The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  Scillia hugged Sarai, then looked up at Seven. “Alta’s hairs!” she said. “You could have killed me with that sword.”

  “No chance of that,” Seven said. “He was much too big to miss.” Her words were brave, but the tremor in her voice and the tears running down her cheeks gave them the lie.

  “Did you learn that at Selden Hame?” Scillia whispered, rocking the weeping child as she spoke.

  “It’s the Game,” Seven said, finally.

  “Game?”

  “The Game of Wands.” She tried to smile and failed. “The mothers taught us. ‘Round the circle, round the ring,’” she began in a breathy voice.

  “I know, child,” Scillia said, gathering her in as well. “I once called it a silly sport. How was I to know?” And she thought how her own mother had taught her only games of peace. Well, it will be the children who are my teachers now.

  THE RHYMES:

  Trot trot to Selden,

  Trot o’er the lea,

  They caught seven children,

  But they never caught me.

  —Ball-bouncing rhyme, South Dales

  Ride a black horse,

  Ride a grey mare,

  Follow the lady

  If only you dare.

  —Toe-and-finger-count game, South Dales

  The number of the beast

  Is three times seven.

  All good children

  Go to Heaven.

  —Counting out rhyme, North Dales

  THE STORY:

  Well before the lowest tide, Sarana led the men along the shore, leaving their horses in the willow copse. Three of them carried the withy ladder and they slipped through the dark, being silent a shadows.

  This time luck was with them. They were not seen.

  The wind off the ocean was cold and they were all shivering by the time they got to the rocks below the castle, but it did not slow them down. They set the ladder against the wall, sighting on the single dark window above them, then anchored the bottom of the ladder between two boulders, with a man on each side. The ladder was within a hand’s span of the window and Sarana let out a sigh of relief.

  “I’ll go first,” she whispered. “I know what to expect. Or at least I knew better than anyone else. If I scream, scatter and find some other way to divert them from looking out toward the sea.”

  “We should have gone the other side, then,” muttered Malwen and several of the men grunted their agreement.

  “We no longer have the numbers for that sort of thing,” Sarana reminded them, though in truth she half believed him right. Without another word, she began to scramble up the ladder, pleased that the rungs held.

  Near the top, she slowed and felt cautiously with her right hand over the sill, something biting deeply into her palm.

  “Alta’s braid!” she cursed quietly. How could she have forgotten the broken glass? She inched up two more rungs, keeping her head and body to the side of the window, and carefully peered in.

  The window was not boarded up but inside the wine cellar it was pitch black. Not a single torch lit the rooms. That is odd, she thought, remembering the flickering light of the prison. She listened carefully for a moment longer, than scrambled down the ladder.

  “What is it?” someone asked. “Were you seen?”

  “There is no one there,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Malwen asked sourly.

  “Just that. The rooms are dark, empty. Can we make a torch before I go back?”

  “I can,” someone whispered, and was gone back up the beach, returning shortly with a stick of driftwood wound round with dry grasses. “It won’t last long.”

  “I just need it for a short while to see what is wrong up there.” She felt in her leather pocket for her flints. “Give it me. I’ll signal as soon as I know.”

  “A scream will do,” Malwen said. He hadn’t meant it to relieve the tension but everyone laughed.

  Sarana scrambled back up the ladder, with less caution this time, though made awkward by the driftwood torch. She balanced for a moment on the sill, and leaned the torch against the side of the window. Then she got out her flints, struck a spark, and lit the torch. She held it in front of her into the cavernous dark and the light flowed like water over the wall and floor. She could see nothing that might be a danger, so she jumped down, slipped on a wine bottle, and stifled a yell. But her head hit the floor hard and she not only saw the torch, but repeating stars as well.

  When the stars finally cleared and there was only a nasty throbbing at the back of her head, she got up and carefully looked around in the torch’s flickering light. The rooms were empty of prisoners and the door out into the hall gaped wide open. Torches in the hall lit the passageway. She was not sure what that meant—whether it was a trap or simple abandonment—but she was about to go back to the window and call the others up when she heard footsteps coming down the stone stairs toward her. Quickly she guttered her torch and faded back into the second room, standing by the door where she could see but not be seen.

  Two men with torches—Garun guards as far as she could tell—entered the wine cellar and after them came two other men, probably servers. One was saying something about the king and his feast. She could not hear it all. Silently she drew her sword and then reached as well to the knife on her belt.

  She waited a long awful moment until the guards were nicely silhouetted in the doorway. Then she stepped full into the doorway of the second room which was still in the dark. Flinging her knife at the one guard’s head, she followed its path before either man realized there was only one of her. She cut the second guard crosswise from neck to underarm, then swung around and thrust the first guard through as well, though he was already falling, the knife through his left eye.

  Immediately she stood up with her sword raised, but the servers were both on their knees before her.

  “Is it the queen?” one asked, unable to raise his head to be sure.

  “I serve the queen,” she said, horrified at how squeaky her voice sounded.

  “Then we serve you,” said the other man. “The usurper is quite mad.”

  She let them stand, but slowly, and had them pull the two dead Garuns out of the light. Then, still sighting them with her raised sword, she had them carry the torches to the open window.

