Veil of Time

by Claire R. McDougall

  “And besides,” said Murdoch, “I already bedded the strange new woman myself and soundly until she rejoiced with joy unspeakable.”

  Fergus made a lunge at his brother.

  Brighde pulled them apart. “Stand back from each other. Have you lost all dignity, the king and his brother fighting like boys? Murdoch, you were bedded here last night. Say so.”

  Murdoch would not say so.

  “Besides,” said Brighde, “the chief reason your brother wants you to remain at Dunadd is in case of trouble with the Picts.”

  Fergus let his brother go. “From the north and east?”

  Murdoch rearranged his plaidie and pulled the brooch back up to his shoulder. “From the Picts of the Boar among us.”

  Fergus spat his words. “Is there any sign of trouble?”

  Murdoch stood astride the hearth as though he were about to issue an edict. “The Christians say this new King Oengus is gathering a large band to the north, and some of our own men are leaving to join them.”

  “Which men?”

  “Cousins of Talorcan and your former wife.”

  Fergus sighed. “The way you treat Talorcan, it is a surprise that he himself has not already gone.”

  “Talorcan has to learn his place,” Brighde said. “There has been no Pictish rule at Dunadd for over two hundred years. We would like to keep it that way.”

  Fergus shook his head. “There will be no trouble, as long as we stay civil with the Picts. They want peace as much as we do. They have no intention of rising up and taking Murdoch’s crown.”

  Murdoch said, “Talorcan has been seen by the lookouts stalking around the castle walls. Such behavior suggests only one intention.”

  Fergus laughed. “To see Illa, you fool. He comes to see the girl.”

  Brighde said, “It is not forbidden for him to see his niece.”

  “No,” said Fergus, “but neither is he welcome.”

  “You should not bring him up here,” said Murdoch.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you can see the mischief in his eyes.”

  “You see only what you seek, Murdoch,” said Fergus. “If you want to find trouble, look to your Christian friends with their infernal bells, spreading trouble, passing laws over our heads about what we can and shouldn’t do.”

  “A bell is not a sword,” Murdoch said. “We need not fear their words.”

  Fergus held his brother with his gaze. “We have reason to fear. These Christians are filling up the lands with their ways. Only four years ago they fought a battle fifty thousand strong against the Moors in the land of the Franks. Now I hear that they chased the druids out of the land of the Sassenachs to an island and murdered them to a man. To a woman. They allow no women. See what they have done to Iona, the Isle of the Druids. There is your enemy, my brother, if an enemy is what you’re after.”

  Fergus turned to go, but Murdoch got between him and the door. “Do not turn your back to your mother.”

  Fergus turned round. “I’m sorry, Mother. I promised Illa I would teach her to play one of the board games.”

  Brighde nodded her assent to his leaving. Fergus did not look back at Murdoch. There was love there, of course, but since childhood he had always felt put upon by his elder brother. His tale of bedding the stranger was typical Murdoch taunting, but it cut Fergus more than it should have, he realized, as he went out and found Illa. Still he was glad of the news that he didn’t have to leave Dunadd anymore. It would be good for him to spend more time with his daughter. And he wanted to find out if this woman was the one Sula had seen in her stones.

  As soon as the door closed behind Fergus, Murdoch turned to his mother. “I’ll arrange a meeting with the woman I have chosen for Fergus. If he were married to one of his own people, his allegiances would soon change.”

  Brighde sighed. Since he was a boy she had found little luck in persuading Fergus onto a different path. “Who is she, this woman?”

  “She is the widow of my friend Erc, who died in the battle with the Northumbrians. Her name is Colla, and she has a daughter just about the age of Illa. Erc used to say there was no woman with a faster tongue than Colla.”

  Brighde laughed. “Then she might suit your brother. But we must work quickly, that he doesn’t become entangled with this strange woman in the meantime.”

