Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (37 page)

Grugni was leaning over Mariarta’s shoulder: she scratched him under the chin. “I thought it was because of a god’s power that he—she—was worshipped.”

“It starts that way,” Diun said. “Favors asked and granted. But gods have needs too. What use is making, if the creation won’t respond?” Her voice grew soft. “You want what you make—to speak on its own, to say the thing you never thought of.” She shook her head. “That’s half of worship, right there. Being spoken back to, with respect—maybe even love. And when it happens, your creation’s soul—enlarges—and some of the power of that enlargement comes back to you. Only a tiny amount, sometimes. But when you have many worshippers, that doesn’t matter, for you have many footholds in many souls. When you need power, for a miracle or whatever, you can call on the power of all of them at once. The more powerful their belief, the more your power as a result of it.”

“But without it...you diminish,” Mariarta said.

“Yes. The only way to stop the dwindling was to slip as far out of this world as might be. That I did, as any of us might. Where the gods are, time bends on itself; backwards and forwards, both. The gods come from beyond it, from the heart of things,where time is tool rather than master: it knows us, and leans to us, as iron leans to the lodestone. Past and future mingle, where we are. How else would the Frisians ride? Their god is with them, and what is and what was make no difference to them any more.”

“In the mountain at Arosa,” Mariarta said softly, “things did feel very—old—”

“My poor sister,” Diun said, and laughed softly. “But that’s love for you: it always sees the past most clearly. Poor Venus....” Diun put the bow aside and folded her hands. “She was not strong enough to survive being sainted, and worshipped under the guise of a virgin mother, all demure smiles and downcast eyes.” Diun smiled wryly. “That of all things would drive
that
wanton mad. No, she lives in a myth now. But I have no patience with such foolery. This place—” She glanced around  with lazy satisfaction. “My will made it what it is. Past and future here both bend to me, and to my will. And to a purpose. I have been waiting for you for a long time....”

The look the goddess gave Mariarta was like a spear; she felt her heart shuddering, transfixed, on the point of it. “Since I saw the book—” Mariarta said.

Diun laughed softly. “Longer than that. When I finished this hiding place, and had a while to regain some strength,  I tried to discover a way out of this trap, back into the living world I loved. After much thought, it seemed to me I might escape by borrowing the One’s trick. He had conquered mortality, he said, by mingling his immortal essence in that of a human soul, and being born in a mortal. I thought I might do something similar. But since trying and failing with one of my lesser selves would have cost me power, I sent my pet— ” she rubbed the silver hind affectionately behind the ears—“into the real world, where a mate found her, and in due time their fawn was born. It had an immortal’s abilities, or at least some of them, though not quite an immortal’s life. But I saw my judgment had been correct, so after I called Chairé home, I saw to it that my new creature was put out of time’s way, until it should be needed again.” She looked with surprising fondness at Mariarta’s stag. “Even then, a few such places existed besides the habitations of gods, where some mortal soul’s conviction about its own condition turned time back locally.”

“The Key Maiden.”

Diun nodded. “An unusually strong haunting, that: but I knew you would break it. For after your stag was born, I knew I could now have what I needed: a human child, who would be able to become immortal, and to bear me out of this hiding place again, into the world, where I might go about, being and doing again. Soon enough, perhaps, even being worshipped....” She leaned back and smiled, the same fond look she had bestowed on Grugni—but it was Mariarta that Diun looked at now, and Mariarta shuddered.

“So I sent my own blood and power out into the world through one of my lesser selves, one of the daughters of wind and storm. A mortal man ‘caught’ her, and gave her and her descendants the only thing I could not, the seed of mortality.  I knew
you
would eventually be born and come to me, and we would strike a different kind of bargain from the old one. Instead of many souls of which a little is given, one soul which gives...almost everything.”

“In return for what?” Mariarta said.

“Oh, power over wind and skyfire,” Diun said, “and the power to aim and always strike: the power of life and death, eternal youth...trifles like that.”

