A Wind From the South Read online

  The boys avoided Mariarta more than ever. That suited her. She still chaired the tenday-meetings of the town council, passing on to them her father’s instructions, or giving them her own when lacking other guidance. But Mariarta longed for the time when her bab would be doing his work again, and she could turn her attention to other things.

  She was desperate to see the Bull’s business finished, one way or another: that way her father could start getting well again. The meat seemed to have been helping, he had put back on some lost weight: but it was not enough.... Mariarta told Ramun, who was master-herd now, to bring another three cows for the silver bull, for the six were now not enough. The creature was the size of three bulls, growing more uncontrollable by the day. No one could get near him any more but Mariarta. One night when she had stepped out of her father’s work room to fetch something, Mariarta came back in time to catch a breath of whispered conversation on the breeze in the hall. “Agnete,” old Gion was saying, “that was her baptismal name, her bab said. It seems she’ll go that way after all...”

  She had paused in fear. The lamb to the sacrifice, yes. Or to the slaughter?

  Mariarta spent more and more time on the mountain. There, the only voices to be heard were the beasts’—real beasts, innocent and thoughtless—and the wind’s. It was the only thing that comforted her any more, its voice growing stronger by the day. Be brave, soon it will be over: trust me. Soon you will be free...

  To do what? Mariarta wondered. Did whatever spoke to her on the wind even see oncoming death as something to be feared? Or did it mean she was not going to die? That was certainly her preference....

  She whistled, her back against the cliff in a favorite spot, overlooking the spring-rill that ran around the mountain-roots to the Reuss pasture. The wind took the whistle, flung it to the surrounding peaks, thinning the sound. From eastward came an answering whistle. Mariarta waited. She had learned there was no need to go seeking. The game came to her. Being ready was the challenge.

  Mariarta watched the sun dim behind a veil of cloud streaming off the upper heights of Giuv. All color went out of the world. Mariarta huddled into the fleece of the hunters’ jacket her mother had made her, whistled again.

  Shadow fell over her. She glanced up—

  —darkness, not a cloud, but a huge shape like the cliffside preparing to fall on her. Eyes, hot red like coals in the fire, glared at her. The Bull leaned over Mariarta, and roared.

  She lifted the crossbow, trembling. The Bull was alive enough, for the wind blew down the line of her aim, and amid the colorless swirl she could see a heart beating dark, behind a hide like armor. She wasn’t sure any shaft would pierce that skin. The Bull bent in toward her, raising one huge hoof—

  The wind screamed at Mariarta, gusting past the peak. She gripped her bow and fired, saw the bolt plunge toward the burning black hide and splinter as it hit, the pieces flaring into bright coals, blowing away in sparks. The Bull roared, in rage this time, lifted that hoof higher—

  The wind screamed until it drowned out the Bull. Her hair whipping her face, Mariarta stared into those dreadful eyes, enraged: she was not ready for the Bull to kill her, that would come later. Infuriated, powerless to do anything else, she screamed too—

  The sound filled the world. The rotten granite of the ledge beneath the Bull suddenly crumbled like dry cheese under its weight. The Bull scrabbled for purchase, found none, slipped bellowing out of sight. Mariarta fell back against the stone, terrified, exhausted and confused.

  I whistled. I whistled, and it came.

  The stone— She examined the ledge by which she had come to this spot: or rather, where the ledge had been. It did not exist any more. The wind itself was dying away, but still she prickled and twitched with the feel of it, a whole day’s worth of föhn crammed into an instant, carrying with it all the föhn’s force.

  Mariarta got up, bracing herself against the cliff, carefully looked over. The stone beneath was smashed as if a boulder had fallen there, and blackened as with fire. I have a weapon, Mariarta thought in desperate hope. The anger, or the wind itself—whichever. Whether it comes to me from my grandmother the tschalarera, or from— Even in thought, Mariarta was reluctant to be too intimate with that grey-eyed presence. But a weapon, even if the crossbow isn’t enough.

  And what if the silver bull was there to help?

  She started for home. The Bull could not fly. It might appear without warning, but if one were going to fight it, the fight should be in a place from which it couldn’t run. If it could be called to a given spot—

  Mariarta felt hope for the first time. It was a great relief to go into a house, after the houseless wild and the shriek of wind, and hear nothing more threatening than the roar of a fire in the kitchen chimney. Mariarta kissed her mother, got out of her climbing clothes, and went to see her bab.

  He was sleeping, as usual at this time of day, huddled under the covers. “Bab?”

  He didn’t answer. He was always a heavy sleeper: she shook him, laughing. “Bab, wake up!”

  —and stopped, for he would not shake properly. He seemed heavy—

  Mariarta leaned over him, saw how still his face was. She looked at his throat.

  No pulse beat in the vein there. It was always one of the most noticeable things about him, the way his neck veins beat so you could see them—

  Mariarta sat on the stool by his bed, going hot and cold with shock. Her glance flicked to the tiny ghost-window above the eaves, as if she half expected to see something struggling to get out through the mesh of wood. But only blue sky showed. It was a long time before she could make herself go downstairs: before she could go into the kitchen and say, “Mamli, I think something’s wrong with bab.” She could not make herself say the word.

