Veil of Time (13 page)

I go to the door with Marcus close behind. He trails me across the top of the hill and stands in front of me as I get close to the cliff edge. The wind rushing up off the sea billows my shirt into a balloon that I try to hold down and then let go, spreading my arms like a supplication to the sea. Only now do I notice Fergus sitting farther down the hill. He must have been here
all along, and he’s not alone, for his arm is about the shoulders of a young girl.

Suddenly a commotion of bells has us all looking back, and the girl breaks free from Fergus and runs over the crest of the hill in her tunic that falls to her ankles, her reddish hair bouncing on her back. Without thinking I start to run after her. I’ve seen this girl before, but not for a long time, and I desperately don’t want to lose her.

I hear my voice come out as though it belonged to someone else, less a call, less a name, than a wheeze. “Ellie!”

But I am making the slave panic. He spreads his arms as though herding a runaway cow. I stop because I am beginning to choke on nothing but my own breath. The little girl doesn’t hear me anyway and runs down the hill out of sight.

I turn to Marcus.
“Puella quisnam est?”
Who’s the girl?

Marcus holds my arm to keep me from following her.
“Puella filia Fergi est.”
The girl is Fergus’s daughter.

As Marcus leads me back to the hut, I catch a last glimpse of Fergus on his ledge below the cliff. Just for a moment, he turns his head and takes me in, all in my distress, confused, my face wet with tears.

Sula is back in the hut when we return. She bids me squat by the fire, where she takes my arms and runs her hands along the insides of my wrists. After Ellie died,
I used to find her sometimes in fleeting dreams, those dreams that taunt you and leave you on the other side of sleep with lead in your chest.

I turn to Marcus.
“Puella nomen?”
What is her name?

Sula pats my wrists, then sets them back by my sides. “Illa.”

“How old is she?”

I almost don’t want to hear. I think I know the answer.

Sula says, “She was born eight years ago.”

I should ask about her mother, but just for this moment I want to be the only mother in this dream.

When Marcus brings us meat and more bannocks, I begin to wish potatoes had already made it to Scotland, because dry meat and bread needs an awful lot of
fraoch
to help it slip down, and this warm ale of yesteryear is stronger than what it would become. I fall asleep, and when I wake, Sula is snoring by the embers and Marcus is making of himself a useful draft block by the door.

I pull my shawl about my shoulders and lift the stick to poke a flame to life, but the fire has been left too long. I’ve noticed a lattice of peat blocks stacked around the outer wall of the hut, and have to step over Marcus to reach the door. Outside, the wind has died down and a rosy glow is creeping up over the horizon, so I am able to find the peat and start making a smaller stack to carry inside. I start to hurry, because I have the sense that
someone is watching me, and I don’t want to be chased back into the hut by King Murdoch again.

But it’s not the king. It’s his brother. Fergus is suddenly crouched beside me, gently nudging me aside and lifting bricks of peat into his arms.

“It’s still night,” I whisper. “Why are you here?”

I don’t mean to question his appearance. All kinds of things have been appearing lately.

He says, “I was waiting for you.”

I stand there, not knowing what to say in English or in Gaelic.

He takes the peat to the door and drops it. “I want to show you something.”

He looks awkward, as though I could wound him by declining. But this is a dream, and in the way of dreams I hold out my hand. He lifts my palm and runs his hand over it, a gesture that might have its meaning in this day, but I’m not quite sure what to make of it. All I know is that I’m not going to let go of his hand this time, even as he leads me down the hill, past the cookhouse that is beginning to stir, to the wall, where a small gap in the masonry allows us to pass through. On the other side, we crouch down, listening for any sign of life.

“Don’t come here by yourself,” he says.

A goat bleats down in the village, followed by an answer from another of its kind. But the people are still waiting for first light, and the village is dark as we drop down into the lane that leads from the fort to the bridge.
Out of nowhere, a heavily tattooed man is in our path on a small bay horse. In what light there is, I can see the horse’s breath as the man dismounts and hands the reins to Fergus.

Suddenly Fergus’s hands are under one of my feet, and I am being lifted onto the horse as the man who brought it here drops back into the darkness. Fergus jumps up behind me and kicks the horse into a trot. He doesn’t lead it to the bridge, but away to the hills on the south side of Dunadd. I haven’t ridden a horse since I went through that phase as an adolescent, but Fergus’s body lodged behind mine manages to keep me in place.

Once we are out of sight of the fort, Fergus slows the animal to a walk. I can feel his rough cheek against my ear.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

He breathes the words against my cheek. “A sacred place.”

I only know the word for
sacred
because Mrs. Gillies used to use that word to describe Dunadd. Maybe that’s what drew me back here.

Fergus doesn’t talk; at least he utters no words. There is plenty of talk between the front of his body and the back of mine, and I don’t mind in the least that half an hour passes before Fergus pulls the horse to a stop. When he jumps down and holds my waist for me to dismount, I hardly care anymore what it is he has brought me here to see.

He reaches for my hand and leads me to several large slabs of rock. There is more light now, but it is still hard to make out what he crouches down to trace with his finger in this sacred place. He takes my finger and sets it in the groove of what I trace out to be a circle, and then within that circle another, and another. With my other hand I trace other circles within circles; all over the rock this pattern of rings repeats itself.

I look into his face. “What is it?”

He places his hand in the small of my back and I feel his fingers trace a vertebra or two, as though I were another of the patterns in the rock. “Sula used to bring us here when we were children. These marks were left by the ancients, the stoneworkers. Do you know who they were?”

Right now, with Fergus’s hand on me, I am not particularly interested in who they were, but I get the feeling his question has more to do with where I come from.

