A Wind From the South Page 24

  The Maiden sighed. “But my heart fell at last to a young man of Walastad, a prince’s son of the Raetii; he shared my other loves, the beasts he showed and named to me. My parents would have none of him. He was no citizen of either Empire, a mere barbarian, they said. So they set him terrible tasks—to ride horseback around the battlements, to fight the lake-beast. My suitor completed all the tasks. Then, rather than wed me to him, my father had him thrown from the fort’s battlements, down the cliff.” She stared straight out the window, not looking that way. “I could not taste food or drink water for grief. Eventually my body could not bear my grieving, and freed itself from my soul. Which remains here, as you see. All the good beasts come to me here as they used to while I lived.” The Maiden stroked the stag, which nuzzled her neck. “They tell me the news they hear, from the mountains to the sea. I know much of the business of the world through them; but here I must remain until someone completes the tasks that set me free...”

  “What tasks?” Mariarta said. “Who set them?”

  “They are three,” the Maiden said. “You must kiss my lap-dog: and the beast that guards the door to my chamber: and the one who guards the door of the fort.”

  “Well, this hardly seems difficult,” Mariarta said. “But how is it I didn’t see the first two as I came in? And who set—”

  “None have succeeded, though the tasks seem easy,” the Maiden said. “I pray that you, brave young man, may succeed where others have failed. For I long for Heaven, and the sight of my love.”

  Mariarta bowed to the Maiden. There are questions she will not answer. Or cannot? But ghosts sometimes could not tell you exactly in what manner they must be freed, that being part of their burden. “I will perform the tasks,” Mariarta said, “God helping me.”

  The Maiden rose from her chair, moving toward the far side of the room. Mariarta followed her, going carefully; for suddenly the room seemed to skew, becoming unpredictably larger and smaller by turns. The white stag with the candle-burning antlers went after its mistress; Mariarta followed them across what seemed a vast hall, stretching off into the distance. There’s not room for all of this here, Mariarta’s reason insisted desperately. While she could hold that thought, the tower room seemed small. But it was hard to hold it. Her eyes kept insisting that the ceiling stretched away half as high as the sky, the walls dwindled into distance like a misted horizon—

  “Here is my lap-dog,” the Maiden said. In the huge wilderness of rich carpets and furniture, across which she and the Maiden and the white stag wandered like rabbits in a field, Mariarta made out a sort of dais. A pillow, really, her reason insisted: though no reason could imagine a pillow the size of a great bed. Sitting on the worn velvet was a monstrous liver-colored dog. As a lap-dog it might have been amusing, even endearing, with its fat-chopped face, bulging eyes, and squashed nose, its bandy legs and big paws. But at its present size, Mariarta disliked the idea of kissing it. Its wet tongue slopped in and out; it drooled, goggling at Mariarta and the Maiden. It smelt like it had needed a bath for some months.

  “Ah well,” Mariarta said. “If it’s to free you—” She clambered with some difficulty onto the cushion. The lapdog turned to watch her—and suddenly its face was Reiskeipf’s face as well. The same fat chops, unshaven, the same stale smell, the goggling eyes, the drool—

  Mariarta quailed, but she would not refuse the task. She reached out, took the ugly face by the ears, tried to kiss it on the chops. It turned its face as she moved, “missing”, as Reiskeipf always had, so that it caught Mariarta on the mouth instead, and the slobber got all over her. Nonetheless she held the kiss for much longer than she wanted to, just in case, then let it go. The “lapdog” with Reiskeipf’s face immediately fell over on its side, beginning to wash itself in a place that made Mariarta glad she had kissed it before that, and not after.

  Mariarta jumped from the pillow. The Maiden was looking at the lapdog with an expression exactly matching Mariarta’s revulsion. As Mariarta came to join her, the Maiden smiled, saying, “This way now.”

