The Fire Opal (21 page)

“If you won’t get the beeswax for me, I will ask Uria herself for it,” I said.

His face dropped.

“I will go directly to her and speak to her. If every small request I have”—I paused for effect—
“as a wife
is going to be refused, I imagine that I might often have to go to Uria.”

The words worked some kind of magic on him. “I will get you the beeswax,” he said plainly.

“And I would like to take the time I need to treat each little girl.”

“All right, but I warn you, you must never have a private conversation with Uria.”

I did not pursue this. It intrigued me that he felt no
threat at all from the ash girls. He seemed to have no idea of their history.

“I will be back to help you,” I said to the girls as Tom led me out. “And they shouldn’t be chained,” I told him.

“They will stay chained,” he answered. “And if anything goes wrong, you will be working the pistons and wheels with them.”

As we ascended the stairs, he grabbed my arm, then pushed me back against the wall, coming close and staring down at me. I wriggled away from him, then turned my back on him, but I felt his eyes on me and they seemed to heat the exposed skin at the back of my neck. He came close.

“If you cause any problems, you know what will happen to your mother’s and sister’s ghosts.”

Shaking, I said, “I ask you, Tom Cavan, with all this hatred you feel for me, why do you want to marry me?”

“I don’t feel hatred for you, Maeve. This is how I love.”

His voice dropped a couple of decibels, and he said, “It’s about upsetting you, Maeve.” He stroked my waist and ran his hand up my back, moving my hair away from my neck. “And about frustrating you so that I can see the fireworks in your face. That warms me like nothing else ever has.”

CHAPTER 18

I
was forced to spend most of the day under Mrs. Cavan’s oppressive, watchful eye. She knitted, and insisted I do the same. The ice-cold needles never seemed to warm from the friction of my hands.

I asked several times if I might take off the ochre dress and lie down. She said I could lie down but that I’d have to keep the dress on.

In the late afternoon, I was lying on my side on the bed, biding my time with the disorienting effects of the dress, when one of Uria’s vulture “ladies” appeared at the door with a jar of beeswax and conferred quietly with Mrs. Cavan.

“Go with her,” Mrs. Cavan instructed me.

The vulture woman led me through the frosty labyrinthine corridors of the barge, and unlocked the
heavy door to the basement. She handed me the beeswax and let me through, but did not follow, closing the door behind me with a boom.

I was halfway down the stairs when the little girl who had come out earlier appeared again, the heavy chain causing her to limp and lurch slightly. I entered the cold deeply blue basement, and the chained creatures crowded around me and told me their names. The girl who had first come out was Breeze. Her cousins, all frail-looking in their ashy clothes and all with dull shadows beneath their large, brimming eyes, were called Trillip, Trala, Floreen and Faze.

“You are sent by the Swan Women,” Breeze said.

“Yes,” I replied, “and I am looking for something under their instruction. The tundra girls upstairs told me that you might be able to tell me how to find the large Fire Opal that belongs to Danu.”

There was a grave collective silence, which filled me with unease.

“What is the significance of the Fire Opal?” I asked.

Breeze went very thoughtful, then shook her head. “We don’t know. Our mothers knew, we believe. It was what they were trying to get when they were caught.”

“It’s a very dangerous task,” the girl named Trillip said in a soft, barely audible voice.

“We have heard that it is very beautiful,” Breeze said dreamily. “Red and orange, like true fire.”

“And flecked with tiny spots of bright green,” Trillip said with a quiver of excitement.

Breeze took a pair of long iron tongs and reached into
the back of the glowing forge. From the crumbs of blue ember and ash, she extricated what looked like a blue glowing coal.

“We think the Fire Opal must look a little like this, only much larger and the color of true fire. Our mothers gave us each a small Fire Opal similar in nature to Danu’s, but these have been fed only false fire, so they are bluish now.”

She set it carefully on the flat iron of the range and told me to wait. Wisps of slow voluptuous blue-green smoke rose from it.

“You must wonder how we’ve survived with our spirits intact all these centuries, trapped in this room.” Breeze touched the opal, testing to see if it was cool, and when she felt it was, she extended it to me. “We each keep one in our pocket at night and hold it and breathe on it. Try it.”

As I breathed on the opal, Breeze touched my arm, and the air and light around us stirred with particles, green and gold and flashing. Suddenly I no longer found myself in the cold, steamy blue basement filled with arcane wheels and defunct mechanisms but in a dense, atmospheric forest echoing with birdsong. Breeze was there at my side, but the other girls were nowhere to be seen.

The trees were so large and high that they created a green canopy over us, so it was as if we were inside and outside at once, the air fragrant with leaves and flowers.

“These are the oak trees that once composed the sacred groves and primeval forests of Ireland. But because
we have only false fire, we experience it all as if we are seeing it through darkened glass.”

There was a cast to everything, a brightness missing, but still, I could understand how visits to this rich, strange place kept these girls from total despair.

On the trunks and branches of the oak trees, mistletoe grew in thick swags, emitting sharp aromatic evergreen fragrances, the luminous berries hanging in damp clumps like pearls.

Breeze glanced significantly at the trunk of one of the oak trees. I jumped slightly when I saw a male figure emerging from the bark. The more he came forward from the tree, the more solid and separate from it his visage became, until he stood almost completely separate, the skin of his strong arms and chest a velvety green, his hair a paler, more golden green. He peered at me and gave me a smile, partly curious, partly mischievous. Then he retreated suddenly, merging back into the tree until he was no longer visible.

“We are all descended from such creatures. The world was once filled with animation, Maeve. The earth, air, water and fire of Ireland were once intensely fertile realms.”

