Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (28 page)

Baseli stood there. He said no word to Mariarta, but he noticed she was alone. She felt his eyes on her from behind as she walked into the town. She would have to deal with him later, but right now other matters were on her mind.

She took Catsch to the inn, stabled him, then went out and walked across town. Not far from the back gate was a steep, broad flight of steps that led into the bottom of a great square tower: “the Bishop’s doorstep”, the townspeople called it. Mariarta climbed the steps, passed under the tower’s dark arch, and came out into the square outside the Bishop’s palace.

The palace itself was simple enough, grey stone with shuttered windows. Over the door was carved the Bishops’ ibex, prancing in its castellated gateway: the arms of Chur. Mariarta only glanced at this, and the guards by the door, then turned to the cathedral across the square.

It was the mightiest church she had ever seen, with a great tower topped by a shining bronze dome; the huge doors were all figured with carven shapes of saints and wise and foolish virgins and all manner of others, seemingly struggling to get in. Mariarta went to one of those doors, pulled it open and entered.

It was a long time since she had been comfortable in a church—not since before the night she came into the church in Tschamut and heard someone breaking open the font. Mariarta’s intention was to go in, light a candle for Flisch’s soul, pray for forgiveness for having led him to so terrible a fate: then to get away into the wilderness, where she could do no one else any harm. But the wonderful inside of the church distracted her. It was not a bright place: the windows ran down only one side. But by the altar, banks of candles burned in iron holders, and a great radiance spread from them to the altarpiece, a triptych of praying forms, all gilded and jeweled.  Mariarta wondered that the sight of gold didn’t make her shudder. But here it was different.

She went to one of the candle-banks by the side of the altar, lit one, knelt on the stone floor to pray. It seemed much darker when she opened her eyes again.
Maybe I slept,
  she thought, embarrassed, and got up. She passed before the altar, bowed, and went past the side altar on her way out. On the altar, Mariarta noticed, was a reliquary, rich with gold in the dimness. Momentarily curious, she bent close to the small crystal set in the face of the reliquary. It was hard to see, but there seemed to be a scrap of singed cloth in there, and a chipped off spinter of stone.

Mariarta shook her head, stepped away from the altar—and stopped, staring at one of the paintings on the side wall.

It was a little old man, in a monk’s robe; so bent with age that it seemed a miracle he could stand. His face was kindly, wrinkled everywhere like a dried apple with smile-lines. Next to him sat a calm-looking bear. The man’s hands were raised in prayer. Off to one side were smaller paintings: the oddest of them showed the bear and an ox, bizarrely yoked together and pulling a wood-cart with a peasant woman riding in it, while the man walked alongside. Mariarta turned her attention back to the main painting. In it with the man were a great number of people, sitting on the ground, listening to him. Painted smaller, behind him, was a woman in a nun’s habit; the paint was flaking off her face, possibly from a wet place in the plaster—but Mariarta didn’t think she needed to see it. What surprised her were the haloes around the man’s head, and the woman’s.

Soft footsteps approached her. “My son,” said a calm voice, “is there something you seek?”

Mariarta swallowed. “Father, who are these people, please?”

“Why, that’s good old Saint Luzius, Chur’s patron saint, who came to preach to the heathens in this part of the world, long ago. He was king in a country called Bretagna, somewhere near Irlanda of the monks; they say he renounced his throne to come here and preach. They made him the first bishop of Chur—it would have been seven hundred years ago now. And that is his sister Saint Emerita, who came with him, and left a princess’s life for a hermit’s.”

“So long ago,” Mariarta whispered.

“Yes. They are with God in glory, for they died a holy martyrdom. Luzius the savages stoned to death, at last, though he laughed at them; his sister they burned as an enchantress.” The priest shook his head. “But many were converted by their witness, so we keep their relics, and holy Luzius does many miracles, even to this day.”

“Yes,” Mariarta said softly. “Father, I thank you. Take this for the saint’s shrine, if you will.” She gave him a coin, the worth of her night’s stay.

He thanked her and went away. Mariarta stood a moment longer, looking at the stiff gestures of the people in the paintings, and finally turned away to go out into the sunlight again.

It was well into afternoon.
I must have slept
.... She found herself grateful, for she felt less bitterly grieved, more somber; a better attitude for someone seeking penance, she thought. She went to the inn and sat by the fire, waiting for the night, and Baseli.

•

He came late, which suited her. He came alone, and sat  by the fire—no one else had joined Mariarta there, sensing something about the young hunter that might be more wisely avoided.

