Drums of Autumn, Page 32

  Because I can’t stay awake to look after you. Are you going to faint and fall headfirst into the fire?”

  Jamie patted me absently on the head.

  “I’ll be fine now, Sassenach,” he said. Restored by food and whisky, he seemed to be suffering no lingering ill effects from his battle with the bear. What he’d feel like in the morning was another question, I thought.

  I was beyond worrying about that, or anything else, though; my head was spinning from the effects of adrenaline, whisky and tobacco, and I crawled off to fetch my blanket. Curled up by Jamie’s feet, I drifted drowsily off to sleep, surrounded by the sacred fumes of smoke and liquor, and watched by the dull, sticky eyes of the bear.

  “Know just how you feel,” I told it, and then was gone.

  16

  THE FIRST LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

  I was awakened abruptly just after dawn by a tiny stinging sensation on top of my head. I blinked and put up a hand to investigate. The movement startled a large gray jay who had been pulling hairs out of my head, and he shot up into a nearby pine tree, screeching hysterically.

  “Serve you right, mate,” I muttered, rubbing the top of my head, but couldn’t help smiling. I had been told often enough that my hair looked like a bird’s nest first thing in the morning; perhaps there was something to it, after all.

  The Indians were gone. Luckily, the bear’s head had gone with them. I felt my own head with ginger fingers, but aside from the small sting of the jay’s depredations, it seemed intact. Either it had been remarkably good whisky, or my sense of intoxication had been due more to the effects of adrenaline and tobacco than to alcohol.

  My comb was in the small deerskin pouch where I kept personal necessities and those few medicines I thought might be useful on the trail. I sat up carefully, so as not to wake Jamie. He lay a short distance away on his back, hands crossed, peaceful as the carved effigy on a sarcophagus.

  A lot more colorful, though. He lay in the shade, a creeping patch of sunshine sneaking up on him, barely touching the ends of his hair. In the fresh, cool light, he looked like Adam, newly touched by his Creator’s hand.

  Rather a battered Adam, though; on closer inspection, this was a snap taken well after the Fall. Not the fragile perfection of a child born of clay, nor yet the unused beauty of the youth God loved. No, this one was a man full-formed and powerful; each line of face and body marked with strength and struggle, made to take hold of the world he would wake to, and subdue it.

  I moved very quietly, reaching for my pouch. I didn’t want to wake him; the opportunity to watch him sleep came rarely. He slept like a cat, ready to spring up at any intimation of threat, and he normally rose from his bed at first light, while I was still floating on the surface of my dreams. Either he had drunk more than I thought last night, or he was in the deep sleep of healing, letting his body mend itself as he lay still.

  The horn comb slid soothingly through my hair. For once, I wasn’t in a hurry. There was no baby to feed, no child to rouse and dress for school, no work waiting. No patients to see, no paperwork to do.

  Nothing could be farther from the sterile confines of a hospital than this place, I thought. Early birds in search of worms were making a cheerful racket in the forest, and a cool, soft breeze blew through the clearing. I smelt a faint whiff of dried blood, and the stale ashes from last night’s fire.

  Perhaps it was the scent of blood that had made me remember the hospital. From the moment I first walked into one, I had known it to be my sphere, my natural place. And yet I was not out of place, here in the wild-wood. I thought that odd.

  The ends of my hair brushed my naked shoulder blades with a pleasant, tickling feel, and the air was cool enough that the small breeze made my skin ripple with gooseflesh, my nipples standing up in tiny puckers. So I hadn’t imagined it, I thought, with an inward smile. I certainly hadn’t taken my own clothes off before retiring.

  I pushed back the thick linen blanket, and saw the flecks of dried blood, smears on my thighs and belly. I felt dampness ooze between my legs, and drew a finger between them. Milky, with a musky scent not my own.

  That was enough to bring back the shadow of the dream—or what I had thought must be one; the great bulk of the bear looming over me, darker than the night and reeking of blood, a rush of terror that kept my dream—heavy limbs from moving. My lying limp, pretending death, as he nudged and nuzzled, breath hot on my skin, fur soft on my breasts, gentleness amazing for a beast.

  Then that one sharp moment of consciousness; of cold, then hot, as bare skin, not bearskin, touched my own, and then the dizzy slide back into drunken dreaming, the slow and forceful coupling, climax fading into sleep…with a soft Scottish growling in my ear.

  I looked down and saw the strawberry crescent of a bite mark on my shoulder.

  “No wonder you’re still asleep,” I said in accusation. The sun had touched the curve of his cheek, lighting the eyebrow on that side like a match touched to kindling. He didn’t open his eyes, but a slow, sweet smile spread across his face in answer.

