Magic Three of Solatia
Read Magic Three of Solatia Online
Authors: Jane Yolen
Jane Yolen
ContentsBOOK I
Sianna of the Song
Book I is for Heidi
F
OR MORE YEARS THAN
anyone can remember, the fisherfolk of Solatia have told this tale of Dread Mary. They tell it late at night before the hearth fires to warn their eager sons and daughters of the dangers that await them on the sea:
Once upon a maritime, when the world was filled with wishes the way the sea is filled with fishes, a witch named Dread Mary lived at the bottom of the ocean.
As she grew in size, she grew in wickedness. So fearsome did she become that no one—man or fish—dared oppose her will. And at last she was called ruler of the whole wide sea.
Even now no one dares go near the Outermost Isle, and especially Dread Mary’s Cove. It is there that she dwells to this very day, beneath the tumbling waves.
Her home is a sunken galleon ringed with the bones of fishermen lost in storms. Dread Mary loves to rise on the midnight tides and sing the sailors down to the deeps in the windless, sunless sea.
She does not cry for the poor drowned men or their widows alone on the land. Such sorrows do not touch her sea-cold heart. She has but one passion, that witch of the deep: for the buttons that shine on the dead men’s coats. And she carries the coats away to her ship and cuts the buttons off one by one. And she keeps the buttons in a barnacled box on the forecastle of her home.
“Then why not wear buttonless jackets?” inquires some quick-witted lad at the hearth fire each year.
“Tush, lad, and show our fear?” answers the storyteller with a frown, and continues:
Every night Dread Mary runs her hands through the buttons and sings this song:
No silver and jewels, but buttons for me,
No silver and jewels, but buttons.
Silver and jewels
Are fine for fools,
But buttons, oh buttons, oh buttons!
So no one ventures to the Outermost Isle, though it is less than a morning’s sail from shore. And no one casts his nets close to the liver-colored rock island, though the largest fish shoal there.
And whenever a Solatian fishing boat sets sail, the fishermen carry with them shell buttons in a leather pouch. When they are well out to sea, each fisherman throws a handful of the buttons overboard and whispers Dread Mary’s name. It is called “buying the sea,” for each man hopes that the witch will take these tokens and leave him and his alone.
So it has been for more years than any Solatian can remember.
I
N THE DAYS WHEN
Solatia was a kingdom to be visited, the world was young. Mountains were newly green, having been thrust from the earth within the memory of the great-grandfathers of grandfathers.
In those days, the seawitch had been younger too. Her name had been Melinna then, a name compounded of beauty and song. The beauty was her own face, pale white with black eyes and hair. She loved to rise on the crest of waves and listen to the singers upon the shore, for she was the last of her kind, and lonely.
One of the singers was Solatia’s young Prince Anggard, and for him Melinna had sloughed off her mermaid’s tail and walked painfully upon the land. She had followed him up the hundred stone steps to his father’s hall. There she had pressed upon him a jacket of woven seaweed. It was a jacket with three silver buttons that had come from the deeps of the sea.
“The buttons are magic,” said Melinna. “Each can grant you a wish.”
“I wish only that you leave me alone,” replied Prince Anggard, and closed the castle door. But he took the jacket with him and never heard the rest.
“If twisted in just a special way,” called Melinna through the heavy oak door, “each button will grant a wish. But only once, and only with consequences, and only if twisted in a special way.”
The prince never opened the door to Melinna again. He had been too much in love with himself to return her love, or anyone’s love. So when he ascended the throne, he grew old there with no queen beside him, nor children to carry on his line. At last he died and left his kingdom to innumerable cousins who fought incessantly for the throne. And the jacket with the magic buttons did not one of them any good, for no one knew the real secret of the Magic Three, as they were named and sung of in the kingdom. And at last the seaweed jacket was worn by one of the cousin-kings who was slain in yet another war for the throne. Years passed, and the jacket had rotted like its wearer in the field. Only the buttons and the bones of that king remained, the silver no longer bright but crusted and lined with dirt and debris.
When Melinna had been rejected by the prince, she retraced her way painfully down the stone steps to the strand. There she found her mermaid tail and put it on again. Then she dove back into the sea and swam beneath the waves to the Outermost Isle, the last of the small islands that lay off the Solatian shore, close but not too close to her lost love.
There, beyond the liver-colored rocks, in a cove that held waves as gently as a cradle holds a child, she stayed, never again venturing ashore. So she never knew that Prince Anggard remained unwed.
