Veil of Time

by Claire R. McDougall

  I jump up, guilty again. “I am sorry, I forgot. Would you like a slice?”

  This time, I slide a wedge of the colorful cake onto a plate and hand it over. Back in my armchair, I watch him dab the errant crumbs with the end of his finger before he starts in on the slice.

  He tells me his father ran a pig farm to the south of Dunadd. He says he built his house at Dunadd himself when he was still fit enough for levering stones out of the ground and heaving them up for a wall.

  He puts his hand flat against the base of his spine. “Fair jiggered the back, though. Now I’m not good for much but digging in the soil.”

  I say, “Your garden must be lovely in the spring.”

  I want to ask about his wife, but something tells me it can’t be done. So I ask about his children. Two girls, he says, all grown up now with families of their own.

  “How about you?”

  I clear my throat. The conversation has turned and is heading my way. I can see he has noticed the wedding ring, something so far I haven’t been able to let go of.

  “Two.”

  Jim looks embarrassed. I’m sure he doesn’t know why, but I don’t have the kind of face that can rearrange emotions and pretend they’re not there.

  “I suppose you must be separated,” he says. “Don’t worry, I won’t pry.”

  I try to order my face. “Divorced. As good as.”

  The question of the children hangs in the pause, so I resort to an expediency well honed by civilized humans: I change the subject.

  “Do you know if any witches were burned at Dunadd?”

  “Witches?” He shakes his head. “It was the church that burned witches. The fort was here before all that, during a time when your witches were women druids. ‘Ban-druidhe,’ they call them in the old language, the Gaelic. It was about as high an office as you could get.”

  I hadn’t even thought of the fact that Christianity was slow and sporadic in its spread across Scotland, that witches once upon a time ruled the roost.

  Jim shakes his head. “No, there were no witches burned here that I’m aware of, though it wasn’t that long ago the ministers used to build fires under the Standing Stones.”

  Jim is turning out to be more interesting than I thought. “Why on earth?”

  “To crack them.” Jim places a hand on his neck and pulls, as though rearranging his spine. “The stones come from thousands of years before any of this history we’re talking about, way back in heathen times. The church saw it all as devil worship. Still does.”

  I point at Jim’s witch’s hat. “Don’t they think that’s devil worship, too?”

  Jim laughs. “Aye, they probably do, but Halloween is one of those church affairs that got stuck onto an old pagan festival. ‘All Holy Evening’ used to be the Celtic Samhain, the Day of the Dead, and let me tell you, it was not holy.” He chuckles. “At least not in the Christian sense.”

  I am ashamed for having relegated this Highland man to an ignorance he clearly doesn’t deserve.

  “I’ve seen you up at the museum,” I say. “Do you work there?”

  “I help out two days a week. They don’t pay me because I’ve nothing better to do with my time and because I make up my own mind about things.”

  He says he needs to be going, but I’m not sure I want him to. It looks as though he’ll be a good resource of local history. And he’s good company.

  After Jim has left, I ring Graeme in Edinburgh. I wait with the phone against my ear, thinking of what to say. But it’s always some other breathless schoolboy grabbing the phone off the wall as he runs by.

  “Graeme Griggs?” I ask hopefully.

  He shouts off down the hall, “Griggs! Your mum.”

  Whatever else they teach at boarding school, it is not telephone etiquette. I don’t know who this boy is, but he obviously knows a mother when he hears one. I am still wondering how I manage to convey this when Graeme’s voice takes a stab at me.

  “Hi, Mum.”

  “Hello, love. What are you up to?”

  “Racing off to class.”

  He’s always racing off. Oliver went through that phase, too. Never any time to talk, not until he sat me down one evening and gave me the break-up speech: too much of this and too much of that, too much time, too much worry, too little freedom to be who he was. My too-muches didn’t seem to enter into the equation. But just for the record: too much absence, too much blame, too much inability to cope in the end when Ellie went.

  “Just wanted to say hello,” I say, “see how you’re doing.”

  “It’s all right, Mum.”

