The Fire Opal

by Regina McBride

  Most of the ancient ghost souls from the statues on the outer deck fled upward into the sky like startled herons, but some floated just above the dripping statues, then dispersed in the firelight.

  A school of misbegotten mermaids, panicking at the chaos and disaster, swam in undulating trails into the distant water and disappeared beyond the mist. That's when, to my relief, I saw the tundra and ash girls standing in little boats on the water, drifting to a safe distance from the barge.

  As their boats rose and dropped on the massive waves, the girls began singing "The Canticle of Fire," their arms open as they gazed upward. I braved the flames and ran to the entrance of the chapel of the frozen mothers. Looking in, the floors covered in melting ice, I saw clouds of light releasing from collapsing ice figures, wriggling and finding their way into the ethereal clothes. As the ghost souls streamed steadily out wearing their pale, glimmering ethereal shifts, they floated down upon their daughters, embracing them in particles and light.

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  Seeing this, I was flooded with hope. "Mam! Ishleen!" I said quietly to the boxes. "I'm going to see you both soon."

  I looked toward Rosscoyne bog. Vultures were circling and screeching wildly, many of them departing in terror. I stood and bent into the wind, and it lifted me and carried me a few feet above the water until I reached the shore. I climbed the hill quickly and saw Tom and Uria facing each other at either side of the bog. Uria still had hold of Mrs. Cavan, who cried out now and again in pain. Tom stood tensely in a defensive posture, filthy with peat and bog water, while embers flew wildly around Uria.

  "Get away from this bog, Tom Cavan!" Uria's demand boomed across the landscape.

  "I won't," he shouted back.

  "I have your mother here, and she will suffer if you do not go."

  "I'm not going," he said matter-of-factly. In a sudden fit of rage, Uria tossed Mrs. Cavan into the bog.

  Tom reacted very little, only to take on an even more defensive stance, never taking his eyes off Uria.

  Swans circled and screeched, slews of them coming in from the western sea along with herons and gulls. Falling feathers and floss met the fire around Uria, singeing to ash and floating away.

  To my shock, the wind caught my skirts and lifted me high on the air. The shawl began to burn, so I was encircled in an aura of fire. The wind carried me until I was floating directly above Uria and Tom. Both looked up, in

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  complete shock. Tom was too dumbfounded to move, while Uria grabbed for me several times. But the wind held me aloft just out of her reach. In her frustration, the skin of her face and arms began to blister and scorch.

  "The ancient weapon, the Answerer, is not here in this bog," I called down to them. "Danu's return to Ard Macha is imminent."

  "Maeve O'Tullagh!" Tom cried out. "You will suffer for this!" Seeing him so distracted and off his guard, Uria stepped across the bog, lifted Tom and hurled him into the peat where she'd thrown his mother. Sparks flew from her arm. Watching him sink, she fumed and her hair burst into a crown of fire.

  Soon Uria's entire body was engulfed in flames. She stood with her arms raised, becoming less and less substantial, until all that was left of her was her spinal column, a massive blackened relic lying on the earth.

  I was surprised by the pity I felt for Uria, blundering monster that she was, helpless against her own nature.

  I descended slowly from the air, and the flames on my shawl went out. The iron boxes I held sprang their lids, and as Mam and Ishleen issued forth, I covered them immediately in the shifts and veils. They embraced me, two spangled, animated ghosts.

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  ***

  CHAPTER 24

  ***

  The three of us, myself and the semitransparent figures of my mother and sister, waited awhile, watching the bog nervously lest Tom rise again.

  I waved at the tundra and ash girls with their ghost mothers in the bay below. Their small boats had surrounded the dormitory with their mothers' bodies in it, which was afloat like an iceberg. Industrious creatures that they were, a group of the girls were working busily with a series of ropes, securing the dormitory to a system of boats which were clearly meant to pull it after. I imagined that they were preparing to sail back to their old latitudes in search of what was left of their culture.

