The Great Alta Saga Omnibus

by Jane Yolen

  In fact, until the Garunian so-called invasion, such places—while abhorrent to the general public—were tolerated because of the perceived magical nature of the sisters of the Hames. My father had only begun to sniff out the depth of this sexual scam going back several thousand years, when he died.

  How much clearer can it be? From the moment of the dissolution of the Hames, after the Gender Wars, when these women—and especially the young girls—were brought back into the main body of society, sapphic practices all but disappeared in the Dales.

  THE STORY:

  The plan was simple enough, though execution would be difficult. There were two parts to it.

  Those with them at M’dorah who knew boats would make their way southward until the marshes at Catmara, cross through the fens by the secret passageways, come up the coast around the horn of land east of Berick. They would commandeer what great ships remained in the harbor towns of Josteen and Southport, sail them by night to the Skellies, that double line of dangerous rocks cupping Berick Harbor entrance. There they would scuttle the boats, between the two lines of rocks, sealing the harbor to any more Garun ships. Jano was to lead that force.

  The second group, under Scillia’s guidance, would march up to Berick from the west, making enough noise when they reached the castle foot to keep the guards from noticing what Jano’s sailors would be doing. They were not to try to take the castle—half a force would have no chance against that fortress—but they might possibly tempt some portion of the Garuns out.

  “Which,” Jano said, “would then put us on an equal footing. Man to man we can beat them. We did it before. And not so long ago at that.”

  “Woman to man we can beat them as well,” said Sarana. She grinned over at Jano. It was a long-standing joke between them. “And if you are not too tired from swimming to shore, you might just get what we leave alive.” She did not see Scillia’s mouth, already set in a hard line, twist downward at her comment.

  And so it was decided. About a third of the assembled troops admitted to some knowledge of sailing and they gathered together to finalize their plans. The others listened to Scillia and Sarana.

  “This is not a battle for a throne,” Scillia told them. “Who sits on that hard seat is not the matter here. The matter is that the Garuns have taken what is ours, imprisoned our sisters and brothers, and threaten our way of life. If we stop more Garuns from coming in by sea to add their forces to those in Berick Castle, if we cork up those inside, even the Garuns will have to admit that they must leave us alone.”

  “And what of the king over the water?” someone cried out.

  Someone else added, “That pimple! That pustule!”

  “That pimple is mine to squeeze,” Scillia said. “No one but me is to touch him.” She smiled when she said it that no one there should know her heart.

  But Sarana did. And while the others raised a great cheer, she alone sighed.

  Jano’s troops left at dawn. At his right hand was a young fenmaster, a man named Goff whose family had lived for centuries in and around the great marsh that extended between the Mandrop and the Killdown hills. Only those who understood the hidden causeways could travel across the fens, those lands which lay under brackish water. It was a family secret, passed father to son, or mother to daughter. They would need Goff to lead them over the flooded lands.

  When Scillia had asked Goff how his people could live in such a place, he had smiled slowly. “We drive the big tree down,” he replied. “And we-ums live atop.” He seemed to think that explained it all.

  There were few horses among Jano’s crew. Only his own soldiers and another twenty guardsmen rode good steeds. The rest—fisherfolk and farmers and a few townsmen who had joined the ragtag army when they processioned to M’dorah—were horseless or rode plow mares. Those on foot would make for slow progress but the horsemen did not dare outrun them, especially since Goff had no horse nor did he know how to ride one.

  Seven days at best with such a troop, Sarana had guessed, if one was to go due south along the King’s Way. But cutting through the great swamp and around the heel of the Dales would add another three at least.

  “Our troops should have a quicker time of it,” she told the captains. There were no good roads on the western route, but except for a few scattered peat bogs—which they would have to be careful to avoid for the peat-hags could haul down even a great Dales mare—the way led through second-growth forest and farmland carved out of the old King’s Wood.

