He sat down on the rectangular stone by the fire. “I have heard of these Christians and their written word among the Britons. They take the power from the ban-druidhe. They do not allow the lines anymore to come down through the women, but only through the men. They spit on the spirits that have sustained our race through winters and wars. It can come to no good end, these eunuchs with their hatreds. It is no wonder they make whisky to dull their pain.”
Brighde rolled her eyes. “Last night, my son, you were happy to dull your own pain with the Christians’ drink.”
She walked to him and laid one arm around his shoulders. “I know it is difficult for you to see the Picts with anything but the kindness you showed your wife. But you have failed to come back to life. Saraid is dead, my son. The ways of the past are changing. The Picts of the north have become hostile, and unless we see the threat, we are in danger ourselves.”
“But what of Illa?” asked Fergus. “Look at my daughter. She is a Pict.”
“Which is why I have tried to keep her from Talorcan.”
“You cannot turn back what is already so, Mother. Talorcan is my brother. He would not turn against me. Talorcan’s mother was also of a royal line. The people listen to him.”
Brighde went back to the fire. “I hope you are right.”
“I know I am right.” Fergus had heard enough. He went to leave but stopped in the doorway, his back to his mother. “Will you invite Sula and the stranger to your fire? The woman is not a commoner—she wears gold upon her finger, and her manner is fine.”
“Sula is always welcome at my hearth. But the stranger, what is she, another ban-druidhe? We already have our own.”
Fergus turned back to Brighde. “For my sake, will you invite them both this evening?”
Brighde sighed. “My son, was it not enough that you took a Pict for your bride, gave me a Pict for a granddaughter? Now you want to take a druidess who speaks no language anyone knows?”
Fergus smiled. “I will tell their slave to bring them.”
“Go,” said Brighde. “Would that you were a eunuch like the monks with their hands folded. Would that I sent you to Iona, that you do not embarrass me with any more ill matches.”
Fergus closed the door behind him, laughing. As with his brother, the moments of love he felt with his mother were few.
Fergus caught Marcus on his way to the bakehouse. “What does the woman Ma-khee say? Did she see me last night with my brother?”
Marcus shrugged. “She was at the door.”
Fergus cursed.
“She is not a common woman,” Marcus said.
A look of pain came over Fergus. “I know.”
“She covers her lips when she belches.”
Fergus became impatient. “Yes, I know this, Marcus.”
“She has fine manners,” he said. “And yet she helped Sula with a difficult birth today. When she saw your daughter, she called to her as though she knew her. If she is a druidess, then perhaps a powerful one.”
Fergus sighed. A druid this powerful would not be released to him as a wife, even if she did still have respect for him.
He said, “Tell Sula to bring the woman to eat with my mother tonight.”
“I think she does not like our food,” Marcus said. “That’s what I see.”
Fergus touched the slave’s sleeve. “What would you eat in Rome?”
Fergus saw how the slave smiled, how glad he was to remember. Perhaps even he didn’t like the food of the Scotti. Perhaps the food of the Scotti was not tasty.
Marcus said, “Olives.” He narrowed his eyes. “Fruit such as you have never tasted: grapes, melons, plums. Yogurt and sauces; white bread made with wheat from Alexandria and dipped in olive oil.”
“Marcus, this does not help. White bread? Olive oil? What is that? And there are no fruits here except apple and pear.”
“Apple and pear, then, in slices, mixed with honey and served with roasted hazelnuts and cream from the top of the milk.”
“But what about meat? No one can live on fruit and cream.”
Marcus slipped back into his dream. “Mutton, ham, bacon. Peacock. And sauces.” His tongue sidled slowly along the inside of his lip. “Yes, sauces.”
“I have tasted this ham,” said Fergus, “but I doubt the kitchens have such a thing, unless there is some salted boar left from the hunt this summer. I will speak to the cooks.”
Marcus followed Fergus to the bakehouses.
“What of drink?” Fergus asked.
