Drums of Autumn, Page 39

  “Oh?” I hoped this wasn’t a sinister thing for me to have done.

  “The white raven flew back, and laid an egg in the palm of her hand. The egg split open, and there was a shining stone inside. My husband’s grandmother knew this was great magic, that the stone could heal sickness.”

  Nayawenne nodded her head several times, and taking the amulet bag from her neck, reached into it.

  “On the day after the dream, my husband’s grandmother went to dig kinnea root, and on the way, she saw something blue, sticking in the clay of the riverbank.”

  Nayawenne drew out a small, lumpy object, and dropped it into my hand. It was a pebble; rough, but undeniably a gemstone. Bits of stony matrix clung to it, but the heart of the rock was a deep, soft blue.

  “My goodness—it’s a sapphire, isn’t it?”

  “Sapphire?” Gabrielle turned the word over in her mouth, tasting it. “We call it…” She hesitated, looking for the proper French translation. “…pierre sans peur.”

  “Pierre sans peur?” A fearless stone?

  Nayawenne nodded, talking again. Berthe butted in with the translation, before her mother could speak.

  “My father’s grandmother says a stone like this, it keeps people from being afraid, and so it makes their spirit strong, so they will be healed more easily. Already, this stone has healed two people of fever, and cured a soreness of the eyes that my younger brother had.”

  “My husband’s grandmother wishes to thank you for this gift.” Gabrielle neatly took back the conversation.

  “Ah…do tell her she’s quite welcome.” I nodded cordially at the old lady, and gave her back the blue stone. She popped it into the bag and drew the string tight about its neck. Then she peered closely at me, and reaching out, drew down a curl of my hair, talking as she rubbed the lock between her fingers.

  “My husband’s grandmother says that you have medicine now, but you will have more. When your hair is white like hers, that is when you will find your full power.”

  The old lady dropped the lock of hair, and looked into my eyes for a moment. I thought I saw an expression of great sadness in the faded depths, and reached involuntarily to touch her.

  She stepped back and said something else. Gabrielle looked at me queerly.

  “She says you must not be troubled; sickness is sent from the gods. It won’t be your fault.”

  I looked at Nayawenne, startled, but she had already turned away.

  “What won’t be my fault?” I asked, but the old lady refused to say more.

  21

  NIGHT ON A SNOWY MOUNTAIN

  December 1767

  The winter held off for some time, but snow began to fall in the night on November 28, and we woke to find the world transformed. Every needle on the great blue spruce behind the cabin was frosted, and ragged fringes of ice dripped from the tangle of wild raspberry canes.

  The snow wasn’t deep, but its coming changed the shape of daily life. I no longer foraged during the day, save for short trips to the stream for water, and for lingering bits of green cress salvaged from the icy slush along the banks. Jamie and Ian ceased their work of log felling and field clearing, and turned to roof shingling. The winter drew in on us, and we in turn withdrew from the cold, turning inward.

  We had no candles; only grease lamps and rushlights, and the light of the fire that burned constantly on the hearth, blackening the roof beams. We therefore rose at first light, and lay down after supper, in the same rhythm as the creatures of the forest around us.

  We had no sheep yet, and thus no wool to card or spin, no cloth to weave or dye. We had no beehives yet, and thus no wax to boil, no candles to dip. There was no stock to care for, save the horses and mules and the piglet, who had grown considerably in both size and irascibility, and in consequence been exiled to a private compartment in the corner of the crude stable Jamie had built—this itself no more than a large open-fronted shelter with a branch-covered roof.

  Myers had brought a small but useful selection of tools, the iron parts clanking in a bag, to be supplied with wooden handles from the forest close at hand: a barking ax and another felling ax, a plowshare for the spring planting, augers, planes and chisels, a small grass scythe, two hammers and a handsaw, a peculiar thing called a “twibil” that Jamie said was for cutting mortises, a “drawknife”—a curved blade with handles at either end, used to smooth and taper wood—two small sharp knives, a hatchet-adze, something that looked like a medieval torture device but was really a nail-header, and a froe for splitting shingles.

  Between them, Jamie and Ian had succeeded in getting a roof on the cabin before snow fell, but the sheds were less important. A block of wood sat constantly by the fire, the froe stuck through it, ready for anyone with an idle moment to strike off a few more shingles. That corner of the hearth was in fact devoted to wood carving; Ian had made a rough but serviceable stool, which sat under one of the windows for good light, and the shavings could all be tossed thriftily into the fire, which burned day and night.

  Myers had brought a few woman’s tools for me, as well: a huge sewing basket, well supplied with needles, pins, scissors, and balls of thread, and lengths of linen, muslin, and woven wool. While sewing was not my favorite occupation, I was nonetheless delighted to see these, since owing to Jamie and Ian’s constantly lurching through thickets and crawling about on the roofs, the knees, elbows, and shoulders of all their garments were in constant disrepair.

