Veil of Time

by Claire R. McDougall

  I look into his face. “What is it?”

  He places his hand in the small of my back and I feel his fingers trace a vertebra or two, as though I were another of the patterns in the rock. “Sula used to bring us here when we were children. These marks were left by the ancients, the stoneworkers. Do you know who they were?”

  Right now, with Fergus’s hand on me, I am not particularly interested in who they were, but I get the feeling his question has more to do with where I come from.

  I take his other hand and hold it against my solar plexus. “Chan e.” No.

  He says, “Sula says they are raindrops on water set in stone. She says life on earth and life in the stars is like this, one circle within another, crossing others.” He looks away, then says a word I don’t recognize: “Eadar-thoinnte.”

  When I look to him for an explanation, he laces his fingers with mine. “Eadar-thoinnte means ‘many strands woven together.’ ”

  He lays his mouth against mine, not a kiss, just a question of some kind. “Tell me who you are, Ma-khee.”

  I could tell him something that is not true, but it would jar against this moment.

  I take my lips from the warmth of his, and say, “I don’t know who I am.”

  He looks back at the rings in the rock and slowly takes his hands from me.

  “Who are you?” I ask, drawing his eyes back to me. “I know you are Fergus, but I don’t know who you really are.”

  He flashes his fleeting smile. “I’m just the king’s brother,” he said. “The king’s sad brother.”

  A weight comes over him and stays that way as we ride home. Yet, moving to the rhythm of the horse, his chest against my back, the questions and answers seem moot. We know who we are and why each one hopes there is no end to this journey. There is nothing I can tell him of what I am that will make any sense to him.

  But when we reach the fort and he helps me dismount, he says, “Ma-khee.” In his eyes the question remains.

  I hold on to him and let that be my answer. Before he leaves me at the gap in the wall, he touches his lips to my cheek. I watch him run down through the rusty bracken before turning in the direction of the cookhouse, which is bustling now with servants running to and fro from other buildings, smoke sidling from the chimneys. Those bells that had caused Fergus’s daughter to run off yesterday morning are being rung, though I can’t see where. They chime in my head as I climb back up to Sula’s hut at the summit. They vibrate loudly, then fall off, and just before I slip out of the dream altogether, I see the girl Illa running between the adults below, glancing up at me, and then moving away.

  10

  The girl comes and the girl goes. As I turn over on my pillows, my eye falls not on Illa but on the bright square in the wall that is my bedroom window. From the fold-out frame by my bed, Graeme and Ellie look back at me. This picture of Ellie hugging Mickey Mouse in Florida has no reference for me anymore. I can’t find her face in any of the photos, just sometimes there in a flash of memory, like her little self in a high chair sucking melted chocolate from her fingers, or waiting by the back door in her first school uniform, her little baby neck in an oversized collar and tie. And a world away on the hill, I could have sworn it was Ellie; the pain under my breastbone suggests it is so.

  I curl around myself, bringing back the movement of Fergus behind me on the horse, the damp warmth of his lips on my face. He smells like the wall and the bracken. His scent is not separate from his surroundings, in the way that I, in this distant land, here but not really here, smell not of myself but of something manufactured. He asked me who I am, but there are many me’s—like looking into a broken mirror, I am scattered all over. And yet, there is something scattered about him, too. He is the king’s brother, son of Brighde; he is the father of his daughter, and perhaps, who knows, the husband of his wife. I know so little of what makes up Fergus MacBrighde. But I understand that sadness he speaks of. I feel it in his eyes.

  We never brought Ellie to Dunadd—only to that refuge of cold Scots, the beaches of Spain, and once to Disney World. I close my eyes and will myself back into sleep, perchance to dream. But nothing is coming to Dunadd in the twenty-first century except a dimming light behind the spray of dead grasses in the window. The birds are not yet quiet, but settling.

