A Wind From the South Read online

  “Midnight it was before he got home. His friends at the Pardatsch hut were waiting for him. He told them what happened, and they decided they’d go back to the glacier in the morning with ropes and ladders, and find this church. But they could never find the right crevasse with the church again.” Giohen shook his head and drank. “Still down there somewhere.”

  “You’ll probably stumble on it sooner or later,” Sievi said to Mariarta, amused.

  Mariarta finished the last of her wine. “Not if I can help it.”

  “You’ll get stuck halfway down the crevasse, the way you’re eating,” Giohen said admiringly, as Turté came along with Mariarta’s chicken and set it on the table.

  Sievi reached out and pinched Turté’s bottom; she glared at him. “That’s what it’s there for,” Sievi said jovially. “You’d be offended if I didn’t. Just go get some more of that wine, Turté.”

  As Turté went off, Mariarta raised her eyebrows and gave her a commisserating look. Turté smiled. Giohen caught it, snickered.

  “They’re good girls,” Mariarta said, taking a leg off her chicken.

  Sievi laughed. “They will be once they’re safely married.”

  “Oh, come on, Sievi.”

  “Taking a fancy to them, are you? They’ve taken enough of one to you. Young Turté there, even that proud-looking Frona—”

  “They’re good girls,” Mariarta said, more softly.

  “They wouldn’t be if they were let run loose,” Sievi said, “and it’s only Sep watching them night and day that keeps them out of trouble. Why, some of the men around here would...” He shook his head. “Never mind, you’re from the country after all, no use mentioning other people’s bad habits.”

  “That the men would jump them the first chance they got, that’s the girls’ fault, is it?” Mariarta said.

  Sievi laughed harder. “It’s Turté for sure. You may have a problem, youngster. She has another lad after her—”

  The wind gusted outside. The front door of the common room blew open with a slam: a figure stood in it, silhouetted in the sunlight from outside. “Speak of il Giavel,” said Giohen, “there’s young Flisch himself. I wonder—”

  He broke off at the sound of a man’s scream. The dark shape in the doorway collapsed.

  People ran to the man, shouting after a moment for cold wine and hot spirits, for blankets and hot stones for his head and feet. Along with Sievi and Giohen, Mariarta went to see what was happening. The closer bystanders had got the man onto a table. Turté was stroking his head with one hand, holding his hand with the other, moaning, “Flisch! Flisch!” The young man, stocky and strong as he looked, was pale as a corpse ready to be buried. But sweat stood out on him, and he twisted and moaned softly. His eyes were squeezed shut.

  Mariarta leaned over him, put a hand to his head. “He’s burning up. Turté, stop it and help me get his coat off. Where’s he been?”

  “Balzer says they saw him coming from the pass,” said a big deep voice behind them. That was Ramun, the innkeeper.

  “He went there two days ago,” Turté said, “he said he heard the chamois were good there—”

  Mariarta shook her head. “But what’s come to him?” Inside, though, she had an idea. Poor Flisch looked a lot like the first boy who had met the Bull, after the shock wore off—

  “This is no good,” Mariarta said. “He ought to be somewhere quiet. Ramun, put him in my room, and send for someone from the Abbey—”

  “Bab Stoffel, he’s the leech. Duf, go bring him. Sievi, Lucas, give me a hand!"

  They got Flisch up to Mariarta’s small room, onto the narrow straw-mattressed bed. Flisch’s eyes never opened. When the others went away, all but Turté, Mariarta shut the door and sat beside him. “Flisch—”

  He moaned, his head turning from side to side on the pillow.

  “Something’s bewitched him,” Turté said, the tears running down her face. “What if he—”

  Another moan. The handsome dark face was all twisted like a child’s when it's trying not to cry. “Turté,” Mariarta said, “open that shutter, would you? It’s close in here.”

  Turté swung the shutter open. A warm breeze flowed in, a momentarily gentle breath of föhn. “Flisch!” Mariarta said. “What happened? You have to tell us!”

  A louder moan. This time, as she leaned close, Mariarta caught a breath of windborne thought: ...put that there...why... Cold. I’ll go in... No! What...no!