Mariarta poured him wine, sat silent. “Well?” Baseli said.

She told him what had happened. Baseli did not speak through the whole tale. When she was done, Mariarta said, “Now tell me, captain of the Bishop’s guard: am I a murderer?  If I am, you must do justice on me.”

The firelight played with the shadows of the furrows in Baseli’s face. “Do you think you are?”

“I hope not. But you must judge.”

He sat silent.

“From the tale you’ve told me,” he said, “I would say that the young man chose his death. He did not have to go with you. That he could not resist—that one—is hardly your fault. Nor that he would not follow your advice. Otherwise—” Baseli shook his head. “If I can help it, no one will go that way again.”

“Where is Berschis, then?  He had family there: I must at least take them the news.”

“Berschis—  It lies near Walenstadt town, on the north-east shore of the Walen lake, a ways upriver from where the Seez river runs into it. Follow the great road that follows the Rein northward; the Seez valley branches off to the west after about fifteen miles. A two days’ journey, no more.”

Mariarta nodded.

“You need not be afraid to come back here,” said Baseli. “Though I will watch you still, for you have secrets.”

“And have you none?”

“Yes,” Baseli said: “that I fear them.” He looked at Mariarta, and did not smile, but did not frown either. He finished his wine, got up, and left the inn.

The next morning Mariarta headed north.

leuora
    Out

grescha     
there

la notg    
the night calls

siu requiem    
its requiem

e leuen
and     in there

davos umbrivals pesonts      
behind heavy curtains

va speronza
    hope passes

da maun tier maun
    from hand to hand

mo ti has ligiau    
But you have bound

tes mauns sil dies   
your hands at your back

e bragias    
and weep

e speras...
and hope....

(
A ferm
/ Held fast,

Felix Giger)

The road was easy, and at first Mariarta refused it. She climbed the Calanda mountain, north of Chur, and from there took herself into the Taminatal on the other side, a place astonishingly deserted for all its closeness to the oldest, busiest city in the Gray Country. The chamois were plentiful. Mariarta hunted, but her heart was not in it.

The wrong goddess,
  she thought repeatedly as days passed. It had never occurred to her that she would not immediately find the right one. All she had left were the rest of old Tor’s words:
...west by the lakes.

Mariarta sighed, that afternoon, sitting in the thinning sunlight of late fall, on a broad terrace under the peak of the Vattner Chöpf mountain. All the world she knew lay spread below her, looking southward: from Chur, invisible behind the intervening Calanda peak, to Mustér, just visible in the misty distance behind Panix and Crap Sogn Gion. Her knowledge of the lands abutting this area northward, though, was poor. Mariarta knew that the lake on which Altdorf sat was the first of a chain of them, stretching northwest. Until she could come where people could give her better directions, she would have to stumble along as best she could—for she was not willing to go to Altdorf yet. There were too many memories there, too many people who might know her, and betray her secret.
I’ve had enough of people knowing, for the moment....

But next morning her impatience drove Mariarta onto the well-paved northward road, which ran through rich farmland. The road was made by the Romish people—so Mariarta was told at the inn she stopped at, in a town called Sargans. She was astonished that something made so long ago should be in such good shape.

“You’ll see more like that as you go north,” the innkeeper said. Sargans was a tiny town; all its people seemed to be in the low stone-built inn that night, but still the master of the place, a skinny, busy man, had time for her. “The Rein valley was their great highway, the Old Roms. They marched armies up and down it when they were fighting with the oldest people, the tribes. There’s a road like that leading to the Walen lake and the Over lake, and it runs right to Turitg, though I’ve never been that way. Great King Carl’s armies used it too, in their time.” He grimaced as he put down Mariarta’s cup of wine. “And now the Austriacs run up and down it like rats, taxing everything in sight—”

Mariarta nodded. “Bailiffs...”

The innkeeper spat on the floor. “Twice last year they raised the tax on this place. Old Rudolf wants more all the time. Anyway, you’ll find enough old Romish work on your way up. In fact, you said it was Walenstadt you were going to—well, there’s an old fort of theirs on the way: ruined, and it’s haunted, but a harmless sort of ghost. Oh, by the way, don’t mind ours.”

“Your inn is haunted?”

