Veil of Time (16 page)

I look around at the congregation, a cross section of the older population of the area. Jim Galvin would look at home here. I half expect to see him, but instead I see purple-rinse perms and older farmers scrubbed out of their shite and muddy Wellies, half dozing from the early-morning rise to milk cows and muck byres. They stand to sing hymns familiar from childhood, and sit to doze during a sermon given in the speak of a litany long since dead. There’s nothing here, I decide, but a remnant, nothing that could be tried and found guilty anymore.

The sermon is about redemption. It is about getting our dues on the other side, but the minister appeals to no “woe betides.” In this church, sin is about letting the side down. It’s the private shame we feel for not doing the good we ought. No burning witches here. No burning souls at all. Just guilt. In that the Protestant and Catholic faiths did not diverge.

When we stand to sing the hymns, I do not sing. I don’t think anyone notices.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, / That saved a wretch like me. / I once was lost but now am found, / Was blind, but now I see.
The red hymnbook, bound in mock leather, has a musty smell that adds to the dim light and dank air and makes for somnolence. After the benediction, the church turns me out on the other side, sapped of fire.

I drive from the church to pick up Jim, and find him in the map room talking to a group of Americans about sacred springs.

“The way the pagans saw it,” he says, “the earth supported the people instead of the other way around, and a spring was where the spirit of the earth ran out.”

He shows them the light-up map of standing stones in the area. It looks like a flat green room full of Christmas lights. “These all follow the path of lay lines, another place where the spirit of the earth was supposed to leak.”

Jim lets the switch go, and the map falls back into greys and dark greens. The Americans move on. We go out through the door into the museum shop, where you can buy silver replicas of the finely wrought jewelry from Dunadd, the brooches that once held shawls about the shoulders of a rough-hewn people.

All along the Kilmartin Valley road to Achnabreck, we pass stone circles.

Jim says, “They used to call this Gleann nan Clachan, you know, the Valley of Stones.”

I shake my head. I didn’t know. “How far do the circles date back?”

Jim points to our right. “Temple Wood there goes back about five thousand years, twice as long as the pyramids of Egypt.”

“Then all of this,” I say, “was already ancient in the time of Fergus MacBrighde.”

Jim nods. “Compared to these stones, Fergus MacBrighde happened only yesterday.”

Not yesterday enough, I think.

The cup-and-ring marks at Achnabreck have, like Dunadd itself, been taken over by the Scottish National Trust, and there are fences all around the slabs of rocks where I crouched only recently with the prince of Dunadd.

Jim shakes his head as I climb over and squat with my fingers in the circle grooves.

“They put the fences up for a reason,” he says.

But I can tell he doesn’t mean it. Without Fergus stroking away all sense, I can focus better on the markings now. The slab almost looks like what happens to a pond in the rain.

“I don’t suppose rain was sacred to the pagans,” I say.

Jim shrugs. “What do you think? This magical stuff that falls from the sky and makes your crops grow.”

I climb back over the fence. “Everything’s so mystical, isn’t it, until you know the science of it.”

“Och,” says Jim, “science, my arse. Everyone assumes these people were just ape-men making random marks in the stone. They were just like us, worried about the same things, asking the same bloody questions.”

I want to go now. This place is bringing Fergus too close without getting me any nearer to him.

Later, I head up to the fort with Winnie in tow. I
wave to Jim in his window as I pass his house and squeak through the stile gate.

The top of the hill is just what I need, windy enough to take your head off. I wish someone would pry open my head, make enough room to squeeze out all the facts and nonsense I’ve been filling it up with. They should hold church services on hilltops and see how much is left when they are finished.

I sit among the rubble, while the wind rearranges my hair and nips at my face, while the declining sun on Crinan Bay sits back and licks the quicksilver sea. Looking out past the white hotel at Crinan, past the castle out at Duntrune, I could be back in Fergus’s time. The islands are secrets, dark and mounding out of the water, but forever keeping themselves from you.

I smile, for the relief of finding a Sunday up here—Day of the Sun, after all.

I don’t feel like going back to the pages. I don’t like that my thesis has turned into a feminist manifesto, though I don’t know now what else I thought it could be. I’m not in the business of being a feminist, at least not a ball-busting one. A sheep bleats from the field below, setting off a chorus of sheepy panic.

On my way back down, I pass a group of German tourists coming to set the inevitable foot in the stone imprint. Future king of England Prince Charles of the Battenbergs once did this, so it says on the board down
below. It is a wonder the entire hill didn’t cleave in twain and erupt with lava flow. Whatever this hill is, it belongs to the history of Scotland, no matter that its present-day inhabitants are a mix of Scots and Picts; in Fergus’s day, those Viking ravagers hadn’t yet done their dance of rage and brought their fair hair with them.

Before bed, I stand at my sink and roll my pills around in my palm, studying them as though they held an answer. I set them on the counter when the phone rings.

“Mum, it’s Graeme.”

“Who?” I tease him, because I think it’s odd that he thinks I wouldn’t know which son of mine it is, given that I have only one. Only one child, when it comes down to it.

He laughs just loud enough for me to pick it up across the miles of country between us.

He says he should be in bed. I wait for an explanation as to why he is not.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says, “that I might take the bus up to see you one weekend, if I could get away early on a Friday.”

I can see that little-boy smile spread over his face, even as he holds the phone against his man’s cheek. “I won’t mind, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” he says.

I say, “I would like to show you Dunadd. It’s very ancient, very interesting, everything that went on here.”

“What did go on there?”

My mind flies to Dunadd in Fergus’s time: the village of thatched roofs, the smoke, the tattoos, heather ale, and the way the necklace of acorns lies just inside the neck of Fergus’s shirt.

