The Fire Opal Page 3

  I noticed that the bottle of pale red liquid around Mam's neck wore a kind of aura in the rain, a cape of luminous mist.

  The rain silenced a little, and the sound took more

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  volume. With a shock, I recognized it as the voice of a single swan. Though it was nowhere to be seen, I knew the song to be identical to the cries of the wild swans that sometimes frequented the lake near the bog. I had often heard them sing, but always collectively. Relief washed over me as the mystery was solved, but then Mam said, "Do you hear her, Maeve? She's calling me."

  When I looked perplexed by this statement, she said, "Your sister, Ishleen. It's her very self that will be coming to us again." She touched her belly with one hand.

  "Nuala," my father said tenderly. "It isn't the same child."

  "It is, Desmond!" Mam said with fervor. She gave him a look then as if his words were a betrayal. "I'm the one who bears the child in my body. I think I know better!"

  Da looked stunned by the intensity in her voice.

  There was the real world of the five senses, the factual world with all its borders and boundaries. Anyone of that real world who could hear it would say the voice was the murmuring of an isolated swan. But there was also the subtler world, which was also a world of the senses, but of infinitely more than five. And in that world, the voice was that of Ishleen, whom Mam was carrying for a second time; the sister who should not have died, and who ached to come back to us. I understood this all at once as the rain soaked me, and, looking into Mam's face, I could feel what she was feeling. Mixed with her anxiety was a vivid yearning, the desire I could feel so physically that it made my stomach seem to float in my body. As strong as it was, it was also elusive. And I remembered suddenly

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  the day Mam and I had gazed out at the horizon and talked about this vague, unnameable yearning. What seemed strange to me now, and made no sense, was that it was the same feeling, as if it had always been Ishleen we'd been yearning for, even before the first Ishleen had been born.

  Only Ishleen returning safe into this world would quell this desire in Mam. Only Ishleen could make the world be right again for her.

  My father and brothers were under the awning, keeping dry while Mam and I stood out in the element, soaked and dripping. Turning and looking into my father's eyes, I felt my heart drop. All the certainty of what I'd just been feeling dissolved. Da's eyes were filled with fear and tinged with melancholy. I thought of the words I'd heard him speaking to Fingal the night before, that Mam's grief had affected her mind and she was not the same woman she had been a year ago.

  I breathed deeply in the rain and was wrought with confusion, torn between the sense that I understood everything Mam felt, and the fear for her sanity. But I could hear the swan, and when I listened to it murmuring and humming, I wanted to believe that Mam was right, that it was whispering to her; that my sister, both dead and yet to be reborn, was speaking through it.

  "Do you feel it, Maeve? How badly she wants to come back to us in this life?"

  It frightened me how much I did feel it, and how intent and overcome Mam was with her certainty about the voice. I nodded, and knew my shivering was not caused by the rain.

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  ***

  CHAPTER 4

  ***

  Mam and I had changed out of the wet garments. She had dried my hair and now she sat before the hearth staring into the fire, the pot of potatoes trembling on the boil, and I stood behind her drying her hair with a cloth.

  Da had taken up repairing his net again, his big calloused hands working deftly, tying and knotting. Donal, who was helping him halfheartedly, suddenly looked up.

  "I hear there are strangers in the village of Dunloe," he said, "and though they are not wearing uniforms, everyone is suspicious that they are English soldiers getting a good look around at the place."

  "Da, we've got to be ready if they come to Ard Macha," Fingal said, and Da nodded in agreement.

  They kept on their conjectures about the English

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  soldiers as if to distract themselves from their fears about Mam, but I saw their eyes flashing to and away from her.

  Donal started talking about The Book of Invasions, about the successive takings of Ireland over the centuries.

  "Why is Ireland always being invaded, Da?"

  Da went still, his hands stopping their steady work. He looked up, his reddish hair glinting in the firelight like newly shined copper.

  "She is wild, her land richer and greener than any other land, and her weather is moody." Da glanced at Mam. "She is superstitious and she is a fatalist. She cannot be fully conquered. The invaders know that, and it eats at them. Her soul is her own."

  Mam was watching the steam rise from the boiling pot. A few droplets of rain still clung to her face and dripped from the ends of her long, dark hair. I had the sense that though Mam was pretending to be lost in her own thoughts, she was listening to every word Da said, and feeling all the meaning of it.

  The potatoes were ready, and I helped Mam ladle them into bowls along with boiled fish. Instead of five places, Mam set six, placing an extra bowl of food between me and her.

  "We'll leave the door ajar," she said, though the rain was still falling, "so she knows she's welcome."

  Mam looked wistfully at the open door the entire meal, the threshold soaked, the earth floor around it going to mud. She raised her head high and strained to listen through the rain.

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  "I hear her again," she said.

  My brothers set down their spoons very quietly, and a soft pall settled around us all. I could not bear to look at Da, knowing what I'd see in his eyes. Mam, sensing their discomfort, frowned, and a wrinkle formed between her eyebrows.

