A Wind From the South Read online

  It missed. The shaft whipped past the bear’s ear and buried itself in a nearby pine. The bear turned to stare at it, then sat back on its haunches and bawled like a calf.

  Mariarta stood there with her mouth open. I missed! But I can’t miss—

  “Now what did you do that for?” demanded the voice. She turned and saw a little old man. Little was the word: he was so bent with age that it seemed a miracle he could stand or walk. He was dressed in what might have been a cassock, the black of it faded to a smudgy charcoal. The man’s face was almost all one wrinkle, like an apple left drying too long; but the wrinkle was a smiling one. The man went to the bear and clouted it on the head. “Now stop that,” the man shouted, “or I’ll give you something to cry about!”

  Mariarta, shocked as she was, started to feel like smiling too. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but all I saw was a bear coming at us. It didn’t occur to me that it might belong to somebody.”

  “Don’t know about ‘belong’,” the man said, “but I’ve been stuck with him for a while, that’s certain.” He clouted the bear again, more affectionately this time. It stopped bawling and merely sat and sniveled.

  Mariarta unstrung her bow. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the hermit of the mountain,” the man said, as if this were as much a nuisance as the bear, which was nuzzling him like a lamb looking for a teat. “Always been a hermit here, probably since there was a mountain. Stop that, you dim creature, I don’t have any more apples!” The hermit whacked the bear’s snout away. It moaned, then got up and ambled off into the woods.

  “Well, I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” Mariarta said. “I’ll find somewhere else to camp—”

  “Don’t be silly, you stay right here,” the hermit said. “And what’s a fine young woman like you doing running around in the back of nowhere shooting at things? You ought to be married.”

  Why does everyone think this except me? Mariarta thought. Then the shock set in again. “Excuse me,” she said, “but—”

  The hermit eyed her. “It’s not obvious, if that’s what you’re worrying about. Never mind, we don’t see many people here, you come along on up the hill and stay with us.”

  “I thought that was the point of being a hermit,” Mariarta said: “not seeing a lot of people.”

  “You can have too much of a good thing,” the hermit said, turning his back on her and heading upwards through the trees. “You come on up.”

  Mariarta reloaded Catsch and followed.

  The way the hermit led her wound back and forth across the face of the mountain; the path was rarely more than a ledge several feet wide. Quite suddenly, after the path’s third turn northward on the mountainface, it broadened, and the opening of a cave showed on the right-hand side. “There’s plenty of room for him inside,” the hermit said. “Emerita, we’ve got company!”

  Mariarta followed him in, finding the cave high-ceilinged once she was past the curving doorway. It was large, the size of a house: stars of lamps burned against the walls or on stones on the floor. Great icicles of stone hung from the cracked ceiling. Under one of those cracks a fire burned brightly on the stone floor, the smoke venting itself through the cracks. “Yes,” the hermit said, seeing Mariarta’s glance as she unloaded Catsch again, “we get a nice draft through here—might as well be living in a fireplace. But rain is a problem, puts the fire out half the time. Emerita!”

  “Oh, hush your shouting.” A woman came out from the back of the cave. She looked better kept than the hermit, though her clothes were easily as old: all dark too, except for the dingy white of the old-fashioned wimple. The bear brushed against the woman, who patted it, then turned to Mariarta. “Welcome, my dear: sit down and I’ll bring you a drink. Just water of the mountain, but it tastes good enough.”

  “Thank you,” Mariarta said, seating herself on a flat stone, looking about her in interest. The cave was far from empty. Pots and kettles sat against the stone wall nearest the fire. Various dark lumps piled against other walls were bags. Provisions, perhaps: Mariarta thought she smelled dried fruit.

  “Here you are,” the woman said, coming back with a wooden cup. Mariarta took it and drank gratefully. “I’m Emerita. Luzius you’ve met. I’ll bring you something nice to eat, and then you can tell us what you’re doing here. Do you like wheat porridge? Good. Luzius, is that last batch of mead ready yet?”

  “It would be if you didn’t keep opening the vat to see how it’s coming along. I swear, anything that takes longer than water boiling is too long for you—”

  “It’s ready,” Emerita said, smiling. “You sit there, dear. —I wouldn’t throw stones on that account if I were you, Luzi—not after what you did to the porridge yesterday—” Luzius snorted and turned his back on her.

