The One-Armed Queen

  “At dark, when the candles are lit, we will come down the stairs, brother light and brother dark,” Jemson said and then giggled. “Won’t Skada be jealous, silly shadow bitch. And see you that the dinner is served promptly. And with the appropriate wines.”

  “You can trust me,” the cook said.

  “You can trust me what?” There was an awful look on Jemson’s face.

  The cook was momentarily confused.

  “You can trust me, Majesty!” Jemson said. “Do not forget.” He put his finger to the side of his nose and smiled. “Wouldn’t want to whip you for forgetting.” He shook his head. “I was whipped for that, you know. But only once. I am a quick learner. King Kras himself said so.”

  The cook nodded and took his leave, feeling lucky to have escaped. But as he went down the stairs—two at a time despite a bad back—a voice came floating down after him. “Send me my dresser!”

  “You can count on me, Majesty,” the cook called back, feeling both foolish and treasonous at the same time.

  Scillia found the first burned-out farm house before she had gone very far. The second was a field away. From the state of the ashes, she knew the homes had not been on fire long ago. That there were two of them was very suspicious.

  When she came upon the third along the same road, she began to suspect the worst. “The Garuns have been here,” she said aloud to her horse, not expecting any reply. But she was feeling incredibly alone and even hearing her own voice was better than the silence.

  “If the Garuns are no longer corked up in Berick Castle, then they have deserted and taken to raiding, or else they have been resupplied from the Continent. Either way, our situation is worsened.” She did not dare think about Sarana and Jano and their troops or try and guess how long they had been gone. “One problem at a time,” she whispered.

  The horse shook its head. Not at her voice, as she first suspected, but at a shadow that suddenly crossed the road. Scillia saw it from the corner of her eye, began to draw her sword, then stopped when she realized it was a girl, not more than ten, with coppery hair as short as a boy’s and a smudged nose. She was dressed in a brown shift, or else the material was muddy. It was difficult to tell.

  Scillia reined in the horse, but did not dismount.

  “Madame,” the girl said, “can you help us? You have a sword and we have none. My pa has been killed. My ma has only me, and she so tore up by the Garuns.…”

  Scillia dismounted then and held out her hand to the girl. “Take me to your mother,” she said.

  The girl took the hand, and lead her into the trees. There, some fifty yards from the road, was a rough lean-to and under it lay a woman. Tore up was a bit of an understatement. Scillia gasped when she saw how cruelly the woman’s face had been slashed, the untreated wounds still gaping, the new flesh trying unsuccessfully to patchwork across the damaged cheeks, the red line on her neck from a garrotting, the broken nose. What was not slashed was bruised. Scillia did not doubt the woman was hurt the same way all over her body. It was a wonder she was still alive. She had no clothing on but a blanket that was loosely draped over her.

  “How did you escape the same fate?” Scillia asked the child.

  “I was in the fields,” the girl said. “I lay down in the rows, between the new timothy. They did not see me.”

  “We said …” the woman croaked, “we were alone and they believed us. Bless Alta who saved my girl.”

  “But who did not save you,” Scillia said, trying to pull away the blanket to see the wounds. The blanket was stuck to the bloody flesh and the woman screamed softly at each attempt. “I wonder why.”

  “I will ask her when I see her,” the woman said. “Which will be very soon. Take my girl. My Sarai. Pledge me that.” She held her hand up to Scillia and when Scillia reached over to take the hand in hers, the woman gasped. “One arm. You have but one arm. Be you the queen’s child?”

  Scillia nodded. “Now I am the queen,” she said.

  The woman closed her eyes, clearly understanding. When she opened them again she spoke to her daughter, “Go with the new queen. Do not mourn. It is the turning. That is all.”

  “The turning?” Scillia asked. But with a deep sigh, the woman was dead.

  Sarai knelt by her mother’s side and covered her face with the blanket. Then she stood. “I be yours,” she said to Scillia, and bowed her head.

  “Then our first task together,” said Scillia, “is to bury your mother.” She patted the child on the head. “I did not get to bury mine.”

