Veil of Time

by Claire R. McDougall

  By evening, the crannog is still not habitable, but it is rising like the moon by degrees, drying out as much as the damp air will allow. Older boys have been dragging dead game out of the forest during the day, and there is a fair pile, but without salt it is sure to rot before we can eat it all. It’s clear we are going to need to move on soon.

  When Fergus sneaks back into Iona’s hut and stretches himself alongside me, I take his hands from my waist and kiss the knuckles, red and sore from his work in the water. “When will we leave?”

  He sits up and shakes his head. I can tell the question is on his mind, too. “How long before Illa can walk well?”

  “Seven days.”

  “There is meat for now.”

  “But not for long.”

  He starts to talk, but I am distracted by his hands in my hair, his fingers down the ridge of my neck, his surprise to find no stretch to my underwear, in fact no underwear to speak of at all.

  He lays his cold palms against my cheeks. “What are you, Ma-khee?”

  “A woman. That’s all.”

  In the dim light I see his smile, a long smile that stretches up into his cheeks on either side. And then he behaves as if I am a woman and his hunger for this woman is insatiable. As mine is for him.

  He leaves in the morning before I awake. By light of day he is with the other men, back to the shivering water in search for what was lost. I imagine all the fine leatherwork from the crannogs sinking into the loch, to be found in fragments in over a thousand years by archaeologists who will make their sketches and speculate about what everything was for.

  When the crannog is repaired, it looks greyer from the mold that has set in. Men and women alike have sat at the shore weaving new mats to cover the sodden and moldy ones. The fire in the main area is lit for the first time, sending up cheers and radiating a damp warmth to the walls and floor. The air is heavy with the smell of steaming grass and reed. The people from Dunadd have woven their own mats to sleep on by a fire on the shore and in the fields where they feel safe next to Iona, their ban-druidhe, and her newly thatched hut.

  I continue in my lessons, only now Iona can’t look at me when she speaks. It must seem strange to teach me the tricks of her trade that are going to incriminate her sisters in the future. She tells me about the great festival of Beltane, when thanks must be given to the goddess for bringing them through the cold months. Everyone must be purified by fire at that time of sowing. Many babies will be conceived then and throughout the summer.

  The leatherworker comes from the crannog up the loch to teach us how to preserve the best of the leather from the animals that must be stripped and stored for our journey. It takes a lot of scraping with sharp stones to take off the flesh, and my fingertips are bleeding. Sometimes we can come by a knife and get the hides down faster to the soft leather that will be good for clothing. The tanner brings us a barrel of brains, he says, brains and water to soak fat into the hide and keep it soft. Whose brains, I want to know. The brains of the animal, says the tanner. It takes days and many women pulling and stretching to make the bags that will carry our food. Iona helps me stuff one with samples of the herbs we might need along the way for common ailments, and especially for sore feet.

  We have been able to beg a little salt from the crannog dwellers, small but precious pay for our help. It screams in the cuts of my palm as I help to rub the strips of meat down and set them out to dry on racks under the trees. Before it gets dark, we have to move the racks into the confines of the crannog wall. Even so, a bear comes early from hibernation and paces along the shore; Fergus appoints two men each night to stand guard with a fire torch. I can see the animals are going to be a problem as long as we are carrying food.

  No one seems to know, though, when we will leave. Fergus consults with Iona. She teaches me to track the stars, to throw her stones across the lines in the dirt. She puts the stones in my hand and seems to want me to decide. At first, they seem to fall into a random selection, but after a while the patterns I expect become different. Small collections of stones straighten out to make a single line. Iona nods her head.

  “Now?” I say.

  “Tomorrow,” she says. “The moon will be coming into its fullness. The stones say the time is close. Tell your man.”

  I spot Fergus cross-legged on the shore by the fire with Illa next to him leaning in close. I am stuck in this moment, a bystander observing a man and a girl, their faces lit by the fire, the smoke rising off into the night sky. For a while he was mine. For a very short while, she was mine again, too.

