Veil of Time (23 page)

Fergus wondered about Ma-khee’s husband, what manner of man this could have been to leave a woman with such a weight about her. Marcus thought there had been a child. So she was like him, this Ma-khee. He hoped that she could forget her old husband. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head, running over the scene in the other house. It had been so long since he had brought himself this close to a woman, but how sweet the cry of the woman in his embrace as it mingled with his own. He had forgotten, had for too long buried himself in a cave with no light and no sound. Ma-khee had brought him back to the edge of his darkeness and shown him the sky. The thought of it
made his heart a little fearful for all that can be lost in love.

It was the mason who woke Fergus in the morning with his clattering at the rock on the hillside just above his mother’s house. The fire had gone to embers and offered little heat. Fergus got up and threw a triangle of peat onto the fire before he walked out to the mason Murdoch had hired to fashion the shape of a foot in the rock. For once, his brother’s ideas concurred with his own. Fergus wanted to stay at Duandd now, not just for Illa but for Ma-khee. But he worried that Murdoch’s antagonism towards the Picts might incite them to revolt after all.

Fergus found Illa in the bakehouse, where the cooks often gave her dough to roll. Leaning against the doorjamb, he ate a dish of oats boiled in milk and looked out on a morning that was damp and quiet under thick clouds. He would gladly have stayed by the ovens, but he had to go down to the village and find Talorcan.

As Fergus followed the path down to the gates, the clouds began to release icy drops, and they did not have far to fall. It was his custom to exchange a few words with the guards, but his thoughts were heavy this morning as he juggled this new woman with his duty as a royal son of the house of Dunadd. He hurried through the gate and down across the bridge which swung under his step and reminded him of the injury to his ankle on the night of Samhain.

Morning in the village smelled of baking bannocks and the yeasty sour smell of warming
fraoch
. Talorcan lived on the far side by the hill in a house surrounded by a tall fence. His wife had borne no children, and so he had sons and daughters with other women. Today he was alone by his door.

Talorcan caught his brother-in-law by the arm. “Fergus. Come and eat.”

Fergus walked into the house and squatted beside his friend at the fire, not willing the time forward for his telling about the new woman. Talorcan had loved his sister Saraid and would not take the news easily.

He spread a bannock with cheese and handed it to Fergus, then set a cup of
fraoch
on top of a few embers in a hole in the ground.

Fergus ate in silence. After a moment, he lifted the warming brew to his lips. It would make the speech easier.

“There have been rumors,” Fergus said.

Talorcan nodded. “I have heard the rumors. I heard you have taken the foreign woman for yourself.”

Fergus sighed. “Do not think it is easy for me to let Saraid go.”

“It is time, though,” said Talorcan. “The dead don’t fit into one of your boxes to be kept. They have their lives, no longer with us except for the times when the veil lifts. But that is not up to us.”

Fergus nodded.

Talorcan slapped his back. “If you had not, I would have taken her for myself.”

Fergus drank from his steer horn cup. He knew it meant nothing for Talorcan to boast about women. Still, it made Fergus anxious to change the topic.

He said, “But these are not the rumors I came to talk about. My brother and my mother are worried about news from the north and east about the new king Oengus. They worry that you Picts of the Boar will rise up and join this king to take Dunadd from us.”

Talorcan picked up a stick and idly drew a boar in the dirt. “I have heard rumors, too,” he said, “that the druidess has visions of this image on the rock inside your fort.”

Fergus shook his head. “How do these rumors come to you?”

Talorcan offered him another bannock. “Remember, the people who serve you and prepare your meat do not come from your stock.”

Fergus looked into Talorcan’s face, traced the handsome outline of the boar on his forehead. Talorcan looked away.

“Then is it true? Should we fear those from whom we have taken our wives, whose goddess we have worshipped? Must they come in the night and murder us?”

Talorcan looked into the eyes of this Scot he had
known since childhood. He laughed. “Not as long as my brother draws breath. Not as long as my sister’s girl sleeps sound.”

