THE MYTH:

And when Great Alta spoke, her words were slivers of glass. Where the sun struck them, then were her words like shafts of the purest light. Where fell the tears of her daughters, then were the words rainbows. But each time Great Alta’s words were spoken, they reflected back the mind of the listener, shape for shape, shadow for shadow, light for light.

THE LEGEND:

There was once a great teacher who came into the Dales from the East with the rising sun. The teacher’s words were so fine, those who heard them said they were like the purest crystal, giving off a high, sweet ringing when touched.

The teacher lived among the people of the Dales for a year and a day, and then disappeared into the West with the setting sun. No one could say for certain afterward whether the teacher had been a man or a woman, short or tall, fair-skinned or dark. But all the words that the teacher had spoken at moonrise—for the teacher was mute except at the full moon—were gathered up by disciples in the Dales and set down in a book. The Dalites were surprised how small the book was when it was done, and how light, and so it was called the Book of Light.

THE STORY:

Jenna was seven years old when she first touched the Book of Light. She stood with the three other girls her age in a straight line, or at least as straight as Marna, the teacher, and Zo, her dark sister, could make them. Selinda always fidgeted. And Alna, who had trouble breathing in the spring, wheezed her way through the ceremony. Only Marga—called Pynt after the small measure—and Jenna were still.

The priestess gave the line of girls a smile, but there was no warmth in that smile, only a formal lifting of the lips. It looked to Jenna like one of the wolves in the forest near Seldenkirk when frightened off its prey. She had seen a pack once. The priestess’ dark sister gave the same smile, though it seemed infinitely more welcoming.

Jenna turned slightly so that she could look only straight upon that second smile, but she watched the priestess out of the side of her eye, the way she looked at things in the woods. Alta knew she had tried to please the Mother. But there seemed to be no pleasing her.

Overhead, the full spring moon illumined the stone altar. From the rowans came a rustling of new leaves as a small wind puzzled through the treetops. For a moment a rag of cloud covered the moon, and the priestess’ dark sister disappeared from her altar-top throne. No one moved until the cloud passed by and the moon called them out again, all the dark ones. Then there was a quiet, contented sigh from the eighty mouths in the amphitheater.

The priestess lifted her head slightly to check out the skies. There were no other clouds in sight, and so she began. Opening the great leather-bound book on her lap, her pointing finger with its sharpened nail underlining each syllable on the page, she read aloud.

Jenna could not take her eyes off that nail. No one else was allowed such a hand, nor would want one. Nails such as a priestess had would crack and break in the kitchen or at the forge, would get in the way of a bowstring or knife. Jenna surreptitiously flexed her own hand, wondering what it would feel like to have fingernails like that. She decided against it.

The priestess’ voice, clear and low, filled the spaces between the girls.

“And the child of seven summers, and the child of seven autumns, and the child of seven winters, and the child of seven springs shall come to the altar and choose her own way. And when she has chosen, she shall follow that path for seven more years, never wavering in her mind or heart. And thus shall the Chosen Way become the True Way.”

The priestess looked up from the book where the letters seemed to take the moonlight and fling it back at her, causing little sparks to dance across the bib of her robe.

“Do you, my children, choose your own way?” she asked.

Her dark sister looked up at the same time, waiting for their answers.

“We do,” the four girls answered as they had practiced, only Selinda came in late, for, as usual, she was dreaming about something else and had to be nudged from behind by Marna and Zo.

Then one by one the girls walked up the stairs to touch the book on the priestess’ lap, Selinda first, for she was the oldest by nine months, and Jenna last. Touch the book, make the vow, name the choice. It was all so simple and not so simple. Jenna shuddered.

She knew that Selinda would go with her own mother and work the gardens. There she could stare off into space without harm, going into what Marna and Zo called her “green dreams.”

Alna, also born to a gardener, would choose the kitchen, where she wheezed less and where she would—it was thought—put a bit of weight on her thin bones. She was not happy about the choice, Jenna knew, for she really wanted to stay with her mother and her mother’s dark sister, who babied and spoiled her, holding her through the rough nights when she labored between breath and breath. But every one of the sisters agreed that Alna needed to be as far from the bursting seeds and floating autumn weed silks as possible. The infirmarer, Kadreen, had warned again and again that one day the space between breaths would grow too long and Alna could die out in the garden. It was that warning that had, at last, decided them all. All except Alna, who had cried every night the past month, thinking about her coming exile, so she had told Jenna. But being an obedient child, she would say what had to be said at the Choosing.

Black-haired Pynt, a warrior’s womb child, would choose the hunter/warrior path despite being so small and fine-boned, her father’s legacy. If they tried to change Pynt’s mind, Jenna knew she would fight them. Pynt would never waver, not for a moment. Loyalty coursed like blood through her veins.

And what of herself? Mothered by all but fostered by none, Jenna had already tried out many different paths. The gardens made her restless with their even rows. The kitchen was worse—everything in its place. She had even spent months by the priestess’ side, which caused her to bite her nails to the quick, sure evidence that it would be the wrong choice. The fact was, she was happiest out in the forest or when playing warriors’ games such as the wands, though only a few times did the women let a child into their circle. And then she and Pynt had been matched as light sister and dark. It was as if Jenna could see better in the woods than in the confines of the Hame. And next year, once she had chosen, she would be taught the bow and knife.

Jenna watched as first mousy Selinda, then wheezy Alna, and then strong-minded Pynt mounted the three steps to the altar where the priestess and her dark twin sat on their backless thrones. One by one, the girls placed their right hand on the Book, their left touching the four places that were Alta’s own: head, left breast, navel, groin. Then they recited the words of the oath after the priestess, speaking to her of their choices. What was said became so, so powerful were the words now: Selinda to the garden, Alna to the kitchen, Pynt to the hunt.

When Pynt came down the stairs, with a big grin on her face, she patted Jenna’s hand. “Her breath is sour,” she whispered.

After that Jenna found it difficult to take the first step seriously. Her mouth would not stay set in the thin line she had practiced. But once she set foot on the second step, it was different. It brought her closer to her choice. By the time she reached the third step, she found she was trembling. Not with fear of the priestess or awe of the Book, but with a kind of eagerness, like the young kit fox Amalda had rescued and trained, when it was in the presence of the hens. Even when he was not hungry, he trembled with anticipation. That was how Jenna felt.

Putting her hand on the Book of Light, she was surprised at how cold it was. The letters were raised up and she could feel them impress themselves on her palm. She touched her forehead with her left hand and it felt cool and dry. Then she put her hand over her heart, comforted to feel it beating steadily beneath her fingertips. Quickly she completed the rest of the ritual.

The priestess spoke, and her breath was not so much sour as alien, smelling of age and dignity and the trappings of state.

“You must say the words after me, Jo-an-enna, daughter of us all.”

“I will, Mother Alta,” Jenna whispered, her voice cracking suddenly.

“I am a child of seven springs …” began the priestess.

“I am a child of seven springs,” Jenna repeated.

“I choose and I am chosen.”

Jenna drew in a deep breath. “I choose and I am chosen.”

The priestess smiled. Jenna saw that it was not such a distant smile after all, but a sad smile and not much practiced.

“The path I choose is …”

“The path I choose is …” Jenna said.

The priestess nodded, her face oddly expectant.

Jenna took another breath, deeper than the first. So many ways lay open to her at this moment. She closed her eyes to savor it, then opened them and was surprised by the predatory look in the priestess’ face. Jenna turned slightly and spoke to the dark sister, more loudly than she had meant. “A warrior. A huntress. A keeper of the wood.” She sighed, glad to be done with it.

The priestess did not speak for a moment. She looked almost angry. Then she and her dark sister leaned forward and embraced Jenna, whispering in Jenna’s ears, “Well chosen, warrior.” There was no warmth in it.

As Jenna walked back down the steps, she heard again the echo of the second thing the priestess alone had whispered in her ear. She wondered if the others had been told the same. Somehow she doubted they had, for the priestess had added, trembling strangely, “Alta’s own chosen child.”

The lessons began in earnest the next morning. It was not that the woods-days had been a time of play before, but the formal teaching—question and answer, memory tests, and the Game—could begin only after the Choosing.

“This is thimbleflower,” said Pynt’s mother Amalda, kneeling beside a dull green plant. “Soon it will have flowers that look like little purple bells.”

“Why is it not called bellflower?” murmured Jenna, but Amalda only smiled.

“Pretty!” said Pynt, putting out her hand to stroke a leaf.

Amalda slapped it away, and when Pynt looked offended, said, “Remember, child, Spilled water is better than a broken jar. Do not touch something unless you know what it can do to you. There are thistles that prick, briars that snag, nettles that sting at the touch. Then there are the subtler plants whose poisons reveal themselves only long after.”

Pynt put her smarting hand to her mouth.

At Amalda’s signal, both girls knelt down next to her, Jenna close and Pynt, still offended, a little way off. Then her own sunny nature overcame her resentment, and she crowded next to Jenna.

“Smell these first,” Amalda said, pointing to the leaf of the thimbleflower.

They leaned over and sniffed. There was a slight, sharp odor.

“If I let you taste the leaves,” Pynt’s mother said, “you would spit them out quickly.” She shuddered deliberately, and the girls imitated her, Pynt with a broad smile on her face. “But should you swell up with water that will not release itself, should your heart beat too quickly and loudly and Kadreen fears for it, then she would make a tea of the leaves and you would soon be relieved. Only …” And she held a hand up in warning. The girls knew that sign well. It meant they must be silent and listen. “Only beware of this pretty plant. In small doses it is a help to one in distress, but too strong a brew, made with a wicked intent, and the drinker dies.”

Jenna shivered and Pynt nodded.

“Mark this place well,” said Amalda. “For we do not pick the leaves until the flower is full out. But Kadreen will be pleased that we have found her a dell full of thimbleflower.”

The girls looked around.

“Jenna, how have you marked it?”

Jenna thought. “By the big white tree with the two branches in the trunk.”

“Good. Pynt?”

“It was the third turning, A-ma. And to the right.” In her excitement, Pynt had reverted to her baby name for her mother.

Amalda smiled. “Fine! You both have good eyes. But that is not all that is necessary in the woods. Come.” She stood up and strode down the path.

The girls followed after, skipping hand in hand.

The second lesson came close upon the first, for not another turn further and Amalda held up her hand. Immediately the girls were silent, stopped in their tracks. Amalda’s chin went up and the girls imitated her. She touched her right ear with her hand and they listened intently. At first they heard nothing but the wind through the trees. Then there came a strange, loud creaking, followed by a high chittering.

Amalda pointed to a fallen tree. They went over to it silently and stared.

“What beast?” Amalda asked at last.

Pynt shrugged.

“Hare?” Jenna guessed.

“Look, child. Listen. Your ears are as important as your eyes. Did you hear that squeaky scolding? It sounded like this.” Lifting her head, she made a high noise with her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

The girls laughed in delighted admiration and then Amalda showed them how to make the sound. They each tried and Pynt got it right first.

“That is the sound squirrel makes,” said Amalda.

“I know that!” said Jenna, surprised, for now that the name was spoken, she found that she had, indeed, known it.

“Me, too!” said Pynt.

“So we know squirrel watches us and scolds us for entering her domain.” Amalda nodded and looked around.

The girls did the same.

“Therefore we look for signs to tell us where squirrel especially likes to come, her favorite places.” She pointed again to the fallen tree. “Stumps are often such a spot.”

They looked carefully at the stump. Around the base was a small midden heap of cone scales and nut shellings.

“Squirrel eats here,” said Amalda. “She has left these signs for us but she does not know it. See now if you can find her little digging places, for she loves to bury things.”