  “Margaret? Time to wake up now.”

  It’s all a shadow of time, just reflections in water. Everything that is happening in my time is happening right now, too, just at a different level of the picture. At this moment I am lying on a hospital bed, and then now because of a change of perspective I am here waiting ahead of a journey that will eventually be historical. Dunadd fell to the Picts in 736. No one recorded the exact earthquake that tipped the bay below Dunadd out to Crinan and rendered it useless as a fort except in the ramblings of a dotty aristocrat whom everyone ignored.

  This particular trail of Scots east to Scone will make it into no annals; the presence of a strange woman from time not yet discovered will be lost. Downright misconceptions will surface in time. The women of the future will be held guilty for the fall of man, and the last vestiges of their wisdom will be tied to a post and her most holy icon of flame will be used against her.

  What is to become of me, once Maggie Livingstone, then Margaret Griggs, now Ma-khee? Iona might know; Sula might have guessed by now. But I cannot say. I am not a witch tried and true. Like everyone else, I am just a traveler in time.

  The moon, about seven months pregnant, drifts slowly along the ridge of filigree trees. I move out of the shadows towards the fire and kneel at Fergus’s back, my arms around his neck, my mouth against his ear.

  “Fergus MacBrighde,” I whisper so that he can’t hear me over the crackling of the fire, “there will never come a time I do not remember you.”

  29

  Margaret?”

  Dr. Shipshap lifted Maggie’s hand and patted the back of it. “Margaret, can you hear me?”

  Graeme let go of his mother’s other hand and stood up from the bed. “She’s been asleep for four days,” he said. “This can’t be normal.”

  “Not usual,” said the doctor, “but not without precedent.”

  He clicked on his little probing light and lifted Maggie’s eyelid. Her head was swaddled in yards of gauze with a tube coming out like a spout. An oxygen mask obscured her face. Monitors by the bed ran different colored lines in and out of the covers. The sharp sting of methylated spirits mingled with the leftover food on a tray by the door.

  Jim patted Graeme’s shoulder. “Look, the heart is strong. She’ll be fine.”

  “But she didn’t wake up when she was supposed to,” said Graeme, turning to the doctor. “Maybe she’s never going to.”

  Dr. Shipshap shook his head. “People just have different ways of responding to anesthetic.”

  Graeme’s face was flushed. “But if you couldn’t wake her up, how did you know which part of the brain to take out?”

  The doctor stepped back from the bed. “Experience.”

  He was finished with questions for today and felt put upon by the woman’s teenage son. He walked out to the nurses’ station to ask the ward sister to lower the level of analgesic. He set the patient’s chart on the desk and left. His shift was over.

  Two young nurses in short sleeves and little starched hats watched the older man comfort the boy.

  One nurse nudged the other. “Is that the father, then?”

  The other shrugged. “I suppose so.”

  “It’s a shame. She should have come round before now, eh?”

  The two nurses watched the son pace the floor at the foot of his mother’s bed. The older man went to the window.

  “Dr. Shipshap is one of the best neurologis
ts in the country,” interrupted the ward sister. “Nothing has ever gone wrong before.”

  An hour later, the woman’s husband confused the nurses by ringing to see if anything had changed. If the woman had a husband, who was this man sitting on the end of her bed?

  Close to midnight, one of the nurses took the man and the woman’s son cups of tea.

  “You should go home and sleep,” she said. “We can give you a ring if anything changes.”

  Graeme shook his head.

  “At least let me find you a daybed where you can go and catch a few hours. You’ll do yourself in like this.”

  “Go on,” said Jim. “You’ll feel better for a snooze.”

  Graeme began to get up, but his body was working against him and was trying to sit him back down.

  Jim got up to help him. “Off you go. I’ll stand sentry.”

  Graeme got as far as the door before he turned back. “Thanks, Jim. I don’t know what we’d have done without you.”

