Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South (35 page)

An hour later Mariarta dismounted, weary with the tension of the ride, and stretched. They stood in the middle of that great meeting-place of glaciers, and all around them the mountains reared up, so tall they seemed to be leaning inward. The afternoon blue of the sky was shading toward evening, and the shadow of the westward mountains lay blue and cool over the glacier.

Mariarta stood still and listened. All day the glacier had been talking to itself, especially when the sun was on it—the chuckle of water, far below their feet, the creak of ice loosening in the warmth when the sun came out; and other less-understood sounds—hisses, moans, bubbling noises. Now the noises were louder, and stranger. The blue mountain-shadow crept across to the mountains on the far side, and the moaning was no more an occasional thing, but constant. Many voices, high and low, could be heard; some crying regularly, as if in the grip of an old, unrelenting pain, others silent a while, then crying out loud and terrible, sobs mixed with moans and strangled cries. Words were muttered or shouted, but in no language Mariarta understood.
All the souls....
Mariarta shuddered. This was no place to spend the night.

The sunlight was dwindling, slipping toward the last crest of the Maiden, the mountain’s shadow slipping up the walls of the Monk and Ogre, drowning the long serrated wall of stone and snow to Mariarta’s right in a flood of blue. Nothing moved anywhere but that shadow; nothing spoke but those voices. Ahead of Mariarta, where the glacier gave way to the frozen
firn-
snow that fed it, was a great expanse of unbroken whiteness, leading up the mountain peaks to the few barren ridges or thorns of stone. Here and there were a few holes in the
firn,
pits where some crevasse’s old snow-bridge had suddenly fallen in, opening a wound in the smooth whiteness. Holes and snow together were drowned in that deepening blue, a reflection of the twilight settling chill over everything—

—everything but one snow-rimmed crevasse some ways under the saddle between the Monk and the Ogre. That was a paler blue than the rest. Mariarta got some more grain out of her pack and fed it to Grugni in her hands, watching that crevasse. While the shadows deepened, while the color of the sky became the color of the shadows filling this great mountain-rimmed bowl of ice, and the last outline of fire slipped away from the Maiden and the other mountains further westward, that crevasse kept the paler-blue color of a depth seen during the day. As the dark grew, that brightness remained, becoming stronger by contrast.

“That has to be it,” she said to the stag. He turned to follow her gaze as she wiped her hands clean. “Has to be.”

Grugni looked at the sky, then looked pointedly at his saddle, and at Mariarta.

Mariarta laughed through her shivering. She mounted up, and they made for the slope of the Monk.

The snow was frozen hard, and once the slope became acute, there was no simply walking it, any more than you might walk up a wall. Mariarta had to repeatedly use her hunter’s walking stick to break that crust, opening a small hole which she would then stamp deeper. All this in deepening dark—putting one foot in the new-punched step, bringing the second to rest in the last one made, while behind her Grugni performed the same operation, nervously, with four feet rather than two. Mariarta’s heart was thumping with fear of what they might be about to find, fear of not finding it, fear of slipping. Her muscles twitched with fatigue. Mariarta tried to swallow, couldn’t for the dryness of her mouth, kept going; one step, the next, the next—

—and she pitched forward as the stick went its whole length through the crust she had slammed it on. Mariarta gasped and wavered forward. Something grabbed her by the neck of her jacket, hard, so that the front of her throat rammed into the collar-fastening and she choked. Mariarta punched another hole closer to her feet, found firm surface, used it to push herself upright again, gasping. Grugni let her go, looking over her shoulder to where the stick had gone in. From just ahead of the hole, in darkness, came a faint tinkling sound that Mariarta knew: icicles, dislodged, falling. Then surprisingly, soft, sounding distant, several small splashes.

Cautiously, Mariarta used her stick to chip away at the snow overhanging the edge of the crevasse. It fell away with more chiming of dislodged icicles, raining into that dark open space beneath them: after a pause came more splashes.

