Veil of Time (29 page)

Jim asks, “Are you sure you’d never heard of Loch Glashan before?”

I shake my head.

“I wish,” he says, “there were some way of testing it all, but I suppose there’s not.”

When we get back to Dunadd, he wants to drive me round to my cottage.

“No need,” I say. “I won’t melt.”

I’m too distracted, too much still at Glashan to make small talk over tea and biscuits. I haven’t been taking my pills, but so far it’s been to no effect. I keep waking up in a room that does not smell smoky, keep pushing my spectacles onto the bridge of my nose and carrying on with my notes.

Winnie meets me on the way back to my cottage, jumping over puddles ahead of me. Here I am, a witch
with my defamation of the church and my own black cat. I round the final wall of the farm and notice something bedraggled sitting on my doorstep. Winnie runs off to investigate, but I need not look any further to know my own child.

“What are you doing?” I call to him.

He smiles with rain running off his chin. “Having a shower, apparently.”

I let him and his duffel bag in, strip off his duffel coat, and hang it over the bath. I bring him a towel and kiss his cheeks as I rub his hair dry.

“I thought you were going to Grandma and Granddad’s for Christmas.”

I stop rubbing to hear his answer.

He says, “But you were all alone.”

I hold him to me, feel his breathing against my chest. “I was all alone. Thank you.”

Looking like he has just come from a bath, his face shining and his hair standing straight up from his forehead, he seems like my little Graeme again. I don’t have a fire to sit him down beside, so I pull a tartan blanket off my bed and wrap it around him on the sofa, put a hot water bottle between his feet.

“Where’s your ring?” he says.

Fergus has it.
I look at my bare finger, still indented where the wedding band used to sit.

He looks at me with his father’s grey eyes. “You and Dad aren’t going to get back together again, are you?”

I shake my head and stroke his cheek for the little boy that he still is.

As I make him hot chocolate, he calls to me in the kitchen. “No Christmas tree either.”

“Oh well,” I say, “Our Little Lord Jesus was probably born in midsummer. You don’t hold a census in bleak midwinter. Perhaps we could get a palm tree. It was the church that plunked him down in winter.”

I hear him laugh. “Why did they?”

“To quash the winter solstice celebration. Why are you smiling?”

“Nothing,” he says, tugging the blanket up around his shoulders. “It’s just that you’re getting awfully militant in your old age.”

I run my hands through my hair. I suppose he’s right.

He says, “It must be the witches that have done it to you.”

I nod. “Must be.”

I want to tell him that I’ve known a few witches in my time, but he wouldn’t understand about “my time.” I let it drop, bring him his hot chocolate, and sit with him, share his blanket. We watch his choice of television programs until we both fall asleep.

Graeme is at the table eating cornflakes the next morning when Jim makes an appearance at the window. He says he’s come to say good-bye before he leaves on his trip down south for Christmas.

I wave him in, proud that the young man at his
breakfast is mine, that I can barely separate who he is from what I am myself.

“My son,” I say, laying my hand on his head. “Graeme, this is my neighbor, Jim, local historian, big know-it-all.”

Jim laughs. “Oh, thank you very much.”

Graeme looks suspicious.

“Do you have a Christmas tree, Jim?” I ask.

It’s a good excuse to send Graeme off to Jim’s house and see what he makes of this newfound friend of mine.

“He fancies you, Mum,” Graeme says when he comes back with a well-battered box under his arm. “Plastic tree,” he says. “I suppose it will have to do.”

Jim follows him in with another battered box of baubles. Graeme looks away when I kiss Jim’s cheek good-bye. If my son only knew what I have been up to in the eighth century with the brother of the king of Dunadd.

“Mum?” Graeme says, as we watch Jim’s car cross the bridge from our window. “Once you’ve had the operation, you won’t be coming back to Dunadd, will you?”

He has to say “Mum?” again, because I hear it on the periphery of my awareness, while I try to get myself around the notion of not coming back to Dunadd.