They scattered, as silently as two seven-year-olds can, and soon each came upon the small dead-end diggings. Jenna’s held a buried acorn but Pynt’s only the acorn caps. Amalda praised them for their finds. Afterward she showed them the slight scratches on the trees where the squirrels had chased one another up and over their favorite routes, leaving a few tiny patches of squirrel hair caught in the trunk. Deftly Amalda picked out the hair and tucked it into her leather pouch.

“Sada and Lina will find a use for these with their weavers,” she said.

The girls scrambled over several more trees, each coming up with handfuls of more hair. Jenna found a tree marked with larger scratches.

“Squirrel?” she asked.

Amalda patted her on the head. “Sharp-eyed girl,” she said, “but that is no squirrel.”

Pynt shook her head, her dark curls bouncing. “Too big,” she said wisely. “Too deep.”

Together Pynt and Jenna whispered, “Fox?” and Jenna added by herself, “Coon?”

Amalda smiled. “Mountain cat,” she said.

With that the lesson ended, for they all knew the danger, and though Amalda had seen no recent scat and doubted the cat was even in the area, she thought caution a fine moral to teach the girls, and led them back home.

At the noon table, piled high with fresh, twisted loaves of bread and steaming mugs of squirrel stew, Amalda could not help but show the girls off.

“Tell the sisters what you learned today,” she said.

“That thimbleflowers can be good,” said Pynt.

“Or bad,” Jenna added.

“For your heart or …” Pynt stopped, unable to remember more.

“Or your water,” Jenna said, and then wondered at the chuckle that ran around the table.

“And squirrels sound like this.” Pynt made the sound and was rewarded with applause. She smiled, delighted, for she and Jenna had practiced the squirrel call all the way home.

Jenna clapped, too, and then, when the noise had died down, she spoke out, eager to win her share of the praise. “We found the mark of a mountain cat.” When there was no applause, she added, “A mountain cat killed my first mother.”

There was a sudden silence at the table. The priestess looked over at Amalda from her place at the head. “Who has told the child this … this tale?”

“Mother, not I,” Amalda said quickly.

“Nor I.”

“Nor I.”

Swiftly the denials ran around the table.

The priestess stood, her voice deep with anger and authority. “This child belongs to all of us. There is no first mother. There is no second mother. Am I understood?” She waited for their complete silence, took it for approval, spun on her heel, and left.

No one spoke for many minutes after, though the children continued to eat noisily, their spoons loud against the mugs.

“What does all that mean?” asked Donya, peering in from the kitchen doorway.

“It means age is wearing away her senses,” muttered Catrona, wiping wine from her mouth with the back of her hand. “She feels heat even on the coldest days. She looks into mirrors and sees her mother’s face.”

Domina added, “She cannot get a child to choose her way, even after so many springtimes of trying. We will have to send to another Hame when she dies.”

Jenna was the only child not eating, staring at her plate and feeling first hot, then cold on her cheeks. She had wanted attention when she said what she said, but not this kind. She scuffed her sandal against the chair leg. The slight sound, which only she heard, comforted her.

“Hush!” said Amalda, her hand on Domina’s arm for emphasis.

“She is right, Domina, Catrona,” said Kadreen in her flat, unsmiling way. She nodded her head toward the table where the gardeners sat, meaning—they all knew—that what was spoken here would find its way soon enough into the ears of the priestess herself. The workers of the field always served the one who blessed their crops; they were hers unquestioningly. Not that Kadreen cared. She took no sides in any disputes, just set the bones and stitched the wounds, but she was not above a warning now and again. “And you, Catrona, remember that when the villagers say There is no medicine to cure hatred, they are right. I have warned you about these passions. Just a month past and your stomach was bad again and you were abed with the bloody flux. Drink goat’s milk as I told you, instead of that rough grape swill, and practice your latani breathing for calm. I do not want you back soon.”

Catrona snorted through her nose and turned her attention back to her food, pointedly pushing the soup and wine aside and attacking the bread with gusto, smearing it liberally with honey from the pot.

Jenna gulped in a deep breath. “I did not mean anything,” she said in a piercing child’s voice. “What did I say? Why is everyone so mad?”

Amalda struck her on top of the head lightly with a pair of foodsticks. “Not your fault, child,” she said. “Sometimes grown sisters speak before they think.”

“Speak for yourself, Amalda,” muttered Catrona. She pushed the bread aside, shoved her chair back, and stood up. “I meant exactly what I said. Besides, the child has a right to know …”

“There is nothing to know,” said Kadreen.

Catrona snorted again and left.

“Know what?” asked Pynt. She was answered with a sharper tapping on the head than Jenna had received.

Jenna said nothing but stood up. Without even asking to be excused, she walked to the door. Then, turning, she spoke. “I will know. And if none of you will tell me, I will ask Mother Alta myself.”

“That one …” Donya said later to her maids in the kitchen, “she will one day tackle the Goddess Great Alta herself, mark my words.” But they did not mark them, for Donya tended to ramble and make such pronouncements all the time.

Jenna went directly to the priestess’ rooms, though as she came closer, she could feel her heart pounding madly. She wondered if Kadreen would have to give her a draught of thimbleflower potion for it. She worried that if the potion were too strong, she would die. To die just as she had chosen her way. It would be terribly sad. All the wondering and worrying disguised how quickly she was walking, and she came to the priestess’ room rather faster than she had planned.

The door was open and Mother Alta was sitting behind a great loom at which she was working on a tapestry of the Hame, one of those endless priestess tasks that Jenna had found so boring. Snip-snap went her fingernails against the shuttle; click-clack went the shuttle across the threads from side to side. Mother Alta must have seen movement from the corner of her eye. She looked up. “Come in, Jo-an-enna,” she said.

There was no help for it. Jenna went in.

“Have you come to ask my forgiveness?” She smiled but the smile did not reach her eyes.

“I have come to ask why you say my first mother was not killed by a cat when all the others say it.” Jenna could not help fiddling with her right braid and the leather thong binding it. “They say she was killed trying to save me.”

“Who are they?” the priestess asked, her voice low and carefully uninflected. Her right hand moved over the left, turning and turning her great agate ring. Jenna could not take her eyes off the ring.

“Which others, Jo-an-enna?” Mother Alta asked again.

Jenna looked up and tried to smile. “I have heard that story ever since I can remember,” she said. “But is it not peculiar, Mother, I do not remember exactly who told me first.” She caught her breath because that was not really a lie. She could remember Amalda saying it. And Domina. Even Catrona. And the girls repeating it. But she did not want them to be in trouble. Especially not Amalda, whom she often pretended was her mother as much as Pynt’s. She secretly called her “A-ma” at night, into her pillow. “And there is a song about it, too.”

“Do not believe songs,” said the priestess, her hands having left the ring to play with the great chain of metal half-moons and moonstones around her neck. “Next you will believe the ravings of village priests and the puns of itinerant rhymesters.”

“Then what should I believe?” Jenna asked. “Who should I believe?”

“Believe me. Believe the Book of Light. Soon enough you shall know it. And believe that Great Alta hears all.” Her finger with its long, glittering nail pointed to the ceiling for emphasis.

“Did she hear that I had a mother killed by a cat?” Jenna asked, appalled that her tongue spoke what her mind had made up, without waiting for her to judge it.

“Be gone, child, you tire me.” The priestess waved the back of her hand at Jenna.

Relieved, Jenna left.

No sooner had the child gone out the door than Mother Alta rose, pushing aside the heavy loom. She went over to the great polished mirror standing in its ornate wooden frame. Often she spoke to it as she would to her own dark sister, when she needed counsel in the day, for indeed the two images were near the same, the only difference being in the color and the fact that the mirror did not talk back. Sometimes, Mother Alta thought wearily, I prefer the glass’s silence to the answers I receive from my dark twin.

“Do you remember the man in the town,” she whispered, “the Slipskin farmer? He had rough hands and a rougher tongue. We were younger then by seven years, but older by far than he. He did not know it, though. How could he, used as he was to the coarse women of his coarse town.” She smiled wryly at the memory and the image smiled back.

“We surprised him, sister, when we took off our cloaks. And we surprised him with our silken skins. And we surprised him out of the story of his only child, the one who had, all unknowing, killed her mother and the midwife who took her into the mountains and never returned. He will remember our passion as a dream, for we came to him secretly at midnight. And all the others we questioned knew but one of us, disguised in the day, and she an old, old crone.” This time she did not smile, and the image stared back at her in silence.

“His story—it had to be true. No man cries in the arms of a woman lest the story he tell be true. We were the first who had come to warm his bed since his wife’s death. His wounds though nine months old were fresh. And so there were three: mother, midwife, fosterer. Three in one. And dead, all dead.”

She bit her lower lip. The eyes in the mirror, as green as her own, stared back at her.

“Oh, Great Alta, speak to me. It is one of thy priestesses begging.” She held up her hands and the mark of Alta, incised in blue, stood out vividly on her palms. “Here am I, Mother to thy children, ruling them in this small Hame in thy name. I have neither helper nor child but my dark sister, no one to speak to but thee. Oh, Great Alta, who is sower and reaper, who is in the beginning and in the end, hear me.” She touched herself: head, left breast, navel, and groin. “Have I done right, Great One? Have I done wrong? This child is thrice orphaned, as it says in the prophecy. But there have been rumors of others before her. One came from the Hame near Calla’s Ford, and one so long ago fostered in the Hame near Nill. But they proved themselves just girls after all.

“Then what is this child, this Annuanna? She is marked with hair the color of new snow, and of such the prophecy speaks. But she laughs and cries like any child. She is quick-tongued and quick-footed, but no better at the games than her foster sister Marga. Many times have I given her the choice of following me as thine own, a priestess to lead thy children. But she chose instead the woods and the hunt and other such follies. How can this be the child we seek?

“Oh, Great Alta, I know thou speakest to me in the sun that rises and in the moon that shapes itself anew each month. I know thy voice echoes in the pattering of rain and the rising up of the dew. So it is written, and so I believe. But I need a clearer sign before I unfold this wonder to all of them. Not just the piqued mouthings of jealous women, not just the guilty, tearful confidences of an unhappy man. And not just my own trembling heart. A true sign.

“The burden, Great One, is so hard to bear. I am so very lonely. I grow old before my time with this secret. Look here. And here.” She pulled aside her gown to show how flaccid her breasts had become. She touched the loosening skin under her chin. Tears began to well up in her eyes and she knelt before the mirror, sighing.

“And one thing more, Great Alta, though thou knowest it already. Yet still I must confess it aloud to thee. The greatest fear of all. If I am not thy priestess, I am nothing. It is all my life. I need a promise, Great One, a promise if she—Annuanna, Jo-an-enna, Jenna—is the one of whom it is written, the light sister thrice born and thrice orphaned, the one who will be queen over all and change what we know. And the promise I beg is that if it is she, then I will still serve thee as I have. That the place at the head of the table will still be mine. That I shall still sit on the throne under the moon and call thy name that the sisters might hear me and pray. Promise me that, Great Alta, and I shall reveal her.”

The mirror image’s face flushed suddenly and the priestess put her hand up to her cheeks, which burned fiercely beneath her fingers. Other than the fire in her face, there was no sign.

She stood up heavily. “I must think upon this more.” Turning, she went out the other door, the hidden door, behind the heavy patched tapestry upon which the forms of sisters light and dark played at wands.

THE HISTORY:

There is, of course, no extant copy of the Book of Light, the great text of the moon-centered Mother Goddess worshippers. Though presumably each Hame or community of Altites had a hand-lettered and illuminated copy of the Book. Such volumes disappeared during the Gender Wars, either—if the Sigel and Salmon dig logs are accurate—into underground chambers especially constructed against such eventualities or—if one is to trust Vargo’s reconstruction of the priestess codes—into ritual fires.

