On the night that our wedding is on us 8 страница

IT WAS A LONG WAY to the whisky clearing, but I didn’t mind. It was blessedly quiet in the forest, and Jemmy, lulled by the movement, finally relaxed into a doze, limp and heavy as a little sandbag in my arms.

So late in the year, all the deciduous trees had lost their leaves; the trail was ankle-deep in a crackling carpet of brown and gold, and maple seeds whirled past on the wind, brushing my skirt with a whisper of wings. A raven flew past, high above. It gave an urgent, raucous cry, and the baby jerked in my arms.

“Hush,” I said, hugging him close. “It’s nothing, lovey; just a bird.”

Still, I looked after the raven, and listened for another. They were birds of portent—or so said Highland superstition. One raven was an omen of change; two were good fortune; three were ill. I tried to dismiss such notions from my mind—but Nayawenne had told me the raven was my guide, my spirit animal—and I never saw the big, black shadows pass overhead without a certain shiver up the spine.

Jemmy stirred, gave a brief squawk, and fell back into silence. I patted him and resumed my climb, wondering as I made my way slowly up the mountain, what animal might be his guide?

The animal spirit chose you, Nayawenne told me, not the other way around. You must pay careful attention to signs and portents, and wait for your animal to manifest itself to you. Ian’s animal was the wolf; Jamie’s the bear—or so the Tuscarora said. I had wondered at the time what one was supposed to do if chosen by something ignominious like a shrew or a dung beetle, but was too polite to ask.

Only one raven. I could still hear it, though it was out of sight, but no echoing cry came from the firs behind me. An omen of change.

“You could have saved yourself the trouble,” I said to it, under my breath so as not to wake the baby. “Hardly as though I needed telling, is it?”

I climbed slowly, listening to the sigh of the wind and the deeper sound of my own breath. At this season, change was in the air itself, the scents of ripeness and death borne on the breeze, and the breath of winter in its chill. Still, the rhythms of the turning earth brought change that was expected, ordained; body and mind met it with knowledge and—on the whole—with peace. The changes coming were of a different order, and one calculated to disturb the soul.

I glanced back at the house; from this height, I could see only the corner of the roof, and the drifting smoke from the chimney.

“What do you think?” I said softly, Jemmy’s head beneath my chin, round and warm in its knitted cap. “Will it be yours? Will you live here, and your children after you?”

It would be a very different life, I thought, from the one he might have led. If Brianna had risked the stones to take him back—but she had not, and so the little boy’s fate lay here. Had she thought of that? I wondered. That by staying, she chose not only for herself, but him? Chose war and ignorance, disease and danger, but had risked all that, for the sake of his father—for Roger. I was not entirely sure it had been the right choice—but it hadn’t been my choice to make.

Still, I reflected, there was no way of imagining beforehand what having a child was like—no power of the mind was equal to the knowledge of just what the birth of a child could do, wresting lives and wrenching hearts.

“And a good thing, too,” I said to Jemmy. “No one in their right mind would do it, otherwise.”

My sense of agitation had faded by now, soothed by the wind and the peace of the leafless wood. The whisky clearing, as we called it, was hidden from the trail. Jamie had spent days searching the slopes above the Ridge, before finding a spot that met his requirements.

Or spots, rather. The malting floor was built in a small clearing at the foot of a hollow; the still was farther up the mountain in a clearing of its own, near a small spring that provided fresh, clear water. The malting floor was out of direct sight of the trail, but not difficult to get to.

“No point in hiding it,” Jamie had said, explaining his choice to me, “when anyone wi’ a nose could walk to it blindfolded.”

True enough; even now, when there was no grain actively fermenting in the shed or toasting on the floor, a faintly fecund, smoky scent lingered in the air. When grain was “working,” the musty, pungent scent of fermentation was perceptible at a distance, but when the sprouting barley was spread on the floor above a slow fire, a thin haze of smoke hung over the clearing, and the smell was strong enough to reach Fergus’s cabin, when the wind was right.

No one was at the malting floor now, of course. When a new batch was working, either Marsali or Fergus would be here to tend it, but for the moment, the roofed floor lay empty, smooth boards darkened to gray by use and weather. There was a neat stack of firewood piled nearby, though, ready for use.

