The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  “It took you long enough,” said the image. “I could have been here days ago.”

  “Who are you?” Jenna asked.

  “Your dark sister, of course. Skada.”

  “Skada?”

  “It means shadow in the old tongue.”

  “Pynt is my shadow.” Mentioning Pynt’s name out loud made Jenna’s throat hurt.

  “Pynt was your shadow. Now I am. And I will be closer to you than Pynt could ever be.”

  “You cannot be my dark sister. You look very little like me. I am not that thin and my cheekbones are not that prominent. And …” She ran her hand nervously down her braid.

  Skada smiled, touching her own black plait. “We none of us know how others see us. It is one of the first warnings taught in my world: Sisters can be blind. I am dark where you are light. And perhaps I am a bit thinner. But that will change.”

  “Why?”

  “You eat better in this world, of course.”

  “Your world is different from ours?” Jenna was confused.

  “It is the mirror image. But image is not the same as substance. We must wait your call for that.”

  Jenna shook her head. “This is very different than I expected. You are very different than I expected.”

  Skada shook her head as if mocking Jenna. “What did you expect?”

  “I do not know. Someone … softer, maybe. Quieter. More pliant.”

  “But, Jenna, you are not soft, quiet, pliant. And though I am many things, I am not what you are not. I am you. And what you keep yourself from being.” She smiled and Jenna smiled back at her. “I would not have waited so long to let Carum kiss me.”

  “You saw that?” Jenna felt her cheeks flush.

  “Not exactly saw. But it happened at night under the moon. So your memories of that are mine.”

  Jenna touched her fingers to her lips, remembering, and Skada did the same.

  “And there are other things I would do differently,” said Skada.

  “Such as …”

  “I would not have hesitated to claim being the Anna. So that means some part of you desires it, too.”

  “No!” Jenna said.

  “Yes!” Skada answered.

  “How can I believe you?” Jenna asked. “How do I know you are not simply a woman of the Hame?”

  “Shall I tell you what Carum said? How he carried you out of the Halla? That was at night, too. Moon nights I share with you, Jenna. Forever.”

  “Forever?” Jenna’s voice was scarcely a whisper. “You will not leave?”

  “I cannot leave,” Skada whispered back. “You called and I came and it is done. Sister called to sister, need to need.”

  Jenna sank down on her haunches and stared at the ground. Skada did the same. “My need …” Jenna muttered. Then she looked up to find Skada staring back at her. “My need is to find where the children have been taken. And Pynt.”

  “I will help you every moonlit step of the way.”

  “Then first help me take the mirror down. And the Book. I want to put the Book by Mother Alta’s head and the mirror at her feet. But I will break the glass first just in case. No man shall ever find the secret to our sisterhood.” She nodded her head at Skada.

  Skada nodded back. “You begin the task, sister, and I will have little say in the matter.”

  Jenna smiled ruefully. “I forgot.”

  “It will take some getting used to,” Skada said. “For me as well. In my own world, except at a mirror or pond, my movements were my own.”

  Jenna stared at her. “Do you resent me for that?”

  Skada returned that stare. “Resent you? You make me—how shall I put it—whole. Without you I am indeed a shadow.”

  Jenna stood and touched the left side of the mirror. Skada touched the right.

  “When I give the signal, lift with me,” said Jenna.

  Skada almost smiled. “When you lift, that will be signal enough,” she said.

  “Oh, I understand. Strange—I have been around dark sisters all my life, but gave them little thought.”

  “Soon you will give me as little. I shall just be,” Skada answered. “Lift the mirror, Jenna. You talk too much.”

  Jenna spread her legs apart and bent her back to the task, and Skada heaved with her, but the mirror would not move, as if it were attached, somehow, to the floor.

  “That is strange,” said Skada.

