Veil of Time (25 page)

He shrugs. After a while he says, “Now, I don’t know much about physics. As I say, I never did go to the university. But I was reading in the dentist’s office the other day that yon fellow Einstein had a few things to say on the subject of time.” He taps his finger on the back of my hand. “It seems to me he was saying time is relative, just like you were telling me. So maybe you’re not just crackers.”

“I wish,” I say, “that I could introduce you to Fergus’s mother. She’s the queen and quite good looking.”

He tuts. “She’ll not be looking for someone of my station.”

I tap the back of his hand with my finger. “She would be lucky to have you. Any woman, say, over the age of fifty-five, would.”

He tries not to look embarrassed. “Are you going to pay for these scones or what?”

I laugh, though I don’t feel it. “Jim, if I did warn Fergus about what’s to come, would it upset the outcome of history?”

He shrugs. “It might. We might end up coming
from
Pict
land instead of
Scot
land. Perhaps we would be speaking Pictish now instead of English.”

“Then maybe he should stay.”

“No. He should leave. What if he gets himself slaughtered?”

I can’t imagine the thought of getting rid of Fergus is too displeasing to Jim, but he’s being kind. I pay the waitress, counting out change without thinking about it.

I am not happy to wake the next morning and find myself in a white house, which is what Mrs. Gillies used to call any house with windows. I wake to find myself in the pitch-dark, but not the kind of dark out of which Fergus emerges. I wonder why I was ever taking pills in the first place if I can’t induce a seizure when I need one.

I spend my time at the computer, surfing through theories about time and its workings. I find out that traveling through time is not actually ruled out by Einstein’s theory of relativity. I learn that a group of scientists, who worried about having their very serious discipline being transformed into science fiction, got together to prove that time travel is not possible. They have been trying, but they still haven’t been able to prove this.

I rub my eyes under my glasses, push my desk away from the computer, and take a walk to the top of Dunadd, looking up at the configuration of stars in their slow sweep of the sky. It strikes me that the constellation
Orion with his belt and tunic actually looks like Fergus in his cloak and belt.

But what if this is the end of traveling for me? What if this is as far as the story goes?

Off and on and without enthusiasm I push my cart around what passes for a supermarket in these parts: narrow aisles of enormous bottles of pop, whisky, and endless sliced bread. The checkout girls chatter to one another in an almost undecipherable accent but talk to me at a speed reserved for the mentally challenged. I come from Glasgow, after all.
Glaschu.

I sit on my blue couch after a dinner of rarebit, with Winnie asleep on my lap, turning my bottle of pills over in my hand.
Do not exceed the stated dose.
No fear of that.

Jim knocks on the window and rescues me from my dilemma. I don’t know why he has come. He doesn’t say when he lets himself in.

“I’d offer you a cup of tea,” I say, “but I can’t move on account of the cat.”

He sees to the kettle himself, but he is quiet.

He sits beside me with his tea, a little too close with the side of his thigh. I don’t know what to make of him tonight. Winnie arches her back and stretches.

He picks the yellow bottle of pills from the table. “What are these?”

“They regulate seizures. I haven’t been taking them, but it’s still two weeks since my last one.”

“Maggie,” he says, “maybe you’re not going to go back.” He picks up my left hand. “I see you’re not wearing your wedding ring anymore.”

I take my hand back. If he only knew where my wedding ring really was.

“Look,” he says, “I know I’m a bit older than yourself.”

“Are you angling?” I ask.

He says, “A wee bit. But we get along like a house on fire, don’t we? The way I see it: we’re two lonely people who need not be lonely.”

I take his cup. “I already have someone.”

He leaves, and I feel lonelier than I have ever felt in my life. I am lying on my couch with Winnie on my chest when I first notice the heat in the soles of my feet. The world narrows down, first to the patterns on the wallpaper and then to the particles of wood that went into making it. The particles swirl, then spread apart until I am looking down into the atomic, subatomic world, and everything is getting heavy, and at last, at long last I am falling through.

19

M
y movement in time doesn’t match up exactly this time, and I find myself back with Illa beside the fire on the floor of Fergus’s house, waiting for him to return.

That was two weeks ago, and I am dying for his shape to fill the doorway, to get close to his smell of moss again, the drape of his hair between my fingers, the texture of the woven cloth on his arms. I want to place my cheek against his again and breathe against his ear, feel his chest expanding against mine.

Illa brings to me a little wooden bowl with a carved top. Inside is a handful of what look like old sixpences, but which on closer examination turn out to be Roman coins. I tip them into my palm, heady with the realization
that not all that long ago, these pieces were being exchanged at the Roman marketplace. Perhaps Illa has stolen into her old home at times to play with this shiny booty. I tip them back into their little bowl, smiling at the pleasure Illa has found in sharing her secret with me.

I touch her arm and bid her come close. She nestles against my side, and perhaps being back in her old place permits her something I’m sure she wouldn’t do in front of her father: a few tears make dirty paths down her cheeks. She doesn’t resist when I pull her against me and the tears turn to sobs. Perhaps no one else has held her since her mother died. I play with her fingers like I used to play with Ellie’s, tracing the spaces between hers. She laughs when I tickle the palm.

I study Illa’s face, trying to extract from it Fergus’s features to get at the mother. But there is not much of Fergus here, not even the hallmark nose. I am looking straight at my competition. She slips her head into my lap. From time to time I reach out and prop up the pyramid with more kindling. Almost automatically I start to sing the bedtime song that Ellie liked:
Golden slumbers kiss your eyes, / Smiles await you when you rise. / Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry, / And I will sing a lullaby.
We had it on a Beatles record, too, and Ellie preferred the jazzed-up version, but not when she was going to sleep. Illa’s eyes close. She is after all just a baby. I have no idea how long I stay by the fire with the weight of my
daughter’s head against my thighs. It feels like all I ever wanted.

