Chapter Twenty-Two The Tale of Melilot
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Tale of Melilot
Once upon a time, when the world was younger and the sky was a little bluer, a man and a woman in the Kingdom of Skalla wished more than anything to have a child.
But that wish, alas, had never been granted.
After many years and much discussion of foster care, adoption, or stealing an infant from its cradle in the dead of night—
“Wait, what?” said Sam.
“Oh, does that not happen in Ecossia?”
“No! Do folk steal bairns in Skalla?”
“Well, not so much anymore. Before the treaty, the fairies used to take babies and replace them with exact duplicates. Then it caught on, and everybody started doing it. It was a big problem.”
After many years and much discussion, the woman at last discovered she was pregnant.
By then she was advanced in age, and the pregnancy was not an easy one.
In fact, she suffered greatly from cramping and soreness, reddened skin, and a troubling swelling in her legs.
Both the woman and her husband were not unlearned in the ways of medicine, and they feared she was suffering from clots in her veins that might well lead to an untimely death.
Now, as it happened, not far from their cottage, close enough that they could see it through their window, there was a marvelous garden.
Beyond the forbidding wrought-iron fence that surrounded it, the garden abounded with every plant imaginable.
Flowers bright with all the colors of the rainbow, ripe and luscious fruit hanging off the boughs, herbs—
“No, hold on.” Sam put a hand on my arm to stop me. “I’m still having trouble with the bairn stealing. Why would the fairies do that in the first place?”
“I have no idea. My sister’s wife is a fairy, but she got all embarrassed when I asked her about it and wouldn’t tell me.”
“Your sister-in-law is a fairy? Like a wee fluttery butterfly fairy?”
“More like a six-foot-tall fairy with a massive sword.”
“I’m impressed by your sister, then.”
“She rides a dragon. They’re evenly matched.”
No one was brave or foolish enough to go into this garden, for it was on the grounds of a magnificent palace that belonged to the queen of Skalla. And if that wasn’t enough to discourage trespassers, the queen happened to be a mighty and terrifying sorceress.
As the woman’s pregnancy progressed, her condition worsened, and she became most miserably ill. They tried every remedy they could think of to thin her blood—teas brewed from turmeric, medicines made from an extract of feverfew, and many more. But none had any effect.
One day, she looked out the cottage window and saw that the garden bed nearest the fence had been left free of flowers for the season.
It had therefore been planted with a luxurious crop of sweet clover.
Sweet clover has a most astonishing ability to renew tired soil since, as everyone knows, it is a hardy, drought-tolerant, nitrogen-fixing plant with a warm-weather biomass production capability that exceeds even that of alfalfa.
Less well known, however, is the fact that sweet clover, properly prepared, can be made into an excellent remedy for blood clots.
But the wise woman at the window knew this, and she likewise knew any plant that grew in the queen’s garden must be potent with magic.
She came to believe the only cure for her ailment lay across the garden fence.
Her belief strengthened with each passing day and grew into an obsession. “Fetch me some of the sweet clover from the queen’s garden!” she belabored her husband.
“But the queen would surely object to such a theft,” he protested, “and smite us with dark magic!”
“She will not miss a small patch of clover,” the woman rejoined. “It’s only grown to prepare the way for prettier plants. And if you do not bring me some, I am sure I shall die.”
The man loved his wife very much and did not wish for her to die.
I’ll fetch her some of the queen’s sweet clover, he decided, no matter the cost. And so that night, he clambered over the garden fence and tore a handful of clover out of the patch as quickly as he could.
When he brought it home, they made a tincture of the leaves.
“Already I feel better,” the woman claimed upon drinking it. “If I take this blood thinner daily for a period of three to six months, depending on presentation of symptoms, I am certain I shall be cured.”
The man was not happy about this pronouncement. “Such a course of treatment would be contraindicated during pregnancy,” he objected, “due to the risk of osteocalcin inhibition causing lower fetal bone growth.”
“The first trimester presents the greatest risk of teratogenicity, and I am already past that,” she countered.
“This story includes a lot more about the side effects of medicinal plants than I would have expected.”
“Yes, well.” I shrugged. “I’m a doctor’s daughter. I was taught to be thorough.”
