The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  “He is mute,” Catrona explained.

  “From birth?” asked Piet. “Can he sign his wishes?”

  “God touched,” Petra said, stepping forward. “And it is new.”

  “Ah, the collar,” said Piet, as if he understood. “And ye child, what name is yourn?”

  “I am no child, but priestess-trained. My name is Petra.” She lifted her head and stared into his eyes.

  “Ye be a child still to me, for all ye speak daily with gods. But well come, Petra. I like children—and I like priestesses. They all speak in riddles. It makes a big man like me feel small.” He grinned at her. She could not help but grin back.

  “And this beauty,” he said, turning toward Jenna.

  “Watch your tongue,” Catrona said, “or she will have it. She is the best of us. She is the reason we are here.”

  At her tone, his grin faded at once. “And what do ye mean, me girl.”

  “She is Jo-an-enna. She is the White One. The Anna.”

  For a long moment Piet stared at Jenna, measuring her by some internal reckoning. Then he shook his head and laughed out loud, a wilder braying than Catrona’s. When the bold laughter had run its course, he stared at her again. “The White One? Have ye taken leave … Catrona? Ye’ve never owned such nonsense afore. The White One! She’s nowt but a girl.”

  “Nonetheless …” Catrona began.

  Just then the man on the gray dismounted and walked over to them, limping badly, his right leg swinging stiffly from an unbending knee. “Jo-an-enna, you say. Could you be called else? A pet name? Or a family name?” His face was clearly thinned down with old pain, but Jenna thought there was something terribly familiar about his cheeks and the long lashes and the hair.

  “Jenna,” she whispered, staring at him. “I am called Jenna by my friends.” The limping man was and was not like Carum. But how many years had it been? He was taller and darker and she felt nothing when she looked at him but a vague tug of reminiscence. Nothing at all. How could that possibly be?

  “Are you Carum’s White Jenna, then?” he asked. Something narrowed in his face so that he had a fox’s look, sly, calculating, cautious, and feral. Carum had never looked like that.

  Jenna breathed out slowly. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath till it sighed out of her. “You are not Carum,” she said, but it was almost a question.

  He grinned, looking more wolflike than fox. “I—Carum? What a thing I shall have to tell him when I see him next. Five years goes by and the girl he loves mistakes his older brother for …”

  “His older brother!” It was an explosion of sound and relief. “No wonder you look like him. You must be …” She reached back in memory and pulled out a name. “You must be Pike.”

  “Pike … I have not been called that in years.”

  Piet interrupted smoothly, “He is Gorum. King Gorum. Majesty-in-exile now. Best remember.”

  “Five years in exile then? We have much to talk about, Piet,” said Catrona.

  “And plenty of time afore dark to speak of it,” Piet said. “And after dark—well, plenty of time for that, too, eh?”

  Catrona patted his hand.

  “But why do ye call this girl the White One?” asked Piet. “What signs brought ye to it? Ye, Catrona, of all folk?”

  The forty or so men dismounted, gathering around noisily.

  Looking them all over, Catrona snorted. “I will tell it once the horses are pastured and we have split a bottle and some bread.” She smiled at Piet. “You do have bread? And bottles?”

  “What army goes without?” asked Piet.

  “Is this an army?” Catrona countered. “Ragtag, and scarcely one shield amongst three? No helms. No pikes—begging your pardon, Majesty.” She made a quick almost mocking obeisance.

  “It is but part of one,” Piet admitted.

  “And the rest?”

  “On a rade. With his brother.”

  “His brother?” Jenna could feel a strange ache suddenly start up in her belly.

  “Him that’s called Longbow,” Piet answered.

  “Longbow? Carum? On a rade? It cannot possibly be. He is a scholar, not a fighter,” Jenna said.

  “Perhaps back then when there weren’t no war, twas a scholar, gel. Perhaps he bain reading up on bow shooting in his books. He is a good shot now, though he doesna like swords yet,” Piet said. He gave Jenna another searching look, then spoke to Catrona. “Come into the Hame, gel. It’s nowt but shambles, but the kitchen still stands. We have bottles well hidden. And bread. And a couple of deer hanging.”

