The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  “I know that,” Carum said, “but I’m going farther along the same road, to a place where only men are allowed. It’s a place of sanctuary where even the Brothers and Kalas—”

  “Lord Kalas,” interrupted Jenna, stroking her finger across her throat. “Remember your head!”

  He grinned. “Lord Kalas wouldn’t dare violate those walls. I’ll be safe there. So I can guide you and …”

  “And we can keep you out of trouble!” said Pynt.

  “Three are better than one where trouble is concerned,” Carum said gently. “At least that’s what we say.”

  “We say the same,” said Jenna. “Is that not strange?”

  “Then I can go along?” His face betrayed his eagerness.

  “After we eat,” Jenna said. “But do not leave the horse out in plain sight. Just because we have not seen any trace of the Brothers does not mean they have missed us.”

  Carum nodded.

  “We shall each take a different path, going only within ear of this place, to find something for our meal.”

  Carum collected the horse and by the time he got it tied to a limb of a middle-size oak, the other two had disappeared into the forest. He looked around, found a wide deer run, and followed along it as quietly as he could.

  Not an hour later they met again near the horse and poured their woods’ bounty onto a kerchief that Jenna spread. Pynt had collected several dozen mushrooms, not the great white puffs of which she was so fond, but a darker variety that had a nutty flavor. Jenna had discovered a squirrel’s cache of nuts and a little dell of ferns, but she left the ferns since smoke from a fire for the boiling of them would have stained the bright, clear sky and given them away at once. Carum had filled his pocket with berries.

  “Berries!” Pynt laughed.

  Jenna explained. “Spring berries are for dye and dying. That is what we say in the Hame. The eating berries are not yet ripe and these others”—she counted through his meager store—“these are all poisonous. Though some—like this Bird Berry”—she touched a small hard black pebbly fruit—“can be steeped in hot water over several days for a strong purgative. And this”—She touched a larger, bright red berry—“which we call Step-o’er-me-lady, can be mashed into a greasy salve for burns.”

  “Berries!” Pynt laughed again.

  Carum looked down at the ground.

  “Oh, hush, Pynt,” said Jenna. “Carum knows much more than either of us, just not what is here in the woods.”

  “And what does he know?” asked Pynt.

  “He knows about warriors who use their braids to strangle their foes, which is what I shall do to you if you do not shut up.” Jenna held her white plait between her hands like a noose and gave Pynt a wicked look.

  “The Alaisters!” Carum said triumphantly, looking up with a grin.

  “What?” Pynt and Jenna turned to him at the same time.

  “That’s the name of the tribe. The Alaisters. I knew I’d come up with it after a time.”

  Jenna squatted on her heels and picked up two mushrooms. Stuffing them into her mouth, she muttered, “Just don’t eat the berries, scholar.”

  They ate quickly and quietly and when they were done, swept away any sign of their makeshift lunch. Carum went over to the horse and untied it.

  “Bring the horse here,” Jenna called.

  Smiling, Carum led the cross-grained gray to her. “Do you want to ride now?”

  “None of us will ride anymore,” Jenna said. “We are going to send the horse across the meadow. That way.” She pointed south. “He will make a wide trail and lead any followers away from us.”

  Carum looked over his shoulder nervously. “Have we been followed?”

  Pynt laughed. “If we had, we would not now be standing here out in the open. Trust us.”

  “But there will be followers. Following you or following the Hound. And well you know it. I have worried all this morning about taking the horse with us, and you both should have been worrying, too. But I think, with Alta’s help, we will use the horse to confuse the trail.” Jenna threw her right braid over her shoulder for emphasis.

  “You did not look worried,” scolded Pynt.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” Carum’s face clouded over. “It never even occurred to me …”

  “That is because scholars worry about the past, Carum, while warriors must worry about the future. It is possible we will have no future if we keep the horse,” Jenna said, her tone low and sensible. “So tell me, horseman, how do we best encourage the beast to ride off that way?”

