Veil of Time (20 page)

I have to laugh. I suppose to the onlooker I am showing all the signs of derangement. “It seems to suit you fine.”

He shakes his head. “It doesn’t suit me fine at all, which is why I was after you finding me a grannie in that dream of yours.” He forks a few chips into his mouth. “There’s not much you can recommend about living alone, eh?”

“No,” I say, “but at least you can have your epileptic fits in peace. Not counting nosy neighbors, of course.”

“Och,” he says, “you’re lucky you have a neighbor, one with an imagination, I might add. You’re lucky I haven’t summoned the wee men in white coats.”

“What if you could go back in time?” I ask him. “Where would you go?”

“Aye, well. That’s a question all right,” he says. He tilts his head for a better slant on the problem. “It
wouldn’t be to that last king of Scotland, James the sixth—he disappeared off down to the English court and nothing was seen of him again. A right disgrace he was to his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. It was him, you know, who put a light under the fire of the Great Scottish Witch Hunt, so to speak.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I think it would be to the time of the Bruce, right after the Battle of Bannockburn—what a glory it must have been to know his army had sent the English packing and Scotland was free at last after all the struggle. I think I would give away most of my life just to know how that felt.”

I am in my staring trance.
Sometimes you just happen on the thing in a person that stirs the quick. It’s a nice thing to see, the quick, and I have to stare. But it makes Jim look away.

I nudge his arm. “The eighth century isn’t that bad either.”

He laughs. “Take away the strapping Fergus, and all you have is plague, wars, a serious lack of heat.”

“You have the witches. Dunadd has Sula, the druidess. I bet in the sixteenth century, the witches were still just doing what witches had done since the beginning of civilization, practicing their herbs, midwifery, a bit of fortune-telling; only now the church was running scared.”

After lunch we walk farther along the front to the cathedral, which is made of the pink granite the islands are famous for.

On the way back to the car park, my ankle is bothering me.

“Probably turned it on one of your jaunts up the hill.”

“Probably,” I say. But I don’t believe it.

For all this being normal, I would swap this tourist town in a second for the chance to be standing by the door of Sula’s hut watching Fergus stagger about with Murdoch.

Jim and I don’t say much on the first part of our journey home. It’s getting dark, and the yellow headlights on the single-track road keep our attention forward.

“I’m sorry about your wife,” I say, somewhere between one small town with a
GO SLOW
sign by a tiny stone school and the next.

Jim looks over at me, then back at the road. “Aye, well. Life has a way of throwing things at you. I’m sorry about your daughter. That must have been very hard.”

I don’t know whether he can see me crying in the dark. I try to take silent breaths, but they want to turn into something more. He says nothing. The branches that arch over the road from their tall hedgerows seem leafless and grim.

I know he is waiting for something more, and for some reason in the dark I want to tell him. “She died during a seizure. She was with a babysitter, one of Oliver’s students, while we went to a god-awful faculty party. I think the thought of her fighting for breath while I sipped on a glass of sherry was the hardest thing of
all. I was barely there at all for the funeral, just going through the motions, trying to fend off the pitying looks. Oliver couldn’t speak to me for weeks after. I couldn’t speak to myself.”

Jim reaches across the gear stick and places his hand on my knee. “It wasn’t your fault, any more than it was my fault that Janet got cancer.” He clears his throat, takes his hand back. “She got thinner and thinner. She was in so much pain I wanted to put the pillow across her face and be done with it.”

His pain is so palpable, it almost eclipses mine. We sit in the silence of it for the rest of the journey.

Dunadd is already in view before I say, “By the way, why did you have to go to Oban?”

He turns and winks. “I didn’t.”

He flicks the noisy indicator on, and we swing in right to the road that has no special name except the Road to Dunadd. Ahead of us, the hill looms in the darkness, just a presence in the dark, nothing clear about it at all tonight. Nobody there, not even the tourists.