I notice the spot on the floor where Fergus and I slept the night before and, as I have so often over the last two weeks, replay that scene. The blanket he laid under me is tossed against the wall. I set Illa’s head on the dirt for a moment while I reach for it, and fashion a makeshift pillow for her head with another from the pile of blankets that must have come from the wife.

I begin to wonder if Fergus aims to return to me tonight.

When I open the door, Marcus stumbles in. He has obviously been set guard, and thankfully so, because I am able to ask him for
aqua,
and when I do a little play illustrating the need to wash, he goes off in the direction of the spring and comes back in a while carrying water in a pitcher with designs of black horizontal and vertical lines.

I leave him again at the door, take a sip of the water, then get out of Illa’s line of vision and strip off my undergarments, made up as they are now of stretchy knickers, string, and ancient leg wraps. The water is icy, but I am able to do a decent job, first with a splash to the face, and then, in the absence of a sponge, with a cupped hand to my nether regions. I dry off with the dusty corner of one of the blankets and feel ready, should Fergus ever come back.

Illa sleeps on, so I take the extra blankets outside,
past the sleeping guard, and shake them out. One on the bottom is a tapestry of a man and a woman, but not this woman. I think I had better keep that one out of sight. Back inside, a little way off from Illa, I set it on the floor as a pad and stretch out under the others. They smell of mold and years of sitting by themselves in an abandoned stone house.

Fergus doesn’t come and doesn’t come. I can’t sleep because of wondering about Fergus and because I fear I am hoping for too much here. The fire burns to embers, and I begin to doze. When I come to, Fergus is standing over me, only I see as he moves into the light of the fire that it is not Fergus but Talorcan. I feel his body come close and kneel beside me; in the shimmer of light sent up by the flames I follow the pattern of the boar across his forehead. His fingers close around my arm.

I sit up and say his name. He says Ma-khee, and then he is earnest in what he has to tell me. “You have to come with me, Ma-khee. I will take you and Illa to Glashan where you will be safe.”

I don’t like his hand on my arm. I say, “I’m waiting for Fergus.”

He shakes his head. “You will wait a long time.”

I shake his hand off and scramble to my feet. “Why? Has something happened to him?”

“No,” he says, “but he won’t leave Dunadd, and the Picts won’t spare him.” He tries to take my hand. “Come
with me and you will be safe.” He slices his throat. “Let Fergus die here.”

“
Cha tig,
” I say. I will not come.

He says again, “Come.”

“
Cha tig.
”

He kisses my hand before he leaves, then steps across the sleeping Marcus, just as he must have done to get into the house in the first place. I go to the door and deliver a kick to the slave’s backside.

I bring him inside the door and make him sit.

I say, “Stay,” in a voice that gives him no choice. “I’m going to find Sula.”

The path to the druidess’s hut is hard to negotiate in the dark, and slippery from the rain. I choose to ignore the protocol for calling at her door and slip right inside. I duck under the first row of drying leaves, expecting to find her asleep, but finding her instead sitting on a stool by her fire, as though she had been waiting.

She gestures me over; I’ve been gone for two weeks, so I’m glad to take her hands in mine.

I kneel beside her. “I have something to tell you.”

I have gone over a line or two in my head on the way up, but all those escape me when she fixes me with her gaze. I wish that I could lapse into English and that she would understand, but I have to struggle through with the Gaelic I know.

“Sula, I told you I was from Glasgow, which is true.
As a child I lived in Glasgow. As a wife and mother I lived there, too. I also said I came from Dunadd, and that is true, too, but I don’t come from the Dunadd you know.”

Sula nods. “You come from the ancestors.”

It would be so much easier to explain if I did come from the ancestors. I shake my head. “I come from tomorrow.”

Sula looks confused. “Tomorrow when the sun rises?”

“No,” I say. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, from many generations into the future.”

I don’t know the Gaelic for “generations,” so I say “families.” But Sula is nodding, and she must have understood.

She opens my hand and smooths her whole hand over my palm. “My teacher told that there was only one time. This is why we see the dead on Samhain.”

I touch her arm. “Sula, I know what is to happen at Dunadd. The Picts are going to take it back, and there will be an earthquake so big it will send the sea out to Crinan Bay.”

Sula is nodding. “And the boar in the hillside?”

“That will come, too.”

She grips my hand as though I’m a life raft. “These things have already come to pass in your time?”

I nod. “You have to tell Fergus. We have to take Illa and leave the fort soon.”

Sula squats by the fire, running her hands over the flames. “I told Murdoch and then Fergus what I have seen in my stones, but Murdoch went off this morning to gather an army, and Fergus sees only his duty.” She shakes her head. “Their father Ainbcellaig taught them well.”

I go to the door, but I don’t know where I’m going, so I come back again. “I have to get to Fergus, but he won’t understand about this one time of your teacher, will he?”

Sula stands and fixes my gaze. “Only the druids have understood this.” She steps closer. “In your time, are you a
ban-druidhe
?”

I shake my head. I am no druid, not like this witch of Dunadd before me, with her magic stones and her very unchristian notions. I go back to the door. “Do you know where I can find Fergus?”

She comes and opens the door before me and points into the cold night. “As a boy when he was troubled, he could always be found on the ledge below the cliff.”

I turn and hug her, this little woman with her long grey ringlets and her tattooed fingers. I have the sense that our paths are about to diverge. There would be no point in telling her what’s to become of her kind when the priests take over.