An Echo in the Bone, Page 72

  space. Narrow red-rimmed eyes glared up at me out of a round face streaked with soot and grime.

  “Get off!” she snarled. “I found ’im first!” It was a knife in her hand; she made little jabbing motions at me, in an effort to drive me away.

  I was too furious—and too afraid for Jamie—to be scared for myself.

  “Let go of him! Touch him and I’ll kill you!” I said. My fists were clenched, and I must have looked as though I meant it, for the woman flinched back, loosing her hold on Jamie’s hair.

  “He’s mine,” she said, thrusting her chin pugnaciously at me. “Go find yourself another.”

  Another form slipped out of the mist and materialized by her side. It was the boy I had seen earlier, filthy and scruffy as the woman herself. He had no knife but clutched a crude metal strip, cut from a canteen. The edge of it was dark, with rust or blood.

  He glared at me. “He’s ours, Mum said! Get on wi’ yer! Scat!”

  Not waiting to see whether I would or not, he flung a leg over Jamie’s back, sat on him, and began to grope in the side pockets of his coat.

  “ ’E’s still alive, Mum,” he advised. “I can feel ’is ’eart beatin’. Best slit his throat quick; I don’t think ’e’s bad hurt.”

  I grabbed the boy by the collar and jerked him off Jamie’s body, making him drop his weapon. He squealed and flailed at me with arms and elbows, but I kneed him in the rump, hard enough to jar his backbone, then got my elbow locked about his neck in a stranglehold, his skinny wrist vised in my other hand.

  “Leave him go!” The woman’s eyes narrowed like a weasel’s, and her eye-teeth shone in a snarl.

  I didn’t dare take my eyes away from the woman’s long enough to look at Jamie. I could see him, though, at the edge of my vision, head turned to the side, his neck gleaming white, exposed and vulnerable.

  “Stand up and step back,” I said, “or I’ll choke him to death, I swear I will!”

  She crouched over Jamie’s body, knife in hand, as she measured me, trying to make up her mind whether I meant it. I did.

  The boy struggled and twisted in my grasp, his feet hammering against my shins. He was small for his age, and thin as a stick, but strong nonetheless; it was like wrestling an eel. I tightened my hold on his neck; he gurgled and quit struggling. His hair was thick with rancid grease and dirt, the smell of it rank in my nostrils.

  Slowly, the woman stood up. She was much smaller than I, and scrawny with it—bony wrists stuck out of the ragged sleeves. I couldn’t guess her age—under the filth and the puffiness of malnutrition, she might have been anything from twenty to fifty.

  “My man lies yonder, dead on the ground,” she said, jerking her head at the fog behind her. “ ’E hadn’t nothing but his musket, and the sergeant’ll take that back.”

  Her eyes slid toward the distant wood, where the British troops had retreated. “I’ll find a man soon, but I’ve children to feed in the meantime—two besides the boy.” She licked her lips, and a coaxing note entered her voice. “You’re alone; you can manage better than we can. Let me have this one—there’s more over there.” She pointed with her chin toward the slope behind me, where the rebel dead and wounded lay.

  My grasp must have loosened slightly as I listened, for the boy, who had hung quiescent in my grasp, made a sudden lunge and burst free, diving over Jamie’s body to roll at his mother’s feet.

  He got up beside her, watching me with rat’s eyes, beady-bright and watchful. He bent and groped about in the grass, coming up with the makeshift dagger.

  “Hold ’er off, Mum,” he said, his voice raspy from the choking. “I’ll take ’im.”

  From the corner of my eye, I had caught the gleam of metal, half buried in the grass.

  “Wait!” I said, and took a step back. “Don’t kill him. Don’t.” A step to the side, another back. “I’ll go, I’ll let you have him, but…” I lunged to the side and got my hand on the cold metal hilt.

  I had picked up Jamie’s sword before. It was a cavalry sword, larger and heavier than the usual, but I didn’t notice now.

  I snatched it up and swung it in a two-handed arc that ripped the air and left the metal ringing in my hands.

  Mother and son jumped back, identical looks of ludicrous surprise on their round, grimy faces.

  “Get away!” I said.

  Her mouth opened, but she didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry for your man,” I said. “But my man lies here. Get away, I said!” I raised the sword, and the woman stepped back hastily, dragging the boy by the arm.

  She turned and went, muttering curses at me over her shoulder, but I paid no attention to what she said. The boy’s eyes stayed fixed on me as he went, dark coals in the dim light. He would know me again—and I him.

  They vanished in the mist, and I lowered the sword, which suddenly weighed too much to hold. I dropped it on the grass and fell to my knees beside Jamie.

