Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (45 page)

An hour after dawn, another scout came in. “They’re packing and getting in order. Not battle order, though. Just marching order.”

“The foot in front?” Walter Furst said.

The scout shook his head. “The knights and their lances. The foot are trailing after. About five thousand of them, we make it.”

“Then let’s go,” said Werner Stauffacher. “Call everyone in for the order of battle.”

It took about ten minutes to get everyone assembled. When they were there, and quiet,  Walter Furst said, “All right.
Eidgenossen,
remember the oath you swore!  Schwyz must be defended from these invaders—if they once break through, we will never be rid of them. Let us kneel and pray God for His help: and then go about our business.”

Thirteen hundred men and a woman knelt and prayed, though not necessarily in the same directions.
Glinargiun,
  Mariarta said, 
are you with me in this?

You’ll live through it,
  Diun said from her seat in the marble house. It was shadowed there, and Mariarta could not see her expression clearly; but there was the slightest smile in her voice.

That’s not what I asked.

Do you ask for my help, sister-daughter?

Mariarta breathed out.
Goddess and my lady,
  she said, 
I do. And how the One, as you call Him, will feel about it, I have no idea.

In my day, the One tended to help those who helped themselves. Have you seen evidence that this has changed?
  But Diun was definitely smiling.
Let us go forward,
  she said.
You will have the help I promised you...if you can think what use to make of it.

People were standing now. “Everyone to your places,” Walter said. “You, the third group, get behind that ridge and make sure you’re not seen, whatever happens, until the second group has moved.” He walked slowly to stand with the standard-bearers, with the men carrying the
harsthorner
and the fifes and drums.

Mariarta would have liked to be with them, but that was not her job. She barely knew what to do with a halberd—but a crossbow was another matter, so she was with one of four groups of snipers stationed on the southern slope, halfway down the pass. In company with some of the other marksmen, she climbed the slope. Heading upslope east of her, she caught sight of a white linen shirt, and laid over it, matter-of-fact as if the man were strolling in to market in the morning, a crossbow. Mariarta paused a moment, watching him fade into the underbrush: then wished a blessing on his aim, and took her own place among four other archers behind one great cracked stone that had been too big to uproot for their purposes.

And then they waited.

Silence fell over everything, except for the birds, which were singing in earnest now. Mariarta closed her eyes and let her vision slip onto the wind, riding it. It was cooperative, the usual morning onshore wind from the Forestlake behind them, and it bore her swiftly to the northeastern end of the pass, where the road bent near the shore of the Ageri lake. There they were, a long slow column trundling along as if riding on a holiday: two thousand horse. Not all the riders were wearing metal armor, by any means—only the knights and their squires, and a few favored pages. The other riders were in leather or linen armor, hardly better at stopping a crossbow bolt than a linen shirt would be. After the unarmed riders, the armorers, the butlers, the personal valets and the other servants, came  the drummers and trumpeters who would give the signals during a fight—playing desultorily, and with restraint, the way men play noisy instruments when they have headaches. After the drums and trumpets came the footmen, straggling along in an untidy column as wide as the road, winding away out of sight around the edge of the Ageri lake.

Up at the front of the column, two standards stirred in the breeze: the two-headed, two-haloed black eagle on gold of the Empire, and smaller, the horizontal white stripe between two red ones of Austria—once the mark, some said, left where a belt kept clean a white surcoat elsewhere stained completely with blood. Armor glittered in the early sun on the first fifty or sixty men, knights of high stature, counts and such following Duke Leopold. Mariarta tried to pick him out, but too many banners and bannerets were scattered among the knights immediately following the Austrian standards. It didn’t matter. As they approached the mouth of the Morgarten pass, Mariarta watched the head of the column slow to a stop, saw knights and their retainers pointing, arms waved, heads turned to ask questions. A scent of disagreement and annoyance came to her on the wind. The main pass-road was blocked in front of them. Massive tree-trunks and boulders were sown across it from side to side. At first it looked like a landslide, but landslides are rarely so thorough.

The knights muttered, laughed. Plainly this was somebody’s desperate and abortive attempt to keep them from going where they intended. Pretty bad, really: untidy, not a proper sort of palisade. Though there was no way the horses were going to get through it.... But it didn’t matter.
What about this side road that goes leftwards and up the slope?  It parallels the main pass road and misses this blockage entirely. Stupid peasants, really thought a few rocks and tree trunks would slow us down. We’ll go this other way....

Mariarta watched them turn up the smaller road. It was rocky, and could take no more than two or three riders abreast. With apparently no further thought given to the matter, the knights went along it, three by three, and all their people followed them.

Mariarta opened her eyes, said to her companions, “They’re coming.” They gazed down at where the track wound into sight on the slope on their side. A tiny village stood there, five houses and a smithy: Schafstetten, it was called. The people who lived in the houses were not there. The houses had other occupants this morning.

The snipers made sure of their bows and their view toward those houses. Mariarta swallowed, thinking, 
It might be that nothing else will be needed, here. This plan was well made. The Austriacs are doing just what we thought they would. Maybe....

She checked her bow, crouched there with the others, and waited. Waited....

A flash of color could be seen through the trees where the upslope track bent around the side of the hill toward them. Gold and black: then red and white: then many others. The first forty or fifty knights started to come in sight now, below them, on the road where the five houses of Schafstetten lay.

In an arolla pine near where Mariarta crouched, a
puppentschiertschen
, one of those small pert red-breasted birds that lives on worms and bugs, sat on a branch and sang his morning song with piercing volume and great sweetness. Mariarta glanced at him sidelong, for she knew that bird from her childhood, and it was not his mate to whom he sang. There was another cock
puppen
somewhere around here, and the meaning of those lovely lilting notes was
Mine, this is where I eat, this is where I live, this is
my
patch of ground, get off it or I’ll kill you!

