Veil of Time (12 page)

He sat down and looked into his mother’s face, still a handsome one in spite of the lines, her long grey hair swept up in coils about her head, her thick woven shawl in reds and yellows hiding the frailty of her shoulders.
“Where is the slave, the Roman who worked in the bakehouse?”

Brighde looked back at her son. “Still in the bakehouse, I suppose. Do you need a slave?”

Fergus met Illa at the door, took a piece of meat from her platter, and led her back outside.

He held the girl by her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. “Hurry. Go and tell the Roman in the bakehouse to come to me.”

Illa ran off; the distance was short, and her legs were long. Fergus walked over to Murdoch, who was sipping
fraoch
by what was left of last night’s spit. His large grey dogs were finishing off the carcass where it lay tossed off into the heather. Fergus knelt on one knee to get his hands closer to the embers.

“How was your night?” Murdoch asked. “I lost you.”

Fergus didn’t answer. He picked up a bone and pushed around in the ash with it. “The woman who was found. Have you seen her yet?”

Murdoch spat. “I chased her off.”

Fergus saw Illa returning with the Roman and wanted to speak before they drew close. “Chased her off the fort?”

“Only from the fire. She might make a good trading piece.”

Murdoch laughed at his brother’s serious look. “Why didn’t you take her to your bed instead of lying with the common women of the village?”

“I didn’t lie with anyone in the village.” Fergus got the words out before Illa and the slave arrived.

Murdoch’s eyes left his brother and settled on his niece. “What’s this? Do you have your own slave now, Illa?”

Fergus stood up and gestured Illa to follow. Murdoch and their mother were the same, always dragging their nails through his wounds.

Outside Sula’s hut, Fergus asked the Roman his name. He came from one of the warm countries and spoke the Gaelic tongue with a strange inflection, like waves beating and retreating.

His voice was high, like a boy’s just before he comes to manhood. “Marcus Paullus.”

Fergus pushed his hair back and stood strong before the druidess’s door though he didn’t feel so strong inside. “Sula!”

They could hear her moving about, before the door opened into the dark space with the small fire at its center. As his eyes adjusted, Fergus could make out the stranger in the recesses. He stayed back by the door and kept Illa with him. He wasn’t yet sure about this woman, and strangers had been known to bring in disease.

The druidess seemed only vaguely to register their presence.

Fergus left Illa by the door and pushed the slave forward. “I brought Marcus Paullus to see if the stranger can speak to him.”

Sula looked up. “I had her cast the stones, and I see again that she doesn’t come from our world.”

Fergus took a step forward so that he could see the woman better. He caught her eyes on him, but she looked away when his gaze fell on her.

“But she is not brown-skinned like the ones from far off,” Fergus said. “She looks more like a Pict, like some of the women in the village.”

Sula interrupted him. “More like Saraid, you mean?”

He shook his head. He didn’t want to give himself away before he had even had time to measure his own feelings. “Like her people.”

Sula patted his arm. “She is strange and came to us at Samhain. I can only think she comes from the place of the dead.”

Fergus could feel his heart speed as it had the night before in the Valley of Stones. How careless of him to grab her like a woman. How quick he had been to relish the warmth in his fingers. He feared what he might have brought upon himself.

They turned to the stranger now because she was uttering a few words. She was looking at him and saying it was nice to see him again in his own tongue.
Is math ur faicinn.
It didn’t sound exactly like it should, but it made Fergus smile.

He stepped closer. “Don’t be afraid.”

Fergus nudged Marcus forward. “Speak to her. Find out where she comes from.”

Marcus seemed to have a bad foot. He kept his weight off it and pulled on the hem of his tunic like a child who must answer for his misdeeds.
“Ubi domus tua?”

The woman’s eyes looked to Fergus and then back at the slave. He liked that she seemed to trust him.

“Don’t worry,” said Fergus. “He’s a eunuch.”

