Magic Three of Solatia (2 page)

If any of the village folk noticed Sianna at her sea play, they did not tell Sian. For they loved both the man and the girl more especially because of their loss. To betray the girl’s secret or hurt the button maker would have seemed cruel to them.

And so it happened when she was twelve years old that Sianna was down by the seashore gathering cockleshells and sand tokens for her cave when a dark, ominous, twisting cloud appeared far out at sea. It swirled around and about, driving a giant wave before it as a shark drives a school of pout.

As the wave ran before the twisting cloud, it grew in height until it was taller than a wall and twice as thick. Fingerlings were troubled to swim in its water and were carried along by the force of the storm. And strangely, the wave was silent—silent as the ocean’s bottom, silent as death in the sea.

One fisherman by chance looked up from his nets to see the wave bearing down upon the village cove. He had time for a single scream before the giant wave washed over them all. Five fishermen and Sianna were carried out to sea by the retreating wave.

The five strong fishermen managed to swim to shore, heaving and panting and crying and touching the sand with their lips in thanks.

But Sianna was seen no more.

The grieving fisherfolk went to Sian’s cottage to tell him of his newest loss. One widow woman, seeking to comfort him, brought the shells and sea blossoms that Sianna had kept in her cave.

But Sian threw the villagers out of his home, cast the shells out after them, and ripped the brittle petals from the blooms.

And in the year that followed, though Sian still went to the village to purchase flour and corn and wine, he never again ate a single thing that came out of the sea. He would stand on the shore and gaze out past the island chain for long moments without saying a word. Indeed, he never spoke to his neighbors again.

For Sian had taken a vow by the chapel door that he would never utter a sound until his daughter was returned to him from the sea—or until some real proof of her drowning was given to him. And so Sian the Silent became his name.

B
UT SIANNA WAS NOT
drowned. She floated like a sea creature on the crest of the wave. The spray crowned her head with jewel like bubbles that sparkled in the sun.

Except for the jacket with the three buttons that she still held in her hand, Sianna was naked. The sea had snatched away all her clothes—her sandals, her dress, even the petticoats she had patched with care—and sent them below.

But Sianna did not feel any shame. For as she floated it came to her that she was a natural part of the wave. And no one had ever thought to clothe the creatures of the sea. She felt she was being reborn in the sea, reborn as a mermaid, reborn as a sister to the anemones and starfish that lived below the waves.

Sianna raised her face to the sky and droplets of water ran down her cheeks. She began to sing a song. She made up the words, though the tune was old. She could not think of any song that seemed quite right for the way she felt then—both old and new. She wanted a new song with an old tune to go with her special feeling. And she sang as she rocked on the top of the wave.

I am the mighty wave, I flow

Where others do not dare, I go.

And all that’s in the sea I know.

I am the wave.

I am the mighty wave, I grow

Encompassing all things below

Into my restless undertow

I am the wave.

While other things move to and fro,

It seems that I must ceaseless flow

In just one way—it is not so.

I am the wave.

For like all life, my motions go

In all directions as I grow,

And like all life, I ceaseless flow.

I am the wave.

Sianna felt so totally new and at one with the sea that she almost tossed the jacket with the buttons into the trough of the wave. But a sudden painful memory of her father, weak and dry on the shore, stayed her hand. And because she cherished the jacket for his sake and not her own, she kept it.

The wave continued to roll on, past the Inner Islands, the Mean Isles, the group of three called the Triades, till it came close to the Outermost Isle. But Sianna felt only elation. It was not in her then to feel fear. And she sat on top of the wave like a queen upon a throne.

Thus feeling her new power, Sianna decided to lie face down in the water and watch the sea creatures that were caught in the tow. But she underestimated the strength of the mighty wave. Before she could even struggle, it had sucked her down, down, down into the deeps. With her eyes wide open and her mouth in a bubbly scream, Sianna was drawn down to the ocean floor. Her long golden hair streamed out behind her as she fell, and she looked like some exotic mer-creature in a dive.