  Jim smiled. “On you go, before I chase you down the corridor myself.”

  After Graeme had left with the nurse, Jim stood by the window looking out at the headlights of a car pulling into the hospital car park, at the black night sky gently fading around the stars. Behind him the elevator sounded its sonorous bell. A woman’s laughter echoed from down the corridor. A call for a doctor crackled over the loudspeaker.

  At length, he walked back to Maggie and sat on the bed by her hip. He wondered if she was dreaming. He still didn’t know what to make of all of that. But whether Fergus was real or not, he was still too real.

  “Look at you,” he said to Maggie. “You’ve made a mess of it now.” He fingered one of her tubes and by the warmth judged it to be the catheter.

  For a moment, Maggie’s eyes seemed to flutter. Jim looked towards the nurses’ station, to the wall of cupboards and the bin marked TOXIC WASTE.

  He said, “I know a certain son who won’t survive if you don’t come back, Maggie.”

  Again he saw a flutter. This time he was sure. And then off to the side of his vision, he caught a movement of the finger onto which her pulse monitor was attached.

  Jim slipped his own finger under the one that had just moved. “It’s time to come back now, Maggie Livingston. It’s time to leave your crannogs and Loch Glashan. You have to say good-bye to that Fergus brute now.”

  A tear ran down Maggie’s face, and then another. Jim half stood up to call the nurse, but he sat back down again and wiped her tears with the edge of the sheet.

  “Maggie, I know you can hear me.”

  “No,” she said, muffled inside her mask, “I can’t hear you.”

  He smiled and sat back in his chair, drumming his fingers on his thigh. “You’re a big teaser,” he said. “The worst I have ever seen.”

  She opened one eye. Jim lifted the oxygen mask so that she could speak. “Am I back in the land of the living?”

  Her eyes closed again, and for a moment it seemed she had drifted off.

  “Are you going to stay?” Jim asked.

  Her eyes fluttered, then opened a little. “It looks like it.”

  Jim blew out his breath. She closed her eyes. A thin line of water forced them back open a crack. Another tear fell off the side of her face onto the pillow.

  Jim kept talking to keep her with him. “The doctor said the operation went well enough.”

  She didn’t respond.

  After a while, he stood up and tucked her sheet under her chin. “Well, there’s a boy I know who wouldn’t mind at all being woken up at this time of night to hear some good news.”

  Maggie kept her eyes closed. “Yes,” she said, “bring that boy to me, will you?”

  The nurse appeared at the door, smiling. “I heard the talking. Is she awake, then?”

  Jim stood back from the bed and pulled his jacket off the chair. “She’s awake and as cheeky as ever. I thought the doctor was going to fix that.”

  Maggie smiled, tried to lift her hand to her bandaged head.

  The nurse intercepted Maggie’s hand. “No, we can’t do anything about cheekiness. You’ll have to deal with that yourself.”

  “I’ve been trying,” said Jim. He slid his arms into his jacket. “She’s a useless case.”

  He walked to the door and stood for a while watching as the nurse checked the monitors. “Bye then, Maggie.”

  Maggie lifted her hand a little off the covers and listened as the squeak of Jim’s shoes passed the tap of Graeme’s down the empty hall.

  Maggie turned to the nurse peering at her monitor. “Does it tell you up there if I’ll have any more seizures?”

  The nurse gently tapped the screen. “It’s much too soon to know about that. The thing you have to work on is feeling better. Sometimes there are no more seizures. Sometimes there are a few and then they stop. Sometimes they keep on as before. But I’m sure that won’t be true in your case. All we can do is hope for the best, right?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said, “all we can do is hope for the very best. Here he is.”

  Graeme came towards her, stifling a sob before he ever made it to her bed. “You’re back,” he said.

  He buried his face in her pillow next to her cheek.

  Maggie tried to reach for him, but she was held back by the drip. “Here I am,” she said, “as though I’d never left.”

