Veil of Time (28 page)

Brighde had holed herself up at the top of the fort with the monks and sent Sula down to live with her people. She had stationed guards all about, and no Pict was permitted to come or go. No traders were allowed in, and grain and salted meat were being rationed. With Talorcan gone, there was much scheming now among the Picts of the boar.

Fergus sent the messenger off to the crannog to eat. He sat on the shore, looking out across the water dotted with the thatch of crannog roofs like this one. Men were out in their curraghs fishing and sometimes sleeping. All was peaceful here; and yet, if they had to, would these people not sign their allegiance to King Oengus? How long before Radha’s family could no longer keep them or risk their own throats? Fergus wanted to return to Dunadd and take his mother off the fort, by force if need be, but he knew she would call on her guards before she let him do that. And he would be able to persuade Sula even less, now that she was down among her own people.

Ma-khee sat down beside him and wrapped her arms about his knees. He took her hand between his and kissed the knuckles, rougher knuckles these days, as a woman’s should be.

He spoke slowly so she might understand. “I don’t know how long we will be safe here. It has begun, everything Sula foretold. It rips at my heart to keep pushing us farther from Dunadd, but I see no other course.”

The woman seemed to understood. She picked up the black cat and laid it in her lap.

“I would have you with me,” he said, “if you will abandon the place from which you came and seek a new life with Illa and me.”

He set her hands in her lap, patted them, and patted the cat. She seemed to want to speak but couldn’t find the words. He noticed a tear drop off the end of her nose.

“I no longer have a husband or daughter,” she said. “But I do have a son.”

She held on to his knees so that he could not get up. But she need not have feared, because he was pleased by the news. “Then I will take him for my own. Where is he?”

“He is at a school,” she said.

“In the east?”

She nodded. “Yes, in the east.”

He wrapped his arm about her shoulders to steady her. He worried suddenly that she might choose the son over him. “When we have fought and won or lost Dunadd,
then I will take a few men and travel to bring your son to you. I make this promise to you, Ma-khee.”

She didn’t seem as pleased as she should have. She sighed. Fergus laid his lips against hers and felt her teeth with the tip of his tongue. He had seen pieces of gold in her mouth, surely a sign of high standing.

“I think in your land you are a queen,” he said. “You have run from that royal house and fear you might yet be captured. For this reason you say nothing about this place you come from.” He placed an imaginary crown on her head. “This is what I think.”

She laughed and shook her head.

“Perhaps we should go there,” he said, “take over that kingdom and live there in the east with your son.”

She said nothing. They watched the black cat run around them with its back arched. Ma-khee reached for it and placed it against her cheek. She said the word
Winnie,
but he did not know this word, or if the woman’s tears were happy or sad. She was strange to him, strange in the way things affected her, like the stone that Fergus MacErc had brought from Erin, the stone of Scotta. And then Fergus remembered the stone itself. How foolish not to have brought it, though the cart might not have borne such a weight. Now it would be left to the Picts, and they might not treat it so kindly, especially being a thing from Erin.

The woman left, and yet he couldn’t keep his thoughts from her, couldn’t help reaching for her in the
nights that followed, tracing the contours of her spine even while she cried. He didn’t understand what her tears were about, but he hoped she loved him and would shed tears over him, if things did not turn out in the end as he planned.

21

W
hen I come round from sleep this time, Jim is holding my hand.

He says, “You’ve been out for an entire day, you know.”

He says I’ve been crying in my sleep.

I sit up. “Where’s Winnie?”

He laughs. “You’re not going to believe this, but I found her coming down from the fort.”

I sigh. This is all too much—first me, then the cat. I guess the witch hunters had this much right, that the black cats were in cahoots. I know from my research that the witch hunters tortured and strung up black cats just as they did the women, but no historical records hold their names dear.

Jim gets up. “Let me make you some porridge. I’ll pour some milk on for extra strength.”

After he’s gone off to the kitchen, I lie back down. My tears run into my ears, picturing Fergus and that goat he was pretending to know how to milk. I succeeded only because I’d seen it on television once. Squeeze and pull, that’s what they said, and no one was more surprised than me when it worked. No one, except Fergus. He made me jump the way he called out, and then every face was turned to him as though he had been bitten. I conjure over and over that quick embarrassed smile while I listen to Jim bubble up the oats and come back along the hall to the bedroom with my serving in a willow-patterned bowl.

He sits on the bed and hands it to me. “I heated the milk.”

“You’re a jewel,” I say, and then smirk as though I might not have meant it.

He throws my pills between my knees. “I thought you might need those.”

When I pick them up and turn them over in my hand, they rattle in their plastic container, little yellow pills with a very loud voice. Every time I open the top they shout out their question: Which life is it going to be, Maggie—this one with Graeme, with the thesis and a PhD, maybe a teaching job and a move to a house in Edinburgh, where life can begin again? Or do you want your life with Fergus on the run from the Picts, with Illa?

If I don’t make my choice before this year is ended, I’ll find myself on the operating table and then the choice will be made for me.

Jim looks at my desk strewn with papers and stacks of books. He notices the piles of paper on the floor. “How’s the work going?”

I shrug. “I have the material. I just need to organize it. Problem is, it’s hard to be impartial when you know a witch personally. Two witches now. Another one has appeared, only this one is young.”

I look at the disbelief on Jim’s face and say, “We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”

I rifle in my bedside drawer and find a bag of jelly babies. Jim picks out a green one and bites the head off. “Don’t hold back on my account.”

“This new witch is really young. Her name is Iona, oddly enough.”

