The Enchantment

A salamander lived on an island in the Black Sea. He was held captive by the magician, who used the salamander to control the citizens living on the island. The magician came to the salamander every night and told him a story. The salamander then dreamt that story and, unknown to him, his dream controlled the activities of all the islanders the next day.

The salamander had not always been a salamander. The magician found him as a boy begging for food in the town square of a Bulgarian village. The magician tricked him with his kind words and promises to care for him. The boy, who missed his family very much, agreed to be cared for by the magician. That was all that was needed. Once the boy agreed, the magician had the power he needed to entrap the boy. He swiftly took a red flower from his satchel and tied it around a string that he looped over the boy's neck. In that moment, the boy transformed into a salamander, and the magician slipped him into a front jacket pocket, right there in the town square. As long as the magician kept the flower near the boy, he would remain a salamander.

The boy had not always been an orphan. He grew up in a great green house in the village with his parents and three older sisters. His father loved his mother, too much some feared. The father worked hard every day as a hat seller in the town square, coming home every night to dote on his sweet wife with warm teas and humorous stories of his day in the marketplace. When she was in the room, he couldn't help but keep his eyes fixed on her. The people in the village whispered about the family. Everyone said that this kind of love could only lead to a bad end.

The wife became sick one day. No one knew what was wrong. She became terribly depressed, and nothing could make her happy. She cried with such a deep sorrow that no one but the father could stand to be around her, which only increased her despair. She began to fear other people and the outside world altogether. Soon, she was even afraid of her own children. For an hour or two every day, she seemed to return to normal, and she and her husband could laugh over his stories of the marketplace. But otherwise she drifted further and further from the world.

The girls took over selling hats in the town square, and the father waited on the mother night and day. One of the women in the village took pity on the father, who she feared would die of heartache if his wife passed away, leaving the children with no parents at all. She went to the father late at night, when she was sure she couldn't be seen by her gossiping peers, and found the father in a half-awake state draped over his wife's bed. The village woman told him about a unicorn that lived outside a village high in the mountains.

"If you take three of its tail strands and weave them into your wife's hair, her thinking will return to normal. She will not live for much longer, so you should go quickly," the woman huskily said, trying her best to conceal her voice. She pulled out a picture of the village, told him the road that would take him there, and then left.

In the morning, the father woke up his daughters and told them excitedly that he was going to find the cure. He said he would go with their mother and both of them would return within five days, but he left the picture the woman had given him just in case they needed to come find him. The father did not come back within five days. On the seventh day, the oldest sister said she was going looking for them. When she didn't come back either, the next oldest sister went and then the last sister, until only the boy was left. He sold his father's hats in the marketplace until they were all gone. He lived alone in the house for nearly a year, hoping his family would return, doing odd jobs or begging. He at least had a home to return to until a tree fell on the roof in a storm, and the boy was driven out. It was then that he met the magician.

In another village high in the mountains lived a teenage boy, Ethan. Since he was young, the boy had had to supplement whatever food his father brought home so his mother and two sisters did not go hungry. He didn't mind, he would tell himself, because he liked staying busy and enjoyed the adventures that accompanied fishing and hunting. Sometimes he would be gone for weeks on hunting trips in the forests surrounding the village. He had crafted himself a boat from a barrel that he could easily strap to his back and then ride down the rivers on fishing expeditions. One day, he came to a river he had never used before. As he was looking for a suitable place to tie his boat and begin fishing, he spied two fish struggling on shore and whispering.

"How strange," he told himself, "I think they are making sounds to each other. Never have I heard of fish talking." He poled himself over to shore and then picked up the fish and threw them in the water. One of the fish leaped up, and Ethan thought he saw it gape open its mouth to thank him.

Ethan brought his boat onshore and began walking through the forest with his bow and arrow. When he came into a clearing, he saw a giant yellow and red bird. He had never seen a creature like that, but it reminded him of a print he had once seen in a merchant's house of a Greek phoenix. He didn't dare shoot it, but nor could he leave it. He just wanted to be in its presence, and the creature did not seem to mind. The two hunted together and fairly soon Ethan was talking to it as if it could understand. One day, while he was bathing in the river, someone shot the phoenix in the wing, and Ethan found it wounded in its nest. Ethan loved this phoenix and was determined to find help.

