Veil of Time (35 page)

I am on the point of brain surgery, and perhaps I should not be so petty, but I tell Oliver that I came down with Jim Galvin, my neighbor, and I do not punctuate the pregnant pause with any disclaimers about his age or the lack of anything that would qualify as a proper relationship. I let the pause take Oliver Griggs wherever he wants to go, and then I say thank you and hang up.

My mother points to her watch and ushers me out of the door.

When I get into the car beside Jim, he smiles. “To Oz?”

I am glad for this man this morning and almost want to take back the words I didn’t say to Oliver about him.

“To Oz.”

Graeme laughs in the seat behind me, and I grip onto that laughter because otherwise I might sink. We wave to my parents in their car and set off in a convoy, trying not to lose each other in traffic on the way to the hospital, trying not to glance behind as we swing through the hospital doors and check me in, leaving the light and the day and the city and perhaps life itself outside. For the most part the hospital has few surprises: the squeaky floors, the polished chrome, the female nurses, male doctors—all conform happily this morning. And at a juncture such as this, conformity seems like no small commodity. It is something. Something to hold on to.

Everyone who came through the doors with me suddenly looks lost, as though we had just been marooned on an island. My parents’ bodies tend back towards the exit. Jim steps back so as not to crowd. Graeme holds on to me and I hold on back, like two drowning rodents. Our faces are wet, and now he is the boy, not the man, just a little bundle of him in his mother’s arms.

The nurse steps in stage left. “Please come this way.”

I ease Graeme off me and hand him to Jim, who has never hugged a boy in his life and doesn’t know what to do with a sobbing seventeen-year old. I step after the nurse, setting one foot in front of the other as though I had just learned to walk, leaving the loved ones at the
swinging doors, trying to get a last look. In the small room of hard edges, I submit to the undressing and the immodesty of a hospital gown. I allow myself to be snagged and tagged, my statistics written down, and my growling stomach to be laughed at. I submit because I am outnumbered. I am in a cathedral with a priesthood in blue scrubs that will cut me open until the devil flies out.

Hours move slowly around the face of the clocks on every wall it seems. I am laid out like Christ, a crucifix of a woman, so they can thread their tubes and needles in, so they can pump in that first release of relaxant. I am vaguely aware of the shaving that drops my lovely locks to the floor, of the Magic Marker that maps the path of their incision.

“Margaret?”

I close my eyes. I will not speak to the devil.

“Margaret?”

“Maggie?”

“Yes?”

“Ma-khee? Mithair?”

I open my eyes to find Illa sitting up and looking at me. She called me “Mother.” I scramble to my knees and bring her face into focus; it is no longer hot. Under her tunic, the infected slash has receded under the poultice.

“Margaret, can you hear me?”

No, I cannot hear you. I can hear only the creak of the thatched roof in the wind. I can hear only the small waves lap against the shore. I can hear my daughter’s breathing and the crackle of the fire. But I cannot hear you anymore.

I put the cup holding Iona’s medicine into Illa’s hands, but it falls suddenly and rolls towards the fire as though on a track. The rafters supporting the thatch begin to groan. Iona comes through the door, moving quickly, gathering her piles of herbs and roots. The small waves at the shore turn into a great sloshing. The ground on which we sit begins to heave, not shake as it had done before, but as though a great rift were splitting the earth.

Iona is shouting at us, urging us towards the door. Marcus flies in, grabs Illa under the armpits, and drags her free of the building. I follow though I am naked, and get out just in time to feel the roof collapse behind me with a gust of dirt and air

We’re on the ground, because there is no mechanism of the inner ear that can adjust balance this quickly. The walls of Iona’s hut fall in, sending another layer of dust over our backs; a louder crash from the water means the crannog has come off its stilts. Winnie runs across my field of vision, but I have no sense of where she came from or where she’s going.

The shaking is interminable. A few rotten apples roll and bounce on the ground like Ping-Pong balls, but, like the swirling contents of a tornado, nothing is real or reachable. If there were a moment of distraction I might amuse myself with the thought that that old fuddy-duddy Colonel Malcolm had been right after all: the shaking of Dál Riada came just the same.

27

W
hen the sun had cleared the clouds and gained its highest place, Fergus held his hand up to stop his people by the waterfall where the beavers lived. The children ran off to gather bulbs of garlic and chew a few pieces before they traveled the second half of their journey. Sorrel and watercress lay along their path, but it had been made bitter by the cold. As the afternoon wore on, the children straggled behind, but the singing of the women added strength to their steps. Many of the songs were in the Pictish language, and it seemed strange now to be separating themselves from what had become part of their own heritage in the long years since the first people from Erin had arrived.

Fergus began to recognize the slant of the hills as
they approached Glashan. Not much farther and they could see smoke rising above the trees.

“Look!” he shouted to the children. “Not long now.”

He brought his people slowly into the bay, but he could do nothing to stop the children running ahead along the shore, mingling with the people who were gathered around a large fire. It wasn’t long before Fergus assessed the damage caused by the quake: the thatched roofs now floating in the loch, men fighting over the small huts that still stood in the fields. Women were weaving wattle as fast as they could soak and bend the hazel and willow into new fences.

