Fergus took hold of the old woman’s bony hands. “Sula, can you help me? I would prefer to release my people without the blood of friends on my hands.”
Sula searched among her jars and brought out a bottle that had not been made at Dunadd. She smiled. “From the Christians.”
The smith had long ago fashioned Sula a bowl of bronze, hammered thin with a handle attached. She dropped into it a concoction of flowers and leaves, added water, then let it simmer. She let it cool while Fergus told her of his plan to follow his mother east to Scone.
“The last crannog along the long loch belongs to my sister druid. Her name is Birog. It is not a good time of year to make such a journey, but she will give you shelter before you turn across the land to the smaller loch that leads east. When I was young, I made the journey to Scone to learn from the old druidess who held court there. She has long since joined the dead, but she told of a time to come when Scone would be as Dunadd is to your people today, a place of kings, and in time a place of desolation.”
Fergus picked up a stick and poked the fire. “Why must desolation always follow?”
Sula laughed a little. “My son, there is only fire and those things consumed by fire. All comes down to ashes; it is the way of things.”
“But not of the goddess. The eternal goddess who sustains us will never turn to ashes.”
Sula placed her hand on Fergus’s back. “Even the goddess, Fergus. Gods and goddesses rise; gods and goddesses fall. Nothing escapes the fire. The task is to burn bright while you can. Fergus, I always knew the goddess had chosen you for this.”
Fergus didn’t like the weight of Sula’s words. He didn’t like the task before him, and he didn’t like that his efforts would eventually come to nothing but words in the mouth of a bard.
“How is your woman?” Sula asked.
Fergus looked straight into the old woman’s eyes. “Sula, I do not understand her ways.”
Sula shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. She is a mystery. You must honor her.”
She wrapped the edge of her shawl about the pan’s handle and tipped the herbs into the bottle of whisky.
She smiled as she handed him the bottle. “The guards will be children in your hands.”
“But who will take it to them? They surely will not accept it from me.”
Sula nodded. “But from the hands of an old woman, something to warm them in the night?”
Fergus took the old hands and wrapped them about the bottle. “Thank you.”
When he brought her head near to his breath, he could smell the scent of her herbs and spice, the way she had smelled when he was a boy and she had run her fingers through his hair.
He left into the dark, his step heavy because this feeling was becoming too familiar, always leaving things behind. With Dunadd, he would leave Saraid once and for all. This was her land, after all, the place where her ancestors were buried. He was angry that Murdoch had muddied the waters that could have remained smooth if he had only taken Sula’s word and moved his people out of Dunadd quietly. Now Fergus had the task of stealing them away, and it was not going to be easy.
He sneaked around to the bridge and crossed, staying low behind the top rail, and then, because this was the place of his childhood, he took his childhood path around the outer wall of the fort to the low space where he and Murdoch had squeezed in and out of the fort as children, the same place Illa had found as a meeting place for herself and Talorcan. Fergus could not squeeze through now, but he could see through to the place where the guard inside turned his back for a moment, just long enough for Fergus to vault on his hands over the top of the wall and land softly.
Inside the fort with his hood over his head, he was just another Pict moving about the place, walking past his old house and then the house of his father and mother, past the well and the forge. Only the light from the bakehouse shone across the flat part of the hill. Fergus moved quickly away from the familiar smell of bread and pushed into the bracken, where a little way up the hill he found the place where the mason had recently carved around Sula’s foot. He lay flat against the rock and saw now, almost with relief, the predicted boar chiseled so finely on the sloping edge of the rock. The Picts had wasted no time in placing their mark there, although they would have to live with the foot, as there was no easy way of erasing what had been put into stone. If the people from Erin should ever regain control of Dunadd, they would have to live with the boar, a handsome female boar at any rate.
Up on the top of the hill, there was no one to disturb him as he stood at the cliff edge and smelled the salt air rushing in against his body, paying no heed to the thin wrap of woven cloth that was a human being’s only defense against the elements. At best, it would be a long time until he cast his gaze again across this water to the western isles. He did not know if the sea to the east had the same look or smell.
He knew every stone on this hill, each place where heather gave way to bracken. This was home as much as any place could live inside a man or woman. For a moment he felt it would almost be better to be penned in with his own people down at the base of the fort than to have to remove himself from everything he knew. But his father had not trained him in the way of being a slave. If the future for his people lay in Scone, he must follow the path his mother had already set.
He scaled the wall again unseen and pushed down through the rusted bracken to the small pond against the side of the hill where the spring collected. It was here the fence had been constructed high against the side of the hill, and here where he heard his people talking quietly among themselves. He followed the fence around to the gate where three guards stood.
He would have to wait until Sula came with her offerings, and this was not the place to do it. He shrank back against the side of the hill, into a scallop of rock where he had hidden once, waiting to ambush his brother. As he waited, his thoughts danced back and forth around Ma-khee. The night before he had awoken more than usual, glad to feel her breathing beside him, glad to wrap his hand around her breast and drop back into sleep.
