The Fire Opal (23 page)

The cord of flesh suddenly spasmed, hurling itself against the wall, as primitive as a snake, sensing distress. But it lost strength and fell weightless again to the floor.

I rushed from the lair. The guardian chimera stirred and my heart stopped with terror. The cord, which was blocking my way out, lifted as I was climbing over it and violently hurled me against a wall of ice. For a few moments, I was confused, struggling to get my bearings again. The cord collapsed then like dead weight, and I climbed over it and escaped.

“The Canticle of Fire” echoed in my memory with such clarity, it was as if I had heard it hundreds of times before. It had entered my bloodstream and my psyche. As I was passing the chapel of the frozen mothers, I could
not resist stepping in to see Mam and Ishleen. The soft light of their ghosts flashed as I approached. In that moment, with the Fire Opal warm against my belly, I could feel so clearly their perpetual state of terror and uncertainty.

“Mam. Ishleen,” I uttered. “Don’t worry. I’m going to bring you back.”

I knew they couldn’t understand me, so I said it again several times, hoping they could feel the meaning of my words from my tone. They pulsed and shimmered, and all the mothers in the room began to flash and pulsate, as if they, too, could feel the spirit of what was happening.

“I will help you all,” I said, then rushed out and back to the main room, where I found Phee among the others. I lifted her in one arm.

As I descended the staircase to the lower level, I heard the waves murmur and the loose ice on the rough edges of the barge tinkle and groan.

We reached the docks and lower courtyard, where misshapen mermaids lay in openmouthed slumber, icy tides foaming in their hair. A small boat bobbed, tethered to a dock post in a lane of water, and I set my sights on it.

I put Phee down into the boat and had begun to untether the rope from the post when I heard a convulsive sloshing and splashing. Looking up, I saw a rogue mermaid swimming in from the surrounding water, having been out of the range of the narcotic air. She sputtered and growled, baring her teeth as she sped toward me.

I grabbed Phee, and in my struggle to run back toward
the stairs, twisted and ripped the hem of my dress. All at once, the fabric buzzed and vibrated, lifting me into the air up and over the sea, until I saw a little empty boat detached and idling on the waves. My father’s boat:
Mananan’s Vessel
.

With one arm extended, I parachuted slowly down and landed with Phee in the familiar vessel.

CHAPTER 20

P
hee and I sailed deep into the night, the compass with the shattered window keeping us on course. Dawn flooded the sky, clouds broken with red and light that gradually grew dimmer until it cast brooding dark green shadows on air and water.

The Fire Opal, hidden in the folds of my skirts, exuded warmth against my belly. I could just barely hear music, slow and high-pitched, that delicate echoing choir of voices harmonizing in minor keys: “The Canticle of Fire.” Sometimes as I listened to it, I rubbed my face, focusing hard, and it stopped abruptly. This made me think that I was hearing it in my own head. But when I forgot about it, it was there again, like hallucinations of sound.

Gradually Phee awakened, and I explained to her that
Gudrun had told me to bring her because she was familiar with the waters of the Shee. She looked around in amazement, her wide-open eyes filled with reflections of the waves as they moved and lifted. When she looked directly at me, I could see my own silhouette.

Hours passed in this extended greenish dawn. The music played and dissolved, a backdrop to the noise of the boat chopping through water and the low roar of the swells beneath us. I lay back, pressing my hands over the pocket that held the Fire Opal, and watched the clouds shift and move. I took the opal out and lifted it, gazing into its rich red-orange transparency flecked with brilliant green, and saw the faces of my father and brothers. The boat seemed to breathe under my back, moving purposefully forward as if navigated by ghosts.

I let Phee hold the Fire Opal. Peering into it, she saw the face of her mother looking very much alive, smiling at her before dissolving into red.

When she returned it to me, just before I put it back into the safe pocket, I saw Francisco’s image in it. He was wearing my father’s oatmeal-colored shirt, standing somewhere on a cliff gazing off into the distance. The sight of him caused my heart to skip. But unlike Phee’s mother, who seemed to look through the opal and see her, Francisco remained unaware of me. I held the opal close and whispered his name, but he continued to stare off in another direction, before fading completely in sparks of orange.

We came into a realm of very dark clouds broken by greenish brilliance, deep shadows alternating with brightness, as shafts of light broke through and shone
down. The water had begun shifting and moving, lifting and dropping the boat uncomfortably.

I heard a stifled cry and, turning, saw a little girl struggling in the water, surfacing and going under again.

“She’s drowning!” I cried out to Phee, and as I was about to dive in after her, Phee grabbed my forearm and squeezed it. She shook her head firmly and slowly:
no
.

“But, Phee!” I shrieked. She gave me a look so fierce and certain, I was taken aback.

Another drowning girl appeared on the other side of the boat, and then a crying baby in a wooden creel. Soon we were moving through a sea of wailing babies and little girls shouting, “Help us, please!” Phee remained unmoved, as if she were deaf as well as mute. And I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears, so that I could muffle the multitude of pleas and obey her. But it went on for what seemed like several unbearable hours.

Gradually, the cries transformed themselves to the screeches of gulls, and the babies and children were all gone.

After that, we found ourselves navigating a narrow lane of water between two islands, where youthful men and women in flowing robes stood on the shores beckoning and calling out to us. Some of them stepped into the tide and came close enough to touch us, offering goblets of wine and pieces of fruit.

