Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (16 page)

She leaned on the fence, watching the bull thunder about, flourishing those terrible horns. Mariarta gloried in them.
It’s time,
  she thought.
Now—

And now, on the brink of the last step, she wasn’t sure what to do. Her father wasn’t here to ask: her mother—  Increasingly her mother had become a shadow, sleeping fitfully in the chimney-corner seat, thin and pale.  Each day Mariarta went about her businesses of hunting, or helping the council, and was afraid to come back to the house, not knowing what she might find. But today, as on all the other days, she went home as the sun began to set.

The chimney-corner seat was empty. Mariarta’s heart seized. She made her way upstairs, touched the door of her parents’ room, eased it open.

Her mother was in the bed, under the coverlet, lying there open-eyed, gazing toward the soul-window. Mariarta stood in the doorway, afraid to come any closer.

Her mother turned her head on the pillow. “It’s no use, Mati,” she said, the words faintly sad, the way the wind had sounded once upon a time. “I couldn’t do it. I tried: I tried for you: but nothing seems to matter, really. It’s all just...” She trailed off. “Surely you see how it is, without him. I can’t, that’s all.”

Mariarta’s throat swelled with her own tears. “Mamli, please...I didn’t know what to do...”

“There was nothing you could do, Mati,” her mother said softly. “Nothing at all... I just can’t, without him. I can’t.”

Her mother said little else for the next few days. That robust and lovely face fell in on itself, the bones growing sharp, the face growing old. She would not speak to Mariarta about the Bull. And on the last day, when it became too much for Mariarta at last, and she hid her face in the coverlet and sobbed, her mother said, “Oh, you’ve been a good daughter. But not mine.” Her voice was like the wind’s now, a mere breath. The hand touching her hair seemed hardly there at all. “Your body was from me, but your spirit...” She shook her head. “Your father’s blood...too strong for mine. He knew, too. Some other mother’s child...some other voice....”

Mariarta swallowed. “Mamli, who is it?” she whispered. “
Whose is the other voice?
”

Her mother only closed her eyes.

The next morning, in the dawn, she died. Onda Baia’s crying had tired her out hours ago, so that she slept now in the chimneyseat. By the bedside were only Mariarta and Bab Luregn. In that last silence they looked at each other, and Mariarta reached out to fold her mother’s arms on her breast. The sacraments were long given, the eyes already closed.

They buried her mother next to her father, a day later. To this funeral, Reiskeipf did not come. Mariarta followed the cart with the shrouded body, her eyes fixed on the ground, and through the service never raised her eyes but once. Near the end, in its pasture near the burying-ground, the silver bull came to stand near the fence on the eastern side. As the dirt was cast on the body, it threw up its great head and bellowed, a sound like a trumpet-blast, imperative and terrible. All the other people standing around the grave crossed themselves hurriedly. But Mariarta looked at the bull with a feeling of rage and bizarre elation.

One more night she spent in the house, though not in sleep. Onda Baia watched her in thinly disguised horror from the chimney-corner seat that night as Mariarta went in and out about her business. Mariarta was beyond caring about her aunt, except to be glad her scolding and prying seemed to have stopped.

Mariarta went to her room, opened the chest standing at the foot of her bed. The cloths and clothes inside it were to have been her wedding-dower. Linens, shifts and a skirt were there, the black embroidered vest and red-brown skirt that a married woman of the village would wear to church on Mass-day. Mariarta put these aside, reaching to the bottom of the chest for the first thing her mother had woven with linen bartered for the grey wool of their sheep. She shook the lavender and rosemary from it and laid it on the end of the bed, pale in the light of the rushlight she had brought with her. It was the only white outer dress most girls from the grey-wool country would ever have: her wedding dress. She reached down and brought up something else, small and round—a coil of white silk ribbon, which her father had bought her in Ursera market on their first trip there. It was for a bride’s garland, to weave with the fillet of white linen a bride wore, and tie the garland’s sprays of white
steilalva
blossom in place. Mariarta knelt there, holding the tight-coiled ribbon in her hand, hearing the uncaring shout of the Ursera marketplace and her father’s laughter, smelling roasting chickens, cow dung, spices, wood smoke....

