“Breech,” I say, but they think I mean Brighde, mother of Fergus. They shake their heads and look at one another.
Now I see that Sula has designs for this breech baby. In my day doctors deliver these by Cesarean section, and it’s funny to think that this operation exists even now, if this was the way Caesar was born. Still, the odds wouldn’t be good for the mother, and Sula obviously has other plans.
The woman’s body seems less tense now, and I wonder if it is because of the leafy brew. Sula wants my hands in this operation, and she guides me the way I should push, around to the outside on one side, while she tries to manipulate the baby going down from the top the other way. I keep my eyes on the woman’s face, because I am very uneasy about pushing so hard. Sula catches my hands, presses them to my chest, and then puts them back on the woman’s stomach. Perhaps she is telling me to feel my way by instinct, and I try, but women of my era were not trained this way. In the nunnery, instinct was the enemy. Inside myself, I will the baby to move. I picture my hands as instruments of healing instead of just paddles.
I look up at Sula. Her eyes are closed. She removes her hands and blows into them, then starts back in the circular motion, almost not touching, as though she could insinuate the movement by hovering slightly above the skin. My hands are still touching. But the baby is beginning to give. I have to see Sula’s movement and mine as one. Where I leave off and start back to the bottom, she takes over and smooths her hands over the top of the mound.
Every so often the baby gives a kick, for which I am grateful—at least I know it is still alive. Once we get it to center point, the baby does the rest itself. Soon we have a solid mass at the bottom. Sula quickly grabs a band from her bag and ties it around the woman just above where the baby’s bottom must now be.
She takes herbs from a different pouch and gives them to the woman in another drink, then sits back and waits. I do the same. The man seems happier now. Just like a contented modern man, he whistles as he sets a pot on a tripod over the fire. The child moves in closer to throw on sticks. I walk over to see the stew, I suppose it is, with lumps of meat and other objects, some of which I can identify, like turnip, but others I’m not sure about. No carrots, I notice, no potatoes. Strange to think how food made its way across Europe in drips and drabbles. Potatoes, that British staple, wouldn’t make it here from the Andes for hundreds of years.
Sula has the woman up and walking about, then squatting with her elbows on a stool. Sula gestures me over. It is my job, she shows me, to smooth my hand down the base of the woman’s spine, while Sula eats from a bowl by the fire. She and Marcus and the husband are talking about me; that’s a feeling you just know, whether you speak the language or not.
The woman is pushing softly, and then I’m not quick enough to catch the baby that falls hard onto the dirt floor. The woman picks her baby up, puts it to her breast, and remains in a squat until the placenta slips out. A dog should come in and eat the afterbirth at this point, but there actually seem to be very few dogs down here. Instead, the child scoops it up and adds it to the stew.
I want to make all the modern noises of objection,
but I sit back on my haunches and keep my peace. I just won’t be having any of the stew myself. The baby is a boy, though no one seems to be paying any attention to that. There is a joke about the size of his testicles, and that must be one of those things, like the shape of the hill on the other side of the road, that time does not change.
The wife lies down in the bed with the baby at her breast. Her older child lies beside them. I worry that the baby has not cried yet, though he is making some powerful sucking noises. Maybe if you’re not being born into original sin, birth is nothing to cry about.
Suddenly through the door a man enters. He is tall with reddish brown hair, and I recognize him as the man with the tattoo of the boar who followed me around the fort on the first night. As he steps closer, I see the tattoo stretches right across his forehead and down on either side of his temples. The tail and the snout run off a little into his hairline. His eyes glance over me, but the person he is looking for is Sula. Like everyone else, he approaches her with respect, though he is unable to hide his eagerness for her to step aside and speak to him. Sula is reticent to leave. She checks back with the woman and her baby, and then brings the man over to me.
She pats his shoulder. “Talorcan,” she says. I can’t keep my eyes off his tattoo. He bows slightly in my direction, keeps his eyes on mine as he begins to talk. I don’t pick up everything he says, but I do hear the
name Fergus and next to it the mention of a wife, and I do register the drop of lead into the pit of my belly. He keeps talking, but I’m not hearing anything else. After a while, his nod to Sula seems to indicate he has more urgent business.
