Free Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South by Diane Duane Page A

when she came to look at the lamb. When they had dared Urs into this, they had foreseen nothing but his failure and embarrassment. Now they were abusing one another about the sudden improvement in his status—for Urs had taken a jump upward in the village’s pecking order. When the lamb grew up, it would be in demand to be bred to others’ ewes. Now Urs stood to make enough money or goods to become, eventually, a moderately well-to-do man. Mariarta heard the other herdboys asking each other bitterly why they’d been so stupid as to taunt Urs into this—
    “Because you’re idiots,” Mariarta said. The herdboys glowered at her. “You’re all just a great mass of spite. Can’t you even have the grace to be glad for Urs, that some good came out of your badness?”
    “Baa,” said one or two of the herdboys.
    Urs was running across the pasture, and the lamb frisked after him, bleating delightedly. Urs stopped, and it danced around him, burning white in the sunshine. Urs saw Mariarta watching him.
    He paused—then bent to pick up the lamb, cuddling it, and turned his back on her.
    Mariarta started back to the house. “Baa,” said the herdboys to her retreating back.
    She went about her chores that day, and that week, and the week after that, feeling ever more heartsore. Suddenly all the others seemed artlessly eager to tell her how Urs and the lamb were getting on. No one had ever seen a pet like it; it even came when called. Alvaun, Urs called it, “silver-white”, a name for sun on snow. The buds of horns were beginning: its fleece was growing so fast, it would need to be shorn soon—that would be a pretty penny in Urs’s pocket too. Suddenly the village girls found Urs worth courting. They followed him around whenever they were free; Mariarta heard their chatter, admiring and envious, go by the house often. She took to staying inside, once her morning’s expedition to the high alp was over.
    Her father, if he noticed, said nothing. Twice during that time he called the village council together, once about the everlasting Selvese demand for a share of the Tschamuts alp, once regarding Nal Asturin’s manure stand, which was getting out of hand again. Each time he told Mariarta to come sit in the meeting, quietly, listening to what he said and did. During the first meeting, when Paol glanced at her, her father said, “A girl who writes and reads Daoitscha and Latin and the home-tongue has better things to listen to than street gossip. Here, Mariarta, write what we say.” And he pushed the quill, inkpot and old scraped parchment to her. Hot with pleasure at the praise, Mariarta wrote everything they said, until her head and hand ached.
    Word got out, of course. The other children began calling her misterlessa to her face. Mariarta let the mockery pass. Urs might have his lamb, but never had there been a girl in the mistral ’s counsels. Afterwards, Mariarta wondered whether her father had done this to give the village something to talk about besides Urs. Whatever his intention, Mariarta was grateful. The nights of taking notes, and afternoons of transcribing them in more detail, interested her so that she had no time to spare for thinking about Urs.
    Not that the subject didn’t come up. The third council meeting, called to discuss the Selvese’s response to Tschamut’s latest refusal of their offer, slid away toward its end into gossip, the six men mulling over old feuds, new problems: Paol’s lower field and its bad drainage, Mudest’s maltreatment of his wife—getting worse, even after he had been taken out and beaten for it just last month—and Urs’s lamb.
    “Growing on well enough,” Paol grunted. Mariarta put her head down, kept scribbling.
    “Well enough, aye,” Flurin said, “but the problem is the boy.”
    “He’s not neglecting his work, is he,” Mariarta’s bab said.
    “Oh, no. Doing it better than usual, if anything. But he spends every other minute of his time with that lamb.