  “Another one!” Jamie sat bolt upright in bed beside me.

  “Another what?” I asked sleepily, opening one eye. It was very dark in the cabin, the fire burnt to coals on the hearth.

  “Another bloody leak! It hit me in the ear, damn it!” He sprang out of bed, went to the fire and thrust in a stick of wood. Once it was alight, he brought it back and stood on the bedstead, thrusting his torch upward as he glowered at the roof in search of the fiendish leak.

  “Urmg?” Ian, who slept on a low trundle bed, rolled over and groaned inquiringly. Rollo, who insisted on sharing it with him, emitted a brief “uff,” relapsed into a heap of gray fur, and resumed his loud snoring.

  “A leak,” I told Ian, keeping a narrow eye on Jamie’s torch. I wasn’t having my precious feather bed set alight by stray sparks.

  “Oh.” Ian lay with an arm across his face. “Has it snowed again?”

  “It must have.” The windows were covered with squares of oiled deerhide, tacked down, and there was no sound from outside, but the air had the peculiar muffled quality that came with snow.

  Snow came silently, and mounded on the roof, then, beginning to melt from the warmth of the shingles underneath, would drip down the slope of the roof, to leave a gleaming portcullis of icicles along the eaves. Now and then, though, the roaming water found a split in a shingle, or a join where the overlapping edges had warped, and drips poked their icy fingers through the roof.

  Jamie regarded all such intrusions as a personal affront, and brooked no delay in dealing with them.

  “Look!” he exclaimed. “There it is. See it?”

  I shifted my glassy gaze from the hairy ankles in front of my nose, to the roof overhead. Sure enough, the torchlight revealed the black line of a split in one shingle, with a spreading dark patch of dampness on the underside. As I watched, a clear drop formed, glistening red in the torchlight, and fell with a plop onto the pillow beside me.

  “We could shift the bed a bit,” I suggested, though with no particular hope. I had been through this before. All suggestions that repair work could wait till daylight were met with astonished refusal; no proper man, I was given to understand, would countenance such a thing.

  Jamie stepped down off the bedstead and prodded Ian in the ribs with his foot.

  “Get up and knock at the spot where the split is, Ian. I’ll deal with it on the outside.” Seizing a fresh shingle, a hammer, a hatchet, and a bag of nails, he headed for the door.

  “Don’t you go up on the roof in that!” I exclaimed, sitting
up abruptly. “That’s your good woolen shirt!”

  He halted by the door, glared briefly at me, then, with the rebuking expression of an early Christian martyr, laid down his tools, stripped off the shirt, dropped it on the floor, picked up the tools, and strode majestically out to deal with the leak, buttocks clenched with determined zeal.

  I rubbed a hand over my sleep-puffed face and moaned softly to myself.

  “He’ll be all right, Auntie,” Ian assured me. He yawned widely, not bothering to cover his mouth, and reluctantly rolled out of his own warm bed.

  Thumps on the roof that were definitely not the feet of eight tiny reindeer announced that Jamie was in place. I rolled out of the way and got up, resigned, as Ian mounted the bedstead and jabbed a stick of firewood upward into the damp patch, jarring the shingles enough for Jamie to locate the leak on the outside.

  A short period of rending and banging followed, as the defective shingle was yanked loose and replaced, and the leak was summarily extinguished, leaving no more evidence of its existence than the small heap of snow that had fallen in through the hole left by the removed shingle.

  Back in bed, Jamie curled his freezing body around me, clasped me to his icy bosom, and fell promptly asleep, full of the righteous satisfaction of a man who has defended hearth and home against all threat.

  * * *

  It was a fragile and tenuous foothold that we had upon the mountain—but a foothold, for all that. We had not much meat—there had been little time for hunting, beyond squirrel and rabbit, and those useful rodents had gone to their winter rest by now—but a fair amount of dried vegetables, from yams to squash to wild onions and garlic, plus a bushel or two of nuts, and the small stock of herbs I had managed to gather and dry. It made for a sparse diet, but with careful management, we could survive till spring.

  With few chores to do outside, there was time to talk, to tell stories, and to dream. Between the useful objects like spoons and bowls, Jamie took time to carve the pieces of a wooden chess set, and spent a good deal of his time trying to inveigle me or Ian into playing with him.

  Ian and Rollo, who both suffered badly from cabin fever, took to visiting Anna Ooka frequently, sometimes going on extended hunting trips with young men from the village, who were pleased to have the benefit of his and Rollo’s company.

  “The lad speaks the Indian tongue a great deal better than he does Greek or Latin,” Jamie observed with some dourness, watching Ian exchanging cordial insults with an Indian companion as they left on one such excursion.

