Veil of Time

by Claire R. McDougall

  “They put the fences up for a reason,” he says.

  But I can tell he doesn’t mean it. Without Fergus stroking away all sense, I can focus better on the markings now. The slab almost looks like what happens to a pond in the rain.

  “I don’t suppose rain was sacred to the pagans,” I say.

  Jim shrugs. “What do you think? This magical stuff that falls from the sky and makes your crops grow.”

  I climb back over the fence. “Everything’s so mystical, isn’t it, until you know the science of it.”

  “Och,” says Jim, “science, my arse. Everyone assumes these people were just ape-men making random marks in the stone. They were just like us, worried about the same things, asking the same bloody questions.”

  I want to go now. This place is bringing Fergus too close without getting me any nearer to him.

  Later, I head up to the fort with Winnie in tow. I wave to Jim in his window as I pass his house and squeak through the stile gate.

  The top of the hill is just what I need, windy enough to take your head off. I wish someone would pry open my head, make enough room to squeeze out all the facts and nonsense I’ve been filling it up with. They should hold church services on hilltops and see how much is left when they are finished.

  I sit among the rubble, while the wind rearranges my hair and nips at my face, while the declining sun on Crinan Bay sits back and licks the quicksilver sea. Looking out past the white hotel at Crinan, past the castle out at Duntrune, I could be back in Fergus’s time. The islands are secrets, dark and mounding out of the water, but forever keeping themselves from you.

  I smile, for the relief of finding a Sunday up here—Day of the Sun, after all.

  I don’t feel like going back to the pages. I don’t like that my thesis has turned into a feminist manifesto, though I don’t know now what else I thought it could be. I’m not in the business of being a feminist, at least not a ball-busting one. A sheep bleats from the field below, setting off a chorus of sheepy panic.

  On my way back down, I pass a group of German tourists coming to set the inevitable foot in the stone imprint. Future king of England Prince Charles of the Battenbergs once did this, so it says on the board down below. It is a wonder the entire hill didn’t cleave in twain and erupt with lava flow. Whatever this hill is, it belongs to the history of Scotland, no matter that its present-day inhabitants are a mix of Scots and Picts; in Fergus’s day, those Viking ravagers hadn’t yet done their dance of rage and brought their fair hair with them.

  Before bed, I stand at my sink and roll my pills around in my palm, studying them as though they held an answer. I set them on the counter when the phone rings.

  “Mum, it’s Graeme.”

  “Who?” I tease him, because I think it’s odd that he thinks I wouldn’t know which son of mine it is, given that I have only one. Only one child, when it comes down to it.

  He laughs just loud enough for me to pick it up across the miles of country between us.

  He says he should be in bed. I wait for an explanation as to why he is not.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he says, “that I might take the bus up to see you one weekend, if I could get away early on a Friday.”

  I can see that little-boy smile spread over his face, even as he holds the phone against his man’s cheek. “I won’t mind, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” he says.

  I say, “I would like to show you Dunadd. It’s very ancient, very interesting, everything that went on here.”

  “What did go on there?”

  My mind flies to Dunadd in Fergus’s time: the village of thatched roofs, the smoke, the tattoos, heather ale, and the way the necklace of acorns lies just inside the neck of Fergus’s shirt.

  I say, “Oh, battles, takeovers, trade and slaves, kings of antiquity, all the usual stuff.”

  He laughs. Even the sound of his laughter makes me feel better, as if I have a place here in the present.

  He says he has to go to bed. I concur.

  He smiles. You can’t hear a smile, but it has a resonance.

  After he hangs up, I go back to the sink, pick up my pills, and toss them onto my tongue. A gulp of water and they are gone. Better to stay on an even keel. That’s what I’ve always tried for, what everyone around me has always been hoping for.

  13

  Even without missing any medication, I succumb to a seizure a few days later, on the blue couch with the curled cat once again doing drum duty by my head. Now, if I were being objective about these dreams, I would be forced to ask why it is I go back into them at the place I last left off, like lifting a bookmark out of the pages of a book.

