Veil of Time (31 page)

I sit on the covers Fergus and I have slept under, smudging tears on my already dirty face, unwilling to get moving this morning. But the old woman needs my help dragging water in for boiling breakfast oats. She shows me how to drop the leather bucket over the side of the crannog wall where the fence has been cut shorter for such things. The rope attached to the bucket is coarse and rips at my hands, and a bucket of water is no small weight to pull up on a rope; by the time I get it on board, half the water has splashed out. I want to cry again, for Fergus being gone and for my being no use here. The women laugh, not to be rude, but I must be a strange thing to those who carry large bundles of everything and think nothing of it. Even the old woman carries more weight than herself in firewood. I would laugh, too, except that I’ve never been that good at laughing at myself. Especially not today, because of that spot on the path from which Fergus just disappeared, perhaps forever.

Close to dusk, when I am still hoping for the sound of hooves on the hard ground, Illa comes in and sinks down by the fire. I notice straightaway her flushed face and bring a blanket for her to lie on. She doesn’t want to move. Her hands feel hot.

I come close to her ear. “What’s the matter?”

She lifts the edge of her tunic to show me a gash on her thigh that has become swollen and infected. I remember now her fall against the bucket. I’d even forgotten about the rumble that caused it. The old woman comes over and shakes her head.

She pats my back. “Take her to Iona.”

As I begin to rush off to fetch the witch, the old woman takes my arm and gestures for me to carry the girl there myself. All a panic, because I have enough medical knowledge to know the danger here but not enough for a remedy, I thrust my arms under her and lift. She is solid, no small weight, but the urgency makes me move fast along to the gate, where one of the other children lets me through. I move heavily through the trees to the hut where Iona lives.

I’m surprised when Marcus opens the door to my call. It is smoky and dim inside, but I can make out Iona by the far wall and allow myself a fleeting moment of jealousy. But I lose it fast enough and set Illa on the floor by the fire.

I lift her tunic to expose the gash. “Iona, you have to help her.”

Iona gives the wound a passing glance. She comes over and blows into it, chanting her prayers. She has not been here long enough to have collected Sula’s array of jars, but on pieces of leather by the wall there are small piles of what look like pressed flowers, roots
of various sizes, and finely chopped bark. She reaches for a flattened piece of yarrow and crumples it into a hollowed-out stone, which serves as mortar to the pestle she grinds into the hollow, adding what look like dried hops. She pours water from a stone jar into a cup and sets the whole concoction by the fire to warm, then goes about making a poultice.

She reaches for a root, which she grinds in the mortar until there is a small amount of juice to pour into her palm. To make the paste, she spits as Sula did and mixes with her forefinger until she has something she can spread across the swollen cut. I lift Illa’s hand and put my lips to the dirty skin. I wasn’t there to save the first Ellie, but I promise myself I will keep this child from harm.

Illa’s forehead still radiates heat, and I think the infection must be bad to have caused this level of fever. Before long, the cup of flowers and bark begins to simmer and I draw it against Illa’s lips. Though she pulls back against the acrid taste, I bring her lips again to the cup. I am the mother here.

She lies down and curls up, so that I can have no thought of moving her again. But neither am I going to leave her. I did that once before.

Iona goes out with Marcus, and they stay away much too long, because I am in a panic alone with the sick girl. My thoughts wander back to the ceremony last night, but I can’t think of that now. The book of childhood ailments on my shelf at home in Glasgow tells me that the
infection can get into the bone or turn to gangrene and then to septicemia. Iona comes back in with a ring of some kind of woven plant, chanting while she sets it all about Illa. But my confidence in Iona is not such at this moment that I can believe in garlands of herbs or mere words.

I turn to Marcus. “Ride out and fetch Fergus!”

Marcus looks nonplussed. Only now do I remember Fergus’s words for me to stay strong, almost as though he knew something was going to demand it. Marcus stays put, so I sit by the wall and close my eyes. Illa sleeps, but I don’t. I just sit with my eyes open, listening to Iona’s murmurings, hanging somewhere people go in the middle of endurance, a floating island of semi-detachment.

In fact, I float all the way out of the eighth century back to my pillowcase and the photographs of my children on my bedside table. The window is dark, hit intermittently by the splash of a large raindrop. I close my eyes and try to push myself back. This is the second daughter I wasn’t there for. Perhaps now there will be no time to get back and find out if she survives?

23

F
ergus loved the woman, though she sometimes seemed weak as though she had an illness. It nagged at him that she had stood back from the circle last night at the solstice ceremony, ill at ease with his role as the horned god. She should have been proud, but perhaps she did not understand that he was not himself in the ritual, and the hands of the women on him were only the hands of Cailleach the goddess? Surely every people had such ceremonies at the midpoint of winter.

When he was getting ready to leave that morning, he was pleased to see her, but he did not want to touch her in case she should hold him back. He had to get to Dunadd. Even before the messenger came, his mother had been in his thoughts. But now that he knew she was
trapped in the fort, he knew he had no choice but to return.

He had consulted Iona, who was too young to be relied upon entirely, but she had cast her stones and they had seemed to say he should go. He had asked that in his absence she take Ma-khee into the woods to teach her of the plants that grew there. If Fergus’s people from Erin were no longer going to rule, then they were going to have to learn these ways.

Still, he longed for her, as he moved about the crannog in the early morning, folding dirks into a cloth wrap and glancing at her as she slept. He didn’t know what he was going to find at Dunadd, but in case of trouble, a man had no better friend than his dirk.

He didn’t like to leave Ma-khee, so he turned his horse away quickly and followed after Talorcan through the trees until the smell of the cooked pig and the smoke of the fire was lost to the air. It was good to put it behind him; there was work to be done.