I went close enough to see what sort of wood it was; Fergus liked hickory, both because it split more easily, and for the sweet taste it gave the malted grain. Jamie, deeply traditional in his approach to whisky, would use nothing but oak. I touched a chunk of split wood; wide grain, light wood, thin bark. I smiled. Jamie had been here recently, then.

Normally, a small keg of whisky was kept at the malting floor, both for the sake of hospitality and caution. “If someone should come upon the lass alone there, best she have something to give them,” Jamie had said. “It’s known what we do there; best no one should try to make Marsali tell them where the brew is.” It wasn’t the best whisky—generally a very young, raw spirit—but certainly good enough either for uninvited visitors or a teething child.

“You haven’t got any taste buds yet, anyway, so what’s the odds?” I murmured to Jemmy, who stirred and smacked his lips in his sleep, screwing up his tiny face in a scowl.

I hunted about, but there was no sign of the small whisky keg either in its usual place behind the bags of barley or inside the pile of firewood. Perhaps taken away for refilling, perhaps stolen. No great matter, in either case.

I turned to the north, past the malting floor, took ten steps and turned right. The stone of the mountain jutted out here, a solid block of granite thrusting upward from the growth of turpelo and buttonbush. Only it wasn’t solid. Two slabs of stone leaned together, the open crack below them masked by holly bushes. I pulled my shawl over Jemmy’s face to protect him from the sharp-edged leaves, and squeezed carefully behind them, ducking down to go through the cleft.

The stone face fell away in a crumple of huge boulders on the far side of the cleft, with saplings and undergrowth sprouting willy-nilly in the crevices between the rocks. From below, it looked impassable, but from above, a faint trail was visible, threading down to another small clearing. Hardly a clearing; no more than a gap in the trees, where a clear spring bubbled from the rock and disappeared again into the earth. In summer, it was invisible even from above, shielded by the leafy growth of the trees around it.

Now, on the verge of winter, the white glimmer of the rock by the spring was easily visible through the leafless scrim of alder and mountain ash. Jamie had found a large, pale boulder, and rolled it to the head of the spring, where he had scratched the form of a cross upon it, and said a prayer, consecrating the spring to our use. I had thought at the time of making a joke equating whisky with holy water—thinking of Father Kenneth and the baptisms—but had on second thoughts refrained; I wasn’t so sure Jamie would think it a joke.

I made my way cautiously down the slope, the faint trail leading through the boulders, and finally round an outcrop of rock, before debouching into the spring clearing. I was warm from the walking, but it was cold enough to numb my fingers where I gripped the edges of my shawl. And Jamie was standing at the edge of the spring in nothing but his shirt.

I stopped dead, hidden by a scrubby growth of evergreens.

It wasn’t his state of undress that halted me, but rather something in the look of him. He looked tired, but that was only reasonable, since he had been up and gone so early.

The ragged breeks he wore for riding lay puddled on the ground nearby, his belt and its impedimenta neatly coiled beside them. My eye caught a dark blotch of color, half-hidden in the grass beyond; the blue and brown cloth of his hunting kilt. As I watched, he pulled the shirt over his head and dropped it, then knelt down naked by the spring and splashed water over his arms and face.

His clothes were mud-streaked from riding, but he wasn’t filthy, by any means. A simple hand-and-face wash would have sufficed, I thought—and could have been accomplished in much greater comfort by the kitchen hearth.

He stood up, though, and taking the small bucket from the edge of the spring, scooped up cold water and poured it deliberately over himself, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth as it streamed down his chest and legs. I could see his balls draw up tight against his body, looking for shelter as the icy water sluiced through the auburn bush of his pubic hair and dripped off his cock.

“Your grandfather has lost his bloody mind,” I whispered to Jemmy, who stirred and grimaced in his sleep, but took no note of ancestral idiosyncrasies.

I knew Jamie wasn’t totally impervious to cold; I could see him gasp and shudder from where I stood in the shelter of the rock, and I shivered in sympathy. A Highlander born and bred, he simply didn’t regard cold, hunger, or general discomfort as anything to take account of. Even so, this seemed to be taking cleanliness to an extreme.

He took a deep, gasping breath, and poured water over himself a second time. When he bent to scoop up the third bucketful, it began to dawn on me what he was doing.

