The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  Still, one day Jerum, too, found the twisty, windy path. Only this time it was lined with currants and set about with pine. He was so mazed by it, he walked a night and a day going true north and then he, too, was stolen by the fairies.

  “Oh, my dear little Jeroo,” said his mam. “Do not dare the fate of your brothers. Stay at home east and stay at home west and stay at home best with me.”

  Now little Jeroo was a good boy and he did as he was told. He stayed at home and took care of his old mam. But when he was an ancient himself, and his mam dead lo! that many a year, he went out into the forest one day to gather firewood.

  And even though he was not looking for it, he found the path the others had taken. Long did he stand upon it, looking due, true north past woodbine, bluets, bayberry, and thorn; past gorse, currant, yarrow, and pine. He thought he saw figures dancing in the distance—young men he could almost remember, their heads crowned with garlands, singing and drinking and being merry.

  Then he turned his back on them, the young and ever fair. He went home, lay down on his old, cold bed, turned his face to the wall, and died.

  THE STORY:

  Jenna did not have time to do more than shove her feet into boots and tie a fresh belt around her tunic. Her long braid had hundreds of escaping wisps, as if mice had been at it. But the tide was an early one and she had overslept, wine and weariness combining. No one had dared wake her until the sun, full on her face as she lay in her bed, reminded her that it was the day.

  The Day.

  She had rushed through her dressing and managed to get down the stairs in time, but just.

  Now she stood on the shore with the others, watching as Jem—looking small and terribly alone in the midst of the Garunian oarsmen—waved at them from the front of the boat, the satchel she had given him snugged under one arm.

  The sailors were a rough lot, Jenna had thought, despite their grand red-and-gold outfits. Black might have better suited them. Then they would have been as funereal as the day. She did not move until the rowboat had reached the ship, and the ship had cleared the breakwaters to sail out to sea.

  The ship’s bright red sails filled with the breeze. But the color only served to remind Jenna of blood. It was an inapt figure, but Jenna was too much mother and too little queen at the moment to care. She willed herself not to cry, but her face was a desolation.

  Corrie came over to slip his hand in hers. “I shall have to be two sons for you now,” he said.

  She looked down at him. “Did your father tell you to say that?” she asked, and when he looked hurt, she hugged him. “You do not have to be any more than just Corrie,” she said. But the damage was already done and she knew it. So she held his hand as they marched back to the palace the long way, through the winding streets of the harbor town crowded with well-wishers. She hoped that her hand, strong on his, would tell him what she could not.

  Part way through Berick, Corrie slipped her hand like a dog off a leash, running away to join some boys playing mumbles in front of the WindCap hostelry without so much as a faretheewell. Which, Jenna thought, was just as well. There had already been too many farewells that day. Farewell to Jem and farewell to her own innocence.

  No, she thought suddenly, that had gone the day she’d agreed to exchange him for a Garun prince.

  For the first time she began to wonder what young Gadwess would be like. Would he be one of those boastful, self-satisfied princelings who looked down on the common folk? And what would his mother be feeling. Any less than I, Jenna wondered, because she is a Garun woman and not supposed to feel any pain? She scolded herself aloud for such an ungenerous thought. “How could I …”

  “For the people, Anna. For all of us.” The speaker was an old woman, her face scarred badly, the right cheek almost quilted with lines.

  “I’m sorry …” Jenna began, realizing the woman had misunderstood her.

  “Ye had to let him go for us,” the old woman said. “For the ending of wars. It says so.”

  Jenna stared, recognizing her for a fisherwoman by the striped petticoat and the black skirt kilted up over the wide leather belt. “What says so?”

  “The prophecy. Dinna ye know the prophecy?”

  “I am done with prophecies,” Jenna said. “Done these thirteen years.”

  “Aye,” the old woman said, lifting up a hand as scarred as her face. “But are they done wi’ ye?”

