The older monk turned and waved his book against the line of people behind him. “It is the judgment of God against your wicked ways.”
Fergus caught his arm. “Take your curraghs and sail back to Iona.”
The monks looked to the men for support.
The older one spoke. “Will you follow this heathen or shall our Holy Father smite you again? Must he send lightning bolts to turn you from your evil goddess?”
Fergus ran at their backs and shoved them hard against the sand. Their coarse brown robes slopped in the water, their sandaled feet floundered in the muddy sand.
“Swim!” he said. “May your God make you float!”
He ran at them again until they crawled backwards like crabs against the ridges of sand, dropping their books, flailing out towards the water’s edge with cries that matched the cries of the children that could be heard now coming from the village.
Fergus picked their sopping books out of the sand and hurled them after them.
“The One God sees all,” shouted the younger monk, stabbing the air with the blade of his hand. “You shall be punished.”
Fergus turned his back on them and gestured for the others to follow. When he got to Talorcan, Fergus laid his hand on his shoulder.
“What use will Dunadd be without the sea?” asked Talorcan quietly.
Fergus gripped his arm. “Come with us.”
“No,” he said. “You can take yourself to Scone, but I belong here. Sula says Dunadd will belong to us, and I believe her.” He took Fergus aside by the arm. “You will leave Iona at Glashan. I shall fetch her when the time is right. At Scone you will find your own druids among your own people.”
Fergus nodded. Ma-khee would be glad for this.
Talorcan took a step back. His words faltered as his voice rose. “May the goddess glide gently in your steps, may she clothe you in righteousness and make life abundant.”
He waved, and they watched him walk back towards the village that was no village any longer. Fergus wiped his face with the back of his sleeve and waved at Talorcan’s back. He knew these Picts who had endured from the time of the standing stones would persist. Sula had said so, and now, with their boar carved in the rock of Dunadd, it was sure they would come to rule this land again. Fergus and his people must flee.
No one followed them, but not until the land curved up into the hills of Dunamuck did Fergus stop the procession with his hand in the air. A child shouted to see Fergus’s horse running across the valley towards them. Talorcan must have ridden out to free her, and now Iona’s vision would be true: Fergus at the front on his horse, two hundred women and children and men behind.
It was dark now. Fergus kept looking back to Dunadd in case anyone should be following. But there was no need, he knew, unless some vengeful Picts had relished the thought of making the people from Erin slaves. He could see the smoke from a fire out in the field where the villagers lived. With no homes to protect them, a central fire would be the best way of staying warm and warding off animals.
After Fergus had tethered his horse, he came back to the procession. There was no point in stumbling in the dark, he told them, they would stop here now for the night, build a fire like the one over at Dunadd. He tied his horse, and then set about clearing a space for the fire. Women and children went about gathering wood, while the men dug out a shallow pit with whatever tools of branches and flat stones came to hand.
An older woman with a crooked back and grey hair bent over her flint, feeding in dry moss from her pouch, striking the smooth stone that finally gave a spark and set the moss smoldering. But the wood was damp, and it took much cutting with Fergus’s dirk, the only weapon they had, to get tinder enough for a flame and then a fire that didn’t care how wet the wood. The fire smoked a great deal, and the people could not come in close. There was no food, nor would there be until they arrived the next day at Glashan.
Fergus stood among the huddle of his people. They were quiet, accepting what they already knew. Fergus looked at them, a concentration of dark heads and smaller bodies than the Picts. He had never seen them set apart like this, but he knew he belonged to them and that he would have to lead them.
He said. “Tomorrow we will reach Loch Glashan, but we will not be safe there for long. King Oengus’s army is moving south to Dunadd. After we have rested, we will move to Scone by the eastern sea. Our people have already settled there, and we will be welcome.”
An old man spoke up. “But we are traveling without the protection of the druidess.”
“I spoke to Sula before we left,” said Fergus. “She and the girl Iona both saw our path away from here. We can do no other than go forward.” He crouched down by the fire. “Sleep now. You will need your strength.”
Fergus saw little sleep. The wolves had gone deeper into the trees, but he could still hear them. If the troupe had been carrying food, there would be bears to worry about. The women slept with their children under their blankets; men lay close to their families. There was no one for Fergus to lie near, no eyes that beckoned him, so he tended the fire and wondered about Sula. As he began to doze, he held tight in his chest the hope that Ma-khee and Illa were safe. He hoped they had not been in the crannog it dropped into the water. He hoped that Ma-khee had not run away.
When he awoke, the dew had frozen on Fergus’s face. He could see the smoke still rising from the field below Dunadd but no one in the valley between. The sky was still dark; the wolves had left off their night hunt and were silent in their dens. He roused the others for what would be a four-hour walk with the children and the few old ones. Their bones were cold and slow to move as they followed on the path that may have been beaten down at some time but now was overgrown with withered weed and bracken. They noticed the sun rise behind clouds in the east and steered their course to the left of it, keeping in sight Fergus, who led his horse and let the children ride in turns.