However, the meat of the Book’s history and its gnomic teachings can be plucked from the rich stew of folk life in the towns that still flourish near the ancient Hame sites. Buss and Bee’s monumental work, So Speak the Folk, gives strong support to the idea that the Alta Hames (or Alta’s Shames, as the priests of the Lower Dales still call them) were in fact merely extensions of the towns and cities which bordered their lands, in effect suburban satellites, at least as far as their speech patterns and folk beliefs are concerned.

Of course, the story of Alta worship is intelligible only in the light of early Garunian history. The G’runs, an ancient, well-connected noble family from the Continent, had come to the Isles in the invasions of the 800s. Worshippers of a male trinity of gods—Hargo, god of fire, Vendre, god of water, and Lord Cres, the brutal god of the dead—they settled along the seacoasts. Slowly they infiltrated into the upper councils of the semimatriarchal civilization they found there. Trying at first to undermine it, they in fact later compromised and accepted a matrilineal succession only after the devastating Gender Wars wrecked both the ancient Hame sites and the famous palace of G’run Far Shooter.

The religion the Garunians were trying to supplant was anathema to the first invaders because of its emphasis on a white-haired goddess who seeded herself without the aid of a male consort. It was a religion that had grown up in part because of the overflow of women following much earlier, devastating wars of succession which had been fought some four hundred years before. Because of the created imbalance between the sexes that followed the civil strife, it had become the custom to expose unwanted, superfluous girl babies on the hillsides. However, in the late 600s, a female reputedly of great height and with long, flowing white hair (possibly an albino, though more probably an old woman) named Alta wandered the countryside speaking out against the brutal custom and gathering what live children she could find. She fashioned carts linked together to trundle the rescued babes behind her. Slowly this Alta was joined by like-minded women who were either unmarried (there were many spinsters, the so-called unclaimed treasures, because of the ratio of men to women), widows, or multiple wives in polygamous marriages. (Especially in the Lower Dales such radical couplings had been tolerated, though only the children of the first wife might inherit.) Thus was the first of seventeen Hames established, as havens for the discarded children and extra women. This reconstruction, first set forth by the late Professor Davis Temple of Hofbreeder University in his now-classic Alta-Natives, is so thoroughly accepted that I need not comment further.

The communities of foster mothers, needing some religious underpinnings, developed the worship of a White Goddess called Great Alta. The genius and genuine goodness of the original Alta was rewarded in this fashion. Over the years, the real Alta and a subsequent itinerant preacher whose name has been given variously as Gennra, Hendra, Hanna, Anna, and The Dark One have merged into the figure of a goddess whose hair is both light and dark, a strange hermaphroditic creature who has babies without recourse to a male consort. The religion borrowed many aspects of the surrounding patriarchal tribes and, later, even took on some of the Garunian worship. (For example, the custom of cave burials, a later addition, was patterned after the G’runs, who came originally from a small valley between cave-riddled mountains where land for cultivation was too prime to be turned over to the dead. Earlier Altite burials were in great mounds.)

Just as the white-haired Alta had been a savior for many a girl child left to die upon a hillside, rumors of a second savior arose. The rumors became belief, set down—if we are again to believe Vargo—in the Book of Light itself. This savior was to be the child of a dead mother; the easy psychological substitution—dead child to dead mother—is the most basic of folk shifts. Not one dead mother, in fact, but three, that magical number. It is a belief still encapsulated in some of the folk songs and sayings in the Upper Dales.

THE SONG:

Alta’s Song

I am a babe, an only babe,

Fire and water and all,

Who in my mother’s womb was made,

Great Alta take my soul.

But from that mother I was torn,

Fire and water and all,

And to a hillside I was borne,

Great Alta take my soul.

And on that hillside was I laid,

Fire and water and all,

And taken up all by a maid,

Great Alta take my soul.

And one and two and three we rode,

Fire and water and all,

Till others took the heavy load,

Great Alta take my soul.

Let all good women hark to me,

Fire and water and all,

For fostering shall set thee free,

Great Alta take my soul.

THE STORY:

“What did she say? What did you say?” Pynt asked breathlessly, twisting her fingers in her dark curls. She was sitting on the floor of their shared room by the window. The room tended toward darkness, as did all the rooms in the Hame, so the girls always played close to the narrow slits of windows, winter and summer. “Did she hit you?”

Jenna thought about what to say. She almost wished Mother Alta had hit her. Amalda had a quick hand and both girls had had recent willow whippings, Pynt for her quick mouth and Jenna for supporting her. But they were not long or hard whippings and besides, such punishment was always followed swiftly by hugs and tears and kisses. If the priestess had acted so, Jenna might not have stayed beyond the door, quiet as a wood mouse, listening. Was she the babe who had, all unknowing, killed her mother not once but three times? The thought had so frightened her, she had not stayed to hear more but run away to hide, down in the cellar, where the great casks of dark red wine were kept. In the dark she had breathed first very fast, with the sobs threatening to burst out of her chest, because if she were that child, then all her hoping for A-ma to be her mother, all her pretending, was just that: a game. And then she had slowed her breathing down and forced herself to stand dry-eyed. She would find Pynt and ask her.

Only now, standing over Pynt, she knew this was too heavy a burden to share. “She asked who had told me such a thing and I said that I could not remember who had told me first.” She slumped to the floor next to Pynt.

“A-ma was first,” said Pynt. “I remember. It was like a story. We were both sleeping in the big bed, a special treat, between A-ma and Sammor, and …”

“Maybe not,” said Jenna, relieved to be past the hardest part. “Maybe I heard it first from Catrona. Or Donya. She talks too much, she probably …”

“… said it three times over.” Pynt laughed. It was a common joke at the Hame, even among the children.

“I heard Domina say something about it. And something about my second mother, too. They were friends.” Was this treading too close to the treacherous ground? Jenna felt her fingers start to twitch, but Pynt seemed not to notice.

Pynt put her elbows on her knees and rested her chin in her hands. “Not Kadreen, though. You would not have heard it from her.”

They both shook their heads wisely. Kadreen never gossiped or gave information freely.

“I like Kadreen,” said Jenna, “even though she is a Solitary. Even though she never smiles.” Solitaries, women without dark sisters, were rare at the Hames, and Jenna felt very much as she suspected a Solitary felt, alone and without the comfort of a companion who knew your every thought.

“I saw her smile once. It was when Alna stopped breathing and then started again with those funny coughs and the bubbles coming out of her mouth. When we were in the garden hunting down the rabbit. Well, the pretend rabbit. Children’s games! And you ran to get Kadreen because you are the fastest, and she put her ear down on Alna’s chest and thumped it.”

“And Alna had a black mark as big as a fist for seven days.”

“Eight—and she loved to show it off.”

“Kadreen did not smile then.”

“Did.”

“Did not.”

“Did. And anyway, A-ma gave me these.” Pynt reached behind her back and brought up two new corn dolls in one hand and a pair of reed backpacks in the other. “She and Sammor made them for us to celebrate the Choosing.”

“Ooh, they are nicer than Alna’s.”

“Much nicer,” agreed Pynt.

“And the packs have the Hame sign on them.” Jenna pointed to the sign in the circle.

“Now,” Pynt said, “we can be truly truly sisters, just the way you like to play it, sharing everything. You take the light pack and the light doll and I will take the dark.”

Jenna took the pack guiltily, remembering how little she had actually shared with Pynt, remembering how Mother Alta had looked, standing in front of the great framed mirror, and speaking the words which had so frightened her. She remembered and wondered if she and Pynt could ever be truly truly sisters again.

Then the dolls proved much more interesting than her own black thoughts and she put the babe in the pack, the pack on her back, and played at light sister and dark with Pynt for an hour or more, until the ringing bell recalled them to their lessons.

“This afternoon,” Catrona informed them, “I shall instruct you in the Game of the Eye-Mind.”

The girls grinned and Pynt elbowed Jenna playfully. They had both heard of the Game. The older girls talked of it secretly at the table sometimes. But none of them had ever really explained it, for it was one of the Mysteries reserved for after the Choosing.

Pynt looked around quickly as if to see if anyone was noticing them. There were three older girls in the warrior yard, but they were busy with their own things: red-headed Mina aiming at the arrow target and hitting it regularly with comfortable thumps, and Varsa and Little Domina having at each other with wicker swords to the accompaniment of Big Domina’s shouted corrections.

“Pynt, watch me!” Catrona said, her voice not at all sharp, but laughing. “I know there is much to see here, but you must learn to focus.”

“What of the eye’s corner? Amalda said …” Jenna hesitated.

“You get ahead of me, child,” said Catrona. She pulled lightly on one of Jenna’s braids, not enough to hurt but enough to get Jenna’s full attention. “First you learn to focus and then diffuse.”

“What is diffuse?” asked Pynt.

Catrona laughed again. “It means to be able to see many things at once. But first you must listen, Marga.” She stopped laughing abruptly.

They listened.

Catrona turned to the table by her side, a small wooden table, much scarred around the legs. It was covered by an old cloth which disguised a number of strange lumps and bumps on the top.

“First, what do you see here?” Catrona asked, gesturing them to the tabletop.

“A table with an old cloth,” said Pynt, quickly adding, “And a ragged old cloth.”

“A cloth covering many things,” said Jenna.

“You are both correct. But remember this—caution in the woods and in battle is the greatest virtue. Often what seems is not what is.” She whisked away the cloth and they saw that the table was a solid carved representation of a mountaintop with peaks and valleys. “This we use to teach the way through the mountain range in which our Hame is nestled. And to plan our stratagems.”

Pynt clapped her hands together, delightedly, while Jenna bent over closer to run her finger thoughtfully over the ridges and trails.

“Now what do you see here?” Catrona asked, guiding them over to the alcove where a second table covered with a similar cloth stood. There were even more ridges and peaks under this cloth.

“Another mountain,” said Pynt, eager as always to be first with the answer.

“Caution, with caution,” reminded Catrona.

Jenna shook her head. “It does not look like a mountain to me. The peaks are not as high. There are round places, as round as … as an …”

“An apple!” Pynt interjected.

“Let us see,” said Catrona. She took the cloth away by lifting it up from the middle. On the table was a strange assortment of objects.

“Oh!” said Pynt. “You fooled me!” She looked up at Catrona, grinning.

“Look back, child. Focus.”

Pynt looked back just as Catrona dropped the cloth back onto the tabletop, covering it completely.

“Now comes the Game,” said Catrona. “We will start with Marga. Since you so love being first, you shall name an object on the table. Then Jenna. Then Marga again. On and on until you can remember no more. The one who remembers the most gets a sweet.”

Pynt clapped her hands, for she loved sweets. “A spoon. There was a spoon,” she said.

Jenna nodded. “And it was an apple, the round thing.”

“And a pair of foodsticks,” Pynt said.

“One only,” said Jenna.

“One,” agreed Catrona.

“A card of some kind,” said Pynt.

“A buckle, like A-ma—Amalda’s,” said Jenna.

“I did not see that,” Pynt said, turning to look at Jenna, who shrugged.

“It was there,” Catrona said. “Go on, Marga.”

Pynt’s forehead made wavy lines as she concentrated. She put her fist into her cheek and thought. Then she smiled. “There were two apples!”

“Good girl!” Catrona smiled.

“On a plate,” said Jenna.

“Two plates?” Pynt asked uncertainly.

“You are lucky,” Catrona answered.

“A knife,” said Jenna.

Pynt thought for a good long while and at last shrugged. “There was nothing else,” she said.

“Jenna?” Catrona turned and looked directly at Jenna, who was pulling on her braids. Jenna knew there had been more objects and could name them, but she also knew how much Pynt wanted to win the sweet. How much Pynt needed to win the sweet. Then she sighed. “A bowl of water. A pin. Some thread.”

“Thread?” Catrona shook her head. “No thread, Jenna.”

“Yes, thread,” Jenna said. “And two or maybe three pebbles or berries. And … and that is all I can remember.”

