Veil of Time (7 page)

“Take off her leg wrappings,” he said, “and we will see if she is man as well as woman. I have heard of such things.”

The stranger fought off Sula’s hands with words Fergus had not heard before. He picked up the word
no
. Like the Romans’
Non
. Perhaps a species of Roman, then. But a word he had heard coming from the Sassenachs,
fuck
—yes, he was sure she had said that.

But Sula was smaller than the woman, and though
she might be good with spells, she had no weight behind her. Fergus moved past the stranger’s flailing hands, closed around her arm, and lifted the creature so that he could reach between her legs. The woman went still.

He let go of her and stepped away. Now that he knew she was a woman, he felt embarrassed for his lack of manners. This was more the art of his brother, and he did not like it. He took another step back, his fingers still warm from the touch of her.

Sula laughed. “A woman, then. But why do her breasts ride so high on her chest?”

The woman lost her calm again when Sula moved back towards her and tried to pull up her short tunic. In the light of the fire, Fergus could see her eyes darting from the druid’s face to his own, and he touched Sula’s arm, unable to see a woman frightened like a rabbit.

“Let the woman be,” he said quietly.

The woman uttered a word.
Okay
. Fergus exchanged glances with Sula, knowing they should be careful. Perhaps this could be a spell. But when he stepped back, the woman smiled at him and lifted the tunic herself. Underneath, her breasts were caught in a sling pulled up towards her shoulders. Fergus noticed the outline of her nipple in the thin fabric. Sula leaned forward and pulled on one of the strings that seemed to stretch like sinew.

The woman said, “Bra.”

In the tongue of Erin,
bra
meant forever.

Sula tapped Fergus’s hand and laughed. “She wants you forever.”

Fergus tried to laugh, but there was something about this stranger that had turned his mouth dry. “Where do you think she comes from? Is she Scot or Saxon? A slave or a free woman?”

The stranger pulled her tunic down and looked away. What kind of a tunic was this anyway that covered so little, that kept out so little cold? She must have come from the east, where it was always warm, so he had heard tell. Such a climate wouldn’t suit the Scotti, who were hardy from birth, whose feet were toughened by a childhood without shoes, who slept wrapped only in their plaidies.

Her shoes, too, were like none other, with black strings that came up the front and tied near her ankle. The bottom was lined, not with leather as were his, but something else that sprung back from Sula’s fingers when she knelt and touched them. They were fine shoes and fit well around her feet, not such as commoners would wear. Not even such as he might wear.

He stepped forward and laid his hand on the woman’s shoulder, to show his shame for having treated her roughly. She was wrapped all over in this strange fabric that stretched under the tips of his fingers.

He smiled a little.
“Co as a tha sibh?”

A smile flickered about her lips but fell back quickly. Her steady gaze did not shift from him, even when he forced himself to look into those eyes that were pale like his own and not free of pain. Her voice was quiet and her Gaelic halting as she told him that she came from Glasgow, which he knew as a small settlement along a burn to the south, popular with the Christians but of no strategic significance. He asked her if she came from the church, but she didn’t seem to understand. It seemed unlikely that Gaelic was her native tongue.

He took a step around her, surprised that her short tunic did not even cover her buttocks.
“A bheil Gaidhlig agaibh?”

She said,
“Tha, beagan.”

If she spoke only a little Gaelic, then perhaps her tongue was Saxon.

He asked,
“A bheil Sasunnaich agaibh?”

She shrugged, then shook her head.

Fergus was confused. The woman didn’t seem to know what language she spoke.

He tried another tack.
“De an t-ainm a th’oirbh?”

He could tell she had understood, but she was slow in answering.
“Is mise Maggie.”

Fergus turned back to Sula. “Ma-khee? Have you heard this name before?”

Sula waved away his question. “No, but what of it, if she is a druidess from elsewhere?”

He turned back to the woman and repeated her
name. Ma-khee. He had never heard the name before, but he liked it.

Ma-khee placed her hand on his arm.
“De an t-ainm a th’oirbh fein?”

“Fergus.”

His name made Ma-khee smile, and he liked the way she muttered it under her breath as though it were a secret between them. He lifted her hand and turned a golden band on her fourth finger. This woman was surely no beggar. This close, he could smell the scent of flowers from her skin; he was about to put her hand to his nose when Sula took him by the sleeve and led him to the door. “Be off with you now. If this Ma-khee is a druidess, you’d better not tempt her with those eyes of yours.”

When Fergus turned back, the woman had stepped out of the shadow of the wall and stood in her man wraps by the fire. Sula opened the door and pushed him out. Ma-khee. He said her name as he went looking for Illa, and he wondered in a small flickering of thought if this could be the woman Sula had seen for him in her stones.

Fergus found Talorcan and his daughter over the hill, throwing a goat’s bladder from hand to foot.

“She is a woman,” he announced. “That much we know.”

“Catch!” shouted Illa.

But the bladder came at him too fast and bounced off his cheek.

Talorcan laughed. “It’s a woman he needs.”

Illa laughed, too—her uncle’s imitation of the king was a good one.

Fergus kicked the bladder, shooting it at Talorcan’s head, and then, when it came back to him, batted it gently to his daughter. He looked back at Sula’s hut, trying to make sense of what he had seen. If the woman were a druidess, as Sula seemed to think, then she would not be released to him and could not be the one Sula had seen in her stones. Fergus stuck out his foot as the ball flew past him. Illa wanted his attention, and he knew he owed her this and more. His ankle hurt as he ran, and he wasn’t disappointed when the ball eventually hit the corner of a rock and split.

“No fear,” he shouted, “there will be plenty of bladders tonight.”