  Mariarta shook her head. “Turté, he doesn’t know me. Ask him what happened.”

  “Flisch—Flisch, it’s Turté, dear one, what happened, what happened to you?”

  ...just a little fire...warmer...what? Mariarta’s eyes flew open as she felt what Flisch had at some point in the past two nights (for the thought was all dark): a huge crashing blow, followed by another, and another, not to the body, but inside it, the soul struck by something that knocked as if at a door.

  “Flisch! Flisch!” Turté sobbed. The wind brought Mariarta the sound of something creaking, wood in a high wind, perhaps? a building?—and more crashes—

  “No,” Flisch said, aloud this time. The knocking got louder—no, it was really someone at the door this time. Turté opened it. A slight man in a rusty black cassock came in and knelt beside Mariarta, taking Flisch’s hand to feel the pulse.

  “Bab Stoffel?” Mariarta said. The monk nodded, brought his hand away from Flisch’s head wet with sweat.

  “This is your room?” Bab Stoffel said. “Bless you then, son. He spoke just now, I thought—”

  “Just the one word.”

  The monk touched one of Flisch’s eyelids. It twitched, but stayed shut. “Flisch!” he said. “In God’s name, tell us what’s come to you!”

  No, the wind said in Mariarta’s ear. But Mariarta thought some other question was being answered. No, I won’t...I won’t... And Flisch screamed: “I won’t! I won’t open it! I won’t open it!”

  Mariarta and Turté and the Bab stared at one another. The Bab stood up. “I think we should let him rest, while we try to find out more. —You come too, Turté. No harm will come to him here. Come along and go do your work, for the meantime.”

  Mariarta shut the door and followed the Bab downstairs into the common room. Ramun was waiting there for them: he handed the Bab a cup of barley-water, which Bab Stoffel gladly drank. “Have you found anyone else who saw him come from the pass?” he said to Ramun.

  “No. Just Michel at the upper farm: says he was driving the cows out and saw Flisch just walk by, not looking right or left.”

  “Striegn,” someone whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Bab Stoffel said. “I have to go back to the Abbey and bring some medicines good against witchery. If they don’t work—then this may be exhaustion compounded by fear of something that happened. If the fear was of something natural, then it will fade, and Flisch will recover. But if he saw something unnatural, a demon, a ghost—”

  “Then the demon has to be driven away, or the ghost laid?” Ramun said.

  “If it can be. His fear ties him to it. The tie must be broken. Otherwise....”

  The sound of weeping came from behind them. Bab Stoffel turned to Turté. “Don’t give up yet! We still have the medicines to try: and there are the holy Sacraments as well. Cry less and pray more, Turté, and you’ll do Flisch more good. Ramun, I’ll be back.”

  ***

  Bab Stoffel returned with a leather bag, and went to Mariarta’s room. When he came to the common room at last, it was mid-afternoon. He went to sit by the fire, where half the patrons of the inn were gathered.

  “Nothing,” he said to them. “He is not changed.”

  Turté had followed him to the fire: her face puckered again, but she held the tears back hard. Mariarta’s heart clenched for her. “He cries out occasionally,” Bab Stoffel said, “but the words make no sense. I fear there’s nothing to do but keep him warm and quiet.”

  The men around the fire muttered. Mariarta couldn’t bear
it any more. She went to Turté. “Look here—”

  Sievi laughed. “Not wasting any time, are you?”

  Mariarta turned, frowning. “Sievi,” she said, “you are an honest tradesman, but in other matters you have a mind like the bottom of one of your vats. I am going up the Pass.”

  A shocked silence fell. “Mattiu, you’re a fool,” Ramun said. “You may be good with a bow, but—”

  “I can bring back some news of what happened to Flisch,” Mariarta said. She took her coat off the back of the bench. “Besides, other people come down that pass. Will you have them fall foul of whatever’s happened to Flisch? Enough of that happens, sooner or later no one will use the pass any more. Then where are your livelihoods?”

  Bab Stoffel said, “If you will do something so dangerous, Mattiu, will you at least take a blessing with you?”

  Mariarta nodded, shrugged into her coat, and knelt, while everything got quiet. Bab Stoffel traced the Cross over her, and after murmuring under his breath in Latin, said, “Go well, and come back to us safely.”

