The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  “Why should there be guards? No one in the Dales would dare violate a Rest.”

  “I would have thought no one would violate a Hame filled with women and children. But Pynt has an arrow in her back, and Verna and the other sister are missing, and we have had to swim an unforgiving river.”

  “That was a Hame and this is a Rest,” Carum said.

  “And you are a king’s son who had to cry me merci from his own kind.”

  Carum looked down. “I’m sorry, Jenna. You’re right. That was a stupid thing to say. A wicked, un—”

  “Unthinking?”

  “Unthinkable thing to say. And there should be someone up. Or we can get someone up.” He turned and hammered on the gates again.

  At last there was a grinding noise and the peephole cover slid aside. They could see a single eye staring through. Carum moved in front of Jenna and shouted up at the eye.

  “We seek sanctuary: I for what time I need, and my companion for the rest of the night.”

  The door opened slowly, drawn inward just a crack, and an old man, with deep creases around his mouth like parentheses, stood in their way.

  “Who asks?”

  “I am Carum Longbow, the king’s …”

  “Ah, Longbow. We have been wondering if you might make your way here.”

  Carum stared. “How did you know?”

  The old man’s head moved back and forth like a clockwork doll. “Your brother Pike, who lies within, had hopes. And there were Kingsmen here just hours ago asking of you. Of course we sent them on their way.”

  “Pike here? And you say lies. Does he sleep—or is he wounded?”

  “Wounded, but nowhere near dying.”

  Jenna stepped forward. “Please let him in. You can talk once the gates are closed behind.”

  The old man peered closer at Jenna. “This is the companion you spoke of?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she is a woman.”

  “She is an Altite warrior who pledged herself to save me.”

  The old man made a tsking noise with his tongue. “Highness, you know we have no women here.”

  Carum drew himself up. “She stays. I am the king’s son.”

  “But not yet the king, nor likely to be unless your brother dies. And only the king can make that request. She cannot tarry here. It is the law.” His head went back and forth again, more like palsy than an answer.

  Jenna put her hand on Carum’s arm. “Go inside, and quickly. My charge is done, Carum Longbow. You are safe now, and I am free of my vow to you.”

  “Free of the vow but not free of me, Jenna.”

  “Hush, Carum,” she said. “We both have other missions now, I to my sisters and you to your brother. And to your life. We were companions because danger tied us one to the other with bonds as strong as the ropes that held us in the Halla.”

  “I won’t let you leave so quickly. Not like this.”

  “Carum …”

  “At least kiss me good-bye.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because … because I have never kissed a man before.”

  “You said I was a boy.”

  “I have never kissed a boy before.”

  “That’s not a good enough reason. I never ate bitter roots before I met you. You never swam a river before you met me.” He smiled, and held out his hands.

  She nodded imperceptibly and moved into the compass of his arms. His lips touched hers softly and when she thought to move away, his hands were on her arms, steadying her, so she moved, without quite meaning to, even closer to him until their bodies were pressed together and she began to tremble. She pulled back a little and took her mouth from his.

  “What is this?” she whispered.

  Carum smiled ruefully. “I’d call it love.”

  “Is that … is that a scholarly definition, Carum?”

  “It’s a guess,” he said. “I’ve never kissed a girl before. But from what I’ve read …”

  “What have you read?” Her voice was still a whisper.

  “That the Carolians, who worship only under an open sky, say that love was the first word God memorized.”

  “What a strange god.”

  “No stranger than this,” Carum said, kissing her once again without touching her anywhere but on the lips. Then he stepped back. “We will see each other again, my White Jenna.”

  “Oh,” Jenna said, unable to say more until the door had closed between them, and then all she could manage was to whisper his name.

  It was only when she got back to the forest’s edge and drew out the map that she found it had been ruined by the water. Knowing no other route to a Hame but the ones she had already traveled, she knew she had to turn back toward the river and retrace her steps. At Nill’s Hame they would give her another map or at least set her on the track to the next mission Hame.

