The Magic Three of Solatia

by Jane Yolen

  “Then listen to this which I have never taught you,” said Sianna. “Know you the old song ‘The Magic Three’?”

  “Oh, yes, Mother,” said Lann, and began to sing softly:

  And one is for a mighty wish,

  And so be two and three,

  And she has left them to her son

  And dived below the sea…”

  He broke off, saying, “It is an interesting tale.”

  “It is no tale,” she said, “for this—” She held out the necklace with the button. “This is the Magic Three.”

  “But Mother, how do you know?” asked Lann.

  “Know that I know.”

  “And where are the Magic One and the Magic Two?” Lann asked again.

  “Gone. Used up. And the consequences have been dear. I know it all too well.”

  “Then, say on, Mother, and as always, I shall listen.”

  So Sianna sat with her son by the cooking fire and told him of the power of the button. She showed him how he should say the spell and twist the button in a certain way to make the magic happen. And with their heads in the light of the fire, it was hard to say which was the older, for they both looked old and young, old with knowledge and young with hope.

  Then Lann arose, and Sianna with him. “Do not use it lightly, son,” she said again. “Its consequences may be too hard to bear.”

  Lann put the chain around his neck and tucked the button inside his shirt. “I shall use it only if there is no other way left. Be assured, I shall try every path before the path of the Magic Three.”

  “I am assured,” she said. “And all my love go with you on this most precious quest.” They walked out to greet their guests and soon entered into the singing of songs.

  Only occasionally did their eyes meet, and the knowledge that flashed from the one to the other reassured them both.

  4. The Shell Compass

  BEFORE MORN, LANN WAS up and away. He had stopped only to place a light kiss on his mother’s cheek and pass a hand over his grandfather’s brow. Then, a small pack on his back, he walked down to the strand.

  He was surprised to see Chando there, sitting on the beach, his lute by his side. He was trickling sand through his fingers.

  “Welcome, my almost-son,” said Chando. It was ever a greeting with them.

  “You knew I would be off this very day?” asked Lann.

  “With as strong-minded a mother as you have, it is best to be off before she makes you stay,” said Chando. “Besides, I was off the same way many years back. Though not, I am afraid, for so good a cause as yours.”

  “Then you agree with what I do,” said Lann.

  “I did not say that,” Chando answered him. “For you may be breaking the hearts of the two people I love best in the world. Besides yourself, that is.”

  “My mother’s heart is stronger than all that,” said Lann.

  “Perhaps you are right,” Chando replied. “Though what son has ever really known his mother’s heart. Still, I did not come down here so early just to chatter idly with you. Nor did I come to persuade you from your quest.”

  “Then why do you sit here, friend Chando?” asked Lann.

  “To give you a parting gift,” the minstrel replied. And he handed his golden lute to the boy.

  Lann took the lute carefully. He passed his fingers lovingly over the neck, which was inlaid with ivory, and over the sound box, which had ivory flowers around the rosette. Then he held it back to Chando. “You cannot give me your lute,” he said. “It is enough that you loaned it to me to practice on, these past six years.”

  “I can give it to you. Indeed, I have given it to you. For a man who is traveling needs a friend with him. And if he is a minstrel as you are, what better friend than his own lute.”

  “But what will you…?”

  “My young friend, my almost-son, I will have much quiet sitting time to make yet another. My traveling days are done. But you shall be too busy questing to carve and shape a lute for yourself. And on your safe return, we shall exchange. I shall give you the one I have worked upon for the year, and you shall give me back my own lute, well seasoned with travel.”

  A tear began to well up in Lann’s eye.

  “Nay, do not cry. For a man bent on questing has no time for tears,” said Chando.

  “A man always has time for tears,” said Lann. “Thus my mother has always told me when I have cried and been teased for it. She says tears cannot unmake a man. They only prove that he loves well.”