  Her mother put down the pot-cloth and slowly went upstairs. Mariarta held still, listening for what would happen next. It was not loud: a name spoken aloud, no more than that, barely audible through the kitchen ceiling.

  It was Onda Baia who wailed and ran out of the house tearing her hair, screeching the news to the whole village. It was Baia whose grief went so loudly next day before the shrouded body, into the churchyard, that Mariarta was embarrassed. Her mother’s face, straight-lipped and still under the black veil, said she was embarrassed too. What’s Onda Baia hoping to prove? Mariarta thought dully. He wasn’t her kin except by marriage. Why should she fear that mamli would turn her own sister out?... It was not until much later that Mariarta thought of the other reason: their own enmity, Baia’s fear that Mariarta would turn Baia’s sister against her. But at the moment, other thoughts were in Mariarta’s mind.

  The Bull. It knows it’s in danger...from me. It came for me. And when it could not get me, it took the one nearest.... It killed him. It has been killing him these four years, now.

  The godchild. My godchild. The Bull killed him: and except for me, there would have been no Bull....

  Those who went with the body to the grave commented on how bitterly Mariarta wept, what a good daughter she was. She could have laughed when the wind bore those words to her, but her heart was too sore. In later days, though, she set out to make them true.

  I will have my revenge on the Bull...and pay the price for my father’s murder.

  ***

  The ninth cow that Mariarta sent for seemed to make a difference. No longer did the silver bull chase its milk-mothers around the field. It went leisurely from one to another, and the sight of a beast as big as half a house suckling them, almost picking them up bodily with its huge head, might have been funny in another time and situation.

  A new mistral was going to have to be elected, but the councillors were in no rush. The week after her father died, Mariarta sat at the table and argued the disposition of cheeses just as she had a week before. But her heart wasn’t in it. Before, there had always been someone to tell what had happened at the meeting. Now only emptiness lay in the upper room; her mother would not sleep in that bed any more.

&nb
sp; Her mamli went about the house, pale and silent, making meals and cleaning as usual. But all the meals were enough for four, and she spoke rarely. Mariarta tried to hug comfort into her as she had in the old days, but the hugs that came back had a stiff feeling about them, as if it were a statue she held, hollow inside. Slowly Mariarta began to realize how much her mother had lived for and through her father, and how little anything else, even her daughter, meant to her by comparison. Frightened, Mariarta pushed the thought away, burying it under her own pain.

  Two weeks after her father died, Reiskeipf came to town. He paid his respects at the grave and to Mariarta’s mother, going on in flowery periods about the great loss. His inward glee could not be hidden from Mariarta. She was angry enough to consider speaking to the wind and dropping some piece of someone’s house hard enough on his head to finish him. But she could feel her father frowning at her, somehow, and it never happened.

  At least Reiskeipf didn’t follow her around any more. Only once he met Mariarta, as she came back early one morning from hunting the chamois. Reiskeipf was on his way to Paol the woolseller’s. He thought (correctly, in Mariarta’s estimation) that Paol would be the next mistral. Mariarta had a near-yearling buck, small enough to carry over her back for short periods, clearly showing the unerring heart-shot that had killed it. With the blood of its gutting on her hands and coat, Mariarta met Reiskeipf in the street. She paused, thinking how easy it would be to end him. In his own way, Reiskeipf had killed her father as surely as the Bull had: his years of casual cruelty had worn away her father’s strength. Mariarta stood and considered, the wind rising behind her. But as she thought regretfully of the trouble a bailiff’s sudden death would cause the village, she was astonished to see Reiskeipf take to his heels, running for Paol’s house as if the Bull were after him.

  She smiled. Maybe it was.

  A day came when Mariarta realized that the silver bull was getting no bigger, but much wilder. The fences shuddered alarmingly when the silver bull crashed into them. It spent the day bellowing, more insistently than ever. The cows huddled in a corner of the field together, mooing in distress.

  She leaned on the fence, watching the bull thunder about, flourishing those terrible horns. Mariarta gloried in them. It’s time, she thought. Now—

  And now, on the brink of the last step, she wasn’t sure what to do. Her father wasn’t here to ask: her mother— Increasingly her mother had become a shadow, sleeping fitfully in the chimney-corner seat, thin and pale. Each day Mariarta went about her businesses of hunting, or helping the council, and was afraid to come back to the house, not knowing what she might find. But today, as on all the other days, she went home as the sun began to set.

  The chimney-corner seat was empty. Mariarta’s heart seized. She made her way upstairs, touched the door of her parents’ room, eased it open.

  Her mother was in the bed, under the coverlet, lying there open-eyed, gazing toward the soul-window. Mariarta stood in the doorway, afraid to come any closer.

  Her mother turned her head on the pillow. “It’s no use, Mati,” she said, the words faintly sad, the way the wind had sounded once upon a time. “I couldn’t do it. I tried: I tried for you: but nothing seems to matter, really. It’s all just...” She trailed off. “Surely you see how it is, without him. I can’t, that’s all.”

  Mariarta’s throat swelled with her own tears. “Mamli, please...I didn’t know what to do...”

