The Fire Opal

by Regina McBride

  Ishleen ran back into the cave and came out with the soda loaf. She stood on the rock shelf and waved it, offering it to them. The small boat came in close, and one of the Spaniards accepted it, but he did not seem worn with hunger the way Francisco had been, and their boat looked much less battered, regal even as it waited there on the clear horizon, sailors watching from deck. Francisco

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  pointed to the ship's carved figurehead of a young woman leaning seaward, her dark hair the same length as mine. Straining forward from the stern, her forearms extended and palms facing up, her posture and her entire bearing suggested that she was on a kind of noble quest.

  "La Hermana de la Luna. 'The Sister of the Moon," he said.

  "She looks like Maeve," Ishleen said.

  Francisco looked at it again and then at me, and nodded in acknowledgment.

  "Vamos," the Spaniard said to Francisco.

  I panicked, thinking of Mam inside and how I was sure Francisco could bring her back to life.

  "No! Don't go!" I cried out.

  Francisco locked eyes with me, and we stood facing each other waist-deep in the bay, steadying ourselves against the gentle surges of the waves.

  "¡Vamos!" he said. "Come."

  I looked at Ishleen. "Let's bring Mam and go with him."

  "No, Maeve!" Ishleen said. "We can't leave Da!"

  I knew she was right. I looked at Francisco with pained reluctance, and shook my head.

  He came in close, pressed his mouth to my ear and whispered, "Gracias."

  A shiver ran the length of me.

  I closed my eyes and felt his lips on my temple. He let go and stepped back from me, leaving me with racing pulses.

  Francisco looked at his fellow sailor and said something

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  fast in Spanish. The sailor looked at me and said, "He says he comes back for you one day soon."

  "Promise," I said.

  "Promise," Francisco repeated.

  He was about to get into the little boat when something occurred to him. He unbuttoned his purple jacket and handed it to me, nodding that I should take it. I thought of the ghost Spaniards wearing their wet jackets on the stone. It seemed an ill omen, but he urged me.

  He came close again, nodding very definitively. "Por favor, Maeve. You please keep me vivo."

  I pressed the coat close to my chest as he climbed into the boat.

  I looked to the other sailor. "Vivo?" I asked.

  "It means ... alive," the sailor answered.

  I held the jacket to my chest and watched as the little boat met the big ship. Several men helped Francisco on board and greeted him with embraces. A distinctive-looking man among them, tall and very thin, with wild black hair, looked out at Ishleen and me wistfully and waved.

  I remained in the water watching until La Hermana de la Luna disappeared on the southern horizon.

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  ***

  CHAPTER 13

  ***

  With Francisco gone, Ishleen and I led Mam slowly back to Ard Macha, and were overjoyed to find Da returned from Dungarven.

  Old Peig was there with him. She told us that when she'd heard that he'd come home and found an empty house, she'd worried and come to look after him. They were both greatly relieved to see us and shocked by the tale I had to tell.

  Da was despondent and tired. He sat that night before the fire, and Old Peig, who said she'd stay on with us for a while, pampered him as best as she could, but he refused to talk about his days in English captivity. And when we asked about Mr. Cavan, he shook his head. He told us that Tom Cavan was responsible for getting him

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  freed, but the shameful thing was that he had done nothing to help his own father.

  Old Peig told us that the day after Tom Cavan had seen to it that Da was sent home, he'd disappeared again from Ard Macha.

  The next morning, soft weather returned, skies gray and lightly damp with rain. I insisted that Da let Ishleen and me come out to fish with him.

  One hour felt like five hours, rocking in the boat on the sea. The misty weather was a kind of limbo in which we remained suspended, and sitting for so long on the cold water, the gloom had a way of getting into the soul.

  I daydreamed about the storm's violence, and the way it had ended in brilliant calm. My eyes were always on the horizon to the south, where La Hermana de la Luna had disappeared.

