The Pictish Child (7 page)

So Jennifer, Molly, and Peter returned to the front door, dragging Ninia with them. There they began to talk loudly and jiggle the handle and fool with the lock, as if they were about to open the door.

They could hear an ominous clanking from the dark mist, where it lurked in the courtyard, waiting for its opportunity like some wild, ravenous beast.

Craning her neck, Jennifer stared through a small window in the entryway. She could see the darkness gathering in all the nooks and niches of the entryway. It obscured the stone flower troughs by the side of the house, and even covered the ivy that climbed on the wall. Sounds of battle cries rattled against the window like pebbles thrown from the past, and she jumped back.

“Rattle the handle again,” she whispered to Peter. “I think we may have it fooled. We want it all here, and no stray wisps in the garden. To give Bridei and the horse time to get set. And to make sure none gets into the house through the garden door.”

As Peter worked the latch up and down one last time, Jennifer tiptoed back to the living room and called out to Gran, “Go!”

At Jennifer's cry, Gran gave the lock a quick twist and yanked open the garden door. Then she stood aside as the horse—with its bulky rider—pushed past. As they went by, she clapped Devil on his rear, which made him jerk forward in surprise. Once horse and rider were through the door, Gran slammed the door behind them and locked it fast.

By then the children had raced back to see if she needed any help.

When it was clear that the door was well shut and bolted, Jennifer ran over to the window and looked out.

For a moment the garden was free of the dark mist, and she could see Bridei clearly. He had both spear and ax raised above his head and was holding on to the horse tightly with his thighs. Devil rose onto his back legs and his front feet pawed at the air while Bridei shouted a loud, ululating challenge that could be heard even through the window.

And then the dark mist responded, rolling over the rooftop and down into the garden like doom, covering horse and rider and table and herbal borders and all. It roiled and boiled from one side of the lawn to the other.

Though Jennifer could not see anything now but the mist, she could hear the clanging sounds of sword and battle-ax and the cries of warriors. She could distinguish the low rumble of carts and the skirling of strange pipes.

“Come on, Bridei!” she shouted. “Come on, Night of Long Thunder.”

She thought she heard him call back.

The other children and Gran crowded next to her, adding their voices to hers.

The battle seemed to go on forever.

It seemed to end all at once.

And then the mist was gone.

Gone from the garden. Gone from the house. Gone from any window the children looked out.

Gone.

“Bridei …” Ninia whispered. She threw herself onto the sofa and buried her nose in the cat's furry neck.

“Did they win?” asked Jennifer at last. “Did they lose?”

No one could give her a real answer.

Twelve

Car Ride

“We must get into the car and ride over to the museum,” said Gran. “Now!”

“But why?” Peter asked.

“Because the answer to Jennifer's question about the outcome of the battle may very well be there. In the museum.”

“No,” Peter said, “I mean, why should we go by car? I thought you were big on walking everywhere. The museum's not far. I went past it this morning when I—went the long way home.”

“Ha!” said the dog. “When he was lost, he means.”

“We go in the car because it will be fastest. And safest.”

Jennifer understood at once. “Cold iron,” she said. “In the car we'll be surrounded by cold iron.”

“Not me, my lass,” said the dog. “Nae cold iron for me.”

“Cold aluminum, you mean,” Peter said. “And plastic. And steel. Cars aren't made of iron.”

“I have a very old car,” Gran said.

She wasn't kidding. The car was so old it had a fierce-looking grille like a lion's open mouth at the front end, and huge tail fins at the rear.

“Does this thing still run?” Peter asked.

“Da says it does,” Gran told them.

“You mean
you
don't know?” Jennifer ran her hand along the metal surface of the car.

“I don't drive,” said Gran.

“Then how, you foolish auld besom, are we to get there?” the dog asked.

“Peter can drive,” said Molly brightly. “Pop lets him practice in the driveway. Pop says he's a … a natural.”

