The Fire Opal (18 page)

“I’m Gudrun,” the older girl said quietly as she approached me. “This is Phee. She does not speak, but she
sees.”

I looked at her questioningly.

“Intuition and premonitions,” Gudrun explained.

In little Phee’s haunted eyes, I saw a disarming combination of childlike wistfulness and dark human wisdom. Her clothes were more worn and faded than the clothes of the others, sewn and patched in places, and tattered.

I looked around the room. “This is my mother,” Gudrun said, nodding toward the ice sculpture she had just been looking at.

Quite distinct from the bodies of the Spaniards in the ice, these were very much the same as the sculptures I’d seen on deck, clear and delicately carved, as if made of glass, and containing pulsations of light.

“These contain the ghost souls of our mothers,” Gudrun said, gesturing at the many ice figures around the chapel.

Other girls in the colorful hats stood before other frozen womanly sculptures, looking at them yearningly, or bent before them lost in thought.

Phee touched my shoulder and pointed to two ice figures: one tall and a much shorter one, sequestered in an icy shadow in a far corner of the room.

My heart began to race. At my approach, I heard
voices, soft and vibrating, but so diffused that they were impossible to understand.

“Do you hear? Listen closely. These are the voices of your mother and sister in the ice,” Gudrun said.

The renderings of Mam and little Ishleen, wearing placid, resigned expressions, were each clearly recognizable, and their blurred voices caused my heart to swell painfully.

“I carved the ice for them,” said a familiar-looking little girl about twelve years old. I realized she had been one of the girls chiseling decorations on the ice barge when I’d arrived. She was introduced as Wheeta.

“You can hear their voices, but sadly, you cannot quite understand what they are saying. And you cannot embrace them,” Wheeta warned, “because the heat of your body will cause the sculpture to melt a little, and they’d lose their contours. There must remain a gulf of cold between you.”

“Mam! Ishleen!” I kept uttering, looking up at them on the ice slab where their sculptures were set, clouds of condensation from my breath on the air between us.

“We are the tundra girls,” Gudrun said. “Uria long ago extracted the ghost souls from our mothers’ bodies but keeps them here so that we will continue to work for her.

“Phee recognized you immediately, although I have to admit, I too felt that you were not one of those others. Not like Mrs. Cavan and her son. Especially after Mrs. Cavan gave me the dress you made. It still retains a very faint oil from your soul on it.”

“Oil?” I asked.

“Anything we create with all of our selves is lubricated a little bit by our souls.”

I realized that my teeth were chattering, and I was shaking so hard that I couldn’t stand still. “It
is
freezing in here,” Gudrun said. “Yet some girls sleep curled at the feet of their frozen mothers. Some girls die from the cold. There have been casualties among us.”

“Why do they do this to you?” I asked, my heart heavy.

“There are some things we understand about our predicament, and some things we don’t. We are from a lost tribe of Danu’s children, displaced nomads who used to move slowly across the realms of cold. We were a shape-shifting society, as all of Danu’s children were, but we were specifically half blue narwhal, the horned whale. Our fathers and brothers swam the shores parallel to the paths our women and daughters traveled on land. It was us, the females, who carved caves out of the ice with spades and torches of fire. Often we moved through sunless lands where it was always night and bitter cold. We are creative by nature, as you can see. Many women and girls carved embellishments in the ice, and even carved towers and gargoyles. Impermanence was our way of life. We’d leave our fanciful architecture behind us, and of course, the elements most likely erased much of it, though we have heard that there are places where these carvings are still pristine, and we dream of one day seeing them again and remembering ourselves as we were long ago in a happier time.”

Gudrun’s words prompted me to gaze up at Mam and Ishleen, and the illumination behind the ice brightened and glowed. I, too, longed for those happier times.