He came to a clearing where he found a dark blue bird and a little bear. The bird peered at him intently, while the bear played with his ball, utterly unconcerned to be so close to a human. Ethan did not dare hunt either animal. Walking slowly past them, he followed the path through a stone doorway into an old walled garden. Through the garden he found a girl, swinging. She had the form of a young girl, but when she smiled the sides of her eyes broke into lines that spread from her cheek bone to her hair line, like the crinkles of a very old woman. Her skin also slightly glowed. It was the strangest thing.

The boy approached her and asked if she knew how to help his friend the phoenix.

"She will heal soon enough from her wound, just give it a day. But it is terrible what has happened to that family," the girl said. She sighed as she took her staff and led the boy into her little red house. As she made them both soup and corn bread, she told him the story of the family. How first the father and mother had come to the forest and then the three sisters. "The problem is that, in this forest, if you don't achieve what you came here for within three days, then you will be turned into an animal and have to live out the rest of your days here. The father and mother couldn't find the unicorn they were seeking, and the daughters couldn't find their parents, at least not in the forms they were expecting. Two of the sisters are now fish, while the third is a bird. The father is a bear, and the mother is a phoenix."

"Was the father mistaken then, that there is a unicorn in this forest?"

"No, not at all," said the girl, "it is me. I am the unicorn. You see," she said pointing to her star staff, "that is my horn. I just happened to be a girl during those days they were looking for me. When I realized what had happened, I felt terrible, but the rules of the forest can't be changed."

"There isn't anything..." the boy said, trailing off, as he stared into a steaming cup of nettle soup.

"Yes. There is something," and then she told the teenage boy about the salamander son. "The magician has given him the power of transformative dreams. Almost anyone can dream of things to come, but this boy now has the power to create the future. He has no idea he has this power. As she looked at him over her second bowl of soup, her eyes were nearly lost in a network of laced skin folds. "If someone, let's say you for example, could find him and tell him he has this ability, then he could break his own and his family's enchantments."

"Yes, I think I can do that. Why not?" (The boy, you remember, loved adventures.)

The unicorn girl told him what she knew, that the boy was in the middle of an island in the Black Sea. "You must remember, though," the girl said, "that you have only six months. By then the father and mother would have been animals for three years, and they will never be able to return to their original forms."

Ethan hurried home to his own village to tell his family he was going away. His sister clung to his sleeve and tried to hide his shoes. But his little brother, now nearly 14, was old enough to help the family. Ethan gave the brother his barrel boat, game sack, and fishing pole. His mother gave Ethan the set of new clothes she had been saving for his birthday and all of the spare money the family had.

Ethan then made his way to the Black Sea, hitching rides and telling stories as recompense. From the farmers who gave him rides, he found out which of the islands was controlled by the magician. He also discovered that getting there would not be easy. The sea was under an enchantment, so only a vessel plated in gold could stand being in the water. Any other type of boat would dissolve, along with everything it carried. The people on the island toiled every day to mine gold, which they then sold in villages along the shore. All the while the magician, who had cast the spell, controlled almost all the gold trade.

The boy made sure he went to the one village in Bulgaria where the magician did not control the sale of gold. This he also learned from hitching rides. A farmer took him home to help repair a fence that had been damaged by boars. While Ethan warmed himself, he overheard the man's wife and her sisters talking while they prepared a parsnip boar stew. They talked about a village where gold was still inexpensive, but only available to locals who needed to travel on the sea as fishermen or merchants.

After spending one of his six months getting to the village that the farmer's wife had spoken of, Ethan spent the next four working to purchase enough gold to cover a wooden row boat and its oars. He hunted and sold game and then supplemented this with stories he had collected while traveling. He told them every night in the local tavern, and it was there that he met his patron, the innkeeper. The innkeeper let him sleep in an empty room and even leant him a row boat, on the condition that he return it at the end of the trip, gold plated.

