Veil of Time

by Claire R. McDougall

  I shout my accusation at him across the river, earthy brown run that at least in my dream looked just like this a thousand or more years ago. Jim looks up and shrugs. After a length, he shouts, “Away round to the bridge and less of your shouting.”

  It’s not easy going along the bank, semi-marsh as it is, piled with lumps of sedge that turn your foot sideways in your Wellie. As though in solidarity, Winnie the kitten follows behind.

  The bridge is an old stone one with a fancy Roman arch for an underside, not that it came out of any great artistic vision, just out of the mud and practicality of the farmer who set it, stone against stone. It’s a beautiful bridge, nevertheless, the mythical drawbridge in my mind that keeps me safe within the shadow of the fort, a recluse with my papers and my questions.

  Jim looks up at me from his seat on the riverbank. “What is it you were saying? Quietly now, so you don’t scare the fish, and take that bloody cat away or she’ll be eating them.”

  I laugh. “It’s nearly bloody winter. There won’t be any catch, and even if there were, they’d have to be gae small fish for the cat to pose a menace. Is it minnows you’re after?”

  He looks back to his fishing. I look down at the dark river, harboring, so Jim hopes, some scaly vestige of life. A seagull lands and hunkers down against the wind. I sigh. Here in the presence of the river, even the burning of witches doesn’t seem worth the noise.

  I say, “I was saying nothing.”

  I sit down next to him and draw my knees up against my chest. Winnie rubs her back around my legs, as though I had just sat down for her pleasure.

  He chuckles. “Sounded like an awful lot of nothing to me.”

  “I was just caught up in my work, research.”

  He looks at me, as though I’ve handed him a measure by which to gauge me. “Aye, they were saying in the village that you were up to something of the sort.”

  The noise comes back. “Something of what sort? What is that supposed to mean?”

  He turns back to his line, which is bobbing all of a sudden. “No need to get your knickers in a twist.”

  Jim lands his fish, little shriveled thing that he ought to throw back, while I’m wondering about my dream. I can’t put it away, because I want to know what the fire was about and who the privileged few were that made up the cheering crowd. I want to go into that village at the base of Dunadd on the sheep field and see the life there. Suddenly I’m finding myself wondering what effect it would have for me to miss a day’s course of pills and perhaps find myself back in that dream. I don’t know what year of the Dark Ages I was in, or if it even matters.

  “Throw the damn fish back,” I say, watching the poor thing writhe, its gills sucking hopelessly. I slide close enough to its tail to flick it with the toe of my boot. Using my foot, the fish bounces itself back into the water.

  “Hoi,” Jim shouts. “That was my dinner!”

  I hadn’t meant to throw the fish back, but I am suddenly giddy that it managed to do it for itself.

  “Nothing to laugh at,” he says. “Now it’ll be beans on toast.”

  I say, “You wouldn’t have found any meat on that thing anyway. I’ll get your dinner for you to make up for it. I’m sure the fish will approve. It was probably some poor little shy’s mother.”

  “Bloody skinny mother, if you ask me,” he says. “What’ll you make me?”

  I hadn’t meant to promise him anything, not least of all more of my study time.

  I sigh, “Sardines on toast?” I can’t help but laugh.

  “Oh aye, very funny. I’ll be over at six.”

  “Fine.” I walk off.

  He comes at five to six, and he’s wearing a silly cravat tucked into the neck of his shirt. It might have worked when he was courting his wife back in the 1950s, but it doesn’t work on me, and not because the “lady doth protest too much,” just because I don’t want his overtures, plain and simple. I’m thirty-eight, and not so desperate yet I need to ponder some old wrinkled bum.

  He’s brought me flowers from the local shop, a few white roses mixed in with fern. “It was the least I could do,” he says, “after you threw back my fish.”

  I take them to the sink; the arrangement falls into a pleasing spray in a vase. “Not threw back exactly. Besides, you should leave the poor fish alone. You can buy a kipper at the shop.”

