The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  Pynt whispered from her cot, “A cat?”

  “Too noisy.”

  “A bear?”

  “Not noisy enough.”

  “Is that meant to be comforting?”

  “That is meant to be—oh, Pynt, we have had this conversation before.”

  Pynt grinned despite the fear.

  “How can you joke at a time like this?” Jenna asked.

  Pynt pushed herself up onto her elbow. “Jenna, you are always asking me to think. You think this time. Think about the last time we heard such a noise, and in the fog.”

  “It was Carum.” Jenna’s voice was suddenly soft.

  “But it is not Carum now. Still, that is a noise made by someone equally human. One someone. Surely we outnumber whoever is there.”

  Jenna nodded and drew her sword. Skada followed suit.

  A voice called out from the bush, “Put up your sword Jo-an-enna. If I had wanted to surprise you, you would never have heard me.”

  Pynt sat all the way up on the cot, her smile disguising the cost of such effort. “A-ma!” she cried.

  Amalda stepped out of the shadows and, as she did, her dark sister Sammor materialized by her side.

  Jenna slipped her sword silently back into its sheath, nodding as Skada did the same. They stepped aside so that Amalda and Sammor might get to the cot.

  “What has happened to you, child?” asked Amalda.

  “I spoke too soon and went first,” Pynt said wryly. “Just what you warned me about. I think that this time I may have learned my lesson. But, A-ma, why are you here?”

  Sammor held Pynt’s right hand, Amalda her left. “You brought us here, imp,” they said together.

  “When a runner came from Calla’s Ford to say that you had not gotten to the Hame with the other two—” Amalda began.

  “See, Jenna,” Pynt interrupted, “I told you they would make it on their own.”

  Unruffled, Amalda continued. “We could not stay at home knowing you had acted so foolishly, knowing that you might have put your life—and others’—in danger. Marga, you went directly against the Mother’s orders.”

  “They were bad orders, made to hurt, not to heal,” Pynt said.

  “They were the Mother’s orders,” said Amalda, “no matter what your heart told you. In the Dales they say: The heart can be a cruel master. And look how cruelly it has served you.” She and Sammor fussed at the bandage around Pynt’s shoulder and back.

  “Even more cruelly served were the women of Nill’s Hame,” Jenna whispered. She gestured at the exodus fanned out around them, the children waiting quietly for their next instructions.

  Pynt bit her lip and looked down.

  “We wondered who they were,” said Sammor. “They have the quiet containment of Alta’s own babes.”

  “That is quite a reaping of hillsides, Jenna,” Amalda added.

  Jenna nodded.

  “Where are their mothers?” Amalda asked.

  “Dead,” Jenna said.

  “All of them?”

  Jenna said nothing.

  “All.” Skada spoke for the first time.

  Amalda and Sammor turned and stared at her.

  “But … but you are …”

  Skada and Jenna both nodded and moved closer together so that their shoulders touched. Seen that way, their twinship could not be denied.

  “I do not understand,” Amalda said, coming over to stand before them, Sammor following. “You are at least a year away from your Night of Sisterhood. Surely the women at Nill’s Hame had no time to set you before the glass. You had no training. You had never even seen the rites.”

  Jenna shrugged. “It just … just happened,” she said.

  Skada’s shrug was more generous. “Need called to need,” she said. “And I answered.”

  They were all silent for a long moment; then a four-year-old broke from the ring of children and came over to tug at Jenna’s sleeve. “Anna,” she whispered urgently, “we have heard the cough of a cat nearby. Some of the little ones are frightened.”

  “And you are not frightened?” asked Jenna, kneeling down beside her. Skada flanked her.

  “No, Anna. You are here.”

  “Why does she call you Anna?” asked Sammor. “That is not your name.”

  “The Anna is …” Amalda began.

  “I know what the Anna is,” said Jenna, “but I no longer know who I am.” She put her arm around the child on one side, and Skada did the same on the other. “Tell me again, sweet heart.”

  “We heard a cat in the woods. It coughed like this.” The child gave a remarkably good imitation of a cat’s rough voice.

