Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (44 page)

“And then the unattached footmen,” Arnold’s father said.

“For what they have to be considering,” the Knight said, “they’d be fools to bring less than six thousand or so. If the Austriacs are wise, they’ll be intending to push through the pass and resecure Schwyz and Kussnacht: garrison them: then divide the forces in two. One side goes for the Kernwald, up to Luzern and across the top of the Lake, securing the access routes. Then the two forces work their way down both sides of the lake at once, converging on Altdorf. Afterwards they could deal at their leisure with the westward countries—Sarnen and so on.”

The messenger nodded. “So they said in Schwyz. The town itself is well protected by palisades and earthworks, but such things won’t last forever. Konrad Hunn says the only way to stop the attacking force is at the pass—and someone else thinks so too, to judge from the warning of when the force will be expected.”

Theo smiled. “Konrad, that old fox, he knows that part of the country better than anyone. What’s his plan?”

“To block the lakeward end of the pass,” the messenger said. “Try to trap the knights in it, then come around the lakeward side and deal with the footmen. But, sirs, they’ve small time. They need your men to start marching now if they’re to be with us in time to do any good.”

“We can send about three hundred now, I’d say,” the Knight said. “Is that right, Walter?”

“That’s every able-bodied man,” Walter Furst said, looking bleak. “Yes.”

“How soon can you march, sirs?” the messenger said. “The muster is at Sattel, just south of Morgarten pass.”

“Tonight,” Werner Stauffacher said. “We’ll be there by...” He thought. “Tomorrow afternoon, late. Two hours before sunset.”

The messenger nodded, stood up. “Don’t fail the meeting, sirs. Schwyz can only send thirteen hundred men, and about a hundred are coming from Obwalden. No more.”

He went out. “Well,” the Knight said, “there we are. I cannot go with you, obviously. But many of my people will. Let’s blow the muster...there’s much to do.”

•

From where they stood on the hilltop, Mariarta gazed down on the southern end of the Morgarten pass. It was a narrow defile between two wooded ridges: one sloping up to the nearby mountain, the other to the marshy shores of a spit of the Ageri lake. She could see people working on the far slope, though in this dim light, under cloud and just after sunset, it was hard to see what they were doing.

“There are so few of them,” she said. “Of us....”

“You’d be surprised what a few men can do when their minds are set,” Theo said.

Mariarta wasn’t so sure. All she could think of was the terrible number of Austriacs heading for them. “What if they’re early?” she said.

Theo, leaning on his halberd, laughed at her. “If you seriously believe that a force of three thousand horsemen and nine thousand foot can be
early
for anything, you’ve never seen an army move before.”

“I
have
never seen an army move before,” Mariarta said, annoyed.

Oh, indeed?
  said the calm voice from inside her. Mariarta shut her eyes—she had found this worked best during these exchanges—and saw a long slope leading down to a mountain pass. That slope was black with men in strange clothes: they covered it like ants, crawling along slowly, and the sun above them winked balefully on the pale polished gold of bronze-bladed swords and spears.

The Persians,
  Diun said.

Mariarta looked at the throat of the narrow pass. There were a very, very few men there.
The vanguard?
  she said.

No. The enemy.

Mariarta gulped.

A place called Thermopylae,
  Diun said. Her memory was oddly approving.
One of the places where we were
not
prayed to. Honor and necessity meant more to those men than gods did.

How long did they last?
 Mariarta said.

A long time. Forever, you might say...for they are immortal now.

“If you’re going to fall asleep while I’m talking to you,” Theo said, “I’ll go get something to eat instead. They’re roasting a sheep down there.”

“No, no,” Mariarta said, opening her eyes. “Sorry, Theo. Just herself. She was remembering another battlefield.”

Theo eyed Mariarta oddly. “Does she fight?”

“It has been a while since I went to war,”
Diun said aloud, “
but I have not forgotten the art. I don’t miss my aim in the excitement, if that’s your concern: and I am not afraid of death.”

Mariarta swallowed: it was strange to have her throat used like that. Theo raised an eyebrow. “Not afraid of death, huh. Watch out for her.”

“I have been...”

For a while they watched the work going on beneath them. Mariarta had already spotted the biggest of the rocks which had been levered out of the far hillside and carefully poised on other rocks to be dropped at the chosen moment. Other boulders had been let fall already. They were scattered about the southwestern end of the pass, and piled among them were many trunks of trees.

“Better hope they don’t send the footmen in first,” Mariarta said.

“They won’t,” Theo said, laughing his saw-in-log laugh. “They’ve got armored knights. The knights will come first, because they know they can hack a way through any force of peasants...and their own foot can come in and finish us off.” Theo grinned like a man looking forward to seeing the trick tried. “Then the knights will go have dinner, they think, and relieve Kussnacht the next day, and start working their way around the lakes. I don’t think so, somehow....”

Mariarta looked down the gorge and tried to see it with Theo’s certainty. A force of horseman would come here, hit those rocks and boulders— “They’ll be trapped,” she said. “Some of us will be here as snipers, others will drop those rocks and trees they’re stockpiling up the slope. Then we attack—” She shook her head. “Theo, they’re still going to outnumber us five or six to one.”

“I guess we’ll each have to kill five or six of them then,” Theo said, and laughed again. “Mati, the
least
that will happen is that the vanguard will get trapped in the pass. What do you think the footsoldiers are likely to do then?  When their armored support can’t protect them, and we break out and take them in the sides?”

“I’d leave.”

Theo nodded. “I bet they will too. This isn’t their fight: they’ll run away and save their skins. Their masters
expect
them to do that—that’s why the knights have to go in first and present them with an easy fight. So... Six hundred knights or so, but certainly no more than a thousand. Seventeen hundred of us, with halberds and crossbows. With rocks, with trees, with the marsh and the lake hemming them in on the other side, with the land fighting for us. And with you—” He grinned. “I was thinking of Sarnen.”