She landed by the side of a sunken galleon. She lay there white as bleached bone, her hair spread around her like rare cloth. Little spotted fish circled her where she lay, still and un-breathing, water within and water without, the jacket clutched in her hand.

From the forecastle of the sunken ship, Dread Mary had watched Sianna’s descent. And when the girl had cascaded to the ocean floor, Mary swam over, her fishtail making scant murmurs in the sea. She seized the jacket with its three blackened prizes and started back. But the gleam of Sianna’s hair, golden even under the sea, made her pause.

Some instinct, which she afterward could not have explained, made Dread Mary turn back. Lifting the girl in her arms, skin against skin, she rose up on the tide. When the two broke through the surface, the girl gave a frothy gasp and began to cough. She half-turned in Dread Mary’s arms and reached out for her.

“Mother?” she asked, for it seemed to her that she was a child again in her dark-haired mother’s arms.

“Tush, child,” said the witch of the sea as she swam with her precious burden toward the cove.

S
IANNA DID NOT WAKE
again during the ride to the shore. And when the seawitch put the girl down on the beach, she knelt on her fishtail, half in and half out of the sea, and sucked the rest of the water from the girl’s lungs. Then casting a backward glance at the sleeping Sianna, the seawitch dove back into the sea.

Sianna slept all through the afternoon, through moonrise and moonset, and into the dawn. The soft winds dried her and kept her warm. But in the morning she awoke, stiff with sleep, and looked about.

Then she noticed she was naked and nearly wept with shame. She glanced around quickly and saw no one either up the beach or down. So she rose cautiously to her knees, then stood and stretched her arms and legs. As no one was about, the feeling of shame left her. She began to spin around and around. Her hair in bright tangles spun out from her head like a golden web.

She gave a mighty shout that echoed from the grove of trees encroaching on the beach. It was a shout of thanksgiving, of being alive.

There was no answer but a bird song.

Sianna whistled in return and a strange golden lark flew out of the wood. It circled three times around her head, then settled down in the sand quite near her feet.

“Why,” said Sianna, so surprised she spoke aloud, “it is the
Gard-lann,
the king-lark. I thought they were no more.”

As if answering, the lark whistled.

“Well, little golden bird, here we are,” said Sianna. “But where are we?”

The golden lark cocked its head to one side as if considering the question.
“Sia, sia, sia,”
it said.

Sianna turned and stood on tiptoe, peering out to the nearest islands. “Those three must be the Triades,” she said, partly to herself, partly to the bird. “And further on, those ridges that stretch out in a line must be the Mean Isles. Don’t you think so?”

The bird whistled again as if in encouragement.

“Which means,” said Sianna, and she lay down and with her finger drew a strange configuration in the sand, “Triades thus, Means thus, and I am…” Here she plunged her thumb deeply into the sand. “On the Outermost Isle!”

It seemed that once she said it, it was suddenly true. What she had guessed at before took on a horrifying reality as soon as it was named. Unbidden, tears came to her eyes and began to trickle down the sides of her nose.

“I wonder if Dread Mary
does
live hereabouts?” she asked herself. “I wonder if she really does collect buttons?” And then she shouted,
“Buttons!”

Sianna twisted around violently, but she could not find her jacket. She jumped to her feet and ran up and down the beach, peering out toward the sea as if to discover the jacket snagged on a piece of driftwood.

For fully half the day she ran around the beach of the Outermost Isle, circling it many times in her search. It was a small islet, with a wood grove that held no beasts but a few golden butterflies and the golden lark. The cove was little more than a groove in the otherwise oval of the isle. And nowhere was the jacket to be seen.

