Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (34 page)

“Tell him the truth. But sir—that bridal wreath in Attinghausen church—”

“It was sold me by a bailiff down south for favors,” the Knight said. “I bought it of him for favors—he thinks. Odd stories have grown up about it: I advise you not to believe everything you hear...” The Knight’s smile was amused. “Meantime, our case is too hard to make me look at gifts askance, no matter how strange. You I know well enough to trust how they’ll be used.” He pulled his cloak about him. “Theo, my ‘boatmen’ are ready, I think: their wives will be cross if I keep them out in the cold too long.”

“Just a moment more, Werner,” Theo said, his voice suddenly excited. “Here, Rogear, tell Mati what you told me. Mati, where was the place mentioned in the rede that young girl gave you?”

Mariarta blinked at Theo and the two young Uri men with him. “Not so much ‘where’. I was to seek a maiden between two lakes. But mountains are in the rede too....”

One of the men nodded. “My brother used to hunt in the eastern Bernese country—he knows such a place. Two big lakes, the Thunersee and the Brienzersee, run together at a narrow strip of land; right south of that, three big mountains rise up. The Ogre is northernmost. South of it comes the Monk; south of that the Maiden, the biggest one.” The man frowned. “It’s haunted country. The glacier behind it is the longest in the world, they say, and all the dead for miles around are in it. There’s a monastery and a nunnery in the valley town between the lakes, built to pray against that mountain. If you’re going there, it had better be a mighty treasure....”

Mariarta swallowed. “I can only go and find out....”

“Rogear, come on,” someone called: “it’s your turn to row!”

The young Uri man and his friend lifted a hand in salute to Mariarta, Theo and the Knight, then left. “Theo,” the Knight said, “I must go too. Altdorf?”

“In a few weeks, Werner. Take care.”

The Knight saluted him and Mariarta, then went after the others. Shortly the meadow was empty in the moonlight. Not even the lake showed any track of the departing boats from this side, for the Moon had moved.

“Theo,” Mariarta said softly, “it’s mad for you to be helping me, especially when you don’t want me to do this.”

“But you have to go.”

“I do. That avalanche—it almost didn’t work. I walk the knife-edge every time I try this mastery of wind and snow. I must find my Lady and finish my business with her; otherwise I’m no good to these men.”

Theo shook his head. “I think if you survive finding her—you won’t be the same again.”

“I think you’re right,” Mariarta said, “but find her I must. At any rate, I’ll go home with you, and come at the mountains the back way: too many eyes are watching by Kussnacht and the lowlands.”

Theo nodded. “You’re wise. I’ll only be in Realp long enough to get my town ready for the call when it comes. Then I go back to Altdorf, to Walter’s, where Werner and the others can find me quickly. You’ll come to me there when you’re done.”

Grugni was waiting for her at the edge of the meadow. Mariarta called him; he came at a trot across the grass, looking uncertainly at Theo, but when Mariarta told him it was all right, he reached his head out, tentatively, to sniff at Theo’s hand. “Come on,” Theo said, mounting. “We won’t stop in Altdorf. Straight on home.”

The journey took them several days. Realp was a village of wooden houses blackened by age, much like Tschamut. Theo came to his house there, and had Mariarta stay for a night. He would have kept her longer, but she was eager to be gone. In the early November morning, he bade her farewell at his door. “In a month,” he said, “I’ll be in Altdorf. I’ll be looking for you then. Mariarta—” He took her by the shoulders. “Your father would say it, so I say it: the good God and His Son keep you, where you’re going—for you’ll need it.”

Mariarta took him by the shoulders too, manwise, the mountain greeting and farewell—then gave up and simply hugged him. “
Stai cun Diu,
” she muttered into his shoulder: swallowed, straightened, and pushed him away.  She headed down the street, making for the woods above Realp, where Grugni waited.

Il mund ei trits

The world is worn

sut tschiel stgir grisch

beneath grey skies

ils cors ein vits...

Hearts empty mourn...

