Drums of Autumn, Page 44

  was still strong in my nostrils, though—it wasn’t part of the dream.

  I poked my head out of my burrow like a snail cautiously emerging from its shell. The sky was a pale purple-gray, shot with streaks of orange over the mountains. The woods around me were still, and dripping. It was nearly sundown, and darkness was gathering in the hollows.

  I crawled out all the way, and looked around. The creek at my back rushed past in full spate, its gurgling the only sound. The ground rose in front of me to a small ridge. At the top of this stood a large balsam poplar tree, the source of the smoke. The tree had been struck by lightning; half of it still bore green leaves, the canopy bushy against the pale sky. The other half was blackened and charred all down one side of the massive trunk. Wisps of white smoke rose from it like ghosts escaping an enchanter’s bondage, and red lines of fire showed fleetingly, glowing beneath the blackened shell.

  I looked about for my shoes, but couldn’t find them in the shadows. Not bothering, I made my way up the ridge toward the blasted tree, panting with effort. All my muscles were stiffened with sleep and cold; I felt like a tree come awkwardly to life myself, stumping uphill on gnarled and clumsy roots.

  It was warm near the tree. Blissfully, wonderfully warm. The air smelled of ash and burnt soot, but it was warm. I stood as close as I dared, spreading my cloak out wide, and stood still, steaming.

  For some time I didn’t even try to think; just stood there, feeling my chilled flesh thaw and soften again into something resembling humanity. But as my blood began to flow again, my bruises began to ache, and I felt the deeper ache of hunger as well; it had been a long time since breakfast.

  Likely to be a lot longer time till supper, I thought grimly. The dark was creeping up from the hollow, and I was still lost. I glanced across to the opposite ridge; not a sign of the bloody horse.

  “Traitor,” I muttered. “Probably gone off to join a herd of elk or something.”

  I chafed my hands together; my clothes were halfway dry, but the temperature was dropping; it would be a chilly night. Would it be better to spend the night here, in the open, near the blasted tree, or ought I to return to my burrow while I could still see to do so?

  A snapping in the brush behind me decided me. The tree had cooled now; though the charred wood was still hot to the touch, the fire had burned out. It would be no deterrent to prowling night hunters. Lacking fire or weapons, my only defense was that of the hunted; lie hidden through the dark hours, like the mice and rabbits. Well, I had to go back to fetch my shoes anyway.

  Reluctantly leaving the last vestiges of warmth, I made my way back down to the fallen tree. Crawling in, I saw a pale blur against the darker earth in the corner. I set my hand on it, and found not the softness of my buckskin moccasins, but something hard and smooth.

  My instincts had grasped the reality of the object before my brain could retrieve the word, and I snatched my hand away. I sat for a moment, my heart pounding. Then curiosity overcame atavistic fear, and I began to scoop away the sandy loam around it.

  It was indeed a skull, complete with lower jaw, though the mandible was attached only by the remnants of dried ligament. A fragment of broken vertebra rattled in the foramen magnum.

  “ ‘How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?’ ” I murmured, turning the skull over in my hands. The bone was cold and damp, slightly roughened by exposure to the damp. The light was too dim to see details, but I could feel the heavy ridges over the brows, and the slickness of smooth enamel on the canines. Likely a man, and not an old one; most of the teeth were present, and not unduly worn—at least insofar as I could tell with a groping thumb.

  How long? Eight or nine year, the grave-digger said to Hamlet. I had no notion whether Shakespeare knew anything about forensics, but it seemed a reasonable estimate to me. Longer than nine years, then.

  How had he come here? By violence, my instincts answered, though my brain was not far behind. An explorer might die of disease, hunger or exposure—I firmly suppressed that line of thought, trying to ignore my growling stomach and damp clothes—but he wouldn’t end up buried under a tree.

  The Cherokee and Tuscarora buried their dead, all right, but not like this, alone in a hollow. And not in fragments, either. It was that broken bit of vertebra that had told me the story at once; the edges were compressed, the broken face sheared clean, not shattered.

  “Somebody took a real dislike to you, didn’t they?” I said. “Didn’t stop with a scalp; they took your whole head.”