Catrona smiled. “Five berries, two of them black and three red. And you both neglected to mention the piece of tapestry with the wand players or the ribband or the writing stick, tapestry needle and—the sweet! But for all that you forgot, you remembered quite a good bit. I am very proud of the two of you for your first time at the Game.” She pulled away the cloth. “Now look closely again.”

It was Pynt who pointed first. “Look, Catrona, there is Jenna’s thread!”

Lying next to the tapestry piece, but far enough away from it to be read as a single item, was a long dark thread.

Catrona laughed out loud. “Sharp eyes indeed, Jo-an-enna! And I am getting foolish and careless in my old age. Fine teacher I am. Such a miss might mean my doom in the woods or in the midst of battle.”

The girls nodded sagely back at her as she picked up the sweet and solemnly handed it to Jenna.

“We will play again and again until you remember all that you see. Tomorrow we will play with different objects under the cloth. By the time this Game is done, you will be able to name everything the first time and there will be more than thirty things to name. But it is not just a Game, my children. The point of it is this—you must look at everything twice—once with your outer eye and once with the eye of your mind. That is why it is called the Eye-Mind Game. You must learn to resee everything, to recall it as clearly the second time as the first.”

“Do we do the same thing in the woods?” asked Pynt.

Jenna had not asked the question because she already knew the answer. Of course they must do the same thing in the woods. And in the Hame and in the towns. Everywhere. What a foolish thing to ask. She was surprised at Pynt.

But Catrona did not seem surprised. “The same,” she said calmly. “What good girls!” She put a hand on the shoulders of each and pushed them closer to the table. “Now look again.”

They crowded close and stared intently at the tabletop, Pynt’s mouth moving in a strange litany as she reminded herself the names of each object there. Jenna stared with such intensity she trembled.

In the evening, the four new Choosers met in their room and sat on Jenna’s bed. They each had much to share.

Pynt bubbled through a recitation of the Game and how Jenna had shared the sweet with her.

“Though she really won it,” Pynt finished. “But tomorrow I will win. I think I have found the secret.” She rocked her new doll in her arms as she spoke.

“You always have a secret way, Pynt,” said Selinda. “And it almost never works.”

“Does.”

“Does not.”

“Does.”

“Tell us about the kitchen, Alna,” said Jenna. Suddenly she could not stand the argument. What did it matter if Pynt sometimes tried to find secret ways or that they seldom worked?

Alna said in her whispery voice, “I never knew there was so much to learn in a kitchen. I got to help cut up things. In the garden they never let me use a knife. And I did not hurt myself once. It smells good in there, too, but …” She sighed and did not finish.

“You would not have liked the gardens today anyway,” Selinda said quickly. “All we did was weed. Weed! I have done that ever since I can remember. How was it different to have chosen? I should have gone to the kitchen. Or the woods. Or to the weavers. Or …”

“I like weeding,” Alna whispered.

“You do not,” said Pynt. “You used to complain about it all the time.”

“Did not.”

“Did.”

“Did not.”

Amalda came into the room. “It is time to get into bed, little ones,” she said. “You must be like the birds. As high as they fly, they always return to earth.” She gave them each a hug before leaving, and Jenna squeezed back extra hard.

Minutes later Selinda’s womb mother came in and stayed only a moment, tucking in Selinda and giving each of the other girls a nod. And then, because it was past dark, and Jenna had gotten out of bed again and lit all the lanterns, Alna’s mother and dark sister both came in. They gave each girl a touch but they fussed nervously and—to Jenna’s mind—endlessly over Alna despite her reassurances to them that she felt fine.

At last Marna and Zo came in and, to everyone’s delight, they carried their tembalas with them. Marna’s instrument had a sweet sound. Zo’s was lower and complementary, just like their voices.

“Sing ‘Come, Ye Women,’” begged Pynt.

“And the ‘Ballad of Ringer’s Forge,’” Alna whispered.

“‘Deny Down.’ Sing ‘Derry Down,’” Selinda said, bouncing on her bed.

Jenna alone was silent as she unbraided her white hair, which was crinkled from its long plaiting.

“And do you not have a favorite also, Jo-an-enna?” asked Marna softly, watching Jenna’s swift hands.

Jenna was slow in answering, but at last very seriously said, “Is there a new song we can hear? One just for this first day after the Choosing?” She wanted this day to be as special as it was supposed to be, not just a strange, hollow feeling under her breastbone where all the little squabbles with Pynt and the odd sense of distance from the other girls were growing. She wanted to be close to them, and ordinary again; she wanted to wash away the memory of Mother Alta before her great mirror. “Something we have never heard before.”

“Of course, Jenna. I will sing something I learned last year when we had that mission visit from the singer from Calla’s Ford Hame. Theirs is such a large Hame, some seven hundred members, one can be just a singer there.”

“Would you want to be just a singer, dear Marna?” asked Pynt.

It was Zo who answered. “In a large Hame, our small talent would scarcely be recognized,” she said.

“Besides, this is our Hame,” said Marna. “We would be no place else.”

“But you were someplace else once,” said Jenna thoughtfully. She wondered if she would feel different, more ordinary, scarcely recognized someplace else.

“Of course I was, Jenna. When I went on my year mission before the final Choosing, before calling my sister from the dark, just as you shall. But for all the Hames I visited and all the sisters there who would have had me stay, I came back here, to Selden Hame, though it is the smallest of them all.”

“Why?” asked Pynt.

“Yes—why?” the other three echoed.

“Because it is our Hame,” Marna and Zo said together.

“Now, enough questions,” Marna said, “or there will be no time for even one song.”

They snuggled down in their beds.

“First I will sing the new song. It is called ‘Alta’s Song.’ And then I will sing the others. Afterward, you must all go right to sleep. You are no longer my little ones, you know, and there will be much for you to do come morning.”

She began the first song. By the end of the third, the girls were all asleep except for Jenna, but Marna and Zo did not notice and they tiptoed out of the room.

The fire in the Great Hall’s hearth crackled merrily and two hounds dozing nearby scrabbled on the stones with their claws as they chased after rabbits in their dreams. The room smelled comfortably of rushes and woodsmoke and of the bowls of dried rose petals and verbena.

When Marna and Zo entered, they saw that all the big chairs near the fire were taken already and the three older girls lay on their stomachs on the rug by the hearth.

“Over here,” called Amalda.

They turned and saw that two places at the large round table off to the side of the hearth had been reserved for them.

“How are the Choosers?” asked Amalda intently.

“Are they still excited?” Her dark sister Sammor seemed more relaxed.

“They are quiet for now. We sang them four songs—well, three, actually. They fell asleep before the fourth. Poor little mites, the day had quite exhausted them and I promised them more work for the morrow.” Marna sat down heavily in the chair.

“We miss those little imps already,” said Zo as soon as she, too, was seated.

Catrona smiled. “This is not such a great Hame that you will not see them every day.”

“But they have been our special charges for the last seven years,” Marna said. “And I feel them growing away from us already.”

Domina sniffed. “You say that every spring at Choosing.”

“Not every spring. We have not had a Choosing since Varsa, and that three years ago. And now four at once. It is very hard.”

Alna’s mother looked across the table at her. “It is harder on Glon and me. They have taken our baby from the gardens. To be a kitchener. Under Donya. Feh.”

“What do you mean by they?” Catrona flared. “You were as worried as we were that she might someday stop breathing out in that weedy trap of yours.”

“Weedy? What do you mean? Our garden is as clean of weeds as any you will find in a larger Hame. Weeds indeed!” Alinda started to stand and Glon, next to her, reached out to steady her. They sat down together, but Alinda still trembled with anger.

“She just meant it was hard,” said Glon to Catrona. “Forgive her. We are both out of sorts today.”

Catrona snorted and looked away.

“The first day after a Choosing is always difficult,” said Kadreen, coming to sit at the table’s head. “And we say the same thing every time. Are we children to have such short memories? Come, sisters, look at one another and smile. This feeling will pass.” She looked around the table and though she herself did not smile, soon the rest were returned to their normal happy moods. “Now are we all here?”

“Donya and Doey are late, as usual,” said Domina.

“We must wait, then. This concerns the new Choosers and so everyone who is involved with them must be here.” Kadreen folded her hands on top of the table, lacing the blunt, squared-off fingers loosely. “Marna, Zo, why not give us a song while we wait? Something—something bright.”

They needed no more prompting, but picked up the tembalas and with an almost imperceptible nod between them to establish the beat, started plucking a quick-step dance that involved a melody which seemed to leap from one instrument to the other. It lightened the mood around the table considerably. They were just reaching the finale, with four strums alternating on the drone strings, when Donya and her dark sister Doey bustled in, wiping their hands on their stained aprons, eager to offer full excuses for being late.

Kadreen signaled them to sit with a wave of her hands, so that the dying strum of the tembalas was accompanied by the scraping of chair legs against the wooden floor.

“As you all know, we must talk now of the future for our new Choosers. These girls are our future. First, though, we must know from Marna what to expect. What do they know and how fast do they learn?”

Marna and Zo nodded. “What I say now is not new to you. Over the years I have consulted with the mothers and with you, Kadreen, when there was illness. But telling it again to all may bring out some other truths, hidden even from Zo and me.

“All four are bright, quick learners and have their first letters already. Jenna can read sentences and will soon begin on the first of the Little Books, though it is Alna who loves the tales the best.”

Alinda nodded complacently. “We always told her stories to calm her when her breath would not come easily.”

Marna smiled and continued. “Selinda is a dreamy sort and she needs much recalling to her tasks.”

Selinda’s womb mother laughed. “Takes after her father Three boys I had after but a week with their fathers. But Selinda’s needed so much recalling to his work, I was with him three months.”

They all laughed with her.

Marna waited out their laughter. “Pynt—Marga, as I suppose she should be called now, though I shall always think of her as Pynt—is the very quickest at most things—”

Zo interrupted. “But she forgets caution much of the time. We fear that very quickness will lead her into trouble.”

Nodding, Marna added, “We do.”

“It has already.” Catrona shifted in her chair and leaned forward, over the table. “She did not get the sweet she wanted at her first try at the Game.”

Marna laughed at that and Zo explained. “She got the sweet anyway. And the larger half at that. Jenna shared it with her.”

Kadreen unlaced her fingers, speaking slowly. “They are like shadow sisters, Jenna and Pynt. It will go harder on them when they have their own dark twins, will it not?” She asked it carefully, aware that as a Solitary she had little right to speak of such things. She had come to the Hame as a full adult, choosing to live apart from the busy towns where she had learned her craft, arriving much too late in life to be introduced to the Hame Mysteries or to learn to call up a sister from Alta’s eternal dark. “I mean, they shall have to wrench themselves when …”

“That is almost seven years from now, Kadreen. And you know what childhood friendships are,” said Marna.

“No,” Kadreen muttered under her breath.

“We could consider it if they still hold fast together when it is time for the mission,” suggested Domina.

“The Book speaks of loyalties,” reminded Kadreen. “This much I know. And Mother Alta has asked me to warn all of you about encouraging their special friendship overmuch. Jenna’s needs cannot be met by one friend alone. She must be loyal equally to all in the Hame. Not just one teacher, not just one mother, not just one friend. Mother Alta has made that quite clear.” She said the words as if they left a sour taste in her mouth.

“She is a child, Kadreen,” Amalda said. “I would have taken her long ago as my own, had the Mother allowed it.”

The others nodded.

“Perhaps she is more than that,” Kadreen muttered, but she did not say more.

THE HISTORY:

Another game that has a tangled ancient history is the popular “I-Mine” of the Lower Dales, which Lowentrout, in one of his brilliant but eccentric leaps of scholarship, has dubbed “a classic Alta warrior training pattern game.” (See his Letter to the Editor, Games Magazine, Vol. 544.) His evidence, which is extremely shaky, rests on Vargo’s highly suspect linguistic shift thesis and interpretations of the priestess codes, rather than the more laborious but detailed archaeological work such as Cowan’s and Temple’s.

