The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  Scillia took a step back, away from her mother’s hand.

  “Sil, you must trust me on this. You and Corrie. As for Jem …”

  “Jem trusts no one and no one trusts Jem,” Scillia said bitterly.

  “That you shall have to sort through yourselves,” Jenna said. “Do you know what the Berick fisherfolk say? The skate and the eel do not swim the same, but they both live in the sea. That is you and Corrie and Jem.”

  “We are not fish nor have we fins.”

  “You are not hearing me.”

  “I am not listening.”

  They glared at one another while around them the soldiers completed their tasks.

  “When father is dead, then will you come home?”

  Jenna took the step toward Scillia again, and put her arms around her daughter whose body remained rigid with anger. “Listen this time. He is not going to die. Nor am I. We will live on in the grove till you need us again.”

  “The grove or the Green Hall? Wasn’t that what the M’dorans call it?” Scillia tore herself from her mother’s arms. “Whatever its name, it is nothing but a nursery story. I will not be cozened at such a time with such tales. I am no child.” This time she walked two steps away, her one hand balling into a fist.

  Jenna smiled sadly. “Such stories hold their own truth, Scillia. And the truth is that your father and I were at the beginning of this circle, but it is your turning now.”

  “You intend to die with him!” Scillia cried. “I will never see you again.”

  Jenna went over to her and took the fist in both her hands, gently prising the fingers open. She kissed her daughter’s palm. “When you look in the mirror, Scillia, when you speak to your own daughters and sons, you will see me and hear me. I will be with you when you need me most.”

  “I need you most now, mother. We all need you most now.” Scillia fought the tears that glittered in her eyes, willing them not to fall.

  “The Dales need you now, not me,” Jenna said. “My work is done. It was done twenty-six years ago but I stayed for love. Your work is just beginning. Take the soldiers and go. Do not make me weak now when I need strength for two.” She embraced Scillia once again and this time Scillia returned it, her body shuddering with emotion.

  They stood breast to breast for a long moment, before Jenna broke them apart. She turned and started lining the sledge with cushions from the cart. A single soldier helped her, a woman with hair like a newly threshed wheat field.

  “I know you,” Jenna said slowly. “You are Sarana! Did you not go back to your own captain?”

  “No, I stayed on at the castle and sent Voss home.”

  “And have you been here, on the road, with us all the time? I did not recognize you till now.”

  “We notice what we must,” Sarana said.

  “And your back?”

  “Better than his,” Sarana said, nodding at Carum still dozing fitfully in the cart.

  Sarana and Scillia helped Jenna lift Carum into the sledge where they tied him down with a soft belt across the chest and feet so that he would not slip out. Scillia leaned over and kissed his face, but he did not stir.

  Then one by one the soldiers filed past to gaze down at their king. Sarana was the last of them.

  “Now go,” Jenna said to them and they started back down the road in a line more ragged than they were used to, but Scillia stubbornly stayed behind.

  “You must go, too,” Jenna said to her. “For your father. For me. Be a queen. Your people need you. Now!”

  Reluctantly, then angrily, Scillia mounted her gelding and rode after the soldiers. She did not look back to see Jenna, white braids atop her head like a crown, pick up the ends of the sledge in which Carum lay and start to pull it over the grass and into the nearest woods.

  Sarana peeled off from the troop at their first rest and, putting the woods between her and her mates, raced back the way they had come. She found the mark of the cart and the sledge tracks going into the woods. Leading her horse, she followed carefully deep and deeper still.

  After a while the trees opened out again onto a meadow where the grass was still winter brown. She puzzled over the muddled trail. Jenna’s track and that of the sledge were clear. But all around them, sometimes going across and smudging the prints, were the signs of many small naked feet, as if a gang of barefooted children had gathered around the woman and her burden.