  Which made me wonder—was the rest of him here, too? I rubbed a hand across my face, thinking, but after all, I had nothing better to do; I wasn’t going anywhere before daylight, and the likelihood of sleep had grown remote with the discovery of my companion. I set the skull carefully to one side, and began to dig.

  It was fully night by now, but even the darkest of nights outdoors is seldom completely without light. The sky was still covered with cloud, which reflected considerable light, even in my shallow burrow.

  The sandy earth was soft, and easy to dig in, but after a few minutes of scratching, my knuckles and fingertips were rubbed raw, and I crawled outside, long enough to find a stick to dig with. A little more probing yielded me something hard; not bone, I thought, and not metal, either. Stone, I decided, fingering the dark oval. Just a river stone? I thought not; the surface was very smooth, but with something incised in it; a glyph of some kind, though my touch was not sufficiently sensitive to tell me what it was.

  More digging yielded nothing. Either the rest of Yorick wasn’t here, or it was buried so far down that I had no chance of discovering it. I put the stone in my pocket, sat back on my heels, and rubbed my sandy hands on my skirts. At least the exercise had warmed me again.

  I sat down again and picked up the skull, holding it in my lap. Gruesome as it was, it was the semblance of company, some distraction from my own plight. And I was quite aware that all my actions of the last hour or so had been distractions; designed to fight off the panic that I could feel submerged below the surface of my mind, waiting to erupt like the sharp end of a drowned tree branch. It was going to be a long night.

  “Right,” I said aloud to the skull. “Read any good books lately? No, I suppose you don’t get round much anymore. Poetry, maybe?” I cleared my throat and started in on Keats, warming up with “Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition” and going on with “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

  “ ‘…Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!’ ” I declaimed. “There’s more of that one, but I forget. Not too bad, though, was it? Want to try a little Shelley? ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is good—you’d like that one, I think.”

  It occurred to me to wonder why I thought so; I had no particular reason to think Yorick was an Indian rather than a European, but I realized that I did think so—perhaps it was the stone I had found with him. Shrugging, I set in again, trusting that the repellent effect of great English poetry would be the equal of a campfire, so far as the bears and panthers were concerned.

  “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

  What if my leaves are falling like its own!

  The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

  Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

  Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

  My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

  “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

  Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth;

  And, by the incantation of this verse,

  “Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth

  Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

  Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

  “The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind…”

  The final stanza faded on my lips. There was a light on the ridge. A small spark, growing to a flame. At first I thought it was the lightning-blasted tree, some smoldering ember come to life—but then it moved. It glided slowly down the hill toward me, floating just above the
bushes.

  I sprang to my feet, realizing only then that I had no shoes on. Frantically, I groped about the floor, covering the small space again and again. But it was no use. My shoes were gone.

  I seized the skull and stood barefoot, turning to face the light.

  * * *

  I watched the light come nearer, drifting down the hill like a milkweed puff. One thought floated in my paralyzed mind—a random line of Shelley’s: Fiend, I defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind. Somewhere in the dimmer recesses of my consciousness, something observed that Shelley had had much better nerves than I. I clutched the skull closer. It wasn’t much of a weapon—but somehow I didn’t think that whatever was coming would be deterred by knives or pistols, either.

  It wasn’t only that the wet surroundings made it seem grossly improbable that anyone was strolling through the woods with a blazing torch. The light didn’t burn like a pine torch or oil lantern. It didn’t flicker, but burned with a soft, steady glow.

  It floated a few feet above the ground, just about where someone would hold a torch they carried before them. It drew slowly nearer, at the pace of a man walking. I could see it bob slightly, moving to the rhythm of a steady stride.

  I cowered in my burrow, half hidden by the bank of earth and severed roots. I was freezing cold, but sweat ran down my sides and I could smell the reek of my own fear. My numb toes curled in the dirt, wanting to run.

  I had seen St. Elmo’s fire before, at sea. Eerie as that was, its liquid blue crackle didn’t resemble at all the pale light approaching. This had neither spark nor color; only a spectral glow. Marsh gas, people in Cross Creek said when the mountain lights were mentioned.

  Ha, I said to myself, though soundlessly. Marsh gas my left foot!

  The light moved through a small thicket of alders, and out into the clearing before me. It wasn’t marsh gas.