As the years went by in her watery home, Melinna grew old, even for a mermaid, and a bit forgetful. She did not remember how she had loved the prince with his beautiful voice and his icy heart, and remembered only her gift of love to him—the jacket with the three magic buttons.
After a few more years went by, she even forgot the jacket and remembered only the silver buttons.
Till at last all she remembered was how she loved buttons.
It was then that she started to sing the sailors down to their deaths in the cold, sunless sea. And soon the Solatians gave her a name that was as different from her old, lost, forgotten name as she herself was from the girl she once had been. The people called her Dread Mary, for they feared her more than they feared the sea. And they put up two fingers in front of their faces whenever her name was mentioned, to keep away “Dread Mary’s Eye.”
Now that kingdom by the sea, which had once been a place of laughter and love, was full of sorrow and fear. The wars of succession had raged for three hundred years, and no less than 113 different cousin-kings had claimed and lost the throne.
The kingdom had been called Solatia, after the sun, which always seemed to shine there with such power. Between the New Mountains to the south and the Northern Sea, Solatia had been long and low and flat, with crops green in the spring and gold in the fall. And prayers of thanksgiving had been sung there from one end of harvest to the other.
But the wars had ended all that. And many now called the kingdom Desolatia. Most farmers had become fisherfolk, reaping the hard-earned harvest of the sea. They remembered the peace of the farmland with longing every time a wave broke over their boats.
But all that remained in the once-green fields now were rusty swords, broken plowshares, and an occasional straying child.
S
IANNA WAS SUCH AN
occasional child. She was the daughter of Sian the button maker, a man of no faith but much talent. Golden-haired Sianna sang like a lark. Her childish voice was so sweet and clear and innocent that all the neighbors lovingly called her Sianna of the Song.
Young mothers begged her to sing their fretful babes to sleep. Old men taught her songs of their youth. And in the chapel, it was her voice that soared above all the rest when the Seven Psalms of Waking were sung.
But Sianna always went to the chapel alone, for her father would not go. He had lost his faith when he lost his wife, just six years after Sianna was born. She had gone down to her beloved seaside to gather the shells from which Sian made buttons. A wave as tall as a wall swept onto the shore. And before the eyes of all the men tending their nets and mending their lines, Sian’s black-haired wife had been borne out to sea. “Gone to her kinfolk, gone to her rest,” said the fishermen, for she had been one of their own, and they knew the power of the sea.
But Sian would not believe the worst. He was sure his wife, his lithe-limbed wife, would swim home to him at last.
Weeks later, her blue vest, with its three silver buttons, was washed ashore. Only then did Sian accept her death as true. The jacket was stiff with salt, the buttons blackened by the water’s touch. But Sian knew the jacket was hers. No one else in the kingdom had had silver buttons like those, for his wife had found them in the field behind their house.
The buttons were all that Sian and Sianna had to remind them of wife and mother. So when a neighbor woman offered to take the buttons and sew them on a jacket for the child, Sian gratefully accepted.
Every year, the buttons were sewn on a larger jacket for the growing girl. But they were never polished again. “Let me remember the cruel sea when I see them,” said Sian, for he had been born of old farming stock and had never trusted the waves.
His daughter, in her innocent wisdom, begged him to let her shine the buttons like new. “So we can renew our own lives,” she said.
But Sian was firm. The black buttons, crusted with salt, remained the mute reminders of his wife’s fate.
Sian was firm about one other thing. “You must promise me never to go down to the shore again,” he told Sianna every day. He catechized her with the dangers of the deep. He tried to make her swear on the memory of her mother that she would not set foot on the strand.
But Sianna never swore such to him. Indeed she could not. Though she got her bright beauty from Sian, she belonged in her soul to her mother’s fisherfolk kin. She could swim before she could walk, she could dive before she could talk. The sea fascinated her, it called to her, she felt it singing in her bones.
Still, as she would not hurt her father, she never spoke of her passion for the sea. And if he remembered her early ease in the water, he conveniently forgot it now.
But often Sianna would stop by the shore on her way from school or run there when Sian was busy at work. She never told him, so he never really knew.
Sianna waded in the tidal pools for periwinkles and starfish, which she dried in the sun and set on a shelf in a sea-hollowed cave. She knew every sea creature by name, every sea stone by sight, and every seaweed by its color and taste. But she did not dare to bring any of her treasures or her knowledge home.