Authors: Regina McBride
“How does it do that?”
“Through the engine. The entire barge is carefully regulated from within.”
I thought of the mysterious ash girls below.
She opened a large door and beckoned me into a more shadowy region of the barge, where four form-fitting long-sleeved shifts stood on dressmakers’ forms, each at various stages of completeness.
All were lovely at first glance, but as I moved among them, I felt a shiver of dread. Only one, the palest of the lot, a dull golden yellow imbued in gray, looked complete.
I approached it warily, uncertain what about it and its unfinished sisters made me uneasy. Gudrun appeared from between two curtains at the back of the room.
“Why is only one dress finished?” Mrs. Cavan asked with a note of accusation in her voice.
“I was trying to work on the ceremonial dress for tonight. I need the young lady for a few minutes for a fitting.”
“All right, then,” Mrs. Cavan said impatiently. “I’ll go and see to Tom, and then I’ll come back for her. After the fitting, make sure she puts on the finished dress.” She pointed to the dull ochre-gray.
Gudrun beckoned me to follow her through the curtains, where the dress I had made stood in the process of being embellished and added to. Gudrun’s additions had made it appear even more like the metallic dress in Muldoon’s.
“I want to speak to you,” Gudrun said in an urgent half whisper. “Don’t worry. Uria’s not listening.”
“How do you know?”
“I can hear it in the rhythms of her breathing. And when she is listening directly, you always know by the pulse of her heart, which you can feel just perceptibly as if it were under your own skin.
“The dress must be completely in tune with you,” she said. “As a seal is one with its thick, glistening fur, and a swan is one with her feathers and her wings, so should a woman be with her garment. This dress, which you must wear for every important action in Danu’s name, must serve as your mode of navigation, your engine of transport.
“I am making a special pocket in which to hide the Fire Opal.”
We could hear the juddering echoes of Mrs. Cavan’s returning footsteps.
“Quick,” Gudrun whispered. “I just want to warn you about those other dresses she ordered for you.”
I followed her back through the curtains and into the presence of the disquieting dresses.
“She gave specifications…. They are all supposed to be dresses of oppression. This finished one,” she said, pointing to the dull golden yellow, “is the least cruel. That’s why I completed it first. The fabric is imbued with certain tinctures meant to keep you disoriented. Mrs. Cavan is looking for ways to hold a constant advantage over you. Clearly, she doesn’t trust you.”
She pointed to each of the others, every one a darker gray than the one before it. “This dress is meant to constrict your breathing, and this one is meant to make you lethargic. The last one is the worst of all. It is meant to erase your memory.”
“Erase my memory,”
I repeated. “Why would she want to do that?”
Mrs. Cavan’s footsteps were now echoing closer.
“Put on the finished one. Don’t worry. Just try to keep your concentration as best as you can.”
Before I took off my dress I remembered the piece of mirror and Francisco’s compass in the pocket. I took them out and slipped them into the pocket of the dull ochre dress, which Gudrun quickly helped me into. When Mrs. Cavan entered the room, Gudrun was busy fastening the back.
“Be sure these others are finished soon,” Mrs. Cavan said coldly to Gudrun, who bowed her head in response.
Stepping after Mrs. Cavan into the corridor, I immediately felt a wave of disorientation. I had to stop and lean with one arm against the icy wall to get my bearings.
Mrs. Cavan turned and focused on me with a fascinated satisfaction.
“The dress is a little tight,” I said.
“You just need to wear it awhile and it will adjust, I am sure.”
As I walked, the ground moved beneath my feet. The strange bluish pallor of everything was intensified by daylight. Shadows seemed to fall at suspicious angles. I turned once to look behind me and saw the corridors receding, as if the room we had exited only moments before was now a great distance away. Space seemed to shift unpredictably in this place.
We stopped at an open door.
“Go to him,” she said, and pushed me in. It was the room of the awful tableau, the bodies of the Spaniards behind ice. Tom Cavan stood dramatically in the middle of the space with his back to me, holding two little black iron boxes. I walked in slowly, each hesitant footstep echoing my reluctance on the polished ice floor, and stopped about a yard away from him. I sensed Uria listening expectantly, her breathing arrhythmic with long spells of quiet, and I could feel the pulse of her heartbeat as if in my own body.
