The Fire Opal (11 page)

Tom Cavan stayed in Ard Macha, and even though I sometimes saw him watching Ishleen and me from a distance when we drove the cows, we managed to avoid him. I had the sense that he was thinking hard about something, trying to decide his next move.

Sometimes Ishleen and I noticed a front of mist on the sea past Woman’s Crag, more visible in the hours when the daylight was waning. It was not like a regular curtain of mist rising off the water, because it seemed to locate itself in one area.

One dusk as I was taking our clothes in off the line, I looked down at the sea. The mist was whiter and denser than I’d ever seen it. It parted very slightly in one area, revealing a shiver of twinkling lights, then closed again immediately. As the sky darkened, the mist became indiscernible.

The next evening Ishleen and I went out to look for the curtain of mist, but it seemed to have vanished.

CHAPTER 10

D
onal and Fingal had been gone almost two months when a violent September storm raged along the coast and a Spanish ship hit Woman’s Crag. Then, fighting stiff southwesterly headwinds, the boat turned toward the shore of the mainland and, trying to beach itself, was wrecked in the jagged rocks of the coast.

An hour before it happened, Mr. Cavan had told us he had heard talk of English soldiers in Killybegs, just south of the ford. For more than a week, people had been whispering about the Spaniards that had come in fleets of ships to help the Irish drive out the English. But the Spanish had been defeated right away in the southeast waters on the other side of Ireland. The retreating Spanish ships took the long course all the way to the north, rounding the head of Donegal, and continuing south
along our western coast toward Spain. The weather had been against them, the seas tumultuous and unpredictable.

Da, who’d lived four decades on this storm coast, said he’d never seen such violent, heartbreaking weather.

Wearing oilcloth coats and boots, Ishleen and I followed Da and Mr. Cavan to stand in the driving wet and look at the great galleon, its sails shredded and beating madly at the masts.

“Something devilish about it,” Da said, squinting into the wind, his face streaked with rain.

“A death ship,” Mr. Cavan yelled over the noise of wind and sea. “Surely its fate is already written.”

“God help them!” my father cried, and made the sign of the cross. As the ship hit more rocks, there was a loud, slow crashing noise.

Da and Mr. Cavan made their way down to the beach in the storm to see the ship still trying to approach our precipitous shoreline. It was filling with water, leaning heavily to one side, and fires had started within the hull in places not deluged with rain. The ship’s name, emblazoned on its side in calligraphic letters, was
Nuestra Señora de la Soledad
.

The Spaniards began to jump from their ship into the water. The waves lifted them high and low, and it was terrible to see how the water dashed them against the rocks. Ishleen and I embraced hard and hunched near the rocky hillside, holding our own against the wind. Some of the dead came in on the tide while others remained
facedown on the water’s back, lifting and dropping, going under and appearing again.

My father and Mr. Cavan took their boats out, nearly losing their own lives trying to rescue any man still living.

Mrs. Cavan stood on the cliff above, her shawl and skirts beating wildly in the wind. Tom appeared suddenly behind her, peering down at me and Ishleen.

Among the dozens of Spaniards struggling to come ashore that day, only three survived.

Mr. Cavan enlisted a reluctant Tom to help bring the injured Spaniards up to their house. Mrs. Cavan had set a big pallet on the floor, and the men were laid there. Ishleen and I helped Mrs. Cavan go to work on the men’s injuries while my father and Mr. Cavan took turns keeping an eye out for English soldiers. But they both came back in when the weather got too bad to stay outside. The wind howled like twenty banshees, and Ishleen clung to me, pressing her face against my stomach and squeezing her eyes shut. The Cavans’ cottage, which had always seemed rooted to the limestone of Ard Macha, shook as if it might be lifted onto the back of the wind.

“When the storm quiets, the English will come,” my father said. “They’ll see that wreck out there and all the dead, and they’ll come up here looking for any still alive.”

“Yes,” Mr. Cavan said. “And the devils’ll shoot the
Spaniards on sight. We should be hiding them as soon as the winds calm.” He pulled aside a curtain and pointed to an area where their sow and her seven piglets were weathering the storm.

Tom, who was standing in the shadows, spoke suddenly. “What will the English do if they know we’re helping the Spaniards?”

My father and Mr. Cavan exchanged a glance. “They’d likely arrest us, but with your help, Tom, we’ll be driving the sow and her sucklings out of the little side room and hiding these men in there, and they’ll never have to know.”

Ishleen and I tore fabric for the men’s wounds. Two of them were unconscious, but one who could not have been much older than me kept opening and closing his eyes, as if he were in the middle of a terrible dream he was trying to awaken from. He mumbled and cried out, moving his head from side to side. He had black hair and thick, expressive eyebrows. On one ear he wore a small gold earring.

“Shhh,” I whispered, kneeling over him. Very gently I pushed the damp black hair away from his forehead and neck, and dabbed his skin with cool water. His eyes opened suddenly, and as he looked at me, he spoke in a fierce whisper,
“Todos están muertos. Todo mis amigos.”

