The One-Armed Queen

by Jane Yolen

  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.”

  “But it will take time, Scillia,” Seven said to her.

  She looked up at the girl, tears in her eyes. “I would hope that you give me such time when mine is all gone. Besides, what is another half day to the Garuns who squat like great toads in our castle?” Standing she said, “Let this place be known from now on as ‘The Hundreds’ in honor of the slain.”

  She wondered how many would come, as she had to the mound at Bear’s Run, to remember their kin who had died so awfully here. She wept inwardly that anyone should have such a duty.

  They did not depart from that place till past dinner, but none wanted to camp the night there. The ghosts of the slain would be loud enough in their dreams.

  Arming the people in the dining room with table knives and the captured Garun swords, Sarana ordered them to barricade the doors. There were seven doors in all. It was not going to be an easy room to defend.

  The servers—and especially the gardener’s assistant—were quick to follow Sarana’s orders. She wondered that the castle folk had not revolted before, or at least run off, leaving the usurper prince to serve himself. But, something her father had always said—her mouth turned sour remembering him and his leather belt—Many will show you the way once your cart is turned over. She would not blame the Berick folk aloud, though her thoughts might rub black thinking of them.

  “The table—put it there,” she said, pointing to the main door. And when she realized the great banquet table was actually not a single piece but broke into five even sections, she ordered each section against five of the other doors.

  “And that carvery to hold the back door.”

  Which left one door still open.

  “We can pile chairs against it, and the wine tub as well,” the gardener’s assistant volunteered, kirtling up her skirts and starting in on the job.

  “Not yet,” Sarana said. “We will use that door for ourselves. One small door can be defended easily. The pass phrase will be ‘The queen lives.’”

  She knew they could hold out for a couple of days in the room if beseiged. There was enough food for that. But how they would ever get out again without losing most of their party, was another problem altogether.

  One foot at a time, one step after another, she told herself. The first thing she needed to do was to give Jano a signal that the diversion was well under way.

  “Malwen,” she said, “Check these windows. They look o
ut on the water. See if you can manage to light some kind of signal fire. One that will be seen out to the Skellies and beyond. Perhaps the tablecloth will burn. There are certainly enough candles.”

  “Me?” He was taken aback. “You want me to do that?”

  “Either that, or serve me some wine,” she said. “You were splendid as a steward, handling that bottle as well as you do a sword.” It was the closest she could come to a compliment, but he took it as such and grinned. She had never seen him smile before. It is not, she thought, a very pretty sight.

  The men picked up in the skiffs shivered with cold, but when they saw the fire burning from the castle window, they cheered loudly. They did not know how Sarana and her troops had gotten in, for they supposed the place heavily guarded. But she had had the majority of their own people, and perhaps they had outnumbered the Garuns in the end.

  “Numbers always tell,” said a Josteen sailor to his companions.

  “Not when they are bottom eaters,” called a Southporter from the stern of the boat. As he was the only Southport lad there he was pushed into the water for his sass. He nearly drowned before the next skiff pulled him in, but if he learned any lesson from it, it was to knock in the head of the next Josteen fisherman he met.

  THE HISTORY:

  From a letter to the Editor, Nature and History:

  Sirs:

  As I have not yet heard from you about my several ideas for articles for your magazine, I am enclosing a chapter that I wrote for a children’s book to give you an idea of the range of styles I possess and so that you will understand the manner in which I can—with the proper editorial guidance—manipulate the Matter of the Dales. I hope that the enclosed will be of interest:

  The War of Deeds and Succession is a rather large title for a very small period in our history. After the death—or rather the disappearance—of the aged and ill King Carum and his warrior queen, the country was split by three rival claimants to the throne: their son, their daughter, and the G’runian prince Jemson who, being the youngest of a family of seven brothers, had no hope of inheriting the throne of G’run.

  The G’run prince, called popularly Jemson-Over-the-Water, had certainly been trained for kingship as were all princes on the Continent. He spoke the Dales language with a heavy accent and was more conversant with the brutal G’run sports of bear and bull-baiting than the songs and play-parties of the Dales, an affinity that some say carried over to his relationship with people. However, in his short time as king he did manage to put the army on a professional basis, close the last of the Hames, and introduced both hunting dogs and warm ale into the country.

  Carum’s own son, Corrine Lackland—so named because it was his older sister who was to have ruled the Dales—remained loyal to the crown, if not the particular crowned head. He was a young man of thought but not action. As a king of the Dales he would probably have been a disaster, but as a hero and a martyr he has no peer in Dalian history.

  Indeed much of what we know of this period comes from songs and stories about him. Far example, the “Ballad of Carrie Lackland” which ends this chapter, as well as the song cycle “St. Corwin of the Stones” at the back of the book. There are hundreds of other poems and songs from the South Dales especially where St. Corwin is one of the more popular saints. Badly corrupted by time and the passage of mouth and ear, these poems and songs are still recognizably about the War of Deeds and Succession. For example, the children’s game-rhyme: “Stoneman, stoneman, say your prayers/Brother Jemmy’s on the stairs.”

  The real favorite among the people, of course, was Ancillia Virginia, the virgin queen, who ascended to the throne not once but twice. The first time was on her parents’ disappearance and once again after her brother’s death and the death of the G’run prince. She was known as the One-Armed Queen because she lost her right arm at the ten-day Battle of Green Hollow where—so the stories tell us—the rivers ran red for a year after.