  That afternoon, I restlessly wandered as far as the edge of Dungarven, looking for any news at all about the Spanish ships, but no one knew a thing, only vague reports about armada wrecks to the south. I told myself that the ship Francisco was on had been undamaged, that the men had seemed healthy, and these factors increased the possibility that they would survive.

  The news I did come by was not what I'd been hoping to hear. Emmet Leahy, my brothers and two other men were fugitives, running and hiding from the English for having set fire to one of their camps.

  I went home and reluctantly told this to Da.

  ***

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  I sat with Mam that evening, whispering to her, rubbing her hands between both of mine to warm them. And try as I did to search her face for the reassuring spark of life that had appeared when Francisco had spoken to her, I could not find it. She looked like a drowned woman.

  "Señiora," I whispered to her softly, the way Francisco had. I struggled to remember other Spanish words but could only remember the names of the ships. "Nuestra Señiora de la Soledad," I added, and then remembered what it meant.

  I watched for even a faint rush of blood to her cheek, a glimmer to return to her eyes.

  "Please, Mam," I whispered. "Please." But the skin of her brow, her eyelids and her mouth all looked heavier and cooler than I had ever seen them.

  I wrapped Mam in Francisco's jacket, hoping she might sense him through it. I warmed the cold metal buttons against my palm, traced the intricacies of the silver braiding with my fingertips and memorized the thick seams and their contours. Mam's arms got lost in the long sleeves.

  In a delirium, I breathed traces of his sweat from the jacket, and the salt of the sea, believing that some of his soul was there in the fabric, his skin, his hair, his respiration and his heart; believing that if I concentrated hard enough, I might conjure him.

  He had, in my mind and imagination, fused himself with my quest to bring Mam back, and with the vision of myself in the metallic dress storming the frozen, windy room.

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  "Oh, Mam," I whispered, closing my eyes and remembering Francisco's heart beating against my neck. I thought I heard a change then in Mam's breathing, dry but active like the brush of wings, but as I pulled slightly back and looked at her, I realized it was my own breathing I'd heard.

  Feeding Mam at the meal later, I was so far away in my thoughts of Francisco that I did not hear the words Da and Ishleen addressed to me until Da said, "It's hard enough that your mother cannot answer when we speak to her."

  His words shocked me. I tried to stay focused, to keep myself present with Da and Ishleen and Old Peig. But all the things I did that were unrelated to Mam or the memory of Francisco, I did with only half my heart.

  The next day, a letter arrived from Donal and Fingal.

  Dear Da, Maeve and Ishleen,

  I felt a pulse of anger that they had not included Mam.

  There are good people in Ireland, always willing to give a bed and food to a rebel. And if there are no cottages on a hill or in a valley, there are plenty of abandoned byres and bog holes. The

  English are hated, and everyone we meet in every

  village and on every boreen has a new story of their atrocities. Suffice to say that we have a plan and our rebellion is well organized, though we

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  cannot tell you more in a letter. We trust it will

  reach you, but beware of treachery. Unfortunately, as we know from our own Tom Cavan, its

  potential exists in every small hamlet.

  Your most fai
thful sons and brothers,

  Donal and Fingal

  The next morning when Da, Ishleen and I set out to fish, the waves were uneasy, cresting and whitening as they moved toward land. I was facing the south waters in the direction La Hermana de la Luna had gone when I saw a slim dark boat appear out of a curtain of mist. Standing straight up within was a woman in a gray-green dress with long rivulets of wet hair clinging to her shoulders and arms, looking like someone who'd just come up from the sea. I recognized her as the woman who had lured Ishleen when Mrs. Cavan had taken me to Dungarven. My body went stiff and cold. I watched her every tiny movement.

  She focused on Ishleen, who, like my father, was looking in the direction of Woman's Crag.