Out of the crowd, the woman who had come to be known as Fergus’s ran to him, her face dirty and shining. Fergus tried not to smile. She threw herself against him while he struggled to keep the horse calm. Despite their weariness, the people in the line behind him laughed a little.

It was good to see her, too, but he would show her that later. For now he had the business of settling his people among this lake population. He noticed Illa leaning against a tree and nodded to her.

Radha came out of the wood with her father. Her scratched and bruised face fell when she saw that Talorcan was not among the travelers.

“Murdoch’s army has been smashed. Dunadd has been taken,” said Fergus. “Talorcan will come when he can.”

Radha’s father stepped forward. “Why have you brought these people here? You can see we no longer have homes ourselves. We do not want the force of Oengus’s army on us for harboring his enemy.”

Fergus had thought out his strategy along the way. “We will not deplete your winter food supplies. We will stay only long enough to help you rebuild.”

Days or weeks. It was a lot to ask. The old man walked the length of the line to see what he would be inheriting by taking these people in. The young men would be of some use to the women at the loch with no husbands. He liked the look of some of the Scotti women, a few with cockiness in the way they stood. He would take them and explain to the people of the loch later. He pointed to his curragh and the net that lay drying on the shore.

A handful of men and women stepped forward and pulled the boat into the water. There was no time to waste; the children were hungry.

Radha’s father took Fergus by the elbow. “Your woman said the druidess at Dunadd knew of this shaking before it came.”

“Yes. She didn’t know when.”

“What of Dunadd? Does it still stand?”

Fergus laughed. “Dunadd will always stand, no matter who rules.”

The old man dropped his voice. “There are those here who say we should go there, take what is ours.”

Fergus ran his hands through his hair. “Since the earth shook, the sea has left Dunadd. It will be a sorry trade that cannot moor its boats to the western side, but must steer up the river against the flow. Picts or no Picts, Dunadd will not last as the center of anything unless the sea comes back.”

The old man nodded, perplexed. “Iona sees something new. I am telling you this because you brought her here, although she is one of ours, not yours.” The old man stopped to see how Fergus would react. “She says great boats with many oarsmen will come down from the far north and fight bloody battles. They are many and tall, with hair like strands of gold. This is what she sees since the earth shook.”

Fergus waved for Illa to come over and join him. He noticed the child’s limp without thinking; his mind was still on the large boats with the yellow-haired people.

“My mother went east to Scone,” he said. “It is a walk of about ten days. If you want, you should bring your family and follow, too.”

The old man shook his head. “With your help we will rebuild our crannogs. The oarsmen from the north will not find us here. We are well hidden. When the time comes, you shall go to your mother, but you must leave Iona here.”

Fergus nodded. He looked at Illa’s pale face properly for the first time. “What is the matter?”

“My leg,” said Illa. “It was bad, but my new mother took care of me, and now it is getting better.”

Fergus lifted his daughter’s tunic high enough to see the gash under the dried poultice. “Your new mother did well.”

He stood up, looking for Ma-khee now. But his mind drifted to the long trek ahead: so many people and no healer, no link to the spirit world. In what little time they had at Glashan, Ma-khee would have to learn the ways from Iona. He looked out on the loch to the men and women in the curragh who were bringing in fish. Even though they were tired from the journey, the children on the shore were running and shouting. Some of the men came out of the forest dragging a deer that had died under a falling tree.

It would be a celebration, though Fergus was wary of celebrating yet. Two hundred more people to feed from this land and this water. There would be no grain except for where the crannog people along the way deigned to give some. If the crannogs on the way to Scone had fallen, their people would be reticent to help at all.

At Loch Glashan, the crannogs sank up to their walls in water. Tomorrow they would start the process of lifting them back onto their islands of rock and tree trunks. Tomorrow the loch people would be glad of the help. For now, some of them stood by the water’s edge, scowling. Fergus knew that he had no dominion here, that these people would soon hear about the victories of
their new king in the north and would not suffer Fergus and his people long.

He set off to find Ma-khee. He had waited for so long to be with her, and now he wanted her near and warm against his chest. He hoped she would agree to go to Scone with him. As he made his way through the scrub, he asked the goddess to hold fast to his people. And he prayed that Ma-khee might want to stay with him and never let him go.

28

W
hen I hear the news that Fergus has been spotted in the distance, I have no other thought than to get to him, so I leave Illa with Iona and run to find him.

As I run, I say his name more than once. Fergus is dirty, bruised, and cut; still, I can’t help but wrap my arms about him, even though it spooks the horse and Fergus has a hard time calming it. People are laughing. But it has been so long since I saw him, days and days, and a lifetime. I didn’t know if I would ever be here again with my cheek against the movement of his chest, my fingers in the weave of his coat, in the warm hair at the nape of his neck. All I know is, I never want to move again.

“Margaret? Can you hear me?”

I bury my face in his coat and don’t let go until he moves. His hands are eager for me, but he has a trail of people behind him. He steps aside to have words with Rhada’s father, and I can see why he might have to. I don’t know how he thinks we are going to feed all these extra people when most of the flour jars sank with the crannogs. I run to see if I can find anything left in the huts by the fields. Despite the chaos, I can’t keep the smile from my face. I have missed this Fergus, son of Brighde.