But Peter, who had been looking in through the driver's side window, shook his head vigorously. “Not a shift car, I can't. Not on the left side of the road, I can't. Not—”

The dog interrupted. “You wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous—”

“All right,” Peter said, as much to shut the dog up as for anything else. “I'll try. Just no more name-calling.”

They covered the backseat and back floor with blankets and a down duvet, but even then Ninia and the dog had a hard time breathing, both being creatures of magic now totally enclosed in a metal shell.

Trembling and silent, Ninia perched on the backseat as if on some sort of wild and unpredictable steed. She kept her eyes closed tightly and her hands clasped. Her knuckles—the ones that were not bandaged—were white with the effort.

On the other hand, the dog lay on a blanket on the floor with his teeth clamped together, and growled continuously.

Jennifer pushed up the garage door nervously, in case the mist was still around.

But there was not a sign of mist, or rain.

Jennifer ran to get into the backseat, shoving over next to Ninia.

Luckily Da had backed the car into the garage and all Peter had to do—once he figured out how to start it and get it into first gear—was to let the car drift down the driveway and out onto the lane.

The first real problem they had was when they had to turn into Double Dykes Road. Peter narrowly missed plowing into a passing motorcycle.

The man on the cycle waved his fist at them and called Peter a name.

Frantically Peter hit the brakes and they were all flung forward. Like all cars of that vintage, it had no seat belts.

Molly screamed. Jennifer cursed—something she never did. Gran cried out, “Keep us!”

And the car died.

It took almost five minutes for Peter to get it started again, for he had flooded the engine without knowing it. They sat, anxiously staring out of the windows and wondering if the mist was going to come back, while he tried and tried again to get the thing to turn over. The whole time they were stuck, Ninia jabbered in her foreign tongue and the dog moaned.

But once the engine started up again,
putt-putting
with a steady rhythm, Peter did just fine, though he never did get the car out of first gear.

“Ye
are
a natural,” Gran said. “There's American magic in those hands, lad.”

Peter was concentrating so hard on the road ahead, he almost did not hear the compliment.

So
, Jennifer thought,
that's what American magic is. Electricity and cars.

The old car juggered along Double Dykes, into Burial Brae, and then—with Gran shouting, “Right! Right!”—Peter maneuvered them around a traffic circle and down Market Street to the little museum.

Of course, he did not so much park the car as abandon it by the roadside. At which point they all stumbled out, Ninia and the dog being the most careful, so as not to touch any of the metal parts. Then they raced pell-mell into the little museum.

But they needn't have hurried. There was not a sign of the dark mist anywhere.

Thirteen

Museum

The museum was smaller than Jennifer had expected. It was housed in an old fisherman's cottage, with only two low-ceilinged rooms and a small entryway.

“This is
tiny,”
Jennifer said.

“Aye—'tis a wee thing. Not much to it,” said Gran. “But it's all we've got.”

She paid a pound for a family admission fee to a bored-looking woman in a sweater and dark tartan skirt behind the desk. The woman barely looked up from her magazine and so didn't even notice Ninia's odd dress.

“Ye three take that room,” Gran said to Molly, Peter, and the dog. “And we will look at this one.”

Jennifer took Ninia by the hand and pulled her over to the first display. In a glass case mounted on the wall there were about eight pieces of worked silver jewelry, not too dissimilar from what Ninia wore. One was identified as a silver mount for a blast horn, another as a silver hair pin. The rest were brooches and rings. All of the silver was covered in designs of Celtic knotwork, as well as with dragon heads and lion heads and birds with long, improbable beaks.

The second display consisted of pieces of gritty, coarse pottery in an oatmeal color that Jennifer thought was not very pretty at all.

In the final display case were three largish stones, each about the size of a chair back. The first was covered with the same swirling designs that had decorated Bridei's chest and arms. The second was crowded with animal drawings, mostly of bulls, though there was something that looked like a man on a horse as well. But the third …

Ninia started jabbering again.

“Gran, look!” Jennifer pointed to the third stone, which had a single snake and bird. “It's her sign. Ninia's!”