Tom turned suddenly and faced me, elegantly attired
in his long velvet jacket with tails, white lace cuffs and a white lace cravat. His wavy hair had grown long and blew to one side in the gusts.
In spite of myself, I saw with a shock what other girls must have seen when they looked at him. He was extremely handsome, almost unnaturally so. Maybe if he had stayed completely still, if he had not spoken, that spell would have lasted longer and I might have held back my breath in reluctant admiration. But he moved and then he spoke.
“Welcome to your new home, Maeve.”
The sound of his voice flooded me with every terrible memory associated with him. I started to shake; my dislike, even hatred, of him overtook me. The floor moved and I swayed on my feet, and, even though I was cold, sweat broke out on my temples. I fought these waves of disorientation. The idea of submitting to him went against every nerve in my body.
“My mother told me that she advised you against asking questions.” His voice had an authoritative echo to it, and I realized that he was much taller than he’d been when I’d last seen him. I wondered if my senses were tricking me and this was all the effect of the dress, or if he had actually managed to gain height. He looked well over six feet tall. When I’d last seen him in Ard Macha, he’d been only about five foot ten.
“She doesn’t want you to be curious, but I think it’s good. I want to tell you everything so that you understand the kind of power I have here.”
I kept my eyes averted from his, feeling gripped by a wave of disorientation. This awful dress, I thought.
“It flatters you nicely,” he said as if reading my thoughts. I glanced at him. His eyes were tracing the contours of my form. His gloating, self-satisfied smile caused a rush of angry blood to heat my face. I discovered, to my relief and surprise, that the feeling of anger dispelled some of the disorientation.
He kept smiling as he gazed at me. “You know I’ve always been drawn to the fire in you. It’s always been my passion to see you blush and shake with frustration.”
He stared blatantly now, his eyes wide and his mouth slightly open with expectation, enthralled by any trace of my anger expressing itself.
Another wave of rage washed away more disorientation. I found that it was better if unexpressed and only felt. This way it did more powerful work.
He watched me with a dark, intrigued smile. Again, I was struck by his beauty. He seemed in his element in this cold light. I averted my eyes again.
It occurred to me now that he might have known that the oppressive dress would inspire anger in me, and that I would be smart enough to discover that the anger was an antidote to the poisonous spell the dress exuded.
“Why were you with English soldiers last night?” I asked.
He focused on me and seemed to be considering whether or not he should answer.
“Do you see all these figures behind the ice?” he asked.
“Spaniards from the armada ships. We have here the bodies of almost every Spaniard who tried to defeat the English in the Irish Sea.”
“So you are in league with the English invaders? You are a traitor against Ireland, happy to kill our Spanish allies?” The floor and everything around me was rock solid, absolutely still, and my senses clear.
He stared at me with an uncertain smile. Then he opened a door that led out onto the deck and pointed at three vulture women perched on the rail. Others floated serenely in the air above the barge.
“Uria’s ladies, as I call them, swarmed the corpses and siphoned the ghost souls. It’s a talent they have, siphoning souls out of bodies, living or dead.”
I was about to break in and accuse him of orchestrating this violence against my own mother and sister, but he cut me off.
“You remember the first ship that crashed? We brought the three men still alive to my mother’s cottage. One of those men you started fawning over, a kind of dark gypsy.” He stared at me, feigning a laugh.
My heart lurched with fear that he had Francisco’s body here somewhere. “Where is that man? Is he in the ice?” I demanded.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “No, he isn’t here, but the ladies are intent on finding him. He can’t have gone far. We have many of the others from the ship he was on.” He pointed vaguely at the wall. “In a way, it’s your fault. Perhaps if you hadn’t mooned over him, I’d not have advised Uria that every Spanish life be taken. So you see, many of
these dead are your fault. Some of them, perhaps many of them, on the ships that followed that first one might have been spared, but you had to fawn over that gypsy….” He paused and glared at me.