They would have to wait at Glashan for better weather before they tried the trek east to Scone. Fergus hoped the land and the loch would support this many more people. He hoped the Picts there would not grow hostile to them when they learned of their people’s victory at Dunadd. But all that was hope for now, nothing to be counted on. He felt for the godstone about his neck and smiled when he saw a hawk circling above. Cailleach the goddess was watching over them.
26
In my childhood room in Glasgow, it is only street dark through the velvet curtains; the house is very still. I don’t want to be here on the eve of my surgery. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I hear Graeme shift in his sleep next door in what used to be my brother’s room. It has been more than a week since I left Fergus, ages since I didn’t know if Illa would be all right. I’ve been lying awake wondering about the books on general pediatrics my mother has kept downstairs in a glass cabinet since my brother and I were children.
It’s quiet in the house as I set my bare feet on the stairs, and make for the front room. The cabinet door squeaks; under my weight the floorboards speak, too. In the semi-dark, my fingers run along the spines of dictionaries and encyclopedias and finally find Diseases of Childhood. I sit down with it at the polished table that hardly ever saw any use and, by streetlight, flip through gruesome pictures of complications from infected wounds: blackened flesh and stumps of legs where proper limbs once ran down into knee-length socks. Antibiotics, of course, are needed. A tetanus inoculation—at the very least, stitches to close the wound against further infection. None of these modern antidotes is available to Illa. I hope against hope that Iona knows what she is doing. I wish I could just move them all like chess pieces: Illa would move forward; Fergus would come in like a knight.
Graeme flicks the light on. “What are you doing? It’s two o’clock in the morning.”
He hovers by the door as though I am about to take flight.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
He shrugs. “Me, neither. What’s the book?”
I close it and set it on the table, as though it h
ad unwillingly flown into my hand. “Nothing, really.”
“Are you frightened?” he asks, standing there in his pajamas.
I shrug, and then I nod, because I am frightened. Terrified. Scared of the operation not working, scared of it working, scared of losing my mind, scared of finding it. Scared most of all of losing my time out of time forever.
He comes over and takes my hand. “I don’t think it will hurt, will it?”
“No.” I kiss his cold knuckles. “But I don’t like the idea of being woken up in the middle of the operation to take an IQ test.”
He smiles. I replace the book and walk my boy back up to bed. He even allows me to tuck him in and kiss him, as though he were the patient, and thank God he’s not. I climb into bed, back on course now, sucking in my breath and going forward for the sake of this son.
I lie down, thinking about Iona, how pale and otherworldly she seems, almost as though she doesn’t exist. The only way I wish she didn’t exist is under Fergus. I can’t erase that picture from my mind. Everything she is—seer, healer, goddess in a fertility ceremony—and everything she knows about the earth are the things for which women will die all over Europe in another eight hundred years.
The walls of my childhood room close in on me. The small noises of the sleeping house flood over my thoughts, and then the tick of the grandfather clock in the hall gives itself to the sound of a woodpecker in the trees where I am walking with Iona. In spite of everything, I am so glad to see her, and I hold on to the sleeve of her robe as we walk. With the sun painting the floor of the forest in shades of light, she leads me to a spring bounded by flat stones, making a little platform on which she stands. She makes sweeping motions with her arms, saying her prayer to the element of water as she did to the fire on Christmas Eve.
She gestures for me to come to her.
“Kneel down,” she says, forcing my head lower than my knees. I remember now this was the first action Sula performed, and I shiver in the same way, as the freezing water sinks into my hair and runs down my neck. She must not be satisfied with the way it takes the first time, because she pushes my head down again below the level of the highest stone and pours water from her cupped hand. May the waters from the hills bring health and peace. May the spring waters bring calm to you, and may the rains always be tranquillity to you. I have never been so baptized in all my life.
I stand up, shaking the water from my head, wiping my eyes with the back of my sleeve, shuddering as tiny rivulets run down my back to my waist. Iona doesn’t seem to like the look of me or the way I behave. As we walk silently and separately now back towards the loch, the earth rumbles, just once, but enough to make me stagger.
Iona catches my arm and takes me quickly back to the hut. There is urgency in her step and something about her that still sets me ill at ease. I wait outside the door before going in, then find her crouched by a sleeping Illa. The roof is creaking on its supports. I close the door and rush to the sick girl, not wanting to touch in case I wake her. Iona starts circling the fire, throwing into the flames little pieces of bark and leaf that send up a pungent smoke.
Iona says, “Take your coverings off.”
I hesitate, because of all that nunnery training and because I was sitting on my bed in Glasgow about five minutes ago. I pull the tunic over my head and undo the strings that hold on my leg bindings, but that leaves the underwear I came with.
“Those, too,” she says.
She sets the tip of a braid of grass against the edge of the fire and starts to waft the smoke it makes over her face and the top of her head. I wave the sweet smoke over my own head, making my eyes weep. Tears are running off my chin and onto my breasts, as I undo the bra and let it fall, then step out of the stretchy knickers. Iona picks up both and tosses them into the flame, adding the smell of burning rubber to the mix. And here I am naked, glancing at the sick child, trying to resist the urge to crouch and cover myself with my hands.
