Veil of Time

by Claire R. McDougall

  Jim reaches across the gear stick and places his hand on my knee. “It wasn’t your fault, any more than it was my fault that Janet got cancer.” He clears his throat, takes his hand back. “She got thinner and thinner. She was in so much pain I wanted to put the pillow across her face and be done with it.”

  His pain is so palpable, it almost eclipses mine. We sit in the silence of it for the rest of the journey.

  Dunadd is already in view before I say, “By the way, why did you have to go to Oban?”

  He turns and winks. “I didn’t.”

  He flicks the noisy indicator on, and we swing in right to the road that has no special name except the Road to Dunadd. Ahead of us, the hill looms in the darkness, just a presence in the dark, nothing clear about it at all tonight. Nobody there, not even the tourists.

  He wants to drive me round to the cottage, but I tell him I can walk the short distance and better to get the car back under cover before it expires altogether.

  I hear his back door close, and it is my main intention to get back to my house and let the cat in, but Winnie appears out of nowhere, and I see no reason now not to climb up the hill.

  She follows me in the dark as though this had been the plan all along, running out from behind boulders as though she were being pursued, and maybe she is. It feels like I am. You can hardly distinguish the eighth-century fort from the present one at night, even despite the absence of gates. I run my fingers into the holes left by the iron rods, while Winnie balances on the ledge above my head, her tail twitching, a proper black Halloween cat.

  The brow of the hill is cold and windy. The one remaining segment of Sula’s wall does nothing to block the elements. Out beyond the fort, the sea, which the tide has taken out even farther than usual, harbors everything it ever knew and kept secret. None of the peaks and valleys between hills has changed since Fergus and his people. But they are not telling either. Real history, the part that is not written down, is mum. No matter if time is a long thread running into a vanishing horizon or a mass of simultaneously moving circles, nothing is being said tonight or any night.

  I slip and slide back down the hill on my bad ankle, back onto the path I was supposed to take in the first place. I nip across the garden, which is a shorter way to my sliding glass door than the road. But I stop at the lone standing stone. No one knows about Standing Stones. Even history draws a zip across its speculation here.

  Winnie arches around my ankles. I run my fingers over the top edge of the stone made smooth with lichen and wish it would speak. But at any rate I can thank it for remaining firm, for withstanding wind, rain and fire, and for sitting in a twenty-first century garden, still knowing something.

  It is late when I return to the cottage, but I switch on the table lamp at my desk, push my glasses on, and sit with my pages, trying to form chapter headings. I’m not sure what I can do for the poor witches, the many Sulas who were dragged from their homes, tortured, and burned. I suppose I could nail my ninety-four theses to the door of the Cannongate Church in Edinburgh and demand an apology. But I can’t undo the division of the world into God and Satan that pitted the Good against the Evildoers in the first place.

  And then there’s Fergus. What’s to become of him? Should I warn him that the Picts will overrun Dunadd? I’m not sure where in the three years of Murdoch’s reign we are; how much time I have left. Or is it even going to matter, if the Vikings are set to destroy Dunadd anyway? I don’t know if all this will be poised to happen when I go back next time. If there is a next time.

  16

  It comes sooner than I thought. No more than a moment after I come to in Sula’s hut, I’m up and shaking Marcus awake. He stares into my face blankly. But I need to know what year of Murdoch’s reign we’re in, no matter that Marcus’s eyes are closing on me.

  I shake him again. “Murdoch Rex. Quo anno?”

  I am surprised I can even come close to conveying my idea, even more surprised that Marcus catches on. He’s a clever little eunuch.

  He fixes his eyes on me. “Annus secundus.”

  The relief makes me sigh. Marcus is watching me carefully, confused, while I work out that this must be the year 735. Of course, 736 starts in not more than a month, and that’s the year Jim said the Picts take over, the year of the earthquake.

  I prod Marcus’s arm again. This time he seems a little impatient for someone who is supposed to be a slave.

  I clear my throat before I speak, because I’m not sure I should be saying this. “Pictii Dunadd vincent.”

  I’m sure it’s hopelessly wrong, but something seems to dawn on him.