  My own heart was pounding in my ears and my hands were shaking with reaction, as I groped for the pulse in his neck. I turned his head and could see it, throbbing steadily just below his jaw.

  “Thank God!” I whispered to myself. “Oh, thank God!”

  I ran my hands over him quickly, searching for injury before I moved him. I didn’t think the scavengers would come back; I could hear the voices of a group of men, distant on the ridge behind me—a rebel detail coming to fetch the wounded.

  There was a large knot on his brow, already turning purple. Nothing else that I could see. The boy had been right, I thought, with gratitude; he wasn’t badly hurt. Then I rolled him onto his back and saw his hand.

  Highlanders were accustomed to fight with sword in one hand, targe in the other, the small leather shield used to deflect an opponent’s blow. He hadn’t had a targe.

  The blade had struck him between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand and sliced through the hand itself, a deep, ugly wound that split his palm and the body of his hand, halfway to the wrist.

  Despite the horrid look of the wound, there wasn’t much blood; the hand had been curled under him, his weight acting as a pressure bandage. The front of his shirt was smeared with red, deeply stained over his heart. I ripped open his shirt and felt inside, to be sure that the blood was from his hand, but it was. His chest was cool and damp from the grass but unscathed, his nipples shrunken and stiff with chill.

  “That… tickles,” he said in a drowsy voice. He pawed awkwardly at his chest with his left hand, trying to brush my hand away.

  “Sorry,” I said, repressing the urge to laugh with the joy of seeing him alive and conscious. I got an arm behind his shoulders and helped him to sit up. He looked drunk, with one eye swollen half shut and grass in his hair. He acted drunk, too, swaying alarmingly from side to side.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Sick,” he said succinctly. He leaned to the side and threw up.

  I eased him back on the grass and wiped his mouth, then set about bandaging his hand.

  “Someone will be here soon,” I assured him. “We’ll get you back to the wagon, and I can take care of this.”

  “Mmphm.” He grunted slightly as I pulled the bandage tight. “What happened?”

  “What happened?” I stopped what I was doing and stared at him. “You’re asking me?”

  “What happened in the battle, I mean,” he said patiently, regarding me with his one good eye. “I know what happened to me—roughly,” he added, wincing as he touched his forehead.

  “Yes, roughly,” I said rudely. “You got yourself chopped like a butchered hog, and your head half caved in. Being a sodding bloody hero again, that’s what happened to you!”

  “I wasna—” he began, but I interrupted, my relief over seeing him alive being rapidly succeeded by rage.

  “You didn’t have to go to Ticonderoga! You shouldn’t have gone! Stick to the writing and the printing, you said. You weren’t going to fight unless you had to, you said. Well, you didn’t
have to, but you did it anyway, you vain glorious, pigheaded, grandstanding Scot!”

  “Grandstanding?” he inquired.

  “You know just what I mean, because it’s just what you did! You might have been killed!”

  “Aye,” he agreed ruefully. “I thought I was, when the dragoon came down on me. I screeched and scairt his horse, though,” he added more cheerfully. “It reared up and got me in the face with its knee.”

  “Don’t change the subject!” I snapped.

  “Is the subject not that I’m not killed?” he asked, trying to raise one brow and failing, with another wince.

  “No! The subject is your stupidity, your bloody selfish stubbornness!”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that! You—you—oaf! How dare you do that to me? You think I haven’t got anything better to do with my life than trot round after you, sticking pieces back on?” I was frankly shrieking at him by this time.

  To my increased fury, he grinned at me, his expression made the more rakish by the half-closed eye.

  “Ye’d have been a good fishwife, Sassenach,” he observed. “Ye’ve the tongue for it.”

  “You shut up, you fucking bloody—”

  “They’ll hear you,” he said mildly, with a wave toward the party of Continental soldiers making their way down the slope toward us.

  “I don’t care who hears me! If you weren’t already hurt, I’d—I’d—”

  “Be careful, Sassenach,” he said, still grinning. “Ye dinna want to knock off any more pieces; ye’ll only have to stick them back on, aye?”

  “Don’t bloody tempt me,” I said through my teeth, with a glance at the sword I had dropped.

  He saw it and reached for it, but couldn’t quite manage. With an explosive snort, I leaned across his body and grabbed the hilt, putting it in his hand. I heard a shout from the men coming down the hill and turned to wave at them.

  “Anyone hearing ye just now would likely think ye didna care for me owermuch, Sassenach,” he said, behind me.

  I turned to look down at him. The impudent grin was gone, but he was still smiling.

  “Ye’ve the tongue of a venemous shrew,” he said, “but you’re a bonnie wee swordsman, Sassenach.”