  “Well, well, well,” Catrona mused. “When you are not on a rade, you are in a well-stocked kitchen.” She patted Piet’s belly. “This is not just five years’ growth.”

  Laughing, Piet put his hand over hers. “This belly’s been longer than five years growing, gel, as well ye know. And I’ve been slimming these last months. But ye be no great beauty yersel. There’s gray in yer hair now.”

  “At least I have it all.”

  “I have enough,” he said, laughing.

  Jenna’s mouth drew down into a thin line, her eyes narrowing. “Should there be guards?”

  “We own the road,” the king said, a bit petulantly.

  “Not good enough,” Petra whispered. “You missed our coming.”

  “What makes ye think ye were missed?” Piet asked.

  “You were just not accounted a problem,” said the king.

  “Not good enough,” Jenna seconded, “for the sisters who dwelt here first.”

  “That is an old, old story,” Piet said, his hand still over Catrona’s. “And not a pretty one. This is a new.”

  “Tell us,” Jenna demanded. “Tell us the story. Now!”

  “How is it ye know it not?” came a voice out of the crowd. “If ye be the Anna?”

  “And where have ye been all these years?” asked another, a man with a scar lacing his right eye like a mask. “Under the hill or somewhat?”

  Jareth’s hand went suddenly to his collar, and Sandor made a small, sharp sound, like a startled daw.

  “Yes,” Catrona said slowly, drawing the word out as she drew her hand away from Piet’s. She turned toward the questioner. “That is exactly where we have been. Under the hill.”

  Piet barked a laugh. “Ye have never been a good teller, my girl. And until this moment, I would have called ye the hard-headest warrior I have ever known. But now …” He shook his head. “Five years ye’ve been gone. I went seeking ye, at that Hame of yourn. Looking for fighters, we were. And nane seen the hide of ye. And now ye appear with a child’s tale and asking us to believe it.”

  Sandor murmured, as much to the ground as the men near him: “She be saying you would not believe.”

  “And she is right,” the king said. “Under the hill. Which of us can believe such a story.”

  “Believe it.” Jenna spoke the words angrily. “Believe it. Though we still scarcely can credit it ourselves.” She would say no more.

  When the horses were unsaddled and hobbled to graze outside the walls, they gathered in the open kitchen, where an unbroken chimney thrust up against the sky. There they started a fire in the hearth and set stew pots to boil. It was then that Pike, the king-in-exile as the men called him, began the tale.

  THE HISTORY

  The so-called Gender Wars took place over a period of no less than five years and no more than twenty, if the Book of Battles is to be believed. The disparity in numbers is due to the fact that the G’runs counted by the years in a king’s reign rather than by a running tally. As they did not count in the years when the usurper K’las was on the throne, it is unclear exactly how long the battles continued. The reign of the king-in-exile (or the King in the Hills, as Doyle translates it) may be counted sequentially with K’las’ reign or simultaneously. We have few notes from the Continent that refer even obliquely to the doings in the Dales at that time. It was as if a great cloak of mist had been wrapped around the island kingdom. If K’
las himself ever penned any histories, they were likely burned by his enemies. History is always written by the victors.

  Magon, of course, makes much of the difference in counts, citing legend and folk stories of the strange passage of time “under the hill” in Faeryland. But as such passages are common coin in the world’s folklore (cf Magon’s own “Telling Time in Faerie” Journal of International Folklore, Vol. 365, #7) such maunderings do little to add to our working knowledge of the awful, devastating Dale wars.

  That these were wars of succession rather than a war of men against women, no matter the appellation that has carried down to modern times, is quite certain. In the Book of Battles we see lists of both sexes fighting side by side. This was not one great war but a series of small skirmishes over a number of years in which first one and then another king was placed on the precarious throne.