Denton aucn arda

But hope undying,

speronza tarda

Still all defying,

per ina glisch...

a light espies.

(
Advent
, Gion Deplazes)

It was a long road and lonely, that time of year, the climb westward from Realp up the Furka Pass. The snow lay deep, and few tracks or remainders of tracks ran through it; for one who had not been that way before, much of the road was guesswork, and the going always slow. The pass itself was dangerous going, the path narrow, switching back and forth across the northern face of the Tallistock. Grugni had an eye for roads like this, though, and made the going easier than it might have been.

They went down the other side of the Furka into the long, straight valley of the Rodan river. It pointed like an arrow south-west to north-east; tiny towns were scattered down it, one side or another of the Rodan. Every alp was buried in white. Nothing else was to be seen but the tiny black splotches of houses and treetrunks, roofs and boughs alike being covered thick with snow.  Most days now there was not even the blue of the sky to give relief or variety; only thin grey cloud, rolling among the peaks of the mountain-wall on their right.

Mariarta stayed in the tiny villages, each early evening bidding Grugni farewell outside, then walking in to find an inn, or some town-farmer’s barn. Múnster was the first one she came to—another like Realp, its dark houses scattered along a slope of old glacial rubble on either side of a stream running to the Rodan. As she walked along the town’s one street, wondering where to ask for shelter, Mariarta was greeted like an old friend by a fine big black cat, all spangled with silver hairs, that came trotting to her, shouting a string of meows, and rubbed about her legs. Mariarta stooped to pet it; the cat surprised her by jumping to her shoulder and balancing there, purring. A woman came laughing out of a nearby house and said, “You’re looking for lodging?  Mutzi always knows. Come in, come in and get warm....”

They fed her and asked her for the news, as people had in a hundred other places: and Mariarta told them all she knew of the doings in the south, and the lake country. The word quickly got around the village that there was a stranger at Nani’s house, and the group that sat around her now, while Mutzi purred in her lap, all frowned as Mariarta told them of the troubles. When she told them about the meeting in the Rutli meadow, fierce glances and eager looks were exchanged among her listeners.

About her own story, the Múnster people were more voluble, especially when they discovered where she was going. “That’s a terrible place,” everyone said. They told her the stories they knew, one man telling how the mountain was hollow, and had the gates of Heaven in it; another saying the gates of hell were there, burst when Christ went down to rescue the damned, and still open under the mountain. “
Lai da Almas
, it’s called, the lake near there,” another younger man said; “the Lake of Souls, and you know souls in torment lie in it, because it never freezes though it’s right by the great glacier. It bubbles, that’s the water from way underneath, boiling—”

The cat purred on, and Mariarta listened to everything, for there was no telling what might be of use.

“There was a road of the Old people there,” another man said, a small bent creature with a beard that fell almost to his knees;  “buried now, the glacier ate it, and all the towns by the road. You can hear the bells in the buried church towers ringing, sometimes. Once that was a fine alp, the best for miles around, the cows on it were the best milkers, the milk and cream flowed like rivers: and the young man who owned it got proud—” He told how the alp’s rich and wasteful owner paved the roads with cheese, showered his spoiled mistress with costly gifts, and even pampered his favorite cow with the kind of food that only people should have eaten. Yet he paid his workers ill, and he treated his old parents cruelly, gave them manure to spread on their bread and gravel for porridge, and finally turned them out. They cursed him, and Heaven heard. It blasted the alp with eternal winter, and condemned the man and girl to die into the glacier until world’s end, and the cow to be a demon cow and run the crags and snowfields above the glacier forever.

“It wasn’t the
cow’s
fault,” said one little girl, greatly aggrieved. People laughed at that; the child’s mother hustled her off to bed; and the stories went on....

