The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  The Garuns had buried Sir Malfas days before, and having no one else to direct their lives—two of their captains having been slain in the fighting on the dungeon stairs and the rest either drunk on the Garunian wines, or incompetent—they slowly began to desert the castle, by ones and twos and threes.

  A few sought to buy their way aboard ships to sail home. They were filleted by the very sailors they offered money to. The canny Dale fisherfolk, while not used to fighting pitched battles, were quite adept at seizing what chances they were given. They rowed the dead and dying Garuns out in their boats well past the Skellies and dropped them over, weighted down with old anchors or chains.

  Others of the Garuns, however, took to the countryside and, in troops of seven or ten or fifteen, began careers of rapine and pillage that the nearby farmhouses and small country towns could not stand against. These were well-organized groups of soldiers and they made lightning-fast raids, escaping with what prizes they could find—a girl, cellars full of cheese and wine, even gold rings, some cut from the fingers of fainting women. As one of them said “We have made more each night than in all the days of soldiering here together.”

  Only a small ship’s company worth—some seventy-three men—stayed loyal to the Dales king, if loyalty to a madman could be prized. They sent off messages using Jemson’s carrier pigeons with little hope that King Kras would send ships for them. He was not a monarch who took defeat well and had never been one to support losers or deserters. Spread thin around the castle, the remaining Garuns guarded Jemson’s shrunken domain with a fierce kind of pride well mixed with anger and despair. They held the servers hostage to that pride and only one—a wine steward who knew about the window in the cellar—escaped to alert the rest of Berick town about what was going on inside. The townsfolk already had some notion of it, from the farmers and foresters who had fled to the city in the hope that the king might call back his troops. They had some notion of the deserters, but not of how few remained to guard the castle. So they did not try to besiege it. Instead they sent delegations to try and talk to the usurper king, the “king from across the water.”

  But the king would not see the Dales folk.

  He would not see anyone.

  He spoke to no one but the dead man.

  And after a while, the dead man spoke back.

  Scillia had led her own company, some two hundred strong, away from M’dorah the hour after Jano’s troops had gone. Sarana rode by her side. Scillia never glanced back at the plain and the rocks that reached jagged fingers toward the sky but kept her face grimly set on the path before them.

  “Once I thought I might find my mother there, in M’dorah,” she said suddenly to Sarana.

  “She is gone over the ridge and into the realm of story,” Sarana replied.

  Scillia did not explain that it had been a different mother and a different story she had been seeking. She liked Sarana well enough, trusted her more than anyone else in their small army. But there were some things a queen could not share.

  And, Scillia thought, now I am forced to be a queen indeed.

  That thought bothered her greatly, that what she once longed for was now a burden. But there was no one she dared tell this to. Except in her conversations with herself late into the night.

  They had made a good start on their march home that first day, camping in a small meadow that lay deep in the woods.

  Exhausted, the troops lay on their pallets, most already deeply asleep. But Scillia could not sleep at all. Instead she went from campfire to campfire, speaking softly with the few men and women who were still awake. They thought she did it for them, to give them heart. She knew she did it because she did not want to dream.

  Her wanderings that night took her to the far edge of the encampment which was lit only by half a moon, and then a foot more into the woods. The dark folded around her. An owl cried out from within the deeper forest, a sound much like a child crying. Scillia shuddered and pulled her cloak strings together, tying them with a quick one-handed movement that was both awkward and efficient.

  A bit of movement beyond the shadows, in the deepest dark, put her on alert. There were pinpricks of light moving toward her, but they moved without any sound. Not a snap of twig or a rustle of leaves or a scuffling of ground. It was as if the forest itself had stopped breathing.

  She turned to shout a warning to the others, and suddenly found herself surrounded by a circle of some thirty mannikins each half the size of a man, dressed all in green, with a skin that had a translucent green glaze over fine bones.

  The shout died in her throat.

