The Fire Opal (6 page)

He looked at me gravely. “You’re right, Maeve. There’s a wharf man’s job waiting for him in Ballyowen. It’s time he grew up.”

“No!” Mrs. Cavan protested.

“I’ll not hear another word out of you about it, Eileen. He’s going to Ballyowen in the morning.”

I felt dazed as I walked home.

Mam carefully put the swan’s wing into a splint, and we made a bed for it with rushes and soft blankets, and fed it oats. I lit a fire, and Mam and the swan settled near it, the swan resting its long neck over Mam’s shoulder. It spoke in a quiet murmur, and Mam spoke back as if she understood.

“This creature reassures me greatly, Maeve,” she said. “It is heavy and substantial, and its heart is big! You can feel it thudding.”

I sat near her and admired the swan, touching its feathers, feeling the silken soft down when it shifted its wings, its bright amber eyes thoughtful and intelligent.

I was restless, alternately excited by the prospect of Tom’s departure and haunted by the words of the two women.

When Da and my brothers came home, they were startled by the presence of the swan.

“This creature’s just here to ensure that Ishleen arrives to us safely,” Mam explained to them with a note of defiance in her voice. She’d not be dissuaded by their doubts. I longed to be as sure as she was.

I watched their eyes as they exchanged uneasy looks. Da settled before the hearth and stared mutely into the fire. I was afraid of this certainty he and my brothers seemed to feel about the unsoundness of Mam’s mind, afraid of the powerful way that certainty held the air. If I
breathed it enough, I wondered, would it persuade me, too? I did not want to face the spark of my own doubts.

Before dark, unable to bear it any longer, I escaped the oppressive air of the house and went out to the pagan stones. Mam was of an impulsive and fiery nature when she was angry. I knew that a time would come when she would regret throwing the comb into the field, so I searched for it in the overgrowth but could not locate it. Eventually I gave up and found myself drawn to the ruins. I wandered down there, around the tower to an archway with a broken wall, half crumbled away. There above, carved into the piece of lintel that remained, was a frieze of birds, mostly swans.

I wanted to get closer to it, so I carefully climbed what was left of a broken banister. Close up, the swans were carved, wings outstretched in permanent, graceful flight.

And then I heard something: a faint infusion of female voices, both there and not there. The harmonies produced were tremulous and high-pitched, and strangely familiar, though I could not recall where or when I had heard this chorus before.

I climbed down from the banister and stood absolutely still, listening very hard as the voices sounded and retreated, sometimes nothing more than an echo or a residue of sound, sometimes getting lost in the gusts and filling me with doubt that I had heard anything at all but the wind.

It was then that a slew of birds came flying in from Woman’s Crag, screeching and honking. They flew over
me where I stood, a riot of movement and sound, white feathers and floss floating down over me like snow.

Moments later, they departed, rising high up again on the air and crossing the sea, their forlorn voices fading into the distance.

Mam had said that the injured swan “reassured” her. This demonstration by the birds had flooded me with something I might also call “reassurance.”

If Mam was mad, I thought, then I am mad, too, but now somehow I was not afraid. As I looked at the feathers all around me, I felt a sense of exaltation. I thought of the woman who had given me the little bottles, and how bits of pale gray down had drifted from her cloak.

CHAPTER 6

O
ver the coming months Mam carried the injured swan with her everywhere, even to church, and the same local women who had seen her and whispered about her stared. The appalled expressions on their faces were bad enough. But it was my father’s and brothers’ pained incomprehension that caused a rift in our house, and made Mam and me feel hopelessly distant from them.

I took over many of Mam’s tasks: cooking, cleaning the ashes and sweeping the hearthstones, driving the cow and her little black calf to and from the field.

As her pregnancy advanced, Mam was uncomfortably hot and perspiring. Some nights she got up and opened the door, admitting the cold wind that came in and
knocked things down, causing the empty kettle to swing on its crane and the hearth ashes to fly.

During her eighth month, an odd thing occurred. It was an unusually still night. I was fanning Mam, dabbing the sweat from her neck, when we heard hard, loud blows on the door. We awakened Da and my brothers, who had slept through the noise, but when they opened the door, nothing was there.

The next day, I returned home from driving the cows and found the swan in the cottage, but no sign of Mam. The necklace with the bottle had been left on the table. I grabbed it and, in a panic, ran outside.

Mam was standing knee-deep in the tide, her shoes on the foreshore as if they’d been flung there. She bent over and splashed her face in the frigid water.

“Mam!” I screamed into the wind, and she looked up.

Just as the tide was beginning to return seaward, I saw a shadow in the water. Mam stiffened as something grabbed hold of her and pulled her into the undertow. Falling into the rushing water, she struggled to get away.

I ran skidding down the hill, raising rocks and clods of earth. The new tide came in with force, throwing Mam back onto the shore, but as it retreated again, she was pulled so hard that this time she disappeared into the waves.

I ran in against the tide, falling to my knees, but making my way finally under, into the dark of the water. There was Mam, twisting and struggling, her hair and nightgown waving gracefully around her as she flailed.
Something had her by one ankle, and was drawing her into the dimness.

I saw a bloated but human-looking female face, ripples of greenish blond hair waving around it like an undersea plant. The rest of the monster, whatever it was, was hidden in the opaque shadow of the water. Suddenly it undulated from the waist, and I saw the flash of a huge fish tail.

Grabbing hold of Mam’s other ankle, I thrust the bottle with its red, pulsating flame into the creature’s face. Its eyes bulged and its nostrils flared as it let go of Mam, and it disappeared in a convulsion of bubbles, its frenetic shadow growing small far below.