He wants to drive me round to the cottage, but I tell him I can walk the short distance and better to get the car back under cover before it expires altogether.

I hear his back door close, and it is my main intention to get back to my house and let the cat in, but Winnie appears out of nowhere, and I see no reason now not to climb up the hill.

She follows me in the dark as though this had been
the plan all along, running out from behind boulders as though she were being pursued, and maybe she is. It feels like I am. You can hardly distinguish the eighth-century fort from the present one at night, even despite the absence of gates. I run my fingers into the holes left by the iron rods, while Winnie balances on the ledge above my head, her tail twitching, a proper black Halloween cat.

The brow of the hill is cold and windy. The one remaining segment of Sula’s wall does nothing to block the elements. Out beyond the fort, the sea, which the tide has taken out even farther than usual, harbors everything it ever knew and kept secret. None of the peaks and valleys between hills has changed since Fergus and his people. But they are not telling either. Real history, the part that is not written down, is mum. No matter if time is a long thread running into a vanishing horizon or a mass of simultaneously moving circles, nothing is being said tonight or any night.

I slip and slide back down the hill on my bad ankle, back onto the path I was supposed to take in the first place. I nip across the garden, which is a shorter way to my sliding glass door than the road. But I stop at the lone standing stone. No one knows about Standing Stones. Even history draws a zip across its speculation here.

Winnie arches around my ankles. I run my fingers over the top edge of the stone made smooth with lichen
and wish it would speak. But at any rate I can thank it for remaining firm, for withstanding wind, rain and fire, and for sitting in a twenty-first century garden, still knowing something.

It is late when I return to the cottage, but I switch on the table lamp at my desk, push my glasses on, and sit with my pages, trying to form chapter headings. I’m not sure what I can do for the poor witches, the many Sulas who were dragged from their homes, tortured, and burned. I suppose I could nail my ninety-four theses to the door of the Cannongate Church in Edinburgh and demand an apology. But I can’t undo the division of the world into God and Satan that pitted the Good against the Evildoers in the first place.

And then there’s Fergus. What’s to become of him? Should I warn him that the Picts will overrun Dunadd? I’m not sure where in the three years of Murdoch’s reign we are; how much time I have left. Or is it even going to matter, if the Vikings are set to destroy Dunadd anyway? I don’t know if all this will be poised to happen when I go back next time. If there is a next time.

16

I
t comes sooner than I thought. No more than a moment after I come to in Sula’s hut, I’m up and shaking Marcus awake. He stares into my face blankly. But I need to know what year of Murdoch’s reign we’re in, no matter that Marcus’s eyes are closing on me.

I shake him again.
“Murdoch Rex. Quo anno?”

I am surprised I can even come close to conveying my idea, even more surprised that Marcus catches on. He’s a clever little eunuch.

He fixes his eyes on me. “Annus secundus.”

The relief makes me sigh. Marcus is watching me carefully, confused, while I work out that this must be the year 735. Of course, 736 starts in not more than a
month, and that’s the year Jim said the Picts take over, the year of the earthquake.

I prod Marcus’s arm again. This time he seems a little impatient for someone who is supposed to be a slave.

I clear my throat before I speak, because I’m not sure I should be saying this.
“Pictii Dunadd vincent.”

I’m sure it’s hopelessly wrong, but something seems to dawn on him.

He gets to his knees, dipenses with his blanket and with Latin. “When?”

“After the new year.”

Marcus bumps into Sula on his way out. When she asks him where he is going, he tells her it’s for food. But I’m still trying to read the change on his face that this news about the Picts overrunning Dunadd has brought. I’m sure now I should have kept quiet.

Sula takes me by the hand and leads me to her rows of earthen pots. She seems to have a lesson in herbology for me this morning. When Marcus comes back in with the food, he sets a wooden board of flat bread, a dish of sour cottage cheese, and a jug of milk on the floor. The milk, I judge from the smell, is not from cows. It tastes like the smell of manure.