He talks to Sula by the door with fewer smiles than he had for me, and eventually, she leaves with him. I stand by the door and watch them walk through the gate of the yard, and then I can see only heads and shoulders moving along the top of the wattle fence along the path that leads away to the farthest houses. Their conversation is quick, secret. She seems to be so much the center of things down here: midwife, teacher, counsel. I wonder if that is why the church objected to the witches: it didn’t want little old women at the center of things. I remember now from the list in the Edinburgh library how many of my witches were midwives.
I feel selfish to be preoccupied by the news of Fergus’s wife, when life has just taken place and I have had a role in it. From the way he acted towards me, I couldn’t have gathered that there was a wife. But this is not my age, and why wouldn’t I think other principles hold? Fergus might have ten wives. But I am gloomy now, abandoned by Sula, shuffling around the strangers’ house, taking in the vat of
fraoch,
the rudimentary loom set against the wall by the door. I know nothing about weaving, but I can admire the quality of the tweed that is being woven. The yarn of the warp hangs down the
back of the loom, weighted with round stones into which holes have been bored.
There are no trees in this village, just yards backed onto other yards, peaks of heather-thatched roofs. The yards are of hard-packed dirt, kept clear by the twig broom that leans against the wall of the house by the door. Racks of drying peat are set up against the lower part of the fence, and there is a small stone hut with a wooden door to the side of the house. I notice similar stone structures in all the yards, though they are too small to be dwellings. My curiosity leads me to push the door a little with the toe of my shoe, but it’s too dark in there to see. It doesn’t smell so fresh, so I pull the door closed.
The orange glow of sun in the far distance is disappearing behind the islands, just as it does in my day. The air is very still, interrupted only now and then by bird cry. The child follows me back into the house, where mother and baby are asleep. I play a game with the child of pick-up sticks made with small pieces of kindling. The child is quiet like its baby brother, unspeaking but contented on the floor by the fire.
I sit cross-legged by the fire and ease the child onto my lap, nuzzling my nose into its unwashed hair. I’m not sure the last time I smelled a small child this close, but I have a powerful compulsion to kiss that head. I wonder when Sula is coming back for me, and I wonder what Fergus wants from me if he already has a wife.
When the child wanders off, I go over to the woman
and place my hand on her forehead to make sure there’s no fever. She is asleep and doesn’t see me watching her. She is like me, with two children. I hope she can stay that way. I hope that fate won’t wrench one of them from her when she is away one evening. The woman opens her eyes and smiles. Her baby’s head is black, not a patch of red gossamer as Ellie’s was when they handed her to me in the hospital. She closes her eyes again but resists when I try to take the baby. I know how she feels. Keep holding on to him, I want to say, and perhaps you’ll never have to let go.
Marcus seems to think it’s time to leave when the sky turns black, not as much light, now that the moon is on its wane. We weave through the houses where the doors are shut against the cold, and over the river on the bridge whose give seems a little more alarming in the dark. My foot keels a little, torqueing my ankle, but I don’t have time to register the pain before I notice Talorcan waiting on the other side.
Marcus hangs back and lets Talorcan take me by the arm up towards the gates. He talks quickly as though he thinks I can understand everything, when all I want to ask him is about Fergus’s wife. He is telling me something about the Picts, how they used to rule Dunadd, how his ancestors were on this land long before the Gaels. I’m not sure of this man, what his hand in the small of my back means. It is with some relief the guards bar him from entering the fort and Marcus is put back
in the role of lead. I hear the slam of the gates closing as I follow Marcus up to the flat esplanade where the houses sit. I wonder about this Talorcan, what he wants from me.
Before we have gone much farther, Marcus reaches back and slows me down; in front of us, a figure is taking shape out of the dark.
Marcus’s voice is quiet as he says, “King Murdoch.”
I already feel apprehensive before we get up to the king, so I hang back a little. He is shorter and stockier than his brother. His hair is curlier and somehow there is less intelligence in his gait.