  My mouth opened, but the words that had been so abundant a moment before had all evaporated like the rising mist.

  He laid his good hand on my arm. “For now, a nighean donn—thank ye for my life.”

  I closed my mouth. The men had nearly reached us, rustling through the grass, their exclamations and chatter drowning out the ever-fainter moans of the wounded.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  “HAMBURGER,” I SAID under my breath, but not far enough under. He raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Chopped meat,” I elaborated, and the eyebrow fell.

  “Oh, aye, it is. Stopped a sword stroke wi’ my hand. Too bad I didna have a targe; I could have turned the stroke, easy.”

  “Right.” I swallowed. It wasn’t the worst injury I’d seen, by a long shot, but it still made me slightly sick. The tip of his fourth finger had been sheared off cleanly, at an angle just below the nail. The stroke had sliced a strip of flesh from the inside of the finger and ripped down between the third and fourth fingers.

  “You must have caught it near the hilt,” I said, trying for calm. “Or it would have taken off the outside half of your hand.”

  “Mmphm.” The hand didn’t move as I prodded and poked, but there was sweat on his upper lip, and he couldn’t keep back a brief grunt of pain.

  “Sorry,” I murmured automatically.

  “It’s all right,” he said, just as automatically. He closed his eyes, then opened them.

  “Take it off,” he said suddenly.

  “What?” I drew back and looked at him, startled.

  He nodded at his hand.

  “The finger. Take it off, Sassenach.”

  “I can’t do that!” Even as I spoke, though, I knew that he was right. Aside from the injuries to the finger itself, the tendon was badly damaged; the chances of his ever being able to move the finger, let alone move it without pain, were infinitesimal.

  “It’s done me little good in the last twenty years,” he said, looking at the mangled stump dispassionately, “and likely to do no better now. I’ve broken the damned thing half a dozen times, from its sticking out like it does. If ye take it off, it willna trouble me anymore, at least.”

  I wanted to argue, but there was no time; wounded men were beginning to drift up the slope toward the wagon. The men were militia, not regular army; if there was a regiment near, there might be a surgeon with them, but I was closer.

  “Once a frigging hero, always a frigging hero,” I muttered under my breath. I thrust a wad of lint into Jamie’s bloody palm and wrapped a linen bandage swiftly around the hand. “Yes, I’ll have to take it off, but later. Hold still.”

  “Ouch,” he said mildly. “I did say I wasna a hero.”

  “If you aren’t, it isn’t for lack of trying,” I said, yanking the linen knot tight with my teeth. “There, that will have to do for now; I’ll see to it when I have time.” I grabbed the wrapped hand and plunged it into the small basin of alcohol and water.

  He went white as the alcohol seeped through the cloth and struck raw flesh. He inhaled sharply through his teeth, but didn’t say anything more. I pointed peremptorily at the blanket I had spread on the ground, and he lay back obediently, curling up under the shelter of the wagon, bandaged fist cradled against his breast.

  I rose from my knees, but hesitated for a moment. Then I knelt again and hastily kissed the back of his neck, brushing aside the queue of his hair, matted with half-dried mud and dead leaves. I could just see the curve of his cheek; it tightened briefly as he smiled and then relaxed.

  Word had spread that the hospital wagon was there; there was already a straggling group of walking wounded awaiting attention, and I could see men carrying or half-dragging their injured companions toward the light of my lantern. It was going to be a busy evening.

  Colonel Everett had promised me two assistants, but God knew where the colonel was at the moment. I took a moment to survey the gathering crowd and picked out a young man who had just deposited a wounded friend beneath a tree.

  “You,” I said, tugging on his sleeve. “Are you afraid of blood?”

  He looked momentarily startled, then grinned at me through a mask of mud and powder smoke. He was about my height, broad-shouldered and stocky, with a face that might have been called cherubic had it been less filthy.

  “Only if it’s mine, ma’am, and so far it ain’t, Lord be praised.”

  “Then come with me,” I said, smiling back. “You’re now a triage aide.”

  “Say what? Hey, Harry!” he yelled to his friend. “I been promoted. Tell your mama next time you write, Lester done amounted to something, after all!” He swaggered after me, still grinning.

  The grin rapidly faded into a look of frowning absorption as I led him quickly among the wounded, pointing out degrees of severity.

  “Men pouring blood are the first priority,” I told him. I thrust an armful of linen bandages and a sack of lint into his hands. “Give them these—tell their friends to press the lint hard on the wounds or put a tourniquet round the limb above the wound. You know what a tourniquet is?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” he assured me. “Put one on, too, when a panther clawed up my cousin Jess, down to Caroline County.”