The game as it is played today is a board-and-counter game, the board consisting of 64 contiguous squares of 32 light and 32 dark. There are an equal number of counters with inscribed faces, 32 with light backs and 32 dark.

The inscriptions are paired, so that there are 32 of each color. They include: a knife, crossed sticks, ribbons tied in a bow, a flower, a circle (presumably representing a stone, since it is called so), an apple, a bowl, a spoon, a threaded pin, grapes (or berries; both names are given), a triangle, a square, a crescent moon, a sun, a crown, a bow, an arrow, a dog, a cow, a bird, a hand, a foot, a rainbow, a wavy line which is called “river” by the players, a tree, a cat, a cart, a house, a fish, a mask, a chair, and a sign which is designated “Alta” and is, in fact, the sign for female that is as ancient as any in the Dales.

The point of the game is to capture the opponent’s counters. The play begins with all the counters turned inscription-side down and shuffled, then set onto the squares in a haphazard manner called “scuffling,” though light-backed counters go on the light squares, dark on dark. Play begins with each player turning over two counters. (They may be two of his own or one of each player’s.) Then those counters are returned to their face-down positions.

Now the memory part of the game begins, for each player, in turn, turns over two counters, one of each color. If the inscriptions match, he keeps or “captures” them both. As the player turns over the counters, he says—on turning over his own—“I,” and if he suspects a pair, as he turns over his opponent’s, “Mine.” If he suspects (or remembers) they are not paired, he says “Thine.” If he should say “I-Mine” to an unmatched pair, he loses a turn. If he says “I-Thine” to a matched pair, he does not win or keep the pair (which are called “suites”) and his opponent then has a free opportunity to turn up the two. That’s the game at its simplest. But in tournament and adult play, certain inscriptions are also paired. If those paired signs—hand/foot, fish/river, bow/arrow, flower/grapes—are uncovered by the player right after one another, they count as two “suites,” rather than one. If the moon suite is uncovered on the very first play, the player gets an extra turn. If the Alta pair is uncovered last, it counts as three. So the game is both a game of memory and of strategy.

If Lowentrout is correct, then another piece of the puzzle of the Dales has been found. But if—as is likelier—this is a later game phenomenon with no early antecedents among the Altites but rather (as A. Baum writes) “a Continental import” (see his naive but striking piece “Point, Counter, Point in the Dales,” Games, Vol. 543), then we must search even further for evidence of Altism in the Isles.

THE STORY:

Jenna marked the years after her Choosing by certain accomplishments. By the rind of the first year, she had read all the children’s books, the Books of Little Lights, at least once through and had learned the Game completely. She played at the Game out-of-doors with Pynt and at night before they went to sleep, until the two of them could remember everything set before them and the colors and counts and placements besides.

The second year Jenna mastered the bow and the throwing knife and was allowed to camp out overnight with just Pynt and Little Domina, who was that year to call out her dark sister, having come home from her mission. Little Domina taught them a new game, one she had learned in another Hame, that of telling frightening stories of girls who had called out demons and ogres from the dark instead of their sisters. The first time she had terrified both Jenna and Pynt, especially as they thought they heard a cat scratching nearby. The second time only Pynt was frightened, and then but a little. The third time Jenna figured out a trick they could play on Little Domina, which had to do with a rope and a blanket and an old tembala with only its top three strings. It so frightened the older girl that she refused to camp with them again, saying that she had much studying to do before her Night of Sisterhood. But Jenna and Pynt knew better. They had to settle for Varsa, who was not as much fun, being stolid, unimaginative, and—so Pynt said—“slightly dim.”

Jenna called the third year the year of the Sword and the Ford. She had learned to handle both the short broadsword and the double-edged blade, using the smaller versions made for a child’s hand. When she complained that she was almost as tall as Varsa, Catrona, laughing, had put a large sword in her hand. Jenna was able to lift it, but that was all. Catrona had thought she would be content with just the knowledge that an adult sword was as yet beyond her. But Jenna had sworn to herself that she would handle one easily by the year’s last turning. She practiced with pieces of wood, heavier and heavier, not even realizing herself that she was growing at a pace far faster than Pynt or Alna or Selinda could maintain. When Catrona had solemnly placed a big sword in her hand on the very last day of the year, Jenna was surprised how light it felt, lighter than any of the pieces of wood she had used and smaller to grip. It sang through the air as she paced it through the seven positions of thrust and the eight of parry.

That was the same day the Selden River overflowed its banks, something that happened only once every hundred years, and a runner from the town came to beg the Hame’s assistance in digging a channel to contain the angry waters. All the warriors and the girls went with him, plus Kadreen, for the town of Selden had but an herbwife and she near eighty-five. Mother Alta sent as many of the others as might be spared, though she had been firm about sending too many. They had done what they could, but seven farmers died anyway, out in the fields trying to save their flocks. The town itself was water up to the rooftrees of the houses. When the Altites tried to return up the mountain, the one bridge had been washed away and they had to ford the still-furious river, going across by holding on to a line which Catrona had begun with a well-placed arrow fired across the flood. Jenna and Pynt admired the strength of her arm and aim. Neither of them was fond of the icy water, but they were among the first across. The Sword and the Ford.

The fourth year they began their instruction in the Book.

Jenna could feel an itch between her toes. She ignored it. She could see Selinda settling herself more comfortably and hear Alna’s rough breathing and feel Pynt’s knee touching her own. But she drew herself in and away from them, focusing only on Mother Alta.

The priestess sat whey-faced and stony-eyed in her high-backed chair. She looked small, even shrunken with age. Yet when she opened the Book on her lap, she seemed to swell visibly, as if the very act of turning the Book’s pages filled her with an awesome power.

Jenna and the others sat cross-legged on the floor before her. They no longer wore their work clothes. Gone were the rough warrior skins, the smudged smocks of the kitchen, the gardener’s dirty-kneed pants. Now they dressed alike in their worship clothes: the white and green of young Choosers, with the full sleeves, the belled pants tied at the ankle, their heads covered with scarves as was the custom of girls in the presence of the open Book. They were all shining with recent scrubbings and even Selinda’s fingernails were clean for once. Jenna noticed them out of the corner of her eye.

Mother Alta cleared her throat, which brought complete attention to her. Then she began with a series of hand signs, mysterious in their meanings but clearly potent. She spoke in a high, nasal voice.

“In the beginning of your lives is the Book of Light,” she said. “And in the end.” Her fingers continued to weave a descant to her words.

The girls nodded, Selinda a half beat behind.

Tap-tap-tap went Mother Alta’s great pointing nail on the page. “It is here that all knowledge can be found.” Tap-tap. The fingers began to dance in the air again. “And here all wisdom set out.” Tap-tap-tap. “And so we begin, my children. And so we begin.”

The girls nodded in rhythm to her words.

“Now you must close your eyes. Yes, that is it. Selinda, you, too. Good. Good. Bring in the dark that I may teach you to breathe. For it is breath that is behind words. And words that are the shapers of knowledge. And knowledge that is the base of understanding. And understanding, the link between sister and sister.”

And love? thought Jenna, closing her eyes tightly. What about love? But she did not say it aloud.

“This is how you must breathe when you hear the Book and …” Mother Alta paused as if to gather them in more thoroughly. “And when you call your sister from the dark.”

It was as if, instead of breathing, at her words they all stopped, for the room was completely silent now except for the faint echo of her voice.

So. We are here, Jenna thought. At last.

Into the silence Mother Alta’s nasal voice began again, a voice of instruction that had little warmth or inflection in it. “The body’s breath comes and goes without conscious thought, yet there is an art to breathing that will make your every thought larger, your every gift greater, your every moment longer. Without this breath—which I will teach you—your dark sister cannot breathe. She will be condemned to a life of eternal darkness, eternal ignorance, eternal loneliness. Yet no one but the followers of Great Alta knows these things. And if you should ever speak of them to others, you shall die the Death of a Thousand Arrows.” Her voice sharpened at the last.

Jenna had heard of that death and could easily imagine the pain, though whether it was a real death or a story death, she could not guess.

Mother Alta stopped speaking and, as if on a signal, all four girls caught their breath and opened their eyes. Alna gave three quick little involuntary coughs.

THE PARABLE:

Once five beasts quarreled over what was most important to life: the eyes, the ears, the teeth, the mind, or the breath.

“Let us test this ourselves,” said Cat. And as he was the strongest, they all agreed.

So Tortoise took out his eyes and without them he was blind. He could not see sunrise or sunset. He could not see the seven layers of color in his pond. But still he could hear and he could eat and he could think. So the beasts decided that eyes were of little importance.

Next Hare gave away his ears. And without them he could not hear the breaking of twigs near his home or the wind through the briars. He looked very strange. But still he could see and think and was not without the ability to eat well. So there was that for ears.

Then Wolf pulled out all his teeth. It certainly made eating difficult, but he managed. He was a great deal thinner, but he could see and hear and with his sharp mind he devised other ways of eating. So much for teeth.

So Spider gave away his mind. It was such a little mind, anyway, said Cat, and besides, he was no stupider than he had been before. Flies, being even more stupid, still came to his webs, though the webs themselves were very strange, and no longer very beautiful.

And so Cat laughed. “We have proved, dear friends, that the eye, the ear, the teeth, and the mind are of but little importance, as I always suspected. The important one is breath.”

“That is yet to be proved,” the other beasts said together.

So Cat himself had to give away his breath.

After a while, when it was clear to the others that he was quite dead, they buried him. And that is how five beasts proved completely that it is breath that is the most important thing in life, for, indeed, without it there is no life.

THE STORY:

“It is said in the Book that we breathe over twenty thousand times in a single day. Half the time we breathe in and half the time out. Imagine, my children, doing something that many times a day and not ever giving it thought.” Mother Alta smiled at them, her serpent smile, all lips and no teeth.

The girls smiled back, except for Jenna, who wondered if she would ever be able to breathe again so comfortably unaware. Twenty thousand. The number was beyond her calculations.

“So—say with me:

The breath of life,

The power of life,

The wind of life

It flows from me to thee,

Always the breath.”

Dutifully they repeated her words, one phrase at a time, until they could say the entire thing without stumbling. Then she had them repeat it over and over until it was a chant filling the entire room. Ten times, twenty times, a hundred times they repeated it, until at last she silenced them with a wave of her right hand.

“Each morning when you come to me, we will recite that together one hundred times. And then we will breathe—yes, my children, breathe—together. We will make my breath yours, and your breath mine. We will do this for a whole year’s turning, for the Book says, ‘And the light sister and the dark sister they shall have one breath.’ We will do this over and over until it is as natural to you as life itself.”

Jenna thought about the sisters she had seen quarreling and the sisters whom she had seen laughing and crying at different times. But before she could wonder further, Mother Alta’s voice recalled her to her task.

“Repeat with me again,” said Mother Alta.

And the breathing began.

That night in their room, before the mothers came in, Selinda began talking excitedly. Jenna had never seen her so enthusiastic about anything before.

“I have seen it!” she said, her hands moving in a dreamy, rhythmic accompaniment to her words. “I watched at dinner. Amalda and Sammor, breath for breath they were, though neither of them was watching the other. Breath for breath.”

“I saw, too,” Pynt said, running her fingers through her dark curls. “But I was watching Marna and Zo.”

“I sat between Alinda and Glon by the fire,” said Alna. “And I could feel them. Like one bellows, in and out together.

Funny not to have noticed it before. I made myself breathe with them and I felt such power. Well, I did!” she added in case anyone dared question her.

