Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (32 page)

“And to think we really thought staying quiet would save our families,” Arnold said, and rubbed his face, a gesture Mariarta had seen her father use. It wrung her heart: he had always done it to scrub away tears before they showed. “It’s not working. Look at my poor father!  Landenberg put out his eyes to punish
me
.”

Werner nodded. “And that poor girl in Arth, just now; the
landvogt
  there shut her in a tower until she would have him—she leapt into the lake, rather. Died of it.”

Arnold let out a long breath. “What freedom we have had, we’ve had too long. Too long to bear
this.
Something must be done.”

“But who decides what to do?” Walter said.

Werner shook his head. “It’s a hard question. We can’t decide for everyone else. Otherwise we become no better than the
vogten
.”

“So ask,” Theo said. “Let the word go out that the free men of the Forest Towns are looking to see what must be done. Let people who think they have answers, come together in secret to say what they might be. Not too many, of course: that would be noticed.”

“Treason,” Arnold said. “Or so the
vogten
will call it.”

“By the time they hear of it,” Walter said, stretching his feet out to the fire, “it may be too late. And they can’t watch every quiet alp or mountainside.... I can think of a couple of spots. A meadow of mine by the lake. Another place, in the shadow of a wood, out of sight of the main road, but accessible. Axenstein, it’s called. Would that suit?”

The others nodded. “Then let’s say six days after Martinmas. A month will give everyone time to make the journey.” He glanced at Mariarta. “Can you make your way right round the Forest Lake within two weeks, mistress?”

“I can.”

“Then go to Yberg, and take our words to Konrad there: and to Konrad Hunn in Schwyz. These also—” He named men’s names, described houses scattered in towns around the lake: Brunnen, Seelisberg, Gersau, Weggis, Stoos. Mariarta committed them all to memory, as she had used to do in the old days when carrying messages for her father, and recited the details back.

The three by the fire nodded. Theo got up, gestured with his head toward the door. Mariarta went after him.

“They’ll have other things to discuss,” Theo said softly. “And Arnold, I think, needs to be with his friends a while. He loves his father dearly: but he dares not go to him, not while the
vogten
are watching....”

Mariarta shook her head as she put her jacket on. Before the fire, Arnold had been rubbing his face again: he now looked at his hands, the grief showing plain. Walter reached out and took one of those hands, and Werner grasped it as well. The gesture started as one of comfort, but as those three men’s eyes met, it became something more. “Before God I say it,” Walter said, his voice shaking with anger and pain, “we will overthrow this tyranny, and our poor lands will be made free again, whatever it takes: my life on it. My life.”

“Mine too,” Werner said. “And mine,” said Arnold.

Mariarta blinked hard and turned away.

•

The next morning there was outrage in the soldiers’ barracks, and an increased presence of them in the market square: for last night, in the dreadful blowing snow, someone had got at the Governor’s hat. The cock-pheasant’s tailfeather that had been stuck in its band was gone, and in its place, shining blue-green in the sun, was a fine long feather from a peacock’s tail. People came from all over town to bow to the hat, smiling, and walked away smiling harder. The soldiers gripped their halberds and glowered.

Mariarta left town without going through the marketplace. Her hide she had disposed of: she had nothing to do but start on her way. She felt blithe, knowing that Grugni would see she completed her errand in good time.

Her path took her along the track under Attinghausen castle, past the door of the church beneath the castle walls. Mariarta paused there, remembering Arnulf telling her of his ancestor’s image there on his tomb. Curious, she went in.

The church was small and dark: this time of year, the fortress would shadow it most of the day. “Except for feast days, we mostly use the chapel in the castle,” Mariarta remembered Arnulf saying. “At least that way we can see the priest.”