  Sarana had heard stories of the Grenna, the Green Folk, the Little People, but she did not credit them. She had put her childhood—stark and terror-ridden—behind her along with childhood’s stories. Still she could not imagine what a group of children would be doing in this high meadow, so far from any town, shoeless and tracking the queen. She did not like the look of that circle of small prints. In her experience, things that could not be explained were dangerous things.

  Mounting her horse again, she galloped along the sledge trail to where the meadow ended once again in the woods. She had to dismount there to follow the trail along a crumbling ridge. In her heart she was all admiration for Jenna who must have been gifted with enormous strength to have come so far so fast dragging the sledge. But her head was full of warnings.

  “Ain’t natural,” she whispered to herself. “Ain’t right.”

  The ridge ended at a cliff’s edge. So did the trail. It took her all the rest of the day to climb down that cliff, sliding at times on the rocky scree.

  There was no sign of the sledge, the sick king, the queen.

  A week’s scouring on small rations and less sleep brought her no more answers. She gave up only when there were no more crumbs of journeycake and her stomach clenched at the thought of more boiled ferns. She rode her horse slowly back toward Berick Castle and the barracks she now called home.

  Scillia and the soldiers had been four days going and three days coming back. Her mood was not helped by the weather: it was grey and foggy in the mornings, grey and rainy in the afternoons. Only at night, under a surprisingly clear sky where stars flickered like fireflies, did she find some measure of peace.

  But she did not sleep.

  And she did not weep.

  The sergeant in charge of the guard tried to find her a place strewn with pine needles, soft and scented, since she would not rest in the cart.

  But still she did not sleep.

  And she would not eat.

  “Please, princess,” the sergeant begged, his homely face scrunched in concern. “If you do not sleep or eat, your mother will have my head.”

  He does not know, Scillia thought. He does not understand that she is never going to return. She did not try to enlighten him.

  Only when they arrived back at the castle to find the gates closed to them and the watch inexplicably wearing the colors of Garun soldiery did she tell him what she knew.

  “A queen three days and no longer,” she said with a self-deprecating laugh.

  “You will be queen for all time, ma’am,” he replied. It was all he said while he marshalled his few men and Scillia, leading them away from the castle and into the cover of the deep mazed woods before the Garuns within the stone walls had time or inclination to follow.

  THE LEGEND:

  Three days ride from Berick is a deep old-growth forest known as Gemma’s Grove or Queen’s Own. The woods there are thick with oak and blackthorn, rowan and ash; three species of squirrel live there and nowhere else in the Dales. In the deepest part of the woods is a strange meadow called The Green. Trackers and huntsmen will not willingly cross that lea. Men have fallen down sinkholes or otherwise disappeared. It is said that in the last century an entire troop of scouts wandered by mistake across that meadow-scape, boys in their first training. Twenty boys went in, only five came out again, and they had no idea what had happened to their mates.

  THE MYTH:

  Then Great Alta took the girl child by the hair and turned her around ten times. “Now,” quoth she, “you are a queen.”

  “I have no throne,” said the girl.

&n
bsp; “Make one. Or take one,” quoth Great Alta. “Or do without.”

  “Can I do such a thing?” asked the girl.

  “Can you not?” Great Alta replied.

  four

  Usurper King

  THE MYTH:

  Then Great Alta saw the girl on the ground and she was weeping.

  “What ails you?” quoth Great Alta.

  “I want my mam,” cried the girl.

  “You are too old for the nipple, too young for the grave. Mother yourself,” quoth Great Alta.

  THE LEGEND:

  There is a story they tell of the hundred-day king that when he returned from over the sea he killed his mother and father, his sister and brother all on the same day. And when the soldiers came to take him to the judgment room, he cried them merci.

  “For I am an orphan child,” he said. “And the last of my line.”

  So they showed him merci who had showed none to others. And from that day forth it is said in the Dales: He is as merciful as a hundred-day king, meaning someone who has absolutely no thought for others.

  THE STORY:

  Jemson found the throne a hard seat.

  He sent for pillows and tried them each in turn, pillows garnered from all the bedrooms and sitting couches in the castle.