  The problem was that Ancillia Virginia was a queen at the time the land needed a king; gender still being an issue in the Dales. Furthermore she refused to marry or to bear a child and thereby guarantee the succession. Her death ten years later ushered in nearly thirty years of commoner kings until the Dalian Circle of Seven was finally established, a method of rule by council which—in somewhat modified form—still runs the country to this day.

  (See the Meacham Award winner for children’s fiction, “Year King” by Giles Tappan which details the life of one of the first of these rulers. Though heavily fictionalized, it is still one of the most readable accounts of life at that time.)

  from A Short History of the Dales, Grade Level sixth form

  THE STORY:

  On the third day, Scillia’s army came into Berick, marching along the coast road. As they neared the castle, someone pointed out to the Skellies, sparkling in the spring sun. It was nearing noon, the tide turning, and there was something odd about the formation in the harbor.

  “Look!”

  Scillia looked. It was a scene she knew well for her entire life had been lived in Berick. And yet—yet the scene was subtly changed.

  And then she knew. There, between the stone hands of the Skellies, were the remains of sunken ships. At least one mast, and the hump of a stern, she thought. Jano had done it. Even without Sarana and her troops.

  With that she began to weep, for Sarana and all the dead men and women left at The Hundreds, for Sarai’s mother, for her own. “I am nowt a queen,” she whispered into Sarai’s hair, “nor do I want to be if it means I must not weep for my people.” She could not remember ever seeing White Jenna cry.

  Then, getting control of herself, she turned in the saddle, stood upright in the stirrups, and shouted “The harbor is blocked. The Garuns will not easily send more men to our shores. Now we must take the castle, my friends.”

  The cheer they sent up surrounded her, filled her up. It was still ringing in her ears when she lead them to the castle gates.

  She stared for a long time at the gate, so familiar to her and yet totally alien as well. How many times had she walked through them, and yet never noticed the carvings on the doors? The signs of Alta so cleverly worked in wood, the relief of the goddess dancing on a flower, her hands above her head.

  She looked up and saw a Garun guard on the battlements staring down at them. He began to shout.

  “My queen,” said Voss, “what is your plan?”

  Plan? she thought. I have no plan. She had not expected to come this far, or get this close, without great losses. But she did not say that to him. Thinking quickly, she said, “Sarana spoke of the wine cellar dungeon. Take one man with you, around the water side, and see if you can spot an open window about one floor up.”

  As Voss and his chosen man raced around the side, several more Garunian guards began to gather on the battlements. They were pointing down and waving their hands.

  “Scillia,” Manya said, “surely we should get out of arrow range.”

  “Indeed,” Scillia agreed, and called her troops back from the gate.

  The dining room was quiet. So were the halls outside.

  Too quiet, Sarana thought. Time to stir things up. “I want two volunteers to come with me,” she said. “One soldier and one server who knows the castle well.”

  “I will come,” Malwen said. “Since luck seems on our side.”

  “And I,” said the gardener’s assistant.

  “Then tell me your name, girl,” Sarana said. “The queen always asks. And so should I.”

  “Allema,” the girl said. “I was born in this castle. I know every hidden room.”

  “Then Allema, show us the fastest, easiest way back down to the cellar.”

  “Not that window again!” complained Malwen.

  “Only the girl will go out,” Serana said. “To go into the town. If they know the usurper is dead, perhaps the townsfolk will help us. We are only along to make sure she gets through.”

  Malwen put the crossbar of his sword to his l
ips. “I hear and obey.” Then he laughed. Unlike his smile, the sound was ripe and comforting.

  “Remember the pass phrase,” Sarana said to her men. “The queen lives. Let no one else in but us.”

  And then they were gone, snaking along the hall and into a servant’s passage that led down the back stairs. They met no one along the way.

  Voss and his man found the withy ladder against the wall and, seeing the open window, got up, in and through. They were just feeling their way through the first of the dark rooms—for the window shed but little light past a square patch on the floor—when they heard the sounds of steps and some whispered confidences ahead of them.

  “Back to me,” Voss growled and immediately felt his companion’s back against his. They stood that way, swords raised, waiting for the enemy to find them. The surprise, they knew, was theirs.

  A sudden torchlight blinded them both.

  “Hit for the torch hand!” Voss shouted, slashing out.

  A girl screamed.

  And then a voice he knew well cried out as well. “Voss, you fool. You utter fool!”

  “Sarana? But you’re dead!”

  “Not I, but you will be if you have injured that girl permanently.” Sarana picked up the guttering torch from the floor and held it over Allema.

  The girl was crying, but from shock, not injury. It was the end part of the torch that had taken the brunt of the blow.

  “Alta’s crown, but you have gotten slow in your dotage,” Sarana said. “In the old days, that arm would have been clean off. She was smaller than expected, I guess. And quicker.”

  “Lucky for the girl,” Voss said.

  “Lucky for you,” Sarana replied.

  Malwen brought them all to their senses. “If we are not quieter, we will have the entire Garun guard down here.”

  “Right you are,” Sarana said. “But Voss …” and she spoke more quietly, “what are you doing here?”

  “The queen stands without the gates,” he said.