  “Grenna!” she breathed. She had thought them but a story. Her mother’s story about them, she had never credited. She had thought the tale only some sort of parable she had never quite understood. “Green Folk.”

  One of the mannikins moved forward, breaking the circle. He came close enough to her that she could have reached out and touched his head but she did not dare such familiarity even though she was queen. He raised his hand in greeting, speaking in a strange, lilting tongue.

  “Av, Scillia, fila e soror. Av Scillia, regens circulor.”

  Scillia thought she understood him, for it was like—and not like—the Old Tongue that her mother had insisted they be taught as children. The Grenna was hailing her as a daughter, a sister, and queen of the circle. She managed to hail him back, though it had been years since her last lessons. “Av, magister circular.”

  The little man nodded. “Your mother taught you well,” he said speaking plainly, his voice only slightly accented.

  Scillia nodded back. “I did not always listen.”

  “That is the way of the Tall Folk,” he said. “But a few learn.”

  “My mother is well?” Scillia’s voice broke in the middle of the question.

  “She is quonda e futura.”

  “Well, quonda—now—is when she is needed.”

  “She is not needed here. You are the One. She sends this message: Every path has a turning. Every turning is a path.”

  Scillia houghed through her nose like an impatient horse. “I hate that kind of talk!” She took a step closer to the little man. “Tell her that …”

  But whatever Scillia was going to say, there was no one left to say it to. For the moment she took the step toward him, the little man and the entire circle of Grenna were gone as if they had never been. Scillia spun around in place once, then again. But she was quite alone.

  When she turned to go back to the camp that, too, was gone. Or at least the troops were gone. Her horse grazed alone. The fires that had been burning steadily at her back moments before were now ashes.

  Cold ashes.

  The conversation with the Grenna that had been but a few sentences long had taken days. Or weeks. She could not tell which. There was no one to ask. She sank to the ground and, for the first time in years, she wept like a child, those deep, horrible, shuddering cries that went on and on and on until the dawn.

  Sarana lay on her blanket alone. She felt every inch a solitary. If she could have wept she would have. She had given up weeping when she was a little girl, knowing that it changed nothing. When Scillia had disappeared, they had spent precious days searching the woods for her. But the scumble of footprints—the circle of tiny naked feet—was exactly the same as Sarana had seen on the ridge when Queen Jenna had gone. At the end of two days, she had called a halt to the search, though she left Scillia’s horse—just in case.

  “We must go on or all indeed will be lost,” she said. “Jano and the others cannot move without our protection.”

  “But who will be our king? Who will rule the Dales?” asked one of the farmers, a man named Flag, whose mouth often flapped like a banner in the wind.

  “Scillia will return,” Sarana told him.

  “You do not know that,” Flag replied.

  “You do not know otherwise,” she said.

  She thought it a strong rejoinder. But that day and the next, several of the farmers and
villagers slipped away in the night, back to their holdings, melting away into the forest as efficiently and mysteriously as Scillia had.

  Do not think, Sarana promised them in her mind, that I will forget your desertion. She had learned all their names with the queen. But she put the deserters out of mind as she pushed the others to move more quickly the next day, through the forest and then out of it onto the narrow western road on their way toward Berick.

  They moved too fast for care, without scouts to give them a measure of safety, for speed was uppermost in all their minds. Therefore they were totally unprepared for the slaughter at the West Road’s turning.

  Five bands of the renegade Garun soldiers, a tight-knit force of sixty-three men, had been shadowing them for a day without their knowing it. The Garuns had waited above a narrow cut through two cliffs and when the main body of Sarana’s marchers were caught below them, the Garuns fired off arrows and rained down boulders on the trapped Dales folk, then scrambled down the cliffside to finish them.

  Only Sarana and ten men at the front on horseback, and a half a dozen at the rear, also mounted, escaped injury. The rest were slaughtered where they lay. Sarana, stone-faced and shaking, watched from afar, held back from adding her own body and those of the few survivors to the defeat by dint of her army training.