I followed Breeze through a maze rampant with wildflowers and ivy, and upon turning a corner became aware of a ghostlike image forming itself a few feet before us. I stopped in my tracks and watched the subtle impression of a female figure defining itself. The body never fully took form, but the face resolved itself, and she studied
me with as much curiosity as the green man of the tree had.

“The air and the wind have elementals as well,” Breeze explained.

The transparent young woman looked more and more palpable before shivering there and dissolving, leaving a trace of smoke. As Breeze and I continued on our way, I passed through the air in which the elemental had just stood, and breathed a warm fragrance like incense from an exotic wood.

“We should go back,” she said, and as she extended the opal away from her body, the forest around us disappeared.

“The large Fire Opal belongs to Danu and is the last of its kind,” she explained as we found ourselves again in the ice-cold blue dungeon. “It contains the potential of an entire primeval forest, with all the original laws of nature in place.”

“Do you know where it is?”

The girls exchanged uneasy looks. “Yes. It is in Uria’s lair. Yours is the same quest that our mothers were on and were destroyed for undertaking. The most dangerous thing that you can do is venture into Uria’s lair. You see, she cannot bear to be seen in her true shame.”

“Her shame?”

“Uria’s true body lies in there, cocooned and preserved in ice and wax and amber. She still bears the burns she suffered in battle with Danu seven centuries ago. To preserve her life, she never leaves that cocoon, though she has developed an emanation, as you know. It travels
out from the lair connected to her cocooned body by a fleshy cord. The emanation is filled with air like a balloon, and is only held down by traveling in an iron dress on a metal platform with wheels.”

The memory of the clanking, squeaking noise sent a shiver through me. I stared into the blue light of the forge.

Two of the little girls opened the jar of beeswax and, dipping their fingers into it, began rubbing it on their tiny hands.

They looked up at me with large eyes, and I could not help marveling at the fact that they were each ancient beings wearing auras of wisdom, yet they were orphans, huddling together, yearning and blighted.

Noticing the way I was observing them, Breeze said, “We’ve wondered what it is in the nature of the blue air in this barge that keeps us stuck. It is awful to live on this way, all of us in the thrall of our grief and longing for our mothers, but perhaps the one good thing is that we remember so far into the past.”

“They keep you so isolated down here,” I said.

A very little one, named Trala, with a pointed, upturned nose, spoke.

“Uria and her henchwomen have gradually made themselves more and more distant from this engine works and this forge. The light down here is brighter, and blinding to them. It all stems from Uria’s fear of fire.”

Now they all took turns chiming in. “You see,” said Floreen, who had very dark eyes, “because true fire was
once down here, she is afraid that it might ignite again, that there might be an ash somewhere, an ember very gray but still volatile.”

“That is how obsessed she is!” exclaimed Trala.

“The women leave the ghost matter in the vats, and we are to gather it and are supposed to channel it into the engine to make the pistons run,” explained Faze, whose face was covered with streaks of blue ash.

“But they do not know that for centuries we have not done that. And the barge has now been stationary here for years, at anchor in the same place,” Breeze said. “We do not need the ghost matter to keep the ship working.”

“That’s right,” Trillip piped up, looking at me with earnest eyes. “We burn the inordinate amount of garbage that Uria and her ladies create, and that is enough to power this barge.”

“And even to keep the temperatures regulated in the various chambers,” Floreen said. “But none of the vulture women even thinks of such things. They leave the mysteries of the barge to us and have forgotten everything about how it works.”

“We have saved the souls of every Spaniard,” Breeze told me proudly. “Tom Cavan thinks they are being used for fuel, but he is wrong. Every ghost lives on, and we are just trying to find a way to release them.”

“We think there is a very high window,” Floreen said, pointing up into a dim corner of the room. “There is far too much ice over it, and it is too distant for us to reach in our chains.”

“I will help you,” I said.

I stacked several wheels and dilapidated pieces of metal in the designated corner and stood on them, finding myself within easy reach of the window. “Give me something to use to chip away at the ice,” I instructed.

Trillip and Trala moved through the area of the room littered with metal pipes, bars and rusted wheels. Trala found a kind of iron hammer and chisel and handed them to me. I began to hit the ice, but made loud noises each time I did, so I stopped, frightened that the sound would travel into the upper floors of the barge and cause suspicion.

I squinted and strained my eyes, peering through the thick ice.

“Yes, the sky is there,” I said. “This window is just above water level. If we could somehow melt this ice …”

I stared at it, wishing I could hit it hard and crack it. Then, in my mind’s eye, I remembered Fingal angling the broken piece of mirror onto the dry beach grass, starting a tiny fire.

I reached into the depths of my pocket and withdrew the broken piece of mirror.

“Can one of you find a small bit of something dry like wood or paper?” I asked.

Trala looked among the ashes and broken pipes, found a piece of brittle wood about a foot long, and handed it up to me.

“Can someone hold a lit candle up as high as possible over here?” I asked.

Breeze brought the candle, holding it high, the blue flame close enough to me for the purpose I had in mind.
With my left hand, I held one end of the piece of dry wood a few inches from the flame, while with my right hand I angled the mirror so it reflected the light. In certain positions, the light flashed brilliantly in the mirror. My heart raced when bands of color, a range of all blues into purple, appeared.

Focusing on the purple light, I angled the mirror just right, moving it minutely, until I perceived a very slender thread of red light. I sustained the angle of the mirror and the red light swelled, refracting more and more brightly, until the brittle wood ignited suddenly with true red-orange fire. The ash girls gasped.

I put the mirror away and held the piece of wood to the ice like a torch.