Jenna said nothing. She, too, had found herself watching the sisters at dinner, though she had observed each pair in turn. But she had also kept an eye on Kadreen as well. It had seemed to her that the Solitary’s breathing shifted from one pair of sisters to another whenever she sat close, as if, without thinking, she were drawn into their twinned breath. When Jenna had tried to observe her own patterns, she found that the very act of observation changed the way she breathed. It was simply not possible to be both observer and observed.

Tired by the excitement of the day, the other girls fell asleep quickly. Alna drifted off first, then Pynt, then Selinda, shifting and turning in her bed. Long after, Jenna lay awake, testing her own breathing and matching it to the sleepers’ until she could slip easily from one to the next with scarcely any effort at all.

The rest of the year, far into the winter’s rind, they learned about breath from Mother Alta. Every morning began with their hundred chantings and the breathing exercises. They learned the difference between nose breathing (altai) and mouth breathing (alani), between chest breathing (lanai) and the breath that comes from lower down (latani). They learned how to overcome the faintness that came with rapid breath. They learned how to breathe standing, sitting, lying down, walking, and even running. They learned how the proper breathing could send them into a strange dream state even while awake. Jenna practiced the different breaths whenever she could—Cat breath, which gave great running power for short distances; Wolf breath, which gave the runner the ability to go over many miles; Spider breath for climbing; Tortoise breath for deep sleep; and Hare breath to help in leaping. She found that she could outlast Pynt in every contest of strength and running.

“You are getting better and I am getting worse,” Pynt said after they had run several miles, stopping to rest by a cross-path. Her chest heaved.

“I am bigger than you,” Jenna answered. Unlike Pynt, she was scarcely out of breath.

“You are a giant, but that is not what I mean,” Pynt said. The sweat at her brow and neck had turned her curls into damp tendrils.

“I use altai and you use alani when running, and you have never practiced Wolf breath,” said Jenna. “And that is why you are puffing like one of Donya’s kettles on boil and I am not.” She crossed her arms in front of her, letting the careful, long breaths out through her nose until her head hummed. She had come to love the feeling.

“I do use altai,” said Pynt, “but not after the first mile. And Wolf does not help. It is all just words anyway. Besides, altai is really for calling up a dark sister, and we have years more to go before we do that. The only dark sister you can call up now is me.” She fanned herself with her hands.

“Why would I want to call you up?” teased Jenna. “You just pop up whenever and wherever you want to. Usually behind me. You are not a dark sister, you are a shadow. That is what they call you, you know! Jenna’s little shadow.”

“Little, maybe,” said Pynt, “but that is because my father was small and yours—whoever he was—was a monster. But I am not your shadow.”

“No?”

“No! I cannot keep up with you. What kind of shadow is that?”

“What is it they say in the Dales? Does the rabbit keep up with the cat?”

“I do not know if they say it in the Dales. I have never been in the Dales, except for the flood, and then all that was being said there was Hold this. Bail that. Hurry up.”

“And Help!!!”

They laughed together.

“But Donya says it …” Pynt hesitated.

“All the time!” They spoke the three words together and began laughing in earnest, so uncontrollably that Pynt stumbled back against a tree and a small rabbit was startled out of the tangled underbrush and leaped away down the path.

“There, cat, see if you can catch up to that one,” said Pynt.

At Pynt’s dare, Jenna bounded away into the brush after the rabbit and Pynt heard her noisy trampling for many minutes. When Jenna returned, her white braid was peppered with tiny briars, there was a fresh, triangular tear in her leggings, and a long scratch on the back of her right hand. But she held the quivering rabbit in her arms.

“I do not believe it,” said Pynt. “How did you get her? She is not shot?”

“My hand is quick where breath is long,” Jenna said, speaking in a high, nasal voice and waggling her fingers in imitation of the priestess. “She is yours, little shadow.” She handed the trembling rabbit to Pynt.

“But she is only a baby,” said Pynt, taking the rabbit from Jenna and stroking its velvety ears. “Did you hurt her?”

“Hurt her? Look at me,” said Jenna, thrusting her right hand in Pynt’s face. “That scratch is from her hind nails.”

“Poor, frightened rabbit,” said Pynt, pointedly ignoring Jenna.

“Put her down now.”

“I am keeping her.”

“Let her go,” said Jenna. “If you bring her home, Donya will want her for the stew tonight.”

“She is mine,” said Pynt.

“She is yours,” agreed Jenna, “but that is not an argument to convince Donya. Or Doey.”

Pynt nodded. “You know, Alna is beginning to sound just like them. Chattering and pompous.”

“I know,” Jenna said. “I think I liked her better before, full of coughs and fears.”

Pynt let the rabbit go and they trotted back up the path to the Hame.

In the heat of the baths, the scratch on Jenna’s hand looked inflamed and Pynt examined it worriedly.

“Should you show that to Kadreen?” she asked.

“And what would I say of it? That it is a scar gotten on my shadow’s behalf? It is nothing. We have both had worse.” She splashed water at Pynt, who ducked under and pulled Jenna by the legs until her head went under as well. Spluttering, they both emerged from the steaming bath and let the cooler air dry them.

“We will have time before dinner …” Pynt began, letting the sentence trail off.

“And you would like to help with the babes,” said Jenna. “Again.” But she nodded her head and followed after Pynt to the Great Hall, where there were three infants in the cradles, all fast asleep, and two younglings, the latest a two-year-old just newly fostered at the Hame.

At dinner Jenna sat with Amalda and Sammor, leaving Pynt to play with the little ones and help feed them. Jenna’s patience with the younglings lasted only until the first bit of food was flung. She preferred the company of adults.

“Mother Alta says that the dark sisters dwelt in ignorance and loneliness until we called them forth,” Jenna said. “Is that true, Sammor?”

Sammor’s black eyes grew wary. “That is what the Book says,” she said carefully, looking at Amalda.

“I did not ask what the Book says,” Jenna was quick to point out. “We hear the Book every day.” She imitated Mother Alta’s high, nasal tones. “The dark sisters dwelt in ig-no-rance.” She elongated each syllable.

Sammor looked down at her food.

Jenna persisted. “But when I ask questions of Mother Alta, she reads me another passage in the Book. I think it tells only some of the truth. I want to know more.”

“Jenna!” exclaimed Amalda, slapping her hand quickly on Jenna’s wrist.

Sammor’s hand touched her other wrist, but lightly, more as a prelude to speech.

“Wait, let me explain,” said Jenna. “Some things Mother Alta teaches us I can see and feel and make true. Like the breathing. When I do it right, I am the better for it. But when I talk to the dark sisters, they do not seem to be ignorant. And I have heard Catrona weep with loneliness, though she has a dark sister. And Kadreen seems to savor being a Solitary. So the Book does not explain everything. Mother Alta answers no questions beyond what is written.”

Sammor breathed deeply. “The Book tells all the truth, Jo-an-enna, but it is how we hear it that makes the difference.”

“So …” Jenna waited.

Sammor and Amalda breathed together several times, slowly, before Sammor continued. “If darkness is ignorance, then I dwelt in ignorance before I saw the light. If to lack knowledge is ignorance, then indeed I was a fool. If to be sisterless is to be lonely, then I was truly alone. But I did not know I was ignorant or lonely before I came here at A-ma’s behest. I simply was.”

“Was what?” asked Jenna.

“I was myself in the dark but without any understanding of my condition.”

Jenna thought a minute. “But Kadreen is solitary and she is not lonely.”

Sammor smiled. “There are many kinds of knowledge, child, and Kadreen has but one. There are many ways to be alone and not all are lonely.”

“There are also many ways of being together, and for some that is as bad as being alone,” Amalda said.

“You talk in riddles,” Jenna said. “Riddles are for children. I am not a child anymore.” She looked across the table, past the sisters sitting there, to the little table where Pynt was spooning food into two-year-old Kara, Donya’s latest fosterling. The child was laughing as she tried to eat, and both she and Pynt were covered with porridge. “Do all loneliness and all jealousy and all anger end when your sister is called forth?”

“So it tells us in the Book,” Amalda said.

Behind Jenna, Sammor snorted. “Do not try to fool this one, A-ma, this child who is not a child. She heard Donya curse out Doey this evening for a sauce slightly burned. She sees Nevara still mooning after Marna. She has heard of Selna …”

“Sammor, shut up!” Amalda’s voice was hard.

“What about Selna?” Jenna turned to Sammor, whose mouth was in a thin line. When she turned back to Amalda, her mouth was the same. “And why does everyone always shut up when I ask about Selna? She was my mother, after all. My second mother. My fosterer. And no one will talk to me about her.” Her voice was low so that it reached only the two of them.

They were silent.

“Never mind, then. I shall ask Mother Alta in the morning.”

Amalda and Sammor stood as one, and each held out a hand to Jenna.

“Come, Jenna, come outside,” whispered Amalda. “The moon is full and we can walk the paths, all three of us together. Do not ask Mother Alta anything. She will just hurt you with her silence. She will try to break you with obedience to the Book. We will tell you what you want to know.”

Outside there was a small breeze puzzling through the far trees. The Hame walkways were of a dark stone flecked with something shiny that reflected the moonlight. As the three of them paced by the great walls, the moon was occasionally hidden by thready clouds. Each time Sammor would disappear for a moment, reappearing with the cleared moon.

“There is a story, Jo-an-enna, of the thrice-orphaned child,” said Amalda.

“I have heard that tale ever since I was little.” Jenna spoke impatiently. “What does my life have to do with stories?”

“There are some who think you could be that child,” said Sammor a moment before the moon was once again cloud-hidden. Her voice trailed off. One minute her hand held firmly to Jenna’s, the next it was gone.

Jenna waited until Sammor reappeared. “That is not I. I have had but two mothers. One dead in the forest and one—I do not know where or how. No one will tell me.”

Amalda said softly, “If I had had my way, you would have had three mothers, for I would have fostered you.”

“Whether you have the name, I always called you that in my mind, A-ma,” Jenna said.

“You have called her that in your sleep as well,” said Sammor. “And the one time you were sick with the Little Pox. But it was the fever speaking or the dream.”

“You see, I have no third mother and besides, you are alive and shall remain so for some time, Alta willing.” She held her hand up in the goddess sign, thumb and forefinger touching in a circle. “So, you see, I can not be the One spoken of.”

They placed their arms around her and spoke as one. “But Mother Alta fears you are and has ordered that no one foster you in truth.”

“And my mother Selna?”

“Dead,” said Sammor.

“Dead saving you,” said Amalda, and she told Jenna all of the tale save the last, about the knife in the babe’s hand, though why she left it out she could not have said, but Sammor, too, was careful not to add it.

Jenna listened intently, pacing her breath to theirs. When they were done with the story, she shook her head. “None of that makes me the One, the Anna. Why, then, did she force this orphaning on me? It is not fair. I shall hate Mother Alta forever. She was afraid of a nursery tale. But for me it is my life.”

“She did what she thought was right for you and for the Hame,” Sammor said, stroking Jenna’s white hair on one side while Amalda stroked it on the other.

“She did what she wanted to and for her own reasons,” Jenna said, remembering the time she had watched the priestess speak to her mirror. “And a priestess who cares more for words than for her children is …” She could not finish, her anger hot and hard.

“That is not true, child, and I forbid you to say it again,” said Amalda.

“I will not say it again because you forbid it, A-ma. But I cannot promise I will not think it. And I am glad my mission year comes soon, for I want to be away from her stale breath and bleak eyes.”

“Jenna!” Amalda and Sammor said together, their shock evident.

Sammor added quickly, “There will be other Mother Altas in the Hames you visit.”

“Other Mother Altas?” It was Jenna’s turn to be shocked.

“Child, you really are very young,” said Amalda, holding her hand. “We may be a small Hame, but in shape we are like them all. There are warriors and kitcheners and gardeners and teachers. And each Hame is headed by a priestess with the blue Goddess sign burned into her palms. Surely you understood that.”

