The Fire Opal (29 page)

CHAPTER 24

T
he 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
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
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
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
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
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.

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.”
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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Deep gratitude goes to my husband, Neil, and daughter, Miranda, for invaluable support, love and a lot of laughter! Much thanks to Claudia Gabel for inviting me to write for young adults; to Françoise Bui for important feedback and for taking this book through the many editorial stages to publication; and to the sharp eyes of copy editors Ashley Mason and Bara MacNeill. Gratitude to my agent, Joy Harris, and also to Adam Reed and Jodi Keller. Love and thanks to Daniel Chausow and Nina Chausow for help with translations into Spanish, and to Diane Garrett of Diane’s Books, for generosity, friendship and her unshakable devotion to the Queendom of the Imagination.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR