Veil of Time by Claire R. McDougall Page B

had swallowed in abundance. He closed his eyes again and feigned sleep, for there was no harm here in the lap of a girl, keeping warm in her woman smell beside the fire.
    The mother of the house came through the door and set a pot of water over the fire, singing a song of supplication to the sun to rise each morning, and for Cailleach the goddess to stay close through the long winter nights. She sang in the strange minor tones ofPictish, but this woman with her dark hair and sallow skin was no Pict.
    The song brought with it thoughts of Saraid, and he remembered with a clutch in the region of his heart that he had not tried to contact her last night. His thoughts had become tangled and slipped from Saraid to the woman in men’s clothes up on the hill with Sula. Perhaps it was happening, what his mother had said, the fading that came eventually after death.
    He sat up and stretched, drawing to him the eyes of the peasant women. The mother handed him a bowl of brose, oats uncooked in milk, which he took but didn’t know if he could stomach. He preferred the milk to be heated, but he nodded in thanks, belched a little, and felt better; after all, this was the food of his childhood. It gave him comfort, as it was designed to do, though what he required of his body this morning was getting back up on the fort to locate the whereabouts of the Roman slave, one of a few he had brought with Murdoch a few years ago from a battle with the Northumbrians. If some of the words he had heard the woman speak were from the Roman tongue, then the slave would be able to find out where she had come from and what her business at Dunadd was. She might well be a druidess sent by the colonies of druids that had been moved off the sacred isle of Iona.
    First he went to make sure Illa was with his mother.Fergus knew he should be more grateful to his mother, though he resented her meddling and had, at the time of his father’s death, wished it were her instead. Still, she was the reason they were living high on Dunadd, the reason Murdoch was now king. She was as much of a mother as Illa had now, and that wasn’t much.
    He found Brighde, an unhappy bundle of shawls by her fire this morning, sipping her custard. Illa jumped to her feet when she saw her father come through the door.
    “Go and find some meat for your father,” Brighde said.
    Illa’s eyes met Fergus’s in a moment of protest, but he nodded for her to leave.
    Fergus went to the fire, stretching his hands out to the warmth. “Must you always send her off? We have slaves for that.”
    “Not on this morning after Samhain,” Brighde said. “They are all like you, slumbering where they should find no slumber. Will you take another commoner for a wife?”
    Fergus poked the fire. He sighed. “Sleep was all I was doing by a commoner. And Saraid was no commoner, as well you know.”
    He sat down and looked into his mother’s face, still a handsome one in spite of the lines, her long grey hair swept up in coils about her head, her thick woven shawl in reds and yellows hiding the frailty of her shoulders.“Where is the slave, the Roman who worked in the bakehouse?”
    Brighde looked back at her son. “Still in the bakehouse, I suppose. Do you need a slave?”
    Fergus met Illa at the door, took a piece of meat from her platter, and led her back outside.
    He held the girl by her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. “Hurry. Go and tell the Roman in the bakehouse to come to me.”
    Illa ran off; the distance was short, and her legs were long. Fergus walked over to Murdoch, who was sipping fraoch by what was left of last night’s spit. His large grey dogs were finishing off the carcass where it lay tossed off into the heather. Fergus knelt on one knee to get his hands closer to the embers.
    “How was your night?” Murdoch asked. “I lost you.”
    Fergus didn’t answer. He picked up a bone and pushed around in the ash with it. “The woman who was found. Have you seen her