  So Jano and his followers left first. They did not go quietly. Instead they were lustily singing the old war songs, marching songs like “King Kalas” and “The Long Riding” and “When Jen Came Home.” Their voices held hope and promise and Sarana almost wished she were going with them until she turned and saw Scillia’s face. Her lips were drawn together in a thin line and another thin line furrowed her brow. But her eyes were clear and the color was more like meadow grass than shadowed woods now.

  “My queen?” Sarana asked.

  “I want to memorize their faces,” Scillia said. “I need to remember their names.”

  Sarana understood. They might never see any of those spirited singers again.

  When the strains of “Langbrow’s Battle Hymn” had faded, they were past the last of the M’doran rocks. The plain ended there and the forest’s edge began. Holding his hand up, Jano turned his horse around to face the marchers. They quieted at once.

  “It is good to sing, comrades. It quickens the heart, it shortens the way. But it also gives notice. Best we go now as quiet as we can.” Though how a hundred can go quietly, who are not trained up to it, I know not, he thought.

  He had little hope for their bedraggled army. All they had was heart. What weapons they carried were old—swords or pikes that had not been used since the Gender Wars, almost thirty years before. The swords were pitted with rust as they had, for the most part, simply hung on farmhouse walls or over an inn’s bar as a memento of the Great Fight. In fact, the first days at M’dorah he and his soldiers had to show the new recruits how to grind and polish their old blades to bring them back to some measure of usefulness. One man had even arrived with a Wirgilder ax and shield, which put his weapons at over a hundred years old since the Wirgilders had not come raiding the Dale shores for at least that long. The broad, crescent-shaped ax head had been fine, but the handle had had to be replaced. Jano took on that job himself as he wanted to feel the weight and heft of the axe, never having held one before. It had felt powerful and he almost thought he could hear the blood singing to him from the ax blade. He wondered, idly, if it were singing a victory song or one of ignoble defeat.

  But odder victories had happened in wars before this, and it would never do to let the troops know his secret fears.

  He said, with more confidence than he felt, “I will send scouts ahead on horse back and, at the hump of the day, hunters will be dispatched to each side to find meat for our evening meal. There is a trained soldier to lead each twenty-person unit, but should there be any complaints of that leadership, bring them direct to me. We have much to do and far to go, but we fight together under Alta’s eye and cannot fail of our purpose.”

  “How far do we march this first day?” called out one of the farmers. Jano tried to remember his name and could not.

  “We will not go on till some few of you drop. Every one of you is needed in this fight. But still we must get to the edge of the fens in three days. And we must be there together for we have but one fenmaster to show us the way across.”

  “What if there are stragglers?” asked a woman whose shoulders were as broad and powerful as any two men of the company.

  A butcher’s wife, Jano thought. Or the butcher herself. He answered her seriously. “If you cannot keep up, turn back. Do not dare the fens on your own. The queen will be glad of your company.”

  “Or find another fenmaster,” added Goff, with that same slow smile. This time there was a kind of challenge in it.

  It took four da
ys, not three, to reach the marshy tidal river that marked the edge of the swamp. Jano suspected he had over-reached when counting on three days. But he was not discontented with four.

  There was an unsettling mist over the river’s grey water, obscuring all. The men and women of the company spread out along the shore, trying to peer through to the other side. They whispered to one other, as occasionally a dark smudge of land seemed to appear and then disappear before them.

  Goff startled them all by pulling a reed pipe from his leather pocket and blowing three shrill, ululating cries. The sound seemed to stop at the river’s edge, swallowed up by the dense fog.

  “How long will this mist last?” Jano asked Goff.

  “Oh—always and e’er.” The fenmaster smiled again. “’Tis Alta’s own cloak. It be our best defense.”

  “When can we go across?”

  “Whenever thou wishes.” Goff cocked his head. “We of the fens be nowt fuddled by the grey shroud. It be our blanket from the cradle. Hear the boats?”

  Jano listened. He could hear nothing but an odd creaking as if the trees along the shoreline were stretching.

