The One-Armed Queen

by Jane Yolen

  She took the bag, emptied the coin into her hand, held it up to the grey light, then bit it. “Five in a boat, then, till ye be over.” She put the coin back in the bag, and tucked the bag into her belt. “We swim the horses behind.”

  It was, Jano thought, like a dream of floating. Like the dreams he had of home, the little cottage by the side of the ferry slip. The bad dreams. Where house and ferry were devoured slowly by some sort of inexorable grey tide.

  What he had not told them was that his father had died of drowning, falling drunk off the ferry on one homeward trip. Jano had long blamed himself for his father’s death, though he understood now that he had been much too young to pull the sodden man back into the boat, had in fact been asleep on a pallet aboard the ferry when it had happened. He had not awakened until his father’s final desperate cry for help. If anyone was to blame, surely it was his mother who had deserted them when Jano was a baby. Or the blame lay on the shoulders of those who did not believe Sandor’s stories of the wars. Or perhaps the blame lay on the man himself. He did not have to drink. He did not have to die. Still—what did it matter now?

  The fog was, if anything, thicker than before and Jano could scarcely see the boat he sat in, even though it was crowded with five people plus the boatman. He could not see the three horses swimming along behind, guided by reins which were looped through an iron ring fastened to the boat’s side. However, he could hear the creaking of the leather, the slight splash of oars, a muffled cough. There was a sensation of movement if he closed his eyes.

  How long? he wondered briefly. How long till we get there? Then he simply closed his eyes and gave himself up, like an ardent lover, to sleep.

  When the boat ground onto another shore and the horses, now happily on dry land, started snorting their pleasure, Jano woke with a start, his hand automatically reaching for the hilt of his sword.

  “We be putting you at this place,” said the fenmistress. “We be going back for the others.”

  “How many this time?” Jano asked, though he had already counted and knew.

  “We be getting the rest,” Goff answered.

  “You be setting a camp for the night,” added the fenmistress. “Fire and all. There be nowt here to sight it.”

  He believed her. Even a great blaze would not be seen where they were. Wherever they were. On an island or on a hidden shore.

  THE BALLAD:

  FEN LOVE SONG

  (Chorus) Speed the boat, pull the oar

  Off to the isles;

  Speed the boat to the shore

  Over the miles.

  Speed the boat, pull the oar

  Off to the isles,

  Speed the bonnie boat o’er.

  Little skin boat, so tough and so tight,

  Speed the boat o’er, speed the boat o’er,

  Carry my lover this festival night,

  Speed the bonnie boat o’er.

  Little skin boat, so rough and so new,

  Speed the boat o’er, speed the boat o’er,

  Tell him I love him and that I be true.

  Speed the bonnie boat o’er.

  Little skin boat, so taut and so trim,

  Speed the boat o’er, speed the boat o’er,

  Take this my token, be bringing it him,

  Speed the bonnie boat o’er.

  If he refuses, I’ll jump in my boat,

  Speed the boat o’er, speed the boat o’er,

  Over the fenway to sink or to float,

  Speed the bonnie boat o’er.

  (Chorus)

  THE STORY:

  It had been ten days and still Prince Corrine was not buried. He lay on Jemson’s bed and though the hearth fire was no longer being lit—for none of the servers dared do more than leave a tray of food outside the door for the king—the room was hot enough by spring’s standard. The windows stood open day and night and still the room stayed warm.

  The smell was awful and daily Corrine’s body grew bloated, and his skin began to streak red, yellow, and black. But Jemson seemed oblivious to any changes. During the day he sat by the bed conversing with his brother as if Corrie could hear. Mostly Jemson told him about what life had been like on the Continent, how the first days had been difficult, so far from home, but that soon gave way to a pleasurable stay when he had found that Garun ways were more palatable to him than those of the Dales.

  “I thought to stay there forever,” he said companionably to the corpse. “Yet here I am. Once again at home. And king. As I should have been all along. And since you have remained here beside me, you must agree.”

  If he noticed that Corrie did not answer, Jemson did not remark on it, but went on instead to tell of his prowess at Garunian games. The boar hunt and his first kill, a bloody romp that took two days. Bear-baiting and how he won enough money on one bet to buy himself an Andanavian horse, a white stallion who could do the “airs” without a misstep. Pigeon-fletching where feathers for arrows were taken from a still live bird and the winner of the contest was the one whose pigeon lived longest and yet lost the most feathers. He boasted about his vast skill at cards. “I am good at skittle and fair at le mont, but I am best in the court at three-card royale.” Corrie had no response to any of this, though a faint buzzing of flies arose from his body which Jemson ignored.

  The king ate but little of what was left outside the door—a few spring berries, a plate of mushrooms broiled in butter, slices of goat cheese. He hardly ate but he drank great quantities of wine, whole bottles of the heavy, sweet red from Berick. At night he slept by the side of his dead brother, so sodden he might as well have been dead himself.

  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 hun
dred 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.<
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  “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.