A smile came to her face. Fergus took a step backwards, because it took him off guard how she put her hands into her hair and shook her head. Her face was struggling, and she shook her head in a comical manner. She did have a look of Saraid, it couldn’t be denied.

She put her hand on her chest.
“Caledonia.”

Marcus was excited.
“Tu es romana?”

She said,
“Non sum romana.”

Marcus asked,
“Tu venisti per mare?”

The woman shook her head.

Marcus looked back at him. “She says she’s not Roman, and she did not come by sea.”

Fergus stepped forward again.
“De tha sibh as iarraidh?”

Fergus liked that she blushed when he asked her what she wanted at Dunadd.

It made Sula laugh. “It looks as though she wants you, Fergus.”

The Roman slave laughed, too, making Fergus turn on him and send him out of the hut.

He drew Sula to one side. “Tell me what this all
means. This woman, is she the one you have seen for me in the stones? Look at her. I do not believe that she comes from Samhain. She has nothing of the aura of the dead.”

He went back to her and touched his fingers to the warm flesh at the center of her palm. “Look, there is heat coming from her.”

He was surprised when she wrapped her fingers around his hand.
“Tha mi a Glaschu. Tha mi a Dunadd. Is mise Maggie Livingstone.”

She seemed so badly to want him to understand her that he wrapped his other hand around hers. But when he asked her how she came to be at Dunadd, she looked away. When she laid her hand upon his shoulder and spoke in a language he didn’t understand, he turned back to Sula.

But Sula only shrugged. “Spells perhaps from her native land?”

Fergus let go of the woman’s hands and stepped towards the door. He put his arm around Illa’s shoulders and led her out. If this woman was a druidess, he had better watch out, and yet something about her made him lean back against the door once it was latched behind them.

Illa looked up at him. “Did you find out where the stranger comes from?”

Fergus took his daughter’s hand and led her a good distance from the hut. She looked back at him with eyes
that were her mother’s. Fergus went to speak, but the words were slow to come out. “I don’t know where she comes from. But Sula says she didn’t understand Oeric’s Saxon, and the Roman wasn’t able to speak to her in his tongue.”

Illa squeezed his hand. “Will she live with Sula now?”

Fergus crouched beside his daughter. He was confused by the odd weight of his thoughts. “Do you remember your mother, Illa?”

The girl looked perplexed, and why shouldn’t she, since he had seldom talked to her of her mother. Brighde never did. “Her face is less clear to me,” she said. “But I remember sitting on her lap in our house, how she played games with my fingers. Talorcan says she had a fine voice.”

“Talorcan?”

The girl shrugged. “He comes to the wall sometimes, where no one can see. I can climb over, though I know I shouldn’t.”

Fergus noticed her eyes fill and rubbed her arm. “Talorcan is a good man, whom your mother loved. You should see him when you can. But don’t let your grandmother or Murdoch find you climbing over the walls or there will be a beating for you.” He prodded her side and made her squeal. “And me.”

Illa nodded. She needed this secret world with her father as much as she needed anything. “Will you teach me the game of blue beads on the board?”

Fergus looked over his shoulder at Sula’s hut. He would go back later, try to find out more about the woman. Sula was stubborn when she made up her mind, and Fergus feared she would persist with her belief that the stranger did not come from their world. He almost wished he felt the same, for he couldn’t rid himself of her. This might be the woman the druidess foresaw, and yet she had come out of nowhere and was stranger to him than any person he had seen from other lands, even the black-skinned ones. He didn’t know how to approach this woman. All he knew was that he wanted her to be from the land of the living. As he watched his daughter run down the hill ahead of him, Fergus hoped that this woman Ma-khee would stay at Dunadd and have no more thoughts for the place she had come from.

9

T
he first thing I see is light breaking into the hut through small chinks and Sula in the doorway in what seems like half a dozen blankets. As she steps to the side, I recognize the figure behind her as Fergus, and my pulse speeds up to jogging rate. My eyes are not yet adjusted to the glare of daylight, but I can make out a small girl behind him across the doorway. I can’t see her well, but from her height she must be about Ellie’s age. Ellie’s last age.