  Mariarta spent more time looking around while Luzius and Emerita carried on their argument. One thing drew her attention: a series of rough pine planks propped against the cave’s most distant wall, with rocks between them to hold them one above the other. Racked on those planks were roll-shaped objects, and more easily recognizable oblong ones. Books—

  Luzius came to her, put a wooden bowl of porridge into Mariarta’s hands. “Here’s the spoon. Mind, it’s hot. Emerita, where’s that hare this boy was eating yesterday?”

  “Over by the fire warming. You know he likes to smell what he’s eating.”

  Mariarta had been wondering what the rank odor was. She turned her mind away from it and concentrated on the porridge, which had not only wheat in it, but hazelnuts, and tasted unexpectedly good after her recent diet of mostly meat.

  Luzius and Emerita sat beside her to eat. Neither of them said much until Mariarta was finished. Then Emerita filled her bowl again and handed it back, saying, “Now when you like, tell us what’s happened to you, for this isn’t the kind of life a young woman usually lives these days.”

  Mariarta found herself telling them almost everything, from her first realization of the desire to shoot. Finally, after Mariarta had told of her night in the Lucomagno, and her decision to go to Chur, Luzius frowned. “Where is that mead?”

  “In the vat, where else? Do you think I’m going to mess with your precious stuff, the way you carry on about it?”

  “Don’t get all fired up,” Luzius grumbled, getting up.

  “The cups are on top,” Emerita called. She smiled at him behind his back as he went, saying to Mariarta, “My brother has his quirks, but I wouldn’t have him otherwise. —But my dear, you look troubled.”

  Mariarta shook her head. “Forgive me—I’m feeling strange. I’ve never been able to tell anyone these things before. I don’t know why I’ve told you now. So long I’ve been secret—”

  “But you have our secret as well,” Emerita said. “Hermits don’t stay that way long when people find out where the hermitage is.”

  “But you—but Luzius invited me in anyway.”

  “When God sends guests to dine with you, you don’t ask questions, my dear,” Emerita said. “You feed them. I don’t think you’d tell our secret.”

  Mariarta nodded. “Will you tell me your story, then?”

  “As much of it as we remember,” Emerita said. “It’s odd, though, as you get older, how much of what was once so vivid just fades, doesn’t seem important any more.... Thank you, Luzi,” she said, taking the cup her brother handed her.

  “Chur, now,” Luzius said, handing Mariarta another cup, smaller than the first. She sniffed at the contents, smelling honey, flowers, the scent of summer, better than wine. Mariarta gulped it, and spluttered.

  “Take it easy with that,” Luzius said, “it’s murder to get out of your clothes.”

  “You put too much pepper in it this time,” Emerita said. “I warned you.”

  “I didn’t put any pepper in it. It’s the rosemary.”

  “What about Chur?” Mariarta said, when she stopped choking.

  “An old place,” Luzius said, “old indeed. I was a priest. I wandered around for a while with onl
y Emerita to do for me, preaching to whoever I found. Then I fetched up in Chur. I was there some years, in the church. Eventually I got old, and they let me go my way, and take my books with me to study and pray. So up here we came when my work was done. But I still think of the church, Sontg Martin’s: you can’t miss it, you must go there, a wonderful place. Though not as old as some things there, indeed not. Cuera,” he said, drawing the word out with the western valley drawl, “that’s just Latin worn down: Curia it was, Curia Rhætiæ, the Courts of the Raetii. And other names it had, before the legions came and warred down the tribes. They left writings of odd things they found, carvings in the mountains, like letters, ones they couldn’t read: and older things, in the ground. Carvings and statues—”

  “Look here,” Mariarta said. She got up, went to Catsch’s pack, and came back with the statue, unwrapping the chamois leather to lay it on the stone she had been sitting on. Luzius and Emerita gazed at it in the firelight. “You’re a learned man,” Mariarta said, “you have all these books. You must know. Who is she?”

  Luzius shook his head: not denial, but recognition. “They never did like her much,” he said softly. “Too dangerous. Some of the other Old ones they managed to domesticate, put wigs on them and dressed them in saints’ clothes— Sometimes it worked. Not with her.” He got up.

