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his teeth before he speaks. It’s a Highland thing. “Well, the history books say it was the Picts until the Scotti sailed over from Ireland.”
    “Scotti? Who are they?”
    “They’re who we get Scot land from. The Scotti were Irish immigrants, though they called their land Erin in those days, not Ireland. The Irish thought, still do, that they were descended from this Egyptian princess called Scotta. Ireland, as you can see from the top of Dunadd on a clear day, is only eleven miles to the west, and there was probably always trade going on between the two coasts. If you ask me, it was always a mix of Pict and Scot hereabouts, sometimes more one, sometimes more the other. The Scots brought the Gaelic with them from Ireland, and by the time of William Wallace, it was the language of Scotland. It’ll no doubt give out in the end, just as the Pictish language did.”
    “Have you ever heard the name Sula?” I ask Jim.
    He says he hasn’t and shows me instead a list of the kings that ruled from Dunadd, strange names mostly that mean nothing to me, names from the Dark Ages such as Ainbcellaig, Fiachne, and Eochaid.
    On my way back to the cottage, rain is pelting against the side of my head. I stop to wade in a shallow puddle,watching the waves made by my boots wash up higher into the gravel, then fall back and disappear. Entire cultures come and go like this, empires rise and crash. The Picts moved off to the north and left nothing except a few strange words in the English of northeastern Scotland. They’re just echoes, like the Standing Stones and like the druids.
    Back at my pages the next day, I’m counting out witch executions, in huge numbers: for the year 1515, more than five hundred witches burned in Geneva; 1518, sixty-four burned in Val Camonica; seventeen hundred Scots burned at the stake between 1563 and 1603. I think about Sula in her hut at the top of Dunadd. She has no idea what would become of her kind in the future. There are no do-good clerics to drag her out of her hut yet, no edicts on the evil of women.
    I set my glasses on the desk and go to the window to watch the river. The rain has stopped this morning, and a little way down the bank, I spot Jim Galvin with a fishing line running downstream as though it wanted to get away from him. Since he knows so much, I want him to tell me why the church did this to women. I want to know what he has to say for himself.
    I shout my accusation at him across the river, earthy brown run that at least in my dream looked just like this a thousand or more years ago. Jim looks up and shrugs. After a length, he shouts, “Away round to the bridge and less of your shouting.”
    It’s not easy going along the bank, semi-marsh as it is, piled with lumps of sedge that turn your foot sideways in your Wellie. As though in solidarity, Winnie the kitten follows behind.
    The bridge is an old stone one with a fancy Roman arch for an underside, not that it came out of any great artistic vision, just out of the mud and practicality of the farmer who set it, stone against stone. It’s a beautiful bridge, nevertheless, the mythical drawbridge in my mind that keeps me safe within the shadow of the fort, a recluse with my papers and my questions.
    Jim looks up at me from his seat on the riverbank. “What is it you were saying? Quietly now, so you don’t scare the fish, and take that bloody cat away or she’ll be eating them.”
    I laugh. “It’s nearly bloody winter. There won’t be any catch, and even if there were, they’d have to be gae small fish for the cat to pose a menace. Is it minnows you’re after?”
    He looks back to his fishing. I look down at the dark river, harboring, so Jim hopes, some scaly vestige of life. A seagull lands and hunkers down against the wind. I sigh. Here in the presence of the river, even the burning of witches doesn’t seem worth the noise.
    I say, “I was saying nothing.”
    I sit down next to him and draw my knees up against my chest.