Mariarta moaned just at hearing the town’s name. “Theo, forget it. My head still hurts from rushing it so. That lightning was
inside
.”

“It was worth it. If I were you, I’d get ready to do it again...if you’re serious about being here.”

“Of course...”

“Come on,” Theo said, starting downslope. “Our watch is over. Let’s go get some of that sheep.”

“In a few moments.”

Theo went ahead.
Well, Glinargiun,
  Mariarta said, 
what
are
we going to do?  We can’t simply blow them away with a big wind: our own people would go too. And lightning’s as bad. Too big a weapon for this small space—

Your enemies are miles away yet,
  Diun said promptly.
Lightning there will not trouble you here. Blast them now!

No. Killing them before they come to this battle won’t work. The Austriacs must know us willing to fight...and able to beat them...or we’ll never have any peace.

A moment’s silence.
It is strange,
  Diun said.
How you mortals hamper yourselves with ‘ifs’ and ‘ors’ and ‘buts’...when the world offers you none such in return: only its old ‘is’. Such hindrances would hardly matter to a goddess.
She sighed too, but it was an unconcerned sound, and Mariarta knew Diun Glinargiun’s thought: that eventually, after enough years in her company, it would not matter to Mariarta either.

Not just yet for me, Glinargiun,
  she said.
I must find another way.

Well, you have all the winds and storms and lightnings to work with from the beginning of things until now,
  Diun said, unconcerned.
I dare say you will come up with something by morning. Meanwhile, what about that sheep?
  She looked down the slope with Mariarta’s eyes, sniffed with her nose.
It has been a while since I had a decent burnt offering....

Musing, Mariarta went after Theo.

•

That night they kept things quiet in the pass. Others were not doing so. Around the time Mariarta went for a piece of the roasting mutton, the Austriac army had started arriving in Hauptsee, the small town northward at the bottom of the Ageri lake. A scout was dispatched, and came back about an hour later with a grim smile on his face to report to the Forestlake leaders.

“Are they coming here to secure the pass?” Walter Furst asked immediately. It was the fear on everyone’s mind.

The scout, the young man Uli, laughed. “Not tonight. They’re getting ready to have a party. They’ve drunk the inn dry, and some of them have already gone out to ‘requisition’ people’s beer barrels from their houses.”

Werner Stauffacher frowned. “And the Duke is making no move to stop them.”

“Oh, no, on the contrary, he’s been saying how this is only the first part of his ‘correction’ of the Lake people. A long nasty revenge to teach us who our lords are. That’s what the few townies left in the inn are saying, anyway.”

“How many knights?” Walter said.

“I make it four hundred.”

This was better news than anyone had hoped for. “Are they crazy?” Arnold von Melchtal said. “Or do they think we’re worth so little in a fight?  It’s insulting.”

“Let the good God send us more insults like this,” Theo said, “and our enemies more of this kind of intelligence. How many foot, Uli?”

“It’s hard to tell, everything’s so stirred up. Nobody in the inn seemed to know for sure. But I counted tents and did some reckoning. Maybe five thousand?”

“Daylight will give us a better count,” Werner said. “As soon as everything’s in place, we’d better set the watch and get what sleep we can.” He smiled. “I hope they find every beer barrel in the village. We may have justice on our side, but I wouldn’t mind having their hangovers there as well.”

•

Nerves got many people up before the time set, an hour before dawn. Many of the Confederates gathered around the one small fire, stamping and blowing on their cold hands, in that grey hour. Mariarta was there with Theo and Walter and the others, silent, nervous, waiting. While they stood around the fire, for the first time the three battle-standards of the Forest Countries were unwrapped and set up—the red square above a white square of Unterwalden: the plain red square standard of Schwyz: and the newest, the standard that the Uri men brought with them. The banner-bearer was one of the horn-bearers that Mariarta had met in the Rutli meadow, the man who had told her the way to the Maiden. Rather shyly he showed her the banner: yellow, with painted on it in black a big bull’s head, a ring through its nose, its eyes red with  menace. “Since we have the horns,” he said to Mariarta, “it seemed like a good idea to have the banner, too. I heard somebody else down south had one, so I made this.”

Mariarta nodded. “By the way, you gave me good advice—about that mountain.”

The young man smiled. “Theo said so, but you can never tell with Theo. Did you see all the dead people?”

“Heard them. A noisy lot.”

“Did you find treasure?”

Mariarta sensed someone listening inside her with odd wistfulness, waiting for the answer. “Nothing I can spend,” she said. “But I found what I went looking for.”

The young banner-bearer smiled again. “
Haarus,
” he said—the war-cry, the luck-cry, of Uri men to one another on the battlefield. Then he went to where the other banner-bearers were standing.

Mariarta saw the great signalling-horns, the
harsthorner
, brought out and softly tested, making smothered hoots. Some of the men of Unterwalden brought out what they used instead of horns—small sharp-voiced drums, and fifes so shrill they would scrape the insides of your ears. “We got them from some people who came from northern parts,” one man said to Mariarta, showing her the big wooden snare drum he was carrying and the huge heavy drumsticks for it, while his mate cleaned out his five-stopped fife. “Basel, I think. They use them at Carnival.” The drummer looked around with a scared, grim smile. “Different kind of carnival today....” Some of the fifes were briefly used for imitating bird calls, and Mariarta heard someone very softly playing a love song on one. Other than that, there was little noise: no shouts, little talk, just men walking around restlessly, or standing in groups of varying size and looking north.