Because he was in a village that did not trade with the magician's islanders, Ethan hoped he could arrive on the island unknown to the magician. Ethan spent nearly a week hammering out the gold and covering the boat with long shining sheets. Finally he was ready. He set out at the same time as the fishermen, before dawn, and arrived on a rocky shore of the island not long after sunrise. He hid his boat under driftwood and then took a deer path through stunted, wild olive trees, up to a field where he found a gentleman sitting at a table reading a giant green scroll. It was clearly a magical scroll with deep meaning, and Ethan hoped that the man would help him. But he and the text seemed to be stuck together. The man did not answer the boy or even look up when Ethan tried to talk to him. Ready to give up, he then saw several items strewn around the gentleman's table.

"Can I take one of these, sir?" Ethan asked. The gentleman didn't answer. "I will return them, I promise," he said, as he gathered up what he thought he might need. He knew that he needed whatever help he could get if he had to face the magician, and he hoped that these objects contained some of the wisdom in the gentleman's scroll.

Ethan first took the ball and threw it into the air. "See for me where we need to go and take me there," he said. When the ball fell to the ground it began rolling from the impact, but then it didn't stop. Ethan followed the ball along the road, through the woods, and finally up to a giant hedge. Ethan crawled into the hedge and peered out, seeing a house beyond a well and kitchen garden. He pocketed the ball and then looked at his remaining items: a glove and a teacup.

"What do I need to know?" he asked himself. Then he whispered, "I need to know when it is safe to approach the house and how to open the doors." The teacup quivered. After some trial and error, Ethan discovered that if he asked the teacup a question, it would tip over when the answer was yes. "Is my name Ethan?" he asked. The teacup fell over. "Is the salamander inside?" The teacup fell over. In a moment of mischief he asked, "Is my brother as good a fisherman as me?" The teacup rippled slightly but remained upright. Ethan asked the teacup if the time was right to enter the house and then waited. When the cup finally fell over, Ethan knew it was time to make his move.

With the glove on, he easily opened the front door. With the help of his ball, he found the room where the boy was kept, up the back stairs in an attic room. He didn't know how long he had, so he quickly pulled the salamander boy out of his watery cage and took the flower too, which the unicorn girl had told him about. Ethan was almost too late--just when he made it back to his hedge, he saw the magician walk up his gold-plated brick way and enter the house. Ethan feared that the magician would find them if he asked the salamander to dream an escape on the magician's island. He would have to get back to shore by foot. He asked the teacup for the exact right moment to leave. With the salamander safely buttoned into his front pocket, Ethan waited patiently, even when the heard the magician crashing around the house in anger and watched him pace outside the house.

At the right time, Ethan left the hedge and followed the ball, through a cave with two openings, across a stream, and into a field. He made it back to the gentleman, where he left the three items at his feet, just as he had found them. Once Ethan's back was turned toward the shore where his boat was hidden, the gentleman looked up and smiled. When he did, his face broke into creases, like hundreds of tiny hands spreading across his face.

Ethan found his little golden boat and pushed it out into the water. The mud slightly hid its shining sides, but the moonlight reflected off the oars and prow. As he rowed away, Ethan saw the magician arrive on the seashore. But he just stood there, staring at him, a tiny black form against the white sand. Ethan put the oars down and shouted as loudly as he could, "Why couldn't you get me, magician? Why don't you stop me now?"

The magician cupped his hands over his mouth. "You didn't want it," he said. "You didn't want anything from me. I can only use my powers on someone who wants something from me. Otherwise, I am only as powerful as any ordinary human. If I had caught you, well, that might have been different. I could have found a chink in your thoughts through fear or maybe convinced you to want something from me."

By the end, the magician's voice was thin. It looked like he was still shouting, but Ethan couldn't understand what he was saying anymore. He rowed harder. He worried that the magician might try to carry down a boat and come after him. But he didn't.

That very night Ethan took out the salamander in the room the innkeeper kept for him. He told the salamander everything he had seen and heard--how he had found its family members as animals, met the unicorn girl, heard about the islanders under control, and heard about villages struggling under the burden of the sea's enchantment. And finally he told the salamander of the power it had to dream the next day. He tied the flower around the salamander's foot and placed it in a dish of water. Ethan then got into his own bed and slept.

THE END