Veil of Time (8 page)

Fergus. He says his name is Fergus, just like any old Fergus I know in the twenty-first century. When I say his name back to him, he smiles quickly and looks away. But there is nothing sheepish in the action. I curse myself when he lifts my hand and notices the wedding ring, but he seems undeterred and brings my hand closer to his face. Maybe it’s only because I’m in a dream, but I begin to wonder what my hands would feel like in his hair.

But Sula has other designs for Fergus. She takes him by the sleeve and is leading him towards the door. I want to hang on to this man with the fleeting smile and the steady gaze. But the druidess, who has been watching the little play between us, pushes him out and shuts the door behind him.

She lifts my hands and smooths her thumbs over my palms, inspecting them, it seems. I would like to
know what she finds there. She brings my palms to her nose and sniffs the air around me, honing in on my underarms, to which I applied a layer of deodorant this morning. While Sula carries out her inspection, I keep looking over at the door and wondering if Fergus is coming back.

The old woman takes a pinch of something from a glass bowl and throws it into the flames, creating that hot woody smell I remember from the first dream. She walks around the fire three times clockwise, then takes a dagger from beside the wall and draws in the dirt one vertical line and three parallel lines crossing through. I’m studying the lines, because I know they have to hold some meaning, but I’m not sure what. She reaches into her shawl for a handful of something that cracks in her hands; she shakes them and blows onto them. I see, when they fall lightly at my feet, that they are colored stones. They go here and there across the lines she drew, and it all seems to mean something to her. I see there are twelve stones. She looks at me and laughs. I smile in response, as though I know what she means, but for all I know I’m laughing at something evil that’s to be done to me. I’m in a foreign land here, in this place I know so well.

She motions to me the universal sign language for
eat
. I nod
yes
, because oddly enough for a dream I do feel hungry all of a sudden, and I don’t think Sula intends me any evil. She is a nice old witch, probably just
like the nice old witches who were set fire to in the years to come, the ones the church decided they wouldn’t suffer to live.

When she opens the door, I strain to see if Fergus is standing sentry. But he’s not there among the stragglers still around the fire. We walk out into the breeze on the brow of the hill, and I have to stop. Sula stops with me, observing my surprise at what appears to be the sound of waves just below the cliff.

Sula must wonder why I am grinning at her, but what can I say? She may be a druid, but she would make no sense of my claim that one day the sea wouldn’t come in to Dunadd at all. I follow her down the hill, past the place on the rock with the foot imprint and the Pictish boar, but neither one is there.

On what is in my day a grassy plateau around an abandoned well, we come upon a wooden shack. Only as we enter do I realize that it is set over the well, and that in this day the well is not dry but is in fact a spring that runs with a gurgle, giving off a dank smell of wet stone. On the wattle walls of the shack hang ribbons and little pieces of rag, and here and there a clay foot or hand. The druidess picks up a wooden bowl and, when she inclines my head towards the water, I see that I am to be given my second baptism, this time presumably into paganism. I take a moment of pleasure to think how this would sit with certain nuns of my childhood acquaintance,
but freezing water running its icy grip down my neck takes me out of that thought. I shiver, and then shiver again. Sula laughs. She gestures for me to drink from the bowl. The thought of tapeworms crosses my mind, another of those dangers I have been taught lurk in the wild, but tapeworms come from sheep, and I am not at all sure that they have sheep in this age. Whatever this age is. The water is ice cold and tastes peaty, tangy.

A line of dead pigs and goats lies outside the door of the kitchen, as though waiting patiently to be granted their life back. Farther off, something is roasting on a spit. These people certainly make more of Halloween than we do. Everyone is crowding the druid, talking so fast I can’t understand. I suppose it could be Pictish and not Gaelic at all. It depends who dominates the fort at this time.