By the time she was fully convinced the jacket was gone forever, Sianna was ravenous. Her next trip around the island was more for food than for the jacket with her mother’s treasured buttons. But she did not recognize the seaweeds that grew in the tidal pools. They were as strange and different as if they had been transported from another world. She was afraid that to eat them might mean her death—and equally afraid of death from not eating at all. She even tried to grub beneath a rock for worms or bugs, like a little beast of the field. But the three small crawlers she found were so unappetizing that she threw herself down in a fit of tears and for the first time surrendered herself to despair and exhaustion. She remained on the beach alternately weeping and napping till the moon rose over the horizon.

She went to sleep then, in the moon’s light. She was beginning to feel the cold.

W
HEN SIANNA AWOKE SHE
was lying on a cold floor in a darkened house. Light barely peeked through a window that was hung with a seaweed curtain. A small shaft of the light had passed over her eyes, and it was that which had awakened her.

Sianna looked around in terror. It was like no house she had ever seen. She remembered the wave. She remembered her many trips around the Island. She remembered her despairing search for food. But somehow this was the most terrifying of all.

She got up and ran to the door. It was made from two pieces of wood that looked as though they might have been hatch covers that had long lain under the sea. They weren’t locked, she noted gratefully.

Cautiously, Sianna opened the top part of the door. There was no one there. But the smell of food was in the air.

“Food?” she asked herself. Then, “Food!” she shouted. Without another thought for caution or fear, she flung open the bottom part of the door. There in front of the house was a large mollusk shell filled with cooked sea plants and the speckled eggs of some seabird. A coral cup was filled with what was certainly berry wine.

Sianna threw herself down on the sand and ate the food with her fingers. After she finished the last drop of drink and the last morsel of food, she remembered to say grace. She changed it to suit the occasion.

“For these gifts which I have just received,” she said with great fervor, “I thank thee.”

But she was not sure who it was she was really thanking. There were dainty human footprints that led up to the dish from the sea, and the same footprints all around the coral house. But they all led back to a strange depression at the edge of the sea. It was as if some great sea creature had lain on the beach and disgorged a good fairy to care for her.

Was it magic? Or was it—and she could not believe it to be true—Dread Mary? For if it had been Dread Mary’s doings, surely Sianna would now be dead, drowned, and bleached to the bone, a decoration for the witch’s galleon. At least that was how the story went. Sianna remembered the old storyteller saying just a few days past, “The galleon is ringed with the bones of fishermen lost in storms.”

It was surely a puzzle. But try as she might, Sianna could not put an answer to it. So she went instead to investigate the coral house.

It was not entirely coral, that she saw at once. Tiger cowries outlined the single window. An arch of scallops was over the door. At least, she thought with grim satisfaction, she recognized the shells. The roof was slanted and spiked at each corner with some kind of giant conch. And the floor was a mosaic of the sea, fishes and eels, sharks and seals, and even a mermaid drifting along in one corner. Sianna had to lift the strands of seaweed on the window and open wide both parts of the door to let in enough light to see it. And when she looked even more carefully, she saw that it was all done with pieces of clam shells.

“It must be magic,” Sianna said. “Or else a miracle.”

But believing in magic and miracles did not mean she should not also help herself. She had been well used to that at home since she had had to be a mother to herself.

Home! The word caught strangely in her mind. She had almost forgotten home. She knelt down in the sand and in a trembling voice sang a song of thanksgiving for her safe arrival and another, a prayer, for her safe return home. Her pure voice rang out over the tiny isle, echoing in the stillness. Out in the cove the water trembled ever so slightly as if sea ears were listening under the waves.

Sianna finished her song and stood up. She picked up the mollusk plate and coral cup and carried them down to the water’s edge, where she washed them with care. She placed them beside the little house and set out again around the isle.

This time she went slowly and with deliberation, not anxiously and with fear. She began to see familiar places: there a path through the wood, there the rock she had overturned looking for worms, there a bird’s nest that must belong to the golden lark. And there again, the coral house.

Coming on the house from the other side, she was struck by its simplicity. And what had at first seemed magic now seemed reasonable when viewed with calm. Such a house might be set up in a single night. Why, she herself could do it, except perhaps for the marvelous floor.