Veil of Time (6 page)

I sigh.

“Are your children with your husband?”

Here we go. I empty my cup of wine. It stings my throat. “No.”

“If you don’t want to tell me,” he says, “that’s fine.”

“It’s just that you will probably ask again.”

He laughs, quite unaware of what is about to come out.

“Look,” I say, “there’s no secret about it. Oliver Griggs, my husband, teaches history at Glasgow University.”

I sense that Jim is beginning to see, probably by the look or lack of look on my face, what he has got himself into.

He says, “Posh,” in an effort to lighten the mood.

The wine is doing a better a job. “We have two children, as I said: Graeme, who is seventeen and at boarding school in Edinburgh. Ellie was eight years old two years ago when she died, so that’s the story.”

Jim leans back over the table. He doesn’t say anything, and for that I’m grateful. I go back to my kitchen, rummage in the bread bin while I try to put myself back in order, and come up with a box of Jaffa Cakes. Jim stops me on the way back to the table with a hand to my arm.

“I’m sorry for your troubles,” he says. “My mother used to say,
Cha do dhùin doras nach do dh’fhosgail doras
.”

I offer him a Jaffa cake. “My Gaelic’s not good enough for that one.”

He takes one. “No door ever closed, but another opened.”

I sit across from him and try to size up this saying of his mother’s, whether he thinks he is the door I’m looking for. “Well, if there’s any other door, I’ve still to find it.”

“So go on looking then.”

I bite into my cake. I haven’t been looking for doors. I haven’t been looking for anything. There are times when there is no point in putting in the effort, when you just have to step aside and wait for the pain to ebb. This is what Dunadd means to me. It was for this reason I came.

I don’t tell him about my operation in January, because then I would have to go into the epilepsy. It’s not something I talk about. I take my pills and try to pretend I am not afflicted. My husband only rarely saw a seizure, my children never. It’s not the kind of thing you want the staff at Glasgow University to know about, so you drink the cocktails and stay away from fluorescent light, like a vampire. And now it’s just reflex to sit on it, and no point in baring my soul in any case, as I only have a few months before there will be no more dreams, because that part of my life is going to be fixed.

5

T
alorcan banged on the gates of the fort with the heel of his hand. “Open up now. I have Fergus Mac-Brighde at my right.”

Echoes of the name rippled back up the hill, and it wasn’t long before a bolt shot back and the men walked through the gate. The torches had been lit up the craggy climb to the edge of the clearing where the royal houses stood, these and the granary, store, and bakehouses beyond. The smell of roasted deer meat from a spit outside the kitchen reminded Fergus that he had eaten little food since the oat bannocks and honey his host had sent with him for his journey. But for now, something more pressing than hunger insisted itself. He looked about for his daughter, Illa.

He heard her before he saw her. “Father!”

She came running with a shout into his arms. Fergus knelt to his daughter’s level, although there was barely any need these days.

“You keep growing,” he said. He ran his hand through the girl’s rust hair and turned back to Talorcan. “She’ll be as tall as that giant Finn M’Coul before she’s done.”

Looking down at his daughter’s smile, Fergus wondered why he ever looked for his wife among the dead, for surely she was still here among the living. Illa’s hair had grown long, gathered from the front and draped around to the nape of her neck. She looked up at her father with bright sky eyes, more his than her mother’s.

She slipped her small cold hand into his and tugged him towards the house farthest up the hill below the summit. They could make out Fergus’s mother, Brighde, standing by the curtain at the door, erect, stately, her headdress pooling around her shoulders.

She embraced her son. “Good to see you return safely.” She patted his chest in the way she had done since he was a boy. “You must be hungry.”

To Talorcan she gave a simple nod.

Illa waited patiently as her father set his bag down and went to warm himself by the fire at the far end of the house’s one room. The girl couldn’t help but hope that a journey of so many months might have won her a
prize. But her grandmother ordered her out to the spit to bring meat for her father.

Fergus watched her go. “Where’s Murdoch?”

“He’s up by the fire,” said Brighde. “But stay here a little and talk with me. Tell me, how was the Briton?”

Fergus laughed. “Fair, of course, or she would not have been thrust upon me. Bonny and generous, but too young to have anything of importance to say.”

Brighde pulled her face tight. “You need a wife, not a war minister. Not a druid, not a bard—someone to give you children. Our line is only as good as its offspring.”

Talorcan, who had been standing just inside the door, shifted his feet, making Brighde look up and sigh, for this Pictish man was a relative forced upon her. She had barely given Fergus’s marriage her blessing and now even less so, for her son could look favorably upon no one else. She knew that Saraid had been as much counselor to her husband as any good advisor, but Fergus was asking too much, and he would have to succumb to the choice of his brother the king if he didn’t act soon.

Illa came back, her thin arms laden with dishes and a cup of
fraoch
—for a dusty traveler, she said, making her father smile. Too much of her life the girl had spent with her grandmother and only an uncle for a father.

“Illa, bring me my bag!”

Talorcan came forward with the bag and handed it to the girl. She danced her steps over to her father, laid
her hand on his thigh while he went through the deep pockets of his deerskin satchel, feigning frustration. But when he noticed his daughter’s dismay, his hand closed around the small wooden box that had been given him by the Briton his mother now wanted to hear about. Illa took the box and kissed it.

“Wasn’t she a good woman?” Brighde asked.

Fergus threw up his hands. Such questioning, always questions from the mother who had survived her husband but sometimes, he felt, should have gone instead.

“I was told she was both young and beautiful,” said his mother.

Fergus laughed. “Beauty, what is that to me? A trinket in the moment for the man whose eyes do not see far. Youth I no longer have myself. Time has brought me forward with scars and knowledge. How could I entrust myself or my daughter to youth that knows nothing of these, that has not properly lived?”

