The Fire Opal (13 page)

T
o the south along the beach, under the limestone overhang where Da and my brothers used to fish for black pollack, there was a system of natural corridors that opened into a cave, deep enough in the wall of rock that a burning fire could not be seen from any passing boats. Because of the jutting nature of the headland, we lay completely hidden, a haven from anyone on shore.

We slept there that night, though I could hardly call it sleep. My mind was in a daze, reliving the noise of the gun and the way it had shaken and deafened me, the face of the soldier in the rain and the tide.

In the daylight, we came down from the cave and stood on the stones where my father and brothers used to fish. Hard rain still fell, and gales blew, and when it all quieted
a little, a mist descended so that we could see no horizon between sea and sky.

Mam remained half sitting, propped up against a blanket in the cave. I led Francisco inside and gestured for him to go near her, and speak to her as he had the night before. He squatted down and whispered to her in Spanish. I saw again, with a racing heart, a subtle effervescent light encasing Mam, her eyes stirring faintly as if with memory. Ishleen and I watched breathlessly, but soon, as if the energy and faint animation were too difficult to maintain, the barely visible twinkling light fled all at once.

Francisco gritted his teeth and closed his eyes, his hand hovering near the gunshot wound. I told him that I should clean it. He sat down on the ground. My hands shook as I carefully removed the makeshift bandage. I dabbed a cloth with whiskey and cleansed the gash in his skin. He winced, squeezing his eyes shut hard.

When it was finished, Francisco stood and sighed, then went back out and wandered a few yards away. He sat on a shelf of rock with his arms wrapped around his bent legs, resting his face on his knees.

The tide filled the pools between rocks with pollack and skate. I had brought a fishing pole, and while Ishleen sat with her legs dangling off the rock, catching fish, I stole glances at Francisco, who brooded there, staring down into the dark water.

At dusk, the splatter of the rain on the sea took on a soothing, almost hypnotic sound. The mood of the weather had gone from violent to soft. I built a fire and
cooked the fish Ishleen had caught. We all ate, and then she went into the cave, where Mam was still propped up. Ishleen laid her head on Mam’s lap and fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.

The descending sun burned red in the humid sky, cleared of clouds. Francisco and I went south past the rocks to a long strand of beach, an unfamiliar stretch that looked like an alien country in the red light of the waning day.

Big pieces of Francisco’s wrecked ship bobbed and rocked on the waves, with some bits stuck in the sand or the rocks. As we approached, I was stunned to see the tide washing over a giant figure of a woman wrapped in kelp. We ran to it and discovered the twelve-foot-tall figurehead from the front of his ship.

“Nuestra Señora de la Soledad,”
he said.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“Nuestra Señora …,”
he began. “‘Our Lady.’”

I nodded.

“… de la Soledad,”
he continued, and hung his head, searching his mind for the word that might translate it best.

“‘Alone,’” he said.

“Our Lady Alone? Lonely?”

He shook his head.
“Soledad,”
he said softly, then looked at me and said enthusiastically, “‘Solitude’!”

“Our Lady of Solitude,” I said thoughtfully, and studied her. I cleared her damp polished face of seaweed, then ran one hand over her prominent cheekbone. Her mouth was the same shape as Mam’s, lips pressed closed and
tense at the corners. Her wide open eyes were set upon something that no one but she saw. She was a giant beauty, but petrified in her eternal longing, seeing nothing but the thing missing from her.

Walking down the length of her supine body, I studied the gracefully carved hands, both pressed to her heart. At the bottom of her dull rose-colored dress, the wood was fractured in places; salt had gathered there and glistened white like streaks of snow.

Francisco gestured for me to help him bring her up from the water. With effort, we dragged her farther up the beach and stood her, impaling the broken wood beneath her hem as deep as we could into the sand. She towered over us, a monument leaning toward the western sea, facing the waves.

“She’s looking toward the Holy Isles,” I said, pointing at the horizon.

He nodded, understanding immediately what I had said.
“Las Santas Islas,”
he said.

He brought out his compass and showed it to me. The Spanish words that I’d seen there before were
Las Santas Islas
.

Instead of north being the top of the four compass points, west was. The face of the compass was embellished in places with Celtic knots.

I marveled that he, too, knew of the Holy Isles, and I remembered what Emmet Leahy had said about the ancient intimacy between the Irish and the Spanish. The triple spiral, I realized with wonderment, was connected somehow to the Holy Isles.

“I used to dream of sailing in search of the Holy Isles,” I said.

He nodded.
“Peligroso …
dangerous journey.”

“But beautiful,” I said.

“Sí.”

He tapped his forehead with his finger. “Maybe only
islas …
isles in the mind.
El sueño de un niño
. The dream … of a child.” He stared darkly toward the horizon, where the sun was still descending, causing the sky to burn very red and the streaks of gold to go purple. Gulls flew at all altitudes, cawing mercilessly above us.

“I believe in the isles,” I said, and touched my chest, nodding, in case he didn’t understand. “I think they are there.”

I handed him back his compass, and as his arm brushed against mine, my heart gave a little jump.

He noticed this and looked at me thoughtfully, then came close, a tender flinch in his eye. He touched my hair, sweeping a strand away from my face. I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I might fall, but in slow motion.

He embraced me and held me close to him so that I could feel his strong heart beating against my neck. Closing my eyes, I felt myself melting into him, drifting into some other state of being, in which every pulse in my body tolled like a bell. After such upheaval, the world was recovering itself with a heightened intensity. The wind rose and fell, deepening some moments to a high chorus, then fading into silence.

In that hour, as the sun disappeared and left the sky
dark blue, it was as if we were utterly alone on the planet, with only Mam and Ishleen safely dreaming in the nearby cave, the giant lady of solitude presiding over us.