“Wine,” Marcus said. “Wine mixed with honey and spices.”
But the look on Marcus’s face told Fergus he was not thinking anymore of food. “What is the matter?”
“The woman, Ma-khee. I think she has a child. I think she has been taken from it.”
Fergus grabbed the slave’s shoulder. “Did she say as much?”
Marcus shook his head. “Her tears tell me as much.”
Fergus walked over to the kitchens, wondering what this could mean. He needed a mother for Illa. Still, perhaps not a child but a husband was the cause of Ma-khee’s tears. He gave his dinner order in the warm-smelling air of the kitchen, but the cooks had only goat’s meat from the slaughter on Samhain. They did not know about Marcus’s sauces, but they could prepare the pears and apples as he requested. Their stock of honey was full after a good summer’s harvest.
Fergus turned back to his mother’s house. He knew his mother had kept the robes his father, Ainbcellaig, had worn, but he wondered if he might borrow them for this evening without rousing too much suspicion. He could borrow from his brother, Murdoch, for he had more clothes than anyone needed, but any such request would only inspire taunting.
This woman was older than Fergus, he knew, but not too old for childbearing. He liked her look, not so much the contours of her face or the shape of her nose or mouth, but that look in her eyes was his own look, the hope that sorrow would not in the end win over. A little more time, and Illa would walk into her own woman years; it was time for her to have a mother again. With her knowledge of herbs and healing, Ma-khee would make a good one.
Ma-khee. Strange name. Not like Saraid, whose name came from the history of the land. His wife still had her hold on him, but the thought of her didn’t catch in his stomach as it had once done. Murdoch wasn’t always right, but anyone could tell his bed had grown cold with no woman there to warm him. Not any woman, not one of the matches his mother or brother had made for him. But perhaps the woman Ma-khee was the one Sula had foretold, the woman for whom he had been holding himself back.
15
The moment I surface, my line of vision is filled with the arm of the blue couch. I close my eyes and ask some unknown god, any god, even the Christian one, to send me back into the dream. But even as I make my petition, I feel myself floating like a disembodied someone farther away from the night on the hill where I am still sleeping. In spite of Colla, I have to smile at the thought of Fergus playing the drunken troubadour.
Winnie the cat is perched on the back of the couch, ready to jump down on me, now that I am conscious and of some use to her. She’s after food. I push my feet off the end of the couch and notice a slight pain in my ankle. I am halfway through chopping up cat food in a saucer before I realize the cause of the injury wasn’t here and now, but there and then.
After a quick change, I leave my papers and head over to Jim’s house, because the question of which king when is burning in my thoughts, more burning right now than the burning of the witches. On the way over, I try to remember if I had had a sore ankle before I went into the dream the last time.
“You were passed out,” Jim says when he opens the door, “so I left you to sleep it off.”
I smile. “Too much stress, I suppose. What’s that smell?”
Jim taps the oven. “Scones. I thought you might be hungry.”
He sits me down in his living room by the fire and goes off to rescue his scones. I settle back into the chair, watching the bricks of peat gl
ow, thinking how strange that after twelve hundred years we’re still taking our fuel from the same banks of peat left by antiquity. After a while, I get up and try to look for the list of kings myself. Instead, my eyes keep falling on books about cancer, so I know now what took his wife.
When he comes back in, I pretend I’m looking at the view from his window.
I take my mug from him. He sets a hot buttered scone in my palm.
I tell myself not to, but I find myself asking anyway, “Doesn’t mo chridhe mean ‘my heart’ in Gaelic?”
Jim sits himself in what must be his chair by the fire. “It does, literally. More ‘my love,’ I suppose.”
I should know better, but there’s no hiding the grin that takes over my face.
He says, “Anyone I know?”
I take a bite of that scone and let the lovely buttery crumbs dissolve in my mouth. “Could I see that list of kings again? I need to find a King Murdoch.”
Jim sets his cup on the hearth, but only has to pull himself up a little to reach for a piece of paper from the shelf by the side of his chair. It is a handwritten list.