  While Fergus showed Illa the board game, his thoughts kept wandering off to Ma-khee. When he had taken her to the ring stones, he felt her ease under his touch, and he had thoughts of seeing how willing she was. But the stones had always had a strange effect on him, and this time was no exception. His finger moving in the circles within circles brought a sense of his insignificance in the great workings of Cailleach the goddess. Despite what he said to Murdoch, Fergus felt that things were changing around him, and part of him didn’t like change. A mood of emptiness had fallen over him, and so he had been quiet on the ride back to Dunadd. He hoped the woman had understood.

  When Fergus looked up, his daughter was waiting for the answer to a question he hadn’t heard her ask.

  “So,” he said, “the eleven blue beads must capture this single white one.”

  He waited to see if he had given the right answer. Illa smiled, but then she always wanted to please him.

  “It’s been a long time since I played,” he said. “It was your mother who really liked games.”

  Illa said, “Especially the new one with the figures on squares carved like kings and queens.”

  Fergus nodded. He had traded furs for that game with the fair people from the land across the North Sea. But trading was all he ever hoped to do with those people. Something about the berserk warrior pieces in that game disturbed him, one biting the top of his shield. He would not want to meet such men in battle.

  After the game, Illa went to fish at the mouth of the river with some of the village children her age. It was on just such trips as a boy that Fergus had grown accustomed to the Picts and their ways. When he got older, he found Saraid, still a girl then, but he liked the way she could gather mud balls and sling them farther than any boy. He liked the small boar tattooed on her shoulder. She quieted down as she got older, but there was still fight in her, as he discovered when they lay together beyond the field of oats. Murdoch had done the same with other Pictish girls, but when it came time for him to marry, his mother made sure it was to a Scot of some standing.

  Fergus climbed to the top of Dunadd. The view had always cleared his head; the salt air and the acid smell of the marsh soothed him. He had the sense of this slipping from him, with all the talk of the new Pictish king and the way the Christians were changing the world about them. He sat down facing the sea and let the wind stroke the hair back from his face. He glanced over at Sula’s hut. Fergus knew that Murdoch did not necessarily stay in his marriage bed, and that was his prerogative as king. But Fergus wanted this Ma-khee for himself, and he had no interest in a woman sanctioned by Murdoch, especially not one Murdoch had already brought to joy unspeakable.

  When Illa tired of fishing, she knew she would find her father at the top of the hill. She brought a wrap from her grandmother’s house and placed it about his shoulders.

  “What’s this?” laughed Fergus. “Do you think your father has not enough strength to bear the wind against his chest?”

  Illa looked ashamed. “Grandmother sent it for you.”

  Fergus shook his head. “Then I have become weak in her eyes, too. Here.” He twirled the woolen blanket off his shoulders and around his daughter’s.

  But Illa shrugged it off. “I said my prayers to Cailleach at Samhain. She will protect me.”

  “Yes, she will.”

  “Look,” said Illa, pointing, “the stranger and Marcus.”

  Fergus glanced quickly. His heart was running ahead of him like a scared animal. But when Illa made a move to go to them, Fergus held her down so they would not be seen.

  “Why do you not want her to see us?” Illa asked.

  But Fergus h
ad no answer and didn’t have to give one. He waited until Illa had run off before calling his name outside Sula’s door. Marcus let him in, and then went back to arranging blocks of peat on the fire. Fergus closed the door behind him and leaned back against the wood for a moment. A torch on the wall cast its light on the woman crouched by the druid’s pots of healing herbs. He picked the torch off the wall and took it close to her. She looked into his face hard, studying first one eye then the other. She placed her hand over the beat of her heart so that he saw what fine white fingers she had, unused to work.

  She said, “How are you?”

  Fergus wanted to touch her, but he didn’t know if she would be willing after he had withdrawn from her at the ring stones. Just like her, he didn’t know who he was. His life for so long had been one of in betweens—neither wholly a Gael nor a Pict; royal but not king; a father and husband but with no wife, and not really wanting one until now.

  He handed the torch to Marcus. “Go to the queen and bring the woman some clothes.”