Talorcan rode up behind him and slapped his back. “The woman Ma-khee has you slumped over like an old man. I saw she was not pleased by your dance last night.”

Fergus’s smile escaped him when he thought of how she had shaken his hand from her arm.

“When it is time for the spring festival,” Talorcan said, “how will she feel then?”

Fergus knew Talorcan was right. During winter, Cailleach took on the aspect of the crone, and so the stag god
could only pretend copulation with her. But at Beltane, when Cailleach appeared in all her youth, there would not just be prayers of thanks, but ritual copulation with the druidess. That was why Iona had to be kept away from men from day to day; she was being saved for the Beltane ceremony. The success of the summer cull and harvest would depend upon it. Being her father, Talorcan would not be able to play the role of the stag god, and so it would probably fall on Fergus to do the rites. Murdoch always played the stag at Dunadd, and for this Fergus was glad, for though he loved Sula, she was not young and pleasing in that way. Still, it was the way of things, nothing to hide from. The druidess would lie back in her ivy and her mistletoe, and the people would chant as they circled the goddess and the stag god celebrating new life to come.

Wives accepted this, but Fergus could tell Ma-khee would not. For at least this reason, it would be better for them to be gone from Loch Glashan before Beltane.

“Why does this woman disturb you?” Talorcan asked. “And why is she not bursting out at the front already?”

Fergus wondered the same thing. He had asked Iona to give her herbs for childbearing. But like any man, he could only wait for the goddess to smile on him. Even during last night’s celebration, as he watched Ma-khee across the fire from him, he wanted to take her out under the stars, even when it was time for Iona to come in wearing the druid’s weed and speak to the queen of fire.

On a night such as the Day of the Dead, such a
prayer would be dangerous, but the dead were in their winter sleep now; even his wife Saraid no longer slipped into his thoughts. When he wanted a woman these days his thoughts turned to Ma-khee.

“If they cut me down at Dunadd,” Fergus said to Talorcan, “you must take care of Ma-khee.”

Talorcan nodded.

“They will not cut you down,” Fergus said, “because you share the same blood. But they will not spare me.”

Talorcan laughed uneasily. “Nor me, brother, for joining with you.”

“But is it not your right to be king of Picts, because your mother was of the royal line?”

“There are others who would claim that right, others who have not played traitor.”

Fergus sighed. “Then I should not have brought you. I should have chosen another man.”

“You could have chosen Marcus, the Roman.” Talorcan began to laugh.

Fergus couldn’t help but smile, too. “When a man’s
clachan
are cut from him, the fire runs out through the hole.”

“Yes, he is best left among the bards and musicians. But there are others. Gavin the Hairy.”

Fergus shook his head. “Much hair, little brain. A soldier would do better with a bear than a man with no cunning.”

Already, one day after the shortest day, the light
would stretch further, though not by much. Fergus’s plan was to hobble the horses, then steal into the village quietly and hide until dark if things seemed hostile. But on this slow walk through the oak forest, there was only his time with Talorcan, the trees and the sun reaching playful hands onto their shoulders.

“I will not return to Glashan with you,” Talorcan said, almost in a whisper, as they drew close to Dunadd.

Fergus pulled his horse to a stop and turned to see what he could read in his brother-in-law’s eyes.

Talorcan looked away. “Iona told me. She saw only one horse and rider coming back along this trail.”

Fergus counted Talorcan a friend and brother; he could not bear to lose him. “Perhaps it will be you, not me, on that horse.”

Talorcan shook his head. “I am going to stay.”

Fergus kicked his horse forward. He didn’t know how to take what Talorcan had said. Was it merely a way of changing allegiance?

“But what about Radha?” Fergus called back.

“It will be best for Radha to stay with her parents. Iona will need her. She will be safe once you have taken your daughter and left Glashan.”

“Taken my daughter and my woman,” said Fergus.

Talorcan shook his head. “You have seen the way she is. You will put yourselves in danger with her along.”

Fergus knew what Talorcan said was true, but if he made it back to Glashan, he would not leave again without
Ma-khee. They would have to stay there until she had gained some strength, learned their ways better. But he kept quiet. He felt suspicious now, as though Talorcan might be up to something.

They came out of the forest just north of Dunadd at the first group of standing stones in the Valley of Stones. This far, no lookout would see them, and here they tied the horses and left them to graze. The hazel groves that edged the forest provided good cover as they weaved along with the fort in sight, such a pleasing vista for Fergus, and for a moment he had to stop to rid himself of the longing for the days when his father was alive.

Talorcan placed his hand on Fergus’s shoulder. “Do you see anything?”

Fergus shook his head. “Only ghosts.”

Talorcan overtook him. “Let the dead sleep. Today we have work to do in the land of the living.”

They moved along the route Fergus had followed after his last journey, when he had returned on the Day of the Dead. Soon they came to the place where his horse had bolted. The village was well in sight now, and nothing looked different: still the children running, still the bleating of goats and the smoke trailing up from the thatched roofs. The fort itself looked the same, from here just a run of tall stone walls on the hillside.

Fergus kept his voice quiet. “Do you think it will be safe to slip into your house?”

Talorcan shook his head. “The women who bore my children will almost certainly have gone to live there.”

“But you can trust them.”

“I can’t be sure. Some of these women have husbands now.” Talorcan started moving. “Come.”

When Fergus hesitated, Talorcan reached for his sleeve and tugged. “We’ll go to one of the elderly. Alban, the man who taught me archery.”

Fergus followed. Talorcan’s father, and Saraid’s, too, had died young, and other men had had to step in to do the work of a father. Fergus’s own father had shown him how to shoot an arrow straight to its target, and for that he was grateful. But Talorcan could hit a target blindfold. His teacher, Alban, had been a good one.