A woman from a kitchen in a long tunic hands me a couple of grey bready articles that look more like something from the Middle East than a Scottish pan loaf. At the spit, a burly man with a beard cuts off a piece of meat from a small animal that I hope is not dog and hands it to me on the edge of his knife. Nice not to use his fingers, even in the Dark Ages. The druidess takes a piece of meat herself and ladles a piss-colored liquid with a lace of foam out from an earthenware jar set in the ground and into a wooden bowl. It is warm and yeasty, not an unpleasant drink. By the time I finish the
bowl off, Sula is gone. I am left by myself on this heathen night of Samhain, crouched on the grass, glancing about for Fergus, feeling vulnerable and biting into the tough bread, which is made of some grain more mealy than I am used to. I put my head down and chew on the tender meat.

A dog barks suddenly down below the gates, the small bark of a lesser dog, but surprisingly clear over the cheering and the strange music and, of course, the drumming. A man comes from behind and fills my bowl with more of the hot, yeasty mixture. I see when he crouches beside me he has the tattoo of a boar right across his forehead. He steals glances at me as I sip and shiver in my modern clothes.

When I stand up, the man stays crouched. I try to walk, but the beery stuff has got into my step, making the men at the spit laugh. I see a smirk on the tattooed man’s face, as I turn and take my feet up to look for Sula. Or Fergus. The man of the tattoo doesn’t follow as I go back to the bare rock where the foot and the boar are still missing. There’s nothing here but what God saw fit to decorate the hill with. It hardly seems like Dunadd without the only part of Dunadd that is going to be left for the tourists. As I wander up to the summit and the warmth of the fire, I keep glancing behind to make sure I am not being followed.

People are jumping over the flames up there, just as Jim said. A line of men opposite a line of women jumping
from either end towards each other across the fire. I join the line of women, just so there’s no question. Only now I see I have been spotted. A dark figure is coming towards me with the light of the fire behind him. He’s a man dressed much like Fergus, but he wears a thin band of gold in his hair. I suppose that’s why he acts like the king, gesturing and shouting,
“Siuthad! Siuthad!”

I do hurry up, but down the hill towards Sula’s hut where he is shoving me. He makes sure I am put inside and closes the door behind me.

It takes a minute to catch my breath and get used to the peat smoke and the warm smell of herbs again. It takes longer to brush off the violence of the king. The druidess is there, calm in her seat by the fire, and I have to sit down by the wall because I am shaking now, not from the cold so much as the fact that this is all a bit much, finding myself here with a king but no foot imprint, with a druid in her place at the top of everyone else, with a woman druid at all when I am spending my days with facts and figures about how the last of these people were simply wiped off the pages of history.

Sula rubs my arms and pulls out a blanket of roughly woven wool to wrap about my shoulders. She sits back down and watches me shiver. When I begin to feel a warmth in my feet, I suspect what I am doing is not shivering, though when it is over I am still sitting and this has been a mild attack, if that’s what it was. That I
could have a seizure in a dream induced by a seizure is a conundrum but not one I want to unravel now.

Sula is really interested in me now. She’s running her hands around my outline, as if she can sense something. A seizure being an electrical storm, maybe she can. Once, before Oliver and I had kids, we climbed Ben Nevis in a storm, and I could generate bars of purple static between my hands. Oliver kept shouting over the wind for me to stop, that I would electrocute myself, but then, as I say, I have this attraction to fire. I set my bedroom closet on fire when I was a child by playing with matches and rolled-up pages of homework. The only thing in my life I failed to set on fire was Oliver.

Sula’s cold hands wrap around my own and drop her twelve polished stones into the cup of my palm. She takes a dagger and repeats her pattern of lines in the dirt, then gestures for me to blow on the stones and throw them like a couple of dice. Feeling a fool, I do as she bids, casting the stones across the lines.

