The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  “All?”

  Gadwess shut his mouth and his eyelids dropped halfway as if—Corrie decided—he was desperately trying to keep a secret. Corrie had, himself, often been in the same situation: the youngest trying to hold on to a bit of dignity. And then Corrie had a wonderful revelation: He was no longer the youngest prince in the Dales. He was so pleased about this, he decided to let Gadwess think he had been fooled. “Come on,” Corrie said, “let’s get dressed.”

  Gadwess jumped down from the bed, relief writ large on his face. “If I have trouble with the clasps, will you help me?”

  Seizing the moment. Corrie answered, “Not as your servant.”

  “As what?”

  “As a friend,” Corrie said adamantly.

  The Garunian boy nodded and quickly ran back through the door that connected their rooms.

  The council chamber was in an uproar. The long-bearded head of the army had leaped to his feet, shouting almost incoherently. “Tricked us, by damn. Tricked us. Alta’s braids! Shouldn’t have trusted them damned Garuns. Too soon.”

  “Sit down, Piet, and think. Think!” Carum said calmly. “Is thirteen years too soon? Trust must begin again or we are at war once more. I do not think this poor country could stand it.”

  Still standing, Piet shouted again. “The army is ready, sire.”

  “The army may be ready to fight. But no one is ever ready to die,” Jenna replied. She stood as well to make her point, staring across the council table at her old friend.

  “Pah! You sound more like your dark sister every day,” Piet said, finally settling back in his chair, but not without a great deal of purposely loud fussing.

  “A hero no more, Piet? The Anna no more?” Jenna replied.

  There was a muttering around the chamber, but it was an old argument between the two of them, though suddenly inside-out. No one wanted to get in the middle of it.

  “I would die for you, Anna. And that you know,” Piet said, pounding his fist on the table.

  “Then live—and listen to Carum. He has more to tell,” Jenna replied, sitting down again.

  Piet started to sputter once more, but was interrupted by the man next to him with a strange croak of a voice. “Shut up, Piet. You were always better with your fists than your brain.”

  “And you,” Piet growled back, “were best when that collar choked off your voice, Jareth.” But it was said for form. Old comrades from the Gender Wars, they were like quarrelsome brothers and never easy in the council chamber.

  Once the room was finally quiet, Carum stood. “It is true we were tricked. Or at least misled. But why should we have assumed they were sending their eldest, their heir? We did not send ours.” He stepped away from the table, turning his back to them and staring out the window where a sullen rain was falling.

  “Only because she is a girl, and unacceptable …” Piet said.

  “To them,” Jenna added quickly. “To them.”

  The men and women around the table nodded. Scillia was not a great favorite at the moment, being a cranky, moody thirteen-year-old. But she was the heir and no one doubted her strength of purpose, or her mind, which was quick. Or her heart.

  Carum continued, speaking to the window. “The Garun heir is—as I now understand—already fifteen and as hard and unyielding as his father, Kras. This younger one is of a tenderer disposition. And he has formed an attachment to Corrie. They are already like brothers.”

  “Squabbling, you mean,” Piet said.

  “Not at all,” Jenna put in. “He looks up to Corrie. He calls him ‘Killer of Cats’—a slight exaggeration.”

  A ripple of laughter ran around the table.

  “He can be molded.” Carum turned and looked directly at Piet as he spoke.

  Piet unflinchingly returned that gaze. “So can young Jemson.”

  Jenna shivered. That had been in her mind from the first.

  At dinner in their bedchamber, the hearth fully aflame, Jenna sat on the big bed and toyed with her knife. A light supper of fish pie in Nillum white wine and a cress salad was on the table. It was one of her favorite meals, but she had not eaten more than a few bites.

  “You have been silent, my love, for half the dinner at least,” commented Carum.

  “To speak is to sow,” Skada said, her fingers on her own knife.

  “… and to listen is to reap,” Jenna finished for her. “I do not like what I have harvested, Piet is quite right.”

  “About what?” Carum asked.

  “About Jemmie.”