“It’s my great-great-grandmother,” the innkeeper said. “She used to keep the place, years ago; but she gave short measure when she served beer. So now she walks around, some nights, saying ‘Thirty thumbs to a measure, thirty thumbs to a measure’. She used to pour the beer like this—” The innkeeper took an empty stoneware flagon from a nearby table, with his thumb inside it, and mimicked pouring beer. “Thirty times you do it and you’ve cheated the customers out of a measure’s worth. Well, either she had a bad conscience when she died, or God thinks it’s bad to cheat people out of beer, because she’s been wandering around here now for how many years—” The innkeeper put the flagon down, started counting on his fingers. “Oh, who knows. Anyway, she’s good for business: people come to see her. But she won’t go away, even though people ask her what she needs to be freed. The old bat, I think she just likes being difficult. Anyway, if you see her, ask her what the problem is. What do you want to eat?”

Mariarta ordered a chicken, ate it thoughtfully, and went to bed, lying awake in hope that something might happen. Despite her terrible experience of the week before, plain old ghosts were common enough in the Grey Country; this one sounded domesticated enough to be interesting. But nothing materialized, and Mariarta awakened to the sun coming in the cracks of the shutters. She had her morning meal and paid the innkeeper, who had Catsch ready for her. “You should charge me less,” Mariarta said, “for not seeing the ghost.”

“Ah, well, maybe next time,” the innkeeper said pleasantly. “Come back soon.”

Mariarta grinned. “How many people just passing through, around lunchtime, decide to stay after you’ve told them that story?”

The innkeeper waved at her, grinned back, and went inside.

Mariarta rode northward, admiring the broad fields which in summer would be full of grain, the vineyards terraced against the nearer, lower hills, like dark ranks of soldiers against the blanketing white. She wondered what village life would be like a in a place where you actually grew your own wheat, rather than having to buy in meal at great price. Once these people would have seemed incredibly rich to her. But here, as in the poorest mountain town, the bailiffs seemed to take so much that people were left struggling.
How did this come about?
  Mariarta wondered.
We’ve always paid them, it’s true...but when did it start?  How did we let it start?

She trudged down the snowy road, making for the inn she had been told about at Berschis. It all came down to armies. Country people had no way of stopping an army sent to discipline them: so they paid the landlords’ bailiffs whatever tax was charged.
But when was the last time an army was seen in the Grey Country?  Are the great lords relying on bluff as much as on their own power?
  No matter how big your army was, it had to be a nuisance to move, even on flat ground. In mountainous country like this...couldn’t it be made more trouble than it was worth?

She passed one more curve in the road, peering ahead through the snow that was starting to sift through the early dusk. The valley was narrowing, the mountains drawing in. They were jagged, thickly wooded, and their closeness to the road made them seem higher than they really were. Two of them ahead leaned in so close to the road as to suggest the uprights of a door; faintly, through the snow, Mariarta could make out a light atop one of them.

The local castle,
  she thought. Mariarta’s thoughts went back to the great pile of Attinghausen, looming above Altdorf.
The Knight’s son. I wonder how he is...
She sighed.

The road curved one last time, running close to the noisy Seez river on the left, under the shadow of the mountain- cliff on the right. It was not truly a cliff, but a small peak in its own right, a cub of the mountain behind. Atop it, the light burned against the darkness of the pile crowning the lesser peak.
A window—
   But as she squinted through the gently blowing snow, the wind swirled it, changed the view. Mariarta’s mouth fell open. There was no wall there for there to be a window in. The castle that topped the peak was hardly there at all; ruined walls slumped against one another where they were tall enough to do so. Elsewhere they resembled a cake with bites out of it, gapped and crumbled. But still the light shone; square, like the light through a window. A warm light, like firelight, friendly—

Mariarta stared. Her first intention was to hurry on. Berschis was close; the thought of having to find Flisch’s relatives was heavy on her mind. But that light drew her.
Suppose this is something to do with my Lady?  If I pass by, I’ll never know—

She saw the second light, then. It was not single, but a cluster, as if someone carried a many- branched candelabrum up the hillside. Some pale shape, paler than the snow that blew between them, seemed to be carrying it. Mariarta tried to see it more clearly. The wind changed direction, clearing the air—

—showing her the white, four-legged shape that paced the mountain. Mariarta’a heart leapt.
The white one!
  But no chamois had such a spread of antlers. From the tips of those antlers the light, like single flames, sprang up,  making the illusion of the carried candlestick. The great
cervin
-stag wearing the antlers was whiter than the snow through which it paced. And it bore something else, on which the light of its antlers shone: definitely a rider....