  A hush had fallen over the company at Goff’s first notes but as the creaking sounds grew louder, first the men, then the women clustered together with an uneasiness born part of fear and part of wonder. Only Jano and Goff remained separate from them, Goff because he knew what to expect, and Jano because he was always ready to expect the worst.

  And then a dozen dark shapes plowed through the mist to hump onto the shore where they were revealed as coracles, skin boats. Their masters leaped out and pulled the little boats the rest of the way onto land.

  “Who be calling?” a woman of the fen folk asked. She was small but well-muscled, her dark skirt kirtled above her knees and a band of bright material binding her hair. At first glance she was young, at second old. “Who be blowing the signal pipe?”

  “Auntie, I be,” Goff said, stepping forward.

  “So thee be coming home, a bad son, a worse nephew, and expect a welcome for it.” For a moment her face was like a cloud and Jano feared they would be turned away. Then the woman laughed and opened her arms to him. “Thee mun nowt be expecting thy mum to be treating thee so.”

  Goff gave her a hug that lifted her off her feet.

  “And who be this great company?” the woman asked.

  “Soldiers for the queen, auntie,” Goff replied.

  “We be caring nowt for queens nor kings, Goffie,” she said. “We be fen folk. We commerce the causeways. We be nowt bending our knee to woman nor man.”

  “Nay, auntie, if we be nowt for the queen, then the men across the sea will be the worse.”

  Jano got off his horse and came over to them. “The men across the sea are here already, mistress. If they stay, they will drain these swamps and build their fortresses on the river shore. They will commerce without you.”

  “They do nowt be knowing the fens. The glassy water will eat them. The river will have its way.” The fen woman folded her arms across her chest.

  “Auntie, listen,” Goff said, his face dark and serious. “I be seeing them at the Great Harbor where I be working the boats. They be taking and they be nowt giving back.”

  “Alta be protecting her own.”

  “Aye—as we be protecting the river.”

  “Aye.”

  “So will you be taking this company over the causeway.”

  Jano intruded once again. “We will pay, mistress.”

  “Ah—that be different.” She held out her hand.

  “We will pay when the devils are back on their own shores.”

  The fen mistress withdrew her hand. “Now or nowt.”

  Goff shrugged and turned to Jano. “It is the fen way.”

  Jano nodded. He was not surprised. “Hold, mistress. I will see what can be found.” He returned to his horse and reached into the saddle pack, pulling out a velvet bag. For a moment he held it against his heart. Then he walked back, handing it to the woman and saying loud enough that all could hear: “My father was named Sandor, one of the five who rode with the Anna into the Grenna’s grove. Some said he was a tale spinner and no such thing ever happened. But he would not retract his life. So he was most of his life without friends, but for me. He had brought back nothing to prove his tale but a single gold coin from the Grove which he never spent. All his life he worked hard as a ferryman though he had a fortune in his pocket. When he died, he left the coin to me. What better way for a ferryman’s son to use that coin than this? Mistress, carry us over the fens.”

  She took the bag, emptied the coin into her hand, held it up to the grey light, then bit it. “Five in a boat, then, till ye be over.” She put the coin back in the bag, and tucked the bag into her belt. “We swim the horses behind.”

  It was, Jano thought, like a dream of floating. Like the dreams he had of home, the little cottage by the side of the ferry slip. The bad dreams. Where house and ferry were devoured slowly by some sort of inexorable grey tide.

  What he had not told them was that his father had died of drowning, falling drunk off the ferry on one homeward trip. Jano had long blamed himself for his father’s death, though he understood now that he had been much too young to pull the sodden man back into the boat, had in fact been asleep on a pallet aboard the ferry when it had happened. He had not awakened until his father’s final desperate cry for help. If anyone was to blame, surely it was his mother who had deserted them when Jano was a baby. Or the blame lay on the shoulders of those who did not believe Sandor’s stories of the wars. Or perhaps the blame lay on the man himself. He did not have to drink. He did not have to die. Still—what did it matter now?

