Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (46 page)

All my fault,
  Mariarta cried into the night, 
not his fault, don’t hurt him for it—!
  Her uncertainty and fear, her anger at the way he tried to manipulate her, the anger which drove Urs deeper into his own spite:
my fault!  I didn’t know how to stop it!  Let him go free!
  Mariarta cried to the lightning lashing about the alp.
He’s done his penance—

Lightning crashed nearby.
And I’ve done mine!
  she cried.
Finish it!  Come fight your battle in the daylight—come fight it now, at last:
come!  She cried the word into the night in her mind with a goddess’s certainty at last, seeing the moment before her—the lightningstrike on the sodden alp, the black shape that killed a boy and ate half his soul. And that other lightningstrike as the black shape sank down, bleeding clear water, redeemed, one-souled again for that brief moment before it crouched into silence and stone. No more need for the silence, no more time for the stone. Mariarta flung her arms high, calling, and struck the dark mass with one last bolt from the sky’s bow, not from the past, but the present. Slowly the shape began moving, straining to get free of the earth, shouldering upward, rearing black against the black sky. Its head came up, met her gaze. Bellowed like the thunder—

They saw it begin to come real, on the battlefield, and did not believe. Even the Uri men, even the ones with the great
harsthorner
, the ones following the Bull banner, stared in shock and dread at the black shape now bulking into reality on the pass road, its shoulders reaching from the southern slope almost to the lake, its black horns flickering with lightning. It roared, gazing at what remained of the flower of Austrian chivalry out of eyes with skyfire in them—and it lowered its head, and took a pace forward, scraping the stocks and boulders and fallen bodies back with one hoof as if they were no more than gravel, preparing for the charge.

“The Bull,” the Uri men began to shout, “the Bull, the Bull of Uri,
haarus!”
They were as terrified of the apparition as everyone else on the field, but they knew it would not hurt them. Everyone else took up the cry, the Schwyzers, the hundred men of Unterwald:
the Bull, the Bull!
  The Bull scraped the bloody ground with its other forefoot, lowering: then reared up, bellowing, and charged.

The Austrian knights fled northward, in wild terror, those that still could. Others would have tried to stand their ground, but their horses panicked and fled. The Oath-confederates pursued them, trapped them, cut them to pieces. Any of the remaining foot who saw the Bull ran away, though most of them had the sense to go back the way they had come, rather than breaking toward the Agerisee. Some of the horse did not. The horsemen, undefended, were driven  into the swampy ground, or carried there by horses mad with fear, and were drowned with the terrified beasts, thrown off and trampled under foot, or sucked into the sedgy depths by the weight of their armor. For the rest, the cries of the fleeing were almost as loud as the roar of the Bull, the crash of the thunder.

Mariarta stood there watching, blinking in the sunlight now striking the hill-slope on the other side of the pass, her crossbow hanging in her hands, forgotten, and the tears ran down her face as they had that afternoon so long ago.
It is all over at last,
  she thought.
Only this was wanting, to knit all together. I bless the God and the fate that brought me here!

You’re welcome,
  Diun said.

Mariarta laughed out loud. Northward in the pass, the huge dark shape of the Bull was ramping and stamping its way to the far end, over the trapped bodies, the huge stones. Boulders shattered under its feet, armor was crushed, the tree-trunks snapped like twigs. The Bull paused at the curve of the pass and glanced southwestward, to where the Confederates stood: there was murder in its eyes, and laughter too, terrible to see. The Bull bellowed again, then turned its back on them, lumbering around the curve of the pass and out of sight. Thunder rumbled one more time behind it; slowly the air began to clear.

Gradually the sound of the battlefield started to die away; the cries of the dying and the screams of the horses began to be stilled.
How many thousands of horses dead,
Mariarta thought, looking at the shambles,
how many of these knights, how many of the footmen—

They would have killed you,
  Diun said calmly, 
and never cared at all. You it was who said your people must be seen to fight and win—

“There is still a place for pity,” Mariarta said softly, “and if goddesses have none, they are poor sorts of goddesses...that’s all I can say.”

The battle did not go on much longer. Indeed it had been nearly over when the Bull appeared, for of the five hundred knights who had entered the pass, nearly all were dead. Their support riders, squires and pages and so forth, numbering another fifteen hundred as well, had done as badly. Some four or five hundred other horsemen, knights and retainers, had tried to escape the way they came, thinking to regroup and join the footmen. But the footmen who had survived contact with the Oath-confederates, though outnumbering them five to one, had panicked and run away—some up the road that led by the Ageri lake, some into the lake itself. That was a fatal mistake, for the marshes by the road were as treacherous as those by the pass, and those driven into them did not come out.

It took a while for the Oath-confederates to regroup. A careful roll-call was taken. Forty men were dead out of thirteen hundred. Counting the Austriac dead would take much, much longer; but of the nine thousand men who came to Morgarten pass, seven thousand did not leave it. Most, especially the knights, were dead. Some, surviving, were taken prisoner to be ransomed in the usual way. And there was one knight who did not try to flee his captors, and held his ground—though he had wisely dropped his weapons on the ground, and dismounted to stand by his horse. He only kept his spear to lean upon, with the poor stained sow-banner of Attinghausen, torn, still hanging from it. The Oath-confederates gathered around him and pounded his armored back, glad to a man that he had been spared: and they wondered that he had survived the passing of the Bull.

“Now, how should it hurt me?” he said to the people around him. “After all, I am an Uri man....”

They cheered him, and he smiled. But suddenly he looked up the slope of the pass road, seeing there a young man with his hair tied in a scarf, and the wind coming at his back. Some there were surprised at the tears on the face of Mattiu dil Ursera, a hunter of renown, whose face was said by some to be made of stone for all the reaction you might normally get out of it. And there was more surprise when Arnulf von Attinghausen and the hunter took hands and smiled, saying nothing. Some of the Uri men later got into a fight over this with some men of Unterwalden, who claimed that Uri people were strange. But all this was soon forgotten in the division of the spoil, and the celebrations.

