Veil of Time (22 page)

Sometime later I am aware of coming to. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, but even then there is no light to speak of under the door or through the wattle walls. Someone is calling so softly, at first I can’t make it out, but then, by the way he says “Ma-khee,” I know it is Fergus.

I have to step over Marcus to reach the door. I stand there, biting my nails, listening to Fergus moving around on the other side. It is so quiet I can hear his breathing. I try to breathe slowly so he can’t hear mine.

Maybe he puts his hand on the door, because it moves slightly towards me.

“Ma-khee.”

My hand goes to the latch but stops short. I know what answering this call is going to mean and that I shouldn’t put myself in its way when I am not going to go through with it. I am drawing on all the reason my age has given me, but my brain seems disconnected from the rest of me, and my fingers push the cold iron latch out of its catch.

He has his arms on either side of the door, unexpectant, it seems, of my response. When he sees me, he steps back. For more than a few moments, we stand opposite each other, me still on the inside, him part of the night outside and just as threatening.

And then he clears his throat softly and speaks. “Tiugainn comhla rium.” Come with me.

He looks at me with his cheeky smile as though he’s asking to be kissed, if kissing has even been invented.

“I can’t,” I say, stepping back over the threshold.

Fergus is not listening to my words. Why should he? They don’t even convince me. He pulls me against him, and I feel his hands spread out over my waist and fold me into him. His shoulder belt presses into my chest bone where it slots between my breasts. My hands go around his back and rest on the belt as it crosses his shoulder blades. I can feel his breath against the top of my ear, and all I have to do is tilt my face back slightly and his mouth falls against mine, infinitely warm in the cold night air.

His hand slips down around mine, and I feel him tug. “
Tiugainn comhla rium
.”

I shake my head. “I can’t.”

He breaks away and stands a little way off. He is breathing hard.

He says, “Because your heart is still with your husband?”

“No,” I say. “Because yours is with your wife.”

He comes to me and holds me by the shoulders. “You are right. It has been for too long. I didn’t think I could love another woman, but I want you, Ma-khee.”

He holds me again like I was his last refuge.

I push him back. “You need to go to her.”

When he pulls back, I see his face is confused.

I give him another push. “Go to your wife, Fergus.”

With all my heart I don’t mean it. But I should. And I don’t know why he is smiling all of a sudden, but I see those blessed even teeth flash in the dark.

It’s a reflex to get defensive. “Colla. Go to Colla.”

He finds this even more amusing. “Colla’s not my wife, only a woman Murdoch wishes were my wife.”

Now I’m the one to be confused. “Well, who is your wife?”

He smiles a quick, unconvincing smile. “She is dead, like your husband. She was Talorcan’s sister.”

I am breathless and reeling all at once. I want to sing “Hallelujah,” but it doesn’t look as though he would take that very kindly. I am not simple enough to think a dead spouse is less of an obstacle than one in the land of the living. Still, it does clear the way. It does make me take his hand and kiss the palm, his not-altogether-clean palm.

He waits in case I have more words for him, and I do, but I can’t even begin to formulate them. I want to tell him to go easy on me, that it has been so long since
I have been loved and now I am all fingers and thumbs with it.

He takes my hand and tugs. “
Tiugainn comhla rium
.”

I walk with him, tied to him, my side moving against his, through the starless dark away from Sula’s hut, down the hill past the spot where the mason has abandoned his tools for the night, down to the buildings on the grassy level. The cookhouse is also dark and silent as we go by and stop outside a small rectangular building. He hesitates before he lifts the latch, and I begin to wonder if this is the place he lived with Illa and his wife when she was alive.

The door swings open into only one room, which, judging by the greenery now decorating the floor, hasn’t been used in some time. The measured way Fergus steps around the room, the way his eyes dart from the floor to the ledge where a bed must once have been, and where there is still a stack of blankets, I know where I am, and I’m not too comfortable with it.

I wait for him by the door, but he comes back for me and leads me in, shutting the light out so that all I can do is feel him in the dark and hear his breath in my ear, as he lifts my tunic and runs his hands over the skin of my back.

He drops to his knees and wraps his arms around my buttocks, pulling me against his face, his mouth right at the place his hand took hold of on our first encounter.
The man wants the woman, and there is no doubt in the dampness of the place where these things get registered that the woman wants the man, too.

He knows more than I about the unraveling of lady’s clothing. The brooch and the sash come off easily and drop into his hands. The robe unsuspended drops about my ankles. He holds me at arm’s length and peers into the dark when my knickers stretch out under his touch then snap back like an extra layer of skin. The bra proves more difficult, but then it is difficult for modern man, too. I don’t linger long over the humor of the situation but, pushing his hands aside, wriggle free from both items of underwear and draw him again down to his knees beside me. If this is a dream, then please let it play on, please may this gasp as his cold palms come against my nipples be real. If there is a god, and especially if she is a woman, may I sink into the hold of his arms and never recover.

Without letting me go, Fergus reaches for a blanket from a pile that sits on the floor and lays it on the ground and me on top of it.

There is no moving in slowly; this is what he brought me here for, and this is why I came. I fumble to untie him, but I don’t know where the knots are, how he is to be unleashed. Fergus knows. He unloosens his belt, and the string and leg wraps drop away as though everything had been designed to do just this, and maybe it was. I
reach up and lay my hands on his chest, feel the pounding of his heart. For just a moment he hesitates before moving towards me. The knife that he wears under his arm still sits against his skin in its halter. I grab it and hold it against his back as he inches down onto me, cupping my shoulders against the hardness of the floor. His knees step between mine, and there is no thinking now. The gates have been opened and he sails in, pausing only to wait for the wall in me to give. I want to hold on, hold back, don’t let it slide so soon. If we could only stop breathing, stay still, and keep ourselves here for a moment longer. But it’s too late. I am falling. Everything is giving way and I am over the edge, grabbing onto him because on the other side of this there is only a fall.