  “The tale will keep,” said Sammor. “The cat will not. We will kill it for you, Amalda and I, and one of your babes will sleep in a skin warmer than her own tonight.” Without another word, they slipped away from the group.

  “Tell the others,” Jenna said to the child. “We will wait here until they return. But no one is to worry further about the cat. At our Hame we say: A cat who boasts once is a cat who boasts once too often.”

  “We say that, too, Anna,” the child said, clapping her hands before she hurried back to the circle of children. Trotting around, she gave them all the message and they sat down in the grass to wait.

  “That cat is not the problem,” Jenna said to Skada.

  “Nor is the telling of the tale,” Skada added.

  “Time is the problem,” Pynt said from her cot. “Every minute we wait here is a piece of moon time lost.”

  “Moon time matters no longer,” said Skada. “A-ma will help with the cot now. You will be able to travel by day, too, if you wish.”

  “If it were just Amalda, Pynt, and me, we would go both day and night. But the children are exhausted. Little food and less sleep is not a healthy rule.”

  “They are young. They will recover,” said Skada.

  Jenna looked over Skada’s shoulder at the trees, dark and untidy in the moonlight. “I wish we were gone from this place. It is too close to bad memories.”

  “And a rough grave,” added Pynt.

  It was less than an hour, with the moon still climbing, when Amalda and Sammor returned, the cat’s skin carried between them.

  Jenna smiled thinly. “A small time,” she said.

  “A small cat,” Amalda answered. “And only roughly skinned. It will stink, but we will clean it better once we are home. We worried about the time, you see.”

  “We worried, too,” Pynt said.

  They dropped the skin on top of Pynt’s feet, and the children gathered around to touch it, jostling one another slightly to get a better look, their infant sisters forgotten for the moment in the high grass.

  “One touch,” warned Petra, “and that is all. Then we must go”

  Silently and solemnly, the little girls touched the catskin; then they turned back to the grass where their sisters lay, and picked up their burdens before forming two straight lines.

  Amalda and Sammor nodded toward the south. “That way is quickest. And it avoids a certain place.”

  “What place?” asked Jenna.

  “A grave with a snarling dog’s helm glowering over it from a broken cross,” Sammor said.

  “But I threw that helm into the grave,” Jenna blurted out.

  “And whoever uncovered the grave the first time gave him a proper burial according to their own rites,” Amalda said.

  “First?” Pynt asked, her voice thin.

  “We uncovered it second,” said Sammor. “We tracked the two of you with an ease that belittles our training. You trod a path in circles with frequent back-treading.”

  “There was a fog,” Jenna said. If it was meant as an explanation, neither Amalda nor Sammor took it so.

  “When we trailed you to that dirt-packed clearing and found the new grave, we feared the worst. But all we found in the grave was a big, ugly lump of a man,” said Sammor.

  “A man killed twice,” added Amalda, “if we read his wounds right. Onc
e in the thigh and once …”

  Jenna made a small sighing sound.

  “Please,” Skada said, “Jenna has no stomach for such tellings. She scarcely had any stomach for the doing.”

  “I did what had to be done,” said Jenna. “But I will not take joy in it, neither once nor again. The children are waiting. Can we go?”

  They walked on and on, sharing out the last of the brod and fruit with the children, giving the infants drinks of water flavored with the honey that Amalda and Sammor had carried with them.

  Along the road, first Pynt and then Skada recounted the horror of the Nill’s Hame slaughter as starkly as they could, reciting just the facts so that Jenna’s blanched face might find its color again. Amalda and Sammor knew better than to interrupt the telling and thus make it longer. And when it was done, they were all five silent, for there were no words for comfort after such a tale. They were careful, though, not to let the children overhear any of it, leaving them to Petra’s gentle chivying.

  At last the southern road turned into the woods, and Skada and Sammor disappeared, so that the cot had to be carried between Amalda and Jenna. They were silent far into the morning, when they led the children beneath a cliff into a great circling encampment with Pynt’s cot at the center. They slept there, at the base of the Old Hanging Man, whose broad, rocky face watched over them until dusk.