  During all the chaos, they had, it seemed, befriended Mr. Cavan, still in his awkward, monstrous form. He was

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  on the boat with Breeze and Gudrun and their mothers. He waved up at me sadly.

  I understood why he did not want to come back to Ard Macha.

  Yet it seemed extreme that he would choose to go so far away, as if there were nothing at all left of his life. In his expression, I saw a fateful resignation. He turned away and faced the horizon to the north.

  Old Peig was standing on the cliff watching the catastrophic fire on the water, and waved when she saw us coming.

  I led the two shimmering figures to their bodies inside. Diligent Peig had wrapped them in shawls and set them comfortably before the hearth.

  For a few prolonged moments, the ghost souls gazed in hesitant wonder at their inert forms and made quiet, pitying sounds. Ishleen was quicker than Mam to reenter her body. Her ghost soul sat on the body and embraced it, and as she disappeared into the flesh, the garment of ether fell and lay in a small heap in her lap. Ishleen blinked and twitched her fingers. Then, after taking a few seconds to focus her eyes, she smiled at us.

  "You go now, Nuala," Old Peig urged.

  "It's been so long." Mam's voice sounded on the air above us. "Where is Desmond? And where are my sons:

  "Still fighting the good cause, Nuala," Peig said. "But

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  word has come in that a big English fort has been destroyed and no rebels have been captured, so they are at large somewhere, being sheltered by good people."

  Mam sighed, then reached over and touched the shoulder of her vacant body, looking at it wistfully like some long-lost sister. She moved near and embraced it, her ghost figure dissolving and the shift and veil falling to the floor.

  Mam's hands moved first. Then her eyes opened. She sat forward slowly and uncertainly, and cried a little with relief.

  "Listen to me, Mam and Ishleen. And you listen, too, Peig, so you know," I said. "Since you two were separated from your bodies, a thread has been broken. You might sometimes feel an urge to separate again for a few hours. If you do, you must always put on the ethereal shift and veil. That will keep you safe until you return to your bodies."

  They listened to me thoughtfully and nodded gravely when I asked them if they understood.

  As Peig stoked the fire, she said she would guard the ethereal clothes with her life. I hung them on pegs right near the box bed. In low light, they were so subtle that they almost became invisible, but as flames rose in the hearth fire, they twinkled, and when I looked closely at them, I could see them quiver.

  "Maeve," Mam said, and reached for my hands, bringing them to her face and pressing her cheek against them. "Thank you, my daughter," she said, looking into

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  my eyes. "You never gave up on me or on your sister. It's always been you I've felt there."

  Old Peig gave Mam and Ishleen stew and tea, which they relished and sighed over. When they'd finished, Mam said, "My bones ache a bit. For now I just want to be near the fire."

  Ishleen curled up on Mam's lap, and Peig added another brick of turf so that the flames sparked up high and hot.

  When I looked closely at Ishleen in the firelight, I was amazed to see that she had small feathers at her hairline and, like the goddess, miniature feathers for eyelashes and eyebrows.

  I overheard Mam weeping quietly. "Oh, missus," she whispered to Old Peig. "How I wish my husband was here. How I've longed to reconcile with him!"

  My heart leapt. I heard Da say my mother's name, his voice low-pitched and soft. But it was only the wind moaning between the stones of the cottage wall.


  While Mam and Ishleen slept, I told Old Peig about Mr. Cavan. "It surprised me that he left Ard Macha so completely. The tundra girls will likely be traveling a very long time to the distant places they lived centuries ago. He doesn't even know where he's going, only that he's going very far."

  "The poor man," Old Peig said, and shook her ancient

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  head. "Tom probably cursed his father, and when a child casts a spell on his own parent, that spell is one that cannot be broken. Mr. Cavan must know that he is condemned to live the rest of his days in that unnatural form."

  I went back to the loft area where my brothers used to sleep and looked at their things.

  I took out The Book of Invasions and studied the battling figures in the etching on the first page. It made me sad to think that the female world and the male world in this house were so divided.