  “That’s as God wills,” Mariarta said. “As for me, I’ll do what I can. Ramun, maybe your kitchen can give me some bread and meat—”

  “Come on,” Turté said, and led Mariarta out.

  ***

  The road up the Lucomagno from Mustér is gentle at first, a series of zigzags that roughly follow the course of the Rein da Medel. As the road bends, the traveller can look back from this spot or that to see Mustér framed as if in a doorway between the hills that rise to either side of the Rein gorge: gentle sloping hills all greenclad, with pines at their tops. Then the road swings eastward, up the Acla slope, to Curaglia village at the mouth of the Masauna side-valley. Mariarta asked at the village inn there, barely more than someone’s front room, whether they had seen a man walk through town that day, a chamois hunter, possibly talking to himself? The house-husband, a gaunt unsmiling man, shook his head at Mariarta and turned away, so that she knew he had seen such a man, and was frightened by him.

  She climbed the pass road for some hours. Afternoon was drawing on toward evening, the shadows of the pines lying across the left side of the pass road as it climbed, with few turns, up Val Medel and past its scraggly rocky alps. The föhn had been blowing all day, in the desultory manner of early spring: nothing spectacular, just the endless hot whining wind that wore everyone’s tempers to shreds. That whining was in Mariarta’s ears as she climbed past the hamlets of Pardé and Fuorns to where the road curved eastward.

  She stopped there a while to eat, looking past the ford where the Cristallina Rein, running from the glaciers, met the Rein de Medel. Above the peaks the sky had gone apricot-colored, and fans of radiance struck upward from behind clouds on the far side. Those clouds worried her. If the föhn decided to blow a sudden fit of bad weather at her, she might have much worse to worry about than ghosts. Hail the size of apples could kill you as dead as fear, and faster.

  Mariarta crossed first the small river, then the bigger one, and turned southward. Another hour’s walk brought her under the shadow of fanglike Scopi, the road running close to the steep cliffs at the mountain’s feet. There Mariarta stopped, for the feel of the air had changed. She glanced upwards toward Cuolm Lucmagn, the actual top of the pass. Over it, light shone, the paling radiance of side-reflected sunlight. Everything was still, but the sky was turning that dangerous, too-luminous blue: the silence was only the kind that was gathering itself for a night of terror.

  Mariarta went on to the top of the pass. There she stopped, looking down the other side.

  Now what in Heaven’s name is that doing there—?!

  By the side of the road was a hamlet called Pertusio. It had probably started as a group of herder’s huts, and had slowly been made into houses over time—probably by herds who hated leaving their families for the whole summer. What was new there was a small wooden building separated from the others: a building in the pass road itself.

  Or what remained of a building. It was splinters of wood, now, lying all flattened toward the neck of the pass, like trees after an avalanche.

  Mariarta went down, remembering what sound had come to her from Flisch’s mind—wood creaking in a terrible wind. Not the föhn, she thought to herself. This was something different. She passed the first of the Pertusio houses, and shouted, but no answer came. “Gone,” she said to herself. Or fled.

  The other three houses were empty also: though not completely—pots and pans, dishes, some clothes, were still there, when Mariarta looked in windows that had come unshuttered: but no people. They had some warning, Mariarta thought. Took whatever was valuable, anyway. Then got out—

  She turned her attention to the broken building in the road. It was no bigger than a cowshed, with doors at either end where the road met it. The building itself was totally smashed—exept the doors. They stood upright in their frames, and they were shut.

  Mariarta stood there in the deepening dusk, thinking of Flisch’s scream. I won’t open it! For a long time, she stood staring at the downslope door.

  Finally she unlimbered her crossbow, kicked aside some of the smaller fallen roof timbers, and sat on the biggest one. Mariarta took some bolts from their quiver, sticking them ready in the neck-binding of her shirt. She sat a long time, while the dusk turned to night, and the stars and moon came out. The moon was only a half at the moment, but bright enough here to light everything well. The wind kept quiet for the time being, but Mariarta was not fooled by this. She had seen the sky at sunset, the sunbeams too bright, seeming to swim in their own radiance. Rain was in that air, or snow, depending on what the wind did: the wind itself had not made up its mind.

