by Jane Yolen
“Tush, child,” said the witch of the sea as she swam with her precious burden toward the cove.
4. The Outermost Isle
SIANNA 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.
5. The Coral House
WHEN 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.
On the way around the second time, Sianna discovered a large piece of driftwood she had not noticed before. It was heavy, but she was able to drag it slowly behind her all the way to the house. Above her head, the golden lark circled and scolded as if to show the way.
Sianna thought the wood might do as a table. Though it was low, it had three stubby legs, and if she sat in the sand, it was just the right height. She moved it next to the house and set the cup and plate upon it. Then she sat down and began to wait for her unknown friend.
“At least,” she thought, “I can thank whomever—or whatever—myself.”
But the sun moved slowly across the sky and no one came. Only a few fish leaped far out at sea. And once Sianna thought she saw the spouting of a whale.
She was beginning to get hungry again. But she was sleepier still. And so, head on hands, hands on the table, Sianna at last fell into a sleep. She dreamed she was home making silver buttons out of the bones of fish she had caught swimming about in her father’s shop.
6. A Night of Watching
WHEN SIANNA WOKE UP on her second day on Outermost Isle, she was warm. Then she realized that she was again in the little coral house.
“Most strange,” she thought, for she distinctly remembered falling asleep outside.
As she stretched herself more fully awake, her feet touched some stiff cloth. She sat up quickly and peered in the dimness. There, lying on the floor near her, were a long skirt woven from seaweed and rushes and her own little jacket.
She put them on. The skirt came down to her ankles and was surprisingly soft. But the jacket felt strange and stiff, for it had been too long under the sea. When she tried to button it, she discovered that the silver buttons had been replaced by shells.
Sianna gasped and put her hand to her mouth. There was no longer any question about it. She was being cared for by Dread Mary herself.
Somehow, knowing that made everything reasonable. And so Sianna determined to stay awake that night in order to meet the seawitch.
“First I shall thank her,” she decided, “and then I shall demand my mother’s buttons back. For surely, since she has so many, three less will not matter.”
Sianna spent the day tidying her home and collecting shells for decorations. She smoothed a path to the sea and lined it with hundreds of scallops, for they lay about the beach in profusion. She found half an old barrel washed up on the far side of the island, and thought she could use it for a chair, but it needed a cushion. So she puzzled out the weaving in her skirt and spent the rest of the daylight gathering sturdy seaweeds to use as threads. She stretched the weed threads between the legs of the table, knotted the threads to the legs, and thus laid out her warp. By then it was sundown and she could see no more to weave.
She stretched and made a great pretense at yawning, for she was certain Dread Mary watched from somewhere in the sea. In a loud voice she announced—rather louder than she had intended—“I think I shall go inside to sleep.”
Laying the remaining weaving threads beside the empty plate and cup, Sianna walked slowly into the house. But once inside, she stealthily parted the curtain at the window and peered out into the night.
A full moon was rising, and the strand sparkled with a thousand little lights. These were shells reflecting back the moon’s rays. And though it was night, the shingle was as bright as morn.
A strange hush settled over the isle. All at once even the constant drumming of the waves on the shore seemed stilled. Sianna felt sleepy. She reached into her jacket pocket and drew out two sharp shells she had hidden there. These she placed on the floor and then stood upon them with her bare feet. The shells pricked her soles, and the pain would keep her awake.
It was near midnight when a splash near the shore startled her. Something—someone—was approaching.
In the moonlight everything appeared larger than in the day. It seemed to Sianna that a great monstrous fish was rising up out of the water. Yet it was no fish, she saw at last, but a mer-creature, part woman and part fish. The creature heaved itself onto the shore with its hands and wriggled farther up the beach.
While Sianna watched from behind the seaweed curtains of the coral house, the mermaid’s tail sloughed off and two perfect legs appeared in its place. Then the seawitch, for it was indeed she, flexed and wriggled her feet slowly as if it hurt to move them. She bent her knees and moved cautiously at first. Then she came toward the hut.
In the moonlight she gleamed white as the belly of a fish. Her hair covered her back and breasts as she moved. And the only things she wore were strands of anemones she had braided through her long black hair.
7. Sianna’s Trade
DREAD MARY DID NOT look so dreadful then, for her face was quite lovely and soft in the moonlight. She moved with the grace of a creature still in the sea, her motions slow and majestic. She seemed to float in the air as she would in a wave.