  “There was nothing you could do, Mati,” her mother said softly. “Nothing at all... I just can’t, without him. I can’t.”

  Her mother said little else for the next few days. That robust and lovely face fell in on itself, the bones growing sharp, the face growing old. She would not speak to Mariarta about the Bull. And on the last day, when it became too much for Mariarta at last, and she hid her face in the coverlet and sobbed, her mother said, “Oh, you’ve been a good daughter. But not mine.” Her voice was like the wind’s now, a mere breath. The hand touching her hair seemed hardly there at all. “Your body was from me, but your spirit...” She shook her head. “Your father’s blood...too strong for mine. He knew, too. Some other mother’s child...some other voice....”

  Mariarta swallowed. “Mamli, who is it?” she whispered. “Whose is the other voice?”

  Her mother only closed her eyes.

  The next morning, in the dawn, she died. Onda Baia’s crying had tired her out hours ago, so that she slept now in the chimneyseat. By the bedside were only Mariarta and Bab Luregn. In that last silence they looked at each other, and Mariarta reached out to fold her mother’s arms on her breast. The sacraments were long given, the eyes already closed.

  They buried her mother next to her father, a day later. To this funeral, Reiskeipf did not come. Mariarta followed the cart with the shrouded body, her eyes fixed on the ground, and through the service never raised her eyes but once. Near the end, in its pasture near the burying-ground, the silver bull came to stand near the fence on the eastern side. As the dirt was cast on the body, it threw up its great head and bellowed, a sound like a trumpet-blast, imperative and terrible. All the other people standing around the grave crossed themselves hurriedly. But Mariarta looked at the bull with a feeling of rage and bizarre elation.

  One more night she spent in the house, though not in sleep. Onda Baia watched her in thinly disguised horror from the chimney-corner seat that night as Mariarta went in and out about her business. Mariarta was beyond caring about her aunt, except to be glad her scolding and prying seemed to have stopped.

  Mariarta went to her room, opened the chest standing at the foot of her bed. The cloths and clothes inside it were to have been her wedding-dower. Linens, shifts and a skirt were there, the black embroidered vest and red-brown skirt that a married woman of the village would wear to church on Mass-day. Mariarta put these aside, reaching to the bottom of the chest for the first thing her mother had woven with linen bartered for the grey wool of their sheep. She shook the lavender and rosemary from it and laid it on the end of the bed, pale in the light of the rushlight she had brought with her. It was the only white outer dress most girls from the grey-wool country would ever have: her wedding dress. She reached down and brought up something else, small and round—a coil of white silk ribbon, which her father had bought her in Ursera market on their first trip there. It was for a bride’s garland, to weave with the fillet of white linen a bride wore, and tie the garland’s sprays of white steilalva blossom in place. Mariarta knelt there, holding the tight-coiled ribbon in her hand, hearing the uncaring shout of the Ursera marketplace and her father’s laughter, smelling roasting chickens, cow dung, spices, wood smoke....

  She came back to herself, looking through the dimness at the sheen of the white linen of the wedding dress, and her eyes blurred once more with tears.

  ***

  That noontime Mariarta came downstairs and told Onda Baia to go around to the councillors, asking them to come to her. At first her aunt bridled. “I’m your elder, and mistress in this house now,” she said; “who are you to order—” Then she started to have second thoughts, as Mariarta simply stood there in the bride’s white shift and dress and stared at her, her grim expression more suited to a shroud than to bridal array. Hurriedly, Baia went.

  Mariarta sat at the table and finished weaving the garland. If I must wear a bride’s dress, she had thought, I’ll wear the rest of it too. The steilalva she had picked last night, by moonlight, as tradition said was best for the bride’s luck. Her mood was slipping unpredictably between bitter grief and peculiar elation. The wind was singing in her ear even in this stillness, filled with excitement and promise—but she trusted it no more than she trusted her mood. Mariarta put the garland on, and waited.

  One by one the councilors came and sat, and Mariarta greeted each. Last of all came Paol, sliding in to sit in his usual place by the window. After him, someone shuffled in the doorway. It was Reiskeipf.

  “Go away,” Mariarta said.

  “Ah, mistress
, the mistral your father is no more, alas. Since you cannot—”

  Mariarta frowned at him. “There is no new mistral yet, for these gentlemen have wisely put off electing one until the Bull is dealt with. After I am dead they can do as they will. But a dil Alicg lives yet to act for the old mistral. You are not welcome in our counsels, Reiskeipf, though Paol will doubtless afterwards lick readily enough at your salt. Meanwhile, tudestg, get out of here. If I see you again while either of us are yet alive, for the sake of the pains you cost my father, I swear you shall die of me!”

  Paol and Reiskeipf both began to stammer protests. Mariarta stood up.

  Reiskeipf fled.

  Mariarta sat down, smoothing the linen of the wedding dress. “Should I not return,” she said, “as none of us think I will, the house passes to my aunt. Should she die without wedding or issue, as seems likely, I will that it be made into a place of refuge for those who have no homes of their own, as orphans, herdboys and such. Let a woman who desires no husband, or one whose family dies untimely, care for it and the people who live in it.”