  “Very strange,” Jenna agreed. She straightened up for a moment, then bent back to the task, Skada following her every movement. “Let us try again.” As she tried to heft the mirror, Jenna’s hand was on the goddess sign and her hand moved it slightly to the right. There was a loud, groaning sound and the floor under Jenna’s foot began to move. Jenna leaped away from the mirror in alarm and Skada did the same. Jenna pulled her sword from its sheath with a single swift motion and was momentarily startled when Skada’s sword flashed back. The moonlight touched the steel and, for a moment, both seemed bathed in a cold fire.

  The floor continued its groaning motion, and slid open until it disclosed a stair going down. There was a strange, high cry from below and a child climbed out, blinking in the moonlight. She looked around, first at Skada, then at Jenna.

  “The Anna,” she cried. “Mother Alta said you would come.”

  She turned, gave a loud, piercing whistle down the stairs, then turned back and flung herself into Jenna’s arms.

  The children boiled out of the tunnel like rats from a hole, all trying to talk at once. Even the babies gabbled for attention. Jenna and Skada hugged and petted them each in turn, then gathered them in a large semicircle.

  “Is that all of you, then?” Jenna asked. “No more hidden down those dark stairs?”

  “Just one, Anna,” said one of the older girls. “But she is too sick to come up herself.”

  Jenna gasped. “How sick?”

  “Very sick,” said a smudge-faced girl with tangled brown hair.

  “Why did none of you bring her up?” asked Skada.

  “She is too big for us to move,” the brown-haired child replied.

  “Too big!” Jenna whispered. Pushing hope down, she stood. “Skada, help me.”

  “Then someone must bring a lamp,” Skada said.

  The oldest child there, a twelve-year-old with dark braids and a deep dimple in her cheek, lit a lamp. “I will.”

  They went down the stairs and through a series of dark, dry rooms with cots lined up along the walls. The remnants of food tins were scattered about. The rooms were close and smelled dreadfully.

  “Too many babies and too few baths,” whispered Skada.

  Jenna wrinkled her nose but did not reply.

  In the last room, the child cried out, “There she is.”

  There was a cot against the wall and the figure in it had dark hair, but her back was to them.

  “Pynt,” Jenna whispered. “Pynt, is it you?”

  The girl on the cot stirred, but she was obviously in too much pain to turn over. Jenna ran to the bed and, with Skada’s help, turned the bed around.

  “Hello, Jenna,” Pynt said. Her eyes were dark hollows.

  Jenna could not contain her tears. “I said I would be back,” she whispered. “In my heart, I said it.”

  “I knew you would,” Pynt said. She smiled up at Jenna, then looked at Skada.

  Jenna noticed the look. “Pynt, this is …”

  “Your dark sister, of course,” Pynt said hoarsely. “I am so glad for you, Jenna. It would not do for you to be alone, and I will not be shadowing you for a while. Not for a long while.” She closed her eyes and was still.

  “Not … not dead,” Jenna whispered to Skada.

  Skada smiled. “Well, they say Sleep is death’s younger sister. No wonder you are confused.”

  “Oh—sleep!” Jenna said, and grinned.

  They hefted the bed between them and carried it carefully through the dark rooms and up the stairs, setting it in front of the half circle of children.


  “But where is Mother Alta?” asked the girl with dark braids.

  Jenna squatted down so as not to tower over the children, and Skada squatted right by her side. “Now listen, little ones, what you will find below will break your hearts if you let it. But remember that your mothers are all with Great Alta now, where they wait for the day we can all be together again.”

  A four-year-old began to snuffle. One or two of the others started to cry. The girl with the dark braids made a strange moaning sound.

  “All?” she asked. “Not all.”

  “All,” Jenna said as gently as she could and wishing there were some comfort in it.

  A baby, unused to the light and the sound of all the crying, took it up in a thin, high wailing.

  Pynt opened her eyes. Without moving more than her mouth, she began to speak, her voice surprisingly strong. “Hush! Hush! You are young warriors of Alta. You are the Mother’s own. Would we trouble the mothers’ rest in Alta’s cave? They are happy there, playing at wands with the goddess herself and taking their nourishment from her breast. Would we make them miss a cast with our cries? Would we disturb their suck? No, no, my babies. We must be strong. We must remember who we are, always.”