  When the woman was buried, and Sarai’s father as well—though that was pretty ghastly, for the foxes and buzzards had been at his bones—Scillia helped her on to the horse and then mounted behind.

  “Where do we go?” asked Sarai. “Do we go to your castle?

  “Not for a while yet,” Scillia answered. “First we must get us an army.”

  “An army?” the child asked.

  “To get my kingdom back,” Scillia told her.

  “How do we do that?”

  “Farmhouse by farmhouse, lane by lane,” Scillia said. She spoke with more enthusiasm than she had, but she did not want to tell Sarai how small their chances were. After all, a child who had already lost so much did not need the promise of more loss to come.

  Scillia and the girl rode for three days, past more smouldering farmhouses, seeking out those who were still alive. She learned then that she was not weeks or months late, but had lost only two days to the Grenna.

  “Thank you, Alta,” she whispered when she first heard that news. Still, even two days put her at a great disadvantage. She had no way to catch up with either Jano or Sarana, or to know how they might fare. She could only do what she had told Sarai she would do: collect an army.

  With an army she could march on Berick Castle herself.

  So by ones and by twos she and the child collected promises at farm houses. In the villages—often no more than a house or inn left standing—they collected more. Scillia did not care who she asked: men, women, children. The aged. The infirm.

  “Come with me to Berick,” she said. “Help me take back our land. It was done once by my mother and father, by your mothers and fathers, by your sisters and brothers. Now we must do it again.”

  She never raised her voice when she spoke; she was all the more compelling for it. What the Garuns had begun with their savagery, Scillia completed with her quiet compassion and strength.

  Men and women and children. The aged. The infirm. They all pledged her their support. And she gave them the same message: They were to meet at several crossroads on a particular day hence. At the Turnings, Scillia called them. The older folk approved the name, though Sarai did not.

  The child ran a grubby hand through her coppery hair. “That is not what my ma meant by a turning,” she said.

  “If it gathers an army, I will call it a tumbling. Or a tossing. Or a tussling.” And when Sarai laughed at that, the high trilling sent the first bit of pleasure into Scillia’s heart since she had left the castle to take her dying father into the woods.

  On the appointed day, a group of some thirty women stood at one turning, waiting. The moon hung by a thread of cloud overhead and the women spoke in uneasy whispers. Their distress showed in the shadows beneath their eyes, in the angular hunch of their shoulders.

  “Where is she?” a middle-aged woman asked, the moon writing runes across her forehead in deep groves. “How can she be late in coming? The night is cold, and passion turns cold, too, with each hour. And what of the Garuns? We would make easy pickings standing out here in the night.”

  “Hush, Manya,” the woman by her side cautioned. They could have been twins, though one was dark-haired with streaks of grey, the other light. “She will come. She promised. And isn’t it said, Better late in the pan than never in the pot?”

  Two younger women, hardly more than girls, stood arm in arm, gazing up at the moon, one of them with braids as light as that wintry moon, the other with plaits bl
ue-black as the sky. The cloud had become a fringe over the upper half of the moon, so that it looked like a broken coin.

  “Look!” the light-haired girl cried, pointing. Her sister pointed as well.

  “If the clouds completely …” Manya’s warning began. She did not have to say more. They all knew that once the moon disappeared, the dark sisters would go as well, back to their shadow world and their part of the mission for at least this night would be that much more difficult.

  “Where is she?” Now it was Manya’s twin who gave the complaint.

  “Hush, Sonya,” Manya cautioned, and they both gave a single laugh at the reversal, a mirthless laugh, more like a sigh.

  “I do not understand,” another woman said. “Why does she dally with the men of Suldan Village? Men are the enemy.”

  A mutter of agreement ran around the ragged circle.

  “Not all.” It was the girl with the light-colored braids. “Not all men.” She spoke with feeling, but without proof. She was that kind of girl.

  “All,” said Manya. “Even the ones we like.”