Fergus tried to bring his thoughts back into a straight line like Sula’s stones. As the moon started to cross the sky, his mood fell. He began to worry that Sula had drifted back asleep, or even that Talorcan might have warned the guards. For the first time he saw that he was alone at Dunadd, without friends, and that just as he had come into life here, this night might see him slip out of it.
24
Winnie hasn’t been back for days. Her empty dish on my kitchen counter is too depressing, so I put it out beside the wilted pansies. With the days inching towards the light, small clusters of snowdrops dangle their bobbleheads over the riverbank; in the lengthening evenings, hares race about the field looking like small dogs, sensing, I suppose, that the fight for mates might be close at hand.
Only a week to go now before my operation, and I put in a call to Dr. Shipshap to ask if there is any way of rescheduling it for February.
He says, “You have nothing to fear, Margaret.”
“No,” I say, “there’s something I have to get done.”
“I talked to your son,” he said. “I quote verbatim: ‘Don’t let my mum wriggle out of it this time.’ ”
Poor Graeme doesn’t understand what is at stake here. My speech, my sight, my personality, my memory are all up for grabs in this operation. But more than that, so are my dreams.
There is silence on the other end of the phone.
I hang up. On doctor’s orders, I haven’t been taking my pills for a week now. They need all those chemicals out of me before they can start their probing. I keep waiting to slip back into Fergus’s world, but my feet plod heavily on the road, in the puddles, with no sign of going anywhere but here.
Ironically, without the medication, I have only minor seizures, plenty of them, but nothing that would rock the ground, nothing that would get me back to the eighth century.
I enjoy the lack of fog. In the clarity that God gave me, I scramble to put
together the outline of my thesis. I spend a week at my desk: papers, books, words, time ticking slowly on the clock in the kitchen. I try to keep Fergus and Illa away from my thoughts. After all, they might have only ever been functions of scarred brain tissue. The weight inside my chest says they are more than that.
“The Burning of Witches, and the Loss of the Sacred Feminine.” The thesis has a title now. The outline comes together quickly, and I see my way forward, now that I may not have any way forward.
Dr. Shipshap rings me back and assures me he is a very experienced surgeon and has never had anything go wrong. But that is what I am afraid of. Once I wake up in the antiseptic hospital room with my head in a turban of bandages, will normality just be deathly dull?
“Och,” says Jim. “Everyone else has to put up with it.”
I am leaning my backside against the edge of his kitchen counter. Inside my Wellies, I shift my feet at the ordinariness of this smell of gas from his cooker, these bread crumbs on his table, the drip of the tap, this feeling of everything going on as it should.
“Do you want to go up the fort?” I ask.
He reaches for his boots. “It’s raining, though.”
Just by way of emphasis the wind takes a bucket of water and dashes it against the window.
I sit down at his table.
He sets his boots back down. “It’d be a bugger up there in this.”
I know he’s right. I stretch my arm along his table and lay my head on it.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
I pick up a large acorn from a bowl of them on his table. “Fergus has acorns on a string around his neck and a funny little stone with a hole in it.”
He sighs. “You don’t have to go ahead with this operation. Nobody’s forcing you.”
I have to laugh, there with my head on my arm on the table, a sort of sideways laugh. “I know. It’s just that the timing isn’t great. Fergus left for Dunadd, and I think the earthquake’s coming. Illa has an infected leg, and I really want to be there to help her, not here in your kitchen with the bloody rain going like the hammers on the window.”
Tears fall sideways, just like the laugh. Jim rests his hand on my shoulder. “You’d get used to not going back there, if everything straightened out.”
I sit up. “Would I?”
I don’t believe so, but here I am choosing to stay in the present for good. I will have Graeme, and he will have me, which is why I am going through with this. I won’t have Ellie. Instead of Fergus, there will just be a gaping sad hole.
“I still want to go up Dunadd,” I say.
Jim goes to the window and pretends he can see through. “If you keep walking out with me, people will be talking.”
I look at the back of him: his short grey hair, his broad shoulders, the dark green corduroy trousers that run into no particular shape across his backside.
“They’ll be saying you’re an old goat, running around with younger women and your wife not four years in the grave.”
I see his breath rise heftily and drop inside his knitted jumper. “Aye, they like their scandal, people do.”
I stand up. “I’m going up the fort anyway. Are you coming?”
He doesn’t turn. “No.”
I slip out of his kitchen door stealthily like a thief, plant my feet on the wet gravel, pull my hood down, and head up the hill. Even the tourists have decided to stay in their cars, fogging up their windscreens as they wait for this lot to clear up. They don’t know about rain here, how it’s out to get you and keep you off the land. It will win, but not today, not against me.
The metal stile is cold and wet as I push the bar back and step around in the mud. My Wellies slip on the stone, and I have to grab handfuls of heather to pull myself up. The heather has learned better than most to grow slowly and gnarl itself into the bedrock. Higher up on the plateau where the houses were, my feet squelch in the grass, trip on the jutting rubble. The well is not dry today but flowing as it did when I was christened here once by a druidess.