  The snuffling cries stopped at her voice; even the baby was still, soothed by her tone.

  When it was quiet, Pynt whispered to Jenna, “They will cry no more. Not a one of them cried in the warren, even when the candles gave out. And I know none of them will cry outside. Lead on, White Jenna. Lead on, Anna. Lead on and we will all be your shadows.”

  They broke the mirror with the butt end of Jenna’s sword and set fire to the kitchen and the Great Hall. Jenna let only the older girls help. She could not bear for the babies to see the bodies and all the blood. So the children waited by the back door.

  Then, with the smoke spiraling behind them, Jenna and Skada carried Pynt’s cot, followed by the single line of children.

  They chopped through the twisted fir tree that lay across the path, clearing the walk for everyone. And when they came to a low embankment, the children scrambled over easily. With ropes they hauled Pynt’s cot up and then, at Jenna’s signal, turned toward the Sea of Bells where, beyond, Selden Hame waited. It was the only place Jenna knew of that would take so many children in. Once she got them safely there, she swore she would find another map and warn the Hames.

  THE MYTH:

  And so Great Alta made the Anna, the White One, the Holy One, out of fire and water, out of earth and air.

  “This One that I have made,” quoth Great Alta, “shall be sundered and yet shall be whole. She shall be drowned and yet she shall live. She shall burn and yet not be ashes. She shall go down into the earth and up into the air and yet shall not die. She shall be the end of all things and the beginning.”

  BOOK FOUR

  THE ANNA

  THE MYTH:

  Then Great Alta took up the hair that bound the dark and light sisters to her and with a great shears severed the braid. It fell between them into the sinkhole of night.

  “Even as I have done, so you must do,” quoth Great Alta. “For a child who is wrapped in her mother’s hair, a child who wears her mother’s clothing, a child who lives in her mother’s house, that one remains a child forever.”

  So the queen of shadows and the queen of light departed, but not before they each took a single hair from the braid, twining it about their wrists, as a token of their love.

  THE LEGEND:

  The day that Mairi Magoren was playing at Counters, she looked up and saw an old woman trotting down the road with her head going back and forth like this, tok-tok, tok-tok. Behind her was a long line of dirty, nasty children calling after her.

  “Old woman, old woman,” said Mairi, “and where are you going so fast?” For she was thinking that she might give her a drink or a chair to rock in or a kind word, and let the gang of children go by.

  But the old woman trotted along without a sound, her white-haired head moving back and forth, tok-tok, tok-tok. And her shadow on the ground made the same motion, tok-tok, tok-tok. And those ragged children kept pace behind.

  And then Mairi saw that the children were bound together with ropes of hair and that she could see right through them to the trees beyond.

  That was when Mairi knew she had seen the Hanna Bucca, the Hanna Ghost or Devil, who stole naughty children from their cradles and lured them from their beds and forced them to dance behind her till their clothes were in rags and their shoes in patches and their mothers long dead in their graves.

  THE STORY:

  They traveled by night, but not because it was safer. How a troop of thirty-three children, ranging in age from infancy to twelve years, hoped to obscure their tracks was beyond even Jenna’s fine woodcraft. But they traveled in the moonlight because Skada could be there to help haul Pynt’s cot. Once into the deep woods, though, Skada’s movements were not to be counted on, and Jenna relied more and more upon dark-braided Petra.

  Petra seemed extraordinarily composed for a girl on the edge of missioning, and Jenna was not surprised to discover she had chosen to follow the priestess’ way. Jenna tried to remember herself just a year past, but what she recalled mostly was the sound of doors slamming, the angry scraping of chairs being pushed from tables, and endless moody self-examinations. Petra seemed troubled by none of these, being equally at home with the babies as with the still-feverish Pynt. She also had an endless store of tales and songs which she recited in a voice that reminded Jenna more and more of the six-fingered Mother Alta.