  Once more the room’s size skewed, sometimes seeming small as a normal tower room, then stretching itself out big as a field. It did not seem quite as huge as it had during their first trek across the vast deserts of carpet; but to Mariarta the two of them still seemed no larger than children as they made their way toward the door of the chamber, by which Mariarta had come in. The stag followed them, itself seeming no more than lap-dog sized. The doorway that led to the stairs towered before them, huge as the castle gates, dark—the torchlight did not reach into the shadows of the stairwell. It glimmered only fitfully on something that crouched in the bottom of the doorway, filling it; a squat, paunchy shape, glistening with dark-green and dark-brown lights, a tarnished, brassy gold glittering in its eyes. It was a toad, a toad as wide as the whole doorway, crouched there, watching them come.

  “This is the beast that guards the door to my chamber,” the Maiden said. Her voice was steady, but full of fear. Mariarta stared at the great ugly thing, which seemed, at present, even bigger than the “lapdog”; she was revolted again, but she went to it.

  It watched her out of unblinking eyes. Mariarta was within reach of it when she caught the smell: not of wet toad, of marsh and weed—but corruption, the smell of the grave. It was what she had smelt so plainly when they dug her father’s grave up, to put her mother in it beside him. How long in the ground, Mariarta thought, thrust back into that memory, how long must you lie before the smell goes away— And she looked into the toad’s face, and saw her father’s.

  Mariarta cried out at the cruelty of it. Her father had never been handsome. He would tell jokes about it, preempting the jokes of others. The big wide grin, the round face—they were there now: but so was the liquefaction of decay, the features fallen in, the ruin Mariarta got a glimpse of when the shroud slipped aside during the second gravedigging. She had wept then with the horror of it, that someone so good should be reduced to this. The indignity, the unfairness of it—

  Angry with the spell that caused her such pain, Mariarta reached out to the toad. It had no ears to grab. Her hands slipped on slickness: she nerved herself, and kissed the dreadful thing full on the mouth, refusing to be caught “by accident” again. The charnel stench gagged Mariarta, but retching, she held the kiss; then staggered back, wiping her face desperately on her sleeve, wondering if she would ever feel clean again.

  Her eyes teared, whether from the retching or the bitterness of her memories, Mariarta wasn’t sure. The Maiden’s expression was sympathetic. “Come,” she said, leading Mariarta down the stairs toward the courtyard.

  Shuddering with disgust and the growing cold, Mariarta followed. They came down, the stag following, into the torchlit courtyard Mariarta had seen on stepping through the gateway. The soldiers stared straight ahead.

  “The beast that guards the gate,” the Maiden said softly,turning away as if she could not bear to look.

  Mariarta looked. The distortion of sizes had stopped. She and the Maiden were their own right heights; the white stag’s head towered above theirs as it should. Looking at the gateway, Mariarta saw it still empty, no gates in it: the humped shapes of the fallen, rotted timbers lay there. Something was odd about them, though. The snow that lay everywhere else, outside the gate, lay on the timbers no longer. They were bare, brown, and the long angular shapes of them spread over the space inside and outside the gate, like spread wings. Slowly they shrugged together, the wings of a bird that lay felled there, recovering itself, finding its footing. Huge, square wings, long-feathered, dark. Eagle, Mariarta thought. But then the head and neck reared themselves up, the wicked bright eyes glaring. Mariarta gulped, took a step backwards. The head of the bird was naked and wattled, the skin stretched taut and dry to the great blood-smeared beak. It was a tschéssa, not one of the bearded ones, which were handsome in their way, but the tschéssa-barbet, skin-faced, ravenous. Mariarta made herself take a step forward, and another. On the third, she recognized
the look in the bird’s eye, malicious, humorous—and buried her face in her hands, moaning. It was Flisch.

  No! she cried inside herself. But she would have to kiss it. And this was a Flisch after the image of his new-chosen goddess; sucked dry, nothing left but the spirit of malice and hunger. It’s not him, she kept telling herself as she tottered forward, it’s not him— But the leathery-dry skin, as she reached out to grab the thing’s terrible head, was that of Duonna Vrene, like time-dried parchment, loathsome; the huge beak struck at her eyes as she tried to close with it, its throat grunting a dreadful parody of Flisch’s drunken laugh—

  Mariarta kissed the tschéssa, and held its beak tight closed as she did, feeling it straining to get open, to pick at her eyes; then pushed herself convulsively away, staggering back to sit hard on the pavement. Her head swam, and she wept again, from pain and grief. It was some minutes before she could see that the dark shape in the gateway was only a pile of old rotted wood. Light stood above her. The Maiden was smiling with a great joy, and the white stag, its antlers burning still and bright, stared at her curiously.