Gudrun resumed. “At night, our fathers and brothers came ashore with their catch and transformed into their human skins. It was at dusk, while waiting for our fathers and brothers after lighting our torches, that we used to stand on the cliffs and sing ‘The Canticle of Fire.’ That is how Uria first came across us, having heard us from her floating iceberg almost seven centuries ago, not long after her terrible battle with Danu. One of her vulture women in human form came to us and commissioned our mothers, who were true geniuses, to carve Uria’s iceberg into a floating palace. Five of our mothers were priestesses with druid knowledge. Not only did Uria want all the walls embellished, fit for a sovereign, but she wanted our mothers to use their understanding of the acoustics of the ice and enable her to hear everything that was said in every room on this ‘palace.’

“There were two rules Uria had: no true fire could be brought aboard the barge—only the blue fire could provide light and the illusion of warmth; and her own corridor, the one in which she lived, was off-limits.

“In the evenings, after working to carve her palace all day, we would return to the shore to meet our fathers and brothers. We would light our torches outside our own ice caves and sing ‘The Canticle of Fire.’ Uria’s emanation would stand rapt on the deck listening. That song has power for Uria, the song that honors the element of fire, which is forbidden here. Uria’s emanation used to watch
the distant burning fires as if she coveted them. She still makes us sing ‘The Canticle of Fire’ once a week at least, these past seven centuries. Ice seems to be her element and her safety, yet in some way, she romanticizes fire.”

“Imagine!” Wheeta uttered wistfully, staring off into the blue candlelight along one wall of the chapel. “Isn’t it curious?”

“Every morning when our fathers and brothers transformed and took to the sea,” Gudrun went on, “we traveled by small boat back to this barge to work. It was unusual that our mothers had accepted this commission, but we realized that they had some kind of plan. They understood something about Uria that they had not told us. We did not know that they recognized the evil here. Against Uria’s orders, they left deaf spots, places they could speak to one another where Uria would not be able to hear them. We did not know that one of their plans all along was to build a system into this barge in which true fire would infiltrate and melt the ice that preserved the goddess. Their plans, we would later realize, were dangerous, and that is why we were not privy to them.

“But one day while all of us girls were carving on the outside, a group of Uria’s vulture women asked us very politely to come inside. It was to this very room we came. We were each presented with a block of ice and encouraged to carve statues of our mothers, a task we each engaged in happily. At the end of the day, our mothers did not come, but the vulture women led us to a room where we were fed. The door was locked behind us, and we
spent a miserable uncertain night, unable to rest, waiting anxiously for our mothers to appear. The next day we were led back to this room. All of our mothers’ statues contained tremulous light, and we heard a riot of indiscernible words, but all of us recognized the pitch and treble of our mothers’ voices. Their ghost souls had been extricated from their bodies and trapped in the ice. The five priestesses among our mothers, it turned out, had trespassed into Uria’s quarters, and had also brought true fire onto the ship, trying to create a forge oven in the basement. The vulture women managed to get rid of the true fire, and Uria enslaved us.”

Gudrun came close to me, the blue flames glowing in her large eyes. She spoke quietly then and with great sadness. “We do not grow here. We are girls eternally, longing for our mothers. And because it is our nature to be deeply attached to them, we remain here, tending to their vacant bodies and devoting ourselves to their ghost souls preserved in the ice. We learned later that a vast net had been spread and our fathers and brothers, who had approached the barge to find us, had been trapped, and most of them probably died. If any of them survived, it is likely that they intermarried with non-shape-shifting narwhals, and over the centuries forgot their shape-shifting ancestry, as you have likely forgotten your own.

“For all these centuries, that basement where the tundra priestesses were trying to build the forge for true fire has been closed off from the rest of the barge. The five daughters of the five priestess mothers who designed the system live isolated in there because they were
apprentices to their mothers. We call them the ash girls. They are forced to labor below, to run the engines and with their wheels and pipes to keep the air cold enough to sustain ice throughout the palace except for certain rooms and corridors. They have been down there, separated from us for all these centuries. We worry over them. The ash girls have unique knowledge, and there are things in that basement that our mothers left behind: mysterious wheels and implements.

“By our wits, we have learned some secrets of the barge. We manage our secret lives here well, but even better since Tom Cavan and his mother have come, because Uria is always listening to them. We have been for a long time insignificant to Uria. Even still, she would sometimes listen to us out of curiosity. But long ago, we developed a language in gestures.”