Fergus finished his drink. He gave Talorcan his hand. “Thank you. I can trust you. But what of the others?”

Talorcan walked him to the opening in the wattle fence. “We have lived peacefully with your people these two hundred years. You took my sister as your wife. No Scot will fall by my hand. Those who want to fight must do so under the sign of the beast of King Oengus in the north. Still, you should tell your people to listen to the druidess.”

Fergus felt uneasy as he walked back through the village. There were many mixed bloods living here, but also plenty of the tall red-haired Picts. If the Picts to the north chose to march south, who knew what others they would pick up on their travel? If the Scots were going to stand against such a force, all the men of the islands and in the larger Dál Riada kingdom would have to be brought in. Perhaps even from as far as Erin. But the word would have to go out soon. Such an army could not be brought together quickly.

He shook off these thoughts as he climbed back up to the fort and was admitted through the gates. His thinking should be of lighter things. After all, he had found a woman he liked well and was eager to see. He hoped the thought of him pleased her as much as the
anticipation of seeing her this morning made him run the last stretch up the hill to the houses.

But she wasn’t in Sula’s hut nor at the bakehouse. A moment of panic suggested she had escaped and gone back to where she had come from. But he found her with his daughter and Sula, watching the mason carve the foot in the rock. He stood close to her, hoping she still wanted him.

She turned to him. “What is the foot for?”

He found a softness in her eyes that made him smile and want to touch her. His fingers went around her hand. Her squeeze tightened his grip. He could feel Sula watching them, but it made no difference now whether Ma-khee was a druidess or not. Too much had passed for Sula to take the woman back.

He said, “The foot will be the place for the payment of fealty by lords from the outlying lands. It means I don’t have to travel to collect it.”

He took a step in until his chest was touching her back. But she was distracted now by the mason asking Sula to step into the imprint that he might take its size from her foot. It seemed to bring the woman Ma-khee much joy, talking quickly in her own language and clapping her hands.

Fergus took the woman by her hand. “Come,” he said in the soft way a man has of speaking to a woman he is not yet sure of.

He led her back to his house, where they had lain the night before. As they walked Ma-khee pulled her shawl to her face against the rain; it pleased Fergus when she slipped in the mud and his hand had to wrap about her waist to save her from falling. He took Illa this time, too, for it was time for her to go back into the house where she had been brought into life. These past two years they had not liked to go in there at all, and it felt strange to him to kneel by the old fire pit with another woman’s eyes on him.

As he had taught her, Illa brought sticks and built them into a pyramid, while Fergus took a leather pouch from his belt and laid out his steel instrument with the two finger holes, a round piece of stone, and a dried piece of fungus. He set the fungus to the side of the fire on a pile of old charred wood, and then began striking the steel shoe with the stone until it produced a spark or two, which he caught in the fungus and blew on as it began to smolder. It wasn’t long until the sticks began to crackle, and the fire rose up out of Illa’s pyramid. He caught the woman’s eye as he gathered his kit back into his pouch and sat back with his hands on his haunches, watching the fire rise.

The woman seemed happy with Illa on her lap, braiding her hair, singing some strange-sounding song with her lips close to the girl’s ear. Fergus stood over her, ran his fingers down her arm; she looked up and smiled. He tried to busy himself moving things about,
but his eyes kept finding her, wishing for it to be dark in here again. By the look on his daughter’s face, it would not be hard for her to accept this Ma-khee as a new mother.

When the house had gained some heat, he left them to find Sula, for there were things to discuss. Outside the house, he stopped for a moment while he gathered himself and took a little more leave of his dead wife. It was simply a new feeling of release, and it lightened his steps as he scaled the hill and came to Sula’s door.

He called out his name and stood back, the woman’s gold band in the cup of his hand.

But Sula was not by herself. In the dim light of her hut, Fergus saw her leaning over Marcus’s foot. He was anxious to talk to her, but he kept yawning from his lack of sleep the night before, and he had no choice but to sit down on the floor and wait. The smell of the poultice Sula was applying overwhelmed Fergus and made his eyes heavy. The next thing he knew, she was bending over him, shaking his shoulder.