  He shakes his head. “Not the manly way.”

  I sigh. “I think we’ve had enough of men and their manly ways. Can’t you just all lay off it?”

  He takes a seat at the table and puts his elbows on it in the way I’m sure his mother told him not to. “You’re not one of those ballbusters or whatever the hell it is the Americans call them, are you?”

  He has defused the moment. I shake my head and smile. “No, not a ballbuster.”

  He nods towards my books and papers removed from the dinner table to a chair. “What’s all that about, then?”

  “That’s the ‘something of the sort’ that local gossip has me working on. It’s about witches, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh, I see,” he says, looking me over, as though I suddenly make sense to him. I wish I made sense to myself.

  I set the vase on the table in front of him. “Did they ever have fires on the top of Dunadd?”

  “Aye, they did. Even up into my day, every Halloween we would build a fire up there. We used to jump over it, and that’s a piece of antiquity right there, though we didn’t know it then.”

  I go back to the kitchen. “What was it for?”

  He shrugs. “A purification rite from Ye Olde pagan times. They used to make their animals go over it, too, to ensure their safety through the coming winter. Most of the cattle, though, they’d have to slaughter, because there wasn’t enough feed to keep both man and animal alive. It would be a lot of meat to salt, and innards, what have you, to preserve for winter, guts and sinew, they used the lot. Anything they couldn’t preserve they’d stick in a sausage, including the blood, which is why we have black pudding to this day. And haggis.”

  I laugh. “Would you like to write my dissertation for me?”

  “No,” he says, clearly pleased, “I don’t know that much at all, never did go to the university.”

  I retrieve the dinner from under the grill and set it down between us.

  “Sardines on toast,” he says. “I thought you were joking.”

  I shake my head. “I never joke. It’s against my nature.”

  I don’t know if he thinks I’m joking now, but I don’t think I am.

  He forks a fish into his mouth and follows it with a bite of toast. I remember now half a bottle of red wine in my fridge and offer it to him.

  “Could you warm it up?” he says. “I’m not one for cold drinks, right enough.”

  I go into the kitchen, pour the unlikely red brew into a pan, and flick the gas on under it.

  “Is that what you do over here,” he says, “drink wine by yourself?”

  I pour the sizzling red wine into two cups and return to the table with them.

  I say, “I would call that prying. How does it taste?”

  “Awful,” he says. “Still, it takes the edge off awkward conversation.”

  I try my hot wine and wince. “Blah. I didn’t think it was awkward.”

  “Not until I started prying.”

  “What do you want to know?” I ask. I take another sip of warm wine and try to gather strength.

  He leans back in his chair, which creaks a little under the strain. “Well, here you are, divorced and without your children. I doubt the farmers around here are going to be of much interest to you, and you’re a bit young to be giving up on life.”

  I’m glad at least that he’s putting himself on the other side of the fence from my romantic interests. Maybe he’s waiting for me to say I prefer older men. But there is too much to explain about my reasons for wanting to be lonely.

  I sigh.

  “Are your children with your husband?”

 
Here we go. I empty my cup of wine. It stings my throat. “No.”

  “If you don’t want to tell me,” he says, “that’s fine.”

  “It’s just that you will probably ask again.”

  He laughs, quite unaware of what is about to come out.

  “Look,” I say, “there’s no secret about it. Oliver Griggs, my husband, teaches history at Glasgow University.”

  I sense that Jim is beginning to see, probably by the look or lack of look on my face, what he has got himself into.

  He says, “Posh,” in an effort to lighten the mood.

  The wine is doing a better a job. “We have two children, as I said: Graeme, who is seventeen and at boarding school in Edinburgh. Ellie was eight years old two years ago when she died, so that’s the story.”

  Jim leans back over the table. He doesn’t say anything, and for that I’m grateful. I go back to my kitchen, rummage in the bread bin while I try to put myself back in order, and come up with a box of Jaffa Cakes. Jim stops me on the way back to the table with a hand to my arm.