  In the semi-darkness of the hut, I crouch by Sula’s fire, remembering now that I forgot to ask Jim for that list of Dál Riada kings. I know the Romans left in 410, and so I could work out the time of King Murdoch from then. I wonder how the years were kept before the birth of Christ. Perhaps they didn’t worry about years, and perhaps it doesn’t matter anyway what time I’m in.

  I am in Once Upon a Time, not of the fairy kind but of the druid, and perhaps here I might even discover who I really am, underneath it all, a woman filled with “insatiable lust.” Marcus looks over as I laugh. Because the way your mother told it, the way the nuns at school leered down their noses, this was the prerogative of the male population, something you were taught to guard yourself against.

  I glance at the door, wishing for Fergus. But Sula has other designs for this day. She covers my outfit with a brown woolen wrap in herringbone weave that hangs heavy and would go twice around me. She pushes my hair back and covers my head with a triangle of cloth that she crosses over my throat and ties at the back of my neck like in pictures of Mrs. Gillies when she lived on St. Kilda. When Sula thinks I’m ready, she gathers a leather pouch and leads Marcus and me down the hill. We can hear the clink of bells as we descend past the buildings on the lower level, and a noticeable change comes over Sula as she ushers me quickly by. The men at the gates bow to her, then let us through.

  The village below takes me by surprise again, just because it is so sprawling and jostling. Each of the round, mud-colored houses has a thatched roof and its own square of yard bound in by wattle fence, along a maze of narrow lanes. Above it all between the highest roof and the cold sky sidles a layer of smoke.

  Sula nudges me on, but there is no stile down at the base of the fort, no Jim Galvin’s whitewashed house, no bridge made of stone, just a swing bridge of wooden slats held to either bank by rough rope. To my left, standing by itself, as though on sacred ground before the river, is the standing stone that in my day will hold a clothesline, only now it is but one of a complete circle.

  I can’t help but clap my hands and run to find the one I know. Marcus darts nervously after me while Sula stands by, watching. And I can’t keep my thoughts in, so all they must hear is a nonsense stream of words that will one day be modern English. I am so happy that my one stone is now among friends that I have to run my hands over them. From across the river come the happy sounds of goats bleating, the cries of children running and playing.

  We rejoin Sula and move off to the swing bridge, which sways as we cross. The fibers of the rope cut into my palm as I steady myself. I stop on the other side, as barefoot children run by us, some leading goats. Groups of men sit in the doorway to their yards; women pass, weighed down by burdens of peat and kindling. The ever-present smoke stings my eyes, but I can hardly bring myself to blink. I notice the clothing of the people down here is much less colorful than that worn by the inhabitants of the hill, just a few drab rusts and greens; nothing fitted, heads and shoulders covered over by yards of woven shawl.

  Sula is watching me as I turn back to get a sense of the fort from down here: its high stone walls wrap around the hill, its smoke lifted by the breeze, so different from what it will be when it becomes part of the Scottish tourist trade. She takes my arm and leads me along the tight worn lanes of the village. The people stop
what they are doing, touch me, and ask Sula who I am. Sometimes she answers; sometimes she doesn’t. All I can do is follow in our little troupe, with Marcus at the rear.

  The hut we are going to is at the far end of the village, close to what will one day become the Oban road, Motorway A83. This is no road there now, just the flat of the valley rising up into the familiar rise of camel-hump hills.

  Our eyes have to adjust to the interior of the house we enter, a round room with someone on a mat on the far side. It smells a bit rank in here. A child of about four or five sits on the dirt floor by the fire, wrapped in a bundle of blankets. Its smudged face is bound by long and curly hair. Whatever sex it is I can’t tell. A man I assume is the father follows us in and bows to Sula. When I go with them to the bed, I see our patient is a woman in labor. I look back at Marcus to see if he has left by his own discretion, but he is as interested as I am, and no one seems to bother about a eunuch being there.

  The labor is different from the image of labor I grew up with. The woman does not appear to be in distress. No frantic breathing, just eyes focused on the floor in front of her. I don’t even know if she’s aware we’re here.