She came back to herself, looking through the dimness at the sheen of the white linen of the wedding dress, and her eyes blurred once more with tears.

•

That noontime Mariarta came downstairs and told Onda Baia to go around to the councillors, asking them to come to her. At first her aunt bridled. “I’m your elder, and mistress in this house now,” she said; “who are you to order—” Then she started to have  second thoughts, as Mariarta simply stood there in the bride’s white shift and dress and stared at her, her grim expression more suited to a shroud than to bridal array. Hurriedly, Baia went.

Mariarta sat at the table and finished weaving the garland.
If I must wear a bride’s dress,
  she had thought,
I’ll wear the rest of it too.
The
steilalva
she had picked last night, by moonlight, as tradition said was best for the bride’s luck. Her mood was slipping unpredictably between bitter grief and peculiar elation. The wind was singing in her ear even in this stillness, filled with excitement and promise—but she trusted it no more than she trusted her mood. Mariarta put the garland on, and waited.

One by one the councilors came and sat, and Mariarta greeted each. Last of all came Paol, sliding in to sit in his usual place by the window. After him, someone shuffled in the doorway. It was Reiskeipf.

“Go away,” Mariarta said.

“Ah, mistress, the
mistral
your father is no more, alas. Since you cannot—”

Mariarta frowned at him. “There is no new
mistral
yet, for these gentlemen have wisely put off electing one until the Bull is dealt with. After I am dead they can do as they will. But a dil Alicg lives yet to act for the old
mistral.
You are not welcome in our counsels, Reiskeipf, though Paol will doubtless afterwards lick readily enough at your salt. Meanwhile,
tudestg,
get out of here. If I see you again while either of us are yet alive, for the sake of the pains you cost my father, I swear you shall die of me!”

Paol and Reiskeipf both began to stammer protests. Mariarta stood up.

Reiskeipf fled.

Mariarta sat down, smoothing the linen of the wedding dress. “Should I not return,” she said, “as none of us think I will, the house passes to my aunt. Should she die without wedding or issue, as seems likely, I will that it be made into a place of refuge for those who have no homes of their own, as orphans, herdboys and such. Let a woman who desires no husband, or one whose family dies untimely, care for it and the people who live in it.”

The men around the table nodded nervously.

Mariarta breathed out. “What I have to do must be done tonight, at sunset: when light and dark have an equal chance. Let prayers be said in the church for our souls. And no, the fight will not be near here,” she said, glancing around at the panicked expressions. “When we’ve gone to such trouble to keep the Bull out of the town, would I bring it down on you?  Surely not so soon after we finally solved the problem with the manure stand.”

No one laughed. Mariarta’s mood swung to sorrow for them. They were all afraid:  if she and the silver Bull failed, they had no hope. They would never move the village. They would all go out on the roads, a fate to them more terrible than dying.

“Tonight,” Mariarta said, “I will take the silver Bull onto the alp. Then...”

Silence fell. The men left, Paol being the first out of the room.

Mariarta sat back, cut a piece of bread from her mother’s last-made loaf, slowly growing dry on the table, and waited for sunset.

•

All that afternoon the air above the mountains grew glassy clear, and the southern wind began to blow. The town grew still. Few of the normal smells of the afternoon were about, for when the
föhn
blew like this, sucking the moisture out of everything, people put out their cooking fires lest a chance spark should land on someone’s barn and light a conflagration. Whirlwinds of dust went by, and at sight of them people hurried inside, slamming the doors.

But when the sun dipped below the pines on the western ridge of Piz Cavradi, and Mariarta came out into the street, she found the whole village waiting there for her, looking like people going to a most unusual funeral. Mariarta just stood there, taking them all in—old men, young boys, older ones, looking at her with horrified fascination—old women, younger ones, drying their eyes of tears shed in pity for her: the people of Tschamut, whom she meant to save. She could not bear to look at them long, for their dear ordinariness reminded her of what she must now lose forever, whether she lived or died.