  “I’m sorry for your troubles,” he says. “My mother used to say, Cha do dhùin doras nach do dh’fhosgail doras.”

  I offer him a Jaffa cake. “My Gaelic’s not good enough for that one.”

  He takes one. “No door ever closed, but another opened.”

  I sit across from him and try to size up this saying of his mother’s, whether he thinks he is the door I’m looking for. “Well, if there’s any other door, I’ve still to find it.”

  “So go on looking then.”

  I bite into my cake. I haven’t been looking for doors. I haven’t been looking for anything. There are times when there is no point in putting in the effort, when you just have to step aside and wait for the pain to ebb. This is what Dunadd means to me. It was for this reason I came.

  I don’t tell him about my operation in January, because then I would have to go into the epilepsy. It’s not something I talk about. I take my pills and try to pretend I am not afflicted. My husband only rarely saw a seizure, my children never. It’s not the kind of thing you want the staff at Glasgow University to know about, so you drink the cocktails and stay away from fluorescent light, like a vampire. And now it’s just reflex to sit on it, and no point in baring my soul in any case, as I only have a few months before there will be no more dreams, because that part of my life is going to be fixed.

  5

  Talorcan banged on the gates of the fort with the heel of his hand. “Open up now. I have Fergus Mac-Brighde at my right.”

  Echoes of the name rippled back up the hill, and it wasn’t long before a bolt shot back and the men walked through the gate. The torches had been lit up the craggy climb to the edge of the clearing where the royal houses stood, these and the granary, store, and bakehouses beyond. The smell of roasted deer meat from a spit outside the kitchen reminded Fergus that he had eaten little food since the oat bannocks and honey his host had sent with him for his journey. But for now, something more pressing than hunger insisted itself. He looked about for his daughter, Illa.

  He heard her before he saw her. “Father!”

  She came running with a shout into his arms. Fergus knelt to his daughter’s level, although there was barely any need these days.

  “You keep growing,” he said. He ran his hand through the girl’s rust hair and turned back to Talorcan. “She’ll be as tall as that giant Finn M’Coul before she’s done.”

  Looking down at his daughter’s smile, Fergus wondered why he ever looked for his wife among the dead, for surely she was still here among the living. Illa’s hair had grown long, gathered from the front and draped around to the nape of her neck. She looked up at her father with bright sky eyes, more his than her mother’s.

  She slipped her small cold hand into his and tugged him towards the house farthest up the hill below the summit. They could make out Fergus’s mother, Brighde, standing by the curtain at the door, erect, stately, her headdress pooling around her shoulders.

  She embraced her son. “Good to see you return safely.” She patted his chest in the way she had done since he was a boy. “You must be hungry.”

  To Talorcan she gave a simple nod.

  Illa waited patiently as her father set his bag down and went to warm himself by the fire at the far end of the house’s one room. The girl couldn’t help but hope that a journey of so many months might have won her a prize. But her grandmother ordered her out to the spit to bring meat for her father.

  Fergus watched her go. “Where’s Murdoch?”

  “He’s up by the fire,” said Brighde. “But stay here a little and talk with me. Tell me, how was the Briton?”

  Fergus laughed. “Fair, of course, or she would not have been thrust upon me. Bonny and generous, but too young to have anything of importance to say.”

  Brighde pulled her face tight. “You need a wife, not a war minister. Not a druid, not a bard—someone to give you children. Our line is only as good as its offspring.”

  Talorcan, who had been standing just inside the door, shifted his feet, making Brighde look up and sigh, for this Pictish man was a relative forced upon her. She had barely given Fergus’s marriage her blessing and now even less so, for her son could look favorably upon no one else. She knew that Saraid had been as much counselor to her husband as any good advisor, but Fergus was asking too much, and he would have to succumb to the choice of his brother the king if he didn’t act soon.

