The Fire Opal (24 page)

We stepped back under the awning, but she left the candelabra exposed to the rain, which had no effect on the flames.

“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.”

“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
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 torc bracelets
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.”

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.

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
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.

Uria came from around a tower wall, grown double her height, flesh, hair and her armor painted silver for battle. The muscles at Uria’s neck strained, and her jaw ground against itself. When she opened her mouth, foam flew from her lips. She pointed her weapon at Danu, and I recognized the Answerer, although the sword was completely intact and the one-eyed face on the handle wore an expression of horror.

Uria seemed to ignite from within like a human lantern, and the fire that came from her body channeled
itself through the handle of the Answerer and flew at Danu like a bolt of lightning.

But Danu moved quickly, and the bolt hit a great oak tree behind her, setting it aflame.

Uria aimed again for Danu, but this time the weapon itself seemed to convulse, and catapulted from her hand as if of its own will. The sword pierced the thick trunk of another oak. Several of Uria’s henchwomen rushed the tree, burning themselves in the blazes of the giant oak beside it as they struggled to pull the Answerer free. But the sword was so deeply buried in the bark that it snapped off with their efforts. Uria’s henchwomen dropped it in the blaze surrounding the burning oak, too injured to retrieve it. Then Danu grabbed it and hurled it into the darkness of the forest.

Uria crouched, cinders and smoke issuing from her eyes and ears.

“That is when I understood how badly Uria needed that weapon. Without it to channel this eerie fire that generated directly from her own body, she was engulfed and scorched by it, in danger of self-immolation.”

Uria ran toward the ocean and toppled down in the tide, vast issues of hissing steam rising from her. After a few minutes the steam died down, but she seemed unable to rise, needing the water to keep washing over her.

Danu advised us, her priestesses, to stay back and not to take any action.

Uria’s henchwomen guarded their goddess fiercely, some of them shape-shifting into vultures, flying threateningly in circles.

“Go!” Uria’s head had risen out of the tide. “Into the woods. Bring the weapon!” she ordered in a booming bass voice.

“But, Goddess, it is broken,” one of the women said.

Uria rose onto one muscular arm, shaking with effort. “Bring it to me!” she called, and the fire under the surface lit her face and neck so it shone a blinding white, threatening again to break into flame. In an agony, she submerged herself again.

Time blurred and shifted again, and now I seemed to be watching everything from the air. The forest burned in bright torrents, smoke rising.

“You see, Uria knew that the handle is where the power resides in that weapon. The blade itself is nothing special and can be easily replaced. But the ice-cold marble and the unique mineral composition of the handle had a way of conducting the fire of her nature through her and away from her so that she could use it against others. Without the Answerer, Uria is helpless and will burn in her own rage. And that is why she preserves herself in the cocoon of ice.”

I could no longer see Ard Macha below. I was back in the little room with Danu. She grasped the Fire Opal in her hand, and all imagery on the walls disappeared.

“At that point, we didn’t know the attack on the birds and the murder of the head priestess were all distractions to cause a confrontation. Uria’s henchwomen had broken into the altar and had taken the Fire Opal.

“The primeval forest, the last of its kind, was destroyed. That fire could not be put out, and the Fire Opal is the only seed with the power to replant it. Uria’s goal has been to make nature less than it is meant to be. Over time, people have forgotten their natural sovereignty, their intimate ties to the elements. She has managed to keep the opal from me for this long. I have it again, but we are not finished.

“Some of the elementals that lived in the woods died in the flames, while others fled, some by air, some by sea. When she managed, in her weakness, to get back to her ship, Uria had my Fire Opal. But she needed the Answerer as well. A slew of screeching vulture women flew into the smoky woods as the fires died down, pulling burned oaks up by their roots and tossing them high and far in long arcs to the sea.