  * * *

  The Indians had left us a portion of the bear meat, tidily wrapped in oiled skin and hung from the branches of a nearby tree to discourage the attentions of skunks and raccoons. After breakfast and a hasty bath in the creek, Jamie took his bearings by sun and mountain.

  “That way,” he said, nodding toward a distant blue peak. “See where it makes a notch wi’ the shorter one? On the other side, it’s the Indians’ land; the new Treaty Line follows that ridge.”

  “Someone actually surveyed through there?” I peered unbelievingly at the vista of saw-toothed mountain ranges rising from valleys filled with morning mist. The mountains rose ahead of us like an endless series of floating mirages, fading from black-green to blue to purple, the farthest peaks etched black and needle-sharp against a crystal sky.

  “Oh, aye.” He swung up into his saddle, turning his horse’s head so the sun fell over his shoulder. “They had to, to say for sure which land could be taken for settling. I made sure of the boundary before we left Wilmington, and Myers said the same—this side of the highest ridge. I did think to ask the fellows who dined with us last night, though, only to be sure they thought so, too.” He grinned down at me. “Ready, Sassenach?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” I assured him, and turned my horse to follow.

  He had rinsed out his shirt—or what was left of it—in the stream. The stained rag of linen was spread out to dry behind his saddle, leaving him half-naked in leather riding breeks, his plaid wrapped carelessly round his waist. The long scratches left by the bear’s attack were black across his fair skin, but there was no visible inflammation, and from the ease with which he moved in the saddle, the wounds seemed not to trouble him.

  Neither did anything else, so far as I could see. The tinge of wariness he always bore was still with him; it had been part of him since boyhood—but some weight had lifted in the night. I thought perhaps it was our meeting with the three hunters; this first encounter with savages had been vastly reassuring to us both, and seemed substantially to have eased Jamie’s visions of tomahawk-wielding cannibals behind every tree.

  Or it might be the trees themselves—or the mountains. His spirits had grown lighter with every foot upward from the coastal plain. I couldn’t help sharing his apparent joy—but at the same time, felt a growing dread of what that joy might lead to.

  By midmorning the slopes had grown too thickly forested to ride any farther. Looking up a nearly vertical rock face into a dizzying tangle of dark branches, sparked with gold and green and brown, I was inclined to think the horses were lucky to be stopping at the bottom. We hobbled them near a stream, thick with grass along its edge, and plunged in on foot, onward and upward, ever deeper into the bloody Forest Primeval.

  Towering pines and hemlocks, was it? I thought, clambering over the burled knots of a fallen tree. The monstrous trunks rose so high that the lowest limbs started twenty feet above my head. Longfellow had
no idea.

  The air was damp, cool but fecund, and my moccasins sank soundlessly into centuries-thick black leaf mold. My own footprint in the soft mud of a stream bank seemed strange and sudden as a dinosaur’s track.

  We reached the top of a ridge, only to find another before us, and another beyond. I did not know what we might be looking for, or how we would know if we found it. Jamie covered miles with his tireless hill-walker’s stride, taking in everything. I tagged behind, enjoying the scenery, pausing now and then to gather some fascinating plant or root, stowing my treasures in the bag at my belt.

  We made our way along the back of one ridge, only to find our way blocked by a great heath bald: a patch of mountain laurel that looked from a distance like a shiny bare patch among the dark conifers, but closer to, proved to be an impenetrable thicket, its springy branches interwoven like a basket.

  We backtracked, and turned downward, out from under the huge fragrant firs, across slopes of wild timothy and muhly grass that had gone bright yellow in the sun, and at last back into the soothing green of oak and hickory, on a wooded bluff that overlooked a small and nameless river.

  It was cool under the trees’ sudden shade, and I sighed in relief, lifting the hair off my neck to admit a breath of air. Jamie heard me and turned, smiling, holding back a limber branch so that I could follow him.

  We didn’t talk much; aside from the breath required for climbing, the mountain itself seemed to inhibit speech; full of secret green places, it was a vivid offspring of the ancient Scottish mountains, thick with forest, and twice the height of those barren black parental crags. Still, its air held the same injunction to silence, the same promise of enchantment.

  The ground here was covered in a foot-deep layer of fallen leaves, soft and spongy underfoot, and the spaces between the trees seemed illusionary, as though to pass between those huge, lichened trunks might transport one suddenly to another dimension of reality.

  Jamie’s hair sparked in the occasional shafts of sunlight, a torch to follow through the shadows of the wood. It had darkened somewhat over the years, to a deep, rich auburn, but the long days of riding and walking in the sun had bleached his crown to copper fire. He had lost the thong that bound his hair; he paused, and brushed the thick damp locks back from his face, so that I saw the startling streak of white just above one temple. Normally hidden among the darker red, it showed rarely—a legacy of the bullet wound received in the cave of Abandawe.