  The seeds of this particular anarchy had been sown when the G’runs, a patriarchal society from the Continent, had conquered the learning-centered matriarchy of Alta worshippers. But over the four hundred years of conquest, the bloodlines thinned for the G’runs married only within narrow clans, hardly ever mixing with the lower, conquered classes. The once-united clans began to vie for power after a G’runian king made the mistake of taking a Dalian for his second wife, naming their son a legitimate heir. One chief of a powerful northern clan, a crafty warrior named K’las, managed to orchestrate a bloodless coup. As he was hereditary head of the clan armies (the Kingsmen) as well as a provincial governor, he had a strong power base. He ruled, as such army-backed leaders often do, with an iron fist. Or, as it says in the Book of Battles “never his hand came out in friendship but in anger.” Of course, the book was penned by a member of the opposing party and so we must read carefully between the lines, as first Doyle and then Cowan have done. (See especially Cowan’s intriguing “The Kallas Controversy,” Journal of the Isles, History IV, 7).

  There is a popular legend known as “The King Under the Hill,” found in some thirty-three variants in both the Upper and Lower Dales, in which the king is killed upon his throne and his three sons flee the province. One is slaughtered from the back, one is badly wounded, and the third, called majesty-in-exile, lives under the hill with the Greenfolk until his troops rally and call him forth into the light of day. Magon has taken great pains in trying to justify the legend with the history as we have been able to reconstruct it. But much of his verification rests heavily on his own much-disputed thesis about an historical figure he calls the White One or the Anna or the White Goddess who fights side by side with the king. Magon mixes folklore and history liberally in a soup that ends up lacking both the meat of verifiable research or the good hearty flavoring of the folk. Cowan, on the other hand, lays down a solid substrata of history, reminding us that there is only mention of one son in the Continental books of the period, not three, and he most probably the bastard of the Dale woman, the G’run king’s second wife. Also, it would be well for us to remember, three is a potent number popular in folklore.

  According to Cowan, the battles for the throne involved not only the overthrown G’runians but a good many of the Dalites as well. After four hundred years of unquestioned subservience to the invaders, the indigenous populations (the Upper Dalite sheep farmers and fisherfolk and the Lower Dalite artisans and city dwellers) had had enough. Young men called Jennisaries (named after one of the martyred leaders, Cowan hypothesizes brilliantly) roamed the countryside destroying the towns and Hames they considered of G’run manufacture. The ruins of one such incursion can still be seen today in the Wilhelm Valley. According to Cowan—and I can only agree wholeheartedly with her—it was not torn down and sown over with sturdy grass as others of its kind because it had become a shrine. The legend goes that it was here that the martyred Jen was murdered and the king crowned.

  That the eager young Jennisaries pledged themselves to the new G’run king in exchange for a vow that he would marry one of theirs is something both Cowan and Magon agree upon, though they agree on little else, because it clearly states in the Book of Battles that “So it is pledged that the dark king and the light queen shall wed, bringing day and night into the circle, that the people themselves might rule.”

  However, much else in the Book of Battles remains unclear. For example, there is little that can be said about the final evocation:

  See where the queen has gone,

  Where her footsteps flower,

  For they lead into the hill,

  They lead under the hill,

  Where she waits for her call,

  Where she waits for her king,

  Where she waits for her bright companions.

  Neither Doyle nor Cowan can offer any easy solution to the puzzle of that final piece. And we must utterly reject Magon’s ridiculous proposal that the poetry means exactly what it says—that some queen (presumably the one of Dale extraction) remains neither living nor dead under the hill waiting to be recalled to a battle which has yet to be fought.

  THE STORY:

  “My father,” the king-in-exile said, “was a good man and a kind man. But he was also a blunt man, given to speaking his mind. That is good breeding in a farmer but not in a king. He had little talent for the sly exercise of politics and he did not understand compromise. He went where his heart led.” Pike’s face softened with the memory.

  “His wife …” prompted the man with the scarred eye.

  Someone poked up the fire in the broken hearth.