A surgeon scrubs before operating for the sake of cleanliness, of course, but that isn’t all there is to it. The ritual of soaping the hands, scrubbing the nails, rinsing the skin, repeated and repeated to the point of pain, is as much a mental activity as a physical one. The act of washing oneself in this obsessive way serves to focus the mind and prepare the spirit; one is washing away external preoccupation, sloughing petty distraction, just as surely as one scrubs away germs and dead skin.

I had done it often enough to recognize this particular ritual when I saw it. Jamie was not merely washing; he was cleansing himself, using the cold water not only as solvent but as mortification. He was preparing himself for something, and the notion made a small, cold trickle run down my own spine, chilly as the spring water.

Sure enough, after the third bucketful, he set it down and shook himself, droplets flying from the wet ends of his hair into the dry grass like a spatter of rain. No more than half-dry, he pulled the shirt back over his head, and turned to the west, where the sun lay low between the mountains. He stood still for a moment—very still.

The light streamed through the leafless trees, bright enough that from where I stood, I could see him now only in silhouette, light glowing through the damp linen of his shirt, the darkness of his body a shadow within. He stood with his head lifted, shoulders up, a man listening.

For what? I tried to still my own breathing, and pressed the baby’s capped head gently into my shoulder, to keep him from waking. I listened, too.

I could hear the sound of the woods, a constant soft sigh of needle and branch. There was little wind, and I could hear the water of the spring nearby, a muted rush past stone and root. I heard quite clearly the beating of my own heart, and Jemmy’s breath against my neck, and suddenly I felt afraid, as though the sounds were too loud, as though they might draw the attention of something dangerous to us.

I froze, not moving at all, trying not to breathe, and like a rabbit under a bush, to become part of the wood around me. Jemmy’s pulse beat blue, a tender vein across his temple, and I bent my head over him, to hide it.

Jamie said something aloud in Gaelic. It sounded like a challenge—or perhaps a greeting. The words seemed vaguely familiar—but there was no one there; the clearing was empty. The air felt suddenly colder, as though the light had dimmed; a cloud crossing the face of the sun, I thought, and looked up—but there were no clouds; the sky was clear. Jemmy moved suddenly in my arms, startled, and I clutched him tighter, willing him to make no sound.

Then the air stirred, the cold faded, and my sense of apprehension passed. Jamie hadn’t moved. Now the tension went out of him, and his shoulders relaxed. He moved just a little, and the setting sun lit his shirt in a nimbus of gold, and caught his hair in a blaze of sudden fire.

He took his dirk from its discarded sheath, and with no hesitation, drew the edge across the fingers of his right hand. I could see the thin dark line across his fingertips, and bit my lips. He waited a moment for the blood to well up, then shook his hand with a sudden hard flick of the wrist, so that droplets of blood flew from his fingers and struck the standing stone at the head of the pool.

He laid the dirk beneath the stone, and crossed himself with the blood-streaked fingers of his right hand. He knelt then, very slowly, and bowed his head over folded hands.

I’d seen him pray now and then, of course, but always in public, or at least with the knowledge that I was there. Now he plainly thought himself alone, and to watch him kneeling so, stained with blood and his soul given over, made me feel that I spied on an act more private than any intimacy of the body. I would have moved or spoken, and yet to interrupt seemed a sort of desecration. I kept silent, but found I was no longer a spectator; my own mind had turned to prayer unintended.

Oh, Lord, the words formed themselves in my mind, without conscious thought, I commend to you the soul of your servant James. Help him, please. And dimly thought, but help him with what?

Then he crossed himself, and rose, and time started again, without my having noticed it had stopped. I was moving down the hillside toward him, grass brushing my skirt, with no memory of having taken the first step. I didn’t recall his rising, but Jamie was walking toward me, not looking surprised, but his face filled with light at sight of us.

“Mo chridhe,” he said softly, smiling, and bent to kiss me. His beard stubble was rough and his skin still chilled, fresh with water.

“You’d better put your trousers on,” I said. “You’ll freeze.”

“I’ll do. Ciamar a tha thu, an gille ruaidh?”

To my surprise, Jemmy was awake and drooling, eyes wide blue in a rose-leaf face, all hint of temper gone without a trace. He leaned, twisting to reach for Jamie, who lifted him gently from my arms and cradled him against a shoulder, pulling the woolly cap down snugly over his ears.