  Corrie heard of the search when a server came to his room and demanded his bed cushions, for he had been confined to the one room since the day the seven Garun ships had sailed into the harbor and taken the castle with scarcely a blow dealt.

  “A hard seat indeed,” Corrie said, and laughed. “And he will find it harder still in the days to come. Here—take them with my blessing. Jem will find no good in them.”

  Trying to curry favor with the new regime, and being somewhat of a toad, the server reported this conversation to the new council chief, a Garun, who in turn told Jemson.

  At the news, Jemson’s face turned a variety of colors, all shades of red, starting with a flush at the neck. He was finding his brother less of a help than he had hoped, than he had counted on. “Blood,” he had warned the Garuns, “that is mine will not be spilled.” By that he had meant Scillia was fair game, but not his mother or brother. But when his mother had not returned, nor Scillia, and when Corrie had proved intractable, Jemson had to change his plans. He did not make new plans easily.

  “What …” he asked, thinking he was crafty in the doing and not realizing how transparent he was, “do you advise?”

  The Garun was the same Sir Rodergo Malfas who had come across the sea thirteen years earlier to take up the young prince. He had molded him, child and man, with an ease that was laughable, though he was always careful not to laugh at Jemson to his face. Jemson did not take teasing well. And any laughter he counted as ridicule, whether it was meant or not.

  “My King,” Malfas said, making such a low obeisance it was almost an insult, “your brother will not change. He can only gather around him those malcontents and wishers-of-ill. Best you put him with the others in the dungeon.”

  “But he is my brother,” Jemson said. He had half expected this advice from Malfas, indeed hoped for it. But faced with it in truth, he had a sudden qualm.

  “He is therefore your chiefest enemy,” Malfas explained. Sometimes he thought it would have been easier to work with the brother; he at least had brains and a sly wit. But it had been Jemson who had been gifted them, and Jemson they had trained. Art is inborn, craft outborn, the Book of Battles said. “We will not have him killed. Just … controlled.”

  “Good. I do not want him killed. He is of my …”

  “Your blood is sacred to us all, my king,” Malfas said, stroking his elegant moustache and smiling indulgently.

  “Then dungeon him,” Jemson said, glad to have had his mind made up for him. “And let’s get on with the coronation. You may call me king all you like, but I am not yet so in the eyes of my people.”

  Malfas nodded. “I will be but a minute,” he said, and went out into the hall to call the guard for that particular duty.

  The guards who came to take Corrie to the dungeon were Garuns as well. Few of the Dale soldiery had come willing into the new army. Those who had not been killed or imprisoned on the day the Garuns sailed into Berick Harbor, were long since fled to the woods.

  Corrie was not surprised by the sudden imprisonment. Indeed, in the weeks he had been confined to his bedroom, he had already managed to contact the two or three still-loyal servers in the castle—a cook, a scullery, and a girl whose father was one of the forest soldiers. He sent messages through them to his sister, though he did not expect to hear back from her. His comments on the guards and Malfas and Jemson were quite specific. He gave Scillia numbers and locations of the soldiers as best he could determine. He gave her his thoughts on the castle staff morale. While he did not consider himself Jemson’s chief enemy, no matter what Malfas might think—for he too held sacred the bonds of blood—he considered himself Scillia’s chief spy. Family, more than mere blood, and the safety of the Dales were first in his thoughts.

  Corrie was not surprised, but he was annoyed. “I am a prince,” he said to the Garuns, something he would never say to someone of the Dales. Still, he knew such things mattered deeply to the Garun men. “Do not dare put your hands on me.”

  They hesitated to touch him, and they let him put on a pair of heavy hose against the cold under his caftan as well as carry an extra cloak, but they chivvied him out the door, and down the stairs nonetheless. He walked before them, head held high, a bit of play-acting to impress upon them that he was Jemson’s brother and not to be tampered with.