“Wake up,” she said. “What is it?”

Fergus opened his eyes. He stood up and moved aside to let Marcus leave. Sula beckoned Fergus to sit on the shelf that jutted from the wall, where Ma-khee had been sitting the first time he saw her.

“This woman Ma-khee,” he said. The very words made him smile.

Sula nodded. “It is time.”

“Will you cast your stones again, see if this Ma-khee is the one you saw before?”

Sula shook her head. “I am afraid to cast my stones these days. What I see no one understands. Not even I understand.”

Fergus edged forward on his seat.

“What do you see? The boar in the hillside?”

Sula walked to Fergus, this man she had known since he was a scrawny boy; she took his head in her hands. “Yes. The Boar in the rock by your footprint. I see a time when these are all that will be left at Dunadd, just the bracken and the carvings in the rock.”

Fergus looked into her face. “When?”

“I cannot tell. But I see black ribbons running down the land. I see carts without horses moving very fast. I do not think this time will be soon. But you must leave.”

Fergus ran his hands through his hair. “How could I leave? Murdoch will never give up on Dunadd and neither will my mother. We will stay and fight.”

“Some things you cannot fight,” said Sula. “You can kill every Pict from the north to the east to the south, but their carving comes to the rock, whether you slaughter us all or not. Fergus, your people will not last here for long.”

She lifted his hand and patted. “I am telling you these things because you have ears that listen. Murdoch is deaf these days to signs given by an old woman. Speak to your mother; speak to your woman.”

Fergus warmed to the touch of the old woman’s hands, as though he were still a child. He caught her hands and brought them together within his own, such fleshless fingers now. “What of the woman?”

The druidess shook her head. “I have no sense of her. I ask my stones and they say this woman has traveled far, but she says she comes from here, and I do not take her for a liar. I can only think she has traveled from the land of past bones. And yet, you are right, she has all the marks of the living.” Sula looked hard into his face and smiled. “Why this woman now? Your mother, your brother, have found other brides, younger, more beautiful than this one. Is this the young Fergus who must always say no?”

Sula took her hands away and squatted by her fire, looking into the flames as though she could find an end to her questions there.

Fergus crouched beside her. “Who can say why? It is not a question for argument.” He turned Ma-khee’s ring over in his palm, and it touched him that she would not have given this up lightly. “Even if she is not the woman in your stones, I would want her to be. You can argue until dark about the right arrow for the job, but in the end the arrow that will make its mark feels right in the hand.”

Sula uncupped Fergus’s hand and picked out the ring. She looked into his eyes, then set it back across those lines of his palm that she knew so well, that told so much.

When she stood up, Fergus saw for the first time that she was old now; her legs could not hold her for long in one place. He watched her run her hand over her face and look back at him.

“These things I see I do not fully understand,” she said. “The shaking of the fort—I do not know whether this is a game of pictures or a quake such as fell once on Erin, but you must take this woman of yours and your daughter. You must leave Dunadd, because the time is coming when it will not be safe for you here. I see it more frequently now.”

Fergus stood and laid his hand on her shoulder. His breathing was fast and shallow. “You know I cannot go.”

Sula stood up. “Leave Dunadd, Fergus, while there is still time.”

Fergus went out from Sula with his thoughts like daggers. He ran to the house of his brother’s wife. She had not seen Murdoch for a night and a day. He ran to the house of Colla. She said Murdoch had left with a company by horse at sunrise.

Fergus found his mother seated by the fire, the book of Colum Cille’s life in her lap.

Fergus knelt before her. He could do no other. “I just came from Sula. You must listen, Mother.”

“I have listened,” Brighde said. “It is you who has not paid her any heed. Even today your brother is riding to the farthest reaches of Dál Riada to round up
men. We cannot defeat the Picts by ourselves. Murdoch will march north with an army and face this King Oengus before he ever gets within sight of Dunadd.” She laid her hand on the top of Fergus’s head. “Will you join them? Murdoch has a strong arm, but you have the trust of the people.”