My Dear Fiona

Chapter 11 - East Over Water I Fared

You spend enough time in a place and you get the mistaken sense you understand it: it's the superficial familiarity born of living in close quarters with strangers.

If you get to know it, it's not because of the hidden places you find to satisfy your curiosity, it is because the spirit of the place decided to trust you enough to reveal itself to you. You know precisely when that moment comes, and from that day forward you are no longer a stranger. You are kin.

What was it about Kirkwall that broke down my walls so I could see it as more than a picturesque collection of old buildings and streets and feel the warmth of life inside its stone walls, ferry louper that I am?

It's like I've lived here for a thousand years, and I'm not sure that feeling is mine, Fiona. I'm not sure at all.

You'd probably been long gone by the time they placed the foundations of this place, but your spirit is alive everywhere: on the sea wall battered by the wind and the waves, in the austere reverence of Saint Magnus Cathedral, in the ancient souterrains that surprise you in the middle of the city, cozily at home in people's backyards.

History is recorded in writing, but a place's traditions live in stone carved images. The lives and beliefs of the people speak to us directly from them, and even in the face of centuries, their visual messages and symbols bear the handprints and the emotions of the artists who carved them. They weren't strangers, those three warriors on the Pictish Stone in Birsay, to the one who carved their likeness. There is no way of knowing whether they were still alive when the stone was cut, but they had actual histories, and lives, and people who loved them. They're not strangers to me either, and they're looking back at me through the window of their historical artifact, like they are curious to find out how things turned out.

I closed my eyes to rest them and compose myself after poring over so many pictures of the crescent and v-rod symbol, which seems to be everywhere, and the various explanations about its purpose or meaning, and in the world behind my eyelids I saw you, Fiona, holding a polished obsidian stone where the broken arrow shoots back up, like a protective barrier.

After that you started tying elaborate knots, so complicated I couldn't follow the threads from beginning to end, and there were so many of them, stretched out in patterns and grids, endlessly interconnected as far as the eye can see.

They're supposed to symbolize people's lives, those threads, under old pagan laws.

That's what we are, nodes in the fabric of our communities, bound to so many others in inextricable ways. It's not the nodes that count, but the bundles of threads that pass through them, which belong to several other nodes as well. We're the sum of all these threads we extend into other people's lives, and our spirit lives on through them after we die.

I was so engrossed in my mental imagery of lives knotted together the knock on the door sounded like thunder and I jumped out of my chair, disoriented.

"You have a parcel, miss," the landlady announced.

"From America."

I thanked her and took the box to the table, sure my mother had sent me a care package, only to note, bewildered, that it was addressed to Fiona Corrigall, in a handwriting I didn't recognize and with no return address.

I tried to tell the host it must be a mistake, but she shrugged and said there's no other American living in the building, and asked me if I knew Fiona and maybe someone back home thought I could deliver the package to her.

I stopped short of telling her Fiona Corrigall probably died somewhere between 900 and 1100 years ago.

I figured the package was probably a prank from one of my colleagues at the Institute, who used to tease me I'd fallen for a dead woman. He laughed at me for writing myself into a story even the most inspired ancient bard, heart on fire for unrequited love, would have found too far-fetched to spin. Obsidian mirror or not.