  “Liked,” corrected Sonya. They lived in a small village made up mostly of women who were the remnants of one of the Hames that had been broken up after the Gender Wars. A group of thirty Garun renegades had fired their houses but a week before, driving the women before them like cattle. Only a few had escaped in the night. The village men had not come to their rescue, instead turning over their coins to the Garuns, begging for their lives. It had not worked. They had not been spared.

  The two girls, too, had been in the drive. But with their young legs they had sprinted to safety early on and had not seen how brutally the Garuns had used their mothers. They remembered the village men with a good deal more affection and were still mourning their deaths. They walked away from the circle and towards the woods, as if that were their answer.

  The moon’s fringe, like a curtain, had lowered even more, and the whisperings from the circle of women grew even more frantic. Then suddenly a drumming of hoof beats signaled them. The girls turned back and called to the circle: “She is here? She is come?”

  The moon disappeared into the cloud completely and a single horse, black as the solid center of an eye, emerged from the woods as if the forest had spit it out. There were two riders, one large, one small and when the horse got closer, the women could see that one rider was a grown-up, the other a thin little girl with red hair.

  The horse was covered with sweat from the run, but when the grown rider got down she was not sweating at all. In fact she was shivering violently for she was wearing only a thin shirt, the one empty sleeve tied up with a bedraggled ribband to her shoulder, a pair of leather trousers, and high soft leather boots run down at the heels. The child was swaddled in what was surely the woman’s cloak.

  Manya shrugged out of her own cloak and offered it. “Here, my queen,” she said.

  “Scillia. Until I am on my throne again, that is my name.”

  “I cannot call you that, my …” Manya said.

  “You will call me that,” Scillia ordered. Her voice was tired but full of authority. It was a new voice for her and she used it sparingly. The voice told them what she would not—that she was the queen. Still, she tired of the same argument whenever she met with her recruits. The men were willing soon enough to call her by name. But the women … I am getting perilously tired of women, she decided.

  “Still, my … Scillia,” Manya stumbled a moment over the name so plainly spoken, “take my cloak. You have none.”

  “The child needed it more than I,” Scillia said, but she accepted the proffered cloak. She thought she knew the difference between courage and foolhardiness. A cloak against the cold was not the difference between a hero and knave. “Tell me your name, now that I have what is yours.”

  “Manya,” the woman said. “Of Craigton Village, and before that Nill’s Hame.”

  “That is a name I have heard from my mother,” Scillia said, nodding, though what her mother had said of it, or when, she had no clue. Still it was best not to admit that now. “Manya,” she said again, thus committing the name to memory.

  “What news then of our army?” the girl with the braids cried out, grabbing hold of Scillia’s reins.

  Scillia turned toward her. “News? There is much to tell, but first give me your name.”

  The girl was suddenly shy. “Seven, madame.” She stuttered on the name and handed the reins back to Scillia.

  Scillia smiled to put her at her ease. “Was that because you were the seventh in your family?”

  Seven giggled at that. “No. Seven because it took them seven years to get me. And then when they got me, and I was only a girl, my father said: ‘A girl is less than no child at all.’ My mother was so hurt by this, she took me in her arms, still bleeding birth blood, and walked to the old Selden Hame where she left me.”

  “And did not stay herself?” Scillia asked gently.

  Seven shook her head. “Na, na. Stayed only long enough to be cleaned up by the sisters and to give me a name. Then she walked back to her man. But it is better so. We say in Selden, Many mothers are best. Besides, without them I would not have my dark sister. None my age know how ’tis done. But I do. I was the last at Selden, though.” She smiled shyly up at Scillia.

  “Well, then you are beyond me, for I have no shadow but the one that follows me on the ground. Though my mother’s dark sister, Skada—blessed be—helped raise me up. And once I visited your Hame, though you would have been a little child.”

  “I do not remember you,” Seven said.

  “Nor I you,” Scillia said. “But I have you now.”

  A moment later the cloud moved away from the moon and Seven’s sister appeared by her side. Scillia smiled.

  “And you ate?”

  “Tween, Your Majesty,” the girl said.

  “Scillia,” Seven said, poking her in the side, getting poked in return.