Arnulf,
  Mariarta thought as she moved forward, seeing in her mind the sun through green boughs, hearing a young man’s laughter. There were two small side altars, to right and left, even plainer than the main one. The left-hand one had a plain-carved statue of Songt Giusep on it, and nearby, the tomb of the first Knight of Attinghausen, a hundred years dead now. On the stone lid lay the blackened bronze effigy of a stern-faced man in a surcoat and mail, hands folded, head pillowed on a pointed helmet. The resemblance to Arnulf was surprising: except that by no stretch of the imagination could she picture him as looking stern. Mostly she thought of him as wearing that look of concealed amusement as the village council of Tschamut handled his sword....

Mariarta turned away from the tomb and glanced at the other altar. A statue of the Virgin stood there, carved from plain pine-wood like that of Songt Giusep. Mariarta was about to leave when she saw a gleam of something pale above the statue. Curious, she went to the other altar. Behind her the church door opened: a glance backwards showed her the local priest, bowing to the altar as he came in.

Mariarta stood gazing at the pale thing. It was a white wreath of flowers gone dry with mountain air and age, muddied, bloodied, hanging over the Virgin’s statue, trailing stained and yellowed ribbons. She swallowed as the priest came by. “What’s that?” she said.

“Why, that’s a great relic hereabouts,” he said. “It’s the bride’s wreath of the niece of the Knight of Attinghausen, who saved the people in the south country from a black bull-monster that sprang from a haunted alp, somewhere over by Ried, I think. It ravaged all the country about, and caused many men’s deaths. They say the girl had to raise and lead a great white bull to fight the black one. In their battle, all dressed in her bride’s array, she died: but without her courage there would have been no victory, so they hung her wreath here to thank God for her sacrifice.”

“Indeed,” Mariarta said softly.
How strange,
  she thought;
go away for a year or three, and the world rewrites your life story without so much as a nod to you. ‘Niece’...
 Mariarta stood silently wondering who in Tschamut had sold this ‘relic’ north: in how many mouths the tale had been, and become confused, before coming to rest here....

“Are you troubled for the maiden?” the priest said gently. “You should not be, for the lords of Attinghausen have masses said every month for the repose of her soul. And surely such a sacrifice has won her a place in heaven.”

“Surely,” Mariarta said. She reached into her purse, fumbling. “Take this, please. And pray for her.”

Mariarta pressed the coin into the priest’s hand and went out of the church at a great speed—for she knew she was about to either laugh or weep. Hurriedly Mariarta made her way into the woods. In a while, after she had found Grugni, the laughter won, and the woods rang with it until the snow started, sifting down to hide their tracks under a carpet of silence.

•

Mariarta went swiftly about her errand, hurrying the stag. House after house she visited, always at night, always under cover of snow, when she could cause it. Part of the problem was that she didn’t know exactly how she was doing it, and the results were uneven.
I must find my Lady,
  Mariarta thought, 
and settle matters somehow or other: for if this power is her gift, like the shooting, it’s no good to me as it is, sometimes working, sometimes not. I must become its mistress if it’s to do me, or anyone else, any good. I only hope the price isn’t more than I can pay...

She and Grugni worked their way sunwise around the Forest Lake—not a simple task, since the lake is actually four small lakes joined head-and-tail together by narrow straits. Mostly Mariarta and the stag stayed in the mountains, approaching the towns and villages directly from the heights above them.

The stories she was told made Mariarta ever angrier as she delivered her message. Her errand grew as she went, for each of the householders to whom she was sent, influential farmers or townsmen, had more tales of the insolence and tyranny of the
vogten
. From the Cellarer of Sarnen she heard the rest of the tale of Arnold von Melchtal’s father—how the old man, Heinrich, had a beautiful pair of oxen that the
Landvogt
Beringer coveted; when Arnold, enraged, had attacked the servant sent to take the cattle, the
landvogt
seized the old father and demanded he turn his son over to him for punishment. Heinrich, having told his son to flee, had no idea where Arnold was: but the
landvogt
said that on second thought, the father would do as well as the son—and had the old man’s eyes put out. All the Unterwald country was seething with rage over the deed: but the
Landvogt
sat invulnerable in his castle above Sarnen, and laughed, while his men hunted for Arnold everywhere.