  He gets to his knees, dipenses with his blanket and with Latin. “When?”

  “After the new year.”

  Marcus bumps into Sula on his way out. When she asks him where he is going, he tells her it’s for food. But I’m still trying to read the change on his face that this news about the Picts overrunning Dunadd has brought. I’m sure now I should have kept quiet.

  Sula takes me by the hand and leads me to her rows of earthen pots. She seems to have a lesson in herbology for me this morning. When Marcus comes back in with the food, he sets a wooden board of flat bread, a dish of sour cottage cheese, and a jug of milk on the floor. The milk, I judge from the smell, is not from cows. It tastes like the smell of manure.

  I take a bite of bread dripping with cheese, then turn back to Sula. But Fergus is on the other side of the door announcing his presence. I swallow hard. When Marcus opens the door, Fergus walks in, looking uncomfortable, glancing first at me and then at Sula. Perhaps he’s embarrassed by his musical performance outside the hut last night, but he keeps his gaze from me and simply hands Marcus a bundle of clothes. He is turning to leave when Sula tugs my arm to draw my attention back to her lesson.

  I try to take in what she is saying about herbs and the circle she traces at the center of her palm, but I have the sense of Fergus hovering by the door.

  She nudges me, points into a pot, and tells me a name in Gaelic. “For fever.” Marcus tries to help by giving me the Latin, salix alba. But I keep on glancing over at Fergus, and he keeps on not leaving.

  Sula takes my hand and crushes a dried mint leaf into it.

  Marcus tries to illustrate this one by holding his buttocks open and making noises. Sula gives up, sits down, and laughs. Marcus’s antics even have Fergus laughing. I smile despite my brooding, even though I feel sad watching his unconscious laugh with his head back and the grooves rising into his cheeks. Why couldn’t this lovely specimen have been wifeless?

  Fergus steps forward and takes the bundle of clothes he brought from the stool where Marcus laid it, and this time he hands it to me himself. When I nod, as a way of saying thank you, he starts to fumble in a leather pouch with yellow and red design, not quite a tartan but getting there, then brings out a brooch and indicates it’s for tying my robe about my shoulders. I turn the piece of jewelry over in my hand, such finely worked strands of gold in filigree about a polished green stone.

  “Thank you.” I smile. “Tapadh leibh.”

  “Tapadh leibh,” Fergus says. A smile spreads over his face, pulling his lips back from surprisingly white teeth. I suppose until sugar makes inroads, teeth will stay the color God designed them.

  “Your singing was nice last night,” I say.

  I stare at him boldly. He just looks embarrassed. I want to push his embarrassment by telling him he called me his love, but what would be the point if he isn’t free to do anything about it? I should resist, but I let him lift my hand and run his thumb over my fingers.

  I look at him and think mo chridhe but try not to let it show. Fergus brings my hand up to his cheek, then kisses it before he goes to the door. I watch while the closing door takes him from me, but hold the feel of his fingers in the palm of my hand.

  After he leaves, I move back to Sula, but she has apparently given up with the lesson and is poking around in the fire with a stick. I unfurl the bundle Fergus brought into a beau
tifully woven robe, almost like a tapestry and almost as heavy. The colors are deep and rich with tiny strands of gold. I want to pull it on, but Sula indicates not to. This must be for another occasion. There is a pointed hat of purple silk that clashes, to my modern taste, with the robe, but I can see I’ll be wearing it nonetheless. A small bundle of hair ties fall from the inside of the hat. Marcus picks them off the floor and braids them into my hair.

  Sula seems to need to sleep. She wraps her shawl about her and stretches out by the fire. Marcus disappears, and I am left to poke the fire. Anything will do to keep my thoughts from Fergus. I wonder why I am taking the moral high ground—whether he has one wife or ten, he is showing me how much he likes me. This isn’t 2014, after all, but 735, and the rules are probably different here. Still, it’s hard to shake the laws of the abbey, even though I might not get to stay here long. I only hope that where I am going in my fancy dress has something to do with Fergus.

