The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  With an army she could march on Berick Castle herself.

  So by ones and by twos she and the child collected promises at farm houses. In the villages—often no more than a house or inn left standing—they collected more. Scillia did not care who she asked: men, women, children. The aged. The infirm.

  “Come with me to Berick,” she said. “Help me take back our land. It was done once by my mother and father, by your mothers and fathers, by your sisters and brothers. Now we must do it again.”

  She never raised her voice when she spoke; she was all the more compelling for it. What the Garuns had begun with their savagery, Scillia completed with her quiet compassion and strength.

  Men and women and children. The aged. The infirm. They all pledged her their support. And she gave them the same message: They were to meet at several crossroads on a particular day hence. At the Turnings, Scillia called them. The older folk approved the name, though Sarai did not.

  The child ran a grubby hand through her coppery hair. “That is not what my ma meant by a turning,” she said.

  “If it gathers an army, I will call it a tumbling. Or a tossing. Or a tussling.” And when Sarai laughed at that, the high trilling sent the first bit of pleasure into Scillia’s heart since she had left the castle to take her dying father into the woods.

  On the appointed day, a group of some thirty women stood at one turning, waiting. The moon hung by a thread of cloud overhead and the women spoke in uneasy whispers. Their distress showed in the shadows beneath their eyes, in the angular hunch of their shoulders.

  “Where is she?” a middle-aged woman asked, the moon writing runes across her forehead in deep groves. “How can she be late in coming? The night is cold, and passion turns cold, too, with each hour. And what of the Garuns? We would make easy pickings standing out here in the night.”

  “Hush, Manya,” the woman by her side cautioned. They could have been twins, though one was dark-haired with streaks of grey, the other light. “She will come. She promised. And isn’t it said, Better late in the pan than never in the pot?”

  Two younger women, hardly more than girls, stood arm in arm, gazing up at the moon, one of them with braids as light as that wintry moon, the other with plaits blue-black as the sky. The cloud had become a fringe over the upper half of the moon, so that it looked like a broken coin.

  “Look!” the light-haired girl cried, pointing. Her sister pointed as well.

  “If the clouds completely …” Manya’s warning began. She did not have to say more. They all knew that once the moon disappeared, the dark sisters would go as well, back to their shadow world and their part of the mission for at least this night would be that much more difficult.

  “Where is she?” Now it was Manya’s twin who gave the complaint.

  “Hush, Sonya,” Manya cautioned, and they both gave a single laugh at the reversal, a mirthless laugh, more like a sigh.

  “I do not understand,” another woman said. “Why does she dally with the men of Suldan Village? Men are the enemy.”

  A mutter of agreement ran around the ragged circle.

  “Not all.” It was the girl with the light-colored braids. “Not all men.” She spoke with feeling, but without proof. She was that kind of girl.

  “All,” said Manya. “Even the ones we like.”

  “Liked,” corrected Sonya. They lived in a small village made up mostly of women who were the remnants of one of the Hames that had been broken up after the Gender Wars. A group of thirty Garun renegades had fired their houses but a week before, driving the women before them like cattle. Only a few had escaped in the night. The village men had not come to their rescue, instead turning over their coins to the Garuns, begging for their lives. It had not worked. They had not been spared.

  The two girls, too, had been in the drive. But with their young legs they had sprinted to safety early on and had not seen how brutally the Garuns had used their mothers. They remembered the village men with a good deal more affection and were still mourning their deaths. They walked away from the circle and towards the woods, as if that were their answer.

  The moon’s fringe, like a curtain, had lowered even more, and the whisperings from the circle of women grew even more frantic. Then suddenly a drumming of hoof beats signaled them. The girls turned back and called to the circle: “She is here? She is come?”

  The moon disappeared into the cloud completely and a single horse, black as the solid center of an eye, emerged from the woods as if the forest had spit it out. There were two riders, one large, one small and when the horse got closer, the women could see that one rider was a grown-up, the other a thin little girl with red hair.