  Leaning out the window, she called down. “Come on up. Even Malwen, I think, will be able to make it through with our help.”

  By the evening hundreds were gathered at Greener’s Hollow, mostly women, all armed. Scillia was one of the few on horseback. Her arm around young Sarai, she addressed her troops under a moon that had a blackened side.

  “I have heard of the Garuns who daily rape and kill. I have seen their handiwork. They have turned our green woods and hillsides, our valleys and farmyards, into slaughteries. We have been their cattle too many days. Now they will become ours.”

  She paused and let them cheer her because it would make them warm while the message she brought them could only bring them chill.

  “We will fight hill by hill if we must, blade of grass by gold of grain. Green and gold then are our colors. Theirs will be the red of blood, the brown of the earth where they shall lie.” Again another cheer, and she waited.

  “But know this—though I was born a warrior, I was not bred up to it. My mother and father wanted me to know only peace.”

  “Alta bless them!” shouted someone from the crowd.

  “My mother said she would wait in the Grenna’s Grove till the Dales should need her again. We need her now,” Scillia said. “But we have only me.”

  Sarai twisted in the saddle and looked up at her. “We want you, Scillia!” she cried. Her little voice managed to be heard by those in the front who picked up the cry.

  “We want you, Scillia! Scillia! Scillia!” The chant continued till it had gone out to those furthest from her.

  With that cry still ringing, Scillia led them out of the Hollow and down the long road toward Berick Castle
where the enemy waited.

  The feast was laid out for a party of twenty. More “lords and ladies” than that Cook had not been able to find. He hoped, with Alta’s blessing, that the king would not be displeased.

  Several maids and one of the assistant gardeners had been conscripted to wear the old queen’s clothes, though the fit was poor. And Scillia’s wardrobe was all one-sleeved and too obvious for them to dare. The king might be mad, but he was not stupid.

  Every man from the kitchen, with the exception of the cook himself, was dressed in King Carum’s clothes. Cook was too fat to fit and, besides, someone had to make the meal. Three gardeners and the boy who had delivered flour from the mill were dressed for the feast as well.

  They all waited silently in the great dining hall, the room that had not been used since well before King Carum’s illness. All the torches were ablaze and five of the seven-branched candelabra lit the table so that not a shadow was seen. The king had been explicit on that point.

  “I want light,” he had said, not once but many times as he was being dressed.

  Old Halles had been practically apoplectic on the matter.

  There were silver platters on side tables piled high with rabbit and venison, cress salads, fresh mushrooms, and goblets ready for the wine. Cook looked uneasily out into the hall. He had sent the wine steward and his assistant down to the cellar long ago and they had not yet returned. The assistant had to be threatened in order to make him go down into the wine cellar. There was a story—no more than that, Cook was sure—that the cellar was haunted now. That the spirits of the dead prisoners—Jareth and Petra and old Piet and the rest—were waiting to be released and were smashing bottles in their frustration. The problem was, the servers could often hear the sound of those smashing bottles and the story had taken on a life of its own.

  Rats, the cook thought. Or Garun soldiers getting drunk. That is all it is. Then he smiled. Perhaps they are the same thing.

  He glanced once again out the hall and this time saw an odd parade coming toward the room. The king was in the front and right beside him came two Garun soldiers carrying the dead prince in a chair, four other guards behind them. The body was slumped over and when they turned into the brightly lit dining hall, Cook could see how grey the corpse’s skin was, how ruled with red and yellow and black lines. His face, Cook thought, looks more like a pudding than a person. It took him a minute to see that what was sitting in Corrine’s lap was a slipper with a part of his foot and leg. The poor corpse was starting to fall to pieces.

  The soldiers carrying the chair were almost as grey-faced as the dead man. Only the king showed any kind of animation.

  “Set my dear brother at the foot, two pretty ladies on either side,” he said. “And I shall be at the head, of course.”

  Cook prayed to Alta that the two ladies chosen—one a scullery maid and the other a gardener—would not have hysterics any time soon. He signalled to the servers to begin bringing the food to the dining table.

  The corpse’s chair was put in place and the two guards remained close by. The other four Garuns stood at attention on either side of the door to the hall.

  And where, Cook wondered a bit crankily, is the wine?

  At that very moment, the wine steward, his assistant, and three men Cook did not immediately recognize, entered carrying bottles. The three were dressed in shirt sleeves and leather pants, and one had a red smear of what might have been blood soaking his sleeve. Cook certainly had his suspicions. But the entire evening being already so strange, he did not voice them and left by the side door back to the kitchen to finish preparing the rest of the meal.

  King Jemson clapped his hands with delight. “Wine now for my guests. And the special bottle of Salubrian Red for my brother.” He gestured grandly to the foot of the table where the corpse had further collapsed against the chair.

  The wine steward nodded but his assistant suddenly, and without apparent reason, dropped one of the bottles he was carrying. It crashed on the floor, soaking into the rushes and spraying both the king and the guests seated by his right side.