  Maggie lay with her son beside her, breathing in the smell of his hair, clasping his hand when it searched for hers against the covers.

  The nurse stepped close when she saw the look on the woman’s face. “Are you in pain?”

  The woman turned her face away, so the nurse gathered all the cups onto the tea tray and left efficiently.

  Maggie could see the brightening eastern sky begin to creep up her window. Before long, the first of the tourists would be setting out along black ribbons of road to climb the path and set their foot in the imprint in the rock. They would stop by the information board and read about the people who once lived at Dunadd.

  But they wouldn’t read about Fergus or Illa or the woman who came to them from a very great distance. They would find out that the people of King Murdoch lost Dunadd to the Picts, but they would get no sense of what Maggie lost.

  From the top of Dunadd, the wind would be still now; the mist lifting off the Mhoine Mhor, the clouds off the sea. The walls of the fort that had kept it strong were this morning, just as every morning, a cold rubble in the wet grass.

  Fergus and Illa weren’t there anymore. But one day they might come back. And if they did, one day, perhaps the woman Ma-khee might find them there.

  GALLERY READERS GROUP GUIDE

  VEIL OF TIME

  CLAIRE R.

  MCDOUGALL

  INTRODUCTION

  Caught in a period of transition between her divorce and an operation that could put her epileptic seizures behind her, Maggie Livingstone decides it’s time to get away. She leaves Glasgow for a three-month stay at the foot of Dunadd Hill in the Scottish highlands, where she intends to finish her PhD thesis on witch burnings that for so long took a backseat to marriage and motherhood.

  Dunadd is a quiet place. Maggie’s only company is a friendly widower named Jim and Winnie, the black cat who quickly finds a home with her. There’s plenty of time to think about the daughter she lost to a seizure, and the son for whom she needs to pull herself together. But when Maggie’s seizures start transporting her into vivid dreams of eighth-century Scotland, she becomes consumed with thoughts of Fergus, brother to the king, and his daughter, Illa, who reminds her of her own lost child. As the date of her operation approaches, Maggie must decide whether she can leave her newfound loves of that world to be present for her son in this one.

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. When Maggie goes to stay at Dunadd, she notes, “I have unearthed the old Maggie Livingstone of childhood and pasted it over the Margaret I had become.” Later in the story Fergus calls her Ma-khee. How do each of these variations of
her name identify a different part of who she is? Discuss your own nicknames, if you have any, and how you relate to being called by different names.

  2. The story intersperses Maggie’s point of view with Fergus’s. What does this bring to the story? How different do you think the book would be if we got only Maggie’s perspective?

  3. What do you make of the almost instant attraction between Maggie and Fergus? What do you think draws them to each other? How might their past relationships have played a role in bringing them together at this point in their lives?

  4. “ ‘But what if time isn’t what we think it is, one damn thing after another? What if what we know isn’t just a series of pictures, but more like a hologram? If the whole thing is contained within each piece, then traveling through time isn’t so much a question of traveling anywhere so much as looking deeper into the image.’ ” What do you think about this interpretation of time? Do you think Maggie’s dreams are more than dreams?

  5. After Maggie asks Jim what period in time he would like to visit, she is struck by the emotion in his response, noting “Sometimes you just happen on the thing in a person that stirs the quick. It’s a nice thing to see, the quick. . . .” What do you make of the phrase stir the quick? What stirs the quick in you?

  6. Maggie sometimes worries about altering history, and whether or not she should warn Fergus about the future. Do you agree with her decision?

  7. Discuss Maggie’s role as a mother. How does her relationship with Illa compare to her relationship with Graeme?

  8. How do Maggie’s relationships with Sula and Iona influence her thesis? Do you think Maggie herself could be considered a witch?

  9. There are a lot of things Maggie fears about undergoing the lobectomy. She worries, “will normality just be deathly dull?” Discuss the concept of being normal. What does it mean to you? Is it something you seek out, try to steer clear of, or something else in between?