He doesn’t speak to me, barely looks in my direction. His orders are directed at the slave. Marcus bows and leads me to a house from which I can hear the music of a harp. There is light and warm air seeping out from under the door. I hope Fergus isn’t in there because I don’t know how to be with him now. After Murdoch has left, Marcus announces us.
Marcus Paullus agus Ma-khee.
When the door opens, he leads me inside. Unlike the house we have just come from, this one is rectangular, with a fire and a rude clay chimney at the far end. Superior torches in silver clasps on the upright beams illuminate the tapestries that cover the stone walls and the carpets strewn over wooden floors. The underside of the turf roof is lined with wooden slats, and the furniture is fine, the chairs and table carved with animals in Celtic design. A man seated on a stool by the door with
a lap-size harp is singing in a falsetto, a little raucous to the ear.
Fergus rises as I approach the fire, and my heart stops. He wants to meet my gaze, but my gaze wants to be anywhere else. There are other people in the room, but I am not looking at them either. Marcus pushes me gently in the direction of an older woman seated between two monks. I suppose they’re monks because of their coarse brown cassocks, which apparently aren’t going to change over the next millennium. One of them holds in his hand a pole with an ornate copper bell at the end tied by a leather thong. Welded onto the face of the bell is a crucifix. The woman gets up with regal bearing and circles me in a way that would be rude in my day, but I’m not caring. I have Fergus in my peripheral vision; he has turned away from me.
Marcus tells the woman my name is Maggie. The woman’s heavily embroidered robe swishes over my feet as she stops in front of me. There’s a look of Fergus about her, in the eyes, in the shape of the brow.
I imagine this is the queen mother, with her gold and garnet brooch and the ornate chain about her neck. Her bony wrists and fingers are bedecked with other finely crafted gold pieces. Her braided hair is wrapped around a band of gold and sits off her shoulders.
At any rate, she seems unimpressed by me and goes back to her chair. I see Fergus motion Marcus forward, and the slave shows the queen all the aspects of my
clothing that were of interest to him and Sula earlier, including the bra. I’m particularly interested to see what the monks make of that. I catch Fergus smiling to himself when they make a show of looking off to the wall. I wish I could smile back at him, but I have already taken too much for granted.
Marcus shows the queen my fingernails, which I suppose betray a life of ease. But the monks want her attention, and have more luck, redirecting her towards a leather-bound book.
All of a sudden, the door opens, and Murdoch comes in leading a handsome woman he introduces as Colla. The harpist ceases his song. The woman’s long hair is very dark and ringed with a coronet braid. She is not young, but younger than me. Fergus seems annoyed when Murdoch sets the woman next to him. Perhaps this is the wife Talorcan mentioned. She certainly seems to have her eye on him, certainly shuffles her bum as close to his as possible. I begin to think Talorcan might be my best ally—he knows what these royals are up to.
Fergus indicates to Marcus that I should be led out. Before I turn, he shoots me a look that concedes he is not happy. I tell my face not to show what I am feeling. I think I have already let down too much of my guard to Prince Fergus. He can have his dark-eyed woman. I don’t know why I thought Dark Age men would have higher standards, but I have to admit he put on a good show.
After the well-lit room, the outside is very dark, so much so that I almost fall over Fergus’s daughter. Like any child, she has been hovering about the doorway listening to adults through the cracks. I can’t see her well, but just finding her makes me fight for breath. I wait a moment for my eyes to adjust, to make out the features of this girl who looks so much like my Ellie. Her hair is longer, of course, the front strands twisted and pulled back to a piece of twine at the nape of her neck. She must think my staring at her has to do with her misbehaving.
“Hello,” I say quietly.
I place my hand on her head and say her name. Illa, not Ellie, but still the word strangles in my throat. She turns her head slightly towards me and then back to the crack in the door she is peering through. I take a step and touch her back. When she looks, I smile. She doesn’t flinch this time but looks back with a smile I have seen a million times before. But Marcus is tugging me upward towards Sula’s hut. I wave to the girl and hope this is a universal signal. She nods, not understanding, I think. I nod, too, anything to bridge the gap between her in her time and space and the thing that is me, here and now, confused. Marcus is confused, too, not understanding the tears, as we walk around the final fortress of wall and up onto the hill.