Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (15 page)

Paol looked shocked. Plainly he had not thought about this.

“Whoever has to do this,” Mariarta said, “is probably going to die. Do you want it to be one of them?  Who—” She stopped herself from saying, 
who hasn’t done anything to deserve it.

But still
—
the chance to simply be out of the danger, set free from fear—

She glanced up, breathed in sharply: Paol cried out and jumped back from the fence. The silver bull was standing not a foot away, its huge face inches from Mariarta’s. How had it come up so softly, like a ghost—

Its eyes dwelt on her. The sorrow in those eyes, the fear and pleading, were unmistakeable. It showed no anger, though. If this was Urs, it was not all of him—none of the spite, the black moods. Mariarta glanced at the alp, scorched and shadowy even in full sun. That dark side of him, perhaps, was elsewhere, serving out a different punishment.

It would be so easy,
  Mariarta thought.
To be free—
 

She slowly reached out to rub the huge head between the brows. “No,” she whispered. “No, we’ll see this through together. Don’t be afraid.”

It was a useless warning. He
was
afraid, would continue to be: perhaps that was part of the punishment this part of Urs must bear. Meanwhile Paol ran off, terrified. Mariarta was terrified, too, but there was no one to console her. Even the wind was still.

She stood there, bearing what she felt: and so came into her womanhood.

•

The summer ended. Mariarta’s father stopped trying to come down to the bab-seat, preferring the shame of being bedfast to the embarrassment of bruises. He was not eating much, either—he complained that food seemed to have little savor. This gave Mariarta an idea...and shortly she scandalized Onda Baia and many others by openly taking up hunting.

The scandal got worse, not better, when Mariarta was immediately successful. But she refused to fail just to placate the village hunters: her father’s appetite mattered a great deal more. Her first brace of hares, and the three
pernitschs
she brought home the day after that, cost her no effort, for the wind blew behind her as she aimed; she could not miss. The chamois, two days after that, surprised even her. Mariarta had been whistling for it, the way the old herd used to do, mimicking their call. But the wind took up the whistling and bounced it from crag to crag—and a one-year buck came bounding down the cliffside at her. She aimed through the swirl of suddenly fearful light, found the beast’s heart, let its blood go. It was a bitter two hours’ work, hauling the carcass home, but Mariarta would have died rather than ask anyone for help. That night, the village’s hunters (along with everyone else) were too busy eating its roast meat to give Mariarta any trouble. And the skin would bring coin-money in Ursera—not a great deal, but every
solida
helped.

The boys avoided Mariarta more than ever. That suited her. She still chaired the tenday-meetings of the town council, passing on to them her father’s instructions, or giving them her own when lacking other guidance. But Mariarta longed for the time when her bab would be doing his work again, and she could turn her attention to other things.

She was desperate to see the Bull’s business finished, one way or another: that way her father could start getting well again. The meat seemed to have been helping, he had put back on some lost weight: but it was not enough.... Mariarta told Ramun, who was master-herd now, to bring another three cows for the silver bull, for the six were now not enough. The creature was the size of three bulls, growing more uncontrollable by the day. No one could get near him any more but Mariarta. One night when she had stepped out of her father’s work room to fetch something, Mariarta came back in time to catch a breath of whispered conversation on the breeze in the hall. “Agnete,” old Gion was saying, “that was her baptismal name, her bab said. It seems she’ll go that way after all...”

She had paused in fear.
The lamb to the sacrifice, yes. Or to the slaughter? 

Mariarta spent more and more time on the mountain. There, the only voices to be heard were the beasts’—real beasts, innocent and thoughtless—and the wind’s. It was the only thing that comforted her any more, its voice growing stronger by the day.
Be brave, soon it will be over: trust me. Soon you will be free...

To do what?
  Mariarta wondered. Did whatever spoke to her on the wind even see oncoming death as something to be feared?  Or did it mean she was
not
going to die?  That was certainly her preference....

She whistled, her back against the cliff in a favorite spot, overlooking the spring-rill that ran around the mountain-roots to the Reuss pasture. The wind took the whistle, flung it to the surrounding peaks, thinning the sound. From eastward came an answering whistle. Mariarta waited. She had learned there was no need to go seeking. The game came to her. Being ready was the challenge.

Mariarta watched the sun dim behind a veil of cloud streaming off the upper heights of Giuv. All color went out of the world. Mariarta huddled into the fleece of the hunters’ jacket her mother had made her, whistled again.

Shadow fell over her. She glanced up—

—darkness,
not
a cloud, but a huge shape like the cliffside preparing to fall on her. Eyes, hot red like coals in the fire, glared at her. The Bull leaned over Mariarta, and roared.

She lifted the crossbow, trembling. The Bull was alive enough, for the wind blew down the line of her aim, and amid the colorless swirl she could see a heart beating dark, behind a hide like armor. She wasn’t sure any shaft would pierce that skin. The Bull bent in toward her, raising one huge hoof—

The wind screamed at Mariarta, gusting past the peak. She gripped her bow and fired, saw the bolt plunge toward the burning black hide and splinter as it hit, the pieces flaring into bright coals, blowing away in sparks. The Bull roared, in rage this time, lifted that hoof higher—

The wind screamed until it drowned out the Bull. Her hair whipping her face, Mariarta stared into those dreadful eyes, enraged: she was not ready for the Bull to kill her, that would come later. Infuriated, powerless to do anything else, she screamed too—

The sound filled the world. The rotten granite of the ledge beneath the Bull suddenly crumbled like dry cheese under its weight. The Bull scrabbled for purchase, found none, slipped bellowing out of sight. Mariarta fell back against the stone, terrified, exhausted and confused.

I whistled. I whistled, and
it
came.