I take a bite of bread dripping with cheese, then turn back to Sula. But Fergus is on the other side of the door announcing his presence. I swallow hard. When Marcus opens the door, Fergus walks in, looking uncomfortable, glancing first at me and then at Sula. Perhaps he’s embarrassed
by his musical performance outside the hut last night, but he keeps his gaze from me and simply hands Marcus a bundle of clothes. He is turning to leave when Sula tugs my arm to draw my attention back to her lesson.

I try to take in what she is saying about herbs and the circle she traces at the center of her palm, but I have the sense of Fergus hovering by the door.

She nudges me, points into a pot, and tells me a name in Gaelic. “For fever.” Marcus tries to help by giving me the Latin,
salix alba
. But I keep on glancing over at Fergus, and he keeps on not leaving.

Sula takes my hand and crushes a dried mint leaf into it.

Marcus tries to illustrate this one by holding his buttocks open and making noises. Sula gives up, sits down, and laughs. Marcus’s antics even have Fergus laughing. I smile despite my brooding, even though I feel sad watching his unconscious laugh with his head back and the grooves rising into his cheeks. Why couldn’t this lovely specimen have been wifeless?

Fergus steps forward and takes the bundle of clothes he brought from the stool where Marcus laid it, and this time he hands it to me himself. When I nod, as a way of saying thank you, he starts to fumble in a leather pouch with yellow and red design, not quite a tartan but getting there, then brings out a brooch and indicates it’s for tying my robe about my shoulders. I turn the piece of
jewelry over in my hand, such finely worked strands of gold in filigree about a polished green stone.

“Thank you.” I smile.
“Tapadh leibh.”

“Tapadh leibh,”
Fergus says. A smile spreads over his face, pulling his lips back from surprisingly white teeth. I suppose until sugar makes inroads, teeth will stay the color God designed them.

“Your singing was nice last night,” I say.

I stare at him boldly. He just looks embarrassed. I want to push his embarrassment by telling him he called me his love, but what would be the point if he isn’t free to do anything about it? I should resist, but I let him lift my hand and run his thumb over my fingers.

I look at him and think
mo chridhe
but try not to let it show. Fergus brings my hand up to his cheek, then kisses it before he goes to the door. I watch while the closing door takes him from me, but hold the feel of his fingers in the palm of my hand.

After he leaves, I move back to Sula, but she has apparently given up with the lesson and is poking around in the fire with a stick. I unfurl the bundle Fergus brought into a beautifully woven robe, almost like a tapestry and almost as heavy. The colors are deep and rich with tiny strands of gold. I want to pull it on, but Sula indicates not to. This must be for another occasion. There is a pointed hat of purple silk that clashes, to my modern taste, with the robe, but I can see I’ll be wearing it nonetheless.
A small bundle of hair ties fall from the inside of the hat. Marcus picks them off the floor and braids them into my hair.

Sula seems to need to sleep. She wraps her shawl about her and stretches out by the fire. Marcus disappears, and I am left to poke the fire. Anything will do to keep my thoughts from Fergus. I wonder why I am taking the moral high ground—whether he has one wife or ten, he is showing me how much he likes me. This isn’t 2014, after all, but 735, and the rules are probably different here. Still, it’s hard to shake the laws of the abbey, even though I might not get to stay here long. I only hope that where I am going in my fancy dress has something to do with Fergus.

Marcus comes in with an armload of rude wool and what I know to be a drop spindle—I have seen them in museums, and this method of making yarn was very slow to be displaced in Scotland. Drop spindling sheep’s wool would be hard enough, I imagine, the spindle being little more than a twirling weight, but whatever wool Marcus hands me not only does not smell that fresh, but isn’t given to holding together. I laugh at my failed attempts to get the spindle spinning uniformly, let alone to draw out a line of yarn. The look on Marcus’s face is one of contempt.