From up the pass, echoing back and forth between the slopes, came the sound of drums, and the trumpets of the Austriacs, faint and unconcerned. The last of the knights were now in the pass. Suddenly, in answer to the trumpets and much closer, came the drumbeats of the men around the Oath-confederates’ standards, and the pure, clear, piercing notes of about twenty fifes, all singing the same tune in a major key, slow, measured and defiant. It was the beat to which a man might march to his wedding, or another’s funeral.
Not much to choose between us and the birds this morning,
  Mariarta thought, and spanned her bow. Around her, the others did the same.

Her priorities, and the others’, were simple. First shoot anything wearing armor: in the head, if possible—no use holing good harness. Second, shoot the horses. After that, any useful target. Mariarta’s thoughts suddenly went back to the
buttatsch
, and she found herself wondering disjointedly, as she took aim at her first knight, held her breath, and waited for the sign, whether it would have been considered “useful”....

Below them the Schwyzers, who had insisted on being the first to attack, leapt out from among the now-empty houses of Schafstetten with crossbows and halberds. Knights’ horses reared, and some knights managed to draw their swords, not that it helped them. The first thirty or so were pulled out of their saddles by halberd-hooks, and they and their horses slaughtered within moments. More knights rode up, some with crossbows. A few Schwyz men fell, but not many, and their comrades came roaring behind them, the
harsthorner
blaring the attack. Mariarta took aim at a shirt of overlapping plates, let the wind roar past her, showing her the life at the other end of the wind, waiting to be set free. She let the shaft go, bore the dreadful influx of power from the knight’s death, and then chose another target.

More knights were riding up, but they were unprepared, their weapons not even drawn. In the pass, something rumbled like thunder. Up rode more knights, and they had no choice about the riding up now: they were being forced forward by their mates behind them, and their mates in turn were forced forward by the impetus of the riders behind
them
. It was going exactly as Werner and Walter had hoped it would, and it was terrible to behold the confusion, and the slaughter. Mariarta knew that behind the knights, the Oath-confederates toward the mouth of the pass were rolling downslope the stones and tree trunks they had spent all night preparing. The knights were now cut off from their footsoldiers by a barrier that none of their horses could pass. The Oath-confederates hidden in the mouth of the pass would be falling on those foot-soldiers now. There would be no help for them from the cavalry. And as for the cavalry—

From behind trees and stones on the slope east of Mariarta, and west of her, the shout, “
Haarus, haarus!
” went up, and the trees and the stones came down. Many of the trapped knights had half ridden, half slid  from the track to the main pass road to find time to breathe and room to fight. They did not find it. The boulders crashed among them, crushing heads, terrifying horses. Shortly there was barely room for a horse to turn around, and the horses began to fall, shot by the crossbowmen, or killed or maimed by their own terror that made them throw their riders, trample fallen ones, break their legs crashing into one another. Some knights managed to dismount and get their swords or bows out, but “
Haarus
!” came the shout from the hill again, and the third group of Oath-confederates came with their halberds and went to work among the dismounted enemy. Mariarta thought she had been watching a slaughter until now, but soon saw otherwise. This was mere butchery, armored men lopped like trees, cut to pieces. She turned her mind to her shooting, and tried to see only armor, not the faces—

Down the pass road some few Austriac knights were gathering, not thrashing about like most of the others. They seemed to be about to charge eastward at a large group of the Oath-confederates who were concentrating on another group of knights. Mariarta wondered how the supply of stones was, upslope, and stared upward hopefully, but saw none coming down.
It may have to be the lightning after all,
  she thought bitterly. She picked a spot on the road, among the lesser knights’ banners.
Now then,
  she said to the sky and the wind, uncertain how well this would work. —
Not too much: keep it confined—

—and suddenly saw a banner that she knew, sow and piglets, the canting arms of the family who lived on the Schweinberg, the Knights of Attinghausen. It was small, a banneret, charged with the crescent, the difference-mark for the younger son.

Arnulf—!

Mariarta went cold with fear. Above her, in the clear sky, the lightning was building, hunting a path to the ground, with her permission or without it. She had called, and now it would come—

Diun!

You called it!
  the goddess said.
It can’t just be sent away like a dish of meat you don’t like the look of!

Frantically, Mariarta cast around for somewhere to divert it. Down beneath her, the knights were charging, and falling: her comrades’ bows were busy. If she didn’t think of something, Attinghausen’s son would shortly be one more bleeding lump. Tears burst from Mariarta’s eyes as she closed them in bitter irony, hunting a solution, any solution. Get rid of the lightning, have it hit anything, the mountaintop. Then find some other way to be of use.
But what use is having all the storms of a world when you can’t—

Her eyes flew open again, shocked, as Mariarta heard Glinargiun’s words again.
You have all the winds and storms and lightnings to work with from the beginning of things until now...

All the storms. Not only new storms, but the old ones. Every storm of Diun’s making. Every storm...

—including
that
one?

Mariarta trembled. More than anything else she did not want to look at
that
—

—but if she waited—!

Mariarta swallowed.
God,
  she thought, 
if we’re still talking, be with me now—and you too, Glinargiun!
  She closed her eyes.
I am the mistress of the storm. It is in me. And I am in it—as it was anciently—

Darkness, and a frightened white blot in it. Herself. The rain coming down, soaking. The alp above Tschamut. That old terror filled her. Someone was here to say the words, he mustn’t say them, if he did—
my fault, all my fault, don’t let him—
  Lightning struck through the night and showed her the tiny white form, the boy’s shape crouched over it. And then—