Mariarta left Múnster in the morning, met Grugni west of the village, and went on. From what the people had told her, she had about another day’s journey before she came to the foot of the glacier. That day they went gently down the valley, passing by the smallest villages, and finally reached Fiesch, where Mariarta turned Grugni loose to feed and sleep, making her way among the black wooden houses to the village’s inn. There was no friendly cat this time, but one of the big shaggy white dogs of the mountain country, which snuffled and licked Mariarta’s hand when she sat by the fire. It dozed at her feet that evening as the village people gathered to hear her news, and to warn Mariarta about where she was going. “There are
‘nanín
there,” one man said, and crossed himself: “the mountain is full of caves and tunnels, gold and jewels, but it’s death to go there:  there’s something terrible in the caves, hiding there since the Fall, hating, waiting....”

Mariarta nodded, and drank the hot wine they gave her. The innkeeper’s mother, a toothless smiling woman huddled in a chair, patted Mariarta on the knee with a clawlike hand, and said, “A woman lived there by the glacier in a hut and spun linen that people brought for her—she used to pray for the ghosts in the glacier, and when she went to bed she would open her window a crack and leave a stump of candle burning for them, so the poor suffering spirits could come into her house and get warm. Years and years, she did that. And when she died, and her cousins came to take her body home, that night they saw lights, lights, thousands of candleflames, going into the glacier. That was all the souls, with all the lights she burned for them, come to fetch her soul; they went into the crevasses all together.” She rocked back and forth in her chair, saying, in her tiny, thin, breathy voice, “All the spirits, all the souls....”

Mariarta rose at dawn, for this would be the day that would see her onto the great glacier. “The big mountain right behind us,” said the innkeeper’s husband, “that’s the Eggishorn: you bear right around its root, and follow the Fieschertal northeastward, until you come to a little glacier. Turn left there, and climb steep. The path  will bring you to Lai da Almas. Westward from there is the great glacier—” He shivered. “Aletsch, it’s called. You’ll be halfway up it...God help you.”

People waved mournfully from their doorways as she climbed the single track leading toward the Eggishorn. It was a boulder-strewn way, the rocks all etched with long shiny scratches from the glacier, now retreated, which had dropped them there. As Mariarta came around the bottom of the Eggishorn, Grugni came picking his way down a snowy corrie, munching the last of some dried grass he had found under the snow.

“A hard day today,” she said, patting him, and fed him grain from her pack in her cupped hands until he had enough: then mounted.

They climbed the narrow valley between the Eggishorn and the Risihorn to its right. Fiesch fell away behind, lost in the fog lying in blurry strips along the valley. In a short time they came to the end of the Fiesch glacier: a vast tumble of strangely-shaped boulders, great tables and blocks of smoothed, scored stone, and rising behind them, some fifty feet high, a wall of dirty, scored snow and packed, layered ice.

Mariarta nudged Grugni up the steep slope which confined the glacier’s end and divided the Eggishorn peak from the Strahlhorn to the north. Between the two stretched a narrow saddle of stone. Grugni made for this, picking his steps with care, for blown snow lay deep. Twenty minutes or so it took them to reach the saddle between the peaks, and there Grugni stopped and stood puffing, while Mariarta looked down in silent wonder.

The drop on the far side of the saddle was slight, no more than ten yards in a long slope. At the bottom of the slope lay a flat oval snow-covered space that Mariarta knew was the first lake, the frozen one. Beyond lay Lai da Almas. Even under this dull sky, it lay blue as a sapphire in a story, pear-shaped. The cold wind ruffled its surface, in which cakes and lumps and one great hill of ice floated silently. The far side of the lake ran against the side of the great glacier, which was still mostly hidden by the remaining upward slope to be climbed. But over the lake, the glacier’s side hung out in a massive slanting half-roof of milky and crystalline ice in stripes, sixty feet high or more, the water lapping at the bottom of it.

