Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South

by Diane Duane

  He grabbed the helm and held it hard: the waves tried to yank it out of his hands, failed. Mariarta saw that Tel should have no trouble avoiding the rocks of the eastern Axenegg shore, for which they had been heading. Past it was another shoreland, rounder and gentler; it would be easy enough to make landfall by the big flat rock. Tel steered for it. The oarsmen and steersman bent desperately to their oars. Gessler clutched his head. Only Mariarta saw Tel glance, and only once, at the shapes of leather and horn and wood lying half under the shattered mast and collapsed sail: his crossbow, the scattered bolts, his quiver and shoulder-belt.

  “Row!” Tel shouted over the wind. Mariarta backhanded another wave into the stern of the boat, so it pitched wildly: but the wave drove it well past the Axenegg point and toward the rounded shoreland, within perhaps fifty feet.

  Mariarta saw Tel look at the wide flat rock. They were within ten oarstrokes. He shouted something to the rowers, Mariarta could hardly tell what, for she knew what he was thinking, and was terrified that the wild waves of the lake would wash him away and drown him before she could do anything. Six oarstrokes: three— Tel jammed the helm sideways, so the prow of the boat jerked around as if on a rope, facing the open lake. He leaped away from the helm, grabbed his quiver and bow even as Gessler lifted his head and swung around to see what was happening. For the barest moment their eyes met. Tel grinned. Then he stood in the back of the violently rocking boat, and leapt.

  The force of his leap pushed the boat, spinning, out into the water again. Mariarta saw him go, held her breath, the wind dropped in sympathy— Tel came down on the edge of the rock, wavered: it was slippery— No! Mariarta cried, and the wind pushed him hard in the back, forward onto the stone. He stumbled, stood, turned to watch.

  Gessler, in the boat, had sprung to his feet. Mariarta hauled off and hit the water like a whip with the wind still captive in her fist. A great wave ran under the boat like a whale’s back. Gessler was flung upward, then went sprawling. The men in the boat, too scared to do anything else, rowed for the lake, where they could at least avoid being smashed on any more rocks.

  Mariarta watched Tel jump off the rock into the undergrowth by the side of the lake. It’s all I can do for the moment. Now then: these creatures— She told the wind what she wanted: this boat to be driven without pause and without landfall all over the lake for the best part of the night, and when the wind ran out, left no nearer than Brunnen, up at the lake’s north end. Let Gessler and his people march back to Altdorf after that—for I’ll bet they won’t want to have anything to do with the water for some while. That should slow them down for the next day or two.

  Mariarta paused in the tumbling cloud. The force of the storm was beginning to wane, without the pressure of the ebbing föhn behind it: clouds rolled over one another, grumbling, and lightning flickered in them, veiled. Mariarta thought of Diun. Where are you? she called.

  Never far, came the answer. You did well, for your first time.

  That’s as may be, Mariarta said, breathing out, but I’m going home.

  Laughter followed her. In the clouds, feeling weary of a sudden, Mariarta closed her eyes and let herself drift. Gods and thunderbolts aside, it was hard to be the storm for long, no matter how angry you were.....

  Shortly thereafter, she felt goosedown under her instead of thunderstorm air. Mariarta’s head ached and pounded as if a thunderstorm were taking place inside it too, but she was too tired to care. Smiling grimly, she turned her face to the pillow and slept.

  ***

  Mariarta did not wake until evening, and when she got up, the headache was still with her. She felt weak and wobbly, and generally thought it would be a good idea to go back to bed fairly soon—though not before she ate something: her stomach was twisting itself into knots.

  “There you are,” Lida said calmly when Mariarta put her nose into the kitchen, “just in time for dinner. If we had really been wooing, I would never have known which you were more interested in, me or the cookpot....”

  Mariarta smiled and sat at the scrubbed table. Lida got a loaf of bread from beside the kitchen fire and began to slice it, putting the pieces on a plate for Mariarta, then starting to slice a sausage as well. “Thanks for warning me about the laundry.”

  “What happened?” Mariarta said.