  The fog was, if anything, thicker than before and Jano could scarcely see the boat he sat in, even though it was crowded with five people plus the boatman. He could not see the three horses swimming along behind, guided by reins which were looped through an iron ring fastened to the boat’s side. However, he could hear the creaking of the leather, the slight splash of oars, a muffled cough. There was a sensation of movement if he closed his eyes.

  How long? he wondered briefly. How long till we get there? Then he simply closed his eyes and gave himself up, like an ardent lover, to sleep.

  When the boat ground onto another shore and the horses, now happily on dry land, started snorting their pleasure, Jano woke with a start, his hand automatically reaching for the hilt of his sword.

  “We be putting you at this place,” said the fenmistress. “We be going back for the others.”

  “How many this time?” Jano asked, though he had already counted and knew.

  “We be getting the rest,” Goff answered.

  “You be setting a camp for the night,” added the fenmistress. “Fire and all. There be nowt here to sight it.”

  He believed her. Even a great blaze would not be seen where they were. Wherever they were. On an island or on a hidden shore.

  THE BALLAD:

  FEN LOVE SONG

  (Chorus) Speed the boat, pull the oar

  Off to the isles;

  Speed the boat to the shore

  Over the miles.

  Speed the boat, pull the oar

  Off to the isles,

  Speed the bonnie boat o’er.

  Little skin boat, so tough and so tight,

  Speed the boat o’er, speed the boat o’er,

  Carry my lover this festival night,

  Speed the bonnie boat o’er.

  Little skin boat, so rough and so new,

  Speed the boat o’er, speed the boat o’er,

  Tell him I love him and that I be true.

  Speed the bonnie boat o’er.

  Little skin boat, so taut and so trim,

  Speed the boat o’er, speed the boat o’er,

  Take this my token, be bringing it him,

  Speed the bonnie boat o’er.

  If he refuses, I’ll jump in my boat,

  Speed the boat o’er, speed the boat o’er,

/>   Over the fenway to sink or to float,

  Speed the bonnie boat o’er.

  (Chorus)

  THE STORY:

  It had been ten days and still Prince Corrine was not buried. He lay on Jemson’s bed and though the hearth fire was no longer being lit—for none of the servers dared do more than leave a tray of food outside the door for the king—the room was hot enough by spring’s standard. The windows stood open day and night and still the room stayed warm.

  The smell was awful and daily Corrine’s body grew bloated, and his skin began to streak red, yellow, and black. But Jemson seemed oblivious to any changes. During the day he sat by the bed conversing with his brother as if Corrie could hear. Mostly Jemson told him about what life had been like on the Continent, how the first days had been difficult, so far from home, but that soon gave way to a pleasurable stay when he had found that Garun ways were more palatable to him than those of the Dales.

  “I thought to stay there forever,” he said companionably to the corpse. “Yet here I am. Once again at home. And king. As I should have been all along. And since you have remained here beside me, you must agree.”

  If he noticed that Corrie did not answer, Jemson did not remark on it, but went on instead to tell of his prowess at Garunian games. The boar hunt and his first kill, a bloody romp that took two days. Bear-baiting and how he won enough money on one bet to buy himself an Andanavian horse, a white stallion who could do the “airs” without a misstep. Pigeon-fletching where feathers for arrows were taken from a still live bird and the winner of the contest was the one whose pigeon lived longest and yet lost the most feathers. He boasted about his vast skill at cards. “I am good at skittle and fair at le mont, but I am best in the court at three-card royale.” Corrie had no response to any of this, though a faint buzzing of flies arose from his body which Jemson ignored.

  The king ate but little of what was left outside the door—a few spring berries, a plate of mushrooms broiled in butter, slices of goat cheese. He hardly ate but he drank great quantities of wine, whole bottles of the heavy, sweet red from Berick. At night he slept by the side of his dead brother, so sodden he might as well have been dead himself.