Read Online Veil of Time by Claire R. McDougall - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Claire R. McDougall
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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 jumpingfrom 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 Icould 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
People are jumping over the flames up there, just as Jim said. A line of men opposite a line of women jumpingfrom 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 Icould 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
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