He touches my shoulder. “Remember you said you might move to Edinburgh?”

I nod. “I did say that, didn’t I?”

His face suddenly looks old and heavy. He says, “I suppose you’ve probably changed your mind.”

He goes and sticks the star on the top of the tree.

“I haven’t,” I say. “Of course I haven’t.”

He hangs up another bauble. And then another, but his actions are mechanical, and he is taking no pleasure from this. I feel guilty for the disruption to the life of what should have been a normal boyhood. I am paralyzed by the window and don’t know how to get to him. He kneels by the Christmas tree, but not in worship of our Lord Jesus.

When I see his shoulders begin to shake, I go to him, crouch down beside him, but I don’t touch him.

“It’s such an awful tree,” he says, and tries to laugh.

But then he is in my arms, sobbing, and it is so unexpected, I feel as if I am being driven backwards off a cliff. I guess I retreated to my corner after Ellie died, just like he did. I abandon any hope of finding something to say, a question to ask that might stop this avalanche. He curls up against me, big boy that he is, in a retreat to the unblemished fetus. And he stays there, we stay there beside the bare Christmas tree with its star until he can look up and I can kiss his forehead and there is a sense of getting back home again.

That night, after we have said good night, I sneak to the door and quietly don my Wellies. With my hood pulled tight around my face, I walk along the path to Jim’s house, then through the stile and up over the stone slabs towards the top of Dunadd. It’s one of those oddly balmy winter’s eves. The wind is set to push me right
over, but it’s a kind, nonbiting wind, and I can set my weight against it and walk, after a fashion.

Before I reach the top, I pass the place where the mason traced around Sula’s foot.

I wonder what they would say at the museum if I announced that the foot at Dunadd belonged to a woman druid. We’re too far gone along the man track even to allow the possibility. In the dark, I stoop and run my finger around the outline of the boar.

At the top, I find shelter in what is left of Sula’s hut and picture her tattooed fingers working her herbs and remedies, her long grey curls bouncing off the small of her back. Herbs drying from the rafters, the smell of mold and dirt and stinky roots. I picture Fergus’s outline in the doorway and feel his hands about my waist, lifting me against him.

At the edge of the cliff, I drop down to Fergus’s little ledge. Instead of the moon, there’s a muted light over the islands. I relax into my own solitude. For the couple of miles between the sea and me there is only the flat stretch of the Great Moss,
Moine Mhor,
boggy and sinking in its peat bath. All the birds are quiet on the Great Moss now; everything is still. No wolves or bears or beavers here anymore, only the faint bleat of a far-off sheep. The lights of an airplane blink high in the indigo sky, unaware of this solitude here on the hill in the grass.

I have no choice but to walk forward off this cliff in
the dark, this cliff of unknowing. The modern world has its answers: it knows how my brain functions and why it fails. It has noted the lesion on my right temporal lobe, and the answer is as easy as the way airplanes fly. It lays its silken path before me and bids me come.
Tiugainn comhla rium.

But it has no answer for one value against another. In the scale of my hands I hold Graeme on one side and Fergus on the other. Ellie sits right between. How can I choose? It’s not a function of the brain; it’s not the way man comes to the table and divides his counters into piles. It’s not a table at all, but a night sky and an ocean spread before you, and not the countable minutes of the clock, but a tunnel that starts and ends in this moment. You can’t walk through any of those things, only hover.

I leave Fergus on his ledge looking out to the islands, his hair blowing back in the wind. I leave him there for now, but can I leave him forever? Graeme wants me to try, to let them tease out the parts of my brain that don’t work for them. I will be saved from the best and the worst of myself. This, I decide in the dark of Dunadd, is what I must do. But not yet. I have to go back once more. Please, just one more time, let me go back to Fergus.