  To change the subject, I said, "Did you see the little bottle I found in the ruins and gave to Mam?"

  Mam fingered the bottle that hung around her neck, glowing softly.

  The others looked at it. "There's something moving in it, like a flame," Da said.

  "Yes." Mam grasped it possessively as Da reached across to touch it. "You know," she went on, not looking at Da but only at my brothers and me, "those ruins are not the remains of a convent as everyone says they are."

  "I always imagined that it was a palace and a king ruled it," Fingal said.

  "It was a palace," Mam said, "but you know as well as I do that it was a queen who ruled it, not a king."

  "A queen?" Donal asked, raising his eyebrows and smiling, but unable to hide the indignant blush that had come upon his cheeks.

  Even when my brothers were small, and Old Peig, the midwife who had brought us all into the world, first told us that a queen had once ruled Ireland, they'd scoffed at the story and insisted it was false. They still did not like the idea of women ruling Ireland.

  "In the early times, women ruled Ireland, Donal, and the entire coastline was covered in primeval forest, trees

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  everywhere, all the way down to the sand on the beach, flowers and fruit and fields of grain. When the trees were cut down, the queen went into exile. Now all one might harvest here is rock and shell. Even our little plots of potatoes and barley are won from difficult labor," Mam said.

  "Old Peig!" Donal muttered, and rolled his eyes.

  Fingal, the biggest skeptic of all, could not help but ask, "And that is because the queen fell, Mam?"

  Fingal was not trying to sound condescending, but it was there always in his voice whenever Mam talked about things she called history and he called folklore.

  I shouted out in defense of Mam. "A queen can rule and a queen can fall, just as a king can fall!"

  "Maybe," Mam said, "with even more terrible consequences than when a king falls."

  Da and my brothers went quiet again at the grave tone of Mam's voice.

  "You've never heard in school of the great queens of Ireland? The first was the goddess Danu."

  "Danu," Donal said. "Weren't she and her people def
eated by the Milesians, who would rule the visible world, while Danu and her people, the Danaans, took possession of the invisible regions belowground and beyond the seas? Isn't it the old myth that they still rule those regions?"

  "It's something like that," Mam said, "though I believe big important pieces are missing from the history books. The Holy Isles were established eventually, and Danu became remote from the people of Ireland, though she longs to return."

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  "But it's a myth, Nuala," Da said gently.

  "How do you know that it's a myth?" Mam asked, turning to him sharply. I could see by her clipped tone that she was very angry with Da.

  "How could such things be real?" he asked.

  Mam rolled her eyes. With my brothers she was a little more tolerant, but with Da right now, she was positively impatient. "There is more to the world than you can see directly before you, Desmond!" she cried, then pounded the table with her fist in exasperation.

  There was a collective silence, which no one dared break.

  Mam was very proud, and Da, I knew, had hurt her by dismissing her certainty that Ishleen would come to us a second time.

  Donal shot Mam a pained look, and seeing it, Mam sighed, then said, in a softer tone, "But all that is hearsay. The ruins are what we were talking about in the first place. They were a convent, as we've always been told. A quiet hostel of nuns at prayer. After all, what good is a woman if she is not quiet?"

  She gave Da a withering look, and his face fell. He hung his head.

  I sat alone on my bed behind the curtain and carefully examined the triple-spiral stopper from the broken bottle meant for Mam. It was a single swirling unbroken line that formed three spirals, like the crest of one wave sitting on top of two others. I worried that the bottle meant for

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  me might not offer Mam all the protection she might need, so I put the triple-spiral stopper onto a string, then went out to her and told her I'd found it also at the ruins, and that I wanted her to have it.

  Her eyes lit up, and she took in a breath, immediately drawn to it. Her hand shook slightly as she reached to take it.

  "But don't you want it for yourself, Maeve?" she asked.

  "No, Mam, it's for you."

  I gazed at the bottle intended for me, glimmering around her neck, and yearned to have it again in my possession. But I could not ask her for it. She had been so moved when I'd given it to her. Besides, when I thought of the mysterious woman's concern for Mam, I knew Mam needed it more than I did.

  Mam slipped out of the house in the middle of the night. I got up and saw my father standing at the open door looking down the cliff to the beach. It was the moonlight and the reflections of it on the water that illuminated Mam's figure, standing there on the black rocks looking out to sea, her forearms and hands pressed to her belly, the crystal bottle glowing softly between her breasts.

  Very faintly from somewhere in the distance, I could hear the soft murmuring of the swan.

  "Don't you hear it, Da?" I asked, and touched his shoulder.

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  He turned and faced me, his forehead fraught with distress. "Hear what, love?"

  "The swan. Do you hear its voice?"

  He gave me a piercing look, a further darkness cast over his brow.

  "Not yourself as well, my girl," he said.

  I felt a wave of panic move through me. "But I hear it, Da."

  "You love your mother so much you think you hear something," he said. "But there's no sound other than the one we're always hearing: the waves breaking below on the shore."

