I am glad for the arrival of the food brought in by Marcus and the other slave. Marcus has a broad smile on his face, not something I have grown to expect from him. They lay the food out on the table in wooden dishes, except for what have to be bannocks in a pile by themselves, small bready rounds that will survive to become another symbol of Scotland. I note the fruit salad with relish, though the only two fruits in it seem to be apple and pear. I suppose grapes without air travel would be a bit much to ask.
Illa leaves her game and pulls out pieces of fruit from the bowl with her fingers in a way I would never have let Ellie do; I follow suit. Fergus reaches for a strip of meat from a different dish. I take one, too, but can’t quite place the taste through the saltiness, something like pork, only gamier. The queen does not appear to be eating. She exchanges her glass of mulled wine for something else poured for her by Marcus from a stone bottle.
I signal for Ellie to watch me as I kneel down, take up seven of the blue beads, and then cast them down in front of me. I used to be good at jacks as a girl and used to play with my children when they were little. I throw the white bead up and scramble for a blue bead before the first bead drops. She comes close and kneels by me, drops the weight of herself against me. I throw my white bead up again and this time catch two blue beads before it drops.
Illa likes this game. Her smile is like Fergus’s, and I would like to kiss that face. Both of them. She puts her hand out for the beads, and that hand is not what you would call clean, but I would still put my lips on it. Fergus says something that makes her withdraw the grubby paw, and everyone, I realize, is waiting for my next move. The game of jacks gets considerably harder after two and especially with glass beads instead of spiky modern jacks. I try, but drop one of the blue beads before I catch the white one.
Fergus swivels down onto the floor by his daughter, catching my eye and taking the beads from my hand with fingers that leave a sting at every point they touch my skin. He starts with one and makes it up to four before he hands the beads over to Illa. The girl doesn’t have much luck after one, so I try to show her how to throw the white bead straight up so that it’s easy to catch again. My eye follows Fergus as he moves away. Illa keeps going. I can hear Fergus and Sula in low conversation with the queen, and the word Boar keeps coming up. The queen holds a book up to him that has Vita Colum Cille and Adomnan on the front. Fergus refuses to take it. I am sure I have seen that title somewhere before.
Marcus refills our glasses, including Illa’s, and soon she has to abandon my game because she is too giddy. After a while, after the talk has died down, she falls asleep on the hard floor. I want to take my cloak off and lay it under her, but I suspect this is part of the toughness training. I wonder if Fergus sleeps on a hard floor, too. I wonder how it would feel to have the weight of him against me.
When Sula gets up to leave, I stand, too. But Fergus wraps his hand around my arm and bids me sit back down. He himself goes out with the others, leaving me in an uncomfortable silence with the sleeping girl and the silent grandmother. Now that her father is gone, I take off my hat and slip it under Illa’s head. I am just wondering if I am supposed to sleep here tonight when Fergus comes back in with a small bundle. These people like their bundles.
He unravels the cloth and brings out a fine bone comb in the shape of a hand attached to a wrist handle. He holds it so carefully that I know it has meaning for him, and I am scared to touch it.
When he places it in my hand, I think I catch the glint of a red hair caught in a crack of the bone. Maybe the hair of a different wife than Colla. I hand the comb back, managing a smile. But then with his mother looking on, he starts running it through my hair. I try to remember the last time I washed my hair. He combs it gently, stopping when it catches. Every stroke of the comb, he follows with a stroke of his hand.
I don’t even want to know what the queen is thinking, so I keep my eyes straight into the fire, just above the Stone of Destiny, and wonder how it became my destiny to mingle here. All I came to Dunadd for was to get away, and here I am under the hand of a medieval lord, whose touch, I might say, is very kind to me.
When the queen falls asleep in her chair, he wraps me about with his own shawl and leads me out into the cold night. We stand by the house with a question between us.
He says, “Tiugainn comhla rium.” The question is in his face as his hand gestures up the hill. Come with me.