  For a few minutes Luzius was a shadow, rummaging among the books. “Here,” he said, coming back to the fire with a book in his arms: old, bound in a reddish leather. He laid it on the stone. Slowly he opened it, the leather of the binding creaking. The pages were bumpy, time-yellowed parchment, written across with big black letters.

  “Before Christ came,” Luzius said, “other powers were loose in the world. They were angels that fell in the first battle, but not so far as Hell, not being evil enough: though they would not admit God was their maker, but set up as gods on their own. And for a while they were let to do so, and men believed them when they came in great power, doing miracles, saying they had made the world themselves. And they ruled. Never doubt that.” Luzius glanced up, and the way the firelight shone in his eyes made Mariarta draw back, with the knowledge of darkness outside, and the sound of the wind hissing in the pines. “They were capricious and cruel, as gods might well be who had not created men, whatever they claimed, and didn’t really care about them. When God sent His Son, who would not play with man’s lives, being one Himself, the Old gods feared: and when He died and rose again in His glory and power, they fled into the waste places, knowing their day was done. That was when the cry went up that great Pan was dead—he was one of the oldest of them.”

  Luzius turned pages. “But before that happened, one great family of them ruled all this part of the world,” he said. “Our own dialas of forest and wind and fire and water were their children, or servants, but no match for the great ones in power. Each of these great old gods had many names, but their characteristics were always the same, because they couldn’t create themselves anew every while, as God can. You would always know which one you were dealing with by his attributes, as you may know a man by his face no matter how he changes his clothes. But here—” He turned one last page, showed Mariarta the book.

  It was she, the huntress: garbed as in the statue, bow drawn, that cool, measuring look on her face. The crescent moon crowned her; a hind, looking small as a dog beside her, stood alert at her heel. The hind was white. Outside the wind went shrill in the treetops, the fire fluttering and smoking in the downdraft from the crack above.

  “She has as many names as the rest of them,” Luzius said. “Hekate, Artemis, Diana—they shouted that name at Ephesus, not so long ago—Isis, Astarte—many another. She was changeable. Sometimes she was the Moon in the sky, sister of the Sun. Sometimes she was the Huntress on earth, in the forests. Down in the caverns, she was the Lady of Death. But at all times, she was the one who strikes invisibly, the lady of the insubstantial that has power. The rays of the moon, that make folk mad. The wind, the lightning, anything that smites mortal things, changing them. The aim that cannot miss.” Mariarta shuddered. Luzius turned the page idly to look at the other side. “She shot her own lover, they say. One story says her brother the Sun tricked her into it, out of jealousy. Others said her lover tried to take her maidenhead without her leave, so she killed him. Either way, she was said afterwards never to have much use for men.”

  “What does she want with me?”

  Emerita shook her head. “Something to her advantage...of that you can be sure. But beyond that—”

  “They were waiting their time, he said to me,” Mariarta said. “The one on the horse. But for what...he didn’t say.”

  Luzius looked thoughtful. “Waiting their time...”

  “I have to find out what she wants of me,” Mariarta said. “I must find her.”

  “It’ll be the death of you if you do,” Luzius said. “Or of your soul. But at the same time...” He was troubled. “There’s no use you running away from her, either. She’ll find you eventually, and bring you to her. She has been doing that, maybe, for a long while....”

  He pushed the book at Mariarta. “It’s Latin,” he said. “You can read that? Good. Much though I dislike spreading the old bad pagan knowledge, you’ve got one of the Old ones haunting you. You’ll need to know them, to have any chance of coming away from her with a skin, or a soul, in one piece.”

  Mariarta took the book. Luzius reached out and folded the chamois over the front of the statue; respectfully, like someone covering a body. “Come on, Emerita,” he said, “it’s time.”

  Mariarta clutched the book, mildly confused. “We keep the church hours, and pray the offices,” Emerita said. “After a while you don’t need to hear a bell to know when. And it’s how many years now, Luzi?”

  “Twice as many, it feels like, when the cold gets into my joints. Here, take this,” Luzius said, handing Mariarta one of the small clay lamps, like a tiny pitcher with a wick out the spout. “There’s plenty of skins there by the wall.”