“But not like ours,” said Jenna, a pleading in her voice. “Not a hard, uncaring woman with a serpent’s smile. Please.” She turned to Sammor, but the moon had gone suddenly behind a great cloud and Sammor was no longer there.

“We may be different—each hunter, each gardener,” said Amalda, chuckling. “But, my darling Jenna, I have found that priestesses tend to be the same.” She stroked Jenna’s cheek. “Though I have never been able to figure out if they start out that way or simply grow into it. However, sweetling, it is time for bed, and besides …” She looked up at the sky. “… with the moon so well hidden, we will not be able to include Sammor in our conversation out here. Inside, where the lanterns bring her forth, we can say our good-nights. She will be furious with me if we stay out here. She hates to miss anything.”

They turned and walked quickly up the stone stairs and into the hall. At the first trembling lantern light, Sammor returned.

Jenna stopped and held out a hand to each of them. “I shall miss you both with all my heart when I am off on mission. But I shall have Pynt with me. And Selinda, who, for all her dreaming, is a good friend. And Alna.”

“That you will, child,” said Sammor. “Not all are that lucky.”

“We will visit as many of the other Hames as we can. A year is a long time. And when we return there will be other young ones for Mother Alta to trouble. I will be old enough then to call my dark sister out, and there is nothing in the tale that says the thrice-orphaned child has a twin! Besides, look at me—do I look like a queen?” She laughed.

“A queen and not a queen,” reminded Sammor.

But Jenna’s laugh was so infectious that both Amalda and Sammor joined her and, still laughing, they walked toward the girls’ room.

Standing in front of Mother Alta’s great mirror, each girl in turn raised her hands and stared into her own face intently.

“Lock eyes. Then breathe,” Mother Alta instructed. “Altai first. Good, good. Alani. Breathe. Slower, slower.”

Her voice became the only sound, the silvered twin the only sight. In those moments, Jenna could almost feel her own dark sister calling in a far-off voice, low, musical, with a hint of hidden laughter. Only she could not quite make it out. The words were like water over stone. She concentrated so hard trying to hear, it took a hand on her shoulder to recall her to the room.

“Enough, child, you are trembling. It is Marga’s turn.”

Reluctantly Jenna moved away and the movement of her mirrored self was what finally broke the spell. Pynt stepped in front of her with a broad grin that was reflected back.

So the pattern of the fifth year was set. Breathing exercises, mirror exercises, and then a reading from the Book with long, weighty explications from Mother Alta. Selinda mostly dozed through the history lessons, with her eyes wide open. But Jenna could tell from the glossy blue of her eyes that she was fast asleep. Alna and Pynt often had trouble sitting through the endless lectures, poking each other and occasionally breaking out into fits of giggles, for which they were rewarded with a bleak stare by the priestess. But Jenna was fascinated by it all, though why she could not say. She took it in and argued it out, though when she spoke out loud, she was silenced by Mother Alta’s short responses that were not, after all, answers but merely simple restatements of the things she had just said. So Jenna’s arguments soon became silent ones, the more unanswerable because of it.

THE HISTORY:

In the Museum of the Lower Dales is the remainder of a large standing mirror whose antiquity is without question. The ornate, carved wood frame has been dated at two thousand years, and is in fact of a type of laburnum not seen in those parts for centuries. Riddled with wormholes and fire-scorched, it is the one whole wood piece discovered in the Arrundale dig. It was not directly in the gravemound but buried separately some hundred meters distant. Wrapped in a waxy shroud and contained in a large iron casket, the mirror is notably unmarred from its long interment.

We know this was a mirror because large fragments of coated glass were found embedded in the shroud. Obviously of sophisticated make, the shards had beveled edges and a backing of an amalgam of mercury and tin, which indicates a glass-making craftsmanship unknown in the Dales but popular in the major cities of the Isles as early as the G’runian period.

What, then, was such a mirror used for and why its elaborate burial? There have been two likely theses put forth by Cowan and Temple, and a third, rather shaky mystical suggestion by the indefatigable mytho-culturist, Magon. Cowan, reminding us that artwork was practically unknown in the Hames save for the great tapestries and the carvings on the mirror, argues the provocative idea that handsomely framed mirrors in which living figures were artfully framed were—in fact—the artwork of the Alta sororities. Lacking the skill to draw or sculpt, they saw the human figure as reflected in the mirror as the highest form of art. The burial, Cowan further asserts, suggests that this particular piece was the property of the ruler of the Hame; perhaps only her image was allowed to be reflected in the glass. It is a fascinating theory set down with wit and style in Cowan’s essay “Orbis Pictus: The Mirrored World of the Hames,” Art 99. What is especially intriguing about Cowan’s thesis is that it flies in the face of all other anthropological work with primitive artless cultures, none of which feature mirrors, great or small, in their tribal homes.

Professor Temple, on the other hand, stakes out the more conventional ground in the chapter “Vanities” in his book Alta-Natives. He suggests that the Hames, being places of women, would naturally be filled with mirrors. He offers no explanation, however, for the peculiar burial of the piece. Though his later work has been pilloried by feminist dialecticians, it is the very sensibleness of his thesis that recommends it.

Off in the stratosphere once again is Magon, who tries to prove (in “The Twinned Universe,” monograph, Pasden University Press, #417) that the great mirror found in the Arrundale dig was part of a ritual or patterning device in which young girls learned to call up their dark sisters. Leaving aside the flimsiness of the dark-sister thesis for the moment, we find the monograph offers no real proof that the mirror had any but the most mundane of uses. Magon cites the odd carvings on the frame, but except for the fact that each carving has a mirror image on the opposite side—a perfect symmetry that reflects its use as a mirror frame and nothing more (if I may be forgiven the little joke)—there is little else to back up his wild thesis.

THE STORY:

Mother Alta touched the Goddess sign at the right side of the mirror frame and sighed. Now that the four girls were gone, the room was quiet again. She had come to treasure more and more the quiet aftermath, the echoing silence of her rooms when no one else was there. Yet this very evening the rooms would be filled again—with Varsa, her foster mother, and the rest of the adult sisters. Varsa would be saying her final vows, calling her sister from the dark. That is, if she could remember all the words and could concentrate long enough. It was always hardest on the slower girls, and Varsa was none too bright. And if, as had happened before, the dark sister did not emerge on the Night of Sisterhood, despite Varsa’s years of training and the vocal encouragement of the others, there would be tears and recriminations and the great sobbing gasps of a disappointed child. Even with the assurance that the dark sister would eventually appear (and Mother Alta knew of no instances when one did not), the girl’s hopes were so entwined with the ceremony it was always a terrible blow.

She signed again. She was definitely not looking forward to the evening. Putting a hand on each side of the mirror, she drew herself so close to it, her breath fogged the glass. For a moment her image looked younger. She closed her eyes and spoke aloud as if the mirror twin could hear her.

“Is she the One? Is it Annuanna, Jo-an-enna who is the White Goddess returned? How can she not be?” Mother Alta opened her eyes and wiped the fog away with the long, loose sleeve of her robe. The mirror’s green eyes stared back at her. She noticed new lines etched across the image’s forehead and frowned at it, adding yet another line. “The child runs farther, dives deeper, moves faster than any child her age. She asks questions I cannot answer. I dare not answer. Yet there is no one in Selden Hame who does not love her. Excepting me. Oh, Great Alta, except me. I fear her. I fear what she may, all unwitting, do to us.

“Oh, Alta, speak to me, thou who dancest between the raindrops and canst walk on the back of the lightning.” She held her hands up to the mirror, so that the blue on her palms was repeated. How new the mark looked, how old her hands. “If she is the One, how do I tell her? If she is not, have I done wrong in keeping her apart? She must remain apart, else she taints them all.” Her voice ended in a pleading whisper.

The room was silent and Mother Alta leaned both palms against the mirror. Then she drew back. The moist shadow of each hand shimmered on the surface.

“You do not answer your servant, Great Alta. Do you not care? If only you would give me a sign. Any sign. Without it the decisions are mine alone.”

She turned abruptly from the mirror and left the room just as the prints of her hands faded from the glass.

Mother Alta’s room was crowded with sisters, light and dark, the only singleton being Varsa. Kadreen, as a Solitary, could not take part in the ceremony and, of course, the younger girls were not present.

The little fires in the lanterns blew about merrily and in the hearth there was a great blaze. Shadows danced across the ceiling and floor in profusion. Because the fresh rushes on the floor had been mixed with dried rose petals, the room was sweet with the smells of past springs.

Varsa, her hair crowned with fresh woodflowers, stood with her back to the hearth as if the fire could warm her. But Mother Alta knew she was cold and afraid, even though the flush of excitement stained her cheeks. She was naked, as naked as her sister would come from the dark the first time. If she comes at all, the priestess thought warily.

Mother Alta and her dark sister walked over to Varsa holding their right hands up in blessing. Varsa bowed her head. When the blessing was done, they removed Varsa’s crown of flowers and threw it into the hearth. The fire consumed it eagerly, giving back another sweet smell. In past days, the girls’ garments had been stripped from them in front of the fire and thrown into the flames as well. But that was in the days of great plenty. In a small, poor Hame, there were many economies to be made, even at the time of ceremony. Mother Alta had made that particular change ten years before, to only a small amount of grumbling from the sisters.

The priestess and her dark sister held out their right hands and Varsa took them eagerly, her own hands sweaty and cold. They led her to the mirror, between the rows of white-clad sisters, each holding a single red blossom. In the silence, their steps through the crackling rushes seemed as loud as thunderclaps. Varsa could not stop shivering.

Slowly Mother Alta and her sister turned Varsa around three times in front of the mirror, and at each turn the watching women murmured, “For your birth. For your blood. For your death.” Then the priestesses stopped the spinning girl, keeping their hands on her shoulders lest she fall. Often a nervous girl ate little for days before the ceremony, and fainting was common. But Varsa, though she trembled, did not faint. She stared at her image in the glass and raised her hands, her fear blotching her small breasts and the flush creeping down her neck from her cheeks. She closed her eyes, slowed her breathing, and opened her eyes again.

From behind her, Mother Alta and her twin intoned:

Dark to light

Day to night

Hear my plea,

Thee to me.

Varsa turned her palms toward her breasts and made a slow, beckoning motion, reciting the chant along with the two priestesses. Over and over and over she called, till first the dark priestess, then Mother Alta, dropped away and only Varsa’s soft importunings could be heard.

The room was tense with anticipation as the sisters all breathed in Varsa’s rhythm.

A slight mist began to form on the mirror, veiling Varsa’s image, clothing it in a mantle of moisture. Varsa caught her breath at the sight, swallowed hard, and missed a beat of the chant. As she stopped, the mist faded slowly, first at the edges and then contracting inward to a white, snowy spot over the heart.

Varsa kept up the chant for another few minutes, but her eyes were brimmed with tears and she knew with the others that it was no good. Once the mist began to break up, all hope of the sister emerging that night was gone.

Mother Alta and her sister touched Varsa on the back, below the shoulder blades, whispering, “It is over for tonight, child.”

Varsa lowered her arms slowly and then, suddenly, put her hands up to her face and wept aloud. Her shoulders shook, and though the priestesses whispered to her to stop, she could not. Her mother and her mother’s dark sister came over and draped a green cloak around her shoulders and led her away.

Mother Alta turned to the others. “It happens,” she said. “Never mind. She will call her sister another night, without the extra burden of the ceremony. It will be as good in the end.”

Nodding and arguing among themselves, the women left the room to go to the kitchen, where a feast awaited. They would eat well, whatever the night’s outcome.

But Catrona and her dark sister Katri waited. “It is never as good,” Catrona said fiercely to Mother Alta.

Katri nodded, adding, “The bond is not the same.”