  “Stranger, you have freed me,” the Maiden almost sang. “I bless you, for I will be in Heaven tonight. Now you must take your reward.”

  Mariarta got up, scrubbing at her eyes. “I really don’t want—” she said, then paused, as the Maiden went to another doorway in the courtyard, one Mariarta had not seen. The Maiden lifted that great bunch of keys, went through it, picked one great iron one and put it into the lock of the door. It turned with a groan; the door swung open.

  Mariarta went to stand beside her, and the stag behind. The candle-flames standing up from the tips of its antlers shone in on the heaps of gold and gems. Mariarta thought of the valley above Arosa, and shook her head. “I don’t want it, but I thank you.”

  The Maiden seemed troubled. “You have earned it,” she said, and stepped forward, reaching into the pile of gold and taking a double handful. “Come now—”

  Reluctantly, Mariarta found her purse and let the Maiden fill it. “Thank you,” she said, stowing it away. “But tell me—”

  As she glanced up, darkness fell, abrupt and total. Mariarta looked around, astonished. Nothing but darkness and snow, all around; the last traces of a fading dusk were erasing all details. Black walls, starless darkness above, and the wind, blowing new snow into the empty courtyard.

  But Mariarta’s purse was heavy.

  ***

  The inn she had been told of at Berschis was just a goodwife’s front room, and a bedroom set aside for the occasional paying guest. The house was pleasantly sited, though, in a grove of trees outside the village proper, not far from the fortress peak. It was pleasant, too, to be someplace more like a house than the public hall of an inn, and to be fussed over by a motherly woman less interested in gossip than in feeding her paying guest better than she deserved. “Look at you,” the goodwife said, “you’re nothing but skin and bone!—” and Mariarta spent all that night eating, and thinking about the next day’s task.

  The goodwife told her in the morning that yes, there was a smith, Riccard his name was; a difficult man, but you could get him down to a fair price if you needed a beast shoed. Out Mariarta went, with Catsch in tow.

  The snow was blackened outside the smithy. A great racket of forging and swearing came from inside it, the smith shouting at his bellows-boy. Mariarta waited. After a while the smith came out, hammer slung on its hook at his belt, wiping his hands on a grimy cloth. He stuck the cloth into a pocket of his leather apron, looked Catsch over, and said, “Two, and the iron.” Mariarta nodded. The smith went into the smithy for shoes that were a close enough fit.

  He was on the second one before Mariarta could nerve herself to say, “Sir, you had a son named Flisch—?”

  The smith spat, went on paring Catsch’s hoof. “Had one once,” he said, “but the fool went off hunting. Haven’t seen him in—” He frowned, considering. “Five, six years now.” He eyed Mariarta suspiciously. “You know him?”

  “Yes,” Mariarta said. She had to force the next words out. “Sir, he died. An accident in the mountains.”

  “Good riddance,” said the smith, and went to poke the fire.

  Mariarta stood there, her breath going out and in with amazement. The smith came out again. “Never could get any work out of him,” he said, matter-of-factly: “wouldn’t do what he was told and stay home; always told him he’d come to a bad end. This one,” the smith tapped Catsch’s third hoof as he pared it, “you want to watch it, it grows faster than the others. Like to lame him. Be a shame; he’s good stock.”

  Mariarta nodded dumbly. She could manage hardly a word more until it came time to pay. After that she was still so shocked that she walked back to the house-inn and let the goodwife overfeed her for the better part of the afternoon.

  When she recovered from the sight of a parent so completely uncaring about his child, Mariarta wanted to leave right away, but it was too late in the day. She fed Catsch, then sat a while with the lady as darkness started to fall. It was a clear night, one of those pellucid mountain sunsets burning peach-colored above the shadowy heights. Mariarta, standing on the porch, looked at the fortress peak. The woods of it were still.

  And there was another light as well—

  Mariarta stood there, staring. A warm light, like firelight or candlelight seen through a window. “Mistress Leina,” Mariarta said over her shoulder, “what’s that light?”

