Celestia

The little moura popped her small head out of the water and shook the drops off the top of it with an energetic toss of her hair, or fur, or scales. (Mouras aren’t easy to describe.) It was slightly chilly because, after all, it was late November. Good thing it wasn't frigid, although, if truth be told, she didn't mind the cool flow of the underground streams to the places where they emerged. Those waters were her home, and every gurgle, every ripple, was hers to play with. She was happy. The waters were where she felt the happiest.

This little being, whom we just have to name so we'll call her Celestia, in honor of the blue of the water, the azure of the skies, and the limpid indigo of her eyes, preferred certain water sources for a habitat. She liked to play where humans had placed an artistic sculpture, meaning a set of stones to catch the crystals that flowed forth as liquid. There was always an assortment of weeds and grasses surrounding these areas, plus people would come to quench their thirst. They came with a parched expression on their faces, then left, sated, often departing with a bucket of the clarity that ran a steady course, day and night. Fountains, with springs gushing from their ever-open mouths, were delightful.

Celestia took care not to appear after dark, or even at luscofusco, which is what Galicians call dusk. She did this because she didn't want to frighten the humans, nor did she want them to chase her - as some surely would - with sticks and a burlap sack. Like most mouras, she remained pretty much invisible, unless she felt safe enough to come out of hiding. Humans always thought that her kind inhabited places where a treasure was buried, which might or might not have been true. However, Celestia the moura had no use for gold coins or jewels, she never searched for them, so she couldn't verify if there were any of them near her favorite spots. Her wealth lay in the freedom to swim through clear, cold streams. Such an enviable existence, when we think about it.

"What's this?" Celestia asked, on a bright, sunny day when early winter finds the paleness of the sun and stretches it above the tops of pine trees like an artist with a steady hand for applying her acrylic. “What is sparkling over there?”

The moura had spotted something with a kind of glimmer among the lacy fronds of the fentos that swarmed about the worn stones of the fonte where waters were splaying out in search of hands or pails. Here and there among the fentos (or fieitos, as some called them in Galician), even more feathery in form, were the shaggy heads of the fiúnchos. Celestia drew near, and the delicate scent of anise wafted toward her from the weed. If she rubbed it or stroked the stem, the fragrance would increase. It would have reminded her of the rosquillas sold at country fairs if she had ever gone to one. 

"It looks like a ring," she said to herself, "a tiny little ring that could only fit on the finger of a baby." Celestia didn’t live with humans, but she’d observed them, and knew some of them were almost as small as she was, and they cried.

Humans don't quite understand the mouras who exist just on the edge of things, on the edge of their known world. The Amazons were like that - liminary or peripheral beings whose appearance changed or varied according to the person who had seen them. But Amazons were not mouras and maybe had never existed, except, perhaps, in the minds of men who wanted to conquer them. They weren't known to carry weapons or engage in battles of any kind. Our little moura was very peaceful, in fact, and meant no harm to anyone. Her ability to dart about quickly, along with her shapeshifting skills, helped keep her safe. 

"This could be real gold," noted Celestia, "and there's a small heart on the band." She immediately set to wondering how such a thing could have fallen into the thick greenery by her fountain, which some called A Fonte da Moura (thank you very much for recognizing my place of residence by naming it after me, Celestia always said). oOthers just called it A Fonte da Nai, the mother's fountain. Maybe it was called that because it was the closest to the village, so mothers could go for water and return quickly, which was better if they had a baby at home. 

Some people will look aghast at the idea of a mother leaving an infant in a crib, all alone, but for many women in that part of the world it was the only choice, unless they carried their babies on their backs. That made it so much more difficult to manage the pole and leather straps for carrying the buckets of water, because the hard pole was placed along the shoulders. It’s hard to sit a pole on your shoulders if there's a baby clinging to them.

Celestia, who was mythical and perhaps not even real, felt an immediate obligation to find the owner of the ring. Had it fallen off a small finger? Or could it have dropped from the cloth handkerchief of the mother when she removed it from the pocket of her apron? The question was how to go about restoring the ring to its rightful owner, while keeping a person who might be greedy for gold, no matter how small the amount, from snatching it.

"I need a plan," affirmed Celestia, who was in truth a very determined little moura as well as an honest one. She was like that because, so far in her centuries of existence, no humans had come to violate her habitat, contrary to the other things she'd heard where people actually went hunting at night. Why would anybody want to capture a moura or a biosbardo, anyway? They can't be sold or eaten (heaven forbid!), can't be kept as pets (they would wilt or wither in captivity), and they can't be trained to fetch. Their only usefulness came from feeding humans' imagination. Which, of course, says a lot about how much we need them, but also makes them elusive.

Celestia knew it wasn’t a good idea to take the ring into the village. If she went knocking on all the doors, people might be frightened to see her. “Maybe I could dress up as a young girl and go house to house,” she thought, but dismissed the idea quickly. “A little girl wouldn’t have a ring like that unless it had been stolen.” 