  Jenna reached into her pocket and drew out a coin. “Take this and forget the prophecy, old one. Buy yourself a tot of rum and toast my baby over the sea.”

  But the old woman had already begun in a singsong voice:

  “Babby over the water,

  Babby under the ring,

  Babby brings a sword and stone

  To come and crown a king.”

  “That is no prophecy,” Jenna said, dropping the coin on the ground before the old woman. “That is a children’s song. I sang it with my own when I dandled them on my knee.”

  She turned and walked away quickly, but the old woman kept singing the song over and over, even after she had picked up the coin from the dirt.

  THE HISTORY:

  The exchange of princes as hostages between formerly warring nations as a pledge of peace was not new when the first prince of the Dales set sail to the Continent. But his ten-year exile in the land of the G’runs was marked at home by a stunning surge of poetry and songs about “the prince over the sea.” Not a few of the poems—and the entire flowering of the First Romantic Movement—can be laid at the feet of the G’runian hostage who brought with him a fresh, poetic voice and a wealth of Continental song traditions.

  Until that time, the few extant Dalian tunes had been modal and without much instrumentation. The tembala—a stringed instrument of the guitar family with five melody strings and two drones—was the exception. For centuries musicologists thought it the only native Dale instrument. However three other instruments have recently been discovered from the early Altan period, instruments that have Continental counterparts but seem wholly of Dale manufacture.

  The first of these is the barsoom, which is a small hand-held skin drum, with copper bangles around the rim. The fragment of drumhead is goatskin. The bangles have slight indentations on their edges, which lends them a variety of tones.

  Secondly, there is the temmon, an early flute with five holes and a range of two modal “octaves.” There were two different flutes found in the dig, both with lateral mouth holes. One was made from a local ash, one from a black wood which never grew outside the Dales.

  The third instrument is the fidoon, a highly arched fiddle-like instrument which is played with a bow on the underside of the strings.

  All three kinds of instruments were found in the Berike Barrow, a dig of utmost importance to musicologists as it has been reliably dated to the early Altan period. We already knew that during the years of the hostage exchange, Dale songs had been marked by particular solo instrumental parts, but until the time of the Berike Barrow excavation, no corresponding instruments had been found. A few of the sophisticated Continental instruments, like the viol and shawm, were used instead by people playing Early Music concerts, for they seeming closest to the range demanded. Also as a further clue, there was still, on display in Baron Fuchweil’s collection on the Continent, “The Prince’s Consort”—a viol and a shawm said to have been brought over with the G’run prince, then returned home with him. But the Berike Dig was the first in which actual instruments of Dale manufacture of that period were found.

  Furthermore, the ten piece song-cycle collectively known as the “O’er the Sea Suite,” with its intricate rhyme schemes and surprisingly salacious (for that period) plays on words like “Jemmie went o’ering, went oaring, went whoring …” all pointed to a new and unprecedented influence from the G’runs.

  The “O’er the Sea” songs are also remarkable for their three-part texture which had long been a feature of G’runian secular songs but not previously found in the Dales. The pra
ctice of having one or more parts whose only—or principal—function is to complete the harmony was entirely a G’runian invention. However the G’run choirs, being male only, had a built-in limitation on the range of voices. When the three-part songs became integrated into the Dales, the voices included sopranos and contraltos which allowed for a greater variety in the vocal lines. This marked out the “O’er the Sea Suite” and made it such an interesting puzzle for musicologists.

  —Cat Eldridge, The Dale Musician’s Handbook

  THE STORY:

  The boat bearing the Garun prince sailed into the harbor the following morning, but Jenna did not go down to meet it. Carum and she had decided that he and Corrie, along with a guard of twenty men led by Marek, would do the honors. She preferred the task of overseeing the reappointment of Jem’s room for the Garun prince. Though it was a task that any of the servers could have completed without her, Jenna was determined to put things right for the young hostage on her own.

  “What I do for him, perhaps his mother will do for Jem,” she told Carum in Jem’s bedroom when he asked her a final time whether she wanted to accompany them to the harbor.

