and lift it on their spades and bury the thing. Grass won’t grow there now.”

“But you got the hay in all right.”

“Oh
si
, we did that at last.” Theo drank, looking sidewise at Mariarta. “What do you think of that,
duonna
?”

Mariarta thought that no one acting so drunk and slurred should have eyes so bright and seeing. “Was that the first thing you tried?”

“No. A traveler through town suggested it, said this Bab Vintgegn had done something similar in Ried. So we sent for him and paid him a silver penny for masses and services rendered.”

“Before or after he did away with the thing?”

“After, do you think we’re crazed?”

“But he did it straight away.”

“That he did. Must still be a few good priests out there.” Theo took the remaining wing off the roasted chicken. “All these wandering Capuchins and whatnot, you never can tell. Thank you for the snack,
duonna
Mariarta.”

“
Bun perfatscha,
” she said, thinking that his appetite hardly needed wishing well. He had eaten a third of their bird.

“Tomorrow early,
signur mistral
di Alicg?” Theo levered himself drunkenly from the table, making it look like he was bowing to Mariarta’s father.

“Not too early,
signur
dil Cardinas, if you please. It’s been a long day. An hour after dawn will be fine.”

“Till then,” Theo said, and lurched away, carefully taking the wine pitcher with him.

Her father’s mouth twisted in dry amusement. “We could have worse company on the road,” he said. “Don’t look so glum,
buobetta,
I saved the skin from him, and there’s more meat on this bird that he didn’t get. Let me show you these good bits underneath—”

•

They rose at dawn, and went to pay the bill. Their horses were waiting in the flagged courtyard of the inn, along with one so splendid that Mariarta had to stare. It was no plowhorse, but a fine-boned, narrow-legged, dancing creature, black as night, with four white socks and a white blaze on his face. He was gelded, but had a wild, mean eye, and Mariarta was careful to admire him from a distance.

Old Theo came wobbling out of the inn door and down the steps, followed closely by the innkeeper. “Till next time!” Theo roared, and the innkeeper winced and turned away. Theo lurched past Mariarta, and those quick eyes glittered at her as he muttered, “Damned skinflint, it’s not like I don’t tip him a king’s ransom every time I’m here—
Which is too damn often, damn beds are full of bugs,”
he added at the top of his lungs. The inn door slammed.

Theo chuckled quietly and leapt into the horse’s saddle. It immediately began bucking. Mariarta and her father pulled their horses back to watch this performance, while Theo occasionally banged the creature between its ears with the butt of a riding-stick. Eventually the horse stopped bucking and stood looking sullen. Theo smiled at Mariarta. “He’s high-strung, and he knows it,” he said: “he thinks he has to do that. He bites you, you just hit him
here
,” and the horse jumped again. “Good boy,” Theo said, patting the horse’s neck affectionately, “good Camegio. Come on, di Alicg, you going to admire my beast all day?”

They got on their horses and followed Theo out of town. Once they were on the road leading south, the morning went from grey to sunny as the cloud burned off. Very soon they came to a long smooth span of stone that seemed to leap from the cliff on their side straight across to the other—a beautiful arch with no supports of any kind.

“There it is, the wretched thing,” Theo said.

“The Devilbridge, yes,” Mariarta said. Her mind was on the night she had last heard the story told, the shadows under the table, the pictures in a book.

The three of them passed over, the Reuss loud beneath them, and followed the road that wound precariously around Piz Tgilutta. The road wound down in tight switchbacks, littered with fallen stone, under the shadow of the great scraped-out scree-slope of Spranggi. This was the first of the places where the names began to change: from here on, the further north they went, the more the names were in Daoitscha. The travellers went softly, for whether you called it Spranggi or Currider, the height had earned its name, “the jumper”; rocks would move at a breath of wind. Several times slides happened just in front of them, or just behind. Mariarta frowned and said silently to the wind, 
This is no time for playfulness—quiet !
  And it obeyed, as for short periods it often did these days.

Two hours more on the road saw them into the Caschinutta valley, which the Tudestg-speakers called Göschenen. At one point, near a slope covered with pine trees and sheltering an old ruined house, the road kinked around a huge boulder that seemed to have been dropped there on the stony ground. “Glaciers,” Theo muttered as he rode past it, “untidy things.”

“I thought il Giavel did it,” Mariarta said.

“What?  The glacier?  Most likely he did, the old beast. This was probably all good alp, before the ice came. Now look at it.” Theo glanced around in disgust. “The only thing that grows here now is millstones. But at least the
giavetschen
ice has pulled back. Aha!” he said suddenly, as the upper side of Caschinutta town came into sight around another bend of the road. He kicked Camegio in the flanks; the horse jumped a foot or two in the air and took off for town.

Mariarta watched him go, amused. “I don’t think he believes in
il Giavel
,
bab
.”

“He may have seen enough people in his time not to need to,
figlia
.”

Mariarta smiled. Odd to be called daughter instead of little girl: but her father had done this last time, too, when they came among strangers, and she was no longer merely the
mistral’
s daughter, but his assistant.

“He’s been
mistral
in Realp for a long time?”

“Fifty years.” Mariarta opened her eyes wide at that. “He saw the Tudestgs, the new ones that is, come into the mountains the first time, when I was born. He went down there, learned Daoitscha, came back to Realp and started to teach it. He was wise, I suppose...you can’t deal with your conquerors if you don’t understand their tongue and their thinking.”

“Conqueror” was a word Mariarta had never heard her father use before: she glanced at him sidewise. “I told you the last time,” he said, “be careful what you say here. This part of the world has seen a lot more of the Tudetsgs than ours. Some people here like them, because they’ve been made to feel secure from invasion. But our language sets us apart. The further north we go, the more likely we are to be seen as ignorant rustics—or disobedient rebels who insist on trying to govern ourselves when there are already perfectly good governors ready to do it for us.” He snorted softly.