  The man is speaking to Sula, but not in Gaelic, so I don’t understand. He is shaking his head, seeming to indicate the cross of the sun over the sky, perhaps saying his wife has been in labor too long. Sula strokes the woman’s forehead, and then lays her hand down at the base of her belly, where a couple of intertwined snakes are tattooed just above her pubic hair.

  Sula turns back and indicates that I should hand her the leather bag she has brought. She pulls out a small pouch of dried leaves and asks for a cup, into which goes a handful of dusty green leaves and a splash of water from a pitcher. She stirs them, and then lifts the woman’s head for a drink.

  But I am not going to be let off that easily. Sula takes my hand and places it on the woman’s protruding stomach right over the tattoo. Because I have felt this on myself, I know that such a full belly should feel solid at the bottom and less packed at the top. This woman’s feels the opposite.

  “Breech,” I say, but they think I mean Brighde, mother of Fergus. They shake their heads and look at one another.

  Now I see that Sula has designs for this breech baby. In my day doctors deliver these by Cesarean section, and it’s funny to think that this operation exists even now, if this was the way Caesar was born. Still, the odds wouldn’t be good for the mother, and Sula obviously has other plans.

  The woman’s body seems less tense now, and I wonder if it is because of the leafy brew. Sula wants my hands in this operation, and she guides me the way I should push, around to the outside on one side, while she tries to manipulate the baby going down from the top the other way. I keep my eyes on the woman’s face, because I am very uneasy about pushing so hard. Sula catches my hands, presses them to my chest, and then puts them back on the woman’s stomach. Perhaps she is telling me to feel my way by instinct, and I try, but women of my era were not trained this way. In the nunnery, instinct was the enemy. Inside myself, I will the baby to move. I picture my hands as instruments of healing instead of just paddles.

  I look up at Sula. Her eyes are closed. She removes her hands and blows into them, then starts back in the circular motion, almost not touching, as though she could insinuate the movement by hovering slightly above the skin. My hands are still touching. But the baby is beginning to give. I have to see Sula’s movement and mine as one. Where I leave off and start back to the bottom, she takes over and smooths her hands over the top of the mound.

  Every so often the baby gives a kick, for which I am grateful—at least I know it is still alive. Once we get it to center point, the baby does the rest itself. Soon we have a solid mass at the bottom. Sula quickly grabs a band from her bag and ties it around the woman just above where the baby’s bottom must now be.

  She takes herbs from a different pouch and gives them to the woman in another drink, then sits back and waits. I do the same. The man seems happier now. Just like a contented modern man, he whistles as he sets a pot on a tripod over the fire. The child moves in closer to throw on sticks. I walk over to see the stew, I suppose it is, with lumps of meat and other objects, some of which I can identify, like turnip, but others I’m not sure about. No carrots, I notice, no potatoes. Strange to think how food made its way across Europe in drips and drabbles. Potatoes, that British staple, wouldn’t make it here from the Andes for hundreds of years.

  Sula has the woman up and walking about, then squatting with her elbows on a stool. Sula gestures me over. It is my job, she shows me, to smooth my hand down the base of the woman’s spine, while Sula eats from a bowl by the fire. She and Marcus and the husband are talking about me; that’s a feeling you just know, whether you speak the language or not.

  The woman is pushing softly, and then I’m not quick enough to catch the baby that falls hard onto the dirt floor. The woman picks her baby up, puts it to her breast, and remains in a squat until the placenta slips out. A dog should come in and eat the afterbirth at this point, but there actually seem to be very few dogs down here. Instead, the child scoops it up and adds it to the stew.

  I want to make all the modern noises of objection, but I sit back on my haunches and keep my peace. I just won’t be having any of the stew myself. The baby is a boy, though no one seems to be paying any attention to that. There is a joke about the size of his testicles, and that must be one of those things, like the shape of the hill on the other side of the road, that time does not change.

  The wife lies down in the bed with the baby at her breast. Her older child lies beside them. I worry that the baby has not cried yet, though he is making some powerful sucking noises. Maybe if you’re not being born into original sin, birth is nothing to cry about.