  After the slave left, Fergus stood apart from the woman, by the wall, awkward to be alone with her. She seemed wary of him, chewing on her lip as he had never seen a woman of any standing do. She seemed nervous, like a slave who had been beaten.

  He came close again and touched her hand, just to let her know that she could trust him. Her skin was soft like a child’s, and he noticed again the band of gold on her finger. This woman was no slave. She smiled, and he liked that smile so much he touched her other hand. His fingers itched to move around her waist. But she seemed wary, looking away and running her hands through her hair. Instinctively, he caught her hand on its way back down. She searched his face, but he couldn’t tell what she wanted of him. Did she have a family, and did she want to go back home? He didn’t ask, because he feared the answer.

  Still he kept hold of her hand, and after a moment, since she seemed willing, he laid each of her fingertips against his mouth.

  When Sula came in and saw what he was doing, she pulled him away by the sleeve to the door.

  “If she is a druid in her own place, you should leave her be. She needs her power, and you should not be stealing her off at night like your brother does the wenches in the village.”

  Fergus lowered his voice. “You have to tell me if she is the woman you have been saving me for?”

  Fergus saw the wrinkles gather above Sula’s eyes. He wasn’t used to seeing her perplexed. “I don’t know. She confuses me.”

  Marcus came back into the hut with a bundle of clothing, and handed a tunic to the Ma-khee woman. Fergus watched as she pulled it over her head and down over her breasts. She did not seem to know what to do with the leg wraps.

  “Never mind,” said Sula. “But she needs a brooch to hold her wrap closed.”

  “I will fetch one,” said Fergus.

  Just as Sula went to latch the door behind him, Fergus touched her arm. He had a question that must be answered. “My brother,” he said quietly. “Has he visited the woman Ma-khee?”

  Sula patted his arm. “You must go. The tinkling bells tell me the Christians are back again from Iona. You must speak for us, Fergus. I will take the woman with me—there is trouble with a certain family below in the village. If she is indeed a wise woman, I can use her hands. Go now, and know your brother did not come.”

  Fergus closed the door of the hut lightly behind him. He brought his fingers to his nose and breathed in Ma-khee’s smell of flowers.

  12

  I keep time now by how many days since my last seizure. The operation looms like a wall in my way back to Fergus. Just dreams, I tell myself. Just an electrical storm playing havoc. I park my glasses on my nose and run my fingers down the list of women held guilty of witchcraft, half expecting to find Sula’s name there:

  The year 1662. Isobel Gowdie, a young housewife, “confest guiltie of the horrid cryme of witchcraft.”

  The record shows Isobel confessed her pact with the devil, that he had placed his mark on her shoulder, sucked blood from the wound, and rebaptized her with it. This trial gave rise to a whole new wave of persecutions.

  I set my pen down and pick up my copy of the Malleus Maleficarum. In its time, this witch-hunt guide was second in sales only to the Bible. “All witchcraft,” it says, “comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.”

  Carnal lust. This would be funny, I think, if you could find anything funny in a book of hate. This is woman perhaps as we can’t imagine her anymore. It’s not the fainting woman of courtly love, or Victorian woman with her sexless sex, not even the sex kitten of modern day. It’s not me either, except for vague memories from before the medicines started to kick in. And me now, perhaps, when I think of crouching in the dark with the hand of a Dark Age prince against my spine.

  Back to the book: it says that witches also have the power to steal men’s penises. I know Freud would have a heyday with that one. No wonder they needed torture for confessions. It’s true someone stole Marcus’s, but it wasn’t a witch. I smile to think that I would have made a poor witch, because I wouldn’t steal Fergus’s even if I could. That part of his anatomy should stay exactly where it is.

  I go to the window, where the sight of the river should make me calm but is not having much luck today. It says in the book that if a woman doth protest too much, she is automatically a witch. How different things would have been if women had stayed in power and the priests had been kept in check. I can’t help but wonder how women changed as an entire sex in the aftermath of such a holocaust. Wrap up that “carnal lust,” my girl, tie it secure, force it down, and bury it deep. And pay no attention at all to that man in his black cassock behind the curtain and what he’s doing to the little girls and boys of the parish. It shall never be spoken. Woman, cover thy shame! Honor thy father, God. Honor thy priest.