Mariarta gulped. She had already tasted such “trifles” and learned how hard it was to do without them, once you got used to them. “So you gave me power,” she said, “but incomplete...on purpose.”

“And I saw to it that the need for it grew. A young man came, with a book. He was my tool, though he didn’t know. And then came some shepherds, with a lamb....”

Mariarta blanched. “They were
your
servants—”

“Borrowed, briefly,” Diun said, stretching lazily, “for others of us move in the world through our servants, and one power may well do another a favor. I saw to it that your friend wakened magics he didn’t understand, and you went seeking your own power to put the trouble right.”

Mariarta was trembling with rage. “You—you have been conniving at my life since I was a child!”

“Since before you were born, actually,” Diun said. “But this is what gods do, my sister, my daughter; don’t take it so hard. Are you not a creature, and is not your business to be a creation?  One would think you had a right to say how you ought to have been engendered.” Diun smiled.

For a few breaths Mariarta simply sat there, enraged.
Made, 
she thought.
Bred to servitude, like an ox or a riding horse!
  She shook with her fury, and behind her Grugni moaned softly, backing a step. “You’ll tell me now, I suppose, that I should think myself lucky to be a goddess’s chosen child.”

“That you speak to me so and yet live,” Diun said, very softly, “is more than luck. And as for the rest—see for yourself.”

The goddess did not move: but a great weight of anger and power descended on Mariarta, inescapable as avalanche, so that she was crushed onto her knees, the light crushed away from her eyes, the thought from her mind. Then Mariarta could see again. But not with eyes, and with more than sight. It was the world Mariarta saw, whole and entire.

She saw everything, as a god sees it. The flow of millions of years and lives, the shift of continents and borders, empires rising and falling, peoples becoming great, mastering their lands, passing away; but everything small and distinct, seeming far away. Mariarta stood apart, watching. There were patterns that repeated, great ones and small, and they were fascinating. All the small lives moving among one another, like grains of sand... The tiny sparks of light that were their lives, burning bright with emotion, fading low with weariness or the approach of death, they all stirred, rustled against one another, their brief frictions making them burn brighter, or extinguish one another in an excess of rage. Murders, Mariarta saw, deaths from sickness, lives wearing themselves out in long toil against the uncaring elements; mighty plots that spanned the rise and fall of kingdoms; brief joys, great loves; but they all seemed distant and worthy of little notice. They passed in a moment, like sparks flying upward from fire, millions of them, no one worth more than any other. The view was vast, and lulling...and Mariarta found it horrible.

I will not have my friends be grains of sand,
  Mariarta thought, struggling.
To have a life, to be
in
a life, working and suffering, and then to have it become, or even seem, nothing more than this—I won’t!
  She pushed herself back from the vision, was horrified to find that it followed her, seemingly unrefusable.
To lose love and anger, and the little pleasures, every small and simple thing—not even for this, not even this vision of power, of—peace—

And there
was
a certain peace about it. To be removed from the troubles of humankind: disease, death, anger, the troublings of love, all made distant, of importance to others far away, but not to you....  Mariarta gasped, once more fighting the breathlessness she had felt on the way in: the hallmark of agelessness, the end of decay—but also of normal human life. The goddess was inside her fully now, taking command of that foothold in her soul; and the foothold went both ways. Mariarta could feel in Diun the knowledge of mortals who had been possessed this way, but without success. It was hard for a mortal to know himself a god, and not fall victim to the knowledge. Diun knew how many a mortal before, becoming god-ridden, withdrew in astonishment to contemplate that remote and seamless vision of the world, and spent a thousand years amazed and immobile—leaving the god trapped too. Other mortals had fallen into fits of action meant to distract themselves from their immortality, and died, as the gods can when careless or briefly unconscious of their godhead. It was always a risk—

But Mariarta gasped for breath, and saw Werner Stauffacher’s face harsh in the firelight, turned away from Walter’s, so as not to see the younger man’s tears falling on their clasped hands. She gasped again, and thought of the clods of dirt falling on her father’s shroud—and the remote and peaceful vision became less acute. She thought of the rain sleeting down the bull-shaped bulk of stone on the alp above Tschamut: she thought hard of the light in the eyes of the Knight’s son of Attinghausen. The weight of years bowing her back lessened. She struggled to straighten herself, and suddenly found her eyes her own again, and looked straight into the surprised eyes of the goddess sitting on the couch across from her.