  He and Emerita went to the back of the cave, knelt, began murmuring. There was a peculiar businesslike attitude about it. These two, obviously used these many years to having no one watch them but God, went about their prayer as matter-of-factly as if they were doing the milking. Softly Mariarta went where the skins were piled, found a soft old cowhide, pulled it over her, put the lamp close enough to be useful but far enough away as not to singe her hair, and settled down to read.

  ***

  She had no memory of losing the light; but the next thing she knew, the sun was shining into the cave. Mariarta had a moment’s worth of terror as she turned over to find a bear peering at her. She managed a sort of stranged gasp before remembering where she was. Then the bear pursed its lips at her like an aged aunt expecting a kiss. Mariarta burst out laughing.

  Emerita’s voice said, “I do the same thing when he pulls faces like that, dear. He’ll just be after your porridge; you smack him on the nose with the spoon if he gets too friendly. Do you want honey on it?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Luzi?”

  “Of course I want honey on it!” said Luzius from outside the cave. “I’ve wanted honey on it for the last thirty years, why should I change my mind now—”

  “Luzi, be quiet. Here,” Emerita said, handing Mariarta a bowl, and went outside.

  Mariarta spent the next while eating her porridge as quickly as possible and keeping the bear out of it. A while later, Luzius came back in with his own bowl, picked up a rag and began scrubbing. He looked at Mariarta and the book. “How did you do?”

  “I read it. I’m not sure I understood a lot of it. So many names....”

  “If you remember the attributes,” Luzius said, “that should be enough. Like a face or a voice, no disguise of them can be complete, or permanent. Sooner or later, the truth slips out.” He sat on one of the rocks that did duty as a seat, took a burnt twig from the fire. “Here—you’ll want to know where the market is in Chur.”

 
; On a smooth part of the stone floor, he sketched a shape like an arrowhead, pointing downward to the left. “The city wall,” he said. “And the river runs here.” He drew a line that ran from the upper left to the lower right, past the bottom of the arrowhead. “Here are the big gates—along the northern side of the wall. The ground slopes up from the gates to the hill at the back of the town: that’s where the Bishop’s palace is, and the cathedral. Now, the market—” He quickly sketched in streets and squares, then pointed to an open space north of the Bishop’s palace, looking at it thoughtfully. “There’s a tavern there,” he said, “that had the best red wine—”

  “It was there,” said Emerita, pointing to another spot. “I should know, since I had to get you out of it enough times—”

  “Don’t get all burnt up about it, you’d think I came back drunk every night—”

  Mariarta laughed, and got up to do her packing.

  She said her goodbyes to Emerita, and Luzius and the bear saw Mariarta into the forest. The hermit would not go out from under the trees. “Not in daylight: too many eyes.”

  “Here?” Mariarta said. As far as she knew, no human being was closer than Vaz.

  “You’d be surprised. But secrets are hard to keep, and we like to keep ours. No matter: yours is safe with us. Just be careful....”

  Mariarta nodded, then led Catsch down the slope. Behind her, the bear bawled: Mariarta turned and waved, but Luzius was gone. Only the bear sat there, looking forlorn.

  ***

  The road to Chur was broad and well kept, running through big prosperous-looking towns as it went north. Mariarta had started from the hermitage about two hours after dawn. It was after noon when she came around the shoulder of the mountain, to the top of the Araschgen pass,and stood above Chur. It was the biggest town Mariarta had ever seen. Its walls were two miles across at the base of the “arrowhead”: high gray walls forty feet tall, with six great gate-towers on the northern side, some having square towers, some round towers with conical roofs. Within those walls were crammed hundreds of houses, each with its peaked roof of slate, and more churches than Mariarta had ever seen in one place. It was the southern side of the city, sloping up to mimic the mountain behind it, that stood out. The square-turreted inner keep of the Bishop’s palace, a small city within the city, perched there as if to peer into the rest of the town: a watching, brooding presence, darker grey than the walls. Only one great church looked down on the Bishop’s palace—the cathedral, perched on the top of Chur hill. From behind it the walls fell away. On the steep ground under the walls, a vineyard was planted. At the feet of it all, past the city walls, the Plessur river ran, ice-green with limestone sand from the glacier, gleaming like a mirror in the sun.