  They had taken as much food from the Hame as they could pack. Each of the older girls carried sacks or baskets crammed with breads, cheeses, and dried fruits. The younger ones had leather pockets full of brod, the hard-baked crackers Nill’s Hame was famous for. Jenna had slung a half-dozen wineskins over her back which she planned to refill with water whenever they were near a stream.

  “Even if we never make it to Selden Hame,” Skada had remarked, “we will never go hungry.”

  The children had cheered then, the first sound they had made since leaving the Hame, though Jenna had shushed them quickly.

  Outlined by the moon, the Sea of Bells seemed an endless realm of closed white flowers and dark, shadowy grass. Jenna was thankful there was no fog.

  She and Skada led the children straight across the great meadow, heedless of the matted track they left behind. More important than any trail was speed. The children needed mothering, Pynt needed nursing, and regardless of Skada’s joke, there was hardly enough food for more than a few days. Besides, Jenna’s head was never long without Mother Alta’s voice saying to her, “You must go from Hame to Hame to warn them. Say this: The time of endings is at hand.” Every repetition brought with it a memory of the horror that had been Nill’s Hame, with body after body in the courtyard and on the stairs, and after the thin smoke trailing up from the funeral fires like an unwinding skein of souls.

  The first morning they picnicked by the eastern edge of the lily bell meadow. The infants, who had slept all night in the arms of their carriers, were wide awake. But the others were exhausted from their night of walking and fell asleep in the grass, heedless of the babies’ happy babblings.

  Jenna and Petra took turns standing guard during the day, though there was, thankfully, little to see except a family of red foxes playing some hundred feet away from the sleeping children and a V of wild geese honking northward overhead.

  In the evening they all shared a meal of cheese and bread, water and a cache of nuts Jenna had found during one of Petra’s turns at the watch. The fruit was saved for treats along the way.

  After the meal, Jenna got them all to their feet, saying, “Come, my warriors. Come, my fine woodswomen. Petra will tell us a story and then we will be on our way.”

  Petra told them the ever-stirring ballad of Krack’s Ride, singing the chorus:

  Hallo, hallay, King Krack does ride,

  And with him, sisters side by side

  and all the
children joined in. Even the infants seemed to take part, waving their arms at the last three words just as the older girls did.

  Remembering Pynt’s recitation of the opening lines of the poem, Jenna knelt by her cot.

  “And how are you doing, my shadow?” she asked.

  Pynt managed to raise her head. “I believe I am healing, Jenna. Who would have credited it? Bouncing along between you and Skada, packed in like a pound of brod and cheese. But my fever broke in the night and the wound aches only a little, like a tooth gone rotten.”

  Jenna put her hand on Pynt’s head and found it cool, though a bit damp. She tucked the covers gently around Pynt’s shoulders as Petra finished the last lines of the poem.

  Pynt whispered the chorus along with the children. “And with him, sisters side by side. That is a good one, Jenna. It will get them moving quickly, and without fear.”

  “So she hoped,” Skada said, materializing by Jenna’s side.

  Glancing quickly to the horizon, Jenna saw the moon making its slow way. She nodded, as if to herself, and said in a low voice, “You are here. Now we can really go.”

  The moon was no longer full, its edges sloped and faded, but Skada seemed as crisp as ever, her laughter piercing Jenna’s moodiest moments. So the first time Jenna tried to hush her along the long march, she would not be still.

  “If I quieted, Jenna, you would say the very same things inside your mind, but they would not be half as amusing. Admit it.”

  “Hush, Skada, I hear something,” Jenna said, stopping, her head cocked to one side. Skada stood in the same attitude.

  “How you can expect to hear anything beyond the tramping of sixty-six little feet, Great Alta alone knows,” Skada said, though she listened as well.

  “Will you hush?”

  “I am still. You are the one who is flapping.”

  As soon as they stopped, the line of children stretched out behind them came to a halt. After the last child had quieted, there was still a shallow echo of sound, a crackling of twigs from the line of trees.