  In the middle of the road, Mariarta thought, glancing at the fallen timbers. And it’s quite new. The slopes of the Scai and Foppone hills drew close to the road here. And they were rocky—no way over them except by going a long way around. Suddenly something Mariarta’s father had said came back to her. A toll-house? And built where the people staying in the Pertusio houses could keep an eye on it. If they had some connection with whatever bailiff ran this land, they might have made it work for a while, until the next lord over made it an issue.

  She moved around among the remains, while a breeze stirred her hair. A blackened spot here— She kicked at the ashes: the charcoal showed bits of pine bough, not hay. Definitely not a cowshed...this was brought in from outside. Again Flisch’s thought came to her: ...cold. I’ll go in. ... A little fire—

  There were no clouds: the moon shone clear. But the wind built, blowing warm from the south even in the middle of the night. Mariarta stood inside the door on the downslope side, facing into the wind.

  The door began to rattle in the rising gale, as if someone was trying the latch. The wind blew harder, and Mariarta could hear sounds and voices in it: not the usual way. Horns, she heard, and the barking of dogs, distant. A great tumult was coming toward her on the wind: thundering, crashing sounds growing closer and louder. But the sound was not in the sky. It was in the farside valley, coming toward her. Peering around the side of the door, Mariarta stared all around in the moonlight, but could see nothing.

  The sounds came closer. She heard the deep clatter of big wheels over stones and ruts: dogs again, barking, not in distress or in the hunt, but cheerfully, like beasts whose masters are near. Shouts she heard, wordless like those of herdsmen driving their cows, hoi! ayai! And horns again, not only deep-voiced ones, but bright horns like the trumpets Mariarta had read about as a child. Hooves she heard on the stones, the quick ones of horses, the slower clop of oxen. But stand there and strain her eyes as she might, Mariarta could see nothing in the road but the dust that the wind blew toward her. And still the roar and clatter of hooves and wheels and voices came closer, until it was surely right before her. Mariarta stood shivering with astonishment, and kept her bow ready.

  Then CRASH! came the blow on the door: and Mariarta felt it inside her, as she had felt the blow struck at Flisch’s soul. The door shoo
k in its frame, the timbers bent inward. Mariarta staggered back with the force of the blow, gasping with fear and pain: but she found her footing, knowing that what struck her was a matter of the spirit, not the body, and the pain would pass. CRASH! the blow came again, and this time she was readier, but she gasped at it, as much from wonder as from fear. Why can’t I see anything, what is it—

  CRASH! came the third blow, striking her less painfully still; though the thunder crashed with it, and a flicker of heat-lightning danced about the peak of Scopi. Mariarta sucked in a great breath of the strange warm air, and cried, “Tuts buns sperts laudan Diu ed jeu e. Igl empren ed il davos plaid ein mes. Tgei maunca a ti e tgei drovas?”

  A great deep voice, from right before her face, answered her. “The Frisian folk are here. Once we have knocked, and been refused, that never knocked or were refused before. Open and let us pass!”

  Mariarta swallowed. “In God’s name, I will do that,” she shouted over the wind, making her way back to the passward door, which was still on the latch. She undid it, then went back to the door that led downslope. Mariarta slid the bolt back, and with some difficulty hauled the door wide.

  The wind blew through. Mariarta stepped back to look through the door, and the breath went out of her in astonishment at the sight of the great crowd of people, more than she had ever seen in her life before, all strung out down the road into the valley, over the next rise and out of sight: a mighty host of men and women, horses and cattle and sheep, wagons and running, barking dogs. In the moonlight upheld spears glittered, banners flapped in the wind, trumpets brayed. Right before Mariarta stood a tall man in armor gleaming like fish-scales, with a tall sharp shining helmet and a spear in his hand; a bearded man in a great fur cloak clasped with a shining spiral brooch. He looked kindly at Mariarta, but not quite at her. Mariarta stepped aside, and bowed to him. The huge man stepped forward and went by, a brief cold breath on the warm wind. She felt something cool against her leg, and was astonished to see the man’s cloak brush, not against her booted calf, but through it.