  “Yes, I know. Are you eating all right?”

  He laughs. Thank God for his laughter. “Of course I am.”

  I laugh, too, because it is all so formulaic, and I suppose that’s why the other boy could tell who I was. The mother with her questions. He probably has one of those, too.

  I say, “I just made a Halloween cake.”

  There’s a pause as the weight moves back in.

  “Got to go, Mum.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll ring you soon.”

  I don’t answer. I know he will want to ring me, and I know that I will dread the call. I will want to ring him back, and he will be running down some corridor, needing to be somewhere else.

  “Bye, then.”

  “Bye, Mum.”

  Off he goes, not quite laughing at something some other boy shouts at him as they flee.

  I lie on the couch with my new cat purring by my head like a stick down a washboard. I smile, thinking of Jim Galvin in his ridiculous witch’s hat. I smile, too, because it’s all right between Graeme and me. The words just mix things up. He knows it’s all right, and so do I. This is just a hiatus until things fall into a better pattern.

  I close my eyes. Since I unloaded my boxes and suitcases in the living room of Dunadd cottage a week and a half ago, I have had only one seizure, and a mild one at that. But I feel heat in the soles of my feet, and I know one is coming on now.

  Maybe it’s the thrumming of the cat or some change in atmospheric pressure or perhaps I forgot to take one of those pills this morning, but the heat moves up my legs, and soon everything begins to dissolve back into the atoms out of which it came. The particles grow big and bigger, until I begin to squeeze between them, and then I am falling into whatever abyss there is once you remove the stuff that everything is made of. I never know anything else until I wake up with a head like a hangover. I can only guess at the dismal scene in between, all the hallmarks of epilepsy that make normal people step away.

  After the attack comes sleep, and probably out of my conversation with Jim, I dream I am at Dunadd—not the present Dunadd, because in my dream there are high walls all up the side of the hill where nowadays the footpath meanders through heather and bracken. I am standing where Jim Galvin’s house ought to be, looking down on the river, only this time there’s a footbridge, and across the field aren’t sheep but a village of houses, all thatched and smoking, not rectangular stone houses but round houses made of wattle and mud, houses that look for all the world like an African village.

  I have had dreams before in the aftermath of seizures: I have argued points of theology with Mary Queen of Scots, who wasn’t the blockhead history has made her out to be. I have strolled along the beaches of Saint Helena with Napoleon insisting to me that he was being poisoned. But nothing has struck quite so close to home as seeing Dunadd in this way, with goats tethered and children running barefoot, with great waves of drumming and singing, and at the back of it all, a low murmuring like a didgeridoo. I must have arrived during some kind of festival.

  I wonder if Jim knew that a big boulder used to be on the site where his house now sits. I lean against it, trying to steady myself, to get my mind around the fact that Jim’s house and that of any ancestor he could name are still more than a millennium away.

  The sun is falling off the rim of Dunadd hill as I look up and notice two men approaching me. I
n the dusk, they look like a pencil sketch of medieval dress. They come towards me gingerly, as though they’re not quite sure what they are seeing. I glance back at the stone to see if I can hide behind it, but the men are already calling to me.

  They’re speaking Gaelic. “Co as a tha sibh?”

  It has been a very long time since I heard Gaelic, not since I last saw ancient Mrs. Gillies, who used to look after me as a child. I know enough to understand they are asking me where I come from, but I’m not even sure how to answer that question in English.

  When the men turn me around and tug on the bottom of my sweatshirt, I begin to wish this dream would end.

  I step out of their reach and start with my name. “Is mise Maggie Livingstone.”

  They shake their heads. No Livingstones at Dunadd in these days.

  They repeat their question as to where I come from, but they are looking more suspicious now.

  I fight to gather the Gaelic words I need. “Tha mi a Glaschu.”

  The mention of Glasgow makes them step towards me. They aren’t rough about it, just take me by the elbows and start walking me along the flat stones just above Jim’s house that start the trail up the hill. One of the men is smaller than the other, so it is an uneven march to what turn out to be fine great oak gates set in the natural cleft of the rock and lit on either side by torches. I have climbed through here time and again but all it is usually is just a narrow gap.

