The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  She sighed, a sound well lost in the mix of pounding hooves. But the sigh reverberated inside. It was Scillia’s youth and her lack of passion for rather than passion against that irritated Jenna. She remembered herself at age thirteen, and Scillia was no mirror of that girl. Skada’s answer that it had been a war that made the difference between them was not answer enough.

  Perhaps, Scillia will find that child at the Hame, she thought. But she did not dare finish that thought: that perhaps she might find the child she had been there as well.

  THE HISTORY:

  From a letter to the editor, Nature and History, Vol. 45:

  Sirs:

  Your recent article on “The Last Goodly Hame—A Look at the Walls of Selden” by that eccentric scholar, Lowentrout, makes much of the folk history of the area. But to state, as he does, that Selden Hame remained a center of culture and learning for women of Alta and their dark sisters, merely perpetuates the myth that the Dale females were able to call up some mysterious Other Self. I thought we had long ago dismissed such maunderings as mere fairy stories.

  It is clear from the stones that have been examined by careful scientists, that the walls that stand on the site are but several hundred years old, not a thousand. The wall construction is typical of the Middle Period, not the Old Dales. Lowentrout’s assumption that there had been new buildings built exactly over the bones of the old, because of stories of ghosts or some such, merely flies in the face of science and technology.

  As long as we repeat the old legends and folk tales as something more than simple imaginative stories, using them to reconstruct a historical base, we will continue to make the same old mistakes in our archeology. There were no dark sisters; the great Queen Jenna was but a jumped-up folk hero, more legend than real. And as for those beliefs that state she and her consort still sleep Under the Hills till the Dales shall need them again … well, really! That’s a folk motif that can be traced all around the world and is typical of hero tales in most primitive lands.

  THE STORY:

  As they approached a seemingly impenetrable rock face, Jenna waved her hand oddly at it. The trail twisted abruptly to the right and up and the mare followed it without urging. Scillia’s gelding plodded placidly along behind.

  “Was that some kind of signal?” Scillia asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Wouldn’t they have changed the sign after so many years?” Scillia’s voice held a measure of amusement.

  “I do not even know if they still use watchers at the turnings,” Jenna said. “But the hand has its own memory. I could no more have gone past here without signalling than … Wait!”

  They both reined in their horses, for a light of some kind seemed to be coming down the mountainside toward them. When the light came closer, they saw it was not a single light, but two torches—held aloft by a pair of women.

  “Hail, Jenna,” the watchers said together. “Hail, Scillia, daughter of women.”

  As the torchlight touched her horse’s back, Jenna felt the familiar warmth of Skada behind her.

  “And what do you return to them?” Skada whispered into her ear.

  “Hail, sisters,” Jenna said. And all her anger and troubled thoughts slipped away with the words.

  They rode slowly along the path, following the torchbearers. The light only occasionally fell upon Jenna and so Skada flickered in and out of hearing. But whenever she was there, comfortably behind Jenna on the mare’s broad back, she continued to comment on everything along the way.

  At last Jenna held up her hand for silence. “Enough! You are worse than a jay.”

  “I would prefer conversation,” Skada said. “But who is to supply it? Scillia is all but asleep on her horse and the two up ahead are paying us no heed. As for your sulking presence …”

  “I am remembering, not sulking.”

  “With you the two are often the same,” Skada said.

  “And with you …” But whatever it was Jenna was about to answer was never spoken aloud, for just then the great wooden gates of Selden Hame were pushed open by the torchbearers and light blazed forth in welcome.

  The doorway of the main house was crowded with women, all in pairs, except for one small woman at the front who was singularly alone. Her black hair was worn long in a warrior’s braid but curled like a crown atop her head. It added little to her height. So fine-boned, she seemed almost a girl but for the great strength of purpose that shone in her face.

  “Pynt!” Jenna cried out, leaping from her horse. She held out her hands to the small woman.

  “I am called Marga now,” the woman said sharply. “Or as the M’dorans among us say, Marget. No one but you knows me by that old name.” She touched hands with Jenna, then Skada, then turned to help Scillia down. “And this, of course, is the M’doran child.”

  “My child,” Jenna said.

  Scillia held out her one hand to the small woman but did not say anything, being slightly overwhelmed by fatigue and the fact that the woman—Marga—had challenged her mother. No one—except maybe Skada and her father, Carum, and old Marek—no one spoke like that to Jenna. As much as her mother liked to believe she was of the people, Scillia knew they held her in too much awe, as both a legend and their queen, to talk back to her.

  “Her womb mother was Iluna. You have raised her in a hero’s place.”

  “Pynt, she is my child in all but birth. How can you, above all people, say other?” Jenna’s face was no longer shining with pleasure, but beginning to darken. Skada’s face was glowering even more.

  Marga pulled Scillia close to her and with the light on them for a moment—just a moment—they looked like a pair of dark and light sisters. “I am True Speaker for the M’dorans, Jenna. I say what must be said. I do not say it in anger or in chastisement. But it must be spoken for truth’s sake.” She turned a moment and whispered something to a woman near her, then turned back. “But come, we have a light meal for you. It is never good to sleep on an empty stomach, worse to sleep right after too great a meal.” She smiled briefly and drew Scillia into Selden Hame, forcing Jenna and Skada to follow.

