Veil of Time (36 page)

There’s no bread, of course, and the little flour that remains is being guarded. No querns, because they were the first things to sink. It will be a cold recovery, but recovered they must be. Somehow everything will have to be set back up, like time-lapse photography moving backwards.

When I get back to the fish roast, Illa is among the children waiting in line. She stands a head taller than the Scotti children her age; her red hair marks her as another breed altogether. My auburn hair marks me as something in between, so I am allowed to stand waiting with Illa among the hungry travelers. Fergus is at the shore with a band of men, brewing plans, I expect, while the women busy themselves with the more immediate task of feeding the five thousand. I keep glancing over at him.

“Margaret?”

No. I don’t hear you. I want so badly to get my hands
around Fergus again, over him, on him. But I am in a race with time that I cannot win.

Marcus walks over and stands behind me, another outcast allowed some privilege at the feast.

“What are the men talking about?” I ask.

“Brighde went east to Scone. Fergus says we must follow.”

“Everyone?”

Marcus shakes his head, smiling. “Not I.”

Fergus must have granted him his freedom.

Scone, I know, is in Perthshire, which I reckon must be a four-hour car drive from here. If we’re all going to march, it’s going to take a week or more. The “scenic route” is the old route east, around Loch Awe and then across land to Loch Earn.

I eat the half fish I am given, but pick out the staring eyes and hand them to Illa. For these children, fish eyes are as close to sweets as they get. Afterwards I walk her back to what remains of Iona’s hut. Some men are already setting her roof back up. The thatch will take longer. When I notice Illa limping, I let her lean in against me. She puts her arm around my waist and holds on tightly.

She looks up at me. “You won’t leave, will you?”

I am her mother. How can I leave her?

“Have you seen Winnie?” I ask.

She shakes her head, looks sad.

We find Iona seated inside her walls, her look far off. I pick the old poultice off Illa’s leg and look for the dried
root that Iona made her ointment from the last time. Everything is mixed in with everything else now. Iona pushes me with the toe of her shoe towards a pile closer to the door.

The mortar is still here, but the pestle must have bounced off during the quake. I go outside and bring back a stone that will do. I like the feel of the powdered root in the cup of my hand mixing together with my spit. I like the sky above the walls of the hut moving fast with the wind. It feels like I know all this, like something that was just asleep in me until now.

Illa winces as I spread my spitty mess over her wound.

When Fergus calls from outside the door, I smile to hear his voice, and because there is no roof and he could just as well look in. He says my name, and I relish the sound of it, not Maggie nor Margaret, but Ma-khee.

“Margaret, can you hear me?”

“Ma-khee?”

Illa looks just as happy to hear Fergus, but I touch her shoulder for her to be still until her poultice sets a little. It is I myself who opens the door.

I lay my palms flat against his chest. Though his face is serious, I feel his whole self alive, the warmth and movement of him beneath my fingers. He takes me by the elbow and leads me away from the hut, stopping among the rubble of field and upended earth. And he starts in on a speech so fast I don’t know how he expects
me to understand. I pick up some of it, about Murdoch, and it must be bad news, the way his jaw tenses and the veins form ropes under his skin.

When I put my arms around him, he shakes his head, though a smile is creeping in.

He holds me out by my arms. “When we go to Scone, Iona will stay here. In the time left, you must learn from her.”

I poke him, and he writhes under the tickle. “When it gets dark, will you come to me?”

He nods but then moves off, back into his serious self. I go back to Illa.

She says, “What did he say?”

I sit down beside her and lay her hand flat against mine. It’s a grubby little hand, but it’s hard to tell where the heat from her palm ends and mine begins. “Your uncle Murdoch was defeated. We are going to Scone. A long distance. But not yet.” I touch her poor leg. “Not until you can run fast.”

I am so glad that she will run fast again, that this time she goes on to live, that I wrap my arm around her and pull her in close against me. She doesn’t resist, not even for a moment.