Fergus nudges a smaller, older man forward, and tells me he is Marcus, the Roman. He tells me in the next breath that the Roman is a eunuch, which makes me smile. But I am more interested in Fergus standing there in his leather jerkin belted at the waist, his tunic
coming to midthigh and the leggings crisscrossed with string. It seems he has made some effort with his hair, tying back strands from the front with lengths of cloth. The short hair around his forehead and neck is curly.

Fergus sees me looking and shifts his feet. I wonder what this man of the Dark Ages makes of me in my androgynous clothing, springing from nowhere, speaking a language that doesn’t exist yet. I tell him I’m from here, but then there are things I cannot say in his native Gaelic. When he touches my hand, my fingers automatically wrap around his so that I am standing holding hands with this man I hardly know, but planning already to take this feeling away with me.
Fergus, I don’t know how I got here, and I don’t even know who I really am, except that I am thirty-eight years old and am as nervous as a teenager before you.

He goes to pull away, but I grab his hand. Now I’m acting like a teenager.

“It’s okay,” I say.

But that offering of English makes him draw back as though I were casting evil spells. With only O Level Latin, I can’t do much better with the Roman. Suddenly everyone is nodding and talking too fast in their Gaelic for me to follow. Fergus retreats to the door, making me wish I had never said a thing. He’s gone, and all I have is the space in front of me where he was standing. Sula takes a blanket from her shoulder and wraps it about mine. I am shaking, and I don’t know why.

I ask her in Gaelic what his full name is.

She says, “Fergus MacBrighde.” And then she tells me an entire history of the man, which I catch only some of.

I say, “Is he the king?”

Sula shakes her head. “No, he is not the king himself. He is King Murdoch’s brother.”

Prince Fergus, then. Sula is watching me, studying my face, which is bad news for me, because I might as well have
I LIKE FERGUS
tauttooed across my forehead. She goes to the door and calls the eunuch back in. He takes a seat by the fire and undoes the one lace on his much-worn leather shoe. There’s a cut on the inside of his foot, and Sula kneels down to attend to it. She points to one of the pots on the floor and asks me to hand it to her, only I can’t really follow the direction of her finger in this semi-darkness.

I get up and make a stab at one.

“Chan e,”
says Sula.
No
.

I keep going through the pots, sniffing. Cloves. Dill. Coriander. Saffron, surprisingly. Something very foul smelling, like sweaty feet. Bark. Chamomile. Mint.

When I lift the lid of a pot containing evil-smelling dried leaves, Sula says,
“Tha!”

She pulls out a pinch of leaves, grinds them in her palm, and spits to make a paste, which she daubs along the jagged line of Marcus’s cut. She blows on it and sings a verse. The Roman is most pleased and keeps saying,
“Math, math.”

He even turns to me and says,
“Tapadh leibh.”
Thank you.

I’m not sure why he would be thanking me. But he is a nice little eunuch.

Sula sends Marcus off and squats by her fire staring at me. I wonder if she has anything in her pots for my affliction. Perhaps in this day it wouldn’t be counted so much an affliction as a blessing. I desperately want to ask what year this is, but if we haven’t come into Christianity yet, there will be no way of gauging my time against theirs. Not from here anyway.

Marcus comes back with a pitcher wrapped in a cloth and bread with something that tastes like cottage cheese slathered over the top. The pitcher contains warm
fraoch
. Warm anything is welcome, so I down a few cupfuls from the same cup used by the other two. But it’s all a bit much for the middle of the day, and I doze off.

When I come to, Sula is gone and Marcus is watching me, almost like a man who isn’t a eunuch. When I sit up, he offers me more food, but I know I’m not going to shake the drowsiness unless I can get some fresh air.