  Without Carum, she did not feel the need to leave the path. One person alone, she reasoned, could disappear quickly into the woods. One person alert, she convinced herself, would hear an army on the road.

  She moved swiftly, stopping infrequently, gathering what edibles grew along the path. She slept only a few hours, a sleep that gave her little rest, for she dreamed of Carum, who fell to his knees and cried out, “Holy, holy, holy,” refusing her embrace.

  By midmorning she found herself back by the fir tree that groped across the path like a disfigured hand. A dark stain, half under the tree, the size and shape of a serving plate, was the only reminder of the violence that had occurred there. Crawling under, she held her breath, for she feared what might wait for her on the other side. But when she came through, she was alone.

  There was a strange silence, broken only by the river’s surging, though in her mind she heard again the screams and cries that had last accompanied her at this place. Those voices haunted her, and she ran quickly to the Hame’s back door. She pushed against it and it was solid and unmoving and, though she breathed thankfully for that—it meant no Kingsmen had gotten through this way—she did not hammer on it in case the enemy were inside.

  Instead, she went back down the path, scrambled once more under the tree, and ran along the path until she came to the place where the cliff was lowest. Hand over hand she climbed up the face, her sword banging against her legs and threatening, at every move, to entangle them. It took her a long time to achieve the top, where she lay panting and grateful on the grass, waiting to catch her breath. Then, slowly, she began to crawl through the high grass toward the front of the Hame, conscious all the while that she could be seen from the tops of the walls.

  As she crawled, she realized that everything except the grass right around her was still. Too still. Surely there would be the sounds of voices or the cries of cocks or the bleating of goats floating on such still air. Fear trembled through her and for a moment she did not dare move again.

  To calm herself, she took three deep latani breaths, no easy task lying on her stomach, then pushed herself to her knees. In a crouched-over position, she ran to the wall and put her hand on the stone. Its very solidity lent her courage.

  Turning the corner carefully, she gasped, her stomach knotting, a strange metallic taste flooding into her mouth. The carved gates were in splinters, the walls breached. Tumbled about like fruit from a bowl, the heavy stones had their dark, hidden faces up to the sun.

  Jenna waited, hardly daring to breathe at all, for minute after minute, straining for some sound. But that deathly pall lay over all. Three more deep latani breaths, and she moved forward at last, stepping carefully between the fallen stones.

  There were bodies scattered everywhere throughout the courtyard: men in full battle armor, women in their warrior skins. She stopped at one body after another, brushing impatiently at the flies, hoping to find someone, something, alive.

  Everywhere, she thought distractedly. They are everywhere.

  The women who died facedown she turned over, looking for someone familiar—Armina, Calli
lla, or the priestess herself.

  Near the well, her hand over her face as if shutting out the sun, lay a young woman in trews. There was a small hole in her throat. Jenna stared down at her.

  Such a small entrance to let in death, to let out life, Jenna thought.

  She knelt and pushed the hand away and recognized Brenna, though she had seen her only the once.

  “Alta’s mercy,” she whispered, wondering where that mercy had been scant hours before. She felt more for that one corpse suddenly than for all the others. “I swear, Brenna, I shall give you a burial if I can find someone to show me your Hame’s Cave.”

  She stood and continued to search through the courtyard, her shadow dancing oddly by her side, until she realized she was moving in peculiar starts and stops. That was when she first knew she was incapable of taking it all in, the heartbreaking horror of it. There was simply too much of it, too much death. And she realized, too, that she was terrified to go inside the Hame.

  She forced herself to squat down and breathe deeply, though the air was filled with a sweet-sharp smell. The sun beat down on her and she began the hundred-chant, trying to steady herself for what further horrors lay ahead. As she counted, she felt again the strange lightening, and she was pulled slowly from her body to float above the courtyard. She looked down as if from a great height at the chanting figure swaying slightly in the midst of the scattered corpses. But when she sailed down to touch one body after another, she found no entrance, no living self to be drawn into. At last she spiraled down, down, down toward her chanting self just as the final number was reached.