  That night, when Mam came back in, she did not sleep with Da behind the curtain in the box bed, but went into the byre and slept between the cow and her new black calf.

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  ***

  CHAPTER 5

  ***

  The next morning, I stepped outside the threshold of our cottage to watch my father and brothers descend the cliff, making their way down to the sand and through the rushes, where they climbed into the small fishing boat and navigated the waters of the bay.

  Close enough that the mists could not conceal it, a skellig rose from the sea, an isle of jagged peaks around which gannets and kittiwakes squealed and circled. When Ishleen was still alive, Old Peig had told us that long ago, the skellig was known as Woman's Crag.

  "Sometimes," the old woman had said, "the goddess Danu herself came and stood there, looking longingly at Ard Macha."

  Sailors and fishermen still reported apparitions there occasionally, of an otherworldly woman.

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  Today the birds around it screeched and called, rising in nervous clouds, circling and alighting again.

  Often my father did not take the boat, but walked south on the headland to a shelf of limestone under an overhang of rocks, where he fished for black pollack. But this morning, in spite of the noise and riot of the birds around the skellig, the sea was still. I watched my brothers help him spread the fishing net.

  I breathed in the soft air and sighed, then went inside, where Mam was sweeping the earthen floor.

  Suddenly she stopped the broom.

  "You know why the birds are screeching like that today, don't you, Maeve?" she asked.

  When I looked at her, at a loss, she touched my cheek and said, "They hear your sister, too, through the voice of the swan."

  With Mam's hand on my cheek, I could hear the very faint uttering of the swan, seeming to come from the air itself.

  "We've got to do everything we can to help little Ishleen come safely back to us," she said. "We need to pick the herb that grows wild around the pagan stones."

  Picking the vervain was looked down upon as a kind of pagan practice, but Mam did it anyway. She hated being dictated to, and, believing there was protective magic in it, she often dried and burned the herb.

  "And we can leave a few offerings at the shrine of Saint Brigid, the patron saint of motherhood," I said to her, the shrine being near where the vervain grew.

  Mam liked this idea, and we gathered a few things

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  together that we might use as offerings: seashells, small stones we'd collected on the shore over the years, buttons and stubs of candles. Mam reached for the comb decorated with rhinestones that Da had bought her in Killybegs before they'd married.

  "You aren't going to part with that, Mam?" I asked. "Da gave it to you."

  The color rose in her face, and she tightened her lips. "I don't like the way your da's looking at me lately, Maeve, like I've lost my senses, when the fact is, my senses have never been finer

  "Why don't you soften to him, Mam?" I pleaded quietly.

  She hesitated, but still put the comb in the wicker basket. When Mam got proud over something, she was as unmovable as a mountain.

  We left the cottage and walked the cliff road to the site of the shrine.

  Mam lit a bit of candle and put it into a china cup to protect the flame from the wind, and left it before the weathered statue of Saint Brigid, who stood in a grotto of rock, long dry grasses trembling in the breeze around her.

  "Maeve," Mam said. "Look, there's the new pastor, Father Cormac."

  A thin, dark-haired figure was walking gingerly around the ancient stones, studying them earnestly, his hat pressed against his heart.

  "How odd, Maeve. A priest in this place."

  In church every week, our old pastor, Father Flanagan,

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  had discouraged anything at all that rang of old beliefs. From the road once, he had seen Mam here gathering vervain and had railed at her to keep away from the pagan stones on her way to the shrines.

  After that day, Mam had stopped attending Mass. I think she got a secret pleasure out of bucking convention, and continued to wander freely among the stones, which some of the local women found scandalous. Da, and the rest of us, still went to Mass. Father Flanagan had died the previous winter and this new, young pastor had been sent to us.

  Mam gazed at Father Cormac intently
as he squatted down and touched one of the stones.

  "He must be a good man, this new priest," she said softly.

  It was then that Father Cormac turned and saw us there. Even at the distance we stood from him, I saw him blush to be caught here, but he rose up and smiled and waved his hat before he put it back on and walked toward us.

  "You seem to understand something that our previous pastor did not, Father Cormac," Mam said.

  "What could that be, Mrs. O'Tullagh?"

  "That there's no great difference between the ancient saints and the new ones."

  "Well, historically you are right, Mrs. O'Tullagh."

  "Our Saint Brigid herself was originally the pagan Brigid, the goddess of mothers, smiths, poets and healers," Mam said with a ring of bravado in her voice.

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  "Yes, the world is a much more complicated place than many give it credit for being," he said, smiling widely at her.

  "And you know also, Father, that a queen once ruled Ireland," she said.

  "Yes, there were great queens once ruling here," he replied.

  "Anyone else, Father, would deny that, would say that women were weak and dependent creatures."

  "I'd never say that, Mrs. O'Tullagh," he said softly, and bowed.

  I liked his pink face and mild blue eyes and his smile that made him press his lips together.

  "Then you are a good and wise man, Father Cormac," Mam said. "So much so that I think I might like to go back to church next Sunday."