My eyes accommodate to the smoke. Iona is intent on covering every inch of me with it, including the parts appreciated by Fergus. She has me kneel, and then she chants as she places her hands on the top of my head. I think a priest once did that, perhaps during my first communion, but I am quite sure I was not naked at the time. I am quite sure it didn’t evoke the reaction that Iona’s hands do. I begin to shake. It is cold, I am without clothes, but I know that is not the reason for my shaking. I wait for the burning sensation in my soles, for consciousness to work its way through the atoms until it falls away altogether. But none of that happens. I go on shaking and calling out until there’s nothing left to come out. When I am finally quiet on my knees in a heap, I look across at Illa, who is still sleeping; when I look up at Iona, she is smiling.
Up again. Now we must dance around her fire, a trudge clockwise. I try to give in to it as much as I can, for Illa’s sake, but I can’t help thinking how damning this would be in the eyes of the clerics to come—naked women dancing around the fire. No wonder they thought the witches were in league with the devil.
Iona is chanting herself into a frenzy and must sit down. I am tired and sit down, too, my backside in the loose dirt, my cold and filthy toes up to the flames. She stares into the fire until her eyes close and she is lost to her spectator.
My thoughts are racing. Iona sits on, unmoving. Eventually, I close my eyes, trying to settle my mind, watching thoughts spin about me with no plan to leave. What seems like hours go by before I lapse into a sort of nonthinking, aware of my thoughts but only in passing.
This space reminds me of the timelessness that comes in the aftermath of a seizure. Illa’s eyes are still closed. I hope she is just sleeping.
I was sleeping, but now I am awake, watching the morning light penetrate the curtains in my room of dolls and horses. Downstairs in the kitchen, Jim has won my mother over by baking scones for breakfast. The daffodils from his garden sit on the linen tablecloth in a ceramic vase too ornate for wilderness flowers. Everyone is looking to see how a person might look before brain surgery. All I know is I am hungry because no food or drink is permitted for patients.
“I’ll save you a scone.” Jim smiles.
I wink at Graeme. “Save me two.”
Everyone is forced into a jolliment this morning. Peering over the chasm, what else can anyone do? On the way out of the door, I even receive a phone call from my ex-husband wishing me all the best. Oliver Griggs, the name that once held so much weight, now floats out of my hands and up the chimney. Oliver has heard through intradepartmental gossip that I handed in my thesis outline on the way through Glasgow. “Interesting title,” he says. There’s a pause before he asks, “Who brought you down?”
I am on the point of brain surgery, and perhaps I should not be so petty, but I tell Oliver that I came down with Jim Galvin, my neighbor, and I do not punctuate the pregnant pause with any disclaimers about his age or the lack of anything that would qualify as a proper relationship. I let the pause take Oliver Griggs wherever he wants to go, and then I say thank you and hang up.
My mother points to her watch and ushers me out of the door.
When I get into the car beside Jim, he smiles. “To Oz?”
I am glad for this man this morning and almost want to take back the words I didn’t say to Oliver about him.
“To Oz.”
Graeme laughs in the seat behind me, and I grip onto that laughter because otherwise I might sink. We wave to my parents in their car and set off in a convoy, trying not to lose each other in traffic on the way to the hospital, trying not to glance behind as we swing through the hospital doors and check me in, leaving the light and the day and the city and perhaps life itself outside. For the most part the hospital has few surprises: the squeaky floors, the polished chrome, the female nurses, male doctors—all conform happily this morning. And at a juncture such as this, conformity seems like no small commodity. It is something. Something to hold on to.
Everyone who came through the doors with me suddenly looks lost, a
s though we had just been marooned on an island. My parents’ bodies tend back towards the exit. Jim steps back so as not to crowd. Graeme holds on to me and I hold on back, like two drowning rodents. Our faces are wet, and now he is the boy, not the man, just a little bundle of him in his mother’s arms.
The nurse steps in stage left. “Please come this way.”
I ease Graeme off me and hand him to Jim, who has never hugged a boy in his life and doesn’t know what to do with a sobbing seventeen-year old. I step after the nurse, setting one foot in front of the other as though I had just learned to walk, leaving the loved ones at the swinging doors, trying to get a last look. In the small room of hard edges, I submit to the undressing and the immodesty of a hospital gown. I allow myself to be snagged and tagged, my statistics written down, and my growling stomach to be laughed at. I submit because I am outnumbered. I am in a cathedral with a priesthood in blue scrubs that will cut me open until the devil flies out.
Hours move slowly around the face of the clocks on every wall it seems. I am laid out like Christ, a crucifix of a woman, so they can thread their tubes and needles in, so they can pump in that first release of relaxant. I am vaguely aware of the shaving that drops my lovely locks to the floor, of the Magic Marker that maps the path of their incision.
“Margaret?”
I close my eyes. I will not speak to the devil.
“Margaret?”
“Maggie?”
“Yes?”
“Ma-khee? Mithair?”
I open my eyes to find Illa sitting up and looking at me. She called me “Mother.” I scramble to my knees and bring her face into focus; it is no longer hot. Under her tunic, the infected slash has receded under the poultice.
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