  THE SONG:

  PYNT’S LULLABY

  Sleep, my child, wrapped up in a dream,

  The stars looking down where you lie.

  The stars have no words to tell of your past

  And neither, my child, have I.

  Sleep, my child, for the past is a dream,

  And women do weep that it’s gone.

  But we shall not weep anymore for the past

  For after each sleep comes the dawn.

  Sleep, my child, into dawn’s eager light

  And wake to the song of the dove.

  Forget all the dreams of the past, for the past,

  Is present in all of my love.

  THE STORY:

  Scillia had no memory of that first meal at the Hame. It was hazed with candlelight, firelight, sleep.

  And dreams.

  She had dreamed and woken and dreamed again. All that she remembered of those dreams was that someone had been singing to her, and it had not been her mother.

  Rising, Scillia got dressed in what clothes had been placed at the bedfoot for her. Not her riding clothes, the leathers stained and smelling of horse, but a soft, white shift with an overdress of linen the green of late autumn. There was a pair of hose in the same green. The boots alone were her own, brown, heeled, scuffed-toed, and comfortingly familiar.

  Whoever had left the clothes had also opened the curtains and she could heard mountain doves coo-coo-rooing from the trees outside. It was a homey sound, not so different from that of the birds that littered the hedges and ledges back at the castle.

  She went over to the window and looked out. After days of foul weather—spitting rain and a wind that had found every crack in her clothing—the sky had finally turned a slatey blue and there was not even a cloud to mar it.

  Something moved in the trees closest to her window. Scillia thought at first it was one of t
he doves till she glimpsed a stockinged foot and heard a laugh.

  “Mother!”

  She was shocked beyond measure that her mother should be climbing trees like some young, hoydenish villager, and was preparing to say so when Jenna’s face poked through the leaves.

  “Awake then, lie-abed?”

  “What are you doing out there?”

  Jenna laughed again. “Rediscovering my childhood.”

  Scillia’s lips drew down into a thin, disapproving line. “Mother! You are the queen.”

  “Then I am rediscovering the queen’s childhood,” Jenna answered placidly, unwilling to be drawn into an argument. “And it included climbing many a tree.”

  Scillia turned away from the window abruptly and went back to the bed, flinging herself face down upon it. She covered her head with the pillow. Why, she wondered. Why? Why? Why? Why? She had no idea what it was she was questioning.

  She felt a hand on her back and slowly lifted the pillow from her head. Turning over, she expected to see her mother.

  It was Marga.

  “Brush your hair, child, and come down to breakfast. This first day you will have no chores. We give guests—even royal guests—a day of rest before we work them. Then …”

  “What do you mean even royal ones?” Scillia asked. “I cannot think you have had many.”

  “Royal guests we work the harder,” Marga said. “Though …” and here she laughed, “we have had none before you.”

  “As it should be,” Jenna said, swinging in through the window. “That you work royal guests the harder, I mean. Does it not say: The king should be servant to the State.”

  “I have never heard that bit of wisdom before,” Scillia said.

  Marga smiled. “Your mother has spent the morning reading The Book of Light.”

  “My mother has spent the morning climbing trees,” Scillia muttered.

  “In many ways it is the same thing,” Jenna said. “Come. Let us go down to the kitchen. I am starving.”

  Marga put her arm around Jenna’s waist, as comfortable as any old friend. “You sounded just like Skada then.”

  “I am Skada. Or Skada is me. It is just that sometimes I forget that when the crown sits too heavily upon my head.” Jenna draped her arm over Marga’s shoulder, and they walked out of the room together.

  Scillia would have lingered longer to show her displeasure, her anger, her dismay. But she was suddenly much too hungry for such displays. Without even tidying her hair, she ran after them.

  At breakfast Jenna seemed absolutely transformed and Scillia could not get over it. The mother who had been so distracted with matters of state, so distant with worry, so often quick to judge or to correct, was gone. In her place was some stranger who told jokes and laughed loudly, who recounted incidents in which she was as often the villain of the adventure as the hero, and who broke into snatches of old songs.

  Scillia was embarrassed beyond telling, and though she had thought herself starving, she suddenly found she could not eat a bite.

  She excused herself and left the kitchen, going out the door they had come in, turning right, and quickly getting lost in the maze of halls. At one last turning, she found herself in a room that was steamy and moist.

  “Baths!” she breathed, her word almost forming in the hot, wet air. No one had mentioned baths last night, when she had been filthy and aching from the long riding. And though one part of her remembered that she had fallen asleep at the dinner table, the other part counted the lack of mention as a rough snubbing. She turned and walked out of the room, but her clothes were a moist reminder.

  “Probably cold water anyway,” she muttered, though the steam had certainly argued against that. But she was feeling too put out to let logic get in the way of her anger. With a few more turns, she thankfully found herself outside.