  Carum sighed. “We have been over and over the same ground, Jenna.”

  “But we have never dug up the true dirt,” she countered.

  There was a long silence in which the only observations came from the fire which snapped noisily. Finally Carum stood, brushing off the front of his shirt. He walked over to the fire and with a poker settled the logs into a better, quieter confirmation. Turning his back to the fire, he said, “And what is in that dirt?”

  Jenna did not answer directly, but fired a series of questions at him. “Is Jemson a good son of the Dales? Does he honor women? Does he love his sister? Does he think too much of himself? Does he lie? Does he bluster? Is he susceptible to flattery? Does he bend the knee to blood?”

  “In Alta’s name,” Carum said, “stop.” He turned back to the fire. “Do you not like our son, Jenna, that you think so little of him?” But he said it softly because he had had many of those thoughts about Jem only days before.

  “I love him,” Jenna said. But she knew that was not the same thing. Not the same at all.

  Unusually silent throughout the exchange, Skada stared into the fire from her place by Jenna’s side. Before the last flames disappeared, calling her back to her own dark world, she spoke. “Trust Alta,” she said, “to see us through the end of this turning.” And then she was gone.

  “And what,” Carum said, facing Jenna once again, “do you suppose she meant by that?”

  “I have long ago told you about Alta’s turnings.” She held out her hand to him and he sat down by her where the moment before Skada had been.

  “You told me a fairy story, my love. About the Green Folk and an Alta who is a woman hundreds of years old and yet not a god. Also something about a paring. I took it to be a parable.”

  “Core to rind,” Jenna said, almost as if reciting a child’s verse. “Rind to core, paring the world. One apple on a vast tree. One tree in a vast grove. One grove in …”

  “… a vast green.” Carum’s voice was full of sudden anger. “Riddles! Once you hated them. Once you found them tiring. Have you changed so much, Jenna?”

  “I have grown old,” Jenna said wearily.

  “How could you not, my love? We all do.”

  “In Alta’s grove no one grows old,” Jenna said.

  “A story for children,” he reminded her. “Only a story.”

  “And my children are all grown.”

  “At thirteen and ten and nine? Not yet.”

  “I feel them grown away. They are not babies.”

  He put his arms around her. “Not grown away. Just growing up. It is the world’s way. The real world, Jenna. Not the world of story, where heroes are ever young and beautiful and unmarked by time.” He smiled at her, anger abated, and took her long white braid in his hands. “As I recall, you never much liked being a hero anyway.”

  She shook her head vigorously, snapping the braid from between his hands. “I must follow Scillia,” she said. “I must show her the way to her mother root.”

  “No, my love, she must find that way herself. Else it is your way, not hers.”

  “But the way is long. And hard. She could be hurt.”

  “So she could. But if I can trust her to Alta, so can you.” He flexed his hands and the fingers creaked like a rocking chair. “You see—you are not the only old one in this room.”

  She smiled crookedly at him. “You are still as young as when we met.”

  “Not so young, I hope,” h
e said. “Ich crie merci, Sister of Alta.”

  At the memory his appeal evoked, when he had first crouched mud-stained, weary, and frightened at her feet, thinking her an illiterate savage, she laughed. Then, as sudden, she was serious again. “But I killed a man to save you then. And I was Scillia’s age.”

  “The woods are no longer filled with marauding Garuns. Women are no longer prey to such villains. We have done some good these thirteen years, Jenna, though we are no longer heroes in everyone’s eyes.” He stood and moved the table away from the bed. “If you come to bed with me, though, I shall prove that in some things at least, age and experience are the better.”

  THE HISTORY:

  Mother root (mah’ ther root) [OD moder rood]

  1. The female genealogy, i.e. the mother’s side of the family.

  2. One’s native country.

  3. A plant of the yam family, tuberisis genetica.

  —Shorter Dictionary of the Dales, Vol. II Mark-Zygoz

  From a letter to the editor, Nature and History

  Sirs:

  I have recently discovered in my father’s unpublished papers the notes toward an answer to Dr. Magon’s article “The Rood to Recovery” in your issue #41.