  He supposed he could have tried to escape, but he was neither a hero nor a coward. He believed in time and in the Dales proverb: An hour makes a difference between the wise man and the fool. If it meant spending that hour in the wine cellar—for they had no real dungeon in Berick Castle—he would do it. He wrapped the cloak around him as if he suffered already from the cold. Actually it was to hide the short sword he had managed to take from his dressing room, hidden as it was against just such an eventuality under the very cloak he now wore.

  The wine cellar was not a dungeon, but its heavy oak door made it an effective gaol. The Garun guards opened the door for Corrie and did not touch him, but it was clear that they would handle him if he did not go in on his own. So he walked in, muttering “Peasants!” as he passed them. He was pleased to see that one of them, at least, had the grace to redden at the slander. It was hardly much of an insult in Dale terms. Most Dale folk were proud of their peasant origins. But the guard had the last laugh for he was the one who got to slam the door behind Corrie and lock it with the wine steward’s own great key.

  At least there were torches alit in the cellar and Corrie wandered through the barrel-vaults of stacked wine, some dusty and old, most of newer vintage and brought over the water with Jemson’s return. He came, at last, to a back room that was set up like a barracks. There were several dozen people sitting on pallets or playing cards in the flickering light: men, women, and several young boys as well.

  “Petra,” Corrie cried when he recognized her with the card players.

  “Ah, Corrie,” she said, looking up, “we wondered just how long it would be before Jemson put you in here, too.” She stood and came over to embrace him.

  “I am not sure it was Jem who did it.”

  Piet, who had been leaning against the wall, snorted. “Who else?” He joined the two of them.

  Corrie shook his head. “You know as well as I that he is a poppet. The hand on his back is Malfas’ own.”

  “And the hand on Malfas’ back?” Jareth said. His voice was husky as always but lower than usual, and he had a brief coughing spasm after speaking.

  “King Kras, of course.”

  “A long reach,” remarked Petra.

  “Drink with Garuns, use a long straw,” said Corrie. “Father says that all the time.”

  “Your father is dead by now,” Petra said gently. “And your mother.”


  Corrie shrugged. “Speaking of him living is an old habit, Petra. I know he is gone. As for mother, who can say for certain? She has not come home these four weeks. Try as he might—even offering a reward for information that would make a prince of a farmhand—Jemson has had no real word of her.”

  A shadow peeled off from the wall, intruding into their conversation. “I have some word.”

  “From her?” Corrie asked.

  “Of her.”

  “And have you told these good people?”

  “I did not know who in this prison to trust so I have kept my own counsel till now. But as they have put you in here, Prince Corrine, you who are her son—and not the other—” here she spat expertly to the side “I shall say what I know.”

  “Who are you?” Piet asked.

  “I am a soldier,” the woman said, running a hand through her short hair. “My name is Sarana. I was with the queen when she took King Carum into the woods.”

  “I know all my guard,” said Piet suspiciously. “You are none of them.”

  “Well, I was new come to them, and you raving about the king’s illness. I doubt you ever saw me. Till I came here, I had been with the southern border patrols. I rode back with the Anna on her last Wanderings, from the south.”

  “And why are you not there now? Did you leave them? Did you …?” Piet’s questions tumbled one after another till Petra put a hand on his shoulder.

  Sarana shrugged. “I am no Garun, sir. I am not the enemy. I came for love of the queen. I stayed for love of the queen. I volunteered to go with the cart and sledge. Would you have me prove more?”

  “Pah! It would be just like Jemson to put a spy in our midst,” Piet said, shrugging off Petra’s hand and turning away.

  “I … am … no … spy.” Sarana’s voice was like a honed knife.

  “What else would a spy say?,” Piet said.

  “This is nonsense,” Corrie put in. “He would not use a woman at any rate. Tell us, Sarana, what you know. We will decide if it is to the point and how to use it.”

  “You are her son, indeed,” said Sarana. “I will speak to you. As for the commander, I wonder that he has not lost the greater part of himself in the king’s death.”