I say, “Oh, battles, takeovers, trade and slaves, kings of antiquity, all the usual stuff.”

He laughs. Even the sound of his laughter makes me feel better, as if I have a place here in the present.

He says he has to go to bed. I concur.

He smiles. You can’t hear a smile, but it has a resonance.

After he hangs up, I go back to the sink, pick up my pills, and toss them onto my tongue. A gulp of water and they are gone. Better to stay on an even keel. That’s what I’ve always tried for, what everyone around me has always been hoping for.

13

E
ven without missing any medication, I succumb to a seizure a few days later, on the blue couch with the curled cat once again doing drum duty by my head. Now, if I were being objective about these dreams, I would be forced to ask why it is I go back into them at the place I last left off, like lifting a bookmark out of the pages of a book.

In the semi-darkness of the hut, I crouch by Sula’s fire, remembering now that I forgot to ask Jim for that list of Dál Riada kings. I know the Romans left in 410, and so I could work out the time of King Murdoch from then. I wonder how the years were kept before the birth of Christ. Perhaps they didn’t worry about years, and perhaps it doesn’t matter anyway what time I’m in.

I am in Once Upon a Time, not of the fairy kind but of the druid, and perhaps here I might even discover who I really am, underneath it all, a woman filled with “insatiable lust.” Marcus looks over as I laugh. Because the way your mother told it, the way the nuns at school leered down their noses, this was the prerogative of the male population, something you were taught to guard yourself against.

I glance at the door, wishing for Fergus. But Sula has other designs for this day. She covers my outfit with a brown woolen wrap in herringbone weave that hangs heavy and would go twice around me. She pushes my hair back and covers my head with a triangle of cloth that she crosses over my throat and ties at the back of my neck like in pictures of Mrs. Gillies when she lived on St. Kilda. When Sula thinks I’m ready, she gathers a leather pouch and leads Marcus and me down the hill. We can hear the clink of bells as we descend past the buildings on the lower level, and a noticeable change comes over Sula as she ushers me quickly by. The men at the gates bow to her, then let us through.

The village below takes me by surprise again, just because it is so sprawling and jostling. Each of the round, mud-colored houses has a thatched roof and its own square of yard bound in by wattle fence, along a maze of narrow lanes. Above it all between the highest roof and the cold sky sidles a layer of smoke.

Sula nudges me on, but there is no stile down at the
base of the fort, no Jim Galvin’s whitewashed house, no bridge made of stone, just a swing bridge of wooden slats held to either bank by rough rope. To my left, standing by itself, as though on sacred ground before the river, is the standing stone that in my day will hold a clothesline, only now it is but one of a complete circle.

I can’t help but clap my hands and run to find the one I know. Marcus darts nervously after me while Sula stands by, watching. And I can’t keep my thoughts in, so all they must hear is a nonsense stream of words that will one day be modern English. I am so happy that my one stone is now among friends that I have to run my hands over them. From across the river come the happy sounds of goats bleating, the cries of children running and playing.

We rejoin Sula and move off to the swing bridge, which sways as we cross. The fibers of the rope cut into my palm as I steady myself. I stop on the other side, as barefoot children run by us, some leading goats. Groups of men sit in the doorway to their yards; women pass, weighed down by burdens of peat and kindling. The ever-present smoke stings my eyes, but I can hardly bring myself to blink. I notice the clothing of the people down here is much less colorful than that worn by the inhabitants of the hill, just a few drab rusts and greens; nothing fitted, heads and shoulders covered over by yards of woven shawl.

Sula is watching me as I turn back to get a sense of
the fort from down here: its high stone walls wrap around the hill, its smoke lifted by the breeze, so different from what it will be when it becomes part of the Scottish tourist trade. She takes my arm and leads me along the tight worn lanes of the village. The people stop what they are doing, touch me, and ask Sula who I am. Sometimes she answers; sometimes she doesn’t. All I can do is follow in our little troupe, with Marcus at the rear.

The hut we are going to is at the far end of the village, close to what will one day become the Oban road, Motorway A83. This is no road there now, just the flat of the valley rising up into the familiar rise of camel-hump hills.

Our eyes have to adjust to the interior of the house we enter, a round room with someone on a mat on the far side. It smells a bit rank in here. A child of about four or five sits on the dirt floor by the fire, wrapped in a bundle of blankets. Its smudged face is bound by long and curly hair. Whatever sex it is I can’t tell. A man I assume is the father follows us in and bows to Sula. When I go with them to the bed, I see our patient is a woman in labor. I look back at Marcus to see if he has left by his own discretion, but he is as interested as I am, and no one seems to bother about a eunuch being there.

The labor is different from the image of labor I grew up with. The woman does not appear to be in distress. No frantic breathing, just eyes focused on the floor in front of her. I don’t even know if she’s aware we’re here.

The man is speaking to Sula, but not in Gaelic, so I don’t understand. He is shaking his head, seeming to indicate the cross of the sun over the sky, perhaps saying his wife has been in labor too long. Sula strokes the woman’s forehead, and then lays her hand down at the base of her belly, where a couple of intertwined snakes are tattooed just above her pubic hair.

Sula turns back and indicates that I should hand her the leather bag she has brought. She pulls out a small pouch of dried leaves and asks for a cup, into which goes a handful of dusty green leaves and a splash of water from a pitcher. She stirs them, and then lifts the woman’s head for a drink.

But I am not going to be let off that easily. Sula takes my hand and places it on the woman’s protruding stomach right over the tattoo. Because I have felt this on myself, I know that such a full belly should feel solid at the bottom and less packed at the top. This woman’s feels the opposite.