  The horse was covered with sweat from the run, but when the grown rider got down she was not sweating at all. In fact she was shivering violently for she was wearing only a thin shirt, the one empty sleeve tied up with a bedraggled ribband to her shoulder, a pair of leather trousers, and high soft leather boots run down at the heels. The child was swaddled in what was surely the woman’s cloak.

  Manya shrugged out of her own cloak and offered it. “Here, my queen,” she said.

  “Scillia. Until I am on my throne again, that is my name.”

  “I cannot call you that, my …” Manya said.

  “You will call me that,” Scillia ordered. Her voice was tired but full of authority. It was a new voice for her and she used it sparingly. The voice told them what she would not—that she was the queen. Still, she tired of the same argument whenever she met with her recruits. The men were willing soon enough to call her by name. But the women … I am getting perilously tired of women, she decided.

  “Still, my … Scillia,” Manya stumbled a moment over the name so plainly spoken, “take my cloak. You have none.”

  “The child needed it more than I,” Scillia said, but she accepted the proffered cloak. She thought she knew the difference between courage and foolhardiness. A cloak against the cold was not the difference between a hero and knave. “Tell me your name, now that I have what is yours.”

  “Manya,” the woman said. “Of Craigton Village, and before that Nill’s Hame.”

  “That is a name I have heard from my mother,” Scillia said, nodding, though what her mother had said of it, or when, she had no clue. Still it was best not to admit that now. “Manya,” she said again, thus committing the name to memory.

  “What news then of our army?” the girl with the braids cried out, grabbing hold of Scillia’s reins.

  Scillia turned toward her. “News? There is much to tell, but first give me your name.”

  The girl was suddenly shy. “Seven, madame.” She stuttered on the name and handed the reins back to Scillia.

  Scillia smiled to put her at her ease. “Was that because you were the seventh in your family?”

  Seven giggled at that. “No. Seven because it took them seven years to get me. And then when they got me, and I was only a girl, my father said: ‘A girl is less than no child at all.’ My mother was so hurt by this, she took me in her arms, still bleeding birth blood, and walked to the old Selden Hame where she left me.”

  “And did not stay herself?” Scillia asked gently.

  Seven shook her head. “Na, na. Stayed only long enough to be cleaned up by the sisters and to give me a name. Then she walked back to her man. But it is better so. We say in Selden, Many mothers are best. Besides, without them I would not have my dark sister. None my age know how ’tis done. But I do. I was the last at Selden, though.” She smiled shyly up at Scillia.

  “Well, then you are beyond me, for I have no shadow but the one that follows me on the ground. Though my mother’s dark sister, Skada—blessed be—helped raise me up. And once I visited your Hame, though you would have been a little child.”

  “I do not remember you,” Seven said.

  “Nor I you,” Scillia said. “But I have you now.”

  A moment later the cloud moved away from the moon and Seven’s sister appeared by her side. Scillia smiled.


  “And you ate?”

  “Tween, Your Majesty,” the girl said.

  “Scillia,” Seven said, poking her in the side, getting poked in return.

  “And I am Sonya,” said Manya’s sister. “Do you wish to name us one by one, or should we be about our business? There is more than chattery to be done this night.”

  “It never hurts to be named,” Scillia said gently, pulling Manya’s cloak tighter around her. “If we are to die, best not to go unnamed into the dark.”

  “We will not die. We will win this fight,” Manya said. The other woman echoed her, all but Seven and Tween who were silent and the girl Sarai who was still napping atop the horse.

  “We all die sometime, my good Manya. Only Alta is forever.” Scillia’s voice was low, but nonetheless full of steel. “And some of us will die in this fight. It is best that we understand that from the start. If you cannot go into it content with that knowledge, best not to go into it at all.” She dropped the reins and, whipping off the cloak, handed it back. Her horse, as if made of stone, did not move. Nor did the child on its back.