  It makes me laugh to see this grand entrance. I have often wondered how it must have looked. My captors glance at each other and tighten their grip. They shout in Gaelic with some urgency to whoever is behind the gate. I look up and see we are standing under a sort of portico; inset in the upper portion of the gate is a sliding hatch that opens now.

  The man behind it is another picture from a book on ancient history, with his leather hood attached to a short cape that drops just below the shoulders. His mustache hangs over his top lip and catches on his teeth as he talks. He wants to know who I am and where they found me. I hear the words ban-druidhe, and I remember this is what Jim called the witches.

  While negotiations go on over our admittance, I am able to step back and get a better look at the gates and at my captors, their knee-length tunics and hefty brown shawls tied at the shoulder with large buckles. The burning of torch wax floats heavily in the air, and the men are laughing now, almost as though they’ve forgotten I’m here. Part of me wants to run away, because I know who lives up on the hill of Dunadd. I know I am being taken to those in authority, and perhaps they won’t have a favorable impression of me in my modern clothes. But even if I could run away, where would I run to?

  When one side of the gate opens, we are let up onto the grassy flat part of the fort that is usually strewn with rubble but now is crowded with actual buildings. All of this I have seen in my imagination, and at the museum where they have tried to reconstruct it, but this is the real Dunadd, standing high and thick, lending the place the feel of an outdoor castle. Somehow I expect it all to look spanking new, but there is lichen on the walls, and I realize this place is ancient even to these ancients.

  The singing and drumming from the village are fainter up here, and I can make out the crackling of a fire on the level above us. My captors pull me off the path to let pass a group of men and women bent under great loads of logs and sticks, presumably fuel for the fire. Another man, moving unsteadily with great stone flagons in either hand, steps in behind them. All the action is clearly above us, and I am getting so nervous about what that action might be that I stop walking and try to shake the men off. They watch me flailing and seem to be in some disagreement as to where I should go. For a moment, their fingers loosen their grip, and I would be free to run now, if it weren’t for the guard at the gate. I begin to move in the direction of a spit that is giving off the smell of roasted meat, but the men seem to have reached agreement and pull me back.

  The smaller man on my left points up the hill. “Ban-druidhe.”

  I don’t know if I am being taken to a Dark Age witch or whether, contrary to Jim’s opinion, one is being burned up there. When I consider that the witch in question might be me, I start to struggle. This dream really ought to come to an end now.

  But we keep moving up towards the top of Dunadd along a path that doesn’t ascend this way in my day. We skirt a wall around the hill and then up higher and back along to a small half-sunk house near the summit thatched with heather and located exactly over a small lip of wall I sometimes sit on during my jaunts up here. The fire is so close now, I can feel the heat, but extras from some medieval film crowd around, obscuring the sight of it.

  Because the small round house is partially built into the hill, the guard has to go down a few steps to get to the door. But instead of knocking, he calls out. Before long the door opens, and I am handed into the dark, where only an orange candle burning smokily on the wall sheds any light. The door shuts heavily behind me. Inside, the air is thick and pungent. I turn back to the door to make my escape, but something draws my eye: a shadow moves, and I see an old woman leaning over a small fire.

  I press my back against the rough wood of the door, gauging the distance between my hand and the torch to see if I could use it in defense, but the woman takes little notice of me. In the light of the fire, I see several brightly colored blankets draped about her shoulders, over which her grey hair falls in soft ringlets. She is busy with her fire, chanting in a language I don’t recognize. My eyes wander from the pots of different sizes around the base of the wall to the drying leaves hanging from the rafters. If this is a witch, she wears no black hat; her nose is not warty and pointed, but she does have long fingernails, and her language is more guttural than Gaelic. She is tall and agile as she moves in a circle about her fire, from time to time throwing in flakes of something that fill the chamber with the smell of scented wood.