  “Well, if Marcus Aurelius had written about tracking porcupines, I expect he’d have found a more eager audience,” I replied soothingly.

  Dearly as I loved Ian, I was myself not displeased by his frequent absence. There were definitely times when three was a crowd.

  There is nothing more delightful in life than a feather bed and an open fire—except a feather bed with a warm and tender lover in it. When Ian was gone, we would not trouble with rushlights but would go to bed with the dark, and lie curled together in shared warmth, talking late into the night, laughing and telling stories, sharing our pasts, planning our future, and somewhere in the midst of the talking, pausing to enjoy the wordless pleasures of the present.

  “Tell me about Brianna.” These were Jamie’s favorite stories; the tales of Brianna as a child. What she had said and worn and done; how she had looked, all her accomplishments and her tastes.

  “Did I tell you about the time I was invited to her school, to talk about being a doctor?”

  “No.” He shifted to make himself more comfortable, rolling onto his side and fitting himself to my shape behind. “Why should you do that?”

  “It was what they called Career Day; the schoolteachers invited a lot of people with different jobs to come and explain what they did, so the children would have some idea of what a lawyer does, for instance, or a firefighter—”

  “I should think that one would be fairly obvious.”

  “Hush. Or a veterinarian—that’s a doctor who treats animals—or a dentist, that’s a special doctor who deals only with teeth—”

  “With teeth? What can ye do to a tooth, besides pull it?”

  “You’d be surprised.” I brushed the hair out of my face and up off my neck. “Anyway, they’d always ask me to come, because it wasn’t at all common for a woman to be a doctor then.”

  “Ye think it’s common now?” He laughed, and I kicked him lightly in the shin.

  “Well, it got more common rather soon after that. But at the time, it wasn’t. And when I’d got done speaking and asked if there were any questions, an obnoxious little boy piped up and said that his mother said women who worked were no better than prostitutes, and they ought to be home minding their families, instead of taking jobs away from men.”

  “I shouldna think his mother can have met many prostitutes.”

  “No, I don’t imagine. Nor all that many women with jobs, either. But when he said that, Brianna stood up and said in a very loud voice, ‘Well, you’d better be glad my mama’s a doctor, because you’re going to need one!’ Then she hit him on the head with her arithmetic book, and when he lost his balance and fell down, she jumped on his stomach and punched him in the mouth.”

  I could feel his chest and stomach quivering against my back.

  “Oh, braw lassie! Did the schoolmaster not tawse her for it, though?”

  “They don’t beat children in school. She had to write a letter of apology to the little beast, but then, he had to write one to mem, and she thought that was a fair exchange. The more embarrassing part was that it turned out his father was a doctor too; one of my colleagues at the hospital.”

  “I wouldna suppose you’d taken a job he’d wanted?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “Mmm.” His breath was warm and ticklish on the back of my neck. I reached back and stroked the length of a long, hairy thigh, enjoying the hollow and swell of the muscle.

  “Ye said she was at a university, and studying history, like Frank Randall. Did she never want to be a doctor, like you?” A large hand cupped my bottom and began to knead it gently.

  “Oh, she did when she was little—I used to take her to the hospital now and then, and she was fascinated by all the equipment; she loved to play with my stethoscope and the otoscope—a thing you look in ears with—but then she changed her mind. She changed it a dozen times, at least; most children do.”

  “They do?” This was a novel thought to him. Most children of the time would simply adopt the professions of their parents—or perhaps be apprenticed to learn one chosen for them.

  “Oh, yes. Let me see…she wanted to be a ballerina for a while, like most little girls. That’s a dancer who dances on her toes,” I explained, and he laughed in surprise. “Then she wanted to be a garbageman—that was after our garbageman gave her a ride in his truck—and then a deep-sea diver, and a mailman, and—”

  “What in God’s name is a deep-sea diver? Let alone a garbageman?”

  By the time I had finished a brief catalog of twentieth-century occupations, we were facing each other, our legs twined comfortably together, and I was admiring the way his nipple stiffened to a tiny bump under the ball of my thumb.

  “I never was sure whether she really wanted to read history, or whether she did it mostly to please Frank. She loved him so much—and he was so proud of her.” I paused, thinking, as his hand played down the length of my back.

  “She started taking history classes at the university when she was still in high school—I told you how the school system works? And then when Frank died…I rather think she went ahead with history because she thought he would have wanted it.”

  “That’s loyal.”

  “Yes.” I ran my hand up through his hair, feeling the solid, rounded bones of his skull, and his scalp under my fingers. “Can’t think where she got that particular trait from.”

  He snorted briefly and gathered me closer.