  THE HISTORY:

  Editor, History and Nature:

  Sirs:

  Female infanticide, so common before the reign of King Carum, has been long held to have disappeared completely with his ascendancy. But new evidence disagrees with these old assumptions. According to old population records discovered recently by Sir Elric Hanger and his wife, Lady Nan, in the ruins of the Northern Palace Grounds at Berike, a lingering misogyny in rural villages still led to an underground trade in girl babies. (See “Farm Babies and Baby Farming in the Midlands” by S. Cowan. Demographics Annual, Pasden University Press, #79.)

  So convincing are these records that they make clear the patterns of abandonment changed only in subtle ways, slowly being incorporated into the so-called fostering laws, those laws that concerned the rearing of children away from their natural homes. (See “Forgotten Fosters” by A. S. Carpenter-Ross, Psychological Abstracts, Conference on Daleian Research, 1978.)

  Of course a foundling must needs first be lost! This simple fact has been overlooked for years in the studies done on the many fostering relationships, such as apprenticeships, oblation, parental death by suicide, or even godparenting. And while there have been many scholarly studies done on fostering in the higher levels of society—for example, King Carum’s own son was sent abroad to live as a royal hostage/fosterling at the palace of the Garunian king till he was sixteen and married to his foster-sister who was known as Mad Jinger—foundlings at the low end of society’s scale have been lost a second time by the historians. With my father’s notes and my own research I hope to write an important essay on this subject.

  What is the difference between fostering and abandonment?

  Ask the child.

  THE STORY:

  Scillia turned to the girls. “I was a foundling myself.”

  “I did not know, Majesty,” Seven said.

  “Scillia.”

  “I did not know, Scillia,” the girl repeated.

  “Queen Jenna was not your mother?” Tween asked.

  “White Jenna was certainly my mother in truth, but she did not give birth to me,” Scillia told her. “She rescued me when my first foster mother, a warrior of M’dorah Hame, died. I had been left on a hillside by my birth mother and found by the M’dorans. The women of the South Dales may say All history begins between a woman’s legs, but I am no longer convinced.”

  She smiled at them. “But we must now talk not of birth but of war. Manya has the right of it.”

  “A man’s war,” added Manya.

  Scillia stared over at her. “It is a woman’s war as surely,” she said. “It is my war. The one who thrust me off my throne was a man, yes. But not all men are cruel.”

  “I have no proof of any other,” Manya said, and her dark sister echoed her, adding “And doesn’t it say in the texts that Man is wood, woman water?”

  “Water weights wood. That is also written in the texts. In The Book of Light, as surely you must know,” Scillia said. She had grown up hearing her mother and Skada argue from texts. It did not impress her, but she could do it if she had to. “And if you want proof, I shall give it you. My brother Corrie is proof. A sweeter man you will not find. Honest, generous, funny, dear. He supports my claim against the Garun king.” She found she could not say Jemmie’s name, as if by naming him he had some kind of hold on her. “My father Carum, too, was always kind and generous and loving.” She thought a minute. “My friends on the council—old Jareth and Piet. I have never had less than good faith from them. And the man who commands half my army now—Jano, of the Southern Guard. No, I cannot say all men are this, all men are that. Men are neither all good nor bad.”

  “And the man who raped me?” asked a young woman standing to one side. “I was neither handfasted nor married to him, but still he had me. And my own father called him ‘brother’ and told him to ride me the harder.”

  “And the man who cut my own mother’s throat in front of me,” added Manya, “as if she were no more than a pig for the butchering. It was then I ran off to Nill’s Hame.”

  Scillia shook her head. “We cannot waste time here countering man for man, tale for tale. We will never convince one another. History begins in the heart, I think. I cannot deny there is cruelty in the world. Certainly we have all born the Garunian yoke. But in this one thing you must trust me. There are good men here in the Dales and they will be fighting with us side by side. The throne will be won back only when we bind ourselves by friendship, not separate ourselves by history. Sisters, give me your hands on this.” She thrust her one hand forward.