  “We are still enough,” she told the men, “to create a diversion for Jano’s sailors. There is nothing we can do here but die. We must ride. Ride for Berick. Ride for the good of the Dales. But never forget what you saw here today.”

  And they rode as if the Garuns were chasing them. But the Garuns, looking for more easy prey, went north instead.

  “My brother and I,” King Jemson announced to a startled server on the morning of the fifteenth day, “want to invite the lords of the Dales and their good ladies to a dinner this night. Full dress is required. See to it.”

  The server, a girl of fifteen with a pronounced limp, nodded, unable to speak.

  “Send me my dresser. And a cook for I wish to plan the menu. This will be a great feast. I will show the Dales how the Garuns give a party.”

  Shaking, the girl took away the breakfast tray which had scarcely been touched and went as fast as she could below stairs to the kitchen where she dropped the tray on the floor and proceeded to have a shrieking fit until the undercook was able to calm her with a draught of berry wine.

  “He wants … a feast!” she cried.

  “Who does?” asked the cook.

  “Him. And his dead brother that was the good prince.”

  “Nonsense, girl,” said the cook who was as sensible a man as a cook could be. “The dead do not eat.”

  “Nor less the living,” pointed out the undercook and nodded at the scattered breakfast things on the floor.

  “Nonetheless, they want it. A big feast, too. With lords and ladies.”

  “Have we any?” asked the steward’s lad who doubled as sauce cook when needed.

  “We have the council,” said the undercook.

  “We had the council,” put in the scullery maid. “That bloody king has killed them all.”

  “What will we do then?” asked the server.

  “You will round up whoever is not actually serving and find them clothes from the queen’s summer things. And the good king’s store. Bless them in Alta’s memory. And I will go up to the mad Jem and work out a menu. Else he’ll kill the rest of us. And have our corpses at a fancy-dress ball no doubt.” And saying that, the cook dusted his hands of the bread flour and went up the stairs. He kept his apron on, thinking even a mad king would know him for a cook and not ask more of him than the menu, though he left his white chef’s hat behind.

  Jemson was actually waiting for him at the door. “I want seven courses,” he began without any other sort of greeting.

  The cook was happy enough to hold the conversation outside the room. Even in the hall he could smell the corpse. It was worse, much worse, than hanged grouse. He nodded at the appropriate pauses in the king’s dinner orders, though all the while he was wondering if there were some way he might poison the man without harming others at the party or getting executed himself. But he is the Anna’s son, he thought suddenly. The cook had been in the army that had liberated Berick Castle, had been cook at the castle from before Jemson was born. Such a small baby. Such big lungs. And with that, all thoughts of regicide fled the cook’s mind.

  “At dark, when the candles are lit, we will come down the stairs, brother light and brother dark,” Jemson said and then giggled. “Won’t Skada be jealous, silly shadow bitch. And see you that the dinner is served promptly. And with the appropriate wines.”

  “You can trust me,” the cook said.

  “You can trust me what?” There was an awful look on Jemson’s face.

  The cook was momentarily confused.

  “You can trust me, Majesty!” Jemson said. “Do not forget.” He put his finger to the side of his nose and smiled. “Wouldn’t want to whip you for forgetting.” He shook his head. “I was whipped for that, you know. But only once. I am a quick learner. King Kras himself said so.”

  The cook nodded and took his leave, feeling lucky to have escaped. But as he went down the stairs—two at a time despite a bad back—a voice came floating down after him. “Send me my dresser!”

  “You can count on me, Majesty,” the cook called back, feeling both foolish and treasonous at the same time.

  Scillia found the first burned-out farm house before she had gone very far. The second was a field away. From the state of the ashes, she knew the homes had not been on fire long ago. That there were two of them was very suspicious.

