by Jane Yolen
Catrona snorted through her nose and turned her attention back to her food, pointedly pushing the soup and wine aside and attacking the bread with gusto, smearing it liberally with honey from the pot.
Jenna gulped in a deep breath. “I did not mean anything,” she said in a piercing child’s voice. “What did I say? Why is everyone so mad?”
Amalda struck her on top of the head lightly with a pair of foodsticks. “Not your fault, child,” she said. “Sometimes grown sisters speak before they think.”
“Speak for yourself, Amalda,” muttered Catrona. She pushed the bread aside, shoved her chair back, and stood up. “I meant exactly what I said. Besides, the child has a right to know …”
“There is nothing to know,” said Kadreen.
Catrona snorted again and left.
“Know what?” asked Pynt. She was answered with a sharper tapping on the head than Jenna had received.
Jenna said nothing but stood up. Without even asking to be excused, she walked to the door. Then, turning, she spoke. “I will know. And if none of you will tell me, I will ask Mother Alta myself.”
“That one …” Donya said later to her maids in the kitchen, “she will one day tackle the Goddess Great Alta herself, mark my words.” But they did not mark them, for Donya tended to ramble and make such pronouncements all the time.
Jenna went directly to the priestess’ rooms, though as she came closer, she could feel her heart pounding madly. She wondered if Kadreen would have to give her a draught of thimbleflower potion for it. She worried that if the potion were too strong, she would die. To die just as she had chosen her way. It would be terribly sad. All the wondering and worrying disguised how quickly she was walking, and she came to the priestess’ room rather faster than she had planned.
The door was open and Mother Alta was sitting behind a great loom at which she was working on a tapestry of the Hame, one of those endless priestess tasks that Jenna had found so boring. Snip-snap went her fingernails against the shuttle; click-clack went the shuttle across the threads from side to side. Mother Alta must have seen movement from the corner of her eye. She looked up. “Come in, Jo-an-enna,” she said.
There was no help for it. Jenna went in.
“Have you come to ask my forgiveness?” She smiled but the smile did not reach her eyes.
“I have come to ask why you say my first mother was not killed by a cat when all the others say it.” Jenna could not help fiddling with her right braid and the leather thong binding it. “They say she was killed trying to save me.”
“Who are they?” the priestess asked, her voice low and carefully uninflected. Her right hand moved over the left, turning and turning her great agate ring. Jenna could not take her eyes off the ring.
“Which others, Jo-an-enna?” Mother Alta asked again.
Jenna looked up and tried to smile. “I have heard that story ever since I can remember,” she said. “But is it not peculiar, Mother, I do not remember exactly who told me first.” She caught her breath because that was not really a lie. She could remember Amalda saying it. And Domina. Even Catrona. And the girls repeating it. But she did not want them to be in trouble. Especially not Amalda, whom she often pretended was her mother as much as Pynt’s. She secretly called her “A-ma” at night, into her pillow. “And there is a song about it, too.”
“Do not believe songs,” said the priestess, her hands having left the ring to play with the great chain of metal half-moons and moonstones around her neck. “Next you will believe the ravings of village priests and the puns of itinerant rhymesters.”
“Then what should I believe?” Jenna asked. “Who should I believe?”
“Believe me. Believe the Book of Light. Soon enough you shall know it. And believe that Great Alta hears all.” Her finger with its long, glittering nail pointed to the ceiling for emphasis.
“Did she hear that I had a mother killed by a cat?” Jenna asked, appalled that her tongue spoke what her mind had made up, without waiting for her to judge it.
“Be gone, child, you tire me.” The priestess waved the back of her hand at Jenna.
Relieved, Jenna left.
No sooner had the child gone out the door than Mother Alta rose, pushing aside the heavy loom. She went over to the great polished mirror standing in its ornate wooden frame. Often she spoke to it as she would to her own dark sister, when she needed counsel in the day, for indeed the two images were near the same, the only difference being in the color and the fact that the mirror did not talk back. Sometimes, Mother Alta thought wearily, I prefer the glass’s silence to the answers I receive from my dark twin.
“Do you remember the man in the town,” she whispered, “the Slipskin farmer? He had rough hands and a rougher tongue. We were younger then by seven years, but older by far than he. He did not know it, though. How could he, used as he was to the coarse women of his coarse town.” She smiled wryly at the memory and the image smiled back.
“We surprised him, sister, when we took off our cloaks. And we surprised him with our silken skins. And we surprised him out of the story of his only child, the one who had, all unknowing, killed her mother and the midwife who took her into the mountains and never returned. He will remember our passion as a dream, for we came to him secretly at midnight. And all the others we questioned knew but one of us, disguised in the day, and she an old, old crone.” This time she did not smile, and the image stared back at her in silence.
“His story—it had to be true. No man cries in the arms of a woman lest the story he tell be true. We were the first who had come to warm his bed since his wife’s death. His wounds though nine months old were fresh. And so there were three: mother, midwife, fosterer. Three in one. And dead, all dead.”
She bit her lower lip. The eyes in the mirror, as green as her own, stared back at her.