“We’re starting a tooth,” I told Jamie. “He wasn’t very comfortable, so I thought perhaps a bit of whisky on his gums . . . there wasn’t any in the house.”

“Oh, aye. We can manage that, I think. There’s a bit in my flask.” Carrying the baby to the spot where his clothes lay, he bent and rummaged one-handed, coming up with the dented pewter flask he carried on his belt.

He sat on a rock, balancing Jemmy on his knee, and handed me the flask to open.

“I went to the mash house,” I said, pulling the cork with a soft pop, “but the cask was gone.”

“Aye, Fergus has it. Here, I’ll do it; my hands are clean.” He held out his left index finger, and I dribbled a bit of the spirit onto it.

“What’s Fergus doing with it?” I asked, settling myself on the rock beside him.

“Keeping it,” he said, uninformatively. He stuck the finger in Jemmy’s mouth, gently rubbing at the swollen gum. “Oh, there it is. Aye, that hurts a bit, doesn’t it? Ouch!” He reached down and gingerly disentangled Jemmy’s fingers from their grip on the hairs of his chest.

“Speaking of that . . .” I said, and reached out to take his right hand. Shifting his other arm to keep hold of Jemmy, he let me take the hand and turn his fingers upward.

It was a very shallow cut, just across the tips of the first three fingers—the fingers with which he had crossed himself. The blood had already clotted, but I dribbled a bit more of the whisky over the cuts and cleaned the smears of blood from his palm with my handkerchief.

He let me tend him in silence, but when I finished and looked up at him, he met my eyes with a faint smile.

“It’s all right, Sassenach,” he said.

“Is it?” I said. I searched his face; he looked tired, but tranquil. The slight frown I had seen between his brows for the last few days was gone. Whatever he was about, he had begun it.

“Ye saw, then?” he asked quietly, reading my own face.

“Yes. Is it—it’s to do with the cross in the dooryard, is it?”

“Oh, in a way, I suppose.”

“What is it for?” I asked bluntly.

He pursed his lips, rubbing gently at Jemmy’s sore gum. At last he said, “Ye never saw Dougal MacKenzie call the clan, did you?”

I was more than startled at this, but answered cautiously.

“No. I saw Colum do it once—at the oath-taking at Leoch.”

He nodded, the memory of that long-ago night of torches deep in his eyes.

“Aye,” he said softly. “I mind that. Colum was chief, and the men would come when he summoned them, surely. But it was Dougal who led them to war.”

He paused a moment, gathering his thoughts.

“There were raids, now and again. That was a different thing, and often no more than a fancy that took Dougal or Rupert, maybe an urge born of drink or boredom—a small band out for the fun of it, as much as for cattle or grain. But to gather the clan for war, all the fighting men—that was a rarer thing. I only saw it the once, myself, but it’s no a sight ye would forget.”

The cross of pinewood had been there when he woke one morning at the castle, surprising him as he crossed the courtyard. The inhabitants of Leoch were up and about their business as usual, but no one glanced at the cross or referred to it in any way. Even so, there were undercurrents of excitement running through the castle.

The men stood here and there in knots, talking in undertones, but when he joined a group, the talk shifted at once to desultory conversation.

“I was Colum’s nephew, aye, but newly come to the castle, and they kent my sire and grandsire.” Jamie’s paternal grandfather had been Simon, Lord Lovat—chief of the Frasers of Lovat, and no great friend of the MacKenzies of Leoch.

“I couldna tell what was afoot, but something was; the hair on my arms prickled whenever I caught someone’s eye.” At last, he had made his way to the stable, and found Old Alec, Colum’s Master of Horse. The old man had been fond of Ellen MacKenzie, and was kind to the son for his mother’s sake, as well as his own.

“’Tis the fiery cross, lad,” he’d told Jamie, tossing him a currycomb and jerking his head toward the stalls. “Ye’ll not ha’ seen it before?”

It was auld, he’d said, one of the ways that had been followed for hundreds of years, no one quite knowing where it had started, who had done it first or why.