The innkeeper had said the ghost was a harmless one—“Come on,” Mariarta said to Catsch, tugging him off the road toward where a path, winding around the side of the peak, was visible in the snow. Mariarta led Catsch carefully to a spot where the trees overhung the path. Under one tree, far enough in to elude casual notice, she tethered the donkey and kicked the snow aside, putting down grain. Catsch started eating.

Mariarta went back to the path, curiously kicked snow aside again, bent to feel the bare stone. The road was quite flat, set stone to stone, close together.
Romish,
  Mariarta thought.
My Lady is Romish...or older, even.
She headed up the path, minding her footing: the snow was deeper here.

The path was carefully made, switching back and forth across the side of the peak that faced away from the road. Mariarta climbed it slowly, watching the top of the peak through the changing thicknesses of pine. The light persisted. Near the top of the peak, the road made one last turn under the ruined walls.  Mariarta found herself standing before what was left of a gateway. Some rotted timbers lay on the ground, their shapes mostly concealed by snow. Brush and pine seedlings had rooted around them, sticking out in places from the wall; the solid square shapes of the old wall-edges were crumbled with time. She readied her crossbow.
Let’s see—

Mariarta picked her way around the broken timbers, peered through the gate. Inside were fallen stones, all shrouded in deep snow—a big courtyard full of odd humped shapes, snow unevenly melted, refallen and melted again. Across the courtyard was a tower, at the bottom of it a doorway, the door itself long perished, the snow swept in by the wind to lie on the first few steps of a stair. High above it shone the light—

Mariarta stepped in through the gate. And it all changed—

The stone of the courtyard lay bare. Torchlight shone on it, from torches fixed in brackets all around.  No wind blew through the courtyard; not a feather stirred in the crests of the helmeted men who stood around its walls, guarding this doorway or that. Not one of them gave her a glance. This suited Mariarta, for the soldiers were not entirely there. She could see the stonework of the thick walls through them; the sheen of their armor was more like glass than metal. Quietly Mariarta walked across the courtyard, toward the door in the bottom of the tower.

She passed through the tower door, climbed the coiling stair. Above her was the light, spilling down the stairwell. Mariarta came to the landing, looked through the door.
There should be nothing here,
  she thought.
Empty air—

The room was as wide as the whole tower, round-walled. Rich tapestries hung from the walls, figured with men and beasts in a strange old style. The stone of the floor was overlaid with carpets, red, golden, dark moss-green, woven in repeating designs. Furniture stood about—old couches, great presses near the walls, handsome chairs draped with rich stuffs, cushioned in colors that gleamed dully in the light of the torches and candles that filled the room. Slowly, softly—for the place was full of a stillness she was afraid to break—Mariarta stepped over the threshold.

A pillow on the couch nearest her rustled. Mariarta stared—then found she was staring at no pillow, but an
erizun
, uncurling and shaking its spines, looking back at her with piggy eyes in the candlelight.  From all around the room came rustles, movements of wings being unsettled, snorts of surprised beast-breath—a raven, sitting on the back of a chaise, absently sharpening its beak on the woodwork: a mountain lynx on the carpet before the hearth,  stretching like a lazy cat: a group of choughs, with their red feet and yellow beaks, roosting on the stone windowsill like so many chickens, staring at Mariarta with interest out of their bright yellow eyes. On a rug underneath the farthest window, lying on its back with its legs lazily spread out, a grey wolf lay looking bright-eyed at Mariarta,  upside down, with its tongue lolling idiotically out of its face.

Off to one side, near the tower’s third window, big enough to be a door, a branched candlestick moved. But it was not a candlestick. The huge white stag now shook the snow out of its coat, gazing at her thoughtfully from where it stood behind a silk-cushioned chair. And folding her cloak by the chair was a young woman.

Mariarta stared. Not only because the young woman had a shadow— unusual, for a ghost. But her clothes were strange. She wore a sort of golden-colored shift, and over it a voluminous wrapping of rose-colored material, heavy and lustrous, with a wide border intricately worked in a geometric pattern, wine-color and blood-color. Her hair fell long and dark from under a headdress like a broad flat crown, beautifully chased in plain gold. The only other ornament she bore, if it could be called an ornament, was a great bunch of keys, iron, silver and bronze, which hung from a chain attached to her girdle, and chimed when she moved. The young woman finished folding her cloak, as anyone might who had come in from out in the weather, and draped it across the back of the chair. Then she seated herself, favoring Mariarta with an expression as thoughtful but untroubled as the stag’s. She was fair, this ghost, with an outlandish kind of beauty, her eyes turned up at the corners, gazing out of an oval face which somehow managed to look both serene and severe.