I look at his outstretched hand, but I cannot take it. I know where this question is leading. I can read it in his eyes. But moral high ground or no, I can’t make love to another woman’s husband. I shake my head. He drops my hand.
I can feel him watching, but he doesn’t follow as I make my way back through the dark to Sula’s hut, holding up my dress to navigate the ascent but feeling nothing like a princess this time. I sit by the embers of Sula’s fire, my knees under the fancy robe pressed against my chest, wishing I could leave this era with its complications of history and love.
I try to sleep, to induce my return to the blue couch and my view of the river and the open fields, but I am having no luck ordering things the way I want them tonight. Later, when Sula and Marcus get back, they quickly take up their spots by the fire, and everything descends again into stillness.
Sometime later I am aware of coming to. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, but even then there is no light to speak of under the door or through the wattle walls. Someone is calling so softly, at first I can’t make it out, but then, by the way he says “Ma-khee,” I know it is Fergus.
I have to step over Marcus to reach the door. I stand there, biting my nails, listening to Fergus moving around on the other side. It is so quiet I can hear his breathing. I try to breathe slowly so he can’t hear mine.
Maybe he puts his hand on the door, because it moves slightly towards me.
“Ma-khee.”
My hand goes to the latch but stops short. I know what answering this call is going to mean and that I shouldn’t put myself in its way when I am not going to go through with it. I am drawing on all the reason my age has given me, but my brain seems disconnected from the rest of me, and my fingers push the cold iron latch out of its catch.
He has his arms on either side of the door, unexpectant, it seems, of my response. When he sees me, he steps back. For more than a few moments, we stand opposite each other, me still on the inside, him part of the night outside and just as threatening.
And then he clears his throat softly and speaks. “Tiugainn comhla rium.” Come with me.
He looks at me with his cheeky smile as though he’s asking to be kissed, if kissing has even been invented.
“I can’t,” I say, stepping back over the threshold.
Fergus is not listening to my words. Why should he? They don’t even convince me. He pulls me against him, and I feel his hands spread out over my waist and fold me into him. His shoulder belt presses into my chest bone where it slots between my breasts. My hands go around his back and rest on the belt as it crosses his shoulder blades. I can feel his breath against the top of my ear, and all I have to do is tilt my face back slightly and his mouth falls against mine, infinitely warm in the cold night air.
His hand slips down around mine, and I feel him tug. “Tiugainn comhla rium.”
I shake my head. “I can’t.”
He breaks away and stands a little way off. He is breathing hard.
He says, “Because your heart is still with your husband?”
“No,” I say. “Because yours is with your wife.”
He comes to me and holds me by the shoulders. “You are right. It has been for too long. I didn’t think I could love another woman, but I want you, Ma-khee.”
He holds me again like I was his last refuge.
I push him back. “You need to go to her.”
When he pulls back, I see his face is confused.
I give him another push. “Go to your wife, Fergus.”
With all my heart I don’t mean it. But I shou
ld. And I don’t know why he is smiling all of a sudden, but I see those blessed even teeth flash in the dark.
It’s a reflex to get defensive. “Colla. Go to Colla.”
He finds this even more amusing. “Colla’s not my wife, only a woman Murdoch wishes were my wife.”
Now I’m the one to be confused. “Well, who is your wife?”
He smiles a quick, unconvincing smile. “She is dead, like your husband. She was Talorcan’s sister.”
I am breathless and reeling all at once. I want to sing “Hallelujah,” but it doesn’t look as though he would take that very kindly. I am not simple enough to think a dead spouse is less of an obstacle than one in the land of the living. Still, it does clear the way. It does make me take his hand and kiss the palm, his not-altogether-clean palm.
He waits in case I have more words for him, and I do, but I can’t even begin to formulate them. I want to tell him to go easy on me, that it has been so long since I have been loved and now I am all fingers and thumbs with it.
He takes my hand and tugs. “Tiugainn comhla rium.”