The stone—
  She examined the ledge by which she had come to this spot: or rather, where the ledge had been. It did not exist any more. The wind itself was dying away, but still she prickled and twitched with the feel of it, a whole day’s worth of
föhn
crammed into an instant, carrying with it all the
föhn’
s force.

Mariarta got up, bracing herself against the cliff, carefully looked over. The stone beneath was smashed as if a boulder had fallen there, and blackened as with fire.
I have a weapon,
  Mariarta thought in desperate hope.
The anger, or the wind itself—whichever. Whether it comes to me from my grandmother the
tschalarera
, or from—
  Even in thought, Mariarta was reluctant to be too intimate with that grey-eyed presence.
But a weapon, even if the crossbow isn’t enough.

And what if the silver bull was there to help?
 

She started for home. The Bull could not fly. It might appear without warning, but if one were going to fight it, the fight should be in a place from which it couldn’t run. If it could be called to a given spot—

Mariarta felt hope for the first time. It was a great relief to go into a house, after the houseless wild and the shriek of wind, and hear nothing more threatening than the roar of a fire in the kitchen chimney. Mariarta kissed her mother, got out of her climbing clothes, and went to see her bab.

He was sleeping, as usual at this time of day, huddled under the covers. “Bab?”

He didn’t answer. He was always a heavy sleeper: she shook him, laughing. “Bab, wake up!”

—and stopped, for he would not shake properly. He seemed heavy—

Mariarta leaned over him, saw how still his face was. She looked at his throat.

No pulse beat in the vein there. It was always one of the most noticeable things about him, the way his neck veins beat so you could see them—

Mariarta sat on the stool by his bed, going hot and cold with shock. Her glance flicked to the tiny ghost-window above the eaves, as if she half expected to see something struggling to get out through the mesh of wood. But only blue sky showed. It was a long time before she could make herself go downstairs: before she could go into the kitchen and say, “Mamli, I think something’s wrong with bab.” She could not make herself say the word.

Her mother put down the pot-cloth and slowly went upstairs. Mariarta held still, listening for what would happen next. It was not loud: a name spoken aloud, no more than that, barely audible through the kitchen ceiling.

It was Onda Baia who wailed and ran out of the house tearing her hair, screeching the news to the whole village. It was Baia whose grief went so loudly next day before the shrouded body, into the churchyard, that Mariarta was embarrassed. Her mother’s face, straight-lipped and still under the black veil, said she was embarrassed too.
What’s Onda Baia hoping to prove?
  Mariarta thought dully.
He wasn’t her kin except by marriage. Why should she fear that
mamli
would turn her own sister out?...
It was not until much later that Mariarta thought of the other reason: their own enmity, Baia’s fear that Mariarta would turn Baia’s sister against her. But at the moment, other thoughts were in Mariarta’s mind.

The Bull. It knows it’s in danger...from me. It came for me. And when it could not get me, it took the one nearest.... It killed him. It has been killing him these four years, now.

The godchild.
My
godchild. The Bull killed him: and except for me, there would have been no Bull....

Those who went with the body to the grave commented on how bitterly Mariarta wept, what a good daughter she was. She could have laughed when the wind bore those words to her, but her heart was too sore. In later days, though, she set out to make them true.

I will have my revenge on the Bull...and pay the price for my father’s murder.

•

The ninth cow that Mariarta sent for seemed to make a difference. No longer did the silver bull chase its milk-mothers around the field. It went leisurely from one to another, and the sight of a beast as big as half a house suckling them, almost picking them up bodily with its huge head, might have been funny in another time and situation.

A new
mistral
was going to have to be elected, but the councillors were in no rush. The week after her father died, Mariarta sat at the table and argued the disposition of cheeses just as she had a week before. But her heart wasn’t in it. Before, there had always been someone to tell what had happened at the meeting. Now only emptiness lay in the upper room; her mother would not sleep in that bed any more.

Her mamli went about the house, pale and silent, making meals and cleaning as usual. But all the meals were enough for four, and she spoke rarely. Mariarta tried to hug comfort into her as she had in the old days,  but the hugs that came back had a stiff feeling about them, as if it were a statue she held, hollow inside. Slowly Mariarta began to realize how much her mother had lived for and through her father, and how little anything else, even her daughter, meant to her by comparison. Frightened, Mariarta pushed the thought away, burying it under her own pain.

Two weeks after her father died, Reiskeipf came to town. He paid his respects at the grave and to Mariarta’s mother, going on in flowery periods about the great loss. His inward glee could not be hidden from Mariarta. She was angry enough to consider speaking to the wind and dropping some piece of someone’s house hard enough on his head to finish him. But she could feel her father frowning at her, somehow, and it never happened.

At least Reiskeipf didn’t follow her around any more. Only once he met Mariarta, as she came back early one morning from hunting the chamois. Reiskeipf was on his way to Paol the woolseller’s. He thought (correctly, in Mariarta’s estimation) that Paol would be the next
mistral.
Mariarta had a near-yearling buck, small enough to carry over her back for short periods, clearly showing the unerring heart-shot that had killed it. With the blood of its gutting on her hands and coat, Mariarta met Reiskeipf in the street. She paused, thinking how easy it would be to end him. In his own way, Reiskeipf had killed her father as surely as the Bull had: his years of casual cruelty had worn away her father’s strength. Mariarta stood and considered, the wind rising behind her. But as she thought regretfully of the trouble a bailiff’s sudden death would cause the village, she was astonished to see Reiskeipf take to his heels, running for Paol’s house as if the Bull were after him.

She smiled. Maybe it was.

A day came when Mariarta realized that the silver bull was getting no bigger, but much wilder. The fences shuddered alarmingly when the silver bull crashed into them. It spent the day bellowing, more insistently than ever. The cows huddled in a corner of the field together, mooing in distress.