The opening stretched for many feet to either side, concealed by one of those wind-carved snow cornices which sometimes piled against such an opening. The actual edge was barely a forearm’s length in front of Mariarta’s feet, and the crevasse itself fell away straight down in a wall of frozen snow and faint blue ice, as if someone had split the mountainside with a giant’s axe. The crevasse’s far side was a hundred feet away; beyond it the snow lay untroubled, straight to the Monk’s summit, a thousand feet higher.

The ice inside the crevasse shone with that faint blueness, like a thick-glassed lamp lit from far within. The bottom of the crevasse could not be seen: only the great smooth ice-wall, vanishing into the darkness...

Mariarta reached sideways with her stick, dislodged another couple of icicles. Chiming, they fell. One breath...two...then, softly, came the splash.

“Well?” she said softly.

Grugni moaned.

“I don’t see what else we can do,” Mariarta said. “What
I
can do. Look, brother, go free: you needn’t—”

Grugni snorted at her, and glared.

She laughed, and hugged him. “To the right, then,” she said, “and I’ll go left, so we won’t foul each other going.” She turned and spent a moment seeing to the saddle’s rigging and the fastenings of her pack with her bow and so forth. When everything was as tight as she could make it, she faced the crevasse, trembling.
What if the water’s not deep enough,
  her mind started screaming, 
what if—

She jumped.

The air tore at her clothes, her body flailed in terror. Then came the splash, and the shock, greater than the impact or losing the air, of finding the water was warm. The thunder of another splash came from right beside her as Mariarta broke surface, gasping and choking more on fear than water. She whipped her hair out of her eyes—her scarf had come off—and started to dogpaddle, staring around her desperately in the dimness. All around her the walls of ice came down, and dimly, through them, that blue light gleamed. Behind Mariarta, Grugni’s head broke surface. He blew water out of his  nostrils and made past Mariarta for something she couldn’t see.

She followed. Grugni heaved his shoulders out of the water in a rush, finding bottom. Mariarta stubbed one foot on a submerged ledge, staggered onto it, and lurched after Grugni. They came onto a shingle of scored stones, gravel, and the powdery “flour” of stone one sees at the bottom of glacier-fed rivers.

Mariarta stood gasping, and started to shiver in the cold air flowing  from the mouth of the crevasse above them. Grugni shook himself all over, like a dog, spraying her.

Mariarta fumbled with her pack, hoping that the leather bag inside it with with her spare shirt and overshirt and breeches might not be wet right through. She found to her immense relief that the clothes in it, wrapping around the statue, were only wet in places. Hurriedly Mariarta stripped off her clothes and got into the dryish ones.

Warm air was coming into this hole from somewhere, certainly the cause of this pool of meltwater. Down the length of the strand where she and Grugni stood, Mariarta saw a low opening through the ice-wall off to the left, a place where the quality of the blue light in the ice changed, becoming both brighter and deeper.

She made for it. Grugni followed her, bending as she did to pass through the narrow opening. Past it lay a curving tunnel. Mariarta followed it, brushing her fingers against the wall as she went. The ice was not wet, though the air around them was still warm, and getting warmer.

The tunnel twisted, alternately climbing and slanting downward; sometimes widening, sometimes narrowing until there was barely room for Grugni’s body. Every now and then Mariarta thought she saw something buried in the ice of the walls—figures carved of ice themselves, then frozen in more; figures of men and women, animals, glowering many-toothed monsters, odd objects she didn’t recognize. Mariarta would squint into depth upon depth of blue ice until her eyes teared, trying to see one clearly, but to no avail. Turn away, though, and something would be looking at her, ice entombed within ice, almost invisible, but
there
, and disturbing. After a while Mariarta stopped looking at the walls.

They walked a long time without anything happening. The only changes were in the light coming from the ice—which slowly, slowly got brighter—and in a strange feeling of breathlessness that was coming over Mariarta, as if she couldn’t get a deep enough breath to do her good. Behind her, Grugni’s breath was coming heavy too. When the tunnel left room, Mariarta walked with one arm around his neck, trying to reassure him.