The cull of livestock down below had brought the screams of goats, pigs, and cattle falling under the dirk. The store of winterfeed wouldn’t be enough to keep these animals alive. Their meat would have to be salted in the next days and stored in the small stone cells that dotted the field between the dwellings.

As Fergus had done in the time of his wife, he went with Talorcan down to the village for the celebration of Samhain. He fancied haggis—fresh innards from the cull and good oats from the harvest—commoners’ food, but a tasty change from the roasted meat they would be serving in the fort. Still his mind was on the woman, as
they begged exit through the gates. There was something about the stranger that kept bringing his thoughts back to her image, half hidden in the dark, proud and yet bruised by life, it seemed.

They climbed down the crags and slabs to where the lights were all lit now in the villagers’ huts, roof upon thatched roof as far as the eye could see in the dark, narrow lanes running in between; each doorway glowed with a carved turnip to keep the spirits passing. Fergus took Illa by the hand over the swing bridge and went to join the dancing about one of the smaller fires. The many drums sent their beat through the body; the horns sounded loud, but not so loud as the singing, singing in great swells as only the Picts knew how.

Talorcan ran under the hanging thatch of his own doorway to fetch the haggis; his people had taught the Scotti so many things, it was hard for Fergus to think of them as separate. And yet, if his sister had not married into Fergus’s line, Talorcan might have thought differently. He might have joined in the talk about the new Pictish king Oengus in the north. Some men under the sign of the boar had already fled Dunadd to join that Pictish kingdom where, because of his own royal line, Talorcan would have office and standing.

The two men finished off a haggis between them, then threw the skin to the dogs. They interlocked arms and drank
fraoch
from the horns of the slaughtered cattle, Talorcan laughing so that the boar tattooed on his
brow seemed to run of its own accord. Fergus danced past the pain in his ankle and fell asleep in the house of a Scotswoman with two daughters. But he kept Illa by his side so that the mother would not lead her daughters down beside him as he slept. It had happened to his brother before, a girl claiming his offspring after a night he couldn’t remember.

As he closed his eyes and felt his breathing grow slow and heavy, Fergus struggled to remember the face of the woman in the strange clothing. He drew his knees to his stomach and thought about the outline of her nipple in the sling that held her breasts. He remembered her smell, and only then did it occur to him that he had forgotten to ask Sula about his wife, Saraid. The dead, like this night of the dead, were slipping away from him.

6

T
he prospect of missing that daily dose of anticonvulsant gets the better of me, and I do it almost without thinking, in the evening: a sin of omission, the nuns would say. There have been triggers before. Fluorescent light has been one, drumming, anything of a quick and intermittent nature. Rain taps at the window as I lie awake, but it is only enough to drive me into a short drowse before I awake in the dark and wander down the hall to the sliding glass door. The night is in its own drowse, the trees heavy with misty rain that manages to hang in the air somehow without ever falling. All the smells are hanging there, too, the comfrey and mint caught by the door in a world between sleeping and waking. I step out of the house, just enough not to break
the spell; everything is unutterably still. I break off a leaf from a spike of mint and crush it in my fingers.

When I get back to bed, I feel myself drift, register the knee jerk, that precursor of sleep. I wake late and spend a perfectly normal morning at my desk gathering information about Joan of Arc, one of the first witches to be burned at the stake, and one the church in an about-turn later decided to canonize. The heady smell of mint is still on my fingers, and I get so dizzy inside those spectacles that later I have to lie down on the cobalt blue couch with the purring cat by my head.

With evening falling dismal into my kitchen window, I climb up Dunadd and watch the sun sink behind the islands. It is when I am sitting with my knees pulled up against my chest on the little lip of stone in Sula’s hut that I begin to feel the telltale sensation of heat in the soles of my feet. It creeps up my legs, even while my back remains cold against the ruined wall of the witch’s cell. This is no place to have a seizure, but I won’t make it back to the house. My field of vision is already getting very very small.

Next thing I know I am lying on the ground with a bump on the side of my head. All I want to do now is sleep. The other next thing I know is that there is a man in the witch’s cell, not much taller than I, and dressed in finer clothes than the men who brought me here. His tunic is more of a jacket with tapered arms, and though the candle casts a dim light, I can make out colored
patterns down the front. His shoes are surprisingly well made, brown leather stained in colored diamonds and tied at the side of the ankle with a wooden toggle. A woven brown cloth is wrapped around each leg with a crisscross of string.

He could be Sula’s son, though he bears little resemblance to her. At any rate, the two of them seem intent on finding out my sex. I can bat away Sula’s hands, but I am so surprised by the man’s hand suddenly around my crotch that I give up the fight. He seems to glean what he wanted to know, then stands back, almost embarrassed. I should be annoyed, but I can’t help looking at him. He avoids my gaze by running his hands through his hair.

But Sula is more persistent, and this time her curiosity takes her under my sweatshirt. I’m slapping her away when the man steps forward and tells her to stop. I notice on the middle finger of his right hand he wears a gold ring with an insignia of some kind. Underneath the ring is a tattooed Celtic band. A Celtic knot tattooed around his wrist makes me want to take my fingertip and trace the endless loop.

I’m so grateful for his intervention, I offer to show them what’s under my shirt, so all questions about my gender can be put aside. For some reason, I feel myself wanting this man to have no doubts about that.

He keeps glancing at me, and I keep digging into my brain for something to say in my rusty Gaelic. He wants
to know where I come from. All I can tell him is that my last address was Glasgow, even though I don’t know if Glasgow exists in his time. But I hear him say the city with a Gaelic inflection,
Glas-chu,
and I think he must have heard of it. I am able to give him my name when he asks, and again the Gaelic accent turns it into something else. Ma-khee. He steps closer to me than people do in modern times, but I feel no need to step aside. I take the liberty of touching him since he has touched me in places no stranger ever has. I can’t help but ask his name.