  In the kitchen I crack open a tin of beans and slot slices of bread into the toaster, everyday actions that edge Fergus and Illa out. The heat from the burner warms my face. The kitchen is in full view of the glass doors, so there would be no hiding from Jim Galvin even if I wanted to, which I’m not sure I do. Alone in my kitchen, watching my beans begin to bubble, I suddenly feel quite lonely.

  Soon enough, Jim opens the door. “Came to see how your headache was doing,” he says. “And the cat.”

  My hand goes over my mouth. “Where is she?”

  “Running after a mouse, the last I saw. Do you know you have been asleep for eight hours? I almost called for an ambulance.”

  I smile and relax my defenses. He takes a step into the house, followed now by Winnie, the very skinny black cat. “I came an hour or so ago, but you were out for the count, so I gave her a saucer of milk. Later, she wanted to go out, so I let her.”

  I don’t like the thought of this man wandering around my cottage with me asleep in the bedroom. My door wasn’t even closed.

  I pick Winnie up and snuggle her against my face. “I took a strong painkiller, that’s all.”

  Jim nods and steps back towards the door. “Well, I was just checking.”

  “Thank you.” I gesture towards my paltry meal. “If you haven’t already eaten? It isn’t much.”

  He looks glad that I want to share my beans and toast with him. I make him his tea with warmed milk. We don’t say much, as though our main business is eating. After the beans, I find a few chocolate biscuits in the bread bin and arrange them on a plate.

  He unfurls the wrapping from one. “How was the trip anyway?”

  For a moment, I think he means my dream. I have to tap my fingers on the table to refocus myself. Glasgow. Edinburgh. The well on Castle Hill.

  “Fine. Divorce finalized. Son educated and on his way. Myself appalled by what I turned up at Edinburgh University. Did you know the last woman to be tried under the Witchcraft Act was in 1944?”

  “Aye,” he says. “Crying shame, that. Old Winston Churchill got involved. It’s him that had the law abolished, you know.”

  I am studying his face, as I often do with people until I realize what I’m doing. “Is there anything you don’t know?”

  He chuckles. “Oh, aye. Apparently I don’t know much about women.”

  I’m not sure I like where this is going, but I ask anyway. “Why do you think that?”

  He gets up and goes to the window, and now I know I definitely shouldn’t have asked. “Well, take you, for instance. You seem to like that cat better than me, and I’m the only man for miles around.”

  I sigh. “Come and sit down.”

  He comes back, but shuffles his chair back a little before he looks at me. For every part of me that could want him, a much larger part steps away. It’s not that he is unattractive, not that he couldn’t be a nice refuge, but I’ve just had enough of slotting into someone else’s idea of me.

  So I change the subject and watch his face drop. “When were you in the merchant navy?”

  He goes for a laugh. “I’m sixty-two, if that’s what you want to know.” He takes a breath, as people do when they are heading into muddy water. “I had a wife, you know, before this one, before Janet. I was already in the merchant navy when we met, and it paid well, so I kept going. We had two daughters. But I was away much of the time naturally. When I came home on my last leave, she’d shacked up with someone in Liverpool, hadn’t even bothered to tell me, just vanished with the wee ones. I had to find everything out from her sister.” He laughs, not happily. “Here I was turning up at the door of my flat in Glasgow, expecting a welcome, and my key didn’t fit in the lock. I�
�m about to break the door down when this fellow comes to the door, says he’s the new tenant and I’d better scarper or he’s going to call the police on me.”

  I watch him ramble on, as my mind drifts away to Fergus. “What did you do?”

  “Punched him in the face.”

  “Did he call the police?”

  Jim shrugged. “I didn’t stay to find out.”

  I sigh. “How long until you met Janet?”

  He lets out a breath, seemingly relieved to be on a happier note. “A couple of years. But it was out of the merchant navy for me. I wasn’t going to risk that again. We came up here, lived in a council house for a good many years, until I built this one here at Dunadd.”

  I want to ask what happened to Janet, but I still hardly know the man.

  He says, “How about you?”