  She walked through a courtyard where several straw targets leaned against the stone wall. Three hens clucked at her, but she ignored them. There was an open gate, and she slipped past it.

  Clearly it was not the main gate, for there was a meadow on the left, not a forest, and the path that skirted the meadow was not the worn road they had ridden up in the night.

  She started down the path, expecting at any minute to be summoned to return to the Hame. She even set her back stiffly, ready to refuse the call.

  But no call came.

  The path went down steeply at first, then crested over a small rise. At the top of the rise she could see into a great natural amphitheater. Some sort of rough stone altar was at the center of the circle, flanked by three old rowans.

  She tried to remember the stories she had heard of the dark and light sisters who had lived in the Hames. A few of the stories her mother had told her, casually, and in an off-handed manner, and only when pressed. Others Skada had recounted, with a great deal more vigor. But Skada’s tales were always vigorous in a way scarcely to be relied upon. Most of what Scillia knew about the Hames—Selden being the only one left of them—came from her old nurse. Nana had spoken much about the sisters, and not all of it complimentary.

  “Your royal mother, the Anna, being the exception, my cherub …” was how many of Nana’s stories began.

  She could not remember any stories about sacrifice, however, so she wondered what the altar was for.

  She must have spoken the question aloud, because suddenly there was an answer from behind her.

  “For Mother Alta to sit and rule.”

  Scillia spun around. One of the sisters of Selden was standing, hands clasped in front of her, smiling. Scillia did not know her name.

  “Our last Mother was not a happy woman. She was hard and not always fair. But she was ours and so we loved her. She’s dead now, almost ten years. Best to remember only the good of her. The Book of Light says: One can never repay one’s debts to one’s mother.”

  “Especially,” Scillia replied under her breath, “if one’s mother is the queen.” She went around the woman and back up the path toward the Hame.

  THE TALE:

  There was once a king who had three daughters, each one more beautiful than the last. But though he loved his daughters well, he loved the golden bird in his garden more.

  One day the golden bird disappeared. All that was left was a single feather. The king took the feather and held it to his breast, crying:

  “Oh, me, oh my, oh me, oh my,

  Without the golden bird I shall surely die.”

  And he lay down on his bed and was indeed seen to be dying.

  The youngest daughter wept and wept until her eyes were red with weeping.

  The middle sister threw herself on the floor and thrashed and moaned till she was quite black with dirt.

  But the oldest daughter said, “Father, do not die. I shall find your golden bird.”

  She left the palace and rode and rode until she came to a place where the road forked. There was an old woman, dressed in rags and looking quite pitiful. The princess got down off her horse.

  “Old woman, may I help you?”

  “Some food and water would be nice,” said the old woman.

  So the princess gave her food and water and her own crimson cloak besides.

  “As you have given something to me, so I will give something to you,” said the old woman.

  “But you are poor and have nothing to give,” the princess said.

  “I have something I can give away and yet still keep,” said the old woman.

  “And what is that?” asked the princess.

  “Advice,” the old woman replied.

  “I am listening,” said the princess.

  “I can tell you where the golden bird nests or I can tell you where your own fate lies. I cannot tell you both.”

  The princess shook her head. “My father’s fate and mine are intertwined,” she said. “Tell me where the golden bird nests and I will get it for my father so that he will not die.”

  So the old woman told her that, but not where her own fate lay, which wa
s actually quite a different thing altogether, and might have been better for the kingdom than saving a cranky, self-devoted monarch from death.

  Do you think the princess made the right choice?

  THE STORY:

  If Scillia had expected lunch to be different, she was soon disabused of the notion. Her mother acted neither like a mother nor a queen, but some stranger telling tales about other strangers who played at something called the Game and something else called Wands.

  “What are those?” Scillia whispered to a woman by her side, a woman whose mouth seemed overfull of teeth.

  The woman turned and stared at her. “What? Jenna’s daughter has never heard of Wands?” She grinned and the entire range of teeth seemed to conspire at some joke. She turned back to the table and spoke to Jenna. “A child of yours knows not of Wands? Then we must show her.”

  “I don’t want …” Scillia began. But the toothy woman already had her by the hand, dragging her up from the table and over to the hearth where a small group of women—including her mother—formed a rough circle.

  Marga took a long leather cylinder from the mantel and another woman, a blonde with hair cropped like a man’s, took down a small hand drum. As Marga untied the cylinder’s top with much ceremony, the women began to chant a slow singsong, accompanied by the steady beat of the drum.

  Round the circle, round the ring,

  The Wands of Alta now we fling.

  Praise Alta’s name, all blessings flow,

  As round the ring the willows go.

  Finally the cylinder’s knots were undone and Marga poured a set of twelve ivory-colored willow wands into her left hand. Plucking two wands from the set, she flung them with quick flicks of her right hand one after another into the circle.

  One wand was caught by the toothy woman next to Scillia, one by Jenna who was on the other side of the ring from them.

  Slip-slap.

  They flung the wands underhanded across to one another, the passage in midair making a strange shushing sound. The toothy woman caught hers smoothly, but Jenna had to make a second quick grab for her wand, an awkward recovery.