“When a Hielan’ chief will call his men to war,” the old man had said, deftly running his gnarled hand through a knotted mane, “he has a cross made, and sets it afire. It’s put out at once, ken, wi’ blood or wi’ water—but still it’s called the fiery cross, and it will be carried through the glens and corries, a sign to the men of the clan to fetch their weapons and come to the gathering place, prepared for battle.”

“Aye?” Jamie had said, feeling excitement hollow his belly. “And who do we fight, then? Where do we ride?”

The old man’s grizzled brow had crinkled in amused approval at that “we.”

“Ye follow where your chieftain leads ye, lad. But tonight, it will be the Grants we go against.”

“It was, too,” Jamie said. “Though not that night. When darkness came, Dougal lit the cross and called the clan. He doused the burnin’ wood wi’ sheep’s blood—and two men rode out of the courtyard wi’ the fiery cross, to take it through the mountains. Four days later, there were three hundred men in that courtyard, armed wi’ swords, pistols, and dirks—and at dawn on the fifth day, we rode to make war on the Grants.”

His finger was still in the baby’s mouth, his eyes distant as he remembered.

“That was the first time I used my sword against another man,” he said. “I mind it well.”

“I expect you do,” I murmured. Jemmy was beginning to squirm and fuss again; I reached across and lifted him into my own lap to check—sure enough, his clout was wet. Luckily, I had another, tucked into my belt for convenience. I laid him out across my knee to change.

“And so this cross in our dooryard . . .” I said delicately, eyes on my work. “To do with the militia, is it?”

Jamie sighed, and I could see the shadows of memory moving behind his eyes.

“Aye,” he said. “Once, I could have called, and the men would come without question—because they were mine. Men of my blood, men of my land.”

His eyes were hooded, looking out over the mountainside that rose up before us. I thought he did not see the wooded heights of the Carolina wilderness, though; rather, the scoured mountains and rocky crofts of Lallybroch. I laid my free hand on his wrist; the skin was cold, but I could feel the heat of him, just below the surface, like a fever rising.

“They came for you—but you came for them, Jamie. You came for them at Culloden. You took them there—and you brought them back.”

Ironic, I thought, that the men who had come then to serve at his summons were for the most part still safe at home in Scotland. No part of the Highlands had been untouched by war—but Lallybroch and its people were for the most part still whole—because of Jamie.

“Aye, that’s so.” He turned to look at me, and a rueful smile touched his face. His hand tightened on mine for a moment, then relaxed, and the line deepened again between his brows. He waved a hand toward the mountains around us.

“But these men—there is no debt of blood between them and me. They are not Frasers; I am not born either laird or chief to them. If they come to fight at my call, it will be of their own will.”

“Well, that,” I said dryly, “and Governor Tryon’s.”

He shook his head at that.

“Nay, not that. Will the Governor ken which men are here, or which ones come to meet his summons?” He grimaced slightly. “He kens me—and that will do nicely.”

I had to admit the truth of this. Tryon would neither know nor care whom Jamie brought—only that he appeared, with a satisfactory number of men behind him, ready to do the Governor’s dirty work.

I pondered that for a moment, patting Jemmy’s bottom dry with the hem of my skirt. All I knew of the American Revolution were the things I had heard at second hand from Brianna’s schoolbooks—and I, of all people, knew just how great the gap could be between written history and the reality.

Also, we had lived in Boston, and the schoolbooks naturally reflected local history. The general impression one got from reading about Lexington and Concord and the like was that the militia involved every able-bodied man in the community, all of whom sprang into action at the first hint of alarm, eager to perform their civic duty. Perhaps they did, perhaps not—but the Carolina backcountry wasn’t Boston, not by a long chalk.

“. . . ready to ride and spread the alarm,” I said, half under my breath, “to every Middlesex village and farm.”

“What?” Jamie’s brows shot up. “Where’s Middlesex?”

“Well, you’d think it was halfway between male and female,” I said, “but it’s really just the area round Boston. Though of course that’s named after the one in England.”

“Yes?” he said, looking bewildered. “Aye, if ye say so, Sassenach. But—”

“Militia.” I lifted Jemmy, who was bucking and squirming like a landed fish, making noises of extreme protest at being forcibly diapered. He kicked me in the stomach. “Oh, give over, child, do.”

Jamie reached over and took the baby under the arms, hoisting him from my lap.

“Here, I’ll have him. Does he need more whisky?”