  Illa came back, her thin arms laden with dishes and a cup of fraoch—for a dusty traveler, she said, making her father smile. Too much of her life the girl had spent with her grandmother and only an uncle for a father.

  “Illa, bring me my bag!”

  Talorcan came forward with the bag and handed it to the girl. She danced her steps over to her father, laid her hand on his thigh while he went through the deep pockets of his deerskin satchel, feigning frustration. But when he noticed his daughter’s dismay, his hand closed around the small wooden box that had been given him by the Briton his mother now wanted to hear about. Illa took the box and kissed it.

  “Wasn’t she a good woman?” Brighde asked.

  Fergus threw up his hands. Such questioning, always questions from the mother who had survived her husband but sometimes, he felt, should have gone instead.

  “I was told she was both young and beautiful,” said his mother.

  Fergus laughed. “Beauty, what is that to me? A trinket in the moment for the man whose eyes do not see far. Youth I no longer have myself. Time has brought me forward with scars and knowledge. How could I entrust myself or my daughter to youth that knows nothing of these, that has not properly lived?”

  He took the box from Illa’s hands and showed her how to slide the secret door open. Illa gasped.

  “Very clever,” said Talorcan. “From the east, no doubt.”

  “I believe from the Far East. A bauble for trade.”

  Illa took the box and slid the top open for herself. She sat down in her father’s lap and laughed as he poked her sides and nuzzled her face.

  When she had struggled free and straightened the folds of her tunic, she said, “There’s a stranger with Sula the ban-druidhe. She wears a short tunic and the leg bindings of a man.”

  Fergus looked to his mother. “Have you seen her?”

  Brighde shook her head. “She was found wandering at the bottom of the fort, in strange clothing, probably one of the traveling people, though she wears gold on her finger and in her teeth. Murdoch had her taken to Sula.” She gestured into the air with her hand. “I’ve heard nothing since.”

  His mother tried to smile at him, but her eyes showed no happiness. Fergus walked to her by the fire and fixed her wool wrap about her shoulders with the pin that had been his father’s, a small golden shield studded with garnet.

  “Then I will go to Sula myself and find out what she knows.”

  Illa jumped up. “May I come?”

  Fergus motioned her to his side. “First, let m
e eat. Then we’ll see what’s to be made of a woman in the leg bindings of a man.”

  Illa laughed. Such a laugh, the same mouth and now the adult teeth same as Saraid. Brighde brought out from a heavy box a glass from the Gauls who brought the wine on ships and took away fine jewelry made by the Saxon Oeric at the forge, the same craftsman who had fashioned the brooch Brighde wore on her shawl. For the glasses she had traded two slaves brought in on raids from the south.

  But Fergus had little taste for the Gaul’s red wine. He gestured to Illa to pass the fraoch, ale made of heather, the common man’s drink. He swallowed in great gulps, letting the bitter brew run down his gullet and warm his belly. The Britons had served sweet mead that did not sit well in his stomach. By the warmth of the fire, Fergus’s eyes started to close, but he still had to climb the hill to greet his brother, Murdoch. More than that, he needed to seek out Sula and make use of this night of the dead.

  Fergus wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he emerged from the smoky house into the night made loud by drums and singing from the camp below, the black air redolent with the blood of animals and the cooking roots of the peasants. Illa was already running ahead, as though her father needed a guide. As they passed the house where Fergus had lived with his wife, he looked for her at the door. Tonight he saw only the door.

  With his daughter running ahead, Fergus pulled Talorcan close. “I have heard it spoken of creatures half woman, half man. Perhaps this is what was found.”

  Talorcan looked puzzled. “Do you mean in stories sung by the bards?”

  Fergus shook his head. “Not in stories, but real, a creature with all the parts of a woman and yet with the parts of a man, too.”

  Talorcan patted his back. “Too much fraoch drunk too quickly?”

  Fergus nudged his brother-in-law in the ribs. “I am telling only what I heard.”