  It is Dr. Magon’s odd contention that the ancient Dalians, who were a matriarchal society, had actually discovered that using tuberisis genetica in an herbal douche guaranteed female babies. We know this is scientific nonsense. My father’s notes clearly show that he consulted the heads of three major teaching hospitals and a half-dozen directors of family clinics, all of whom confessed grave doubts that any such thing was possible.

  Magon’s thesis about the douche is based on folklore and a totally bizarre reading of a line in the only extant—though water-damaged and stained—copy of Langbrow’s Book of Battles: “Moder rood is my way and my rite.”

  In the BOB that phrase is used one warrior to another, though because of the staining, one cannot read the gender of either warrior involved. The paragraphs before and after the exchange are totally illegible. Still, Dr. Magon has chosen to ignore the other possible (and more probable) readings to offer your subscribers his preposterous herbal trifle.

  My father’s more moderated and sensible readings of that line are threefold:

  1. The phrase may be referring to a particular food preference, or religious dietary law (“rite”). We know such practices certainly existed in the army. For example, soldiers from the southern parts of the Dales often made a savory cat-tail stew which they served only on the eve of their sabbath. And soldiers from the Galanza area ate raw roots of the yam family the eve before a battle, to purge the body’s evil.

  2. Alternately, the phrase may be referring to the ritual known as “Taking the Mother,” a form of self-flagellation with a large stick (“rood”) known as The Mother. This ritual, brought over by the first of the conquering G’runs, had only a small following. But, especially the day preceding an expected battle, those who were believers whipped themselves into a frenzy till—as has been noted in Doyle’s early work—“The Mother ran red with the blood of would-be heroes.”

  3. A third alternative is that the phrase may be a reference to the great central road that once ran through the Dales, known to some as Alta’s Way and to others as The Mother Road.

  Without knowing the exact context of the phrase—even with laser technology the stains have remained unparsable—we have only educated guesses. But surely my father’s three suggestions are at least as viable as Dr. Magon’s. I feel—and I hope you do, too—that they deserve publication so that your readers might make up their own minds.

  I would be happy to send on a copy of my father’s notes. Or even happier to write them more fully in a complete paper. I am not only executor of my father’s estate, I am a scholar myself, holding a doctorate in Dalian studies under Dr. Cowan at Pasden University.

  Yours,

  THE STORY:

  Scillia had ridden out into the storm but had been wise in dressing for the weather. Her waterproof cloak and great traveler’s hat kept the rain off her clothes and head, and her boots were equally waterproof and warm. She had been as smart about her food, her saddlebag packed with enough provisions for five days, and some journeycake for beyond that. And for protection, as well as for further provisioning, she had taken two knives from the kitchen—a short knife with a blade that was finger-length, and a larger knife that had a blade as long as her forearm. It was useless for her to take a bow; that was not something that could be used one-handed, so she had never learned how to shoot. But she had taken her father’s short sword, still wrapped in its ceremonial cloth. Though she had only actually seen it once before—when he had shown them all the watering on its blade and told them stories about the Gender Wars because Jem had asked—she knew where it was kept. They all knew where it was kept: in the great wooden cupboard in her parents’ bedchamber.

  She did not think that taking the sword constituted theft. After all, her father never used the thing and therefore would not miss it. She would get it back to him long before he even knew it was gone. But carrying it tucked beneath her leg, against the saddle, she felt invulnerable. That sword had killed its share of men in the Wars, and the blood grained into the steel would keep her safe. She did not just know this, she believed it utterly.

  She thought about her brother Jemmie, now well on his way to the Garunian shore. She did not miss him, not the real Jem, who was a whiner and an occasional liar, and who always made himself out to be the hero of any tale. But she missed the brother he could be, her good right hand when she was queen.