  Standing again, she walked purposefully toward the broken door into the Hame.

  She found Callilla in the kitchen, her throat slashed, and five dead men around her. Armina was on the main stairs, an arrow in her back and a broken sword at her feet. Behind her were three men whose faces had been scored by her nails and whose throats had been pierced with a knife.

  Jenna sat on the step by Armina’s head and stroked the crest of hair. “Laugh longer, live longer,” she whispered hoarsely. And only then the tears came, gushing out of her eyes, along with great gulping sobs. She wept uncontrollably, not only for Armina, but for all of them, her unknown sisters who had died defending themselves against the Kingsmen. The Kingsmen, who wanted Jenna for the killing of the Hound, and Carum for … she realized for the first time that she did not even know why they wanted Carum. Only that they did. They wanted him so badly they had slaughtered an entire Hame of women to find him. And to find her. This horror, then, was their fault, Carum’s and hers. Just as Mother Alta had said: she was an ending. An entire Hame gone.

  An entire Hame! And Pynt, too! Jenna leaped up and, turning, took the stairs two at a time, trying desperately to remember where the hospice room was. Somewhere on the second floor, that much she knew. She could not make herself believe the men would kill a wounded girl lying in a hospice bed.

  She opened door after door, stepping over corpses of women and their pursuers, for the women of Nill’s Hame had taken more than their own number into the dark Cave.

  A tall, bearded man with a face as seamed as wood and a bloody throat lay against a closed door, blocking it. Jenna kicked him aside.

  “And are you throwing bones over your shoulders for those bitter dogs now?” she shouted. “May they rip your throat out again.” She opened the door and saw it was the hospice. Three dead women lay on the cots and one, her eyes bandaged, was under a table. None of them was Pynt.

  “Pynt!” Jenna screamed. The room echoed with the name but there was no answer.

  She raced out the door, leaped over the dead man, and ran down the hall, flinging doors open and shouting wildly into each room. One door was already ajar. When she looked in, she saw it was the playroom from where, two days before, she and Carum had leaped into the icy flood. She went over to the windows and stared down at the Halla below, coursing mindlessly between its banks. When she turned back, the scattered toys looked like the corpses of playthings.

  Slowly something else teased into her mind, something beyond the horror and the blood.

  “The children!” she whispered. “I have seen no dead children!”

  Leaning against the window frame, she tried to remember what it was Armina had said to them about the children, but when she tried to picture Armina speaking, she could only see her body stretched out along the stairs.

  “I must think,” she said aloud. “I must remember.” She forced herself to recall the dinner and the fatal hammering at the doors. That was when Armina had told them something about the children. But what was it she had said?

  And then she remembered. “… a place for them. Never fear.” The children, she had said, and the wounded. Jenna bit her lip. She had seen the wounded murdered on their cots. No safety there. Then she said, speaking her thoughts aloud, “But surely not all the wounded. In a battle of this size, things would have gone on for hours. So there must have been others, moved earlier. To the place Armina mentioned. If only she had named it!” She thought, suddenly, Perhaps Pynt is there as well.

  Afraid to hope too much, she nevertheless allowed herself a faint glimmering. Leaving the playroom, she finished her search of the second floor and then, finding the back stairs, mounted to the third.

  There were fewer bodies here, as if the fighting had not reached so far or, she thought grimly, as if there had been fewer fighters left. And then she came to Mother Alta’s carved doors. They were shattered, split down the middle. Cautiously she stepped inside.

  It was here some sort of stand had been made. The last of the wounded were clustered at Mother Alta’s feet, almost stacked up, their bandages soaked in newer blood. The infirmarer, her own head encased in a linen binding, had fallen across the priestess’ lap. Mother Alta’s fingers were entwined in hers, the sixth finger alone outstretched. The priestess’ marble eyes were wide open and staring.