  The children were hungry and one or two even complained of it, despite Petra’s warnings and the many songs she had them sing. The children were all were ragged from the long, steady, unending march, and finally Jenna and Amalda let several of the smallest take turns riding on their shoulders. Pynt cradled a few of the infants at a time in the cot by her breast and at her feet, freeing the older children from their heavy burdens. In this way the band of thirty-six straggled up to the gates of Selden Hame at dawn on the fifth day, flanked by two silent Hame guards who had not asked questions, fearing to delay them further.

  The gates were opened at once, for the doors of a Hame were never shut to children, and the women of Selden boiled around them, lifting the children into much-welcomed embraces. Then they guided the ragtag crew into the kitchen for food.

  Jenna knew that the Hame baths would be kept steaming long into the afternoon, and she could already feel the laving of the waters over her tired legs and back. She put her arm around Petra.

  “Come, my good right hand, after we cram some hot stew down you and clean you up, you and I will have to go and speak to the Mother.” She said it jauntily, though her own stomach knotted at the thought. When she looked down at Petra, to her surprise, the girl had tears in her eyes.

  “Are we safe here, Anna?” Petra asked in a whisper.

  “You are safe here, Petra,” Jenna answered. “And the children, too, because of your good shepherding.”

  “The Goddess smiles,” Petra said, her voice a small echo of the six-fingered priestess.

  Jenna turned away slightly and under her breath, so that Petra could not hear, muttered, “The Goddess laughs, and I do not know if I like the sound.”

  “What did you say?” Petra asked.

  Jenna did not answer, but guided her to a chair in the kitchen, where Donya set two steaming mugs of stew before them and a platter of thick bread slices slathered with melted butter and cloudberry jam.

  Amalda had let no one question them while they were eating, then took Pynt to see the infirmarer. Kadreen checked Pynt’s shoulder and back while she gulped down a second mug of stew.

  “A good piece of work,” Kadreen said, her mouth in its usual thin line. “You will not lose the use of the arm, which is often the case when a wound cuts across muscle. But you will have to exercise that arm as soon as you are able.”

  “When will that be?” Pynt asked.

  “I will tell you,” said Kadreen, “and it will be sooner than either you or your arm will want. We will work on it together, you and I.”

  Pynt nodded.

  “There will be a nasty scar,” Kadreen said.

  Amalda smiled. “I will trace it for you myself, Marga. A warrior’s scars are the face of memory, a map of her courage.”

  Pynt hesitated a moment, then looked up at her mother. “I am a warrior no longer, A-ma. I have seen enough death for twenty warriors, though my hand struck but one, and he only in the thigh. Yet was I a bringer of death, as surely as if I carried some contagion.”

  Amalda’s face blanched. “But …”

  “My mind is made up, A-ma. And it is not to shame you. But at my Night of Sisterhood, I will choose to tend the children, like Mama and Zo. I am good with them, and surely with so many new ones in our Hame, there will be need of me.”

  Amalda started to speak again, but Kadreen put her hand up. “Listen to her, Amalda. There are some scars that we cannot see and they heal slowly if at all. I know. I have such scars myself.”

  Amalda nodded and looked again at Pynt. “You are tired, child.”

  “I am tired, my mother, but that is not the reason I say what I do. If you had seen them in the end, all the beautiful, strong women of Nill’s Hame: sisters side by side. Jenna pulled my cot into the kitchen and the hall that we might bid them farewell. She said—and I shall carry it with me always—that we must remember. For if we forget, then their death has no meaning. Sisters side by side.” She turned her face down and stared at the cot as if she could read some picture there, pushed the mug away, and wept.

  Amalda sat down on the cot and ran her hand over Pynt’s curly hair. “If that is your wish, heart of my heart. If that is your wish, child whom I carried beneath my breast. Then that is what shall be. You always were a stubborn little thing. Hush. Hush and sleep. You are safe here.”

