The One-Armed Queen

by Yolen, Jane;

  “Which queen?” Sarana could scarcely breathe.

  “The queen that is.”

  “And that is?”

  “Scillia, of course, you silly cow,” Malwen said. “Who else would it be?”

  “Is is the truth?” Sarana asked, her head swimming as if she were suddenly drunk.

  “Aye. She’s rounded up some five hundred to fight for her, but half are children or dotards. How many do you have here?”

  “A handful. The rest …”

  “Gone. I know. We saw them die. Ran for the trees when it was clear we could not help.”

  “Buried them, too,” his man put in. “Thought for sure we’d buried you. Old Voss here weeping like a …”

  “Shut up, mind you,” Voss said. “I’ll not miss an arm a second time. Even in the full dark.”

  Sarana hushed them both. “If the girl goes out with your man, you can tell the queen we are quartered in the dining room. With the dead king.”

  “The usurper is dead?” Voss sounded impressed.

  “By my hand. Do not tell the queen that. It should come from me.”

  “I’ll get this child and Nohm here out the window and down the ladder before you can say Alta’s Hame. And then I’ll accompany you back up to that room. Dead, eh?” said Voss. “I want to see it before I believe it so.”

  “It is quite so,” said Allema. “And her other brother even more so.”

  “A bundle of news, and not all of it good, I see. Well, up you go, lass. And you Nohm after. Tell the queen to storm the gates and we will take them Garuns by surprise from within.”

  Sarana, Malwen, and Voss had made it only to the second landing when they ran into a quartet of Garun soldiers making their rounds.

  “Only four,” Voss called. “I’ll have two.”

  Sarana dispatched her man by the simple expediency of kicking him in the crotch while he set himself for a sword fight. Then she chopped down with her blade and cut his neck half through.

  Quickly turning, she went to help Malwen who was having a tough time with his man, who was ten years younger and half Malwen’s weight. Malwen was down on the floor, his left leg buckled beneath him.

  Sarana got the Garun from behind right before he brought his sword down on Malwen’s right leg. The sword fell from his hand, its downward path still true enough that it took a slice of Malwen’s trouser and ran a bloody line up along his thigh.

  “Voss?” Sarana called.

  “Do you need help?’ Voss called back.

  Sarana turned and Voss was wiping his sword on the back of the guard’s shirt. Another Garun was underneath, equally dead.

  “We had better get back to the dining room and regroup,” she said.

  “I thought our group was doing fine already,” Voss said.

  “I forgive you,” Sarana told him. “For frightening the girl.”

  Nohm and Allema got down the ladder and around the castle wall to the queen’s troops as fast as they could.

  Scillia was stunned by the news. “Sarana alive?” She could hardly credit it.

  “Very alive, ma’am,” said Allema. “And gone back to the dining room which is barricaded except for one door.”

  “Which door?”

  Allema told her. “There’s words that must be said to get in.”

  “And those are?”

  “The queen lives.”

  “I do indeed,” Scillia said. She turned to her troops. “I want the men and women who have battle experience or training up front. Children are to go into the town. Knock on every door and tell them what it is we do. Tell them: The queen is here and where are they?”

  “And what if we meet any Garuns in town?” asked Seven sensibly.

  “Run like stink,” advised Sarai. “I will.”

  In the dining room, Sarana’s instructions were brief. “Do not fight if you have neither the nerve nor the heart for it. No blame will attach to that. You have done your part already,” she said to them all. “But I and my men will be out in the halls harassing what Garuns we find. You stay here and keep the barricades up.”

  Five maids plus the oldest of the gardeners, Halles, and several of the younger pot boys elected to remain behind, but the assistant head gardener and the miller’s boy, plus three of the cooks, all of whom were still dressed in their borrowed finery, chose to go with Sarana. They were armed with Garun swords.

  “Stay behind the soldiers and follow our lead,” Sarana said. And like the mice in the story, they went nose to tail down one long hall after another.

  It was when they heard shouting from below that Sarana glanced through the nearest window. She turned to her men, laughing. “Here we have been creeping about floor after floor, and all of our foe are hand-fighting at the gates. Come on, lads! Let’s get down the stairs and give them a big surprise!”

  As they raced down the great winding staircase, one of the young cooks tripped on his long robe, and almost threatening to bowl them all over. Voss picked the boy up and skinned him out of the bulky garment. He was wearing only a shirt over hose beneath.

  “A fine figure of a fighting man,” Voss said to him. “Stay to the rear, lad. You’ve scant protection in that.”

  But the boy did not mind him and charged after Sarana with Voss having to follow after.

  They got out into the courtyard without being noticed for the Garuns—about sixty men in all—were busy trying to hold back a tidal wave of Dales folk who were pushing at the great wooden doors. The Garuns, frantically trying to shore up the gates, all had their backs to the castle.

  “With me!” shouted Sarana to her men, and a few of the Garuns turned at her voice.

  Just then the right hand gate fell inward and the rush of Scillia’s followers came in like the flooding tide.

  What Garuns were not killed in that first onslaught, were quickly captured. Sarana was everywhere, her shirt stained bright red, then black with blood.