  Carum laughed. “Trust me,” he said. Dropping the horse’s reins, he went over to a flowering bush, cut and stripped a switch. Then he came back to the horse, patted it once on its nose, and whispered into its ear. Turning it around so that its head was facing south, he brought the switch down hard twice on its flank, shouting, “Get on home!”

  The horse shied, kicked out its rear feet, and missing Carum’s thighs by a scant inch, galloped off across the meadow, leaving a swath wide enough to be read by even the most reluctant trailers. It did not stop until it was hundreds of yards away, where it put its big nose down and began to crop the grass.

  “What did you whisper into its ear?” asked Jenna.

  “To forgive me for the switching,” Carum answered.

  “I do not think it forgave,” Pynt pointed out, “if its aim was any indication of its intent. Had it connected, I doubt there would be many new scholars of your line.”

  Jenna smothered a laugh and Carum scowled.

  “I thought you Altites knew nothing of men,” he said.

  “We know we do not spring from flowers or cabbages or from the beaks of birds,” said Jenna. “Our women give birth so we know where babies come from. And how they are made. We choose …” She stopped, for Carum’s ears were beginning to turn red from embarrassment, but Pynt had no thought to spare his feelings.

  “We choose to use men but not to live with them. To serve them for wages as guards if need be, but not to stay otherwise in their service.” Although she said it with conviction, it sounded more like a litany, and Carum began to protest.

  “Your mouth says that, but …” he began. Jenna put her hand on his arm to stop their argument.

  “The horse has not moved on,” she said.

  Carum walked a few feet into the meadow and shouted, “Gee-up home, you misbegotten son of a she-ass!”

  The horse lifted its head and, with a mouthful of grass and lilies still hanging from its jaws, took off south. Soon it was just a moving dot on the horizon.

  “Wonderful!” said Pynt sarcastically. “Your shout should have alerted every follower within miles.”

  Carum ignored her pointedly and turned to Jenna. “There was no other way.”

  Jenna nodded and turned to Pynt. “What is wrong with the two of you? First you shout, then he shouts. You speak with fire and he answers with ice. We cannot go on this way.”

  “Then send him off,” muttered Pynt, not entirely under her breath. She walked a few steps away.

  Carum drew in a deep breath, then spoke softly so that only Jenna could hear. “Never mind, Jenna, we’ll be at the Hame soon, and I’ll be gone. And don’t worry about the horse.” He raised his voice at the end so that Pynt, hearing him, looked back. “Kalas’ horses are well trained and he’ll find his way home eventually.”

  “And home is …” Pynt’s curiosity overcame her anger and resentment.

  “North,” Jenna said. “The Northern Holdings, you said. Alta’s Hairs! That horse will be going the same way we are.”

  “No, Jenna,” Carum interrupted, putting his hand on Jenna’s shoulder. “That was home for Lord Kalas once. But now he’s taken over the High King’s palace in the South Downs and calls it after himself. The wine cellar my … king so loved has been made into a dungeon. And Kalas squats on the throne for the past year like a toad in a hole, waiting for a coronation that will not—if the gods forbid it—ever come.”

/>   “I thought you believed in no gods,” said Pynt.

  “I’ll believe if there is no coronation sanctioned by the priests. But in the end, even that won’t matter. A man who sits on a throne long enough even though he wears but a helm is still called Your Majesty. The people’s memory is short when mercy and justice are short. I fear Kalas will be king ere long.”

  The girls stared at him as he spoke, for the words seemed to lay a mantle of majesty on him, though it was sorrowing majesty at best. When the wind ruffled his hair, he seemed, somehow, taller and yet—at the same time—stooped.

  “Oh, Carum,” Jenna said, and there was a real sadness in her voice, loss echoing loss.

  Carum seemed to shake himself suddenly free of the oratory and shrugged. “Never mind me. We scholars sometimes invent an appropriate metaphor and, other times, we simply talk because we love to hear the sound of ringing words.”

  Pynt said nothing for the longest time, but at last she cast a glance at the lowering sky. “Where is that shortcut you promised?”