The moment she saw the seawitch, Sianna knew what she would have to do. All thoughts of thanking her fled. The girl crawled out the window, though the shells scraped her legs. She ran down to the sea where the mermaid had shed her tail.
Grabbing up the slippery, wet tail in her hands, Sianna called out to the startled witch in a voice that quivered with fear, “Dread Mary, I conjure you, take care. You shall not return to the sea till I have what is rightfully mine.”
At the sound of the girl’s voice, Dread Mary turned. She came slowly over to where Sianna stood and held out her hand to the girl. In the moon’s light Sianna could see the delicate pulsing membranes stretched taut between each finger and on the witch’s neck, close up under each ear, were faint red gill lines that beat in her heart’s rhythm.
“Give me my tail, child, and I will not harm you,” came Dread Mary’s voice. It was liquid and low and full of the sounds of the sea.
“You shall not harm me anyhow, mother from the sea.” Sianna’s words were braver than her voice. “I am not afraid.”
“Take care, child, for there is much to fear.”
“Give me my buttons and you shall have your tail.”
The seawitch kept her hand stretched toward the girl, but a smile formed on her face. It was perhaps the first time in almost three hundred years that she had smiled that kind of smile. It was a fond smile, a smile of liking, a smile of respect.
“I will make you such a trade,” said the witch. “Give me my tail.”
“First swear,” said Sianna, who could not read that smile in the moonlight and feared a trick. “Swear by all you hold sacred and true.”
“I swear by the constant sea,” said Dread Mary. “I swear by the tides that turn again each day. By the infinite grains of salt in the ocean and the multitude of grains of sand on the strand. I swear by the scales on each fish in the water and by the seaweed rosaries that sway in the sea. By all these I swear that I shall return to you what is yours if you but give me back my tail.”
Sianna smiled then. “It is yours. I cannot hold it.” And she gave the fishtail to the witch.
Dread Mary moved closer then and took the tail from Sianna. Their hands touched briefly, the girl’s warm and soft, the mermaid’s cold and rough. Sianna looked deeply into the mermaid’s black eyes. They were fathomless, they were ageless. The mermaid smiled again as she slipped into the tail. Then she dove back into the sea.
8. A Strange Pact
IN THE MORNING WHEN Sianna woke, though it was nearer noon according to the sun, she ate and drank what Mary had left. It was then she found the three small buttons at the bottom of her cup.
“Thank you,” she called out to the sea. “Thank you for everything.”
There was no sign that she had been heard, so Sianna rose and went down to the water’s edge. She slipped out of her skirt and jacket and left them lying neatly folded on
the shore. Then she waded into the water and swam with strong strokes out to the middle of the cove. The Gard-lann, the golden king-lark, circled her head as she swam. Playfully she splashed water up at it, and it turned indignantly and flew back to shore.
Sianna took a deep breath and dived. As she went down, down, down to the bottom of the sea, she began to feel the wonder of it again. Little spotted fish and big bloated groupers swam by. A many-legged squid pulsed along near the bottom. And ahead Sianna saw the galleon which Dread Mary called home.
She circled around the galleon half looking for the bones of the fishermen and half fearful lest she find them. But bones and dead fishermen were as much part of the storyteller’s art as was Mary’s wickedness. At least that was how it seemed under the sea to Sianna. She rose for a quick breath, then dove again.
This time Sianna swam directly to the ship and, pulling herself along the rail, came to the forecastle. Hoping that at least that part of the legend was true, she knocked three times upon the wood. But there was no answering knock. The last bits of air in her chest were aching for release, and so Sianna swam quickly to the top. Gasping for breath, she was just deciding whether she was strong enough to go down again when there was a loud splash behind her. Sianna turned and there was the seawitch smiling at her and holding out her webbed hands.
Without a word, Sianna took the hands in hers. Then Dread Mary drew her down under the waves and together they searched out the hidden caves and grottos of the deep, played with schools of flying fish, rode on rays, and even straddled porpoises for a race across the cove. Whenever the girl tired, the mermaid would hold her up. Whenever the girl grew short of breath, the mermaid would bring her to the surface.
Later, when they were both exhausted from the swim, they came ashore. The mermaid doffed her tail, and the two played a game of tosses with an ivory shell.