“The goddess doesn’t trust Tom Cavan, though she has made him her agent,” Wheeta said. “He is doing some kind of work for her, searching for something onshore. Tom must be doing something to betray her, because he has discovered some of those deaf spots on the ship. He speaks to his mother and sometimes to English soldiers in those areas.”

“He pretends to serve Uria, but it seems he has plans of his own,” Gudrun agreed.

Tom’s presence on the ship made me feel fearful for Mam and Ishleen. I gazed at them. “Are they safe in here?” I asked Gudrun.

“Yes,” she said. She then looked sadly and meaningfully at Phee, who hung her head slightly and stared at
the icy floor. Whatever it was seemed a private matter, so I didn’t ask. But there was another question that was burning in my mind.

“May I ask you, you said that each girl tends to her mother’s vacant body?”

Gudrun and Phee exchanged a glance.

“Yes,” Gudrun said softly. “They are in the inner sanctum.”

They led me through a narrow passage and pushed on a door that swung slowly open with a long despairing groan. I followed them into a very long icy dormitory room, dim and blue, lit by blue flames in sconces on the walls. A multitude of slim white beds were lined up in rows. My heart contracted. On each bed lay the body of a woman, every one in a slightly different posture, some with hair spread out on pillows in frozen clumps, some bodies draped in fabric starched with ice. An occasional bare foot or hand peeked out from under icy drapery, blue with cold.

“Each girl tends to her own mother’s body,” Gudrun whispered.

I watched a very small girl brush away gathering snow from her mother’s hair, then look up at me, wearing an expression of haunted composure.

The walls were spangled in crystals of frost, and snow fell and floated in the dim blueness of the lamps. Deeper inside, a child pushed a shovel between a row of beds, and another followed, dusting salt in the pathways to prevent girls from slipping on the ice.

A small girl held a bit of mirror up to her mother’s
mouth, and let out a little relieved sigh to see it misting over.

“When it gets very cold, the heartbeat slows down so much it can be difficult to detect, and girls get panicky, so they use the little mirror to check for breathing. This room is subject to blizzards, and the gusts blow so hard sometimes that they snuff out the lamps, so there are always girls in attendance.”

“Can’t they be moved to a warmer place?”

“But you see,” Wheeta said, “we want them in this very cold room. It preserves them in the state they are in. It is a terrible balancing act we must sustain. The cold will preserve them, but it cannot be so cold that they will lose hold of life.”

“Look over here,” Gudrun whispered, beckoning near a wall. “This entire dormitory room is part of a wrecked vessel stuck in the ice. We have very carefully created seams in the ice that attaches it to the barge, so that when the right moment arrives one day, it will require only minimum strategic cutting from the wall in order to detach this dormitory from the ship.

“Our plan had once been to release the ghost souls and try to return them to the mothers’ bodies. Come here,” she whispered, and beckoned me after.

At the end of the dormitory, she drew aside a velvet curtain, stiff with frost, revealing what looked like a large dresser of opaque ice with three semitransparent drawers. Each one contained the body of a woman, each in a posture both stiff and graceful. All three looked as if they’d been caught midswim, frozen.

“Phee, a girl named Lloyda and a girl named Rue had volunteered to release their mothers’ ghost souls to see if they could be coaxed back into their bodies. When the souls were released from the ice,” Gudrun whispered, watching Phee kneel down before the lowest drawer and peer in, “they dissipated on the air, and the bodies convulsed almost as if they were dancing, and died suddenly.”

Phee touched the side of her face to the ice drawer that contained her mother.

“All these centuries later it is still unbearable for her.”

I knelt down and looked in at Phee’s dark-haired mother, lying on her back, twisted slightly at the waist, neck arched and arms lifted as if she were floating. Her palms faced up, and long strands of hair were petrified, caught forever in a whirl around her head. But the most striking thing about her was the expression on her face, eyes wide open and staring up, almost euphoric.

As Phee touched the ice with her fingertips, I asked Gudrun, “What do you think could have happened to her mother’s ghost soul?”