  Lida gave Mariarta some sausage. “I’ve never seen a föhn like that before. It blew away everything that wasn’t fastened down. It uprooted the linden tree in the marketplace and threw it in the lake. Father was cross....he liked that tree.”

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” Mariarta said, and rubbed her head, wondering what else she had done that she wouldn’t have meant to. Or had Diun done it? Or was there a difference?

  “What did happen?” Lida said, as her father came in and sat beside Mariarta. Theo came in behind him, and Werner Stauffacher.

  “Wilhelm is free,” Mariarta said, and reached out gratefully for the cup of wine Lida brought her. “I last saw him by the Axenegg shore, running off into the trees.”

  “You saw him—” Werner Stauffacher said.

  “I rode the storm,” Mariarta said, rubbing her head again. “I made it free him. Or rather, he freed himself.”

  A silence fell at that. Mariarta drank her wine and told Walter and Werner what she had done, though she did not mention Diun. At the end of it, Theo smiled and stretched. “If Gugliem comes back here, he won’t stay long. Walter, I think you’re going to have to hide Hedwig and young Walter again.”

  “They’re already on their way up the valley behind Attinghausen,” Walter Furst said, weary-looking. He rubbed his face and leaned back. “This is terrible, Theo. We can’t wait. People are wild to do something. And we have to move before the Austriacs do, whatever happens now: otherwise they’ll descend on us separately and wipe out the men who would otherwise go to the battlefield.”

  “They’ll have to move by land, which will give you some time,” Mariarta said. “Trust me when I tell you...no bailiff’s boat will be safe out there. Our own people’s will.”

  Werner Stauffacher said, “We’ll have time to get messages out to folk around the lake, if nothing else. They’ll be warned. But we’re going to have to start getting our people ready to go to battle....”

  “Where?” Theo said.

  Lida sat next to her father and patted his arm so that he would notice the plate and cup she had put in front of him. Walter Furst took a piece of sausage and chewed on it before he said, “It must be a place that strikes both at the Austriacs’ trade and at their pride, and be a severe enough blow that they must respond with an army, not a raiding party. There’s one good possibility, though not everyone has liked it much. Einsiedeln—”

  Mariarta’s mouth fell open at that. “The holy shrine?! But the monks—”

  “Are paid their benefice by the Austriacs,” Werner Stauffacher said. “We won’t do them more harm than we must: it’s their masters we’re quarreling with.”

  “Well, burn the place,” Theo said, “but for pity’s sake, loot it first. You can’t afford to waste all that gold. Just don’t hurt the books and the holy things.”

  “We’ll get word to the monks when we’re ready,” said Walter Furst. “They have safe places in the mountains there—always have: after all, armies have sacked that place five, six times since it was built....”

  The talk went on, revolving around the number of men who would be able to come to the muster—no more than a couple of thousand. “Nothing we can do for a day or two anyway,” Werner Stauffacher said, “until we get word out to the people around the lake.”

  Mariarta glanced up. “If you need a messenger—”

  Walter and Werner stared at her. “Look at you,” Walter Furst said, “you’re pale as a ghost, you look like someone who’s seen a batch of them—and you want to go out riding after what you’ve been doing this afternoon? Mad girl, shut up and eat your food.”

  Mariarta smiled and bit her bread at Walter with defiance. Lida smiled and
gave her another piece.

  After a while Werner left for home, and Walter Furst went to bed, complaining that his head hurt too—as much from the föhn as from the effort of trying to keep the whole town calm in the face of what had happened. Lida moved about the kitchen, putting away food. Mariarta and Theo sat talking for a good while. She told him everything about her journey to the Maiden and what she had found beneath it, not minding that Lida heard.

  Theo was silent for a while after Mariarta finished her story. “Are you satisfied?” he said eventually.

  Mariarta listened to her mind. Diun was quiet for the moment: busy, or sleeping. Though do goddesses sleep, when they’re wrapped in human flesh? Who knows—and who but I can find out—

  “It’s hard to say, Theo,” Mariarta said softly. “I’m not sure who I am at the moment. Most of the time there’s another voice at the back of my head, and it’ll be there always, I think. I’m not even sure I can die any more....” She laughed. “What do I say about that in confession? Can I even go into a church any more without being struck by lightning?” Then Mariarta laughed again, a different tone. “No, never mind that last, lightning’s not a problem....”