“King Murdoch, eh?”
I take another bite of scone and have to use my hand to catch the crumbs. “I’m thinking around the middle of the eighth century.”
I can tell Jim knows I’m after something in my dreams by the way he tilts his head and peers at me. “Close to the earthquake, you mean?”
He sets a pair of half-rimmed glasses on his nose and runs his finger down the page. “According to the Irish annals, one King Murdoch mac Ainbcellaig ruled Dál Riada from 733 to 736.”
My heart begins to thump. “What happened after 736?”
Jim shakes his head. “There are no recorded kings again until after 750.” He picks his cup up. “You know, not only was there an earthquake in 736, but that’s the year the Picts overran Dunadd. That’s probably what happened to your Murdoch.” He sips his tea. “What’s the matter?”
If the Picts overran Dunadd, did they kill Murdoch and his house? What will become of Illa? What about Fergus, mo chridhe?
I try my best to look calm. “Jim, there’s a King Murdoch in that dream I’ve been having. There are monks with handbells. There’s a sea that comes right up to the base of the fort and cup-and-ring marks in the rock. How the hell do you think I got all that right? I’ve never even heard of the Irish annals.”
Jim takes his time answering. “I don’t know about handbells.”
I want to grab him and shake him. “Neither do I. But it’s such an odd detail, isn’t it? And that heather beer—did you know they warmed it up in earthen jugs over embers set in little pits?”
Jim shrugged. “No bloody wonder. They didn’t have central heating, you know.” He chuckles. “Yes, I suppose you do know.”
“And that field out there, you can’t even see for thatched roofs with stones hanging off ropes to keep the thatch on. Every house has a yard, and there are odd little stone structures belonging to each house.”
“Cleits,” he says. “Little storage houses for peat, dried meat, and provisions. It’s how they got through the winter. A kind of ice house, if you like.”
I can’t tell from the look on his face whether he’s mocking me or not. “It’s all right,” I say. “I know all this sounds completely bloody loony. It sounds loony to me, too. I’m just having dreams, aren’t I?”
Jim is beginning to look uncomfortable. He takes his glasses off and twirls them by one of the stems. “God, lass, I don’t know.”
We finish our tea without speaking. Maybe he is just waiting for me to go.
I stand up. “But what if time isn’t what we think it is, one damn thing after another? What if what we know isn’t just a series of pictures, but more like a hologram? If the whole thing is contained within each piece, then traveling through time isn’t so much a question of traveling anywhere so much as looking deeper into the image.”
“You’ve lost me,” says Jim. “I don’t see how it could all be happening at once if one thing causes another. Look, in this list of kings, your King Murdoch comes directly after King Eochaid.”
I throw up my hands. “I know.”
Jim senses I am anxious to leave and stands up too. “I have to go up to Oban tomorrow, if you’d like to come.”
He tells me he has a car in his garage, but it must be a small car because I thought his garage was a shed. I shouldn’t go anywhere because I have to keep working on the witches, but I am about to explode.
“All right,” I say. “I could do with the distraction.”
I have been to Oban only a few times and not at all on this visit. Jim is pleased. For one day, I just want to be normal, though that would be a new feeling for me. I can just see Oliver giving me his deadpan look. I can just see the psychiatrist he sends me to telling me that the subconscious often produces a colorful reality to compensate for the prospects of a dull one.
The next morning early, Jim backs his ancient car out of the garage onto the gravel drive. He has had the heater going, but car heaters in the 1970s weren’t what they would become. I can see my breath as I wait for him to turn the car around, stamping my feet on the gravel to generate some modicum of warmth in my toes. At least the sky has decided to show itself from behind cloud.
The road to the tourist town of Oban dips and curves around lochs with sailing boats surrounded by forest and through scenes that would be at home on any calendar. And always the sea stretches out around the islands and beyond to the edge of the horizon.