  “And I am Sonya,” said Manya’s sister. “Do you wish to name us one by one, or should we be about our business? There is more than chattery to be done this night.”

  “It never hurts to be named,” Scillia said gently, pulling Manya’s cloak tighter around her. “If we are to die, best not to go unnamed into the dark.”

  “We will not die. We will win this fight,” Manya said. The other woman echoed her, all but Seven and Tween who were silent and the girl Sarai who was still napping atop the horse.

  “We all die sometime, my good Manya. Only Alta is forever.” Scillia’s voice was low, but nonetheless full of steel. “And some of us will die in this fight. It is best that we understand that from the start. If you cannot go into it content with that knowledge, best not to go into it at all.” She dropped the reins and, whipping off the cloak, handed it back. Her horse, as if made of stone, did not move. Nor did the child on its back.

  THE HISTORY:

  Editor, History and Nature:

  Sirs:

  Female infanticide, so common before the reign of King Carum, has been long held to have disappeared completely with his ascendancy. But new evidence disagrees with these old assumptions. According to old population records discovered recently by Sir Elric Hanger and his wife, Lady Nan, in the ruins of the Northern Palace Grounds at Berike, a lingering misogyny in rural villages still led to an underground trade in girl babies. (See “Farm Babies and Baby Farming in the Midlands” by S. Cowan. Demographics Annual, Pasden University Press, #79.)

  So convincing are these records that they make clear the patterns of abandonment changed only in subtle ways, slowly being incorporated into the so-called fostering laws, those laws that concerned the rearing of children away from their natural homes. (See “Forgotten Fosters” by A. S. Carpenter-Ross, Psychological Abstracts, Conference on Daleian Research, 1978.)

  Of course a foundling must needs first be lost! This simple fact has been overlooked for years in the studies done on the many fostering relationships, such as apprenticeships, oblation, parental dea
th by suicide, or even godparenting. And while there have been many scholarly studies done on fostering in the higher levels of society—for example, King Carum’s own son was sent abroad to live as a royal hostage/fosterling at the palace of the Garunian king till he was sixteen and married to his foster-sister who was known as Mad Jinger—foundlings at the low end of society’s scale have been lost a second time by the historians. With my father’s notes and my own research I hope to write an important essay on this subject.

  What is the difference between fostering and abandonment?

  Ask the child.

  THE STORY:

  Scillia turned to the girls. “I was a foundling myself.”

  “I did not know, Majesty,” Seven said.

  “Scillia.”

  “I did not know, Scillia,” the girl repeated.

  “Queen Jenna was not your mother?” Tween asked.

  “White Jenna was certainly my mother in truth, but she did not give birth to me,” Scillia told her. “She rescued me when my first foster mother, a warrior of M’dorah Hame, died. I had been left on a hillside by my birth mother and found by the M’dorans. The women of the South Dales may say All history begins between a woman’s legs, but I am no longer convinced.”

  She smiled at them. “But we must now talk not of birth but of war. Manya has the right of it.”

  “A man’s war,” added Manya.

  Scillia stared over at her. “It is a woman’s war as surely,” she said. “It is my war. The one who thrust me off my throne was a man, yes. But not all men are cruel.”

  “I have no proof of any other,” Manya said, and her dark sister echoed her, adding “And doesn’t it say in the texts that Man is wood, woman water?”

  “Water weights wood. That is also written in the texts. In The Book of Light, as surely you must know,” Scillia said. She had grown up hearing her mother and Skada argue from texts. It did not impress her, but she could do it if she had to. “And if you want proof, I shall give it you. My brother Corrie is proof. A sweeter man you will not find. Honest, generous, funny, dear. He supports my claim against the Garun king.” She found she could not say Jemmie’s name, as if by naming him he had some kind of hold on her. “My father Carum, too, was always kind and generous and loving.” She thought a minute. “My friends on the council—old Jareth and Piet. I have never had less than good faith from them. And the man who commands half my army now—Jano, of the Southern Guard. No, I cannot say all men are this, all men are that. Men are neither all good nor bad.”