Gran read the placard below the stone aloud. “‘Found at Campbell's farm, south Fairburn, 1957. Considered a Class III stone, period after A.D. 800. Both the eagle and the snake are thought to be wisdom signs.'”

“If she's so wise,” Jennifer groused, “why can't she speak English?” She was embarrassed the moment the complaint had left her mouth.

“Hush!” Gran said. “No need to sound like that silly dog. Besides, the stone gives us a possible date.”

“Why should we need one?”

But Gran's answer was interrupted by Ninia, who could not stop gibbering at the stone. She tried to touch it and her hand hit the glass. She tried a second time, only a little too hard, and an alarm went off.

The woman in the sweater and tartan skirt came rushing in. “Here!” she said. “Don't be touching that.”

Jennifer dragged Ninia away from the glass and stood in front of her. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It won't happen again.”

Meanwhile Molly and Peter, with the dog at their heels, came running in at the sound of the alarm.

“Jeez, Jen, what did you guys do?” Peter asked.

“Nothing,” Jennifer said. “Ninia was just a little overexcited. There's a stone here with her … clan pictures on it.”

“Snake and bird?” asked Molly.

Jennifer nodded. “Supposed to be wisdom signs. What's in your room?”

“Just photographs,” Peter said. “Of old stones.”

“Those are
Pictish
stones,” the woman said in a voice full of disgust.

“Did ye read what the experts said about them?” asked Gran.

Peter looked surprised. “Were we supposed to?”

“The lass canna read, nor can I,” the dog added.

“I can, too, read,” Molly said. “Only it was in hard writing.”

“She means cursive,” Jennifer explained.

But Gran had already gone past the children and into the second room and was bending over, reading the legend under one of the photographs.

“Och—I have been such a fool!” she cried out. Then she straightened and turned to the children. “How could I have forgotten the history?”

The children and the dog rushed over to see what she was talking about. She was standing before a greatly enlarged and grainy photograph of a very ornate stone. “Look!”

They looked, and Ninia was the first to respond. She fell to her knees and began beating her chest with her right fist and keening.

It was an awful sound. Molly put her hands to her ears and so almost missed Jennifer's reading the placard aloud.

“‘Sueno's Stone,'” Jennifer read, “‘which means “Sven's Stone,” is the largest Pictish sculptured stone yet discovered. It lies outside of the old Burghead fortress. Twenty feet high, it has nearly one hundred figures carved upon one side, a Celtic cross on the other. It dates from the ninth century.

“‘The stone depicts scenes of fighting and killing. There are bodies of decapitated prisoners depicted as well.'” She shuddered, then went on.

“‘It is thought that the stone commemorates the alleged slaughter of the Pictish nobles in a single treacherous act by the Scottish king Kenneth mac Alpin, who, in
A.D.
843, forged together a single nation of Scots and Picts, by the sword.'”

“Well, what is it, Gran?” Peter asked. “What history do you mean?”

But Jennifer knew, even though Peter seemed to have forgotten.

“Kenneth
mac Alpin,”
she said.

“That's Maggie's name!” shouted Molly, clapping her hands. “Do you think Kenneth is her daddy?”

The dog laughed, a low, lugubrious sound, almost like a howl. “Her father?” He laughed again. “More like her great-great-great-great-great—” Peter jerked his collar, cutting him off.

“Taken,” Jennifer said, suddenly remembering what Maggie MacAlpin had been saying before she fell asleep. “Waken. Mistaken. Shaken.”

“Enough!” cried Gran.

“Enough is right,” said the woman in the sweater and plaid skirt, coming into the room. “You lot are much too wild for this little museum. I'll be happy to refund your money.”

“We were just leaving,” Gran told her. “Keep the pound, for all the good it does ye. We have gotten at least a pound's worth of information here.”

Gran swept out of the door as if she were royalty, and the children followed her. For a brief moment the dog considered leaving a small token behind, but he thought better of it and galloped out through the closing door.