I take his other hand and hold it against my solar plexus.
“Chan e.”
No.

He says, “Sula says they are raindrops on water set in stone. She says life on earth and life in the stars is like this, one circle within another, crossing others.” He looks away, then says a word I don’t recognize:
“Eadar-thoinnte.”

When I look to him for an explanation, he laces his fingers with mine. “
Eadar-thoinnte
means ‘many strands woven together.’ ”

He lays his mouth against mine, not a kiss, just a question of some kind. “Tell me who you are, Ma-khee.”

I could tell him something that is not true, but it would jar against this moment.

I take my lips from the warmth of his, and say, “I don’t know who I am.”

He looks back at the rings in the rock and slowly takes his hands from me.

“Who are you?” I ask, drawing his eyes back to me. “I know you are Fergus, but I don’t know who you really are.”

He flashes his fleeting smile. “I’m just the king’s brother,” he said. “The king’s sad brother.”

A weight comes over him and stays that way as we ride home. Yet, moving to the rhythm of the horse, his chest against my back, the questions and answers seem moot. We know who we are and why each one hopes there is no end to this journey. There is nothing I can tell him of what I am that will make any sense to him.

But when we reach the fort and he helps me dismount, he says, “Ma-khee.” In his eyes the question remains.

I hold on to him and let that be my answer. Before he leaves me at the gap in the wall, he touches his lips to my cheek. I watch him run down through the rusty bracken before turning in the direction of the cookhouse, which is bustling now with servants running to and fro from other buildings, smoke sidling from the
chimneys. Those bells that had caused Fergus’s daughter to run off yesterday morning are being rung, though I can’t see where. They chime in my head as I climb back up to Sula’s hut at the summit. They vibrate loudly, then fall off, and just before I slip out of the dream altogether, I see the girl Illa running between the adults below, glancing up at me, and then moving away.

10

T
he girl comes and the girl goes. As I turn over on my pillows, my eye falls not on Illa but on the bright square in the wall that is my bedroom window. From the fold-out frame by my bed, Graeme and Ellie look back at me. This picture of Ellie hugging Mickey Mouse in Florida has no reference for me anymore. I can’t find her face in any of the photos, just sometimes there in a flash of memory, like her little self in a high chair sucking melted chocolate from her fingers, or waiting by the back door in her first school uniform, her little baby neck in an oversized collar and tie. And a world away on the hill, I could have sworn it was Ellie; the pain under my breastbone suggests it is so.

I curl around myself, bringing back the movement of
Fergus behind me on the horse, the damp warmth of his lips on my face. He smells like the wall and the bracken. His scent is not separate from his surroundings, in the way that I, in this distant land, here but not really here, smell not of myself but of something manufactured. He asked me who I am, but there are many me’s—like looking into a broken mirror, I am scattered all over. And yet, there is something scattered about him, too. He is the king’s brother, son of Brighde; he is the father of his daughter, and perhaps, who knows, the husband of his wife. I know so little of what makes up Fergus MacBrighde. But I understand that sadness he speaks of. I feel it in his eyes.

We never brought Ellie to Dunadd—only to that refuge of cold Scots, the beaches of Spain, and once to Disney World. I close my eyes and will myself back into sleep, perchance to dream. But nothing is coming to Dunadd in the twenty-first century except a dimming light behind the spray of dead grasses in the window. The birds are not yet quiet, but settling.

In the kitchen I crack open a tin of beans and slot slices of bread into the toaster, everyday actions that edge Fergus and Illa out. The heat from the burner warms my face. The kitchen is in full view of the glass doors, so there would be no hiding from Jim Galvin even if I wanted to, which I’m not sure I do. Alone in my kitchen, watching my beans begin to bubble, I suddenly feel quite lonely.

Soon enough, Jim opens the door. “Came to see how your headache was doing,” he says. “And the cat.”

My hand goes over my mouth. “Where is she?”

“Running after a mouse, the last I saw. Do you know you have been asleep for eight hours? I almost called for an ambulance.”

I smile and relax my defenses. He takes a step into the house, followed now by Winnie, the very skinny black cat. “I came an hour or so ago, but you were out for the count, so I gave her a saucer of milk. Later, she wanted to go out, so I let her.”

I don’t like the thought of this man wandering around my cottage with me asleep in the bedroom. My door wasn’t even closed.

I pick Winnie up and snuggle her against my face. “I took a strong painkiller, that’s all.”

Jim nods and steps back towards the door. “Well, I was just checking.”

“Thank you.” I gesture towards my paltry meal. “If you haven’t already eaten? It isn’t much.”

He looks glad that I want to share my beans and toast with him. I make him his tea with warmed milk. We don’t say much, as though our main business is eating. After the beans, I find a few chocolate biscuits in the bread bin and arrange them on a plate.

He unfurls the wrapping from one. “How was the trip anyway?”

For a moment, I think he means my dream. I have to
tap my fingers on the table to refocus myself. Glasgow. Edinburgh. The well on Castle Hill.

“Fine. Divorce finalized. Son educated and on his way. Myself appalled by what I turned up at Edinburgh University. Did you know the last woman to be tried under the Witchcraft Act was in 1944?”

“Aye,” he says. “Crying shame, that. Old Winston Churchill got involved. It’s him that had the law abolished, you know.”

I am studying his face, as I often do with people until I realize what I’m doing. “Is there anything you don’t know?”

He chuckles. “Oh, aye. Apparently I don’t know much about women.”

I’m not sure I like where this is going, but I ask anyway. “Why do you think that?”

He gets up and goes to the window, and now I know I definitely shouldn’t have asked. “Well, take you, for instance. You seem to like that cat better than me, and I’m the only man for miles around.”