I pulled Mam, still stunned and flailing, to the surface and, fighting the tide, brought her ashore. She was weak, drenched and breathing hard, pressing her palms against her swollen belly. With shaking hands I placed the necklace with the bottle on it around her neck.

As I led her up the hill, Mam told me to go and fetch Da from the rock cliffs to the south, where he was fishing for black pollack with my brothers. “Tell him to bring Old Peig to me.”

Old Peig, a small, ancient figure leaning deeply on her blackthorn stick, sent my father and brothers from the house, saying that they were out of their element in the province of women.

Examining Mam, she concluded immediately that the baby was not yet ready to come.

I took orders from the old woman, arranging the
feather bed so that Mam was comfortable, putting the kettle on the fire and boiling a little porridge for the three of us.

The swan watched placidly as Peig sat at the foot of the box bed, dabbing an herbal concoction on Mam’s feet and ankles where the monstrous creature had bitten her and sunk its nails.

“What creature was it?” the old woman asked.

“A woman, half fish,” I said.

Peig’s hands paused, and she looked into Mam’s eyes.

“I told my husband, Peig, but he didn’t believe me that the thing had a human face.”

“Things have not been good between Mam and Da,” I told Peig. “Mam’s been sleeping in the byre.”

Peig gasped with disapproval. “You’ll stop sleeping in the byre immediately and take your place again in this box bed!”

Mam looked admonished and closed her eyes.

“Why do you keep the swan?” Peig asked Mam.

“It was injured and I brought it home to heal it. I’ve grown attached to it,” Mam said. She shifted on the pallet, and the bottle around her neck caught the light.

The old woman pointed a wrinkled, trembling finger at it. “Where did you get this, Nuala?”

“Maeve found it at the ruins. I’ve been wearing it every day since.”

“It’s for protection,” I said softly. “But she took it off today.”

Peig looked thoughtfully at each of us. “Why did you take it off, Nuala?”

Mam shook her head. “I can hardly account for my actions, missus. I thought I’d burn up with the heat. I wanted nothing touching my skin. I almost lost all sense and tore the very gown from my body. I could think of no better refuge than the cold tide, then that awful creature grabbed me by the ankle.”

Peig gave me a piercing look with her rheumy eyes.

“There’s a shadow over Ard Macha,” the old woman said gravely, “since the time when Ishleen died.” She dabbed Mam’s forehead with a cool cloth. “You mustn’t get agitated, Nuala. You must get some rest. Maeve and I are here if you need anything.”

When we heard Mam’s steady breathing in sleep, Old Peig leaned toward me and whispered, “Tell me about the bottle. How did you come by it?”

“A mysterious woman gave it to me—a woman wearing white with feathers on her cloak. She gave me two bottles: one she said was for Mam, and the other, which Mam is wearing, was meant for me. She said they would protect us. When I was coming home, Tom Cavan surprised me and tried to take Mam’s bottle. It fell and broke. Mam needed protection more than I did, so I gave her mine. On another cord around her neck, Mam wears the stopper from the bottle that was meant for her. It has a little symbol on it.”

“Did you ask the woman why your Mam needed protection?” Old Peig asked.

I shook my head. “Looking back, there are many things I wish I had asked.”

Old Peig got up and approached Mam’s sleeping figure. Very gingerly she moved aside the fabric at Mam’s chest until she was able to see the stopper. She came back quietly.

“It is an old Danaan symbol. Ard Macha has a mystical history that very few people know of, Maeve,” she said. “And something very ancient has indeed resurfaced. The armor the men found in the bog, I believe, is an artifact of a terrible battle that was waged here seven centuries ago. But what I know about Ard Macha, though it is an incomplete history, begins long, long before that battle.

“In the beginning, Ireland was a place of primeval forests and oak groves. The original inhabitants were the Tuatha de Danaan, or the children of the goddess Danu. They were not mortals but another breed of human, a subtle people who worshipped trees and water, people who transformed themselves into birds to fly, or into seals or walruses to swim long distances across the seas.

“A less subtle people known as the Milesians invaded Ireland, battled Danu’s children and drove the goddess and her people into exile. During the wars, many of the children of Danu who narrowly escaped the Milesians with their own lives fled Ireland in bird form or swam away in the water in the form of seals. Many went south by way of the Celtic Sea, settling in northwestern Spain, where, in their human forms, they intermarried among
the Spaniards. Others flew far into the western seas, colonizing and establishing the legendary Holy Isles. But there was also an agreement made between Danu and the Milesians. Danu would keep a seat in Ireland. She chose as her sanctified place Ard Macha. She and her priestesses moved between the Holy Isles and her monastery here, which she came to every year at Samhain, just before the dark of winter.

“But another queen of mysterious origins came to try to defeat Danu and take her throne. There was a terrible battle. Neither was completely defeated, but each was injured enough by the other. That is all I know. But the residue of that evil queen remains here, just as the sacred residue of Danu is still with us in some distant ways.

“I don’t know why the unearthing of that armor brought so much darkness to us, but it still contains power, and it’s been unleashed upon the air.” She was silent a moment, then asked, “What happened to that armor that was found?”

“It disappeared. Someone took it the very night it was unearthed. The men left it in the bog, and when they returned later, it was gone.”

Old Peig stared a few moments into the dying fire, then looked again at the stopper. It began to glow, and she gazed at it, then closed her eyes and lifted her head, as if she were seeing something within her own mind. When she opened her eyes, she looked earnestly at me.

“You’ve got a lot of responsibility to shoulder,” she said.

“What do you mean, missus? What did you see?”

“I believe it
will
be Ishleen coming back, just as your mam says. You’ll have to be a very strong girl, Maeve. You’ll have to be steadfast.”

“Why, missus?” I asked.

But Old Peig just shook her head, then looked again at Mam. The Danaan symbol around her neck glowed in the firelight.