Catrona touched her on the arm. “Remember Selna …”

“You, Catrona, you, Katri—you are never to say this to Varsa. Not ever.” Mother Alta’s hands were clenched. “The child has a right to believe in her sister. You shall not say other.”

Catrona and Katri turned and walked silently out of the room.

Varsa was still weeping in the morning, her eyes raw-looking, her nails bitten to the quick.

Jenna and Pynt sat on either side of her at the table, stroking her hands.

Pynt murmured, “But you will call her eventually. She will come. No one who calls has ever gone without.”

Varsa snuffled and swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “It is the worst thing that can happen. All those people staring and then my sister not coming. Nothing worse could ever happen in my whole life.”

“Of course something worse could happen,” said Pynt cheerfully. “You tell her, Jenna. Of course something worse could happen.”

Jenna made a face at Pynt. “Some help you are,” she mouthed.

“Well, tell her, Jenna,” Pynt said.

Jenna thought a minute. “You could be without a mother. Or without friends,” she said. “Or you could be Hameless. Why—you could live in a town and never even know about sisters. Those would be worse.”

Varsa stood up, pulling her hands angrily from theirs. “What do you know? You have not even tried yet. Nothing could be worse.” She walked away through the arch.

“Let her go, Jenna,” said Pynt as Jenna started up after her. “She is right, you know. Nothing could be worse.”

“Oh, there you go being stupid, Pynt. There is a lot worse. But she is right about something. We cannot know how she feels. Not yet.”

“Well, I know one thing,” Pynt said, “I am not going to make a mistake. I am going to get my sister the first time.”

Selinda, sitting across the table, shook her head. “Why such a fuss? She will get her sister eventually.” She spooned more porridge into her mouth.

But in fact it was Alna who understood best. “Right now it hurts her more than anything and of course she cannot think otherwise. And nothing we say will console her. I was the same when I had to choose the kitchen. And now—well—I cannot think of a better place to be.” She smiled in satisfaction and cleared the table.

As soon as Alna left the room, Selinda spoke up. “How can she say that? She knows that being in the fields and gardens is the best. She, of all people … How can she say it?”

Pynt put her hand on Selinda’s but Jenna laughed. “What is it they say? Words are merely interrupted breath. That is how she says it. By interrupting her breathing. Easy, quite easy, Selinda.”

Selinda got up and walked away without speaking.

Pynt slid close to Jenna and whispered urgently, “You do not suppose we were the cause of her failure?”

“Because we watched from behind the door?” Jenna asked. “No one saw. No one heard. And we will know the ceremony ourselves in time. We hurt nothing.”

“But suppose …” Pynt let the sentence hang.

“Varsa is slow and afraid of too many around her. That is what caused it. Not two extra pairs of eyes and ears. You saw her; you heard how she hesitated the moment she saw the mist.” Jenna shook her head slowly. “She will find her sister. And soon.”

“I know what happened last night to Varsa has affected us all. It happens, sometimes, that a girl does not call out her sister during the Night of Sisterhood. It does not happen often, but it does happen.”

Jenna elbowed Pynt meaningfully.

“But you shall see,” said Mother Alta. “All will be for the best.” She raised her hands and held them in Alta’s blessing over the girls.

They bowed their heads and closed their eyes.

“Sometimes Great Alta, she who runs across the surface of the rivers, who hides her glory in a single leaf, sometimes she tests us and we are too small to see the pattern. All we feel is the pain. But there is a pattern and that you must believe.”

Selinda made a small, comfortable sound and Alna nodded her head, as if remembering her Night of Choosing. Pynt poked a tentative finger into Jenna’s leg but Jenna ignored her, thinking, There is something more. I feel it. She is saying something more. For some reason she felt chilled and there was a strange emptiness in her stomach, though they had just come from the meal.

Mother Alta spoke the words of Alta’s grace, the girls following in response. “Great Alta, who holds us …”

The girls answered, “In thy care.”

“Great Alta, who enfolds us …”

“In thy bounteous hair.”

“Great Alta, who knows us …”

“As thy only kin.”

“Great Alta, who shows us …”

“How to call the twin.”

“Great Alta, give us grace.”

The girls repeated, “Great Alta, give us grace.” Then they looked up at Mother Alta and began to breathe in her rhythm. After they had chanted the hundredfold breathing prayer and had worked for an hour, each in turn, in front of the great mirror, Mother Alta had them sit once more on the floor in front of her. She took the Book from its ornate wood stand and opened it to the place marked off with a gold ribband.

“It says in the Book that Before a child becomes a woman she shall greet the sisters of her faith in every Hame, for a child who knows not of the world chooses out of ignorance and fear, just as the dark sisters before they came into the light.” She looked up from the Book, smiling her smile of little warmth. “And what does this mean, my children?”

Jenna sat still. She no longer answered immediately, even though she knew the expected response, for the priestess always became angry when she spoke first. Now she held her counsel, reserving the last place to speak, summing up when the others were done, adding to it and refining.

“It means our mission,” said Alna, clearing her throat halfway through the short sentence, a sure sign of spring.

Selinda, elbowed by Alna, added, “We go to every Hame in turn.”

“Or at least as many as we can get to in the year,” added Pynt.

Mother Alta nodded. “And Jo-an-enna—have you nothing to add?”

Jenna nodded back, holding on to her right braid as she spoke as a reminder to herself not to be sharp. “It is true, Mother, that we go from Hame to Hame, but not just to visit and play. We must go with open eyes and ears, mind and heart. We go to learn, to compare, to think, and to … to …”

“To grow!” interrupted Pynt.

“Very good, Marga,” said Mother Alta. “And it is that growth the Mother of each Hame must be concerned with. Sometimes growth comes when all the girls go together and …”

Jenna felt the cold return. She pulled on her braid until it hurt in order to keep herself from shivering.

Mother Alta drew in a deep breath and instinctively the girls breathed in with her, all except Jenna. “And sometimes the growth comes when they are apart. It is my judgment therefore, as your guide and as the Mother of this Hame, that you will do best separated during your mission year. Marga, Selinda, and Alna, you will begin by going to Calla’s Ford. But you, Jo-an-enna …”

“No!” Jenna said, the word exploding from her. Startled, the other girls moved away from her anger. “Girls are never separated in their mission year if there be more than one girl ready.”

“Nowhere does it say that in the Book,” Mother Alta said slowly, carefully, as if speaking to a very young child. “All the rest is mere custom and laziness, subject to change at the discretion of the Mother of the Hame.” She opened the Book to another page, one not marked by the ribband, but obviously often consulted, for the pages stayed open without any pressure from her hands. “Here, child, read this aloud.”

Jenna stood and read the sentence underlined by Mother Alta’s long nail. Her lips moved but no sound came out.

“Aloud, Jo-an-enna!” commanded the priestess.

Jenna’s voice was strong as she read, betraying neither her anger nor her sorrow. “The Mother’s wisdom is in all things. If it is cold, she shall light the fire. If it is hot, she shall let air into the room. But all she does, she does for the good of her children.” Jenna sat back down.

“You see, my child,” said Mother Alta, a smile starting in her mouth and ending up, for the first time, in her eyes, “you will do as I say, for I am the Mother and I know what is best for you, Jo-an-enna, and what is best for the others. They are like little flowers and you the tree. They cannot grow in the shade you cast.”

Pynt’s hand crept into Jenna’s and squeezed, but Jenna did not respond. She willed the tears not to start in her eyes. She willed her heart to stop pounding so wildly. Slowly she brought her breath under control and stared at Mother Alta, thinking, I will not forgive you this, not ever.

Mother Alta raised her hands over the girls, and Selinda, Alna, and Pynt obediently bowed their heads to receive her final words. But Jenna stared up at her, dark eyes into green, and had the blessing of Great Alta flung into her upturned face.

They packed the next week, on a morning so filled with the trillings of birdsong, Jenna’s heart ached. She had been silent about the priestess’ ruling, but everyone else at the Hame was abuzz with it. The girls, especially, had been inconsolable and Pynt had cried herself to sleep every night. But Jenna nursed her sorrow to herself, thinking that way she would not double anyone else’s, not realizing that her silence was more troubling to the sisters than any tears might have been.

Only once during the week did she refer to it. She pulled Amalda aside as the girls and their mothers went on the traditional walk around the Hame for departing missioners.

“Am I a tree shading everyone?” she asked Amalda. “A-ma, does nothing grow around me?”

Amalda smiled and pulled Jenna into the circle of her arms. Then she turned her around and pointed to a great chestnut by the path. “Look under that,” Amalda said.

Jenna looked. By the roots of the tree grew white trillium and clumps of violets, all nodding in the breeze.

“Your friends are hardy little plants,” said Amalda. Then she laughed. “And you are not yet a mighty tree. Another few years, perhaps.” But she hugged Jenna fiercely and they walked in silence the rest of the way around the Hame.

Jenna remembered that silence as she packed, putting her best leggings at the bottom and her nightdress in the middle. She reserved the top space for the food she would get from Donya, and for her corn doll. She picked up the doll and was preparing to put it in the pack when Pynt stopped her.

“No,” said Pynt. “Give me your doll, the light sister, and I will give you mine. Then we will not really be parted.”

Her earnestness convinced Jenna, who traded dolls solemnly. Pynt stroked the cornsilk hair before setting Jenna’s doll in her own pack.

Selinda gave Jenna a moon snail shell which had been a present from her mother on the day of her Choosing, and Alna gave her a posy of dried flowers.

“From the garden. I’ve always kept it by my pillow,” she said shyly, as if it were a secret, though they had all known of it.

Jenna cut a lock of her hair for each of them and, as she set the white curl in her friends’ palms, said quietly, “It is only a year. One year. And then we will be back here, together again.”

She had meant it to sound brave and jaunty, but Alna turned away, and Selinda gave her a quick hug and ran from the room. Only Pynt stayed, staring down at the bone-white curl resting in her hand.

Down in the warrior yard, Catrona waited for them by the tabletop map. She stared at each of them in turn, noting Alna’s reddened eyes, Selinda’s pale complexion, the determined look on Pynt’s face. Only Jenna seemed calm.

Folding her arms, Catrona said briskly, “Let us go over the way again. And then you must be off. Remember—The sun moves slowly, but it crosses the land. You must not waste the best part of the day. The trip is long enough as it is.”

The girls moved closer to the table.

“Now show me the way,” said Catrona.

Pynt started forward.

“Not you, Marga. You know the woods so well, I would have Selinda or Alna show me. Just in case.”

Alna’s hand flew rapidly along the route, first west away from the sun, down the path toward the town of Slipskin, and along the river. At the mountain’s foot she hesitated for a moment and Selinda’s hand pushed hers off toward the south.

“And that,” Catrona interrupted, “Jenna, is where you leave them. You must take the more northerly journey to Nill’s Hame. Your markers are what?”

Jenna moved closer to the map, tracing the path with a steady hand. “The river has two paths. I go around toward the Old Hanging Man, the mountain with the high cliff shaped like a man’s face, till I come to the Sea of Bells, the lily field.”

“Good. And you others?”

“We go with our back to the Old Man, our faces toward the twin peaks of Alta’s Breast,” Pynt said.

They recited the rest of the route in like fashion, several times through, so that Catrona was finally assured. Then she gave them each a hug, reserving the final embrace for Jenna.

All the women of Selden Hame waited at the great gates. Even the outer guards had been alerted and had come in from their posts. They stood in silence while the girls knelt before the priestess for their final blessing.

“Hand to guide them,” Mother Alta intoned. “Heart to shield them. Hold them in thy hair forevermore.”

“Evermore,” the watching women echoed.

Jenna lifted her face and stared at the priestess, but Mother Alta was already looking down the road.

The girls hoisted their packs and started off to the accompanying ululation of the watchers. The eerie quavering sounds followed them around the first three turns of the trail, but long after the sounds had died away, the girls were silent, thinking only of the path.