  “His first wife, my mother, died giving me birth. She had had trouble birthing my older brother, Jorum, and the doctors warned her that she dared have no more. Jorum was so big he had torn her all up inside. But kingdoms need heirs. One is not a safe number. So I was sown in that ruined terrain. And killed her leaving it.” He spoke dryly. It was obviously a story well rehearsed, and the emotion had been leeched from it by so many tellings.

  Jenna said in a low voice, “I killed my own mother in just that way.” Hesitating, she added, “My first mother.”

  The men nearest her murmured, turning that bit of information over and over, and one repeated out loud, “First mother.”

  Gorum seemed not to hear, but continued staring silently into the fire. Then he shook himself all over and went on. “The midwife was a lovely little Dale woman, small and dark. She sang lullabies with a voice like a slightly demented turtledove. She nursed me through that first cold year when my father could not think about babies because they made him so angry.”

  Jenna burst out, “My second mother was a midwife. She died carrying me in her arms.”

  Some of the men nodded, as if acknowledging something as yet unsaid, but Gorum simply stared at Jenna for a long moment, then turned back to the fire and his tale.

  “On the day I walked toward him, taking my first baby steps away from her arms, he forgave me. I called him Papa, which she had so carefully rehearsed with me, and he wept and called me his Good Son. He married her in secret at the year’s turning, not so much for love but for gratitude. His real love was buried in my mother’s grave. When three years later she gave birth to a healthy babe, and she herself still strong, he announced the marriage and claimed the child an heir.”

  “That was Carum?” Jenna asked.

  Gorum smiled at her, the first generous smile she had won from him. “That was Carum. He was small like his mother so, unlike the rest of us, he learned the art of compromise.”

  “Here, he’s not so small as that,” cried out a wiry, short man from the sitting crowd. “He be a head taller than me. That’s not short.”

  “Short may-be,” said another, “but he baint called Longbow for nowt.”

  The men chuckled at that. Even Sandor and Marek smiled.

  Jenna blushed, though she was not sure why, and Catrona sitting next to her put a hand on hers.

  “Do not mind them. You will have to get used to it. Men in a mob are all randy-mouthed. It means nothing,” she whispered.

  “It means less than nothing to me,�
�� Jenna replied, “since I do not know what they mean.”

  “Then why have you flushed like some spring maiden at a court dance?” asked Catrona.

  Jenna looked down at her hands and twisted the priestess ring around her little finger. “I do not know,” she said. “I am not sure. I do not even know what a court dance is!”

  The king-in-exile laughed along with his men, then took a deep draught of his wine. “The marriage was the mistake Kalas had hoped for. A mistake he could use directly against the king. It was only an excuse, of course. He would have found another in time.

  “He began to spread rumors, and those rumors sparked small rebellions: knives in taverns, rocks at the king’s gate. What Kalas promised was the sanctity of the clans against the mixing of blood and seed with the Dales. Sanctity! As if we had not been sowing babes throughout the Dales for four hundred years! There was never an uncompromised clan on this island since the first days our forefathers set foot here.

  “I have bred horses, boy and man, and this I know—the lines without a wild strain thin out. Bones break, blood runs rose. The people of the Dales make the clans stronger, not weaker. My uncle, Lord Kalas, will find this out in the end.”

  “To the king!” two of the men shouted spontaneously, raising their cups.

  “To the kingdom,” countered Gorum, raising his.

  “To the Dales!” Jenna said, standing. In the late afternoon sun her white hair seemed haloed in light, electric with the puzzling wind.

  The rest of the men leaped to their feet, foremost among them Piet and the king-in-exile.

  “To the Dales!” they shouted, the thunder of their voices bounding back oddly from the broken walls and cracked stones. “The Dales.”

  They raised their cups, draining the last of the wine in the resounding silence. And into that silence there insinuated another sound, a low, insistent pounding.

  “Horses!” Catrona cried. She was quick to reach for her sword, but Piet was quicker.

  Placing his hand over hers, he said, “Those are our own.”