  “Good. Don’t spend time doing it yourself here unless you have to, though—let their friends do it. Now, broken bones can wait a bit—put them over there under that big beech tree. Head injuries and internal injuries that aren’t bleeding, back there, by the chestnut tree, if they can be moved. If not, I’ll go to them.” I pointed behind me, then turned in a half circle, surveying the ground.

  “If you see a couple of whole men, send them up to put up the hospital tent; it’s to go in that flattish spot, there. And then a couple more, to dig a latr
ine trench … over there, I think.”

  “Yes, sir! Ma’am, I mean!” Lester bobbed his head and took a firm grip on his sack of lint. “I be right after it, ma’am. Though I wouldn’t worry none about the latrines for a while,” he added. “Most of these boys already done had the shit scairt out of ’em.” He grinned and bobbed once more, then set out on his rounds.

  He was right; the faint stink of feces hung in the air as it always did on battlefields, a low note amid the pungencies of blood and smoke.

  With Lester sorting the wounded, I settled down to the work of repair, with my medicine box, suture bag, and bowl of alcohol set on the wagon’s tailboard and a keg of alcohol for the patients to sit on—provided they could sit.

  The worst of the casualties were bayonet wounds; luckily there had been no grapeshot, and the men hit by cannonballs were long past the point where I could help them. As I worked, I listened with half an ear to the conversation of the men awaiting attention.

  “Wasn’t that the damnedest thing ye ever saw? How many o’ the buggers were there?” one man was asking his neighbor.

  “Damned if I know,” his friend replied, shaking his head. “For a space there, ever’thing I saw was red, and nothin’ but. Then a cannon went off right close, and I didn’t see nothin’ but smoke for a good long time.” He rubbed at his face; tears from watering eyes had made long streaks in the black soot that covered him from chest to forehead.

  I glanced back at the wagon but couldn’t see under it. I hoped shock and fatigue had enabled Jamie to sleep, in spite of his hand, but I doubted it.

  Despite the fact that nearly everyone near me was wounded in some fashion, their spirits were high and the general mood was one of exuberant relief and exultation. Farther down the hill, in the mists near the river, I could hear whoops and shouts of victory and the undisciplined racket of fifes and drums, rattling and screeching in random exhilaration.

  Among the noise, a nearer voice called out: a uniformed officer, on a bay horse.

  “Anybody seen that big redheaded bastard who broke the charge?”

  There was a murmur and a general looking around, but no one answered. The horseman dismounted and, wrapping his reins over a branch, made his way through the throng of wounded toward me.

  “Whoever he is, I tell you, he’s got balls the size of ten-pound shot,” remarked the man whose cheek I was stitching.

  “And a head of the same consistency,” I murmured.

  “Eh?” He glanced sideways at me in bewilderment.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Hold still just a moment longer; I’m nearly done.”

  IT WAS A HELLISH night. Some of the wounded still lay in the ravines and hollows, as did all the dead. The wolves that came silently out of the wood did not distinguish between them, judging from the distant screams.

  It was nearly dawn before I came back to the tent where Jamie lay. I lifted the flap quietly, so as not to disturb him, but he was already awake, lying curled on his side facing the flap, head resting on a folded blanket.

  He smiled faintly when he saw me.

  “A hard night, Sassenach?” he asked, his voice slightly hoarse from cold air and disuse. Mist seeped under the edge of the flap, tinted yellow by the lantern light.

  “I’ve had worse.” I smoothed the hair off his face, looking him over carefully. He was pale but not clammy. His face was drawn with pain, but his skin was cool to the touch—no trace of fever. “You haven’t slept, have you? How do you feel?”

  “A bit scairt,” he said. “And a bit sick. But better now you’re here.” He gave me a one-sided grimace that was almost a smile.

  I put a hand under his jaw, fingers pressed against the pulse in his neck. His heart bumped steadily under my fingertips, and I shivered briefly, remembering the woman in the field.

  “You’re chilled, Sassenach,” he said, feeling it. “And tired, too. Go and sleep, aye? I’ll do a bit longer.”

  I was tired. The adrenaline of the battle and the night’s work was fading fast; fatigue was creeping down my spine and loosening my joints. But I had a good idea of what the hours of waiting had cost him already.

  “It won’t take long,” I reassured him. “And it will be better to have it over. Then you can sleep easy.”

  He nodded, though he didn’t look noticeably reassured. I unfolded the small worktable I had carried in from the operating tent and set it up in easy reach. Then I took out the precious bottle of laudanum and poured an inch of the dark, odorous liquid into a cup.