  Where the meadow ended, the ground was boggy, sucking eagerly at footfalls. Jenna led them back into the woods so as not to leave a pattern of prints, and they came around the northern edge where the great oak and beech forest gave way to newer growth. There was a real track now on the meadow’s far side, not just deer paths. The track was wide and well worn, with roadside bushes and flowers that bespoke a nearby civilization: the prickly raspberry patches, the yellow spikes of toadflax, and the tiny, pensive blue and purple heads of heartsease nodding in the rising breeze.

  They found a clear spring, and bent over to drink one at a time, long eager draughts. Then the girls rinsed out their skin bottles carefully before filling them again with the water.

  “We must stay off the road but close enough to it that we do not lose the way,” said Jenna.

  “Why not let Carum walk in the woods, keeping us in sight? No one is searching for us,” Pynt argued.

  “Because we undertook his guardianship,” said Jenna. “He cried us merci. And though that is not something we have yet pledged, you and I, I guess it will be one of the seven vows we will take in less than a short year’s time.”

  Pynt nodded, but muttered, “Could we not guard him as well from the road?”

  Jenna shook her head.

  “All right,” Pynt said at last. “Into the woods, then.” She turned abruptly and entered the woods first without snapping a single twig.

  Carum followed after and Jenna, after checking the road both ways, came last.

  They walked along as quietly as possible, all comments contained in the kind of hand signals the guards at the Hame used, which left Carum out of the conversation entirely. It was the road, not fifty yards to their right, that silenced them, but Carum did not seem to mind. He walked along almost oblivious of his surroundings, caught up in his own thoughts.

  Single file, with Pynt in front and Jenna in the rear, they moved in a rhythm dictated by the density of the undergrowth. Twice Carum let a branch snap back into Jenna’s face and, turning to apologize, received only a scowl and a dismissing wave of her hand. Once Pynt stepped in a small depression, twisting her ankle, though not severely. But the accidents, small as they were, served as warnings. Silently, they watched the ground as well as the branches, glancing only occasionally off to the right to check the road.

  Brambles caught at their clothes and hair, slipping without incident off the rough skins that Jenna and Pynt wore. Carum, in loose weave, had the most trouble and often they had to stop and help him untangle himself from the thorns. But silently, always silently, the road so close by a stopper in their mouths.

  The silence in the end was what saved them, and the fact that, for once, they were not moving ahead but standing in a knot trying once again to unhook Carum’s shirt from a high raspberry bush. The sound of hooves galloping nearby was a thunder underfoot. They crouched down instinctively, huddled together, while a dust of riders raced by, going north.

  As soon as the riders had passed, Pynt whispered, “Could you see?”

  Jenna nodded. “At least a dozen,” she said under her breath, “maybe two.”

  “There were twenty-one,” said Carum.

  Pynt and Jenna looked at him. “How can you be so sure?”

  “I counted. Besides, a company of horse is always twenty-one, with a captain at its head.”

  “And,” Pynt said, the sarcasm a hard edge in her voice, “I suppose you also happened to notice who was in charge!”

  Carum nodded. “The Bull.”

  “I do not believe it,” said Pynt, her voice growing louder until Jenna had to silence her with a hand on her arm. Then Pynt whispered, “They went by too quickly and we were kneeling here on the floor of the forest.”

  “You were kneeling,” Carum pointed out. “I was caught upright by the thorns.”

  “He is right,” admitted Jenna.

  “Besides,” continued Carum, “only the Brothers ride those big cross-grained grays. And the Bull is so large, he towers over his men. And his helmet gave him away.”

  “His helmet,” Jenna whispered, her face marking the memory of the other helmet and the sound it had made thunking down on the dead man’s back. She was silent for a moment longer than necessary, then whispered fiercely, “We must move even deeper into the woods. If we can see them, then …”

  She did not have to finish the thought. Both Carum and Pynt nodded, united at least on the danger. Pynt ripped Carum’s shirt from the thorns without regard for the cloth, and led them further into the forest where some of the old, great oaks still stood sentinel.