  When she came upon the third along the same road, she began to suspect the worst. “The Garuns have been here,” she said aloud to her horse, not expecting any reply. But she was feeling incredibly alone and even hearing her own voice was better than the silence.

  “If the Garuns are no longer corked up in Berick Castle, then they have deserted and taken to raiding, or else they have been resupplied from the Continent. Either way, our situation is worsened.” She did not dare think about Sarana and Jano and their troops or try and guess how long they had been gone. “One problem at a time,” she whispered.

  The horse shook its head. Not at her voice, as she first suspected, but at a shadow that suddenly crossed the road. Scillia saw it from the corner of her eye, began to draw her sword, then stopped when she realized it was a girl, not more than ten, with coppery hair as short as a boy’s and a smudged nose. She was dressed in a brown shift, or else the material was muddy. It was difficult to tell.

  Scillia reined in the horse, but did not dismount.

  “Madame,” the girl said, “can you help us? You have a sword and we have none. My pa has been killed. My ma has only me, and she so tore up by the Garuns.…”

  Scillia dismounted then and held out her hand to the girl. “Take me to your mother,” she said.

  The girl took the hand, and lead her into the trees. There, some fifty yards from the road, was a rough lean-to and under it lay a woman. Tore up was a bit of an understatement. Scillia gasped when she saw how cruelly the woman’s face had been slashed, the untreated wounds still gaping, the new flesh trying unsuccessfully to patchwork across the damaged cheeks, the red line on her neck from a garrotting, the broken nose. What was not slashed was bruised. Scillia did not doubt the woman was hurt the same way all over her body. It was a wonder she was still alive. She had no clothing on but a blanket that was loosely draped over her.

  “How did you escape the same fate?” Scillia asked the child.

  “I was in the fields,” the girl said. “I lay down in the rows, between the new timothy. They did not see me.”

  “We said …” the woman croaked, “we were alone and they believed us. Bless Alta who saved my girl.”

  “But who did not save you,” Scillia said, trying to pull away the blanket to see the wounds. The blanket was stuck to the bloody flesh and the woman screamed softly at each
attempt. “I wonder why.”

  “I will ask her when I see her,” the woman said. “Which will be very soon. Take my girl. My Sarai. Pledge me that.” She held her hand up to Scillia and when Scillia reached over to take the hand in hers, the woman gasped. “One arm. You have but one arm. Be you the queen’s child?”

  Scillia nodded. “Now I am the queen,” she said.

  The woman closed her eyes, clearly understanding. When she opened them again she spoke to her daughter, “Go with the new queen. Do not mourn. It is the turning. That is all.”

  “The turning?” Scillia asked. But with a deep sigh, the woman was dead.

  Sarai knelt by her mother’s side and covered her face with the blanket. Then she stood. “I be yours,” she said to Scillia, and bowed her head.

  “Then our first task together,” said Scillia, “is to bury your mother.” She patted the child on the head. “I did not get to bury mine.”

  When the woman was buried, and Sarai’s father as well—though that was pretty ghastly, for the foxes and buzzards had been at his bones—Scillia helped her on to the horse and then mounted behind.

  “Where do we go?” asked Sarai. “Do we go to your castle?

  “Not for a while yet,” Scillia answered. “First we must get us an army.”

  “An army?” the child asked.

  “To get my kingdom back,” Scillia told her.

  “How do we do that?”

  “Farmhouse by farmhouse, lane by lane,” Scillia said. She spoke with more enthusiasm than she had, but she did not want to tell Sarai how small their chances were. After all, a child who had already lost so much did not need the promise of more loss to come.

  Scillia and the girl rode for three days, past more smouldering farmhouses, seeking out those who were still alive. She learned then that she was not weeks or months late, but had lost only two days to the Grenna.

  “Thank you, Alta,” she whispered when she first heard that news. Still, even two days put her at a great disadvantage. She had no way to catch up with either Jano or Sarana, or to know how they might fare. She could only do what she had told Sarai she would do: collect an army.