I walk with him, tied to him, my side moving against his, through the starless dark away from Sula’s hut, down the hill past the spot where the mason has abandoned his tools for the night, down to the buildings on the grassy level. The cookhouse is also dark and silent as we go by and stop outside a small rectangular building. He hesitates before he lifts the latch, and I begin to wonder if this is the place he lived with Illa and his wife when she was alive.
The door swings open into only one room, which, judging by the greenery now decorating the floor, hasn’t been used in some time. The measured way Fergus steps around the room, the way his eyes dart from the floor to the ledge where a bed must once have been, and where there is still a stack of blankets, I know where I am, and I’m not too comfortable with it.
I wait for him by the door, but he comes back for me and leads me in, shutting the light out so that all I can do is feel him in the dark and hear his breath in my ear, as he lifts my tunic and runs his hands over the skin of my back.
He drops to his knees and wraps his arms around my buttocks, pulling me against his face, his mouth right at the place his hand took hold of on our first encounter. The man wants the woman, and there is no doubt in the dampness of the place where these things get registered that the woman wants the man, too.
He knows more than I about the unraveling of lady’s clothing. The brooch and the sash come off easily and drop into his hands. The robe unsuspended drops about my ankles. He holds me at arm’s length and peers into the dark when my knickers stretch out under his touch then snap back like an extra layer of skin. The bra proves more difficult, but then it is difficult for modern man, too. I don’t linger long over the humor of the situation but, pushing his hands aside, wriggle free from both items of underwear and draw him again down to his knees beside me. If this is a dream, then please let it play on, please may this gasp as his cold palms come against my nipples be real. If there is a god, and especially if she is a woman, may I sink into the hold of his arms and never recover.
Without letting me go, Fergus reaches for a blanket from a pile that sits on the floor and lays it on the ground and me on top of it.
There is no moving in slowly; this is what he brought me here for, and this is why I came. I fumble to untie him, but I don’t know where the knots are, how he is to be unleashed. Fergus knows. He unloosens his belt, and the string and leg wraps drop away as though everything had been designed to do just this, and maybe it was. I reach up and lay my hands on his chest, feel the pounding of his heart. For just a moment he hesitates before moving towards me. The knife that he wears under his arm still sits against his skin in its halter. I grab it and hold it against his back as he inches down onto me, cupping my shoulders against the hardness of the floor. His knees step between mine, and there is no thinking now. The gates have been opened and he sails in, pausing only to wait for the wall in me to give. I want to hold on, hold back, don’t let it slide so soon. If we could only stop breathing, stay still, and keep ourselves here for a moment longer. But it’s too late. I am falling. Everything is giving way and I am over the edge, grabbing onto him because on the other side of this there is only a fall.
I can hear him saying, “Ma-khee.” He brings his mouth against my ear. “Ma-khee.”
Ma-khee. The scene begins to fade. I fight to stay on, running my hands over his back, stepping my breathing in time with his.
But a voice rattles in from another world. “Maggie.” Under a different veil of time, someone is trying to waken me.
I close my eyes, breathing hard. “No.”
Fergus kisses the hair by my ears where the tears fall. “Stay with me, mo chridhe.”
He slides off me, covering me over with the end of the shawl. There’s a faint line of light under the door now, and pots and pans are being set down in the cookhouse. I have to keep touching him to reassure myself that this all happened, at least this once. The tears are in case it never comes again.
I can tell by Fergus’s rhythmic breathing, the slow rising of his chest against my side, that he has fallen asleep. I smile, because no matter what the age, some things never change. Right at this moment, I wish they never would again. But they are going to change. Only eight weeks until an operation that is precisely designed to ensure that they will.
I nudge Fergus a little to see if I can rouse him. I lift his hand, but it drops from my fingers. Fergus, mo chridhe.
My hand slips down onto the rise of his flank. “Fergus.”
I wait to see if he stirs. Not a muscle moves. I smooth the line of his eyebrows.
“Fergus.”
I clear my throat. I don’t know if I should say this, what it might mean to history. But if I never come back, I have to warn him before I go.