The spoil was considerable: enough armor and weapons to arm every able-bodied fighter of the Forest Lake countries. All this booty was divided in exactly the same way that Forest Lake people divided cheeses, or land, when in dispute. The town councillors put forth an opinion on who should have what, and everybody voted on it, as their fathers had done under the Old Emperor, and, God willing, would eventually do under the new one, when he saw reason....

The celebration went on much longer than the division of spoil, which was as it should have been. Bonfires were lit on every hill around, even the one above Einsiedeln, where the monks were already rebuilding. Those who climbed the hills to light the fires that night saw the chain of sparks of light spread from mountain to mountain: Scheidegg above Brunnen, the Zugerberg, Pilatus above Luzern; the Burgenstock, Seelisberg, Brandegg above Rutli: Uri-Rotstock, Schweinburg, Fluelen above Altdorf; Morschach, Illgau, Great Mythen above Schwyz. The wind rose and fanned the fires so that they burned like stars fallen on the mountains, and the people of the Forestlake countries sang that night for the downfall of the enemy and the goodness of God.

At least one god noticed this, and was heard, by her hostess, to laugh like someone who knows a secret.

•

“What now?” said Arnulf.

They were making their way toward the Lion, through the marketplace of Altdorf: Mariarta, Theo, the Knight of Attinghausen, and his second son.

“I think I shall be moving on,” Mariarta said.

“This is a terrible time to travel,” Theo said. “It might snow any minute now.” He eyed Mariarta hopefully.

She laughed. “No, I have a promise to keep, Theo. Some traveling to do. But I’ll come back when you need me. Not immediately, though.”

The Knight of Attinghausen shook his head. “There’s turmoil at court at the moment. Some people screaming that this whole part of the world has been mishandled, and that what happened was deserved. Others screaming that another punitive expedition is needed—as long as it’s not
they
who have to go. And of course the plain truth is that no such expedition can be started after the loss of troops in the last one. Nor would such be started anyway, this deep into winter, especially after the lesson we’ve taught them about trying such things in November. No, I think we’ll have a respite. A year, maybe two.”

Mariarta glanced over, as they passed it, at the spot where there a hat once sat on a pole. The pole was still there, but a banner with a black Bull’s head hung there now, and the cold December breeze stirred it. “That’s what I think too,” Mariarta said. “So Grugni and I will go north for a while. I want to see Zurich, and the countries around the northern lakes. Someplace,” and for a moment she got an odd glint in her eyes, “that’s
not
mountains. But, Arnulf, what about you?”

“Oh, I’ll go back to court,” he said. “There are so many other knights who ran home, if they managed to get away, that no one’s going to look askance at
my
having done it.”

“That’s good,” Mariarta said. She looked at the Knight, and Theo. “But we’re a bad example to all the other countries under their dominion. In the long run, nothing will satisfy the Austriacs but our fall.”

“Theirs may come first,” Theo said. “In the meantime...make sure we can find you if something comes up.”

“Just say my name to the wind,” Mariarta said, glancing at Arnulf and smiling as they made their way through the Lion’s courtyard. “So. Who’s for dinner?”

Together, they went in through the doors of the Lion; and the breeze swirled about and followed them.

•

Mariarta’s story will continue

in the second volume of the “Raetian Tales”,

The Wind and the Eagle,

telling of her journey north to Basel and beyond,

and the mortal intrigues

and deadly magics she finds there: 

and
The Fifth Wind,

in which her path brings her into conflict

both with the Empire in its death-throes

and with the only other half-immortal

who also harbors a god;

and in which her own final fate is determined.

I have taken liberties with some matters of timing and location in this book. People who may find themselves looking further into the events described herein will probably be wondering why: and my Swiss readers will already know what liberties have been taken, and will almost certainly want an explanation.

The tale of the Bull of Uri begins to appear in written form no sooner than the 1500’s, though the battle of Morgarten, where we first hear of the Bull Standard being carried to war, took place in 1315. (A standard almost identical to the Morgarten one, made slightly later, can be seen in the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum in Zurich.) Readers curious enough to look for Tschamut on a modern map will find it’s not actually in Uri, but just over its eastern boundary, in the canton variously known as Grisons and Grischun—the Grey Country, heart of the alliance which later became the Grey League (which gives the canton its present German name,
Graubünden
). In its original form, the story of the Bull takes place some miles to the northwest, near the Englerbergtal. But since one of the things I wanted to do was tell a story from inside the Romansch languages and cultures, and since the Englerbergtal was by that time mostly if not wholly German-speaking, I moved the story east. This is probably not
entirely
cheating, since Swiss pre-cantonal borders fluctuated for a long time. There was almost certainly a time when Tschamut was part of Uri, especially considering the nearness of Ursera (now Andermatt) to the Oberalppass, a vital link to Cuera in a time when the mighty Bishops of Chur were the major political force in the region.

 Most of the other stories I have tried to leave where they were supposed to have happened. One of the delights of Swiss folklore is its sense (however specious) of really having happened, strengthened by the matter-of-fact naming of places and people. The rock the Devil dropped after building the bridge over the Schöllenen gorges of the Reuss can still be seen just north of Göschenen (Romansch
Caschinutta
); the ruined castle haunted by the Key Maiden can still be visited (though it’s actually in Tegerfelden, not Walenstadt. The height above Berschis is the site of an old Roman fortification, and later a fortified medieval Church of Saint  George). And there are still white chamois in the Alps, though reduced populations and constricting ranges have made the albinistic form even rarer than it used to be.