22

I
find myself in the woods with Iona this last time picking hazels and acorns from the leafless trees and looking for something she calls
druidh lus.
I look around for Fergus but see only Marcus sauntering nearby with a dagger tied to the end of a long stick. As we push into an area of dense thicket, something large moves quickly away from our feet. Marcus lifts the goat’s horn that has been hanging from his hip and calls back in the direction of the loch. Iona pays it no heed. She tugs on my sleeve and shows me how to pull a withered plant for its roots, which she snips off with her fingernails and drops into a jute pouch tied around her waist.

My day brightens when Fergus, the old man, and several others come running past us, some with spears,
some with daggers like Marcus’s, all with their tunics bouncing off their backsides. Iona doesn’t look up, just keeps picking and dropping things into her bag. It’s been so long since I saw Fergus, I have to hold my hand by my side to stop it from catching the hem of his tunic and pulling him back to me. I strain to catch a last glimpse of him, but Iona is calling; she has found her sacred plant growing halfway up an oak tree.

“Druidh lus,”
she says, pointing, with as much animation as I have yet seen come over her.

“Mistletoe,” I say.

But Iona is not interested in learning English names. Her pale blue eyes pass over mine only fleetingly. I am glad that the tradition of mistletoe and Yule will carry forward all those years into my time. God only knows, and only if she is a pagan goddess, how far back it goes the other way.

Iona pries the plant off its oak host with a stick and lays it carefully on top of the greenery and white berries in her lap of nuts. Somehow I think the mistletoe of these people has more significance than a means to a kiss.

There’s a clattering through the bushes, and then we jump back as a wild boar tears past us with the men in pursuit, all of them laughing for the distraction or just for the anticipation of hog meat tonight. I am half excited myself. The tradition of roast turkey at Christmas must come later.

All the way back to her hut, Iona holds on to my sleeve. When she closes the door, we are in almost complete darkness, except for small chinks in the mudded wattle where the light slips through. It takes a minute before I see her moving about near the floor. She takes a knife from her belt and starts carving off small pieces from a root.

She holds one out to me.
“Seo.”

I don’t understand what I am being administered or why, but I take it despite my mother’s warnings. The root is damp and slippery in my hand, bitter to the tongue.

The men are still out when I get back to the loch. I am still trying to break the fibrous root into pieces I can swallow. Before I go into the crannog, I spit it out on the ground and cover it with soil.

I find Illa sitting with the old woman at the back of the crannog, gutting small fish from a barrel. It is Illa’s job to toss the entrails over the fence into the loch. When I lay my hand on her back, she turns to me. I wish Graeme could see that look in her eyes. I wish he could look in through this window and see that Ellie was not just one moment in time, but a kaleidoscope of moments. I go back through the crannog to let the cat in at the gate, straining past the lap of loch waves to the noises of the now distant hunt. Illa comes running with a handful of fish guts, which Winnie wastes no time clearing up.

The old woman takes my offering of hazelnuts and shows me how to set them around the fire to roast. I see now the holly strung around the wattle, another tradition that will not be lost. I wish Graeme could be here on this eve of winter solstice, for this is a better Christmas than at my house.

When it begins to grow dark, I worry for the safety of the hunters. I wonder about Iona, who rarely joins us in the crannog; I wonder whom she plans to trap beneath her mistletoe. With Fergus gone so long, I hope it is not him.

Eventually, the men come back with much noise and excitement, telling the tale of the hunt with large gestures and much cheering. They gut the boar on the beach, bringing in the dogs for their evening meal, and then string the beast from the rafters with a bucket beneath its noisy dripping. The old woman chants, walking clockwise about it, saying prayers of thanks for a successful hunt. Outside, a steady snow is dropping into the loch.

I am glad to slide in next to Fergus when we all lie down on this Christmas Eve without the Christ. The church Christ wouldn’t approve of what we are about to do, though I imagine that radical Israelite knew where he came from and didn’t care. Oh Lord, I am trying not to care either. Fergus taps my nose to draw me back from my distraction. Our noses touch and then our lips. I run my finger along the ridge of his eyebrows and kiss each eyelid. When he reaches under
my wraps, the earth falls away. A bit like time travel, I suppose.