  Despite the warmth of the day, I shivered slightly in recollection. I would greatly have preferred to forget Haiti and its savage mysteries altogether, but there was little hope of that. Sometimes, on the verge of sleep, I would hear the voice of the cave-wind, and the nagging echo of the thought that came in its wake: Where else?

  We climbed a granite ledge, thick with moss and lichen, wet with the omnipresent flow of water, then followed the path of a descending freshet, brushing aside long grass that pulled at our legs, dodging the drooping branches of mountain laurel and the thick-leaved rhododendrons.

  Wonders sprang up by my feet, small orchids and brilliant fungi, trembling and shiny as jellies, shimmering red and black on fallen tree trunks. Dragonflies hung over the water, jewels immobile in the air, vanishing in mist.

  I felt dazed with abundance, ravished by beauty. Jamie’s face bore the dream-stunned look of a man who knows himself sleeping, but does not wish to wake. Paradoxically, the better I felt, the worse I felt, too; desperately happy—and desperately afraid. This was his place, and surely he felt it as well as I.

  In early afternoon we stopped to rest and drink from a small spring at the edge of a natural clearing. The ground beneath the maple trees was covered with a thick carpet of dark green leaves, among which I caught a sudden telltale flash of red.

  “Wild strawberries!” I said with delight.

  The berries were dark red and tiny, about the size of my thumb joint. By the standards of modern horticulture, they would have been too tart, nearly bitter, but eaten with a meal consisting of half-cooked cold bear meat and rock-hard corn dodgers, they were delicious—fresh explosions of flavor in my mouth; pinpricks of sweetness on my tongue.

  I gathered handfuls in my cloak, not caring for stains—what was a little strawberry juice among the stains of pine pitch, soot, leaf smudges and simple dirt? By the time I had finished, my fingers were sticky and pungent with juice, my stomach was comfortably full, and the inside of my mouth felt as though it had been sandpapered, from the tartly acid taste of the berries. Still, I couldn’t resist reaching for just one more.

  Jamie leaned his back against a sycamore, eyelids half lowered against the dazzle of afternoon sun. The little clearing held light like a cup, still and limpid.

  “What d’ye think of this place, Sassenach?” he asked.

  “I think it’s beautiful. Don’t you?”

  He nodded, looking down between the trees, where a gentle slope full of wild hay and timothy fell away and rose again in a line of willows that fringed the distant river.

  “I am thinking,” Jamie said, a little awkwardly. “There is the spring here in the wood. That meadow below—” He waved a hand toward the scrim of alders that screened the ridge from the grassy slope. “It would do for a few beasts at first, and then the land nearer the river might be cleared and put in crops. The rise of the land here is good for drainage. And here, see…” Caught by visions, he rose to his feet, pointing.

  I looked carefully; to me, the place seemed little different from any of the steep wooded slopes and grassy coves through which we had wandered for the last couple of days. But to Jamie, with his farmer’s eye, houses and stock pens and fields sprang up like fairy mushrooms in the shadows of the trees.

  Happiness was sticking out all over him, like porcupine quills. My heart felt like lead in my chest.

  “You’re thinking we might settle here, then? Take the Governor’s offer?”

  He looked at me, stopping abruptly in his speculations.

  “We might,” he said. “If—”

  He broke off and looked sideways at me. Sun-reddened as he was, I couldn’t tell whether he was flushed with sun or shyness.

  “D’ye believe in signs at all, Sassenach?”

  “What sorts of signs?” I asked guardedly.

  In answer, he bent, plucked a sprig from the ground, and dropped it into my hand—the dark green leaves like small round Chinese fans, a pure white flower on a slender stem, and on another a half-ripe berry, its shoulders pale with shade, blushing crimson at the tip.

  “This. It’s ours, d’ye see?” he said.

  “Ours?”

  “The Frasers’, I mean,” he explained. One large, blunt finger gently prodded the berry. “Strawberries ha’ always been the emblem of the clan—it’s what the name meant, to start with, when a Monsieur Fréselière came across from France wi’ King William that was—and took hold of land in the Scottish mountains for his trouble.”

  King William that was. William the Conqueror, that was. Perhaps not the oldest of the Highland clans, the Frasers had still a distinguished heritage.

  “Warriors from the start, were you?”

  “And farmers, too.” The doubt in his eyes was fading into a smile.

  I didn’t say what I was thinking, but I knew well enough that the thought must lie in his mind as well. There was no more of clan Fraser save scattered fragments, those who had survived by flight, by stratagem or luck. The clans had been smashed at Culloden, their chieftains slaughtered in battle or murdered by law.

  Yet here he stood, tall and straight in his plaid, the dark steel of a Highland dirk by his side. Warrior and farmer both. And if the soil beneath his feet was not that of Scotland, it was free air that he breathed—and a mountain wind that stirred his hair, lifting copper strands to the summer sun.