  The Sabbath day dawns, and all I want to do is to go looking for the cup-and-ring stones Fergus took me to. Jim says I’ll have to wait until he’s done at the museum, and so, for some perverse reason, I fill my time with the enemy in a pew at the local Church of Scotland. It is Protestant, not what I’m used to: no incense, no Hail Marys. No Mary at all. I suppose at least the Catholic church got that much right: it kept the goddess. But then they made up for it double by putting men in charge. Eunuchs, or would-be eunuchs.

  I sit in the last pew by the door, just to make sure everybody knows I’m just an observer looking for evidence, hoping to find some John Knox snarling at the mouth, leaning over his lectern and condemning “carnal lust.” But this minister isn’t Knox and looks as if he never heard of carnal anything.

  The pews are hard, the backs set at the wrong angle. The wood is so old, its brown is almost black. Broken stained-glass windows have over time been replaced by ordinary glass, lending a view of trees and a hillside that perhaps the old windows were designed to obscure. The remaining stained glass allows a filtered kind of light through its gory biblical scenes. But nothing in the church is as old as the air. Once the walls were put up and the door closed, I think the first air was afraid to leave.

  I look around at the congregation, a cross section of the older population of the area. Jim Galvin would look at home here. I half expect to see him, but instead I see purple-rinse perms and older farmers scrubbed out of their shite and muddy Wellies, half dozing from the early-morning rise to milk cows and muck byres. They stand to sing hymns familiar from childhood, and sit to doze during a sermon given in the speak of a litany long since dead. There’s nothing here, I decide, but a remnant, nothing that could be tried and found guilty anymore.

  The sermon is about redemption. It is about getting our dues on the other side, but the minister appeals to no “woe betides.” In this church, sin is about letting the side down. It’s the private shame we feel for not doing the good we ought. No burning witches here. No burning souls at all. Just guilt. In that the Protestant and Catholic faiths did not diverge.

  When we stand to sing the hymns, I do not sing. I don’t thin
k anyone notices. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, / That saved a wretch like me. / I once was lost but now am found, / Was blind, but now I see. The red hymnbook, bound in mock leather, has a musty smell that adds to the dim light and dank air and makes for somnolence. After the benediction, the church turns me out on the other side, sapped of fire.

  I drive from the church to pick up Jim, and find him in the map room talking to a group of Americans about sacred springs.

  “The way the pagans saw it,” he says, “the earth supported the people instead of the other way around, and a spring was where the spirit of the earth ran out.”

  He shows them the light-up map of standing stones in the area. It looks like a flat green room full of Christmas lights. “These all follow the path of lay lines, another place where the spirit of the earth was supposed to leak.”

  Jim lets the switch go, and the map falls back into greys and dark greens. The Americans move on. We go out through the door into the museum shop, where you can buy silver replicas of the finely wrought jewelry from Dunadd, the brooches that once held shawls about the shoulders of a rough-hewn people.

  All along the Kilmartin Valley road to Achnabreck, we pass stone circles.

  Jim says, “They used to call this Gleann nan Clachan, you know, the Valley of Stones.”

  I shake my head. I didn’t know. “How far do the circles date back?”

  Jim points to our right. “Temple Wood there goes back about five thousand years, twice as long as the pyramids of Egypt.”

  “Then all of this,” I say, “was already ancient in the time of Fergus MacBrighde.”

  Jim nods. “Compared to these stones, Fergus MacBrighde happened only yesterday.”

  Not yesterday enough, I think.

  The cup-and-ring marks at Achnabreck have, like Dunadd itself, been taken over by the Scottish National Trust, and there are fences all around the slabs of rocks where I crouched only recently with the prince of Dunadd.

  Jim shakes his head as I climb over and squat with my fingers in the circle grooves.