  How I ached to tell Da and my brothers everything I'd done, about the journey I'd made to the Holy Isles and back. I imagined them listening, acknowledging me with their engrossed silence, their attentive eyes and occasional nods. I imagined them asking questions, wanting to know the nature of the weather or the night sky in the Other World. Somehow, I thought, our worlds could not be so far away from each other as they felt. But I did not think that it would be possible to tell them. They would not believe me and would call me Mad Maeve, as they had in the past, and I could not have borne for them to do that after everything I'd been through. No, I thought, that would be unbearable.

  The thick, serious volume of The Book of Invasions made me feel lonely. I leafed through it, reading the names and dates of battles, the stark details of slaughter.

  A dried fuchsia blossom, as delicate as paper, fluttered

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  loose of the book and fell to the floor. Da had given me this flower many years before, and I had placed it between these pages and forgotten about it. I suddenly missed Da deeply. I wanted him to see Mam, to speak to her. I wanted to see them embrace, the awful rift ended between them.

  I was about to close the book when I found, marking another page, Fingal's drawings of the night sky from one June years before, when it had been very clear and he had been able to mark the movements of the stars the entire month. How carefully, how devotedly he had drawn and charted everything. I remembered him struggling for precision, looking at the sky with such intent, as if knowing somehow that it might help him understand our lives.

  And then, in another section, I found something written in Donal's compact scrawl. There are and always have been two realms existing simultaneously: the Everyday World and the subtler realm not everyone can perceive, known as the Other World. But each parallels and informs the other. Like the soul is to the body, the Other World is to the Everyday World.

  He had written it years ago, before he had begun to devote his entire self to the secret rebellion, when he'd still liked to imagine the Holy Isles and had insisted to Fingal that they were real. Even though he'd changed since then, Donal had the romantic nature of a poet. If anyone might listen, maybe it would be Donal.

  I took heart, and lay down exhausted in my bed.

  ***

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  I was following a trail of dead birds. They led me to Tom Cavan, who was bent over a heap of kelp on the beach. I approached. The Answerer, with its penetrating eye, lay there like another of Tom's victims, its jewel eye cracked and clouded. Tom turned to me with a cruel smile.

  I awakened gasping. Shaking, I got up and checked on Mam and Ishleen and Old Peig. The ethereal shifts glimmered calmly on their pegs. I tried to reassure myself. The Answerer, according to Danu, was still safely hidden in the buried room, and Uria was now conquered. But at that hour, as everyone slept, I heard a distinct unease in the wind and the sea, the surf turning anxiously upon itself. Some darkness still held Ard Macha in its thrall.

  I feared, in my twilight mind, that maybe Tom would find a way to survive, thriving on mud and mineral and rot, then emerge somehow from the bog. I went outside and took a deep breath, trying to put that thought to rest, reassuring myself that it was only a dream, and remembered what Danu had said about the nature of the Rosscoyne bog.

  I was about to go back in when I felt a stirring on the air, and thought of Francisco. He had eluded death by sea and death by English bullets. He had eluded Uria's henchwomen and Uria herself.

  I heard, very faintly, so that I was not sure if it was real or hallucination, strains of "The Canticle of Fire."

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  Looking south to the rocks along the headland, I saw light near the water's edge. I went down in the cold wind, clutching my shawl tight around me, and as I descended, I saw Danu's candelabra, the tide foaming up and splashing the rock it sat on. My heart went wild. I could not help but relate its presence here to Francisco, and remembered the vague figures of human males in my dream, swimming on the seafloor around it.

  I moved closer. The candelabra lit the water in its proximity, so I seemed to see things in the twisting tide. Kelp tended to look like fabric, and with an almost painful anticipation, I was certain that I was about to see a deluged Spanish jacket, its silver embellishment issuing steam. But the water shifted, and there was no jacket.

  I stayed watching the water, waiting for it to leave something in the damp around the rocks, but it kept touching them and retreating, leaving nothing behind. Lifting my eyes to the dark distances of the horizon, I wondered where Francisco was this very hour.

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