“Not odd at all,” he says. “The old Gaelic name for the island of Iona was
Eilean nan Draoidhean,
the Isle of the Druids.”

I bite the head off a red jelly baby. “You’re joking.”

My mind runs back to the look on Sula’s face when she heard the bells of the Christians. How else would she feel towards the Christians who had usurped her sacred isle?

“Marcus said that Iona was
Aegyptius.
”

“Gypsies,” he says. “That’s where we got the word. Today they’re just Tinkers.”

“She is like a ghost,” I say. “Pale, otherworldly in a way that Sula wasn’t.”

Jim reaches for another jelly baby, a yellow one this time. He doesn’t bother dismembering the thing, just throws the whole baby into his mouth.

He says, “
Wasn’t?
What happened, did she die?”

I shake my head. “No, we’ve left Dunadd and moved to a place called Glashan. Have you ever heard of it?”

“Aye,” he says, “it’s not that far from here. Of course, they built a hydroelectric dam up there in the 1960s.”

I smile, because this Loch Glashan is another thing I shouldn’t have known about. “We’re living in a crannog—a word, by the way, I didn’t know until Illa told me.”

He looks away, embarrassed, but I can see him smiling. Sooner or later the facts, I hope, are going to overwhelm him.

“If you like, I’ll drive you over there,” he says. “But the road is a bit iffy these days.”

I am excited to go and start moving towards my coat. “My car would be better, then.”

He laughs. “No, I’m not going in a car with you. It’s not safe.”

I stop by the door, put my hand on my hip, and tut. “Fine.”

He pauses. “But there’s no crannogs left there now, you know.”

Of course there aren’t, but it catches in my throat
nevertheless. Houses of sticks and mud weren’t going to last to tell their stories like the buildings at Dunadd. I have lived with these people, and suddenly I have to see them as wisps of air, barely that, not even a mention in a history book.

It takes me a week to work up the courage to go, a week of nights alone in my springy modern bed. A whole seven days without one glimpse of Fergus. Winnie has become restless and wants to be out at night. Graeme calls and wants to know what I’ve been up to. Fergus is what I have been up to, but I can’t tell him that. If I did, he would hear in my voice how much I want to get back there.

I sit in the car with Jim, waiting for him to turn on the ignition. My fingers are drumming on the dashboard.

He says, “We don’t have to go out to Loch Glashan, you know.”

I clear my throat. “No, I want to.”

A week away from Christmas and the roads are a dull, grey brown and bowed down under sogging vegetation. Jim and I seem to be the only ones about, driving past houses smoking from their chimneys, Christmas trees lit in the windows. The skeleton trees manage only a few spindly fingers over the road.

“What do you do for Christmas?” I ask Jim.

He takes his eyes off the road only long enough to glance at me. He shrugs. “Remember, I do still have two
daughters. I get asked down to England, to whichever one is not entertaining their mother.” He’s quiet for a minute. “I wouldn’t want to see her, not now, not after all these years.”

“Is she still with the bloke she ran away with?”

He laughs. “God, no. But she is married, which is more than I can say for myself.”

I don’t push it any further. Maybe he will go south for Christmas, and maybe I will be ringing in the bells with only Winnie for company. Graeme is to spend Christmas with his dad in Glasgow, where there’ll be festive lights to ogle over, and Oliver’s parents will provide Christmas hats, Yule log, brandy-lit plum pudding. We spent a dismal Christmas there last year with the vestiges of a marriage still hanging on like a broken tree ornament.

Along the rough forestry road to Glashan, Jim’s low-hanging car dips with a splash into potholes. We are driving up through rows and rows of Scandinavian conifers, such a different look from the oak forests that covered the hills the last time I was here. Sight of the loch comes and goes until we pull over by the new dam. The slam of the car doors echoes off the water. It is not until I am standing by the imposing concrete wall that I realize it has been erected directly across the bay where our crannog once stood. Gone is the smell of smoke and dung; all the tilled fields have grown back in now. There’s no shore here for a young girl to run along, no curraghs to cast from; just a wall of water and below it a great drop.

Across the loch, the outline of hills has not changed, nor has the peaty color of the water, but the place feels very empty. An oystercatcher flits across the water, casting its shrill intermittent call back at us.

I say, “There used to be wolves, you know. I can hear them at night.”

We walk along the edge of the loch to a mound of stones just breaking the surface of the water. “They excavated it,” says Jim, “and found a lot of leather and spatulas, a midden of course.”

I think of the satchel Fergus brought for me from the tanner along the loch, finely crafted, light tan, with a running thread of darker leather through the flap, like something you’d find at a craft fair these days. I could walk around with that satchel at any Highland Games and no one would be any the wiser.

And then, of course, there would be traces of a midden, the ever-present midden. It’s all I can do to stop myself objecting to them chucking stuff over the side of the crannog, but I am bringing my sense of a planet sinking under a burgeoning population to these people and their counterparts all over Europe barely making a mark. The forests back then haven’t been cleared, the seas polluted; no holes in the ozone. Everything is ticking along as it should and will do for almost another thousand years.

It has started to rain, but we pull up our hoods and walk down to the gravelly shore where the tideless water
is repeating itself in pointless waves. Some old man’s curragh must have once sat upturned here with its hide skin catching a glare off the sun. I picture Fergus pulling up the curragh to this pile of stones in the water, which in my imagination is back to being its old crannog self. It hits me with a pang, as though that life back then were my real life and this projection into the future the phantasmagoria.

Jim fishes in his trouser pocket and hands me a hankie.

On the way back home, the wipers are having trouble keeping up with the downpour.