  Seven and Tween grabbed her first, then the others. Manya and Sonya were near the last. But finally they too were carried, if not by Scillia’s oratory, at least by the fact that they were afraid to stand alone.

  “Sisters, if I had a second hand I would use it to hold you all fast. But I have only the one. Still I have a heart—and that you have entire.”

  Manya and Sonya did not look completely convinced, but Scillia ignored them and kept on speaking. “You must all ride on to Greener’s Hollow. We gather there tomorrow eve. Collect what weapons you can. Surely even in the ashes of your homes there can be found a sword, a pike, a knife, a bow. A simple cudgel from a stout tree will serve. If the Garuns think this a man’s war, we will prove them mistaken. If women think they cannot fight, then in this they are wrong. But I must ride now. There are several more Turnings I have to visit, bringing them news of the meeting place and time. You are the seventh. I will get no sleep this night.”

  She walked back to her horse, placed her foot in the stirrup, and pulled herself up one-handed. There was nothing awkward in the movement.

  “We will come with you this night, Scillia!” Seven and Tween cried out together.

  Scillia looked down at them, her arm around Sarai who still slept wrapped in her cloak. “I have promised one mother to take care of her child. I cannot watch after more.” Then kicking the horse into a sudden canter, which served to wake Sarai for a moment, horse and riders were quickly gone into the dark woods.

  Above the clearing the moon was a full, bright promise. Seven cocked her head to one side. “She has no dark sister and only one hand. She needs us.”

  “Do not fancy yourself, girl,” Manya said. “She has been one-handed from the first. And perhaps a queen needs time to be alone.”

  “She is not alone,” Tween pointed out. “There is the child.…”

  Seven nudged her to be quiet and Tween shut up. But the nudge was as much promise as warning. They walked away from the other women as if they no longer cared.

  THE LEGEND:

  About two hundred years ago, in Cannor’s Crossing, the wife of the town cobbler gave birth to twin girls who were joined at the hip and shoulder. The midwife took such a fright at the devilish sight, she left before the birthing was done, making her way across the ford in a shallow boat and leaving
the poor mother to die in a pool of her own blood.

  What was the cobbler to do, never having seen such a thing before? He took his leather-cutting knife and severed the girls, sewing up their wounds at hip and shoulder with heavy black boot thread. Only the misfortune was that the babes had just three arms between them, so one girl got two arms, the other just one.

  The one-arm girl got married, and lived to a ripe old age, the other didn’t. No accounting for a man’s taste, I suppose. The two-armed girl stayed with her father and learned his trade. But when the old man died, she died, too, as if he—and not her sister—had been the twin and they joined together.

  My grandmother told me this story, and as she was born herself in Cannor’s Crossing, I have no reason to disbelieve it.

  THE STORY:

  Sarana and her ten fellow soldiers rode through day and night toward Berick. The horror they had seen, the bodies left unburied, haunted them and they did not dare sleep. They also did not know that a few at the rear of the marchers had escaped back into the deep woods. Only one thing was on their minds—to get to Berick and do what they could for a diversion so that Jano and his sailors might block the harbor unseen.

  When they got to the coast it was almost day, and but a quarter of that day’s journey by foot more to Berick. Sarana halted their headlong flight. The horses were near exhaustion, the riders likewise. She knew that they would have to rest before the last part of their exercise. Besides, they did not dare let themselves be seen so close to the city. There were certain to be patrols ahead of them, though they seemed to have outrun any Garuns at their back.

  “We will travel no more through the day,” she said. “We will go the rest of the way tonight.”

  “Why waste time?” asked Malwen, a short man with a notoriously short temper that had not been improved by his lack of sleep. “It is tomorrow’s morning when we should be making our noise.”