He took the box from Illa’s hands and showed her how to slide the secret door open. Illa gasped.

“Very clever,” said Talorcan. “From the east, no doubt.”

“I believe from the Far East. A bauble for trade.”

Illa took the box and slid the top open for herself. She sat down in her father’s lap and laughed as he poked her sides and nuzzled her face.

When she had struggled free and straightened the folds of her tunic, she said, “There’s a stranger with Sula
the
ban-druidhe
. She wears a short tunic and the leg bindings of a man.”

Fergus looked to his mother. “Have you seen her?”

Brighde shook her head. “She was found wandering at the bottom of the fort, in strange clothing, probably one of the traveling people, though she wears gold on her finger and in her teeth. Murdoch had her taken to Sula.” She gestured into the air with her hand. “I’ve heard nothing since.”

His mother tried to smile at him, but her eyes showed no happiness. Fergus walked to her by the fire and fixed her wool wrap about her shoulders with the pin that had been his father’s, a small golden shield studded with garnet.

“Then I will go to Sula myself and find out what she knows.”

Illa jumped up. “May I come?”

Fergus motioned her to his side. “First, let me eat. Then we’ll see what’s to be made of a woman in the leg bindings of a man.”

Illa laughed. Such a laugh, the same mouth and now the adult teeth same as Saraid. Brighde brought out from a heavy box a glass from the Gauls who brought the wine on ships and took away fine jewelry made by the Saxon Oeric at the forge, the same craftsman who had fashioned the brooch Brighde wore on her shawl. For the glasses she had traded two slaves brought in on raids from the south.

But Fergus had little taste for the Gaul’s red wine. He gestured to Illa to pass the
fraoch,
ale made of heather, the common man’s drink. He swallowed in great gulps, letting the bitter brew run down his gullet and warm his belly. The Britons had served sweet mead that did not sit well in his stomach. By the warmth of the fire, Fergus’s eyes started to close, but he still had to climb the hill to greet his brother, Murdoch. More than that, he needed to seek out Sula and make use of this night of the dead.

Fergus wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he emerged from the smoky house into the night made loud by drums and singing from the camp below, the black air redolent with the blood of animals and the cooking roots of the peasants. Illa was already running ahead, as though her father needed a guide. As they passed the house where Fergus had lived with his wife, he looked for her at the door. Tonight he saw only the door.

With his daughter running ahead, Fergus pulled Talorcan close. “I have heard it spoken of creatures half woman, half man. Perhaps this is what was found.”

Talorcan looked puzzled. “Do you mean in stories sung by the bards?”

Fergus shook his head. “Not in stories, but real, a creature with all the parts of a woman and yet with the parts of a man, too.”

Talorcan patted his back. “Too much
fraoch
drunk too quickly?”

Fergus nudged his brother-in-law in the ribs. “I am telling only what I heard.”

They followed Illa up higher, to where the fire burned high and hot against the dark sky, almost starless tonight because of the bright face of the moon. Murdoch spotted them and came running in his wide stride, the belly of his tunic taut around a growing stomach. His hair dark and curly, his eyes set deep below his brow, he stood an inch or two below his brother.

“Come!” he shouted. “Come here.” He grasped his brother by the hand, ignored Talorcan. “What of your travels? But come and make your jump. The fire is dying.”

Fergus and Illa followed him, Talorcan dragging behind. Fergus had not yet shaken that touch of death by the stones, so he ran straight at the fire and launched a leap that only just carried him to the other side. He barely cleared the charred wood and slipped on a rolling log that brought him down and covered the back of his tunic with ash.

Fergus stood up, embarrassed, hearing Murdoch and the little girl laughing.

“It’s a woman he needs,” Murdoch said. “She would put the spring back in his jump.”

Fergus dusted himself off. “Is there no end to this?”

Murdoch’s face grew dimmer, too. “The Briton didn’t suit his majesty?”

Fergus gave his brother a shove, so that he, too, was
now among the embers and covered in dust. Talorcan laughed. Illa stepped back; she knew the king well enough to expect the anger that often followed the tightened muscles of his jaw. But Murdoch got up and gathered himself.

He tapped Fergus on the shoulder with a broad hand. “Next time, my friend, you will pay for that.”

Fergus waved him off and set off towards the hut of the druidess. Illa took Talorcan’s hand; she knew to lag behind when her father had that look about him. Perhaps what he had to say to Sula was not for the ears of others.

Fergus stood at the door and called Sula’s name. It was a few moments before she opened the door. If she was pleased to see him, little showed on her face, old grandmother of the people, actual grandmother to some of them. She barely nodded him in, and after the glare of the fire and the moon, it was hard for him to make out where the old woman had gone. He picked up an unfamiliar scent over the musty smell of Sula’s incense. He had heard that Roman women bathed in essence of flowers, but this was not any flower he knew of, and then, when the stranger came into focus by the far wall of the cell, she was not like any woman he had ever seen either.

He started to move towards the shadow, but Sula held him back, feeling for the godstone about his neck, smiling when her fingers found it.

He caught her hand. “Thank you,” he said. “Your blessings kept me safe, even in the Valley of Stones on Samhain. On foot.”

She patted his arm. “You make yourself easy prey for the wandering dead on the night of Samhain, half dead you are.”

“No,” he said, “there is still life, just burning a little dim.”

He wanted to tell her more about the night ride, about the owl and the voices he had heard. But his eye kept moving to the stranger coming in and out of focus by the far wall. Her hair was short for a woman’s.

“What is this?” he asked. “Man or woman?”

He inched forward for a closer look. The woman did not seem young, and yet her face was smooth and appealing. Around her eyes she wore the dark lines he had seen in drawings of Scotta the Egyptian princess. Her defiant look held him, expecting him to look away. But he would not.