  “Can’t you?” W
ithout waiting for an answer, he went on, “If she goes on wi’ the history—d’ye think she’ll find us? Written down somewhere, I mean.”

  The thought had honestly not occurred to me, and for a moment I lay quite still. Then I stretched a bit, and laid my head on his shoulder with a small laugh, not altogether humorous.

  “I shouldn’t think so. Not unless we were to do something newsworthy.” I gestured vaguely toward the cabin wall, and the endless wilderness outside. “Not much chance of that here, I don’t imagine. And she’d have to be deliberately looking, in any case.”

  “Would she?”

  I was silent for a moment, breathing the musky, deep scent of him.

  “I hope not,” I said quietly, at last. “She should have her own life—not spend her time looking back.”

  He didn’t respond directly to this, but took my hand and eased it between us, sighing as I took hold of him.

  “Ye’re a verra intelligent woman, Sassenach, but shortsighted, forbye. Though perhaps it’s only modesty.”

  “And what makes you say that?” I asked, mildly piqued.

  “The lassie’s loyal, ye said. She’ll have loved her father enough to shape her life to do as he would have wanted, even after he’s dead. D’ye think she loved you less?”

  I turned my head, and let the piled hair fall down over my face.

  “No,” I said at last, voice muffled in the pillow.

  “Well, then.” He took me by the hips and turned me, rolling slowly on top of me. We didn’t speak anymore, then, as the melting boundaries of our bodies disappeared.

  It was slow, dreamy and peaceful, his body and mine as much as mine was his, so that I curled my foot round his leg and felt both smooth sole and hairy shin, felt callused palm and tender flesh, was knife and sheath together, the rhythm of our movement that of one heart beating.

  The fire crackled softly to itself, casting red and yellow highlights on the wooden walls of our snug refuge, and we lay in quiet peace, not bothering to sort out whose limbs were whose. On the very verge of sleep, I felt Jamie’s breath, warm on my neck.

  “She’ll look,” he said, with certainty.

  * * *

  There was a brief thaw two days later, and Jamie—suffering slightly from cabin fever himself—decided to take advantage of it to go hunting. There was still snow on the ground, but it was thin and patchy; the going would be easy enough on the slopes, he thought.

  I wasn’t so sure as I scooped snow into a basket for melting, later in the morning. The snow under the bushes still lay thick, though it had indeed melted on the exposed ground. I hoped he was right, though—our food supplies were low, and we had had no meat at all for more than a week; even the snares Jamie kept set had been buried under the snow.

  I took my snow inside and tipped it into the large cauldron, feeling, as I always did, rather like a witch.

  “ ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’ ” I muttered, watching the white clumps hiss and fade into the roiling liquid.

  I had one large cauldron, filled with water, which bubbled constantly on the fire. This was not only the basic supply for washing but the means of cooking everything that could not be grilled, fried, or roasted. Stews and things to be boiled were put into hollow gourds or stoneware jars, sealed, and lowered on strings into the bubbling depths, to be hauled out at intervals for checking. By this means, I could cook an entire meal in the one pot, and have hot water for washing afterward.

  I dumped a second basket of snow into a wooden bowl and left it to melt more slowly; drinking water for the day. Then, with nothing of great urgency to do, I sat down to read Daniel Rawlings’s casebook and mend stockings, my toes comfortably toasting by the fire.

  At first, I didn’t worry when Jamie didn’t come back. That is, I did worry—I always worried when he was gone for long—but in a small and secret way that I succeeded for the most part in hiding from myself. When the shadows on the snow turned violet with the sinking sun, though, I began to listen for him with an increasing intensity.

  I went about my work in constant expectation of the crunch of his footsteps, listening for a shout, ready to run out and lend a hand if he had brought back a turkey for plucking or some more or less edible thing in need of cleaning. I fed and watered the mules and horses, looking always up the mountain. As the afternoon light died around me, though, the expectation faded into hope.

  It was growing chilly in the cabin, and I went out for more wood. It couldn’t be much past four o’clock, I thought, and yet the shadows under the huckleberry bushes were already cold and blue. Another hour, and it would be dusk; it would be full dark in two.

  The woodpile was dusted with snow, the outer logs damp. By pulling a chunk of hickory from the side, though, I could reach inside and extract dry splits—being always mindful of snakes, skunks, and anything else that might have sought shelter in the hollow thus provided.

  I sniffed, then bent and peered cautiously inside, and as a final precaution poked a long stick inside and stirred it briefly round. Hearing no scuffles, slitherings, or other sounds of alarm, I reached inside with confidence, and groped until my fingers encountered the deep-ridged grain of a chunk of fat pine. I wanted a hot, quick-burning fire tonight; after a full day spent hunting in snow, Jamie would be chilled through.

  Fat pine for the heart of the fire, then, and three small chunks of