  “If I become queen,” she reminded herself. Being the daughter, or the adopted daughter, of a queen did not routinely mean queenship. Not in the Dales where the people had already, in her lifetime, rid themselves of a hated king. But Scillia hoped that this adventure would prove her worthy. To herself, above all others. “And,” she whispered into the rain and wind, “at the same to find my mother root.”

  She did not remember when she had first heard the phrase. But long before she had learned about the warrior woman of M’dorah she’d known it. There was a story, a fairy tale really, that her old nurse used to tell. About the little woodcutter’s child who went to seek her lost mam, going along the “mother rood,” the mother road, and finding not one but ten mothers awaiting her. It was an odd tale, not one of Scillia’s favorites. But her old nurse had a lot of stories that were odd to a Southern sensibility. She was from some mountain village in the back of beyond, brought home by a soldier as wife, and then widowed in the Wars. In the South, everyone seemed to say “mother root” when they meant simply the mother who bore you.

  “And that’s not Mother Jenna!” Scillia said aloud, renewing her anger which had gotten soft under the lulling rain.

  The horse flicked its ears back and forth as if agreeing, and Scillia leaned forward to pat its neck. Then she urged it off the road and under a tree. Her stomach had just reminded her it was well past time for eating.

  The rain continued all day and by early evening Scillia was too tired to ride any longer. There was no town in sight, and so she unsaddled the horse and tied it loosely by one leg to a tree so that it would not wander off in the night. Then, remembering her mother’s stories about her time in the woods, she climbed the same tree, but with little grace, and settled into the main crotch to sleep. She was not about to chance a wolf at her throat. As as for cats—she kept the large knife un-sheathed in her lap.

  Sometime in the middle of the night the rain stopped. Startled out of sleep by the horse’s night-time grunting, Scillia looked up and saw stars overhead through the interlaced branches. She spoke the patterns aloud as if by naming them she could regain a familiar sense of comfort. “The Hound,” she said, outlining one figure with her finger. “Alta’s Braid.”

  As she shifted about in the tree to see all the stars, the knife fell from her lap and clattered to the ground. The horse shied from it, giving a frightened snort, but the rope aroun
d its leg held fast.

  Scillia thought about climbing down in the dark to find the knife, but was suddenly too afraid to attempt it. Instead, she took the smaller knife from her belt and, holding that, finally fell back to sleep.

  The morning was cold and grey, but clear. When Scillia woke, the first thing she saw was her own breath pluming out. Her legs were cramped and when she stretched them, she realized that the little knife was no longer in her lap. Looking down, she saw it resting, blade on blade, atop the larger one, not far from where the horse was contentedly cropping a patch of old grass.

  She managed to get down the tree with even less grace than she had gotten up, only to discover that some small animals had been at her pack.

  “What a ninny!” she scolded herself aloud. She should have carried the pack up the tree. A wolf or a bear would have made quick work of it on the ground. But with only one arm, climbing the tree was difficult enough. How could she bring the pack up as well? In her teeth? It was much too heavy. She would have to figure that out before another nightfall.

  However, although the animals—probably wood mice, she thought—had nibbled a bit of the journeycake and burrowed well into the loaf of bread, they had left the rest of her food alone. She had been lucky this time. She would not chance it again.

  She ate enough to be comfortably full and drank several long swallows from her waterskin. Then she saddled the horse. She’d long practice in that, at least. Setting the two knives well into her belt, she mounted the horse and urged it along.

  She was soon too warm in the cloak and hat, skinning out of them both without dismounting and tucking them into the left saddle pack. The woods were alive with animals, but none that she could see. There were tracks criss-crossing the path, especially at the narrower points. But nothing that looked big like bear, or as threatening. She was glad of that.

  She yawned loudly and the horse pricked its ears up at the sound, but did not otherwise change its plodding pace. She fell into a half sleep as the horse picked out its own way, following the easiest route.

  By noon the road had straightened and ran alongside the woods instead of through them. It was hard-packed and rutted, as if wagons had been-pulled frequently along the track. Scillia’s naps had finally ceased and she was able to watch the road and forest beside her with equal parts interest and wariness.