  As if propelled by some unnatural force, the woman's craft brought her swiftly and silently closer, then stopped, treading the waves about three yards away. Long leaves of dark green kelp were interlaced with strands of her hair, and some lay on her bodice in twists and curls like ribbons. She bent slightly forward from the waist, her expression almost fierce, and showed me something metallic in her hand. I did not breathe. I could see that little

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  snails and pearls clung to the skin of her fingers and palm, but whatever she held reflected light so strongly that I could not discern what it was.

  She stood up straight again and shivered on the air, so I thought she'd dissolve. Instead, she divided into three women, each a little different from the other, but all in wet dresses of gray-green. They came closer on their boat, which now looked more like half a giant unhinged seashell. I saw that the hems of their dresses were pulpy and a little transparent, and within the folds of that sleek, shiny fabric, I saw jellyfish, internal lights igniting on and off, causing eerie pale blue illuminations on the women's dresses. The vision became more and more uncanny: the water sloshed around the women's ankles; jellyfish writhed, convulsing gracefully, blossoming open and closed; and starfish walked the sides of the boat. What disturbed me more than anything else was the way two of the women were staring at Ishleen. The eyes of the one at the center, who was the original woman, kept flashing from me to Ishleen and back again to me.

  Gradually the three women resolved back into one, and the boat shrank into a long dark craft not unlike my father's fishing boat. With a kind of sneer, the woman again held the metallic object up significantly, then tossed it into the water. She dissolved then, leaving the smell and charge of lightning on the air.

  My father and Ishleen, who had not once turned around while this vision had taken place, remained oblivious, and I did not want to tell them about it.

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  That night after pulling in our catch, we were sorting through the fish when I found Francisco's compass among them. Its window was shattered, but the name Las Santas Islas and the triple spiral were still clearly visible.

  Old Peig left when we arrived home, having been sent for by the family of a woman in childbirth. Though my mind was wildly distracted, I managed to prepare dinner but did not eat with Da and Mam and Ishleen. I lay down on my pallet facing the wall, stunned by the memory of the woman holding the shattered compass.

  I took Francisco's jacket out from under the blanket and found that the silver cording on the shoulders issued light, mist rising from the fabric. And I feared, though I could hardly bear to consider it too closely, that Francisco might be dead. It seemed that the woman, or trinity of women, had been suggesting this to me.

  I held the compass, but its solidity tormented me. Its hard, cold surfaces warmed under my breath and intensified the feeling of Francisco's absence. I placed the shattered compass in the front chest pocket of the jacket and pressed it to me. Each time my heart beat, I felt the compass needle quiver there, comforting me as if it were Francisco's heart beating against my own. From this, I tried to convince myself that I would see him again.

  In my dream that night, the sea was crashing. Over the noise of the swells, I heard Francisco calling me. "Maeve! Maeve! Help me!"

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  I sat up, breathing fiercely. As quickly as I could, I put on my boots and went out, making my way in the moonlight to the overhang of the cave.

  The water sloshed quietly in the dark. I went to the cave and found a candle we had left there. I brought it out, lit it and dripped hot wax onto the stone where the Spanish ghosts had been sitting the other night. Then I stuck the candle in place on the stone, the flame stirring and pulsing. Next to the candle I laid the jacket very carefully, then climbed to the threshold of the cave, the place where I had been standing when I'd first seen the dead Spaniards in their jackets. I resolved to wait as long as it might take for the two dead shipmates. I placed my hope in them, thinking they might be able to tell me where Francisco was. But now I realized with disappointment that the air did not feel the way it had that night.

  The moon was only a smear behind the thick, smoky cloud cover, and the water had none of the clarity and brilliance from all the starlight. There was a vacancy now on the air, as if much of the vivacity from the time when Francisco had been here had departed with him.

  Every slosh of tide at the rocks left an echo under the overhang.

  I gazed back at the jacket. Even the issue of light from the silver cording was dull, and an awful sensation of emptiness swept over me.

  Still, I wouldn't leave.

  I remembered his promise to come back, and I was determined to wait for him.