“Oh, Great Alta, speak to me. It is one of thy priestesses begging.” She held up her hands and the mark of Alta, incised in blue, stood out vividly on her palms. “Here am I, Mother to thy children, ruling them in this small Hame in thy name. I have neither helper nor child but my dark sister, no one to speak to but thee. Oh, Great Alta, who is sower and reaper, who is in the beginning and in the end, hear me.” She touched herself: head, left breast, navel, and groin. “Have I done right, Great One? Have I done wrong? This child is thrice orphaned, as it says in the prophecy. But there have been rumors of others before her. One came from the Hame near Calla’s Ford, and one so long ago fostered in the Hame near Nill. But they proved themselves just girls after all.
“Then what is this child, this Annuanna? She is marked with hair the color of new snow, and of such the prophecy speaks. But she laughs and cries like any child. She is quick-tongued and quick-footed, but no better at the games than her foster sister Marga. Many times have I given her the choice of following me as thine own, a priestess to lead thy children. But she chose instead the woods and the hunt and other such follies. How can this be the child we seek?
“Oh, Great Alta, I know thou speakest to me in the sun that rises and in the moon that shapes itself anew each month. I know thy voice echoes in the pattering of rain and the rising up of the dew. So it is written, and so I believe. But I need a clearer sign before I unfold this wonder to all of them. Not just the piqued mouthings of jealous women, not just the guilty, tearful confidences of an unhappy man. And not just my own trembling heart. A true sign.
“The burden, Great One, is so hard to bear. I am so very lonely. I grow old before my time with this secret. Look here. And here.” She pulled aside her gown to show how flaccid her breasts had become. She touched the loosening skin under her chin. Tears began to well up in her eyes and she knelt before the mirror, sighing.
“And one thing more, Great Alta, though thou knowest it already. Yet still I must confess it aloud to thee. The greatest fear of all. If I am not thy priestess, I am nothing. It is all my life. I need a promise, Great One, a promise if she—Annuanna, Jo-an-enna, Jenna—is the one of whom it is wr
itten, the light sister thrice born and thrice orphaned, the one who will be queen over all and change what we know. And the promise I beg is that if it is she, then I will still serve thee as I have. That the place at the head of the table will still be mine. That I shall still sit on the throne under the moon and call thy name that the sisters might hear me and pray. Promise me that, Great Alta, and I shall reveal her.”
The mirror image’s face flushed suddenly and the priestess put her hand up to her cheeks, which burned fiercely beneath her fingers. Other than the fire in her face, there was no sign.
She stood up heavily. “I must think upon this more.” Turning, she went out the other door, the hidden door, behind the heavy patched tapestry upon which the forms of sisters light and dark played at wands.
THE HISTORY:
There is, of course, no extant copy of the Book of Light, the great text of the moon-centered Mother Goddess worshippers. Though presumably each Hame or community of Altites had a hand-lettered and illuminated copy of the Book. Such volumes disappeared during the Gender Wars, either—if the Sigel and Salmon dig logs are accurate—into underground chambers especially constructed against such eventualities or—if one is to trust Vargo’s reconstruction of the priestess codes—into ritual fires.
However, the meat of the Book’s history and its gnomic teachings can be plucked from the rich stew of folk life in the towns that still flourish near the ancient Hame sites. Buss and Bee’s monumental work, So Speak the Folk, gives strong support to the idea that the Alta Hames (or Alta’s Shames, as the priests of the Lower Dales still call them) were in fact merely extensions of the towns and cities which bordered their lands, in effect suburban satellites, at least as far as their speech patterns and folk beliefs are concerned.
Of course, the story of Alta worship is intelligible only in the light of early Garunian history. The G’runs, an ancient, well-connected noble family from the Continent, had come to the Isles in the invasions of the 800s. Worshippers of a male trinity of gods—Hargo, god of fire, Vendre, god of water, and Lord Cres, the brutal god of the dead—they settled along the seacoasts. Slowly they infiltrated into the upper councils of the semimatriarchal civilization they found there. Trying at first to undermine it, they in fact later compromised and accepted a matrilineal succession only after the devastating Gender Wars wrecked both the ancient Hame sites and the famous palace of G’run Far Shooter.
The religion the Garunians were trying to supplant was anathema to the first invaders because of its emphasis on a white-haired goddess who seeded herself without the aid of a male consort. It was a religion that had grown up in part because of the overflow of women following much earlier, devastating wars of succession which had been fought some four hundred years before. Because of the created imbalance between the sexes that followed the civil strife, it had become the custom to expose unwanted, superfluous girl babies on the hillsides. However, in the late 600s, a female reputedly of great height and with long, flowing white hair (possibly an albino, though more probably an old woman) named Alta wandered the countryside speaking out against the brutal custom and gathering what live children she could find. She fashioned carts linked together to trundle the rescued babes behind her. Slowly this Alta was joined by like-minded women who were either unmarried (there were many spinsters, the so-called unclaimed treasures, because of the ratio of men to women), widows, or multiple wives in polygamous marriages. (Especially in the Lower Dales such radical couplings had been tolerated, though only the children of the first wife might inherit.) Thus was the first of seventeen Hames established, as havens for the discarded children and extra women. This reconstruction, first set forth by the late Professor Davis Temple of Hofbreeder University in his now-classic Alta-Natives, is so thoroughly accepted that I need not comment further.