It was dark when we crept back to the cave. I took my place beside the slumbering Ishleen, and he took his place on the other side of the fire, which was almost out. A few times as I started to sleep, I opened my eyes and looked over at him in the light of the dying embers. His eyes were open and he stared into the darkness above him.

In the middle of the night I heard soft voices. Both Francisco and Ishleen were deep asleep. I got up and crept out through the corridor to the threshold, following the sounds.

The water was very still, the sky above, clear and wildly starry, and each star’s reflection shimmered on the water’s surface, a quiet festival of lights.

On the shelf of rock where Francisco had sat in a reverie earlier in the day were two figures wearing purple jackets with silver braiding—the uniform of the crew of
Nuestra Señora de la Soledad
, the same jacket Francisco wore. At first I could make out only their silhouettes and minimal movements, but the wet silver braiding issued a faint illuminated mist that rose like steam from their shoulders. I did not breathe, and gradually my eyes adjusted enough that I could see that the two young men were dark-haired like Francisco. They whispered and conferred excitedly with each other.

One of them saw me and informed the other one and they froze where they were. For some reason that I did not understand, I knew that they were dead or no longer of the world Francisco, Ishleen and I lived in. And then I realized why. They were the other two rescued Spaniards, Francisco’s friends who had died when they’d been shot.

The one who had seen me first took off his jacket, leaving it on the rock. His human silhouette lost its contours and he became a dark liquid shadow that poured itself into the water. The other one followed suit. When the water they had disappeared into had gone quiet again, I looked at the jackets that lay on the rock, sleeves in expressive postures still steaming, the wet silver cording ignited.

I looked out at the sea. It must have been filled with the Spanish dead, yet the elements seemed to be rejoicing and excited, in the way the two Spaniards had been before they’d seen me. Shouldn’t the sea feel like a giant tomb, I wondered, floating with Spaniards and a single murdered Englishman? Instead there was a shivery animation to the new silence and the starlight, a charge on the air and an exhilaration barely held in check. I thought of Francisco sleeping inside, and my heart quickened. He seemed like the single survivor of a dark-haired breed of gods. Maybe he’d been meant for the sea as well, but Ishleen and Mam and I were keeping him, holding him in this other world.

When I looked again at the shelf of rock, the two jackets were gone.

A few minutes later, Francisco appeared at the threshold of the cave, carrying the lamp, looking questioningly at me.

I hesitated, then said, “Seals. I was watching them swim.”

He raised his eyebrows and smiled, then exclaimed in a soft voice, “Seals! They are …” He struggled to find words. “Humans.”

“Like humans?” I asked.

Ishleen came out then, rubbing her eyes sleepily.

Suddenly, as if it were a vision, a Spanish boat appeared, an armada ship.
“La Hermana de la Luna!”
Francisco cried, and held up the lamp, waving his arms wildly at them.

The ship dropped anchor. With the water so calm and the moon so bright, the sailors could see the rockiness of the beach and knew not to attempt to come closer. Two men boarded a small boat and were lowered to the water. They navigated between the rocks and came toward us as Francisco ran anxiously into the sea. He and the Spaniards spoke in urgent tones to one another.

Ishleen ran back into the cave and came out with the soda loaf. She stood on the rock shelf and waved it, offering it to them. The small boat came in close, and one of the Spaniards accepted it, but he did not seem worn with hunger the way Francisco had been, and their boat looked much less battered, regal even as it waited there on the clear horizon, sailors watching from deck. Francisco
pointed to the ship’s carved figurehead of a young woman leaning seaward, her dark hair the same length as mine. Straining forward from the stern, her forearms extended and palms facing up, her posture and her entire bearing suggested that she was on a kind of noble quest.

“La Hermana de la Luna. ‘The Sister of the Moon,’”
he said.

“She looks like Maeve,” Ishleen said.

Francisco looked at it again and then at me, and nodded in acknowledgment.

“Vamos,”
the Spaniard said to Francisco.

I panicked, thinking of Mam inside and how I was sure Francisco could bring her back to life.

“No! Don’t go!” I cried out.

Francisco locked eyes with me, and we stood facing each other waist-deep in the bay, steadying ourselves against the gentle surges of the waves.

“¡Vamos!”
he said. “Come.”

I looked at Ishleen. “Let’s bring Mam and go with him.”

“No, Maeve!” Ishleen said. “We can’t leave Da!”

I knew she was right. I looked at Francisco with pained reluctance, and shook my head.

He came in close, pressed his mouth to my ear and whispered,
“Gracias.”

A shiver ran the length of me.

I closed my eyes and felt his lips on my temple. He let go and stepped back from me, leaving me with racing pulses.

Francisco looked at his fellow sailor and said something
fast in Spanish. The sailor looked at me and said, “He says he comes back for you one day soon.”

“Promise,” I said.

“Promise,” Francisco repeated.

He was about to get into the little boat when something occurred to him. He unbuttoned his purple jacket and handed it to me, nodding that I should take it. I thought of the ghost Spaniards wearing their wet jackets on the stone. It seemed an ill omen, but he urged me.

He came close again, nodding very definitively.
“Por favor
, Maeve. You please keep me
vivo.”

I pressed the coat close to my chest as he climbed into the boat.

I looked to the other sailor.
“Vivo?”
I asked.

“It means …
alive,”
the sailor answered.

I held the jacket to my chest and watched as the little boat met the big ship. Several men helped Francisco on board and greeted him with embraces. A distinctive-looking man among them, tall and very thin, with wild black hair, looked out at Ishleen and me wistfully and waved.