“I don’t know, but at least he can’t squawk if your finger’s in his mouth.” I relinquished Jemmy with some relief, returning to my train of thought.

“Boston’s been settled for more than a hundred years, even now,” I said. “It has villages and farms—and the farms aren’t all that far from the villages. People have been living there for a long time; everyone knows each other.”

Jamie was nodding patiently at each of these startling revelations, trusting that I would eventually come to some point. Which I did, only to discover that it was the same point he’d been making to me.

“So when someone musters militia there,” I said, suddenly seeing what he’d been telling me all along, “they come, because they’re accustomed to fighting together to defend their towns and because no man would want to be thought a coward by his neighbors. But here . . .” I bit my lip, contemplating the soaring mountains all around us.

“Aye,” he said, nodding, seeing the realization dawn in my face. “It’s different here.”

There was no settlement large enough to be called a town within a hundred miles, save the German Lutherans at Salem. Bar that, there was nothing in the backcountry but scattered homesteads; sometimes a place where a family had settled and spread, brothers or cousins building houses within sight of one another. Small settlements and distant cabins, some hidden in the mountain hollows, screened by laurels, where the residents might not see another white face for months—or years—at a time.

The sun had sunk below the angled slope of the mountain, but the light still lingered, a brief wash of color that stained the trees and rocks gold around us and flushed the distant peaks with blue and violet. There were living creatures in that cold, brilliant landscape, I knew, habitations nearby and warm bodies stirring; but so far as the eye could see, nothing moved.

Mountain settlers would go without question to help a neighbor—because they might as easily require such help themselves at any moment. There was, after all, no one else to turn to.

But they had never fought for a common purpose, had nothing in common to defend. And to abandon their homesteads and leave their families without defense, in order to serve the whim of a distant governor? A vague notion of duty might compel a few; a few would go from curiosity, from restlessness, or in the vague hope of gain. But most would go only if they were called by a man they respected; a man that they trusted.

I am not born either laird or chief to them, he’d said. Not born to them, no—but born to it, nonetheless. He could, if he wished, make himself chief.

“Why?” I asked softly. “Why will you do it?” The shadows were rising from the rocks, slowly drowning the light.

“Do you not see?” One eyebrow lifted as he turned his head to me. “Ye told me what would happen at Culloden—and I believed ye, Sassenach, fearful as it was. The men of Lallybroch came home safe as much because of you as because of me.”

That was not entirely true; any man who had marched to Nairn with the Highland army would have known that disaster lay somewhere ahead. Still . . . I had been able to help in some small way, to make sure that Lallybroch was prepared, not only for the battle, but its aftermath. The small weight of guilt that I always felt when I thought of the Rising lifted slightly, easing my heart.

“Well, perhaps. But what—”

“Ye’ve told me what will happen here, Sassenach. You and Brianna and MacKenzie, all three. Rebellion, and war—and this time . . . victory.”

Victory. I nodded numbly, remembering what I knew of wars and the cost of victory. It was, however, better than defeat.

“Well, then.” He stooped to pick up his dirk, and gestured with it to the mountains around us. “I have sworn an oath to the Crown; if I break it in time of war, I am a traitor. My land is forfeit—and my life—and those who follow me will share my fate. True?”

“True.” I swallowed, hugging my arms tight around me, wishing I still held Jemmy. Jamie turned to face me, his eyes hard and bright.

“But the Crown willna prevail, this time. Ye’ve told me. And if the King is overthrown—what then of my oath? If I have kept it, then I am traitor to the rebel cause.”

“Oh,” I said, rather faintly.

“Ye see? At some point, Tryon and the King will lose their power over me—but I dinna ken when that may be. At some point, the rebels will hold power—but I dinna ken when that may be. And in between . . .” He tilted the point of his dirk downward.

“I do see. A very tidy little cleft stick,” I said, feeling somewhat hollow as I realized just how precarious our situation was.

To follow Tryon’s orders now was plainly the only choice. Later, however . . . for Jamie to continue as the Governor’s man into the early stages of the Revolution was to declare himself a Loyalist—which would be fatal, in the long run. In the short run, though, to break with Tryon, forswear his oath to the King, and declare for the rebels . . . that would cost him his land, and quite possibly his life.