The communities of foster mothers, needing some religious underpinnings, developed the worship of a White Goddess called Great Alta. The genius and genuine goodness of the original Alta was rewarded in this fashion. Over the years, the real Alta and a subsequent itinerant preacher whose name has been given variously as Gennra, Hendra, Hanna, Anna, and The Dark One have merged into the figure of a goddess whose hair is both light and dark, a strange hermaphroditic creature who has babies without recourse to a male consort. The religion borrowed many aspects of the surrounding patriarchal tribes and, later, even took on some of the Garunian worship. (For example, the custom of cave burials, a later addition, was patterned after the G’runs, who came originally from a small valley between cave-riddled mountains where land for cultivation was too prime to be turned over to the dead. Earlier Altite burials were in great mounds.)
Just as the white-haired Alta had been a savior for many a girl child left to die upon a hillside, rumors of a second savior arose. The rumors became belief, set down—if we are again to believe Vargo—in the Book of Light itself. This savior was to be the child of a dead mother; the easy psychological substitution—dead child to dead mother—is the most basic of folk shifts. Not one dead mother, in fact, but three, that magical number. It is a belief still encapsulated in some of the folk songs and sayings in the Upper Dales.
THE SONG:
Alta’s Song
I am a babe, an only babe,
Fire and water and all,
Who in my mother’s womb was made,
Great Alta take my soul.
But from that mother I was torn,
Fire and water and all,
And to a hillside I was borne,
Great Alta take my soul.
And on that hillside was I laid,
Fire and water and all,
And taken up all by a maid,
Great Alta take my soul.
And one and two and three we rode,
Fire and water and all,
Till others took the heavy load,
Great Alta take my soul.
Let all good women hark to me,
Fire and water and all,
For fostering shall set thee free,
Great Alta take my soul.
THE STORY:
“What did she say? What did you say?” Pynt asked breathlessly, twisting her fingers in her dark curls. She was sitting on the floor of their shared room by the window. The room tended toward darkness, as did all the rooms in the Hame, so the girls always played close to the narrow slits of windows, winter and summer. “Did she hit you?”
Jenna thought about what to say. She almost wished Mother Alta had hit her. Amalda had a quick hand and both girls had had recent willow whippings, Pynt for her quick mouth and Jenna for supporting her. But they were not long or hard whippings and besides, such punishment was always followed swiftly by hugs and tears and kisses. If the priestess had acted so, Jenna might not have stayed beyond the door, quiet as a wood mouse, listening. Was she the babe who had, all unknowing, killed her mother not once but three times? The thought had so frightened her, she had not stayed to hear more but run away to hide, down in the cellar, where the great casks of dark red wine were kept. In the dark she had breathed first very fast, with the sobs threatening to burst out of her chest, because if she were that child, then all her hoping for A-ma to be her mother, all her pretending, was just that: a game. And then she had slowed her breathing down and forced herself to stand dry-eyed. She would find Pynt and ask her.
Only now, standing over Pynt, she knew this was too heavy a burden to share. “She asked who had told me such a thing and I said that I could not remember who had told me first.” She slumped to the floor next to Pynt.
“A-ma was first,” said Pynt. “I remember. It was like a story. We were both sleeping in the big bed, a special treat, between A-ma and Sammor, and …”
“Maybe not,” said Jenna, relieved to be past the hardest part. “Maybe I heard it first from Catrona. Or Donya. She talks too much, she probably …”
“… said it three times over.” Pynt laughed. It was a common joke at the Hame, even among the children.
“I heard Domina say s
omething about it. And something about my second mother, too. They were friends.” Was this treading too close to the treacherous ground? Jenna felt her fingers start to twitch, but Pynt seemed not to notice.
Pynt put her elbows on her knees and rested her chin in her hands. “Not Kadreen, though. You would not have heard it from her.”
They both shook their heads wisely. Kadreen never gossiped or gave information freely.
“I like Kadreen,” said Jenna, “even though she is a Solitary. Even though she never smiles.” Solitaries, women without dark sisters, were rare at the Hames, and Jenna felt very much as she suspected a Solitary felt, alone and without the comfort of a companion who knew your every thought.
“I saw her smile once. It was when Alna stopped breathing and then started again with those funny coughs and the bubbles coming out of her mouth. When we were in the garden hunting down the rabbit. Well, the pretend rabbit. Children’s games! And you ran to get Kadreen because you are the fastest, and she put her ear down on Alna’s chest and thumped it.”
“And Alna had a black mark as big as a fist for seven days.”
“Eight—and she loved to show it off.”
“Kadreen did not smile then.”
“Did.”
“Did not.”
“Did. And anyway, A-ma gave me these.” Pynt reached behind her back and brought up two new corn dolls in one hand and a pair of reed backpacks in the other. “She and Sammor made them for us to celebrate the Choosing.”