Though I did not understand his words, the power of the grief in the sound of them caused a quake of emotion to rush through me like a wave. He winced against his pain and his eyelids fluttered, and soon he closed them again, breathing and moving feverishly. I felt stunned,
and remained there kneeling over him, wanting desperately to know what it was he’d said so that I could help quell his suffering somehow. I watched his lips as he mumbled, and saw something flash between two of his teeth: a small bright red jewel embedded there, probably a ruby.

Something made me turn. Tom was watching us with narrowed hawklike eyes. And so I moved away from the Spaniard and tried to behave casually, busying myself by stoking the fire. Da and Mr. Cavan brought the sow and her piglets into the main area of the cottage, and carefully moved the injured soldiers into the side room.

When the wind quieted, about half an hour later, Tom slipped outside. For a while, I struggled to stay calm, but feeling nervous about what he might be up to, I went out.

A swarm of English soldiers in red tarps was on the beach below, inspecting the dead and the ruined ship. Tom stood among them, talking and pointing up the cliff.

I ran back to the cottage, threw the door open, and shouted, “Tom’s speaking to the English soldiers! And I saw him pointing up here!”

“Christ, could that creature be my own son?” Mr. Cavan cried out, and Mrs. Cavan shot him an angry look.

Within minutes, four soldiers arrived. “We know you’re hiding Spaniards in this cottage,” one of them said. He was an imposing figure with a barrel chest and a coat much too tight for him. His big red face was streaming with rain. He looked around the place with squinting eyes, and sneered as if disgusted.

Pointing at the sow in the corner, he asked my father, “Is that your wife?” My father’s face went purple, and his jaw tightened. His hands became fists, but I saw him close his eyes and resist his impulse to hit the man. In that moment, tense with anger and restraint, my father’s muscles looked like they were made of iron.

The red-faced man stepped forward and moved the curtain aside, revealing the injured Spaniards.

The soldiers arrested my father and Mr. Cavan and took them to Dungarven, while a younger soldier, fair-haired with small cold eyes and a scar on his chin, took the three surviving Spaniards outside and shot them in the rain.

The rain kept on that evening. Ishleen and I went home, nervous that Tom might return. We were fretting over our father and kept looking anxiously outside.

Rain was pouring hard, but I ventured out onto the road again and again, once going as far as the place where the Spanish soldiers had been shot. That was when I saw one of them move, the young black-haired one with the ruby in his tooth. I stood there holding the hood of my tarp over my head, watching, hardly breathing, and he moved again.

My heart raced. I ran down to where he lay and knelt beside him. The rain had pooled in his ear and around the lids of his closed eyes. He opened his mouth and seemed
to be trying to drink the rain. I could see the wound on his shoulder where he’d been shot. I struggled to wake him, his eyes squinting against the wet. After much cajoling, I managed to get him to his feet.

Something fell from one of his pockets, and I picked it up. It was a small compass made of pewter, the sensitive needle under the glass window moving wildly, like something alive and in a panic. Decoratively carved within its window were words I assumed were Spanish and could not translate; just above those, I was stunned to see a tiny, delicate rendering of the triple spiral.

Not believing my eyes, I wiped the beading droplets of rain from the compass with the inside of my sleeve and examined the design. It was unmistakenly the triple spiral. Very gingerly I returned the compass to his pocket.

He leaned heavily on me as I brought him home, where I tended to his shoulder, using my father’s whiskey to clean it. His bloodstained shirt was in shreds, so I carefully removed it and helped him into one of Da’s warm shirts of heavy woven cloth, the color of oats.

I gave him some water to drink and offered him food, and though he tried, he could barely stomach it.

CHAPTER 11

T
he storm continued to rage throughout the night. The next day, I left little precocious Ishleen watching over Mam and the wounded Spaniard while I stole from the house, leaning into the wet wind and finding my way to Mrs. Cavan’s. She had no word of my father or her husband.

“How could Tom have done such a thing, Mrs. Cavan, to his own father and to mine?”

“There’s bad blood between Tom and his father,” she said.

“I’m very worried. He’s said to me that soon I’ll have nothing and that I’ll have to marry him. Is that what he’s up to, turning my father over to the English?” I grabbed her hard by the wrist and looked into her face. “If my father is hurt in any way at all, I will curse Tom’s name to
my grave! I’d rather move to Galway and beg in the streets. He doesn’t know who I am if he thinks he can reduce me to nothing and then win me.”

Mrs. Cavan looked as though I’d hit her in the stomach. “I will tell him, Maeve. I think if he believes it might bring you round to him, he’ll do the opposite and make sure your father stays safe. The fact is, for whatever reason, it’s you he wants to marry.”

I was about to rush out when she called me back.

“Maeve, if he does that for you—brings your father back, I mean—will you accept his offer?”

“I cannot promise you. All I can say is that if my father is not returned safely to Ard Macha, my hatred for your son will never be soothed.”