  Marcus comes in with an armload of rude wool and what I know to be a drop spindle—I have seen them in museums, and this method of making yarn was very slow to be displaced in Scotland. Drop spindling sheep’s wool would be hard enough, I imagine, the spindle being little more than a twirling weight, but whatever wool Marcus hands me not only does not smell that fresh, but isn’t given to holding together. I laugh at my failed attempts to get the spindle spinning uniformly, let alone to draw out a line of yarn. The look on Marcus’s face is one of contempt.

  Sula sleeps the sleep of the dead and does not wake until the sun is beginning to set and the dismal light in the hut has become even more dismal. While Marcus lights the torches on the wall, Sula reaches for the bundle of fancy clothes and hands it to me.

  She says, “Put these on now.”

  I don’t know where we’re going, but all of a sudden the excitement in the hut is palpable. Marcus leaves, not to provide me with any privacy, I suspect, but on some other errand. He comes back with a saffron belt tied around his tunic, his hair smoothed back off his face with oil.

  When I pull on my new robe, I realize that it, too, has a belt. I tie it tight, like a trouser belt, but Sula loosens it to sit low on my pelvis. The hat stands up a little at its point, and all I need now is a chiffon scarf hanging from the peak. I don’t know when mirrors were invented, but I’d like one now. I’d like to see how Maggie Livingstone transforms into her Dark Age counterpart.

  As Marcus ties the brooch to the shawl that hangs heavily over one shoulder, I begin to wonder why this period came to be known as the Dark Ages. It doesn’t seem to be dark to anyone living in it. As Jim says, the lack of heat can be a problem, but it doesn’t seem to bother anyone else. The village children run barefoot, no matter that it is almost winter. Mrs. Gillies’s flat in Glasgow was always cold. She said no one had central heating on St. Kilda, and no one ever took ill with a cold. I suppose our age may someday be designated the Soft Age.

  Marcus grabs a torch on our way out of the hut and shines it on my path so that I don’t trip on the long robe over my feet. I have to lift it in little puckers, in a way I haven’t done since I was playing princess as a child. As we make our descent off the top of the fort, there is a clattering of metal on stone. Every so often a ping is added to the percussion.

  “What is it?” I ask Marcus.

  He points to his foot and then to the ground. Foot on the ground. This is Dunadd. Yes, I know exactly what is being carved into the rock. Not the Boar yet, but the foot imprint. But I don’t know why this is happening now unless there is a new king to be crowned.

  We are being taken back to the house of the queen, and now I understand my colorful clothing. I like the custom of announcing one’s presence by calling from the outside. The unplaned wood of these doors certainly wouldn’t do your knuckles any favors. Sula calls her name and mine, but doesn’t mention the servant. In fact, when we go inside, Marcus remains outside.

  It’s much brighter inside this house, and the once beautiful queen sits on a wooden chair by the fire. A thin golden band encircles her grey hair, but my attention is quickly drawn to Fergus, who stands by her chair, and to Illa, who’s sitting on a stone at the hearth. So far, no wife. I try not to meet Fergus’s gaze, but he looks even more appealing in a purple jacket tailored to the waist and leg wraps that appear to be made of tweed. My impulse is to curtsy before a queen, but Sula merely approaches her. Fergus moves another wooden chair from the wall towards the fire for the druidess; I am left standing, until he taps Illa’s shoulder and gestures for her to give up her seat. I notice she is wearing shoes tonight and a scarf in her hair. She lifts her long pale green dress at the front as she jumps up from her stool, a sandstone block with curious handles at either end that seems oddly familiar to me.

  A wiry man with red hair comes in and sits by the door, stroking his small lap harp, humming something of a harmony to its melody. Another musician comes in and joins him with a reedy-looking instrument that sounds like the chanter from a set of bagpipes. My fingers automatically play with the ring handles on my stool.

  A servant who is not Marcus, and, I suspect, neither Roman nor eunuch, comes into the room holding a jug from which he dispenses an amber-colored liquid into glasses on the carved table. I take a sip, glad that it is not a spirit, tasting something close to mulled wine. When Illa is offered a small glass, I almost object. She is only a girl, after all.