  Suddenly through the door a man enters. He is tall with reddish brown hair, and I recognize him as the man with the tattoo of the boar who followed me around the fort on the first night. As he steps closer, I see the tattoo stretches right across his forehead and down on either side of his temples. The tail and the snout run off a little into his hairline. His eyes glance over me, but the person he is looking for is Sula. Like everyone else, he approaches her with respect, though he is unable to hide his eagerness for her to step aside and speak to him. Sula is reticent to leave. She checks back with the woman and her baby, and then brings the man over to me.

  She pats his shoulder. “Talorcan,” she says. I can’t keep my eyes off his tattoo. He bows slightly in my direction, keeps his eyes on mine as he begins to talk. I don’t pick up everything he says, but I do hear the name Fergus and next to it the mention of a wife, and I do register the drop of lead into the pit of my belly. He keeps talking, but I’m not hearing anything else. After a while, his nod to Sula seems to indicate he has more urgent business.

  He talks to Sula by the door with fewer smiles than he had for me, and eventually, she leaves with him. I stand by the door and watch them walk through the gate of the yard, and then I can see only heads and shoulders moving along the top of the wattle fence along the path that leads away to the farthest houses. Their conversation is quick, secret. She seems to be so much the center of things down here: midwife, teacher, counsel. I wonder if that is why the church objected to the witches: it didn’t want little old women at the center of things. I remember now from the list in the Edinburgh library how many of my witches were midwives.

  I feel selfish to be preoccupied by the news of Fergus’s wife, when life has just taken place and I have had a role in it. From the way he acted towards me, I couldn’t have gathered that there was a wife. But this is not my age, and why wouldn’t I think other principles hold? Fergus might have ten wives. But I am gloomy now, abandoned by Sula, shuffling around the strangers’ house, taking in the vat of fraoch, the rudimentary loom set against the wall by the door. I know nothing about weaving, but I can admire the quality of the tweed that is being woven. The yarn of the warp hangs down the back of the loom, weighted with round
stones into which holes have been bored.

  There are no trees in this village, just yards backed onto other yards, peaks of heather-thatched roofs. The yards are of hard-packed dirt, kept clear by the twig broom that leans against the wall of the house by the door. Racks of drying peat are set up against the lower part of the fence, and there is a small stone hut with a wooden door to the side of the house. I notice similar stone structures in all the yards, though they are too small to be dwellings. My curiosity leads me to push the door a little with the toe of my shoe, but it’s too dark in there to see. It doesn’t smell so fresh, so I pull the door closed.

  The orange glow of sun in the far distance is disappearing behind the islands, just as it does in my day. The air is very still, interrupted only now and then by bird cry. The child follows me back into the house, where mother and baby are asleep. I play a game with the child of pick-up sticks made with small pieces of kindling. The child is quiet like its baby brother, unspeaking but contented on the floor by the fire.

  I sit cross-legged by the fire and ease the child onto my lap, nuzzling my nose into its unwashed hair. I’m not sure the last time I smelled a small child this close, but I have a powerful compulsion to kiss that head. I wonder when Sula is coming back for me, and I wonder what Fergus wants from me if he already has a wife.

  When the child wanders off, I go over to the woman and place my hand on her forehead to make sure there’s no fever. She is asleep and doesn’t see me watching her. She is like me, with two children. I hope she can stay that way. I hope that fate won’t wrench one of them from her when she is away one evening. The woman opens her eyes and smiles. Her baby’s head is black, not a patch of red gossamer as Ellie’s was when they handed her to me in the hospital. She closes her eyes again but resists when I try to take the baby. I know how she feels. Keep holding on to him, I want to say, and perhaps you’ll never have to let go.

  Marcus seems to think it’s time to leave when the sky turns black, not as much light, now that the moon is on its wane. We weave through the houses where the doors are shut against the cold, and over the river on the bridge whose give seems a little more alarming in the dark. My foot keels a little, torqueing my ankle, but I don’t have time to register the pain before I notice Talorcan waiting on the other side.