“Fergus, the Picts are going to overrun the fort soon. And an earthquake is going to tip the land and send the sea too far away for decent commerce. You don’t even know about the Vikings yet, but they are going to come down on you like hell itself, only you don’t have hell yet. You will, when the Christians take over. Eventually, Kenneth MacAlpin, half Pict himself, will be crowned first king of Scotland here at Dunadd, but not until 843.”
I stroke the back of his head and down to where his hair stops just over his shoulders. “You want to know who I am, but if I were to tell you, you wouldn’t believe me; before I was Ma-khee, I used to be Margaret, with a husband who is not dead but might as well be. I had a daughter once, too, just like Illa.”
I lay my forehead against his chest, and let my tears roll onto his skin.
“I come from Scotland in the twenty-first century, where there are no more witches except at Halloween, and even then they are not proper witches, but just cartoons. We don’t depend on the druidess anymore but on stuff, on cars and houses and Rolex watches.”
I stop speaking when Fergus moves slightly under my hand and groans. I wait until he is still again, watch the morning force itself under the door and me further from him. I can feel it slipping.
“Maggie,” says Jim, “are you all right?”
I wrap my arms about Fergus’s back and press myself against him, every inch of me that can find an inch of him.
“Fergus,” I whisper, though he wouldn’t understand what I am saying in a language that doesn’t even exist yet. “Fergus, you’re going to find electricity and gas and bombs and turn into such a queer people, whose men turn against their women and burn the strong ones alive. Eventually, there’ll be a car park at the base of Dunadd, and people from all over will climb up here to put their foot in an imprint in the stone that isn’t even here yet. Nobody then will believe the sea ever came up this far, except some English nutter who lives on the great estate that will make its millions on the backs of slaves in faraway sugar plantations and will possess all this land as far as you can see.”
I stroke the back of his thighs. Perhaps, if Dr. Shipshap is right, he might absorb some of wh
at I’m saying into his subconscious, except that hasn’t been invented yet either. Before I leave I have something else to say. “Fergus, people are going to go out from this nation and take over entire continents, a bit like the Vikings are set to do, killing off the natives like there is no tomorrow, and perhaps there is no tomorrow. Everything gets very crazed, except on a much larger scale than you can imagine. What I have to tell you, mo chridhe, is that, as far as the moon is from this place, I come from your tomorrow.”
I slip the wedding ring off my finger. It doesn’t come off easily, wedged as it is in a little groove of me. I get to my knees and bind the ring onto his belt with a tie from my hair. I lie back down and press myself against him. I suppose he will find the ring in the morning when he is without me, and it will tell him whatever it is he wants it to.
17
After the woman had left, Fergus went to lie near his daughter by the dwindling fire in the warmth of his mother’s house. But too many thoughts weighed against sleep tonight. Illa’s head still rested on the hat the woman had worn. He liked that the woman was kind in that way, and it made him smile to remember how she had felt in her strange wrap about her backside, about her breasts. He rolled over, and his eyes fell on the stone by the fire. How odd, Ma-khee’s reaction to that. Of course, this was no ordinary stone, but came from far to the east. Perhaps it was because Ma-khee also came from the east that she recognized what type of a stone it was.
Her ways were strange. Her language was nothing he recognized, even though he had traveled as far as Gaul. It sounded more like Saxon than anything, but had a lilt to it. He had feigned sleep as she talked, felt her hand on his backside, her fingertips on his eyebrows. He smiled when he remembered she had called him mo chridhe.
Illa moved suddenly in her sleep and touched Fergus’s hand. She could not know that on this night her father had moved on from her mother. He had waited until Illa was sleeping to bring out the thing her mother had loved, the comb that came in a bag of loot from an attack on the Northumbrians. It had felt odd to hold it in his hand and run it through another woman’s hair. Still, he had liked the way his hand slipped so easily across her hair down onto her shoulders. His fingers lingering there had sensed no resistance.
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