The final ascent is blinding, and the view from the top of Dunadd is a sheet of driving rain. I have to imagine the hills and the islands, because today they have been swallowed by the demon sea. Dunadd doesn’t want me here today; it wants all that history of people wiped clean. But I sit on Fergus’s ledge and defy it. The small voice of defiance is all I have left.
Back at my desk, I order my data into time periods: the rise and final ebb of the witch hunt in Scotland. Only, I want it to be seen against the arm of the patriarchal god, the deus ex machina of the church. That is my thesis, the one I will write when my brain has been fixed and I see with the clear light of day.
I pack the papers and the books into boxes, the ones I first walked through the door with. The cottage will revert to its spring holiday status, and there will be others at this window with their tea in the morning, people who think Dunadd was just a place for crowning kings, who have never heard of Fergus MacBrighde and his daughter Illa, but who might open the window to a small black cat one day if she ever comes back.
Jim knocks at my window later, holding a bunch of early daffodils from his garden.
“You’ll need someone to drive you down to Glasgow,” he says.
I make him jump when I stretch out my arms and wrap them around him. He doesn’t hug back, but we stand there in some kind of understanding for a moment.
“If all goes to hell,” I say, “and I lose my marbles, I will come and live with you. You can feed me soup through a straw and wipe my bum when I need it.”
I hope, once they maneuver my poor lobe out, they won’t take my sense of humor with it, because I haven’t had it for long and I rather like it.
Jim is blushing when I pull out of the embrace. I punch his arm.
He punches my arm back. “All right,” he says. “It’s a deal.”
I turn him round and push him towards the door. “Get out of here.”
Dr. Shipshap is back on the telephone, asking me if he told me he’s going to wake me up halfway through the operation to make sure he doesn’t cut out anything that governs major function. Standard procedure, he says, though it is not exactly a comforting thought. What is comforting is the thought of being wrapped up in a blanket with Fergus MacBrighde, of holding in my arms the daughter I never wanted to lose in the first place.
On the day of departure for Glasgow, the sun decides to make an appearance. The sky is clear and vivid blue over Dunadd. Jim appears with more daffodils.
“For your mother,” he says.
I wrap them in plastic in my empty kitchen and set them on the backseat of my car on top of sheets and pictures of my children. They smell like a hill fort in the rain.
He waits outside for me to make a last check, make sure I haven’t left anything, at least not anything I can put my hand around. On the blue couch, on the table by the bed, in the small cracks around the windowsill I have left everything, and it takes longer than it should to decide I can walk away from it and turn the key in the lock for the last time.
“Don’t you have any luggage?” I ask, as Jim slides down into the driver’s seat.
“Do you mean clean underwear, that sort of thing?”
“That would be a start,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I only changed them last week.”
He winks and makes me smile in spite of the engine moving me away from my view out of the window, away from the barn and the remnants of animals that once lived there, away from the stile at the base of the fort, over the bridge, a little dip in the bottom of the stomach. I cannot bring myself to catch a last glimpse of Dunadd fort, great elephant back of a mound in the sea.
Tiugainn comhla rium. Come along with me, it says over my shoulder. I will keep you here. How could it not? It’s not a place, after all, but a state of dream.
25
Fergus stumbled against the rock, hitting himself hard. He stood up, rubbing his hip, but when the ground began to shake again he fell back. Stones s
lammed and cracked as they bounced off the hill above his head, first one or two and then a great torrent, louder than thunder. It would have been a vain effort to throw himself forward and try to crawl out of their reach. There would be no time now to wait for Sula. He must get his people out and away before the entire fort fell to its knees.
As he crouched in his hollow, he saw the end of the bridge come loose and the whole swinging structure drop heavily into the river. Beyond, many of the houses that had stood in the fields stood no longer. The men guarding his people, some of whose faces he recognized, were crouched close to the ground like him, but no one was worrying about allegiances now. No one even thought to call out while the ground kept shaking, the boulders kept falling, and Fergus had to keep in sight Iona’s vision of the trek back to Glashan. He inched out, covering his head and steeling himself against the rubble falling against his back.
There was a pause in which he managed to run free of the stones, but then another great shaking brought his chest hard against the ground. Great clouds of dust and rumbling rose as though the fields themselves were rolling away. When things grew still again, Fergus turned onto his back, wincing where the stones had cut through his jerkin.
“Fergus MacBrighde,” he cried out. “I am here.”
It took a moment when he stood up to get his balance, but then he made for the wattle prison that was all a tatter now; the people were pushed against the side of the hill, separated, men together, women by themselves; the two monks who had befriended his mother were crouched by the men, clutching wooden crosses and muttering in Latin from their leather-bound books.
“Gather yourselves quickly,” Fergus said. “We must leave.”
No one was going to argue. The women called for their children and stood by their men. The monks closed their books and came towards Fergus, but he would not let them near.
He started walking in the direction of the sea, the monks close at his back, and then the women with their children, the men coming up behind. But Fergus stopped suddenly as they came out from under the cliffs and saw for the first time the tide run out as far as they could see, as though the islands had decided to keep the sea for themselves. In the distance, they could make out Talorcan, his back to them, standing far out on the new stretch of sand.
Veil of Time Page 24