They fall in a kind of slanted line, which makes Sula mutter and obviously has some significance for her. She pats my shoulder and hurries out. With no guard on the door, I suppose I could scarper, but I have nowhere to go except wakefulness, and I’d rather stay to see if Fergus comes back. I crouch by the fire and prod the logs with a charred stick, still unsure if these people intend me any harm. If they killed me, I wonder, would I die in my sleep?

The door opens, and Sula hurries back in followed by a smallish man. She calls him Oeric and points at me. He comes over and looks at me for a long time, walking round me, touching my clothes but not manhandling me. Oeric is very, very dirty, in the way of a coal miner with smudges on his face but no tattoos. He goes back to Sula and shakes his head. She pushes him towards me again, this time apparently with an order to speak, because he starts in on something that does not sound like Gaelic, but now and then a little like Chaucer. If I had paid more attention to
The Canterbury Tales
for Higher English, I might have a clue what he is asking me.

I offer him something to see if anything strikes a chord, but I remember only one line from Chaucer and that only because it has its equivalent in modern English:
Every thing which schyneth as the gold, nis nat gold, as that I have heard it told.

For a minute he chews around the word
gold,
then lifts my hand and points to my wedding ring.

“Yes,” I say, “gold.”

Communication has taken place. We have a word in common.

He turns back to Sula and says,
“Or. Gold.”

He places his filthy hand on my chest.
“Wiffman.”

“A’bhean,”
says Sula.

“Woman,” I say.

Oeric shakes his head.

Sula places her hand on Oeric’s chest.
“Fir.”

“Mann,”
he says.

“Yes,” I say, “Man.”

I look into Oeric’s square face with the cleft chin, but I understand not a word when he starts to talk in what must be Saxon. After all, hundreds of years separate modern English from Chaucer, and
The Canterbury Tales
was hard enough. I gesture with my hands that he is making no sense to me.

Oeric gives up and goes back to Sula, shaking his head. They must be concluding that I am not from South of the border, if the border during these times even exists. In their talk I pick up the words
Frank
and
Goth
.

“No,” I say. “I’m Scottish!”

Sula leaves with the Saxon and doesn’t come back as before. I lay myself out on the narrow ledge as much as I can with the blanket around me. It has been a long day, too much pissy liquid, and I have to close my eyes against the smoke. How I sleep in a dream that is already in sleep is another thing I don’t ponder until later, but when I do awake alone in the cell, the candles are out, and the only faint light comes from outside. The door is unlocked, and things have quieted, so there is no one to notice me run onto the top of the hill, not even Fergus. The fire is down to embers and the sudden odd flare. Behind me, at the rim of the hills, the sun is forcing a band of light on the eastern sky.

I follow the sound of waves and stand over the cliff
edge, line my toes along the rim, and look down, as I have on so many occasions in waking. It has never made any sense to me that if Dunadd was such a central port, the boats had to stop miles away in Crinan Bay or follow the river upstream. And no wonder it made no sense, because here’s the reason why: tonight the breeze that runs against the underside of my shirt, up my neck, and against my lips is salty. Down below me, in the time of Fergus, in my dream, the Atlantic Sea does not stop out in Crinan Bay as it does in my time. Tonight the waves are crashing right against the side of Dunadd fort.

7

T
here’s no full moon and there is no sea as I pick my way down the trail to the car park at the base of Dunadd hill. I stop by the stile, incline my head towards the black ceiling of night, trying to pick out a constellation: the Plough, Orion, the Pleiades. Tiny pinpoints of light coming at me from distances too vast even to think about. But I’ve been on the fort for hours, and I need to sink into a hot bath. It’s when I’m up to my ears in warm water that I think about Fergus. I see him crouched beside me with his dirty fingers in my water, with that quick smile of his and the glance away. If his hands were really here, I might pick them out of the water and kiss each one and then lay them against my heart for that part of me that is still living. And then I would let his
hands go, to see if there is more than pain in his look. I would hope that there was longing and that the water would turn cold long before we unraveled ourselves and realized what we had done.