"Jane Yolen - The White Babe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yolen Jane)

The White Babe
by Jane Yolen

art: Val Lakey Undahn
Jane Yolen’s hundredth book, Sister Light, Sister Dark (out from Ace Books sometime next year),
will be set in the same milieu as “The White Babe.” Recent publications by the current president of the
Science Fiction Writers of America include Favorite Folktales from Around the World (Pantheon’s
Folklore Series) and the novel, Cards of Grief.

An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.
Notes




And the prophet says an white babe with black eyes shall be born unto a virgin in the winter of the
year. The ox in the field, the hound at the hearth, the bear in the cave, the cat in the tree, all, all
shall bow before her singing, “Holy, holy, holiest of sisters, who is both black and white, both
dark and light, your coming is the beginning and it is the end.” Three times shall her mother die
and three times shall she be orphaned and she shall be set apart that all shall know her.—So goes
the Gamnian prophecy about the magical birth of the White Babe, layering in all kinds of folkloric
absurdities and gnomic utterings to explain away the rise of a female warrior queen. These “hero birth”
tales arise long after the fact, and it is no coincidence that one tale resembles another. (C.F. the birth of
Alta’s Anna, or the white one, motif #275f in Hyatt’s Folklore Motif Index of the Dales.) This one
points to the birth of White Jenna, the Amazonian queen of the Dark Riding, a figure of some staying
power in the myth sequences out of the early Garunian period during and after the infamous Gender
Wars.

1. THE WHITE BABE
The Myth:
Then Great Alta plaited the left side of her hair, the golden side, and let it fall into the sinkhole
of night. And there she drew up the queen of shadows and set her upon the earth. Next she plaited
the right side of her hair, the dark side, and with it she caught the queen of light. And she set her
next to the black queen.
“And you two shall be sisters,” quoth Great Alta. “You shall be as images in a glass, the one
reflecting the other. As I have bound you in my hair, so it shall be.”
Then she twined her living braids around and about them and they were as one.

The Legend:
It happened in the town of Slipskin on a day far into the winter’s rind that a strange and
wonderful child was born. As her mother, who was but a girl herself, knelt between the piles of
skins, straddling the shallow hole in the earth floor, the birth cord descended between her legs like
a rope. The child emerged, feet first, climbing down the cord. When her tiny toes touched the
ground, she bent down and cut the cord with her teeth, saluted the astonished midwife, and
walked out the door.
The midwife fainted dead away, but when she came to and discovered the child gone and the
mother dead of blood-loss she told her eldest daughter what had happened. At first they thought
to hide what had occurred. But miracles have a way of announcing themselves. The daughter told
a sister who told a friend and, in that way, the story was uncovered. The tale of that rare birthing
is still recounted in Slipskin—now called New Moulting—to this very day. They say the child was