  Scillia proved able enough in the battle, but after the first minutes her heart was not in it. She knew at once that they had won and she could not bring herself to strike just for the killing. So she stood to one side and watched as the Dale folk—women even more than men—put fleeing Garuns to the sword. Tears rained down her cheeks.

  This is not what I want, she thought. This is not the way I would rule. But she could not think how to stop them, what word would recall them to their senses. The slaughter went on till over half the Garuns were dead.

  By then it was clear even to the bloodthirstiest of the Dalites that the Garuns who were left proved no threat. The killings eased to an end, and the rest of the Garuns were bound with leather ties—arms, wrists, knees, and ankles.

  The infirmarers spent their time first working on the few Dales folk who had been hurt, Voss and the cook’s boy among them, before they turned their attention to the Garuns.

  Sarana found Scillia and kneeled before her. “My queen,” she said.

  Scillia shook her head, and bending down, raised Sarana up. “Do not call me that,” she whispered hoarsely. “How can I be queen now? I cannot rule over such a bloody place. I would have my brother Corrine be king.”

  She does not know, Sarana thought. Someone must inform her. And then she knew that she alone was the only one who could tell the queen.

  “You must come with me, Scillia,” Sarana said. “There is something you must see.”

  They stood in the dining room together, side by side, but not touching. Scillia no longer wept but she was rigid with sorrow. Sarana did not dare to climb the mountain of that grief.

  Earlier she had sent everyone else away so that the queen might mourn by herself. She had meant to leave as well. But then Sarana could not go. Not when the queen was so very much alone.

  Scillia had surprised her by weeping as much for Jemson as for Corrine.

  “He died a boy still,” was Scillia’s only explanation. “He never had a chance to grow up.”

  He was a man, with a man’s capacity for evil, Sarana thought
. She did not say it aloud.

  “But Corrie died a hero,” Scillia added. Then she turned to Sarana and, quite surprisingly, smiled. “Songs will be written about him. And stories told. He will like that.” She turned and said over her shoulder, “I will like that, too.”

  Then she walked out of the room.

  The two princes were buried side by side, Jemson in his dinner finery and Corrine sewn up in a golden bag made from his favorite caftan. It was the only way to keep his parts all together. Scillia was right. There were songs made about him almost at once. Two were sung at the funeral: “Pile Them On, Boys!” and “The Death of Prince Corrine.”

  The dead Garuns were burned in a pyre that flamed late into the night. The Garun prisoners were long debated about, for Scillia knew they could not very well be kept in the wine cellar for long. There were simply too many of them.

  “And while we could stone and mortar the window, they would always be a dangerous presence,” Sarana added.

  In the end their fates were decided by a council made up of Sarana, Jano, the fenmaster Goff, old Halles—Cook having declined—the harbor master of Berick, the headman of Josteen, and the boat mistress of Southport. Chained together seven in a line, the remaining Garuns were rowed out in small boats from the tiny harbor in Southport. Behind the boats large masted rafts were towed. Halfway across the water, but long before the Garun shore was in sight, the prisoners were transferred to the rafts with a flask of fresh water each and one journeycake.

  “Tides and wind helping,” the boat mistress said, “they can make it to shore. But chained like that—only if they work together.” She smiled. “I do not know if they will manage. A Dales crew might.”

  Jano laughed. “Not if half were from Southport and half from Josteen.”

  She cocked her head at him, then broke into laughter. “Been troubled by bottom feeders, have you?” she said. She did not expect an answer.

  How did it all end? How does any story end? They lived happily, they lived long, they lived ever after. And then they died. The saga of the Dales is not so different.

  Scillia refused the crown. Supposedly she said, “The land has had enough blood shed in the Anna’s name. It is time to take a different path.”

  Instead, she turned the ruling of the kingdom over to a circle of councillors. So none is higher, none is lower, goes the story. She was not to know it, but in this she echoed the Greena. In her own way, Scillia changed the Dales more than ever her mother had done. She returned to Selden Hame with the girls—Sarai and Seven and Tween—where she learned the Game of Wands from old Marget. In the end she played it better than any of the two-handed sisters at the Hame. None of the girls stayed on at the Hame, but when Scillia died of a lump in her breast they all returned with their own children to do her honor as their mother. And to weep at her grave.

  Gadwess outlived his childless brother, becoming king of the Garuns when he was quite old. It took him five years of careful politics, but he managed a treaty with the Dales that has lasted—with only one or two minor disturbances—till this day.

  Seven and Tween married a Josteen fisherman and had five children, all girls. Sarai went to Berick as a councillor for the women of the South, and lived there till she was seventy-five. She adopted three children with her blanket companion, Allema, who had once worked as as assistant gardener in the castle. They named the children Carum, Jenna, and Sil.