  But Pynt and the children were gone. The realization came to Jenna suddenly. The men must have taken them, taken the screaming, hysterical children and … Here her imagination failed her utterly. She simply could not guess what grown men would do with several dozen children, some still babes in arms.

  For the rest of the day Jenna carried the corpses of the women down to the kitchen and the Great Hall. She carried them reverently, as if by doing so, somehow, she could excuse her guilt. She laid them side by side, leaving room between for their dark sisters. The last one she brought down was Mother Alta, the small, twisted body weighing less than a child.

  She knew that she could not bring them all to the Cave, had she even an idea of where the Cave lay. Instead, she planned to set the Hame afire. It would serve as a fitting memorial for the battle brave.

  It was deep into the night by the time she brought Mother Alta down, setting her gently atop the kitchen table and arranging her shrunken legs. She kissed each finger on the six-fingered hands before crossing them over the old woman’s breast. Jenna’s eyes had grown used to the almost-dark. She lit lamps only at the far turnings of the stairs, for otherwise she would have been burdened with the dark sisters as well as the light. But once she had Mother Alta’s body arranged, she lit a candle and placed it at the priestess’ head, watching with quiet satisfaction as the corpse of Mother Alta’s dark sister appeared, her flickering sixth finger resolving in the full light.

  “Sisters side by side,” Jenna whispered. Then she lit all the kitchen lamps before proceeding into the Great Hall. Making sure all the corners of the room were well lit, she nodded as corpse after corpse appeared next to their light sisters. Unbidden, the words of the grave prayer came to her lips.

  In the name of Alta’s cave,

  The dark and lonely grave …

  And she thought that those dead sisters would not be lonely this night. The memory of the last time she had heard those words came to her: Mother Alta’s reedy voice following them down the stairs.

  Mounting those stairs one last time, Jenna was suddenly aware j
ust how exhausted she was. She headed directly for the priestess’ room, for she had already decided to bring down two final tributes to the courage of the Nill’s Hame sisters—the Book of Light and the mirror. Standing before the broken door, she took a single deep breath, then went in.

  She snatched the cloth from the glass, momentarily startled at her reflection. There were blades of grass in her hair and her braid needed replaiting. Black smudges seemed to be growing under her eyes. She had either lost weight or grown unaccountably taller. Blood spotted her clothing and there was a smear of it across her right cheek. It was a wonder Carum had ever wanted to kiss her.

  At the thought of him, she put her fingers to her lips, as if some trace of the kiss still lingered there. And he is gone, too, she thought. Gone to a place where I cannot go.

  She raised her hands toward her mirror self as if pleading, and whispered hoarsely, “Thee to me. Thee to me,” the only part of Night of Sisterhood she could remember. “Thee to me.”

  She meant Carum and Pynt and the children and all the dead women of the Hame. She meant her stepmother A-ma and her foster mother Selna and her real mother who had been cat-killed. And even Selden’s Mother Alta. Even her. All the ones who had been part of her life and were gone from her now. “Thee to me.” Knowing they were dead or too far for her recalling, still she called. “Thee to me.” Tears ran hot down her cheeks, washing away the bloodstains. “Thee to me. Thee to me.”

  The moon silvered through the window and a small breeze stirred the tendrils of hair at her forehead and neck. In the mirror a mist seemed to form, as if there were moisture in the air, clouding the glass. But Jenna’s eyes were so teary, she did not really see it.

  “Thee to me,” she whispered urgently.

  The mist shrouded her reflection slowly, from the edges in, and all the while her hand moved in its beckoning motion and the chant, taking on a life of its own, ran its course.

  “Thee to me.”

  The image, mimicking her motions, whispered back, “Thee to me.”

  As if in a trance, Jenna stepped forward until she was almost on top of the mirror. Palms out, she placed her hands upon the glass. Instead of the hard surface, her hands touched warm skin, palm to palm. She closed her fingers about the image’s fingers and drew the other from the glass.