The next idea she had was to put an ad in a local paper, but then she realized few people read the newspapers. Not that they were illiterate, but they worked from sun up to sun down, and there was little time for reading between chores. On top of that, the moura had no money to take out an advertisement. Yes, that’s rather ironic, seeing’s how everybody associated the mouras with gold. Some were even said to sit on a rock, combing their long hair with a golden comb. Celestia wasn’t one of those mouras. She had her water home and her freedom, but nothing more.

It soon became clear that the person who had lost the ring would have to return to the fonte. That was where Celestia would wait, but she would hold onto the scrap of yellow metal until she was certain it was time to hand it over. She held on tight, too, because she was determined not to misplace it. Somewhere out there, probably not too far away, a little child, a baby, was missing a ring. Its mother must have placed the golden circle with the heart design on a chubby pinkie finger and it had strayed from the tiny hand, landing in the grass.

Celestia watched and waited. She never gave up hope, day after day, year after year. She knew the child would no longer be able to wear the diminutive ring, but the sentimental value would have remained. Who was mourning its loss more, the child or the mother? 

None of the women who went to fetch water seemed to be the right one, but suddenly one approached the mouth where the water flowed forth. She didn’t put her bucket under the stream, though; the woman, who was no longer young set it to one side and rested her weary bones on a flat rock. Her body creaked and the strands of hair that poked out from the kerchief that covered her head were salt-and-pepper. Her eyes were beautifully slanted the way eyes are when the person’s family has lived in that part of the world for generations, perhaps forever.

Celestia couldn’t take her eyes off the woman. Although bent over, she wasn’t hunch-backed. Her spine was strong from carrying water, cutting the tall grass with a scythe, milking cows. The bending over was a simple, momentary concession to thought and weariness. While she sat, she let her gaze wander over the area near the fountain, stopping its movement often in order to focus on a blade of grass, a thistle, a bit of moss or lichen. Clearly she was hoping to find something, although that hope was so tenuous that it was barely there.

The moura knew then that somehow the ring belonged to the woman. The woman who might never have been to a Fonte da Nai because she had been left at home in her crib. Her mother, the loser of the ring, would never return for water, but her daughter, whose name might be Isolina, was there to take her place. Both mother and daughter had shed many tears over the lost object because it had been worn by many daughters in the family. It had been lost before Isolina ever got the chance to wear it, which was certainly a bad sign.

Nevertheless, the moura brought out her only, her tiny, treasure and left it in the exact spot where she had found it, beside the same fentos and fiúnchos where it had appeared decades before. She had never taken her eyes off them, so she was able to use her speed, darting in while Isolina sighed as she picked up her bucket to thrust it under the cool stream coming from the stone mouth.

When the bucket was full, Isolina rose and took hold of the handle. She turned and, right there, in the spot where her mother had told her she’d dropped it, she spied the ring. She had indeed lost it on taking out her handkerchief to wipe away the tears that wouldn’t stop. Isolina’s father had been shot by the fascists during the war and had never seen his daughter. So many children had grown up that way. The ring had come from his family, and Isolina’s mother felt like she had lost her husband again when the ring disappeared.

And so goes the story of Celestia, the little moura. She might have returned the ring to its rightful wearer if she had been sure of who that was, but nobody had come, sat down, and looked around the fountain so intensely as Isolina had. When she saw the ring now, the woman almost shrieked, but then she laughed with joy, even though she knew that it would no longer fit on her finger. No matter, because she could wear it on a chain around her neck.

As she turned to go back along the path to the village, Isolina began to hum a soft tune. Out of the corner of her left eye, she thought she had spotted something move quickly, something small, with blue eyes. She realized then that the mouras really do possess treasures. One just needs to know how to find them.

Epilogue

As I read this story, I wish there were a moura to help me. You see, I too had a gold baby ring and it was lost when my home was ransacked. Since it was gold, some greedy human made off with it. Or so I thought.

Suddenly, the little band I had worn until it grew too small reappeared in one of my drawers. It was like magic, because I don’t recall putting it there and hadn’t seen it in years. So much had been stolen from me that I just assumed it was gone, leaving the memory of how special I felt having a real gold ring, given to me by my mother. It was a family tradition, just like it was for Isolina.

Smart me, I put the little ring with its heart on my keychain. (I don’t usually wear things around my neck.) I loved seeing it there and would rub my index finger over it. Like Aladdin’s lamp, it opened up onto secret things, tiny words spoken softly to me by my mother. 

The ring on my keychain lasted for a day, or maybe two. Then I lost part of the keychain, the part closest to the lanyard. The part with the baby ring. I drove back in a rush to the store and inquired. They told me yes, somebody had found it in the parking lot. I picked it up at customer service and counted my blessings.

A few minutes later, I happily pulled into another parking lot to run another errand. I caressed the ring, then went into the store. Afterward, back in the car, I realized I had one more errand and headed to another store. That was when I saw the ring was missing from my keychain. No amount of searching around parking lots or along floors made it appear.

Still, I can’t stop hoping that Celestia or some moura like her, will bring back my beloved treasure. I have to believe that my treasure is in her small hands.