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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
We stepped back under the awning, but she left the candelabra exposed to the rain, which had no effect on the flames.
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"Have you taken any time to look really closely at the Fire Opal, Maeve?" she asked.
"In the boat I looked into it and could see someone I miss," I said. I was about to ask her about Francisco, when she began to speak again.
"Yes, it is good for that," she said, and gazed at it. "It is good for many things. It has extraordinary potential and responds to the imagination of the one who holds it."
She held it up in her hands, and it threw deep red and orange reflections onto the white stone of the floor.
"Don't look for anyone in it, Maeve. Just gaze at it and see if any memory is awakened."
As I stared at the Fire Opal, I felt a shadow stirring and remembered a particular day when I was seven, sitting on the stair in the ruins with my mother and the heavy basket of kelp.
"We looked at the horizon," I uttered, in the thrall of the memory. "We felt a kind of yearning."
"That yearning is for a part of yourself that's missing," she said softly as I kept staring into the Fire Opal. "I feel the same longing when I look toward Ireland. We are all exiles, Maeve. I was part human, as you were once part goddess, but we have been separated from ourselves." She studied my face with an anguished sensibility. "I miss the human element," she said, and touched my cheek very softly, as if she were afraid her touch might injure me. "I miss the perpetual uncertainties, the constant searching and getting lost in wishes and desires. Being a goddess can be isolating, and even static. Without human contact, the element of drama is lost."
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"I was once part goddess?" I asked.
"All the women of Ard Macha were. Do you sense, under the surface, the great potential that is hidden from you? It is like you own a treasure chest but you have lost the key. That day when you were seven, when you and your mother sat on the stair in the ruins with the basket of kelp, something significant happened. Do you remember?"
I looked at her helplessly, not knowing the answer.
"Look again at the Fire Opal." She held it cupped in her hand to block some of the light from the sky. A vague shadow moved within the opal, and I had the feeling that something inside it was looking at me. It came closer, and with a pulse of shock, I recognized the face of the Answerer, the broken sword, which I had hidden from my brothers so many years ago.
"I found it in the kelp that day," I said, and began to shiver. "It had come up on a big wave. For some reason, until now I had forgotten about it."
"I want to tell you about the significance of the Answerer," she said.
I followed her off the porch and back into the room, where she set the Fire Opal on a stand that seemed made especially for it. Very slowly the stand began to revolve, and the Fire Opal picked up all the light in the nearly empty room and any light coming in from outside, casting bright refractions onto the bare white walls.
Danu took my shawl gently from my shoulders and smiled, acknowledging its similarity to her own. She drew out a threaded needle and a handful of very tiny red
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beads. As she continued to speak, she slowly sewed the tiny beads into various places on my shawl.
"Almost seven centuries ago, I still ruled Ard Macha. As long as the last primeval forest grew there, it sent its fertilizing sparks on the wind currents, which traveled slowly around the world, and because the forest existed at all," she said, and leaned into me, emphasizing the words, "the world's potential was still full of texture. There was sound in silence. There was luminosity in darkness."
As Danu spoke, I saw, as if from above, a thick forest of formidable trees spanning hills and a deep valley. I seemed to be moving on the air above them in a westerly direction until I reached the sea. The trees nearest the beach strained and leaned inland, stunted by the Atlantic gales.
And there were the ruins, before they were ruins: pristine towers and walls, arches and pediments. The tumultuous Atlantic crashed and rolled, foaming up a vast staircase and slapping at the massive doors.
Suddenly I was inside the edifice, moving through a corridor until I entered a chamber, a kind of apothecary filled with bottles and plants. On one of the walls hung charts and diagrams of the cross sections of flowers and their buds. That's when I saw the red jewel stars embedded in the green and gray marble of the wall, and recognized this chamber as the collapsed room where I would one day, as a child of seven, hide the Answerer.
In the center of the room, a group of young women wearing sleeveless crimson gowns and gold tore bracelets
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on their bare upper arms were chanting softly, and moving slowly around a kind of altar. I recognized the chant as the same language the Swan Woman had lapsed into when she'd given me the bottles.