  The queen takes a sip and eyes her glass accusingly. Fergus says something about Romanus, so maybe the recipe is left over from the empire. Fergus seems disinterested in the drink, more occupied with looking at me in the clothes he brought. He keeps finding excuses for moving closer to me, and I can’t say I mind. I suppress the urge to brush my shoulder against his thigh or lean in and rest my head against him.

  The queen doesn’t seem pleased with me. It suddenly occurs to me that these clothes I’m in might come from Fergus’s wife, and perhaps she is a particular favorite of the queen.

  “Why is her hair so short?” she asks without looking at me. “Did her husband die?”

  I feel Fergus waiting for the answer. Illa comes over and gently gathers the ends of my hair in her hands as though they must hurt. My hair must seem short compared to the other women at Dunadd in 735. More like the length of her dad’s.

  “Where is your husband?” the queen asks.

  If it weren’t for the fact that Fergus’s face is quite well represented in hers, I don’t think I would like this woman.

  She says, “Are you married?”

  Fergus is looking at the floor and doesn’t see me shake my head.

  “No,” I say, loud enough for him to hear. But I don’t know if divorce has any status in this time, so I follow it with, “My husband died.”

  The queen pats me on the shoulder. The haughtiness goes out of her eyes. “How old are you?”

  Fergus looks at the ground again. I tell them I’m thirty-five, which isn’t exactly honest, but it’s close.

  The queen speaks more gently now. “Where is your country?”

  My country? I’ve tried Caledonia, but it doesn’t seem to work.

  I say, “Alba.”

  They just look at me.

  So I say, “Dunadd,” in the way people in 2014 say Dunadd. They correct the pronunciation. “Doonadd.”

  They nod their heads and seem well pleased.

  I say, “Before that, Glasgow.”

  Again a moment’s pause and then the proper pronunciation. “Glaschu?”

  Only Fergus seems to know this one. “Glaschu,” he says, and then he tells them of a small dwelling by a stream to the south. I have to smile that Glasgow was ever this insignificant. He says it’s popular with monks.

  “Is she a Christian?” the queen asks.

  “No,” I am quick to say.

  Now the queen knows a little more, she seems better disposed towards me. I am pleased because Illa seems less wary, too. From the corner of my eye, I can see the disbelief on Sula’s face. The queen gives me her hand and offers me
her seat. It’s not until I turn and glance back at the stone I have been sitting on that I see what has been nagging at me ever since I first sat down.

  For there on the floor, being sat upon like any other seat in the world, and much less worn around the edges, but undeniably, in the heat and flicker of the fire, is Scotland’s famous Stone of Destiny.

  Sula seems to understand my shock. She comes over and holds my arm because I am almost shaking. Nothing has brought this strange reality I am living home to me like seeing this icon of Scotland being used as a seat by the fire. I want to tell them what’s going to become of this stone, never to let it out of their sight, because England’s King Edward has his eye on it. But Edward, the Hammer of the Scots, is still five hundred years from the start of his hammering.

  The musicians have stopped playing. The queen is speaking to her son in low tones that I can’t make out. Illa seems quite amused by the spectacle that I am, and have always been. It’s only by looking at her that I manage to calm down.

  I really want to sit back down on that stone, but Illa has perched herself on it again. When I smile at her, she smiles back, though I can tell she doesn’t know why she is smiling. The queen is studying me. Fergus orders the musicians to continue.

  Fergus brings out a nicely crafted board game with blue glass pieces and one white one, which seems to be a favorite of his daughter’s and has her up and jumping around. This girl is less interior than Ellie, more excitable. Fergus gestures for me to watch them play, but it seems a good deal more complicated than I can pick up without a proper explanation. As far as I can gather, the goal of each player seems to be to capture the white bead, and the rules seem somewhat similar to backgammon. I suspect Fergus will want me to play next, but there’s no hope. So I study him instead: the quick smile of regret that comes when his daughter gets the better of him and laughs; the hair that falls forward over his cheeks as he studies his next move; the square hands that run through his hair when he is frustrated; the golden ring over the tattoo on his middle finger.