Oban comes into view, a stately town with the houses built up on a grade from the harbor to the top of the hill where sits an old folly like a small coliseum. The Castle of Dunollie sits on a hill at the far end of the town, one of the first but now just a collection of ruined walls overrun with moss and ivy.
Swans float in the harbor among dismal seaweed like fairy boats; seagulls preen themselves on the harbor wall and on the backs of benches; large ferries pull silently in and out of the long pier, destined for Mull and the many Hebridean islands farther north. We walk along the front and go in for lunch at one of the older bakeries for a piping hot cup of tea, chips with tomato ketchup, and thick slices of bread.
I hum to myself, sitting here with Jim, making my chips and bread into a butty, doing the normal stuff.
Jim says, “I bet they didn’t have those in the eighth century.”
After a while, he says, “Maybe it’s not good for you, spending so much time by yourself.”
I have to laugh. I suppose to the onlooker I am showing all the signs of derangement. “It seems to suit you fine.”
He shakes his head. “It doesn’t suit me fine at all, which is why I was after you finding me a grannie in that dream of yours.” He forks a few chips into his mouth. “There’s not much you can recommend about living alone, eh?”
“No,” I say, “but at least you can have your epileptic fits in peace. Not counting nosy neighbors, of course.”
“Och,” he says, “you’re lucky you have a neighbor, one with an imagination, I might add. You’re lucky I haven’t summoned the wee men in white coats.”
“What if you could go back in time?” I ask him. “Where would you go?”
“Aye, well. That’s a question all right,” he says. He tilts his head for a better slant on the problem. “It wouldn’t be to that last king of Scotland, James the sixth—he disappeared off down to the English court and nothing was seen of him again. A right disgrace he was to his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. It was him, you know, who put a light under the fire of the Great Scottish Witch Hunt, so to speak.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I think it would be to the time of the Bruce, right after the Battle of Bannockburn—what a glory it must have been to know his army had sent the English packing and Scotland was free at last after all the struggle. I think I would give away most of my life just to know how that felt.”
I am in my staring trance. Sometimes you just happen on the thing in a person that
stirs the quick. It’s a nice thing to see, the quick, and I have to stare. But it makes Jim look away.
I nudge his arm. “The eighth century isn’t that bad either.”
He laughs. “Take away the strapping Fergus, and all you have is plague, wars, a serious lack of heat.”
“You have the witches. Dunadd has Sula, the druidess. I bet in the sixteenth century, the witches were still just doing what witches had done since the beginning of civilization, practicing their herbs, midwifery, a bit of fortune-telling; only now the church was running scared.”
After lunch we walk farther along the front to the cathedral, which is made of the pink granite the islands are famous for.
On the way back to the car park, my ankle is bothering me.
“Probably turned it on one of your jaunts up the hill.”
“Probably,” I say. But I don’t believe it.
For all this being normal, I would swap this tourist town in a second for the chance to be standing by the door of Sula’s hut watching Fergus stagger about with Murdoch.
Jim and I don’t say much on the first part of our journey home. It’s getting dark, and the yellow headlights on the single-track road keep our attention forward.
“I’m sorry about your wife,” I say, somewhere between one small town with a GO SLOW sign by a tiny stone school and the next.
Jim looks over at me, then back at the road. “Aye, well. Life has a way of throwing things at you. I’m sorry about your daughter. That must have been very hard.”
I don’t know whether he can see me crying in the dark. I try to take silent breaths, but they want to turn into something more. He says nothing. The branches that arch over the road from their tall hedgerows seem leafless and grim.
I know he is waiting for something more, and for some reason in the dark I want to tell him. “She died during a seizure. She was with a babysitter, one of Oliver’s students, while we went to a god-awful faculty party. I think the thought of her fighting for breath while I sipped on a glass of sherry was the hardest thing of all. I was barely there at all for the funeral, just going through the motions, trying to fend off the pitying looks. Oliver couldn’t speak to me for weeks after. I couldn’t speak to myself.”
Veil of Time Page 14