  Jemson screamed, a sound like a woman in labor. Two of the Garun guards rushed over to help him, kneeling down to mop up the spill with table napkins. At that same moment, one of the new servers—the girthy man with the bloody sleeve—lifted the wine bottles he was carrying by the necks and brought them down, simultaneously, on the heads of the kneeling guards. Meanwhile his companions flung their bottles at the two guards by the door. The guards tried to catch the bottles and missed, cursing wildly as the bottles exploded in front of them.

  The door burst open then, and Sarana with the rest of her men rushed in, swords drawn. Three of them carried an extra sword each which they tossed to the steward’s new helpers.

  The two Garuns at the door were killed quickly, the two by the corpse’s chair wounded so badly that they swooned from the pain. And the two who had been crowned by Malwen’s bottles were tied up and a watch set over them by the gardener’s girl who was armed with a carving knife. The surprise had been so complete, not a one of Sarana’s crew was even slightly injured, except for Malwen who had a long gash on the underside of his right arm, got not in the fight but when he had been hauled through the wine cellar window.

  “This is an outrage!” screamed the king who had not moved from his chair during the fight. “An insult to me and to my dear brother, Corinne.”

  Sarana cast an awful glance at the dead man at the end of the table. Prince Corrine. Scillia’s favorite, she thought suddenly. He was entirely slumped over now, the stench of death overpowering even the smell of Cook’s hearty food.

  “Tell her, Corrie!” Jemson cried. “Tell her whose fault this is.”

  “He is dead, Jem,” Sarana said, walking over to the blubbering king. Raising her sword over her head with both hands, she added, “And so are you, my prince.” She brought the sword down on him with all her might, thinking that with this single cut she was severing herself from Scillia forever. Pity might have stayed her hand. But the mad Jem commanded no pity from her. Only anger and disgust. Alive he would always be at best a distraction, at worst a rallying point for malcontents. She had to do what Scillia could not.

  “And so are you,” she repeated as the sword sliced through him, crown, bones, and all.

  Scillia’s army, which she and Sarai had gathered by ones and by twos, was now so many and so noisy—singing battle songs as they went—they met no resistance at all. The better fighters, the men and women who had served thirty years earlier in the Gender Wars or who were professional soldiers in the Dales guards, rode on the outside of the ever-swelling troops.

  They came upon no Garuns on their march. Whoever had been raiding the lonely farmyards and small villages was too smart or too wary to tackle a mob almost five hundred strong.

  The second day, near evening, six men, who had been waiting in the shadows of the oak forest till they were certain of the noisy troops, came out onto the road. Leading their horses, they held their hands up in supplication.

  Riding at the forefront of her people, Scillia stopped her horse about thirty feet from them. “Who are you? Garun or Dales?” she called.

  “Great queen,” said one, “I am called Voss.”

  “I know you. You were with Sarana,” Scillia said. “But why are you here? Have you deserted her?”

  “We are all that is left of Sarana’s troops. The rest lie slaughtered between two cliffs. You must not go this way.”

  “There is no other way to Berick,” Scillia said.

  “There is only death here.”

  “We know,” Scillia said. “And we are ready to meet it.” She got down from her horse, then, and went to them, embracing the man and his companions, calling them by name.

  They camped for the night, the watch set hourly that all might be refreshed for the duties of the awful morn. Scillia sat up with the six men till she knew their story by heart, as if she had been there at the cliff’s slaughter herself. />
  “If Sarana is dead,” she said to them, “then surely Jano’s part in the plan has miscarried as well for there would have been no one to provide a diversion. We have only ourselves to rely on now. I am not such a fool as to think sheer numbers will stand against a trained force. Few in my ragged army know how to fight. You men must take on more than your share of the burden. I ask you to do this not for me, but for the Dales.”

  “Our Queen, we will,” the men said. They did not see that at each mention of her station, she shuddered. Or if they noticed, they assumed its origin was the coldness of the night.

  She left them to their sleep and went back to her own fire, not daring to stir from it lest she risk another encounter with the Grenna. But she thought about their terrible adventure as she sat by her dying embers, the girls asleep at her feet. She thought about her mother as well. She remembered how often Jenna had gone off into the woods on her own, claiming that the crown was a cruel burden, the throne an uncomforting seat.

  “Oh, mother,” she whispered, “how I understand you now.” She covered Sarai with her own blanket and stroked the child’s head, but softly so as not to wake her. By the fire Seven and Tween slept fitfully, their sleep punctuated by moist little hiccuping snores.

  In the morning Scillia sent several dozen outriders ahead to secure the cliff tops and the rest, led by Scillia, marched the long road. When they rounded the bend and came to the cliffs, they were not as prepared as they had thought. The hundred dead lay right where they had been slain days before, their ravaged faces and hands and legs testimony to the efficiency of the local scavengers.

  Scillia forced herself to look at them, to commit them to memory. This, she thought, is the result of kingship. As if in refutation, a sudden memory her father’s face, kind and concerned, came to her.

  For a long time she looked for Sarana’s body, but was not surprised when she could not identify it. The faces were too damaged for that.

  “We will bury them here and do them honor,” Scillia said, kneeling by the side of one guardswoman whose breast had been pierced by an arrow and whose face was but shards of bone. “We cannot leave them shriven by buzzards alone.”