  “His mother will not have seen Gadwess except at formal occasions for the past six years,” Carum reminded her. “Lest she unman him. Lest she make a woman of him.”

  “A woman of him!” Jenna’s voice shook. “Do they forget that it was a Dale woman who bested them at war?”

  “Dale women and men together bested the Garuns,” Carum said acidly.

  For a moment they glared at one another, till Carum looked down. “Lips,” he said.

  “Knives,” Jenna answered, sitting down on the unmade bed.

  It was their private code, a way of remembering the old saying: If your mouth turns into a knife, it will cut off your lips. It was their way of making sure they did no lasting harm through arguing.

  “Whatever is done for Jem or not done, I must still do what I can for Gadwess. He will be wretched from the journey, and frightened. He will be alone in a new land.”

  “He is a Garun,” Carum said. “Which means he will never show his wretchedness or fear.”

  “He is still a boy,” Jenna countered. “So I will make him his own room. And freshen the bedding. Let a new wind blow through an old place.” It was a line from a song they both loved.

  “Then I will go along with just Corrie and the guards.”

  “Best that way,” Jenna said. “Carum …”

  He looked at her face and its familiar grief.

  “I need more time.”

  He nodded, leaned over, kissed her on the brow, and left.

  But Scillia, coming into the room on the heels of her father’s departure, cried out in dismay. “Mother! What are you doing? Do you wish all reminders of Jem gone before his boat has even reached the Garun shore?”

  Jenna turned her full fury on her daughter. “Wretched girl, how dare you say that. I carry him here, still, under the breastbone, where I carried you all.”

  “You never carried me there,” Scillia said, leaving as explosively as she had come.

  There were three servers, two men and a woman, standing in the hallway, ready to enter the room, and they did not move as Scillia stormed away. They were rigid with embarrassment for both the queen and her daughter. Jenna saw them, but said nothing directly about the incident. Her renewed fury, which was but a displacement of her sorrow, had nowhere to go but inward. She would never castigate her serving people when the fault was her own. So she grabbed up the bedding and began beating it with her hands until the air was filled with dust and bits of down.

  “Take this away,” she said between slaps to the bedding, “and bring me a new coverlet. And move this bed to there.” She pointed to the window and the servers came in to the room at last, but tentatively.

  “No—move it there.” She pointed to the far wall. “It is still too cold to sleep so far from the fire.”

  The two men picked up the heavy wooden bedstead and carried it where she commanded. Under the bed, where brooms had never fully reached, was the dirt of a long winter, a wooden ball from the Peg-in-the-Ring Jem had so loved the last summer, three game cards, and his bear still wearing its jaunty red bow.

  “Brownie!” Jenna sobbed. Then she turned and raced out of the room so that none of the servers could see her cry.

  Once in her own bedroom, Jenna closed the curtains to make a night of the morning light. She lit the hearthfire and crowded close to it. When the logs had fully engaged the flame, throwing out a rosy light, Skada appeared beside her.

  “So,” Skada said, “the Gender Wars continue to wound us all.”

  “I am not dead of them.”

  “Not yet. But something will die if you continue on this way.”

  Jenna turned on her dark sister. “What do you mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean.”

  “Say it.”

  “Love will die. Family. All that you hold dear.”

  “A prophecy, sister? You think less of them than I do.”

  “Not a prophecy. A prediction.”

  “Am I that awful a force?” Jenna held her hand out and twined her fingers in Skada’s.

  “You are the Anna, the White One, the Girl With Three Mothers, the Queen.”

  “You know I am only Jenna. You have seen me bleed.” She gave a half-cozening smile.

  “I have seen you shit in the woods.” Skada gave the half smile back, only on her mouth it was fully ironic. “But what you and I know makes no matter. The people believe. And Belief trumps all.”

  “You think this but a game, sister?” Jenna asked.