  The goodwife came out beside Mariarta, then tsked as she polished a mug, looking upwards. “Oh, that. Well you might wonder. That’s the light of a poor maiden who’s been there all these years, dead, the poor thing. She loved a boy, and her parents didn’t approve. They killed him and she died of grief—”

  “Yes, I know the story,” Mariarta said, looking at the castle height with annoyance, “but what’s she doing there now?”

  “Ah, well,” the innkeeper sighed, drying her hands on her apron, “many people have tried to free her, and they’ve all failed—”

  “Indeed,” Mariarta said. She put her hand to her tunic-waist, at the spot where her purse lived underneath. Nothing was missing. Or rather, no more was in it, and no less, than there had been last night, before the Maiden filled it with ancient, but ephemeral, gold.

  “Now this isn’t fair,” Mariarta said. “Not at all. Not to her—and not—” She ducked inside the door, got her pack. “Mistress, I’ll be back later.”

  “But your dinner—!”

  “Later,” Mariarta shouted, already halfway down the path that led to the road.

  ***

  She found everything as it had been: the empty courtyard, filled with light; the silent soldiers; the stairway leading upward. Mariarta climbed it, annoyed. What’s the point of doing a good deed if it won’t stay done? It’s not fair! The firelight and warmth of the upper room reflected off the inner walls of the stairway as she climbed, and came to the threshold.

  Mariarta stepped in. A figure arose from the cushioned chair by the window. “I greet you, stranger. I am the maiden of the castle—”

  “Yes,” Mariarta said, “I know. Why are you still here?”

  “My fate, and my pride. I must set you three tasks—”

  “No. I did that yesterday, and it didn’t do any good. And after what I went through—!” Mariarta shook her head.

  “—and when you have done them, I will be free—”

  “No!” Mariarta said, more loudly. “The first thing I’m going to do is get you out of here. This place is bad for you.”

  The Maiden gazed at her, not seeming to understand. Anything that defies the way her spell’s set, Mariarta thought, she just can’t hear it, can’t grasp it— She went to the Maiden, took her hand. It was solid enough, if chill. To one side, something rustled: the milk-white stag with the bright antlers stood there, shining faintly, looking troubled. “I won’t hurt her,” Mariarta said. “Come on—”

  She got the Maiden on her feet. It was like leading one
blind and half lame. Mariarta could get her no further than the doorway. There all movement stopped, as if the Maiden had struck a wall that Mariarta could not feel. The spell binds her here. Others might conquer their own fears, but that’s no good to her. How many have come here, taken the reward and gone away satisfied, never looking back: while she remained....

  The young woman leaned against Mariarta, immobile. The light of the stag, behind them, threw both their shadows against the stairway wall. Mariarta’s eyes filled. Ah, poor Maiden, there must be something—

  Then, Maiden, Mariarta thought. She recalled Duonna Vrene’s scornful words: What she sees in you milk-and-water creatures, I will never know.

  Mariarta reached into her back-bag and came out with the hide-wrapped statue, unwrapping it. “Here,” she said to the Maiden. “Put your hand on this.”

  The Maiden did nothing. “Come on, here—” Mariarta put the Maiden’s hand on the statue, clasped her own around it.

  The Maiden’s eyes flew open. She tried to wrench her hand away. “No!” Mariarta said, and held it. “Step forward. There. Now turn— Look around you!”

  The Maiden looked, with an expression that suggested she had not been able to do such a thing for a long time. Inside herself, Mariarta said, Lady who watches me, grant me this, who never asked you for anything before. Put forth your power for this other maiden, as you put it forth for me—

  The Maiden stared at Mariarta. “What has happened to my house?”

  “Time,” Mariarta said softly, with pity, for the rich room was now only air and outward-poking timbers, and the white stag stood uncomfortably crowded onto what remained of the threshhold. “Come down the stairs, and look.”

  They went down into the dusk. Mariarta led the maiden to the fortress wall. The Maiden shook her head, as if her eyes dazzled and she was trying to clear them. “Everything is changed! These trees were never here: they would never have been let grow so near the walls. The tribes—”