A beautiful woman who reminded me of Mam offered me an apple, and on an impulse I extended my arm to receive it. Phee quickly knocked it out of my hand, and as it fell and bobbed on the back of a wave, it became wrinkled
and rotted to the core. Phee looked at me fiercely, took out a piece of charcoal and wrote on a wooden plank in the boat’s interior:
goblin fruit
.

I looked at the woman who had offered it to me, and right before my eyes her skin withered to yellow, patched with gray. She no longer looked anything like Mam.

We passed those isles, and the sea grew wide again. Still, spectral sheaths of fog undulated and trailed past and alongside us, and I felt afraid.

Phee pointed at the horizon, where the light changed dramatically, and I sensed from her expression that once we got there, we were free of this dangerous realm.

I kept a steady gaze toward the distance, but when I heard a soft scratching at the bottom of the boat, I made the mistake of looking into the water. Girls who looked very much like Breeze and the other ash girls lay on their backs floating about a foot beneath the surface, eyes wide and pleading. The one who looked like Breeze reached her arm up. Even though I knew that it could not really be she, I longed to reach back. She held my eyes, and a sensual thrill rushed through me, a kind of pleasant amnesia so powerful that I began to lean toward her. I wanted to believe in her and the others, and to go with them wherever they took me.

But Phee pulled at me before my finger could touch the apparition’s, forcing me fully back into the boat. Irritable and confused at first, I resisted her. But she stood directly before me where I sat and stamped her foot hard, then shook me by the shoulders, with an angry admonishing look.

I returned to my senses, but the scratching and tapping at the bottom of the boat continued, intensifying to dozens of scratches and taps and frenetic knocks. Phee held my eyes and squeezed my shoulders, one in each of her small hands.

“I don’t understand this weakness in me, Phee,” I said when I realized what I was doing. “I don’t know why I’m so drawn to them….”

Phee refused to let go, and maintained eye contact with me, not allowing me to break it.

I was shaking and shining with sweat when our little boat passed into a new realm of the sea. The light changed dramatically, the sun streaming over us gold and white, blinding in flashes as it hit the shifting surfaces of the water. Squinting, I saw the ships, pale transparent replicas of the Spanish galleons, forming themselves of smoke and mist, appearing and disappearing and then appearing again. On board, dozens of shades waved from the decks, the female figureheads leading from the bows, incandescent and proud. Before I could remark upon them to Phee, the cries of swans began to trumpet, a slew of them circling wildly overhead, feathers floating down around us. Our boat followed their exuberant lead until they alighted on an island, transforming into women as they descended.

Heralding our arrival were birds of various kinds. Swans, herons and gulls rose on the air, mewing and screeching, departing and returning. Several of the women in white and blue-gray waded into the tide to meet us, their fringed shawls reminiscent of feathered
wings. They brought our boat in and helped us beach it, the sand knee-deep in feathers and down.

Phee disappeared happily into a group of women, while two others led me up a rocky pathway and left me before a white dwelling.

That was when I first saw Danu as she appeared in the doorway. She was perhaps seven feet tall, with large soft limbs, her loose sleeveless gown the color of milk. Though it was sunny, she held a large, lit candelabra, and though the wind was forceful, the flames leaned at extreme angles but did not extinguish.

She began to move slowly toward me, leaving behind faint images of herself after each step, as if she were composed of hundreds of subtler selves that gave her an ever-shifting, translucent aura.

“I am Danu,” she said simply in a soft voice that tolled like a bell. Her eyes, glimmering and shot with sunlight, were profoundly clear and steady, like two aquamarine pools. I noticed that she had tiny fine feathers instead of eyelashes and eyebrows.

She hesitated expectantly, and I realized that she was waiting for me to give her the Fire Opal.

I reached into the special pocket of my dress to retrieve it, and as I placed it on her open palm, I watched seven or eight afterimages of her hand as it closed around the opal, sparks of color exploding in the opal’s red-orange transparency.

For a few moments, Danu said nothing, just stood there with her head bowed, holding the opal to her heart. In her other hand she held the large, weighty candelabra
at a negligent angle, facing away from her. It looked to be made of ornate brass gone greenish at its edges and must have been close to three feet tall.

She sighed, then looked at me, raising her damp eyes.

“Come in,” she said quietly.

I followed her along an interior pathway, two lanes of water to either side of us. As we approached a staircase, I was unable to hold back and asked, “Goddess, how can I release my mother and sister from the ice statues on Uria’s barge?”

She stopped and turned around, looking at me with gravity, then said reassuringly, “Everything we talk about today, everything you are doing, is in pursuit of that goal, Maeve.”

We ascended the stairs, and I followed her out onto a terrace that faced over the sea, where we leaned against a wide white stone railing.

“The sun is shining brightly today, but you sometimes have days like this on Ard Macha,” she said.

“Yes, now and again,” I replied.

“Mostly, the weather here matches the weather in Ireland; the rains of the equinox, the damp and mild snows of winter. I try to make this place of my exile as close as possible to the place I have been driven from.” She stood very still for a few moments in a concentrated silence, gazing at the sky. Suddenly clouds began to gather and the air darkened. Within moments, it began to pour.