“You’ll have to do better than that, Diun Glinargiun,” Mariarta said, and got off her knees. “For you to be in me the way you desire, I must be willing, must I not?  Even the One had to get the consent of the woman He fathered His child on. You might trick me into thinking you could not be resisted...and so make me my own jailer. But I know better. Nor can you have me on your terms only. When will you offer me what
I
want, Diun Glinargiun?  Bargain with me in earnest!”

Diun was angry, but smiling. “I did not breed you to be stupid,” she said softly. “Perhaps I might have bred for...less acuity. But no matter: I am well pleased with what I have created. So then, my creature, you will make demands of
me
. Your mistress...your lady...” Her voice softened. “Your lover....”

Mariarta’s body awakened in the space between one breath and the next. That old breathing sweetness, the touch of soft wind on her neck, stroking, stroking downward, delicious warmth, like sunlight, stroking,
there;
more than the disembodied touch, but something real now, all through the depths of her, so that she arched her back, wanting—

“
No,
” Mariarta said, and the word jerked out of her, almost a cry: but angry. She opened her eyes and glared at Diun. “Not that either!”

“I can be that to you whenever you please,” the goddess said. “What are the brute lusts of men to
that?
  You don’t know in your own flesh yet...but you can guess well enough.”

“I don’t care,” Mariarta said. The heat in her was anger again.  “Now, what was it you were offering, Diun?  Power over wind and skyfire, power to aim and infallibly strike?  The power of life and death?  ‘Trifles like that’?”

“Yes,” the goddess said: and lifted her hand.

The power swirled in and filled Mariarta. She collapsed to her knees, but not under weight, this time. Mariarta was pushed there by the force of wind roaring in her ears, blinding her, rushing into her lungs with the next breath she gasped for. Mariarta could smell the stink of lightning. Her skin itched with it, that unbearable dreadfulness that the
föhn
wind brought with it—like breathable rage that built inside you with every breath, leaving nothing of
you
in the end, only the wrath. The powers of wind and lightning raged inside her, threatening to leave Mariarta no room to exist, much less to master them.
And that would suit her too—
  Those powers were another of Diun’s old footholds: another link in the chain being forged for Mariarta—unless she could break it, or get a grip on it that would make it
hers
.

Difficult, though. This random, raging power was as seductive in its own way as the cool, remote vision of the world’s life had been. How easy to be an unfocused rage, like lightning held in a fist, released at another’s command: no need for control, only unleashed fury. The lightning seethed and crackled under Mariarta’s skin, the wind raged inside her, shouting down her mind.
Surrender, give it all up, be the weapon you were forged to be...

But above the shriek of the wind Mariarta turned her thoughts to the murmur of talk in the inn at Altdorf, the sound of men angrily telling their grievances, determined to act, but in the proper time and way. The sound of rage, controlled: Theo putting down his winecup, just so, not a slam, but a soft click that was more comment than any amount of broken crockery. Mariarta gasped for breath to speak with, and found it. “It’s a useful thing, anger,” Mariarta whispered, “but not just for itself. That’s not my price. I had reasons why I came. We need
reasons
, goddess. Don’t you see that?”

She pushed herself to her feet again, needing the support of the nearby couch to do it. Grugni slipped under her arm for her to lean on. “Stop trying to master me!” Mariarta said. “If you do it now, I promise I’ll find a way to kill myself later. All the power you spent will be lost. Maybe you won’t even be left enough to survive.” Mariarta smiled. “Be sure, I would wait until you had invested enough in me before I acted...and I would see to it you suspected nothing. You would have a good slave—until one day it would be too late.”