  Pynt turned back and stared up at her, eyes still brimming with tears. “But, A-ma, you do not understand. I shall never ever feel safe again. That is the worst of it. Yet I shall dedicate my life to the safety of those little ones so that they do not have to feel as I do. Oh, A-ma …” She sat up suddenly and threw her arms around Amalda, without regard for the pain in her shoulder and back, and held on as if she would never let go.

  THE BALLAD:

  The Ballad of White Jenna

  Out of the morning, into the night,

  Thirty and three rode off to fight

  To put the dreaded foe to flight,

  Led by the hand of Jenna.

  Thirty and three rode side by side,

  And by the moonlight fortified.

  “Fight on, my sisters,” Jenna cried,

  “Fight for the Great White Alta.”

  The blood flowed swift, like good red wine,

  As sisters took the battle line.

  “This kingdom I will claim for mine,

  And for the heart of Alta!”

  Thirty and three rode out that day

  To hold the dreaded foe at bay,

  But nevermore they passed this way,

  Led by the hand of Jenna.

  Yet still, some say, in darkest night

  The sisters can be heard to fight,

  And you will see a flash of white,

  The long white braid of Jenna.

  THE STORY:

  The bath had been soothing and Jenna even fell asleep for a moment in the hot, scented water. Her white hair, free of the confining braid, fanned out around her like strands of bleached seaweed.

  Petra picked at a single strand that had floated across her breast, silently waiting for Jenna to speak. At last, unable to wait longer, she asked, “What is your Mother Alta like? I shall be studying with her.”

  Jenna opened her eyes and stared at the wooden ribbing of the roof. She was a long time answering, and the silence stretched between them like a taut rope.

  “Hard,” she said finally. “Unbending. A rock.”

  “A Hame needs a solid rock upon which to build,” Petra said slowly.

  Jenna did not answer.

  “But one can bruise oneself against unyielding stone,” Petra said with a little sigh. “Our Mother alw
ays said that a priestess should not be rock but water. That there is an ebb and flow to a Hame. Our Mother Alta …”

  “… is dead,” Jenna said very softly. “And the fault is mine.”

  Petra shook her head. “No, no, Jo-an-enna. There is no fault. No blame, no shame, Mother Alta always said. And she told me about the Anna. To study to be a priestess is to learn prophecy. If you are the Anna …”

  “Am I?”

  Petra tried to smile. “I believe you are.”

  “But do you know?”

  “I will know a hundred years from now,” said Petra. “I will know tomorrow.”

  “What kind of an answer is that?” Jenna asked disgustedly. “It is priestess talk, all words and no meaning.” She slapped her hand against the water, splashing them both.

  Petra rubbed the water from her eyes as she answered. “It is what Mother Alta said. She meant that we must act now for now, and leave the answers to those who come after. And so I believe.”

  Jenna stood and the water came up only to the sharp ridge of her hipbone. Her body, with its covering of fine white hair, seemed to glow in the darkened room. “I wish I could believe so simply. I wish I knew what to believe.”

  Petra stood next to her, the water past her waist. “Jenna, a prophecy only suggests, it does not tell. It can be read accurately only long after. We who live it must read it on the slant.”

  “Those were Mother Alta’s words.”

  Petra shook her head. “Not just words, Jenna, but the heart of it. If you are the Anna, then there is much for you to do. If you are not, you must still do it, for events will happen whether you believe or not. The Hames must be warned.” She put her hand on Jenna’s arm. “And this Hame must be warned, too.”

  Jenna wrung her hair between strong hands, then quickly braided it up, tying a ribband around it, and flinging it over her shoulder. She smiled wryly. “I had hoped to put it off.”

  “Put what off?”

  “Speaking to the rock.”

  “I will be there, Jenna. And I will be water over stone for you. You will see.”

  “Water over stone,” Jenna mused. “I like that.”

  They slipped into clean clothes that had been left for them and, arm in arm, went into the hall. But the hot water had drained them both of any strength after the long nights of walking, and before they could be summoned to see Mother Alta, they had both fallen into a deep sleep across Jenna’s bed. Jenna awoke only once all afternoon, when Amalda came to fetch them and instead tucked Petra into Pynt’s old bed.