  I say, “Oh, you know. The marriage didn’t survive after Ellie died. It was just too much. Some things are.”

  He’s not the first person I’ve told, but I feel my voice run off a little shaky, perhaps because I just saw Ellie again not more than half an hour ago. Men of Galvin’s ilk weren’t schooled in what to do with shaky women, so we both wait a second until the emotion passes.

  He shifts in his seat. “What about Graeme?”

  I like this note better; it takes me out of my freeze. “Graeme’s after a place at St. Andrew’s University. More tea?”

  He hands me his cup. The little activity lasts long enough to change the tone.

  “It wasn’t a headache,” I say.

  He looks interested.

  “Why I slept all those hours wasn’t because of a headache.”

  I have to force out the next words, which never come easy, not even to Dr. Shipshap. “I have epilepsy. Complex partial seizure disorder, to be precise.”

  He looks at me as though I had just told him the bull in the field has only one testicle. “Is that a fact?”

  I shrug. “As close as we’ll get.”

  He looks at me sideways, as though not completely sure he should be asking. “You shouldn’t be driving, then, should you?”

  “Luckily, I have very distinct auras before each seizure, so I always have a warning.”

  “Which is why you kicked me out earlier before I’d finished my cornflakes.”

  “Correct.”

  I gather the plates and go to the sink with them. “Anyway,” I say, “after a seizure I normally sleep deeply for a few hours, which is how you found me when you came uninvited into my house.”

  He brings me the glasses. “I was worried about you, and now I see I had good reason.”

  “Not good reason.” I turn the tap on, hoping to drown out the conversation. “It’s just a sleep like any other. Only deeper.”

  He picks up a tea towel and waits for the first wet plate. “Is that why you’re always on about your dreams?”

  The man is fast to catch on. I nod.

  “I’ve been wondering, right enough, how you could have known about the sea coming up to Dunadd. As far as I know, no one but the nutter who lived on the estate a hundred years ago ever proposed such a thing.”

  I’m not saying anything, just handing him dripping knives and forks and letting him draw his own conclusions. Maybe he could make sense of it for me.

  He looks perplexed. “Anything else from these dreams of yours?”

  “Well—” I stop and wonder if I should. “There’s a Fergus.”

  “MacErc? The annals say he was the first to come over from Ireland.”

  I shake my head. “MacBrighde. He’s the brother of the king.”

  “The list of Dunadd kings doesn’t mention brothers. I suppose Fergus was a common enough name.”

  “And a witch named Sula.”

  He shakes his head. “You’ve got me there.”

  “She lives at the summit in what is now just that part of the round wall. It’s a cell with a heather thatch and herbs hanging from wooden rafters. They think maybe I’m a Saxon or a Roman.”

  He’s scratching his stubble. “Do they now?”

  “In my dream.”

  “Aye.”

  I don’t know whether Jim thinks I’m entirely insane; he isn’t giving much away.

  I stand up. “Anyway. All nonsense.”

  “Och,” he says, “would there be anything left if we took away all the nonsense?”

  I empty the washing-up bowl and drape the dishcloth over it. Winnie paces behind the taps, purring.

  “And this Fergus bloke,” Jim says, sitting back down at the table, “is he a handsome brute?”

  I try to look calm and completely with it. “It’s my dream. How could he not be?”

  He laughs. “Could you find a good-looking grannie for me in that dream?”

  To make him feel better, I place my hand on his shoulder, and before I know it his hand is on top of mine. I take mine back and go to the kitchen. It’s not long before he gets up to leave.

  But there’s one more question. “I don’t suppose there’s a rock around here with rings on it?”

  He shrugs. “Out at Achnabreck, aye. The cup-and-ring marks, you mean?”

  I take a deep breath. If this is a dream, it’s turning out to be awfully accurate.

  He laughs. “Now, even I have no theories about what they are all about.”