Then he approached me slowly. The chandeliers chimed above, a weird, inhuman-sounding music. He put his arm slowly around me, one hand pressed to my waist. Containing my fury and upset, I trembled hard, and he gazed with intent fascination at me. He took my hand and, accompanied by the bright, dissonant twangs of the chandeliers, led me in a dance.
I moved stiffly, but when he breathed in my hair, I couldn’t bear it and turned my head quickly away.
“You are responsible for my mother and sister!” I disentangled my hand from his and stepped away from him. “I saw them last night.”
“You are free to see them whenever you like. Every ice carving with light in it is a ghost. Most are the ghost souls of the dead, but some, like your mother and sister, are still living. Eventually their abandoned bodies will die, but their ghosts will live on to illuminate the barge. That light can burn eternally for us if we allow it to.”
“You’re talking about the souls of my mother and sister,” I cried, and the anger I could not help but express caused him to come close to me again.
“What you should realize, Maeve, is that I am offering you eternity and power.”
“I don’t want those things,” I said. “Especially not with you.”
At this, a dark look washed over his features. “If you
do anything that truly displeases me, I can have your mother’s and sister’s ghost souls placed in these black iron boxes where they will be perpetually isolated and in complete darkness.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” I said.
“I would,” he sneered softly.
“Well, then, I would have to fight back somehow.”
Something occurred to him, a serious thoughtful look coming into his eyes. He took my arm and steered me through a hallway, unlocking a heavy door that led to a staircase down into a dark, cold basement.
“She can’t hear us here. You must never meet with Uria privately. Only when I am with you.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Never mind why. Just don’t do it or I will put your mother and sister in these.” He held up the small iron boxes.
From his tone it was clear that he did not trust Uria. I was pleased at this revelation of vulnerability in him, though I did not yet know how I might make use of it.
All of a sudden, a door creaked open below. A little ragamuffin of a girl covered in blue ashes came out, one of her feet dragging a chain.
She peered up at us quietly and then said, “I’ve come out for more ghost matter.”
Tom smiled. “Let me show you, Maeve, what is done with the ghosts of the Spaniards. Come here.”
I had assumed that the ash girls, being apprentices to their mothers, would be at least Gudrun’s age, but all these girls were tiny, gaunt and large-eyed, dull blue ash
and sweat soiling their colorful hats and dresses, tufts of the matted fur linings peeking out from beneath their sleeves and skirts. Ashes coated their faces and forearms, and the dim steamy room of their prison was cobalt-blue with light from an oven kept ajar. All manner of metal wheels and pipes, things that looked like mystical contraptions, filled the area.
“Show this young lady how the engines work,” Tom said.
One of them turned a metal wheel, and a large round container funneled light into a complicated network of pipes, releasing steam. Pistons lifted and huffed mechanically.
“The ghost souls of males provide energy,” Tom said. “Those of females provide illumination, so that is what is harvested from each. This container we keep filled with male ghost matter. The ghosts feed the pistons with their energy, and the temperature and life force of the barge is controlled. The cold winds and icy conditions are channeled throughout on air currents that originate here. This barge maintains its own weather systems, and these girls are responsible for keeping it working. Of course, they have no choice but to do it. If they didn’t, the ice all around the mothers upstairs would melt.
“Uria has always harvested ghost souls as food and energy and light, but the armada ships provided a windfall.”
My mind worked wildly as I tried to think of ways I might find private words with these little ash girls, but like Gudrun and Phee, they recognized me for who I
might be: one approached, wide-eyed, and showed me her hands covered in burns from scorching cold.
“This little girl needs help. Look at her hands!” I went to my knees before her, taking her hands gently and peering into her eyes. “I demand beeswax to rub into these burns.”
Tom smiled, entertained by my desire to help, the way he had been when I’d held the dying baby bird he had knocked from its nest years ago.
“My friends, too, need caring for,” the child said in a soft voice, and all of them crowded me, showing me their burns.
“You haven’t changed, Maeve,” Tom said. “Still wasting energy on the insignificant pests of the world. Forget about the beeswax.”