The Fire Opal (4 page)

“I hope he goes soon,” I said, excited by the prospect of his disappearing from our lives. “Where might he be sent?”

“I don’t know. It isn’t for certain yet,” Fingal said. “Anyway, enough talk about Tom Cavan.” He took out the little notebook in which he liked to chart the stars on
clear nights, matching what he saw to the time of year, the month and the day.

At the schoolhouse in Dunloe, Fingal had heard of Galileo and astronomy and had, to no avail, tried to find books in Dungarven or even in the larger port town of Killybegs. He had these notions about the turning of the world and the stars and sun, a desire to somehow see the order in the universe.

But education was difficult to get; teachers passed through, and for long periods of time, there’d be no teacher in residence at all. Because I was a girl, I didn’t even have the option of attending. But Donal, who was also a gifted student, taught me to read from a book of adventure tales, a book that was illustrated with etchings of castles and knights and ladies, which he had borrowed from the schoolhouse and intended to return if there was ever a teacher again.

It had been hard lately to get him to read with me, though. He had become preoccupied with fighting the English invaders in Ireland, and collected stories from friends and acquaintances about English atrocities committed against the Irish.

Fingal got up and wandered to the door, looking out and up at the sky. “It’ll rain again tonight,” he said with disappointment. Rarely was there a night clear enough that Fingal could observe the movements in the heavens. He sat down near the fire with his notebook and began to reread his scribbled observations from the last clear night.

Mam and I were finishing the potatoes, getting ready
to boil them with the mackerel, while Da was stoking the embers, bringing the fire to a roar.

I felt Mam’s eyes on me and realized that I kept stopping my knife on the skin of the potato, absorbed by the memory of the woman who had given me the bottles.

“Maeve,” Mam said, “are you all right?”

I looked up, startled, wishing I could pour my heart out, but some fear held me back.

“Yes, Mam, I’m fine,” I replied, though she continued to look at me doubtfully.

Suddenly Donal spoke. “I heard today about a mother and child that were murdered by English soldiers in Galway.”

A shadow fell over Mam’s face.

“Donal,” I said, and shook my head at him.

He looked at me darkly. “It’s all got to be spoken about, Maeve. We cannot pretend it isn’t happening.”

“All right, then, but don’t be so detailed in the way you tell things.”

He smoothed back a big lock of dark brown hair that kept falling over one eye. “I’ll say only this: the English soldiers value Irish lives less than they value the lives of sheep.”

The beautiful little bottle in my pocket seemed to pulse just as Mam looked up from her peelings and announced in a soft voice filled with portent, “I have something to tell you children.” Tension filled the air as we all waited, hardly breathing. After a silence, she said, “There’s going to be a baby.”

We all looked at one another anxiously, but Mam
looked down again at the potato she had in her hands and went quiet.

The rain began to fall, making soft, eerie sounds in the thatch above us.

Mam looked distracted and fragile. When I saw her eyes begin to dampen, I reached with a sudden impulse for the beautiful little bottle in the pocket of my flannel dress and handed it to her.

She put down her knife and took it, holding it up in the firelight.

“How beautiful, Maeve,” she whispered, her eyes wide and glistening. “It looks like a little flame in there.”

“I found it at the ruins,” I said.

Mam gazed at it incredulously. “Is it fire or is it liquid?” she whispered as if to the air. She seemed to forget about the potatoes, her eyes misting over.

“It’s for you!” I said suddenly. I felt a physical pain in my stomach at parting with it.

“Thank you, Maeve,” she said quietly, tearing her eyes from it to look at me. She reached over with her other hand and brushed the hair from my face. “You’ve mud in your hair,” she said, slightly startled, and smiled. She looked down at my hems and saw mud dried thick there and on my shoes.

I had not noticed a very tiny hole in the top lip of the bottle, but Mam saw it immediately. She put the bottle on a piece of thread and hung it like a necklace around her neck. I thought it astonishing that she knew to wear it as a charm, and this made me ache to tell her about the woman who had also worn it that way. But as Mam
picked up her knife again, urging me to do the same, and we peeled the skins from the last of the potatoes, I held back. The woman’s concern over Mam caused a heavy weight in my stomach.

When we’d finished, I stoked the fire beneath the pot. Mam suddenly raised her face and listened to something she heard outside. Wiping her hands on a tea towel, she stepped out into the downpour, where she stood without moving.

Da went to her. “Come back inside, Nuala,” he said, but she did not reply. After several minutes, each of my brothers chimed in, pleading with her to come inside, but she refused, holding a hand up in the air, still listening hard to something. I went out and stood with her, looking up into her face.

“Do you hear?” she asked me.

At first, I didn’t, and I felt my heart growing heavy. But then she took one of my hands in hers, and beyond the drumming and splatter of the rain, I detected another sound. I held my breath and listened to a soft humming, weird and mournful, a voice human-sounding yet hardly human. I recognized it somehow, at moments sweet and plaintive like music, but could not place it. The sound filled me with a vague yearning I could not name. The quiet calling seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

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
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
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.

CHAPTER 4

M
am 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
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.

“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
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?”