Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South Read Online Free PDF Page A

she could, she opened it.
    The book was written in big black round letters. The words made no sense, so this was probably the mass-Latin the scolar had been singing in. There were few pictures in this book. When Mariarta finally came to one, she wasn’t able to make much of it—a burly man holding a three-tined grass-fork. He seemed to be waist-deep in water—he had fallen in a river while haying, maybe. She turned more pages. Here was a picture of a man with a stick with snakes around it, holding the stick out to some creature that had eyes all over. At first Mariarta thought it was a buttatsch , but then she saw that the eyed thing was just a very large man. Several pages further on was a picture of a pretty woman standing in a cart with sparrows and doves harnessed to it— Laughter rang above the table: Mariarta froze, but no one seemed to have noticed she was gone. She lowered her head, turning pages. More of the black words— She turned another page. A picture of a woman with a bow—
    She stared. The woman was shooting. She was young, strangely dressed in some kind of flowing shift tied up with several thin belts to above her knee. Her hair was tied tight at the nape of her neck. The bow was bent deep, and she sighted along the arrow with a look that made the hair rise all over Mariarta: cool and dangerous, the expression of someone who might do anything she pleased. Beside her, as if tame, stood a beast like a chamois, but with odd branched horns.
    Mariarta never heard the renewed laughter above the table, never heard the way the wind moaned to itself in the chimney. She’s shooting!   Until now Mariarta had never heard of any woman shooting; this had made her unwilling to ask her bab any more. But here it was, in a book, which meant somewhere it was true. Mariarta felt again the way she always felt when the hunters left town: she wanted to go along, not just to watch. To do it herself, to feel the quarrel leap away from the crossbow, to feel the force leaping away to do her bidding, to strike—
    She gulped, shut the book. Magic—it’s put me under a spell!  Now something terrible will happen—
    But nothing happened except that someone banged the table with their cup, and the laughter and talk went on. Mariarta put the book back in the bag, fastened the flap—then began to inch her way into the light. Her mother was drowsing beside the fire. Everyone else’s faces were turned toward Flep, who was filling the wine-cups again. They never saw Mariarta boost herself back up.
    “They’ll never bother coming here,” said Flep. “They’ll come up the road from Caschinutta and over the Bridge, stop at Ursera for a week or so, then go up the Munt-Avellin pass. I would make extra butter this season, and more cheese.”
    “It would help to have more grass to feed the cows,” said Cla. “Where are we supposed to get that ?  And what will we live on over the winter, when we’ve sold them all our spare cheese?  Coin money eats too hard for me!”
    “Damned bridge anyway,” Paol said. “It’s all coming true, the curse.”
    “Which one?” said the scolar .
    “You don’t know the story, you with your book and all?” Laughter, not least from the young man himself.
    “Well then.” Gion took a drink. “You know the awful way the Reuss river valley gets there: gorges a hundred fathoms high, the river too fast and deep to sink piers in. But there was the road south from Hospental over the Munt-Avellin pass, and on the other side of it, the wine of Talia—”
    “And the money,” someone put in.
    “And the armies,” Mariarta’s father said quietly.
    “Aye, aye. Everyone wanted an easy way to that southern road: pilgrims, traders, young men wanting to go south to fight and make a few solidi for themselves. But how to get at the pass road, with the Reuss running between Ursera and the northern lowlands, no way across, and the mountains blocking both sides?  Anyone wanted to take trade south to Talia,