I can hear him saying, “Ma-khee.” He brings his mouth against my ear. “Ma-khee.”

Ma-khee. The scene begins to fade. I fight to stay on, running my hands over his back, stepping my breathing in time with his.

But a voice rattles in from another world. “Maggie.” Under a different veil of time, someone is trying to waken me.

I close my eyes, breathing hard. “No.”

Fergus kisses the hair by my ears where the tears fall. “Stay with me,
mo chridhe
.”

He slides off me, covering me over with the end of the shawl. There’s a faint line of light under the door
now, and pots and pans are being set down in the cookhouse. I have to keep touching him to reassure myself that this all happened, at least this once. The tears are in case it never comes again.

I can tell by Fergus’s rhythmic breathing, the slow rising of his chest against my side, that he has fallen asleep. I smile, because no matter what the age, some things never change. Right at this moment, I wish they never would again. But they are going to change. Only eight weeks until an operation that is precisely designed to ensure that they will.

I nudge Fergus a little to see if I can rouse him. I lift his hand, but it drops from my fingers.
Fergus, mo chridhe.

My hand slips down onto the rise of his flank. “Fergus.”

I wait to see if he stirs. Not a muscle moves. I smooth the line of his eyebrows.

“Fergus.”

I clear my throat. I don’t know if I should say this, what it might mean to history. But if I never come back, I have to warn him before I go.

“Fergus, the Picts are going to overrun the fort soon. And an earthquake is going to tip the land and send the sea too far away for decent commerce. You don’t even know about the Vikings yet, but they are going to come down on you like hell itself, only you don’t have hell yet. You will, when the Christians take over. Eventually,
Kenneth MacAlpin, half Pict himself, will be crowned first king of Scotland here at Dunadd, but not until 843.”

I stroke the back of his head and down to where his hair stops just over his shoulders. “You want to know who I am, but if I were to tell you, you wouldn’t believe me; before I was Ma-khee, I used to be Margaret, with a husband who is not dead but might as well be. I had a daughter once, too, just like Illa.”

I lay my forehead against his chest, and let my tears roll onto his skin.

“I come from Scotland in the twenty-first century, where there are no more witches except at Halloween, and even then they are not proper witches, but just cartoons. We don’t depend on the druidess anymore but on stuff, on cars and houses and Rolex watches.”

I stop speaking when Fergus moves slightly under my hand and groans. I wait until he is still again, watch the morning force itself under the door and me further from him. I can feel it slipping.

“Maggie,”
says Jim,
“are you all right?”

I wrap my arms about Fergus’s back and press myself against him, every inch of me that can find an inch of him.

“Fergus,” I whisper, though he wouldn’t understand what I am saying in a language that doesn’t even exist yet. “Fergus, you’re going to find electricity and gas and bombs and turn into such a queer people, whose men turn against their women and burn the strong ones alive.
Eventually, there’ll be a car park at the base of Dunadd, and people from all over will climb up here to put their foot in an imprint in the stone that isn’t even here yet. Nobody then will believe the sea ever came up this far, except some English nutter who lives on the great estate that will make its millions on the backs of slaves in faraway sugar plantations and will possess all this land as far as you can see.”

I stroke the back of his thighs. Perhaps, if Dr. Shipshap is right, he might absorb some of what I’m saying into his subconscious, except that hasn’t been invented yet either. Before I leave I have something else to say. “Fergus, people are going to go out from this nation and take over entire continents, a bit like the Vikings are set to do, killing off the natives like there is no tomorrow, and perhaps there is no tomorrow. Everything gets very crazed, except on a much larger scale than you can imagine. What I have to tell you,
mo chridhe,
is that, as far as the moon is from this place, I come from your tomorrow.”

I slip the wedding ring off my finger. It doesn’t come off easily, wedged as it is in a little groove of me. I get to my knees and bind the ring onto his belt with a tie from my hair. I lie back down and press myself against him. I suppose he will find the ring in the morning when he is without me, and it will tell him whatever it is he wants it to.

17

A
fter the woman had left, Fergus went to lie near his daughter by the dwindling fire in the warmth of his mother’s house. But too many thoughts weighed against sleep tonight. Illa’s head still rested on the hat the woman had worn. He liked that the woman was kind in that way, and it made him smile to remember how she had felt in her strange wrap about her backside, about her breasts. He rolled over, and his eyes fell on the stone by the fire. How odd, Ma-khee’s reaction to that. Of course, this was no ordinary stone, but came from far to the east. Perhaps it was because Ma-khee also came from the east that she recognized what type of a stone it was.

Her ways were strange. Her language was nothing he recognized, even though he had traveled as far as
Gaul. It sounded more like Saxon than anything, but had a lilt to it. He had feigned sleep as she talked, felt her hand on his backside, her fingertips on his eyebrows. He smiled when he remembered she had called him
mo chridhe.

Illa moved suddenly in her sleep and touched Fergus’s hand. She could not know that on this night her father had moved on from her mother. He had waited until Illa was sleeping to bring out the thing her mother had loved, the comb that came in a bag of loot from an attack on the Northumbrians. It had felt odd to hold it in his hand and run it through another woman’s hair. Still, he had liked the way his hand slipped so easily across her hair down onto her shoulders. His fingers lingering there had sensed no resistance.