  “Your mother is the wisest woman I know,” said Chando, and clasped the boy to him so that Lann could not see the tears that fell unchecked from his eyes. “Go now, before I go with you.” The minstrel walked off then, and did not look again at the boy.

  Lann stood gazing up the strand. He said to himself, “But which way shall I go? South to the land of Cantwell, where men listen not and speak more than they know? Or west past the New Mountains to the home of the shepherds, where riches are counted in cattle and sheep? Or north, where men still live with the skins of animals untanned upon their backs? These are all lands I have heard of in song and story. Yet never have I heard of a crystal pool that ‘from the salt sea springs.’”

  Not knowing which way to start, Lann bent down and picked up a shell. For in Solatia, it was a game with the young boys and girls to toss a shell in the air and follow its point. “The shell compass,” they said, “will take us to our pleasure.”

  Lann threw the shell high in the air. It made several turnings and came down. When it landed in the sand, its pointed end was toward the sea.

  “Well, that is certainly not the choice I would have made,” thought Lann. “For ship I have none. And that good a swimmer I am not.” He bent down to pick up the shell to try again. As he stood up, he saw a movement far out on the sea. It was a shimmering that caught his eye. He wondered if it was fish or whale, and stood still for fully a minute. As he watched, a small rainbow formed where the sun touched the shimmer. Moments later, he saw what was causing it. It was a strange oval boat coming toward him, of mottled green. It had neither captain nor crew and was big enough for five or six as tall as he. When it came closer on the gentle tide, beaching soundlessly by his feet, Lann looked inside. There was no water in its well. At the bottom, half hidden under an oar, was a piece of cloth that looked to be a sail. The name carved on the boat’s bow was “Song of the Sea.”

  “It is magic,” thought Lann. “A song for a minstrel.” And then he thought, “I wonder if it belongs to some poor shipwrecked soul.” But he knew that no one in Solatia owned such a boat, for the design was strange to him and the writing most foreign.

  Lann put the lute and his pack into the boat’s well, and took off his boots and threw them in, too. Then he pushed the boat off the Solatian shore and hopped into Song of the Sea.

  5. The Solatian Isles

  LANN POLED THE BOAT away from the strand until it was free of the tide that moved ceaselessly toward the shore. Then he pulled the oar in and bent to the task of raising the sail. It was hard work, for a stiff breeze was blowing and at each try the wind threatened to tear the sail from his hands. But at last he was able to raise it, and without even benefit of her rudder, Song of the Sea headed joyously out toward the Solatian Isles.

  He sat down in the boat’s stern then and tried his hand on the rudder. He lifted his face and smelled the breeze. It looked to be a fine start to an adventure.

  Lann felt new, or at least different from the way he had felt earlier in the morning. It must be the boat, he thought. Though his great-grandfather had been a fisherman, Lann had never sailed this far from shore. Yet something sang in his body. And then he knew it was not the boat. It was the sea. Without even thinking, he began a song for the sheer joy of it:

  I seek you in silence,

  I seek you in singing,

  I seek you in sorrow,

  I seek you in joy.

  I seek you by asking,

  I seek you by giving,


  I seek you as man and

  I seek you as boy.

  And his song was like a shout and a prayer.

  Suddenly, close by, he saw the nearest of the Solatian Isles, the Inner Isles. He guided the boat carefully into a narrow cove and marveled at the ease of it. “As if I had always been a sailor,” he thought. And then again remembering his great-grandfather, he thought of it no more.

  But when he stood on the shore and looked around, it seemed to be merely an extension of the land he knew so well. There were a few small cottages built like the ones on the Solatian shore, for often Solatians gathered here for special events: a wedding party or a time of fasting or for periods of silent thinking before a declaration of war.

  Sadly Lann got back into the boat. Surely if the crystal pool were so close, he would have heard of it.

  No sooner did he step into the boat than it seemed to take off by itself, as if it had a life of its own. He had neither to push it off with the oar nor steer it with the rudder. And they headed, for by now Lann thought of the boat as a person, toward the next of the Solatian Isles—the Mean Isles.