  I move towards the only thing familiar to me, the little ledge jutting from the wall, and walk my head straight into the trailing leaves. For the first time, she looks at me, reaches out and touches my arm. She touches, then pats, curious about the fabric of my sweatshirt. Her fingers pull on the stretch of it, and then work down to my jeans; she stoops to run her hands over my sneakers. She stands up, turns my face to the light of the fire, then takes hold of my hands, turns them over and studies my nails, the gold ring on my finger. Her fingers are dirty and tattooed with Celtic designs. There are lines of tattoo about her cheeks and a circle of Celtic knots around her wrist.

  “Ban-druidhe?” she asks. She turns her face to me, and I see that her expression is kindly.

  I shake my head, smiling at the irony of her taking me for a witch.

  She lays her hand on her chest. “Is mise Sula. ‘S mise ban-druidhe. Sula.”

  Sula. Her name lingers in my head, as does the smoke. Sula’s smoky fingers on my cheeks make my eyes sting until I am forced to look away to the chinks of light around the door. I can still hear the fire on the hilltop crackling, the intermittent cheer from the crowd. I hear the word Sula, and I hear fire. I hear them loud, and then they fall off into the distance and become a whisper. I fight to stay with Sula the witch, but the blue couch has forced itself back in; the weight of the small black cat is upon my shoulder.

  3

  Fergus had been gone from Dunadd for months. After the long journey, his horse was tired, so he didn’t want to push her. But he was nearly home; from here at the top of the Valley of Stones he could see the fire on Dunadd hill. The men he had ridden out with on his rounds collecting fealty from the lords of the kingdom had returned a week ahead of him. Fergus had sent them back to Dunadd with the cattle and the silver, while he rode south some short distance to stay awhile among the Britons and meet a young woman, a good alliance for the future, his brother the king had said.

  The woman had been fine and gentle, bonny enough. There was no problem there. The problem was with Fergus, he knew it; he had heard it enough from his brother and his mother, the queen. What gain coul
d there be, they said, in keeping his heart with the old wife, the dead wife? With Saraid.

  But he had a daughter by this woman. It was no small thing to cast her off as though the heart could turn on its heels and leave. It had been two years since the plague, two years since the druidess Sula had cast her stones and seen the cloak of death around his princess. She had tried with her fire and her chants, but even druids must bow before the goddess. Fergus knew it then, and knew it now, but he still couldn’t forgive either one of them, Saraid for rejoining her ancestors, Sula for failing to change the course.

  Two years without a woman. Murdoch, the king, had ordered him to find one before he himself secured some company for his brother’s bed. Sula said, No, wait. Murdoch said no more waiting. Sula said, Wait, something there in the way the stones fell from her hand to the ground, something in the pattern, she didn’t quite know what.

  Fergus ran his fingers between his black mare’s ears, keeping before him the warrior stars, the cluster of seven twinklers to his right almost too faint to see tonight because of the moon. The dark had brought with it a keen sense of sound that made his horse’s back twitch at every snap of branch or call of a late gull careening back to its rocky ledge.

  The great fire burning high on Dunadd hill was for Samhain, the Day of the Dead, and his horse did not care for the Valley of Stones on such a night. No more did he. His pony had thrown him here long ago when he was less than ten years in age and Murdoch had ridden up behind him with a stick draped with cobwebs and weed to scare him. On this Day of the Dead, Fergus kept to the hazels skirting the valley floor, measuring the distance between him and Dunadd in trees and shadows. Fergus leaned forward and soothed the mare with a shush—soothed himself, for she was not the only one to feel the small hairs rise on the skin.

  To his left he passed the first of the ancient circles of standing stones that gave the valley its name, put here not by his own people but by the Picts who had ruled before. In the distance, the cry and chatter of voices at Dunadd held its breath. In a moment, the cheer would go up as the torch took its ritual path from the high fire down to light those in the villagers’ houses for the start of winter. But for now in the dark, only the far-off song of the wolf could be heard, only small patters among the rusted leaves, perhaps the sound of the dead themselves, for this was the time in all of the year when the veil between the living and the dead grew thin enough to allow spirits through.