It was the same elsewhere: lands stolen, young brides carried off and old women slaughtered as a joke, houses burned, crops stolen. Always the excuse was that the people of the Forest countries were to be “taught a lesson”: the lesson being that they must conduct themselves like other serfs—or die. In each place Mariarta told the other stories she had heard, and watched the faces of her listeners, men and women both, grow grimmer.

Mariarta was two days done with her errand—having delivered the last message, to the senior townsmen of Vitznau on the main part of the Forest Lake—and was making her way back to Altdorf, when she got a fright. She had left Grugni to wander for a day or so under the shadow of the white peak of the Fronaltstock. At its feet, in the village of Morschach, she was sitting quietly in a corner of its inn, drinking spiced wine, when the soldiers came in.

They were loud, which was typical, and they sat down and demanded wine and food, which was understandable. It was astonishing to see how the whole common-room of the inn went tense and quiet. The soldiers noticed this, congratulated themselves on having caused it, and got louder.

Mariarta sat in the corner, busily being a grubby hunter worthy of no one’s notice. The door swung open after a while, to admit another of the locals. The usual icy blast came howling in through the ineffective door-curtains. Mariarta, without moving, leaned forward in thought to catch what that wind might bring.

—out of here and north again, to catch the big ones—

There was more, a sort of inner grumbling about the weather and the food and the mud; but what upset Mariarta was a clear image, windborne, of the Axenstein. This was a valley road some miles distant, which ran through land too steep to farm, too poor to graze; the bones of the earth stuck through it in granite ribs and ridges. There was no reason for anyone to be there, which made it a good place to gather. Except when someone knew you were coming—

She held still, praying God and her Lady to have someone open that door again. It hardly mattered which of these soldiers’ thoughts she had overheard—she only wanted to hear more.
Who talked?  Who betrayed us?  What should I do?!
  Down the chimney, she could hear the wind beginning to howl.
Yes,
  she begged it, 
for pity’s sake, bring me the word I want to hear!
 

Something howled outside: not the wind. Mournful, thoughtful-sounding, it wound down the chimney with the wind-moan and matched it, a third higher, in harmony as sure as any mountain-singers’ who sang the alp-blessing to call the cows home. Not a person in the common-room did or said a thing until that howling stopped. Even the soldiers looked unnerved. Mariarta sat remembering something about her lady from Songt Luzi’s book:  “—when She stands at the meeting of three roads, hark!  hear Her children baying—”

Talk resumed eventually. Shortly the innkeeper went out to see that the beasts in the stable were all right—for knockings and bangings could be heard out there, a response to the howls—and as he opened the door, the blessed draft came screaming in again. Mariarta closed her eyes and leaned back, tasting the wind.

Quite clear, this time, the image of many men at arms, coming from all over, to lie in wait for those meeting at the Axenstein in a week. The captain’s own men knew nothing of it: only the various troop captains knew, so that the men wouldn’t have a chance to blab to the locals.

I’ve got to get out of here,
  Mariarta thought. When the soldiers’ attention was turned to their arriving food, she staggered to her feet, “drunk”, and lurched out the inn’s back door, ostensibly to pee, then went around toward the stables. The door was open: the innkeeper was there. “Miki,” she said, “I’ve got to be away early: let me pay you now.”

“Two and one, was it?”

“It was two,” Mariarta said pointedly, holding out the small copper pieces.

The innkeeper shrugged, took them, smiled. “Sleep well, then.”

“I will,” Mariarta said.
But not here!
  She climbed the outside stair to the rooms, got her bag, and five minutes later was heading for the woods.

Morschach had a
bannwald
behind it, a forest planted dense to break the fall of avalanches. Mariarta fled into its shadows, to see something white come melting through the dimness. “Oh, am I glad to see you,” she gasped, throwing her arms around his neck. Grugni nuzzled the back of her neck affectionately while she tried to think. “Back to Walter’s,” Mariarta said. “He has to be told; this is his game and Werner’s. Altdorf—” She  swung up onto Grugni. “Come on, we have to hurry!”