The maiden lived in a sunny, lowland pasture that defied the long shadows of the three high peaks from the surrounding Alps. Gisela ran a tidy farmhouse all to herself. Chickens and cows were her morning wards, a field of wheat and rye her summer labor, a small stone watermill her bakehouse in the fall. Perhaps some leftover grain to barter with the hermit monk who brews from the mountaintop abbey. A few dozen barrels muled up the summit’s pass, a few barrels of weissbier down in return. Something to pass the alpine winter nights as she traced her gaze from the wolf moon to Orion’s belt for signs of her soldiering fiancé’s return.
Those quieter winter-meadow nights would soon be upon Gisela, possessing her thoughts with all the would-ifs and could-haves that idle hands invite. But not yet.
Her fields had just been cleared, her cows were growing fat, and the smell of winnowing husks hanging in the wind calmed her senses. Soon that mighty waterwheel will be grinding steel and stone over kernels. Soon she’ll be powdered white, busy sifting flour beside a brick-domed bread oven, crackling defiantly through the night against howling winds. But not yet.
Today was the Harvest Moon, the golden season of perfect stillness. The last shovel had been tossed, and soothing serenity was her reward. The bubbling brook that turns that mighty wheel served a different purpose now. It called to Gisela and guided her down the gorge to where it widened to her crystal-mirrored lake she named Wendel – a handsome turquoise body by whom she longed to be engulfed. Her farmer’s skin felt salty and sunsoaked as she unlaced her blouse, and the surrounding forest stood windless, as if holding its breath in awe of her purity.
Gisela slipped into her bath of cool glacial mint, just cold enough to force a tiny gasp before she settled into shallow, quick pants. Before long, every goosebump, every capillary found its equilibrium to the surrounding embrace. This young maiden floated on her back, warmed by the sun, and cooled from below. Just as the autumn earth took a break from its restless tilting toward and away, she floated in perfect peace.
The forest ridge could not hold its windless breath much longer at this enraptured sight. A rustle of the bushes betrayed a shape, a blinking pair of lonely, yearning eyes. A shadow of a giant, a child of the very mountains above. A stone figure, a quiet ogre, loomed in hiding, watching over Gisela, as he often did through the many seasons of her solitude.
She was his muse, she was his temptress, she was his priestess – the grace to his clumsy stone cave-dwelling, bone-gnawing, rock-scratching life. He was Eiger, forest protector, the demon avenger to poachers and woodcutters. His primal screams joined the chorus of wolves, howling at far-off castles, reminding all princes and thieves they are not welcome in these mountains.
Eiger knew the face of the man for whom Gisela pined. Eiger had watched winters pass with her face painted in a frosted window, that face clutched tightly in a silver frame. And only Eiger knew her prayers were hopeless, passing softly through an unseen mourning veil.
This wildling brute towered among pine trees but shrunk to a small boulder in her presence. There he crouched every day from afar, too terrified to breathe, too enraptured to want for anything but the taste of these moments. Craggy lips pursed tight, he was petrified, entranced by her stillness. Every slowed heartbeat, a horror, tolling with the threat of a broken silence. For even a whisper or a thump escaped would carry his secret along the wind. That one escaped breath alone would stab her ears with the truth, graying her raven hair and splintering her youth.
His trespass, now his own burden to hold in silent vigil. Eiger will hold his lungs forever if needed, bellowing with the sorrow of a diving blue whale. Locked away deep inside, defiant of the procession of time, protecting his fair maiden from a forever winter.
Gisela did not open her eyes, but she felt him there, as she always did. A stillness pressed too carefully into the tree line, a silence too aware of itself to be only forest. Half-dreaming as a fresh westerly stirred, she let herself wonder at the shape of watchfulness. A familiarity she could not place and did not trust herself to name.
Gisela began to tread back to shore. She thought of her soldier, of the face she was keeping warm in memory, a face that may have grown cold. Perhaps a person could return changed enough to be a stranger. Perhaps a stranger could carry inside him someone she still loved.
She did not let the thought finish. Soon the frost would come, and with it the long nights for such thinking to grow teeth. But not yet.