They made their way downslope, skirting the frozen lake on the right, and were passing the shore of Lai da Almas when they heard a sudden sound like a waterfall. Grugni shied, backing away from the lakeside; Mariarta swallowed, not knowing what terrible thing might be about to happen—and then saw. The biggest iceberg floating in that lake was leaning toward them, bowing in their direction. Mariarta groped for her bow, spanned it, brought it up. The pointed berg bowed like the head of some huge beast—then upended itself in the water, showing, instead of the white “head” crusted with sun-pitted ice and new snow, its bottom side, smaller, rounded, and perfectly crystalline blue, like a floating gem. Water rushed down, streaming; waves spread from the berg as it settled, all the smaller cakes of ice bouncing and dancing as the waves passed. From the ice cakes at the edges of the lake came a soft, musical clunking sound; a sound that, if you heard it at a distance, might have been made by the bells of drowned churches...

Mariarta breathed out, patted Grugni. Off to the left, where the Eggishorn peak fell off steeply, there was a sort of rough stairway of blocks of ice and table-stones, ground together crookedly against the mountainside. Fifteen minutes’ climbing and they were on top.

A mighty road of torn and tumbled ice, three-quarters of a mile wide, climbed in great curves for miles steadily north-eastward, sloping between lesser peaks until it flattened out in a great round basin a mile across. Down to this basin flowed five more glaciers from the shoulders of the three great peaks ahead. Furthest, a black mountain, hunched, its top bare of snow, crouched the Ogre: nearer, the Monk brooded, hooded in white above the great forked spur it sent southward. Then, nearest, joined to the Monk by a snow-piled saddle that fed the middle glacier, rose the Maiden herself; two lesser spurs and an uprearing central peak, a lifted head, proud, cool, the kind of mountain that left you certain it was watching you. From the three peaks to where Mariarta and Grugni stood, the ice flowed down in a tremendous motionless river, scored with long deep lines following the curves of its path; a great white many-laned road, full of death for the unwary.

Mariarta swallowed in the cold wind and nudged the stag. He shook his head and stamped; but he went forward.

The morning went by, and afternoon passed, while they made their way up the glacier. It was, Mariarta thought, about eight miles from Lai da Almas to the foot of the Maiden, where the five lesser glaciers met. But this was nothing like traveling eight miles on a road. Any glacier’s surface was a wrack of ice and torn-up stones, new snow and old, piles and cones of old dirt, crevasses of all depths. But as this glacier was larger than any Mariarta had seen, so its boulders and ice-chunks and towers were huger, some the size of houses; and the width and depth of the biggest crevasses horrified her. There was no question that whole churches could be dropped into them. Lesser crevasses Grugni leapt with little trouble. There was nothing to do with the greatest ones but follow them sideways to find a narrow spot where they could be crossed by jumping or by some old snowbridge—then try to go further northward before having to start working east or west again. Going more than six feet in a straight line without having to go sideways was an event.

They stopped in mid-afternoon, four miles along. Mariarta fed Grugni, looking with concern toward where the five glaciers met at the Maiden’s foot. The weather was clearing, the grey cloud tattering away to show the luminous blue behind: from the Maiden’s head the wind, blowing northward, streamed out a long veil of vapor that thickened into opacity, thinned away to nothing. It was not a good sign.

Grugni nuzzled her. “Are we great idiots?” Mariarta said to it, rubbing its flank. “Me for hunting and hunting—you for following me—” She sighed. “But you at least can take care of yourself if something happens to me....” Mariarta looked at the dreadful height of the Maiden, robed all in white except, here and there, for the bare stone of some jutting precipice too sharp and terrible to hold even the wettest snow. The sun came out, and the whiteness became blinding; glorious, but unbearably so, a pain to the eyes.

Mariarta put her blindfold on, and spent a few minutes trying to make something similar for the stag; but the cloth irked it, and it shook it off, blinking and tearing. “All right,” Mariarta said. “I just hope you don’t miss your step....”

They went on, Grugni picking his way, sometimes leaping, sometimes standing at the edge of a crevasse, blinking and tearing in the light as he judged his chances. More than once Mariarta reined him back instead and urged him along the edge of the crevasse, the long way. It was a relief when the sun finally slipped behind the Aletschhorn peak to the west.