  Sarana captained her own Riding in the north after serving a month as a farm worker for an old lady she said she owed a promise to. Voss and Malwen became her unlikely lieutenants in the Riding. They harried the remaining Garuns unmercifully till the last of them was dead, some seven years later. Voss was killed in one of the encounters. Malwen took a blow meant for Sarana during another, and though he lived, he was never quite the same after. Sarana retired from the guard to care for him till he died, cursing her heartily, though she never took that as mean-spirited. She knew how to read his eyes and they had spoken a blessing at the end. But she lived on alone after that to a ripe old age in a little house that faced the sea, tending a small cottage garden and spending hours staring across the water, as if keeping a watch out for Garun ships. She never saw Scillia again.

  Jano gave up his captaincy and went to dwell in the fens where he learned enough to become a fenmaster, which surprised all the fen folk except Goff. Jano spent quiet days fishing the silvery waters, or piloting people over the hidden causeways. At last he married Goff’s sister, and they had a son who went to Berick as a member of the council for a year. But he so hated the city he came back before his term was over to live the rest of his life in the fens in his parents’ home.

  Old Halles died the year after the princes, of a shock it was said. Cook took to drinking and frequented the wine cellar more than the kitchen. And the laughing man, who had helped rescue the young Prince Corrine from the cat—well he made a living telling stories about the family of White Jenna, some of them true and some of them false and all of them told with great good humor.

  As for Jenna and Carum, it is said they are waiting in the Grove till the Dales needs them again. But if they did not come at Scillia’s call, I am not sure they will come at ours.

  THE MYTH:

  Then Great Alta took three children and set them next to the One-Armed Queen.

  “One of you is for war,” quoth she. “And one is for peace. And one is for the time that is in-between.”

  “But which is which?” asked the children.

  Great Alta smiled. “The question is never which,” she said. “But why.”

  The Wisdoms of the Dales

  A snake sheds an old skin but still he does not go skinless.

  Before you make a friend, eat dirt with him.

  A woman’s mouth is like a spring flood. (From the Garunian)

  The King should be servant to the State.

  One can never repay one’s debts to one’s mother.

  A girl is never too young for the Game.

  Do not roll up your trousers before you get to the stream.

  The sharper the thorn, the sweeter the rose.

  Do not speak to a man’s girlchild lest you come bearing a wedding ring.

  Dogs bark, but the caravan goes on.

  Help first, chat later.

  If you cannot swim, do not go near the water.

  Never trust a cat to do a dog’s job. (Garunian adage)

  Sorry puts no coins in the purse.

  What you give away with love, you keep.

  Better a calf of one’s own than a cow owned by another.

  If your mouth turns into a knife, it will cut off your lips.

  Let a new wind blow through an old place.

  Storm in Berick, sun in Bewick.

  To speak is to sow and to listen is to reap.

  Do not measure a shroud before there is a corpse.

  Kill once, mourn ever.

  Stretch your feet according to your blanket.

  Even a highest tree has an axe at its foot.

  The anvil must be patient. Only the hammer can be strong. (From the Garunian)

  Easier to love a dead hero than a live king.

  Two sisters, two sides.

  The skate and the eel do not swim the same, but they both live in the sea.

  Art is inborn, craft outborn.

  An hour makes a difference between the wise man and the fool.

  Drink with Garuns, use a long straw.

  Blood is blood no matter who sucks it.

  A good shepherd tells his sheep of green grass, not grey wolves.

  A knife wound heals, a tongue wound festers.

  To take is not to keep.

  Small keys open big doors. (From the Garunian)

  A hard head hides a soft tongue. (From the Garunian)

  Both the hunter and the hunted pray to a god.

  The spider sits in the center of its web and entices the fly to come to it. (From the Garunian)

  The further north, the greater noise. (From
the Garunian)

  A white ewe may have a black lamb. (From the Garunian)

  You can call a rock a fish but it still cannot swim.

  A rabbit cannot put its paws on the deer’s horns.

  Better late in the pan than never in the pot.

  Many mothers are best.

  All history begins between a woman’s legs.

  Man is wood, woman water.

  Water weights wood.

  Many will show you the way once your cart is turned over.

  The Music of the Dales

  The Two Kings

  Stolidly

  The one ruled East, the one ruled West,

  Lonely, oh lonely, the queen rides down.

  The one ruled East, the one ruled West,

  And neither ruled the kingdom best,

  The queen rides in the valley-o.

  Ill fares the land where two are king,

  Lonely, oh lonely, the queen rides down.

  Ill fares the land where two are king,

  For names and swords and bells do ring,

  And blood flows down the valley-o.

  Pynt’s Lullay

  Achingly

  Sleep, my child, for the past is a dream,

  And women do weep that it’s gone.

  But we shall not weep anymore for the past

  For after each sleep comes the dawn.

  Sleep, my child, into dawn’s eager light

  And wake to the song of the dove.

  Forget all the dreams of the past, for the past

  Is present in all of my love.

  Song of the Three Mothers

  With passion

  One is the mother who bred me,

  A moment of passion and heat.

  Two is the mother who fed me

  Her blood and milk and meat.

  Three is the mother who led me

  Through love and pain and war.

  She is the mother who’s wed me

  To all that is worth living for.

  (Chorus) One to make me,

  Two to take me,

  Three to carry me away.

  The Feast Song

  With Spirit

  Bring in the black breads, the brown breads, the gold,

  Bring in the honey-sweet beer.