Mariarta lost her sense of how long they had been walking, though she thought they were heading more or less westward, toward the Maiden. The light kept brightening; the sound of groans and voices speaking in tongues got less, finally fading away altogether, to Mariarta’s relief. But breathing got harder, and the distress in Grugni’s eyes grew.

The tunnel through which they moved began to widen again, and its ceiling drew away. This unnerved Mariarta, for some reason, almost as much as her difficulty breathing—she was finding it hard to even walk straight. Gasping, she brought the bow out, and spanned it: then went on between the glowing walls of ice, Grugni pacing behind. The light in the walls seemed to shimmer off something directly ahead that moved and gleamed like falling water. As Mariarta walked toward it, she gasped, found no air at all—then tried to gasp again, found her lungs locked—

Behind her Grugni made a strangled noise and bolted past her, into the shimmering curtain; passed through, vanished. Mariarta could not speak or breathe, could think of nothing to do but follow him through the ripple of clear light. As she burst through, it trailed a shock of bitter cold over her. Half-blind with terror and lack of breath, she blundered a few steps further and rammed into Grugni: gasped one more time, but this time got a breath, and then another one, perfectly normally.

For a few moments she leaned on Grugni, trying to recover her composure. The darkness all around was a relief after the uncanny light of the tunnel. Darkness, at least, was something Mariarta expected to find inside a mountain. She glanced around, then gulped with surprise. The moon, hanging low above the tops of distant trees, was
not
something she had expected to find inside the mountain. And not a young crescent moon. Only last night she had come to Fiesch under the light of a fat bright moon just past its full....

And there was starlight. The Plough hung upside down in a configuration of spring midnight, with the great Triangle standing high.
April, possibly...
The ground here was scattered with pine needles; Grugni was browsing absently on a branch of arolla pine, and the air was thick with its green fragrance. They stood at the head of a long clearing, running downslope.

Quietly she started to walk down the clearing; Grugni followed. That moon above them was brighter, as a crescent, than the gibbous moon had been the night before—so bright it hurt to look at it, and the old moon in the crescent’s arms glowed dust-silver, like an ember under ash. It wasn’t setting, despite its thinness and how low it hung above the trees.

The land fell away gently, the clearing leading into another, wider, angled toward the left. Everywhere else, the country seemed covered with pine forest. In one place Mariarta saw water gleaming faintly silver: a lake. But the oddest thing was how, in the distance, the forested country sloped up again, giving way to barren slopes of scree and stone, and then to pale jagged peaks that gleamed at the edges, their upper snows backlit by the burning moon.

They followed the clearing over soft turf, and came to its end, pausing at the spot where it joined the second. This too led downslope, but more gently, and the trees about it changed—less pine, more of the silver birch that one saw in the mountains below the snowline. As Mariarta went she saw the buds on the gracefully upheld branches swollen, but not a leaf showing yet. All those trees shone white in the moonlight and threw a tangle of sharp, delicate shadows on the moonlit ground, so that Mariarta and Grugni paced through a webwork of silver and black, surrounded by white half-lit tree-pillars—all in utter stillness, with never a breath of wind.

After a while the second clearing came to an end in a scatter of tall birches. Irresolute, Mariarta paused and gazed into the wood, while Grugni nibbled the tender buds. Mariarta found that she could see some of the birches deeper into the wood much more clearly than she should have been able to; the dark halves of their trunks seemed to hold a soft light in them, like the old moon in the new moon’s arms.

“Come on,” she said. The further they went into the birch wood, the taller and greater of girth the trees became. The greater the trees, the more moonlight they seemed to hold about them; it glowed softly in the trunks themselves, or clouded the thin upper branches in a silvery mist. The birches grew straighter and smoother, losing the faint penwork-tracery of black on their bark. After a while it was as if Mariarta and Grugni walked through a forest of delicately-hewn pillars in the guise of trees of stone, all burning white as if lit by lamps from within. Mariarta reached out to one and found it as smooth and cool to the touch as one of the pillars in the great cathedral in Chur.