  I smiled up at him, fighting back my growing dismay.

  “Fréselière, eh? Mr. Strawberry? He grew them, did he, or was he only fond of eating them?”

  “Either
or both,” he said dryly, “or it was maybe only that he was redheided, aye?”

  I laughed, and he hunkered down beside me, unpinning his plaid.

  “It’s a rare plant,” he said, touching the sprig in my open hand. “Flowers, fruit and leaves all together at the one time. The white flowers are for honor, and red fruit for courage—and the green leaves are for constancy.”

  My throat felt tight as I looked at him.

  “They got that one right,” I said.

  He caught my hand in his own, squeezing my fingers around the tiny stem.

  “And the fruit is the shape of a heart,” he said softly, and bent to kiss me.

  The tears were near the surface; at least I had a good excuse for the one that oozed free. He dabbed it away, then stood up and pulled his belt loose, letting the plaid fall in folds around his feet. Then he stripped off shirt and breeks and smiled down at me, naked.

  “There’s no one here,” he said. “No one but us.”

  I would have said this seemed no reason, but I felt what it was he meant. We had been for days surrounded by vastness and threat, the wilderness no farther away than the pale circle of our fire. Yet here, we were alone together, part and parcel of the place, with no need in broad daylight to hold the wilderness at bay.

  “In the old days, men would do this, to give fertility to the fields,” he said, giving me a hand to rise.

  “I don’t see any fields.” And wasn’t sure whether to hope I never would. Nonetheless, I skimmed off my buckskin shirt, and pulled loose the knot of my makeshift brassiere. He eyed me with appreciation.

  “Well, no doubt I shall have to cut down a few trees first, but that can wait, aye?”

  We made a bed of plaid and cloaks, and lay down upon it naked, skin to skin among the yellow grasses and the scent of balsam and wild strawberries.

  We touched each other for what might have been a very long time or no time at all, together in the garden of earthly delight. I forced away the thoughts that had plagued me up the mountain, determined only to share his joy for as long as it lasted. I grasped him tight and he breathed in deep and pressed himself hard into my hand.

  “And what would Eden be without a serpent?” I murmured, fingers stroking.

  His eyes creased into blue triangles, so close I could see the black of his pupils.

  “And will ye eat wi’ me, then, mo chridhe? Of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil?”

  I put out the tip of my tongue and drew it along his lower lip in answer. He shivered under my fingers, though the air was warm and sweet.

  “Je suis prest,” I said. “Monsieur Fréselière.”

  His head bent and his mouth fastened on my nipple, swollen as one of the tiny ripe berries.

  “Madame Fréselière,” he whispered back. “Je suis à votre service.”

  And then we shared the fruit and flowers, and the green leaves covering all.

  * * *

  We lay tangled in drowsiness, stirring only to bat away inquisitive insects, until the first shadows touched our feet. Jamie rose quietly, and covered me with a cloak, thinking me asleep. I heard the stealthy rustle as he dressed himself, and then the soft swish of his passage through the grass.

  I rolled over, and saw him a little distance away, standing at the edge of the wood, looking out over the fall of land toward the river.

  He wore nothing but his plaid, crumpled and blood-stained, belted round his waist. With his hair unbound and tangled round his shoulders, he looked the wild Highlander he was. What I had thought a trap for him—his family, his clan—was his strength. And what I had thought my strength—my solitude, my lack of ties—was my weakness.

  Having known closeness, both its good and its bad, he had the strength to leave it, to step away from all notions of safety and venture out alone. And I—so proud of self-sufficiency at one time—could not bear the thought of loneliness again.

  I had resolved to say nothing, to live in the moment, to accept whatever came. But the moment was here, and I could not accept it. I saw his head lift in decision, and at the same moment, saw his name carved in cold stone. Terror and despair washed over me.

  As though he had heard the echo of my unspoken cry, he turned his head toward me. Whatever he saw in my face brought him swiftly to my side.

  “What is it, Sassenach?”

  There was no point in lying; not when he could see me.

  “I’m afraid,” I blurted out.

  He glanced quickly round for danger, one hand reaching for his knife, but I stopped him with a hand on his arm.

  “Not that. Jamie—hold me. Please.”

  He gathered me close against him, wrapping the cloak around me. I was shivering, though the air was still warm.

  “It’s all right, a nighean donn,” he murmured. “I’m here. What’s frightened ye, then?”

  “You,” I said, and clung tight. His heart thumped just under my ear, strong and steady. “Here. It makes me afraid to think of you here, of us coming here—”

  “Afraid?” he asked. “Of what, Sassenach?” His arms tightened around me. “I did say when we were wed that I would always see ye fed, no?” He pulled me closer, tucking my head into the curve of his shoulder.