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  ***

  Very early in the morning, just at the break of dawn, a fisherman passed in his boat and was startled by the sight of me: a wild thing on the rocks, my hair disheveled and blowing, grasping the coat of an armada Spaniard around my shoulders. The fisherman stood awkwardly in his craft and made the sign of the cross.

  Da and Ishleen appeared on the rocks an hour or so later, calling me home. I was sitting on the stone shelf curled up into myself, not even caring that the tide was high and wetting me to the bone.

  But with the sun up, there was little hope that Francisco might come. My heart had fallen so hard, I didn't want to move. I felt so helpless against what now felt like Mam's inevitable sinking away.

  Da got his boat and steered it around to where I was.

  "Come home now, Maeve," he said, and reached out to help me into the boat. When I looked into his eyes from under my wind-matted hair, I saw the same look he had given Mam when she'd heard the voice of the swan.

  As we ascended the hill at Ard Macha, Da stopped to talk to a local man who told him about all the wreckage from Spanish ships in a confluence of rocks a few hours south of our shore.

  After washing and dressing, and wearily sleeping away the afternoon, I heard Francisco's voice again calling me: "Maeve! Maeve! Help me!"

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  I prepared for another night's vigil among the rocks. It was as if I couldn't help myself.

  This time I did not remain in the rocks near the caves, but walked south along the shore in the direction the ship had gone. Some of the wreckage I saw was from Francisco's original ship. I knew, because I found a warped broken board with the blistered decomposing letters of the word Soledad on it. But, finding no signs of La Hermana de la Luna, I tripped my way back toward Ard Macha, the wick of my lamp now dark and quenched in oil.

  It was dawn when I saw Da and Ishleen appear in the boat, with despondent expressions. Shivering, I got in with them.

  Ishleen looked wistful.

  "I think Francisco is in trouble, Ishleen. I hear him calling me."

  Her eyes darkened, but she said nothing.

  Da pulled the boat up onto the sand, and I got out, but Ishleen stayed with him to go out fishing that day.

  In Da's search to find me, other residents had come out to lend a hand. When they saw that I was safe, most of them disbanded, but as I climbed the hill back to the cottage, Mrs. Molloy and Mrs. Callahan were standing there. They stared as I carried the burned-out lamp, my hems torn and soaked, my hair matted from the wind.

  "She's like her ow
n mother, as mad as the mist and snow," one of them said.

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  Tears streaked my face as I heard this, but I was not dissuaded.

  "Look at her, wearing the coat of a dead Spaniard," the other whispered.

  When I was inside the cottage, I laid Francisco's jacket on a chair near the fire, to dry from the mist and salt spray. My skin was hot and feverish, and my stomach felt queasy. I knelt before Mam, who was in her wheeled chair facing the fire, hanging her head. Her eyes were three quarters of the way closed, inward-looking. Her breathing was very faint. I laid my head in her lap and cried.

  That night before the meal, Da took me aside and told me that he had to leave early the next morning for Killybegs. The remaining men of the Ard Macha faction were going to meet to discuss more action against the English and to try to find a way to bring aid to the fugitives.

  "You can't keep traipsing off every night this way, Maeve," he said. "You've got to stay here and take care of Ishleen and your mam."

  Nervous at the danger he faced and the gravity of the situation, I promised him I'd not do it again. And even though I heard Francisco's voice, I didn't go out for three nights.

  But on the fourth night that Da was gone, I felt an intense expectation on the air, a certainty that Francisco was waiting for me. The moon was large and hung in a

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  clear sky. I told myself I'd go down to the overhang while Ishleen was asleep but come back well before dawn, and she'd never know that I'd gone. As I was planning this out in my thoughts, she awoke, having somehow sensed what was on my mind.

  "There is a storm ring around the moon," she said softly as we stood by the open door, looking out. She peered into my distracted face. "There will be wind and very high tides in the morning."