  “It is Alta’s game, sister,” Skada answered. “And we are but players on the board. You are the White Queen, and I the Black.”

  “Thank you for that reminder,” Jenna said. She rose and walked out of the room into the day-lit hall, alone.

  Carum stood at the water’s edge straining to see the incoming ship while Corrie sat atop a grey stone that humped out of the water. He was dropping shells onto the stone, making splashes in the rainwater that had been caught in a deep hollow on the boulder’s surface. The water splashed onto Corrie’s trews, staining them.

  A strong wind blew from behind them and out into the harbor, making white-topped waves that looked like many little knives. The wind whistling by their ears caused Corrie to shiver.

  “There’ll be a hard landing today,” Marek commented.

  “They won’t sail her in, but use the oars,” Carum said, putting a hand up to shade his eyes. “Provided they get past the Skellies.”

  “They will, sir, don’t you fear,” said one of the guards, whose eyes were bluer than the water. “My brother’s on that ship. No finer sailor in the Dales.”

  “No finer sailors—all of them,” Marek amended quickly. “They are not about to lose that ship.”

  “Or that prince!” added Carum.

  “Father,” Corrie said suddenly, looking up from the grey stone, “what of Jem?” No one had been paying any attention to Corrie, but though he’d been playing with the shells, he’d been all ears for their conversation.

  Carum was silent, as if weighing his answer, but Marek did not hesitate “Now, boy, don’t we say: Storm in Berick, sun in Bewick?”

  “You mean Jemmie will have good weather there if we have …”

  “Just so, young master.” It was another guard, his cheeks scoured to the color of early wine by his days out in the wind and sun.

  “I hope so. Jemmie’s never been good in a boat.”

  “Corrie!” Carum’s voice was steel.

  Just then one of the men cried out, “I see it! I see the ship.” He pointed to a speck on the horizon.

  “Where? Where?” Corrie leaped to his feet, scattering shells over the top of the boulder. Treading carelessly on them, he placed both hands up to shade his eyes. “Where?” One leg slipped on the crushed shells, his hat fell over the rock’s edge, and he started to slide after it into the ocean.r />
  Marek was quickest into the water, and knee-deep, caught the boy before he fell in. “Sometimes,” Marek whispered to him, “you are too much bother.” He waded back and deposited Corrie on the shore.

  Corrie twisted out of Marek’s grasp and ran over to his father. “Where is it?”

  Putting his left hand on his son’s shoulders, Carum showed him. “There. Follow my finger.”

  “That? That speck?”

  “That speck.”

  “But it is so small.”

  “It will grow sooner than you, little master,” said the red-cheeked man, laughing.

  The others passed the joke around and the laughter tracked all the way through the guard.

  Corrie’s cheeks burned with embarrassment. He was not so young that he did not know that. He had meant that the boat was actually small. Smaller than the one that had taken Jem away. Four masts to the Garun’s eight. But anything he said now would only make the men laugh the harder.

  Marek stopped the laughter soon enough. “Look smart!” he scolded them. “Or do you want to bring shame on our king and queen and all the Dales in that young Garun’s eyes?” He did not mention Corrie, but he had not missed the brands on the boy’s cheeks.

  “Aught will shame us for laughing,” called out one man, but he quickly found his place in the proper formation with the others.

  The speck was now visible as a ship, sails down and long oars out. But before it had completely cleared the Skellies, that double line of dangerous rocks that cupped the harbor entrance like two hands almost at prayer, a cold rain began. At first it was a sputtering, spitting sort of rain, and then it came down in hard, heavy drops.

  Carum, Marek, and the guards were all wearing hats, but Corrie’s had fallen off in his mishap on the rock and was even now floating out of reach.

  “Corrie, go back to the inn and wait for us there,” Carum said.

  “But Father, I want to see the Garun prince.”

  “You will have plenty of time to see him. Almost a lifetime. However, if you stay out here without your cap, you will catch your death. And then I will be without any sons.”