  Lann had known of the Mean Isles for as long as he could remember. “Not because they are wicked,” his grandfather Sian had told him when one day he asked, “but because they are in the middle, the mean.” He could see clearly now what his grandfather had meant. In between Solatia and the Inner Isles on the one hand, and the Triades and the Outermost Isle on the other, nestled the Mean Isles. They were but a waystop for fishermen, a place to dry the catch. Lann could see the wooden racks all along the shores of the many small isles. He merely shrugged, and the boat sped by.

  As they neared the Triades, the three small isles that grouped together, Lann stood up in the boat, steadying himself with his hand on the mast. He cast a hurried glance at the three, but they were barren save for the bleached bones of an old ship lost many years back. It rested on the largest isle like a kit on its mother’s breast. The wreck was picked clean, as clean as the Triades of growth. “Surely,” thought Lann “a crystal pool would mean trees nearby.” He steered the boat around the three and past them.

  When the Outermost Isle came into sight, some time later, a small oval isle with a groove in one side which some called a cove, Lann felt a chill. There the seawitch, Dread Mary, had made her home. Lann knew that the seawitch had saved his mother’s life and taught her all her spells in exchange for the Solatian songs. So she must have been a good witch, regardless of all the bad tales they told about her.

  “Still, if there is any crystal pool on that small isle, my mother would have known,” he said aloud, as if addressing the boat.

  And despite a rude rudder that did not want to listen to his hand and tried to steer itself straight toward the Outermost Isle, Lann put the boat’s nose into the wind and sailed her out toward the open sea.

  “To the Crystal Pool!” he shouted into the wind, feeling very brave and fortunate. A sound came back to him, as if in answer, but it was only the wind returning his voice to him in cries and whispers and sibilant sounds.

  So Lann spent a day and a night in his boat, Song of the Sea. He fed himself from his small pack. His mother had put in some bread and cheese, and he had added dried golden fruit from her winter stores and a flask of berry wine. To keep himself warm, Lann drank several draughts of the wine. He slept then, wrapped in his dreams and rocked to sleep by the waves.

  When he woke in the morn, the boat was caught on the edge of a strange green isle as if it were moored.

  Lann stood up and rubbed sleep from his eyes, then he stretched and looked around. The isle was small and dome-shaped, and the ground seemed smooth and spread with moss. Lann slung his lute across one shoulder, the pack across the other, and stepped ashore. The ground was not smooth and mossy at all. It was slick and covered with a green slime. But by walking with care, Lann made his way to the top of the peak.

  “’Tis odd,” he thought when he stood upon it, “but the isle is the same on all sides like an egg. No coves, no grooves, no indentations.”

  Just as he made that observation, there was a rumbling and the entire island began to shake. Lann slipped and fell. But luck was with him, and he landed upon the pack of food and not upon the lute. When he was at last able to sit up again, he was shocked to find that the isle had grown a head and a tail.

  “’Tis no isle at all but a giant turtle,” he said to himself. He did not scream or call out, for doing so would have been useless. And like his mother and her father before her, he did not like to make useless cries for help.

  “If it dives below the sea, I am a dead man,” he thought. And added ruefully, “Though man I am not yet.” Then he thought briefly about the button, the Magic Three, which he carried around his neck. He even put his hand on the chain. But when the tortoise, contrary to others of its kin, set to swimming above the waves with long leisurely pulls of its legs, Lann dropped the chain. He settled himself upon the island’s peak, which was the uppermost part of the turtle’s shell, and looked about.

  The giant creature seemed not to notice him at all, and kept swimming in a northerly direction.

  “Perhaps I had best get off while I can,” Lann said to himself. But when he looked for his boat, he could just make it out on the horizon. And before he had time to blink again, the boat was out of sight.

  “Well,” he thought, “this monster is speeding faster than I thought. I wonder if I should try to swim?” But there was nothing but sea for miles around.

