The maiden lived in a sunny, lowland pasture that defied the long shadows of the three high peaks from the surrounding Alps. Gisela kept a farmhouse of oak beams and sooted hearth, its every task hers alone to tend.
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 brewed from the mountaintop abbey. A few dozen barrels muled up the summit’s pass, a few barrels of weissbier down in return. Softsip comforts to pass the alpine winter nights as she traced her gaze from the Wolf Moon to Orion for signs of her soldiering fiancé’s return.
That quieter meadow wintering would soon be upon her, 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 would be grinding steel and stone over kernels. Soon she’d be powdered white, busy sifting flour beside a brick-domed baker’s oven, crackling defiantly through the midnight’s howling winds. But not yet.
Today was the Harvest Moon, the golden season of pristine stillness. The last shovel had been tossed, and a soothing bath was her reward. The bubbling brook that turned that great wheel served a different purpose now. It pointed Gisela down the gorge to where it widened to a 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 startle 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 respite from Her restless tilting towards, then away, she too was held 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 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 were 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, and a different face she 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 shrinks to a small boulder in her presence. There he crouched every day from afar, too terrified to breathe, too spellbound 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 would carry his secret along the wind. That one escaped breath alone would stab her ears with the truth, greying her golden locks and splintering her youth.
His trespass, now his own burden to carry in silent vigil. Eiger would 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 might 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.