“It was magic sweet clover, though, wasn’t it? Would that have any side effects?”
“Anyway, it’s magic sweet clover,” the woman reassured her husband. “It probably doesn’t have any side effects. Don’t worry so much.”
“But even so, if we persist in our theft for that long, we shall surely be smited! Or smitten! Or smote! I am unsure of the correct participle.”
“And if we do not,” she uttered darkly, “I shall die.”
And so it was that the man found himself climbing over the garden fence night after night. Each time, he would snatch a bit of clover, bring it home, and make a tincture of the fresh leaves. After many weeks passed without incident, he decided the queen either had not noticed or did not care.
Each day, his wife waxed healthier and healthier.
And finally, several months later, they decided a single additional dose of the tincture would be enough to pronounce her cured.
The clouds gathered ominously on that fateful night, and as the man set forth, the heavens unleashed a torrent, accompanied by flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder.
Nonetheless, he once again sneaked into the garden, drenched to the skin but relieved to know he soon would need to thieve no more.
Of course, anyone who has ever heard a story before will be unsurprised to learn what happened next.
As he snipped off that final clump of sweet clover, rainwater cascading off the leaves, there was a blinding light and a deafening boom, and a hand thumped onto his shoulder.
He turned his head, blinking away the glowing spots the light had left in his vision, to see the queen standing behind him.
The rain touched neither her clothes nor her hair, as if her very presence was repellent to nature itself.
“So you are the thief who has been making off with my clover,” she mused. “I believe it is time for some serious smitening.”
“Oh, great queen, please let your justice be tempered by mercy!” he begged her, dropping to his knees with a splash as he landed in a puddle. “My wife is ill, and without your sweet clover, she would surely perish.”
The queen hesitated and peered at his face. “Wait. Aren’t you my next-door neighbor? The cute one?”
“Uh…yes? That is, our little cottage is indeed inexplicably adjacent to the forbidden magical garden of your grand palace.”
We cannot know what passed through the queen’s mind at this time.
Perhaps his pleas moved her and softened her heart.
Perhaps she reflected that he had been a good neighbor for many years until desperation forced him into theft.
Or perhaps she was thinking not with her head but with a different body part altogether.
Whatever the reason, she refrained from smiting him.
Do not, however, mistake her restraint for gentleness, for the next thing she told him shook him to his core.
“You shall not be smitterated this night,” she decided, “and your wife may have however much of my clover she requires. But it is not in me to let a debtor escape without payment or allow an insult to go unanswered. In exchange for your lives, a life must be given to me. Someday, I will take your child as my own. I will care for it like a mother and train it in sorcery, for any child born under the influence of a magic herb will bear magic in its blood.”
Having no alternative, the man conceded to her demand, and with a heavy heart he went home with the last handful of clover. While his wife might survive, he feared his child was lost to him.
Survive the woman did, and some time later, she gave birth to a healthy girl. Because of the unusual circumstances of the pregnancy, they decided to name the child Melilot.
“I’m not following,” Sam said.
“Not following what?”
“Why Melilot?”
“It’s another word for sweet clover. Like how some people say garbanzo bean, but other people call it a chickpea.”
“You were named after the medicine your mother took when she was pregnant?”
“Listen, I was lucky. If she’d had a cold, I might have been named Sneezewort.”
“Or Bastard Toadflax,” Sam suggested. “Or Wormwood. Or Rapunzel.”
“Bastard toadflax is badass. But rapunzel is basically an anemic parsnip. Awful.”
“Agreed.”
When the child was born, the queen came to visit the cottage, an event the new parents viewed with much trepidation. They felt certain the queen would take the baby as she had threatened to do that terrible night.
Much to their surprise, she did no such thing.
Instead, she brought gifts—a bottle of fine wine for the parents and a pretty doll for the child.
Accompanying the queen was her own daughter, the two-year-old princess Jonquil, who was named after the lovely rush daffodils that bloomed in the garden.
Princess Jonquil’s father had perished not long earlier in a tragic self-bifurcation incident—
“In a what?”
“Someone guessed his name, and he got so mad that he tore himself in two. It happens.”
Sam shook his head decisively. “No, it doesn’t.”
“Well, it happens in Skalla.”
“Skalla is a very strange place.”