  Lann looked down at the lute. “I wonder if it would float,” he asked himself. He stroked the fine wood, not out of fear or even possessiveness, but with a kind of pity that he would not now have time to make its acquaintance. And then a sudden thought struck him. “There is nothing that happens that does not happen for a reason. Just as the shell pointed me to the boat and the boat brought me here, so perhaps this turtle will take me closer to my heart’s desire. Who knows?”

  So he settled himself more comfortably on the peak of the shell and took out his pack. He found he had squashed the cheese and bread by falling upon it, but still it was quite tasty. He ate the last of it. What was worse, though, was that he had lost his berry wine. It must have fallen down the turtle’s back and slid into the sea when he slipped. The sun was now high in the sky, and there was nothing to shade him from it. He was becoming very thirsty, and thinking of thirst made him crave something to drink even more.

  “Perhaps if I sing,” he thought, “I shall forget my fears.” So he put down the pack and picked up the lute, thinking to play a song.

  But he had no time to begin, for just as he picked the instrument up, the turtle began to slow down. Lann stood up shakily. He put his hand above his eyes to shade them from the glare of the sky. Far ahead, but coming closer with each stroke of the turtle’s powerful legs, was land.

  6. Turtle Isle

  THE GIANT TORTOISE SWAM directly to the land. As they came closer, Lann could see it was a verdant isle with trees of every size and shape and much lush undergrowth. But of houses or boats, of roads or chapels or humankind, there was no sign.

  There was a sudden bump as the turtle’s feet touched shore. The giant did not stop, though, and continued directly upon the land, walking with the same rolling gait it had had in the sea.

  “Enough for me,” thought Lann. And, clutching his empty pack in one hand, the lute in the other, he slid down the back end of the turtle’s shell and landed none too gracefully upon the shore.

  He looked about him in wonder. The island seemed to creep and crawl with every manner of tortoise. There were small turtles with patterned shells and turtles whose backs were seamed and leathery. There were green turtles and brown turtles and yellow turtles and turtles with vermilion designs. There were turtles as small as Lann’s smallest finger and some nearly as big as a horse.

  Yet strange to say, for all the movement in the undergrowth as the turtles moved slowly and clumsily onto the well-worn paths of the isle, there was no sound of lif
e but the sound of a hiss.

  As Lann watched, the giant tortoise that had carried him to the isle moved up a central pathway to a high peak. And when it reached the peak, where surely it must have been seen by the entire island, it raised its monstrous head to the sky and opened and shut its terrible jaws. The loud snap-snap resounded all over the isle.

  As if at a signal, the turtles began to converge on Lann. Slowly, ponderously, but relentlessly, they came from all sides to the beach where he was standing. And before he could think of a plan of escape, he found himself surrounded by hundreds of turtles, their black, beady eyes staring at him, their mouths opening and shutting in imitation of their leader. But the only sound that emerged was that ever-present hiss.

  Lann felt cold, yet warm too, as if his body could not catch up to his fears. He could barely move. Was this, then, the end of his quest?

  As he pondered his fate, one especially large turtle pushed menacingly toward him and Lann stepped back awkwardly. As he moved, his elbow knocked the lute and set the strings a-quivering. At the strange new sound, the turtles all looked up and then down in a single motion, and stopped all movement as the sound of the humming strings died slowly in the air. When the sound could no longer be heard, the turtles began to move again.

  “So that is the way of it,” thought Lann. And he swung the lute in front of him and began to pluck a tune. As each note sang across the island, the turtles began to bob their heads on wrinkled necks up and down as if dancing. And soon Lann’s fears subsided and he began to sing:

  The magic of a single song

  Is but, in fact, a moment long.

  But captured in your reverie,

  That moment can forever be.

  And so I sing a magic spell,

  And hope I sing that moment well,

  So my sweet song can catch you fast,

  And in your heart forever last.