  “How is your soul?” Theo said.

  Mariarta shook her head. “Well, I seem to have one, according to my—guest, I guess we should call her. But what the One—what God thinks of me, I’ve no idea. This might be Hell already. Yet at the same time, I have what I want. What I always wanted. I should be happy, Theo!” Mariarta said. “Why aren’t I happy?”

  He said nothing.

  Mariarta turned her own cup around and around. “I did know who I was once. I didn’t much like my life, but I had one, I had a place, people who knew who I was, and that I didn’t have to hide from. People to whom I wasn’t strange. Then the Bull came....” She grimaced. “And I was never just Mariarta any more. I was the odd one, the dangerous one. Now the Bull is gone, but things didn’t go back the way they were before it came. At the time, that was the last thing I wanted. Now... Now I think I would give anything for that lonely village life I so hated the thought of. A house to tend, food to grow, nothing else expected of me....”

  Theo leaned back in his seat. “If you don’t know who you are at the moment,” Theo said, “that seems like reason enough to be troubled. But give things a while to settle, Mati. Think how it was when you were a child. How long did it take you then to find out who you were?”

  “Some years, I suppose....”

  “So you go through a great change of some kind and expect to understand it all in a few days? Fool.” He cuffed her gently on the side of the head, and tears came to Mariarta’s eyes, not for any pain: it was the same gesture Mariarta’s father used with her from time to time, as Theo well knew. “But meanwhile, you have business to do. It’s good to have business: it keeps your mind off your troubles.”

  Mariarta rubbed her aching head again, and smiled. “You’re right there. Oh, Theo—you should have seen it! The look on Gessler’s face.”

  “I don’t look to see anything much more from that one,” Theo said, “God willing. But I think Tel will have something to say about that too...”

  ***

  Mariarta went back to bed shortly, still much fatigued from the afternoon’s exertions. Sleep came swiftly, despite the noise of the wind outside the windows—the last remnants of the föhn still rattling shutters and scratching tree-branches against each other.

  The sound of wind ran all through her dreams, becoming a color eventually, like the flows through which she and Diun had moved. Then, she could not have named the color: now it was dark and light together, water with moonlight on it, and beyond that, the roughness of woodland under the westering moon. She gazed at the town by the lakeshore. Brunnen, it was, with its waterside warehouses for the goods shipped through the valley between the northern lakes and the Forest Lakes. Many boats lay tethered, bobbing, at the piers jutting into the lake. One of them was a big sixteen-oared boat, clinker-built. All but three of its oars were missing, its mast was a stump, and its ruined sail hung over the side like a soiled washcloth....

  Mariarta smiled at the sight as the wind swept her past the town. She was borne over thebranches of the trees, toward a long dark mass of upward-jutting land northeast of the lake. This was the Rigi rise, which lay on the northeast side of the upper reaches of the Forest Lake, separating it from the Lake of Zug further to the north. The westering moon glinted on the white dust of the road which led from Brunnen to the Zugersee, then bore south to where an upreaching finger of the upper Forest Lake came within two miles of the Zugersee’s shore. There, where the white road passed the lakeshore, crouched a great dark shape from which the moonlight slid away, only its shadow across the road betraying it: a mass of encircling wall, and square towers jutting up like stumps of broken teeth. Kussnacht it was, the heart of the power of all the vogten in these parts, and now Gessler’s home, the prison of his enemies, the fortress of his allies.

  The moon stood high, paling: dawn was coming. Mariarta saw how the trees bent in toward the road at one point, how the road dipped into a gorge there and ran along it, coming within a half-league of Kussnacht. Down the wind she rode came a sound: marching feet. Back along that road she saw a little troop of men, several of them on horseback. On one of them she could see the glint of armor. The man had borrowed a hat from someone. It was too large for him, and had no feather in it.