She walked down the street, the wind whipping at the fine linen of the wedding dress. At the pasture gate, the silver bull waited for her, seeming in the early evening half the size of a house, indeed. At the sight of the townspeople it stamped a hoof and let out another of those terrible trumpeting bellows, like an army wanting to charge.

“Be still,” Mariarta said as she came to the gate. The bull stood quiet, gazing at her.

Paol opened the gate. Mariarta slipped in next to the silver bull. Its head was easily five feet above hers.

“Down here,” she said, reaching up to her bride’s garland. Obediently the bull put its head down. Mariarta pulled loose one ribbon spared from the weaving, the last ell of her father’s present. She doubled it and put it through the bull’s nosering, slipping the loose ends of the ribbon through the loop to make the knot. The townspeople stood aside as Mariarta led the bull out through the open gate. The silver shine of it prickled on the skin, making it feel dangerous to be near, like a tall oak when lightning is brewing.

Mariarta led the bull past her house. All her old troubles now seemed unimportant, with the slow tread of the silver bull shaking the ground behind her, and evening drawing on. The silken ribbons of the garland rustled about Mariarta in the wind as she made for the end of the street.

There it turned two ways: one into the narrow stony path which was the road to Val Mustair and eastward to Cuera: the other way, upwards along the grassy, cow-poached path that led to Tschamut’s alp. Mariarta stopped there, saying, “No further than this, until the fight is done.”

Bab Luregn stepped out with a green branch and holy water to bless her. Mariarta considered how holy water had started all this, but kept her peace. Bab Luregn asperged the bull too. It shook its head, and sneezed.

“Come on,” Mariarta said to him, and led him up the alp track.
How many times have I walked this road?
  she thought as they climbed.
For
alpagiadas,
every year till I grew: and to learn the shooting: and with Urs—

Behind her, the bull walked easily, its breathing briefly louder than the sound of the wind. It would not be so for long. The wind was rising, for which Mariarta was grateful. The wind was her ally. If only it would not turn fickle—for the
föhn’
s nature was to gust, and drop away, then treacherously blow twice as hard again.... Clouds were piling above, their leaden-grey lower reaches pouring like water over Piz Curnera and Piz Blas. Mariarta welcomed them, for sudden storms like this were the
föhn’
s great weapon.

The darkness above her grew. Behind her, the heavy tread of the silver bull began to sound dreadfully loud in the confined path between the overhanging ridges. So many times she had come this way with Urs. How different it had looked then: sun on the pines, the clean wind blowing,
steilalva
blossoming between the stones. All changed now, with the lowering cloud, and the thunder-mutter in the clouds above, like the building roar of something dark—

From behind her came an answering bellow. Mariarta turned in time to see the sudden rage in the silver bull’s eyes. She jumped out of its way. Up the narrowing track it leapt, bellowing. Mariarta scrambled after.

She came out at the top of the track where it met the bottom of the withered alp. It was more terrible than ever in this odd light, with the sunset reflecting underneath the heavy black clouds, making them look like the ceiling of Hell. All around, like skeletal sentinels, the dead pines stood; the rotted turf, once so green, now squelched underfoot like bog. The silver bull ramped across the black ground, bellowing in rage, clods of thrown-up mud and shattered stone flying everywhere.

“Stop it!” Mariarta shouted above the rising wind. The bull came down from one last bound and stared at her, head hanging, a furious look of frustrated power.

“You’ll get your chance,” Mariarta said. She had visited this spot last night, wanting to make sure of the ground in the dark. Now she went to what was left of the great lightning-shattered boulder in the middle of the field. She saw the silver bull’s glance follow her uncomfortably.

“I know,” Mariarta said. “Not much longer now.” She put her back against the stone, closed her eyes.
God,
  she said, 
mortal’s daughter or
tschalarera
’s, or whatever I might be, hear me: help me now!