  I have to bite my tongue, hold back Sula’s explanation of the stars and the way the earth turns. I watch Jim as he walks home, skirting the puddles in his sensible brogues, berating myself for telling him anything. He’ll no doubt be telling the postman, who comes in his own time three days a week, Yon woman from Glasgow’s as loony as you please. You couldn’t blame him for thinking it.

  I keep insisting to myself that it’s all just a dream, but I’m finding it harder to believe that. I certainly wish it were more. I like Dunadd in the Dark Ages. I like that Sula lives above everyone, and ministers to them with her herbs and her stones. I like that the king’s brother listens to her. I like the king’s brother, period. I like his lovely hand on the place the priests have so much trouble with, his fingers in the palm of my hand, his mouth resting softly against my lips. I like the way his hair curls where it meets his shoulders, and the way his nose is just slightly off-kilter. I smile when I think of the look of amusement on his face when he told me Marcus was a eunuch, and I am very glad Fergus MacBrighde is not one. I don’t know that for a fact, but something in my pulse registers it. Something in the way my fingers fidget with the latch on the window tells me this is so.

  11

  Fergus came back up to the fort through the gates this time and climbed up to the house of Brighde, his mother, to the house where he had been a young boy with his brother and father. He found her by her fire with Murdoch, her firstborn, her ally in a way Fergus had never been. Murdoch had a wife and five children but often slept in his childhood house. Fergus was more like his father, Ainbcellaig, who had not himself been king, just the consort of his royal wife. The gold band would never sit on Fergus’s head either; Murdoch was much better suited for king anyway, for the ceremonies and the honor. Murdoch had always known his station and lorded it over his brother.

  For a moment, they didn’t register him, but kept talking and drinking wine from the glasses their mother loved so well, the ones the Franks had traded.

  Murdoch noticed him first. “Here he is, the night rider.”

  Brighde beckoned him to the fire. “Come and warm yourself. Where have you been?”

  Fergus accepted a glass of the blood-red liquor from his mother’s hand. “I did not know your spies were out, Murdoch. Since when could a man not go where he pleases?”

  Murdoch dashed the remains of his drink into the fire and stood up. “Since when did a brother of mine sneak around in the darkness like a criminal?”

  Fergus pressed the heel of his hand against his temple. He always tried not to go along with Murdoch’s games, but it was hard not to feel the anger in his stomach. “I only went to the ring stones. Perhaps it would do you g
ood to go there, too, and remember what Sula taught us.”

  “We don’t live in that age anymore,” said Murdoch, “when rain patterns in stones could hold any sway.”

  Fergus said, “No, we live in the new age of suspicion and division.”

  Brighde laid her hand on Fergus’s shoulder, anxious to steer the conversation clear of argument, but Murdoch had to get in one more comment.

  “We know who you took there.”

  Fergus stood up and handed his glass back to Brighde.

  She caught his hand. “Stay a little. There are things to discuss.”

  Fergus sat back down but turned his shoulder away from his brother.

  Brighde said, “I have decided to keep you at home for a while, send some others out for the next collection.”

  “Or have them come here,” said Murdoch. “It shouldn’t be our job out risking our necks for a collection. I have heard it told in other kingdoms, how the lords come and bring with them a bag of soil from their land. They empty their bags out in the presence of the king, set their foot upon their own soil, and then swear their allegiance. We could have the stone mason carve a foot into the rock itself to mark the spot. Fergus should be at my side, not running his horse all over Dál Riada collecting fealty.”

  Fergus shrugged. He had no argument with this. And he was glad for the change of topic.

  But Murdoch couldn’t let it rest. “If you won’t take a woman from outside Dunadd, I know of one for you here from the clan of Scotti.”

  Fergus stood and walked towards the door. “I have heard enough of your plans for me, Murdoch. Don’t you understand these things can’t be found in the schemes of others? Especially yours.”

  Murdoch caught his tongue between his teeth, a sign that Fergus knew of old was the rumbling before the storm.

  Brighde laid her hand on her elder son’s knee. “Murdoch.”

  She turned to Fergus. “The marriage is no matter.”