  Mariarta bent closer, seeing, in the woods, something the men who marched could not see. In the low growth between the trees, in one clear spot above the road as it ran through that gorge, a man crouched. The paleness of his white linen herdsman’s shirt gave him away, seen from above. The shirt was not as white as it had been earlier, though: an evening’s and night’s march without pause from the Axenegg shore to this forsaken spot had left it torn and muddied from steep hills climbed, shrubbery plunged through, muddy mountainside tracks slid down. Mariarta saw the man cock his ear to the sound of men and horses approaching. He reached into his quiver. Only two bolts were there. Silently he spanned the bow, put the first bolt in the nock: looked at the other. Thoughtfully, and with a terrible smile, he stuck the remaining one in the neckband of his shirt, the hunter’s old habit.

  It was the worst time for shooting. There was little light, and no shadow. The morning mist that dwelt by all the lakesides hereabouts in spring was beginning to rise. The man’s lips moved: in prayer, Mariarta thought.

  She prayed too, and heard no laughter, or any other comment.

  Leaf-plate, she heard him think. I’ve never shot at plate before. I wonder, will this work?....

  The sound of feet and hoofbeats echoed in the gorge. The man lifted the bow, sighted, waited. The armored shirt he was most interested in came toward him on the sauntering horse at the lead of the group. The man pulled the trigger.

  The snap of the string was loud. Gessler turned in the saddle, just in time for the bolt to catch him fair in the middle of the chest—not the side-shot that the archer would have been quite contented with. The bolt buried itself in the plate-shirt right to the pheasant-feather fletching. Gessler’s mouth worked: he stood in the saddle. Then with a crash like a tinker’s load coming off a horse, Gessler fell.

  The other horses in the group reared and shied. The soldiers with their spears stared around them, got only the briefest look at a ghostly figure in white who vanished into the undergrowth. A few tried to chase him, but they didn’t know the land, and soon enough it occurred to them that, from behind any stone or tree, that unerring bow might be trained on them too. As quickly as they could without looking completely craven, the soldiers got back on the road, and made off towards Kussnacht.

  The wind was passing, the last of yesterday’s föhn breathing itself gently over the lake as the sky went from colorless grey to the beginning of delicate shades of pink and gold. Mariarta gazed at it with a fierce joy and thought of the old story in Luzi’s book, that dreams which come at dawn are true. Weary still, even in the
dream, Mariarta told the wind to take her back to Altdorf, to bed.

  But she yearned for the morning.

  FOUR

  Cur ils noss velgs buns Pardavont

  When our good forbears in their wards

  vanginen fig d’ils lur Tirauns

  grew weary of their tyrant lords,

  sin beras furmas mal tractai,

  who treated them in shameful wise,

  tras chi ean els vangi spindrai?

  through whom did their salvation rise?

  Tras Tei, o Deus! Halleluja!

  Through Thee, O God! Halleluja!

  (“Concerning the Goodness of God

  Toward Our Country”, anonymous)

  Mariarta told Walter and Werner and Theo what she had seen, but they said nothing about it. The next morning, the people gathered in fear and hope along the lakeshore saw one tired, footsore man trudging up the road, with a crossbow over his shoulder and an empty quiver. They welcomed him like a hero and brought him into the Lion to hear the tale of his escape: but it wasn’t until he finished the story that they realized what his return meant.

  The town went wild: winekegs were broached, and people came out in the street to drink, pledging God like just one more drinking-companion, thanking Him for the death of the tyrant, who would oppress them no more. Even Walter Furst was able to watch his beerkegs rolled out into the street with tears of joy rolling down his face, instead of the usual complaints that it wasn’t ready. Arnold von Melchtal came out of hiding at last and was reunited with his old father, who, blind as he was, danced the gilgia in the middle of the marketplace, shouting “Revenge! Revenge!” and alternating the shouts with creaky singing of the old psalm-hymn about the just God who punishes the evildoers in His time.

  There were a few who smiled and drank the wine or beer, but were not quite so merry. “They’ll appoint another bailiff right away,” Werner Stauffacher said to Walter Furst. “But first they’ll send the army to punish us...”