  Carum had promised them the trip to the Hame would take only a day, and they had hoped to get there by evening. But the woods, even the edge of it, slowed them down considerably. Twice more that afternoon a company of riders raced by, once from the north and once up from the south. The first had been a silent ride, all dark purpose. The next time the riders were shouting, though their words were lost in the dust and clamor of hooves. Each time the three in the woods moved deeper into the shadows of the trees.

  “We will try and rest now,” Jenna said. “And we will move only at night. Even if it takes an extra day or two. Carum must be kept safe.”

  Pynt nodded and, under her breath, muttered, “And we will be safer, too.”

  They found a hollow tree with a large enough hole that all three of them—with a bit of sorting out of arms and legs—could sleep as comfortably as kits in a den. Pynt reminded Jenna of a story they had heard in Selden Hame about a sister who had lived for a year in a hollow tree, and Jenna smiled at the tale. Carum fell asleep in the middle, snoring lightly.

  THE HISTORY:

  We are more certain of the makeup of the armies of the G’runians than of anything else of that period, since the Book of Battles is quite clear on the subject. The Book of Battles (hereinafter referred to as the BB) is the only extant volume discovered in the old script. It was translated by Doyle even before her monumental work on Alta-linguistics. It is best to remember, however, as Doyle herself reminds us in her Introductory Notes, that work on the BB is far from over. Many words are, as yet, untranslated and the idiomatic phrases are often puzzling. But the BB brings us closer to that dark period in the history of the Isles than any other single rediscovered object.

  The BB is dedicated to two gods: Lord Cres of the dark and Lady Alta of the light. This is the earliest literary reference to Alta, firmly placing her within the Garunian pantheon of gods where, as Professor Temple advises us in his book, “she reigned as a minor goddess of childbirth and song.” Even more puzzling, then, her position as dedicatee of the BB, though it would be wrong, as Magon would have it, to conclude that it is “further indication of Alta’s warrior status.”

  The BB begins its descriptions of the armies with the following invocation. (The translation is, of course, Doyle’s.)

  Come, lover of the light,

  Come, my strong right arm,

  Follow me dow
n into the dark walkways.

  Be my sword, my shield, my shadow.

  Be my Blanket Companion.

  A curious prayer, and the most curious part of all is the phrase “Blanket Companion,” which Doyle translates baldly, having—as she says—no notion of the idiomatic usage. She suggests, however, that the phrase has more to do with the homoerotic impulses of long-term soldiery than with actual battles, war, or the makeup of the armies.

  The BB delineates three types of forces. Paramount was a warrior caste, a hereditary guard known as Kingsmen who “ate before the king.” (Doyle states that it is unclear whether this means the Kingsmen ate in front of the king—i.e., where they were placed at the table—or that part of their job was to serve as food tasters, so that they ate their food earlier than the king.) According to the BB, the sons of a Kingsman could choose to be in the guard, but the eldest had to become a member or forfeit his life. (The phrase “offer his naked neck to the king’s sword” is used.) There has been much debate about the origins and the state of antiquity of this curious caste. Baum argues for the simple equation: nobles Kingsmen in his treatise “Might Makes Right: Noble Ranking and Noble Favors in the Early Dales” (Nature and History, Vol. 58), while Cowan, always searching for a more intricate answer, holds forth the provocative idea that the Kingsmen represented the retention of arms in the hands of a conquering people who have, by their conquest, reduced an entire population to serfdom. (See her footnote #17 in the article “Orbis Pictus,” Art 99.) The Kingsmen were a mounted guard, the only soldiers allowed horses, and they rode in groups or troops of twenty that were paired (perhaps Blanket Companions?) under a single leader. These leaders were known by animal names, such as the Hound, the Bull, the Fox, the Bear. (In fact the BB cites twenty-seven such names.) The leaders of this select horseguard were known, collectively, as the Brothers, and the men of the guard colloquially—and only amongst themselves—as the Sisters. (Which nomenclature, Dr. Temple points out convincingly, most likely gave rise to the mistaken belief that there were women in the armies.)