Suddenly I was not just a spectator, but one of the chanting women. We were focused on the Fire Opal, displayed there on a stand, similar to the one Danu had. One young woman seemed to be leading everything. She wore a kind of garland of small lit candles on her head. She held her arms up in a gesture, and we all responded with an introspective silence.
"My priestesses," Danu said, narrating in the background, "were the keepers of the Fire Opal."
Our leader approached the Fire Opal ceremonially and took it in her hands, placing it carefully into a glass box with brass hinges. Removing a large ring of keys from the belt around her waist, she selected one and locked the box, then placed it on a shelf behind a dark velvet curtain. She rang a small bell, and we all formed a single file line and followed her out of the room along a narrow hallway with very high ceilings. Through the tall windows above us, all manner of birds flew in and out, their chirping and singing echoing loudly. Even herons swept past us, some on foot, some flying horizontally, low to the ground.
We arrived at a large entrance hall, where Danu awaited us.
"I told my priestesses that we would be entertaining the goddess Uria and her handmaidens."
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Looking through a wide arch, I saw a very large woman in armor crafted of black iron, the chest and back piece recognizable to me as the one Tom Cavan would one day dig out of the bog. She was sitting among a congregation of women in dark gray who hunched together, some peering over their shoulders at us with cool, suspicious eyes.
"I did not know everything I should have known about her at the time," Danu said. "Word had not yet spread across Ireland about her true nature. I knew only that she had evolved into goddess status, having distinguished herself as a warrior queen. I believed her when she said she had come posing no threat to us, only needing a place to rest and to prepare her ship before leaving Ireland for the northern Greenland waters. She had asked to stay for three days.
"I would find out when it was too late that she had come as a Valkyrie, a corpse goddess, from the land of the Vikings. While the Irish had been celebrating victory after the definitive battle against the invading Vikings at Clontarf Uria, uninjured, had stolen the ancient weapon from Brian Boru, the great Irish hero. It was the weapon I had bestowed upon him myself, made by druidesses, the metal and stone that composes it taken from the sacred spring of boiling minerals. The druidesses named it the Answerer, and presented it to me, and I in turn presented it to Brian Boru, the greatest protector of Ireland. He called it his battle-axe, although, as you know, it looks nothing like an axe at all."
I followed the priestesses to help them bring out platters of fish and fruit for Uria and her women.
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As I set down a pitcher of wine, one of these women grabbed my forearm with clawed fingers and, peering at me with pale, amber eyes, said, "We expect to eat roast bird, preferably heron or pelican."
Another priestess near me who overheard this turned and said, "Birds are holy to Danu and are never eaten in her house."
The women laughed, rolling their eyes, some speaking in ironic tones to one
another under their breath. One of these women got up and whispered directly into Uria's ear.
Feathers littered these rooms and halls, and one happened to be on the table where Uria sat. She lifted her fork high, then in a grand and violent gesture, jabbed the feather and waved it back and forth on the air before she ate it.
There was another shift in time. I found myself walking quietly into a dim corridor, surrounded by more of Danu's priestesses, when we came upon a gang of Uria's women crouched around several dead birds, eating them, blood and feathers all over their hands and faces. The other priestesses I was with rushed forward, confronting them. A fight broke out, but I was behind the others, being jostled, not privy to what was going on at the front of the scuffle.
I heard a loud jingling of keys, but the commotion was so rough in that narrow area, I was pushed brutally aside, the air knocked out of me. More tumult ensued
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and footsteps rushed past. My head ached so badly I couldn't move. When I finally lifted myself up on one arm, I saw Danu's head priestess, the keeper of the keys, lying in a heap, beaten and bloodied on the stone floor, the flames mostly all gone out on the garland on her head.
I crept over to her and touched her shoulder. She was cold. The keys had been torn from her belt. I listened at her chest, but there was no heartbeat.
Time blurred and shifted again.
I found myself on the great stairs before Danu's palace, among the priestesses. Danu appeared from within the nearby forest, stepping out onto a clearing. The white of her gown emitted wisps of ethereal light, like mist rising from damp water. She stood firmly, her legs wide, and leaned slightly forward. Ready for battle, she emitted high-pitched vibrations like dozens of shivering tuning forks. Each time she moved, turning her head or lifting her arm, faint trailers of herself appeared momentarily and dissolved.
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