She says, “I am glad you came to be my mother.”

It is not hard to exhale, but my inhale shakes and I am unable to say anything back. Illa, if you only knew what sweet torture it has been to be your mother.

I manage quite a bright fire, relatively smokeless. I
didn’t see Iona down by the loch, so I don’t know what she has eaten, or ever does eat, but she stretches out on the floor of the hut by the fire across from Illa and falls asleep in no time. I sit up, waiting for Fergus, only this time I hope he doesn’t call out at the door.

He doesn’t. He taps, a small sound only the wakeful can hear. There is nowhere to go but inside, so he follows me in, and there is nowhere to lie except next to the others, which we do, and I can only hope that sleep lies heavily on both and they cannot see what is happening in the flicker of a fire under a very cold roof, with the wraps coming off and the tunic over the head followed by hands that want to get me down to my core skin, and bones and muscle all moving to his skin and bones and muscle until the two become one thing moving among the shadows.

“Don’t leave me,” I say in English this time, because I don’t want him to know my need. He wants me to be strong, but here I am clinging to him, so that he will stay and stay and stay. And so will I.

“Margaret.”

No. I desperately don’t want to drift away. Not now.

The next morning, Fergus joins the men who strip and push their bodies through the frozen water to exhume what can be found in the crannog below the water. The children are sent off to find grasses, nuts, and grains of any kind in preparation for the quern stones drying out and beginning their toil of grinding once again.

I sit by the water, trying hard to hold on. A shake to my shoulder brings Iona into focus. She sits down beside me and takes my hand.

“The moon is a woman,” she says. “The moon is Gealach. Her children are the stars.”

Iona turns my hands palm up. “The hands take power from the sky.”

I hold my hands up and feel first the cool breeze across my palms. But then they turn hot. I rub them together, and then hold them up again. First the coolness, then the heat. I smile to show that I know what she is saying. She takes hold of my right hand and circles her finger around my palm. She starts tapping it, chanting to Gealach, mother of all. It gives me a headache, the kind of rhythmic noise that usually sends me into an episode. I fight to stay on. She smooths my palm several times, then looks into the center of my hand. The look on her face is intent as she pulls back my fingers so that the blood runs out, leaving in my palm only white skin.

Her brow furrows under her strangely pale hair. She pins me with her pale blue eyes. “You come from what has not yet been lived.”

Yes. A time of no wolves or bears or beavers, of no crannogs on the lochs, and of only a few remaining stone circles. I come from the time of witches at Halloween; of the jealous God who will have nothing to do with the goddess moon.

I take a deep breath in slowly, but she is looking at
me now as though she doesn’t know if she should run or stay.

Suddenly she grips my knee. “I have seen the burnings, Ma-khee.”

I lay my hand over hers. “They won’t come for hundreds of years.”

Her eyes suddenly fix me, so pale within the darker rim. “But it will happen. I have seen it.”

I nod. “Yes, it will happen.”

My gaze glances off this witch, this sixteen-year-old dreadlocked blonde with the far-off look. She’s the only one who knows the whole story, and perhaps it will be better for her to keep it to herself.

I clasp her hands, and then I leave, because it seems as if there should be a space now.

Fergus is by the water with some of the men, each one naked beneath a blanket. Their nakedness offends no one, not least of all me. I sit on the shore and watch them, catch Fergus’s eye and make him smile. Across the loch I see others about the same task. The men take turns out of the water shivering by the fire under woolen blankets. Slowly the end of the crannog comes up on its stilts to its former level, levered up by trunks and settled again on its island of stone. The thatch drips like a great rainstorm greedily back into the loch. The mud from the wattle walls falls in globs. I help the women hoist the walkway out of the water, heavy and weeping, until the rope cuts into my telltale palm. We
bind the walkway to the end of the crannog that is still attached to the shore and repair it with fibrous rope and awls made of bone.

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.