  He was tall, and he was naked. Beyond a breechclout, he wore nothing but paint; long stripes of red down arms and legs and torso, and his face was solid black, from chin to forehead. His hair was greased and dressed in a crest, from which two turkey feathers stiffly pointed.

  I was invisible, completely hidden in the darkness of my refuge, while the torch he held washed him in soft light, gleaming off his hairless chest and shoulders, shadowing the orbits of his eyes. But he knew I was there.

  I didn’t dare to move. My breath sounded painfully loud in my ears. He simply stood there, perhaps a dozen feet away, and looked straight into the dark where I was, as though it were the broadest day. And the light of his torch burned steady and soundless, pallid as a corpse candle, the wood of it not consumed.

  I don’t know how long I had been standing there before it occurred to me that I was no longer afraid. I was still cold, but my heart had slowed to its normal pace, and my bare toes had uncurled.

  “Whatever do you want?” I said, and only then realized that we had been in some sort of communication for some time. Whatever this was, it had no words. Nothing coherent passed between us—but something passed, nonetheless.

  The clouds had lifted, shredding away before a light wind, and dark streaks of starlit sky showed through rents in the racing cirrus. The wood was quiet, but in the usual way of a drenched night-wood; the creaks and sighs of tall trees moving, the rustle of shrubs brushed by the wind’s restless edge, and in the background the constant rush of invisible water, echoing the turbulence of the air above.

  I breathed deeply, feeling suddenly very much alive. The air was thick and sweet with the breath of green plants, the tang of herbs and musk of dead leaves, overlaid and interlaced with the scents of the storm—wet rock, damp earth, and rising mist, and a sharp hint of ozone, sudden as the lightning that had struck the tree.

  Earth and air, I thought suddenly, and fire and water too. And here I stood with all the elements; in their midst and at their mercy.

  “What do you want?” I said again, feeling helpless. “I can’t do anything for you. I know you’re there; I can see you. But that’s all.”

  Nothing moved, no words were spoken. But quite clearly the thought formed in my mind, in a voice that was not my own.

  That’s enough, it said.

  Without haste, he turned and walked away. By the time he had gone two dozen paces, the light of his torch disappeared, fading into nonexistence like the final glow of twilight into night.

  “Oh,” I said, a little blankly. “Goodness.” My legs were trembling, and I sat down, the skull—which I had almost forgotten—cradled in my lap.

  I sat there for a long time, watching and listening, but nothing further happened. The mountains surrounded me, dark and impenetrable. Perhaps in the morning, I could find my way back to the trail, but for now, wandering about in darkness could lead to nothing but disaster.

  I was no longer afraid; my fear had left me during my encounter with—whatever it was. I was still cold, though, and very, very hungry. I put down the skull and curled myself up beside it, pulling my damp cloak around me. It took a long time to fall asleep, and I lay in my chilly burrow watching the evening stars wheel overhead through rifts in the cloud.

  I tried to make sense of the last half hour, but there was really nothing to make sense of; nothing, really, had happened. And yet it had; he had been there. The sense of him remained with me, somehow vaguely comforting, and at last I fell asleep, cheek pillowed on a clump of dead leaves.

  I dreamt uneasily, because of cold and hunger; a procession of disjoint images. Lightning-blasted trees, blazing like torches. Trees uprooted from the earth, walking on their roots with a dreadful lurching gait.

  Lying in the rain with my throat cut, warm blood pulsing down across my chest, a queer comfort to my chilling flesh. My fingers numb, unable to move. The rain striking my skin like hail, each cold drop a hammer blow, and then the rain itself seemed warm, and soft upon my face. Buried alive, black soil showering down into open eyes.

  I woke, heart pounding. Lay silent. It was deep night now; the sky stretched clear and endless overhead, and I lay in a bowl of darkness. After a time, I slept again, pursued by dreams.

  Wolves howling in the distance. Fleeing panicked through a forest of white aspen that stood in snow, the trees’ red sap glowing like bloody jewels on white-paper trunks. A man standing in the bleeding trees with his head plucked bald, save a standing crest of black, greased hair. He had deep eyes and a shattered smile, and the blood on his breast was brighter than the tree sap.

  Wolves, much closer. Howling and barking and the scent of blood hot in my own nose, running with the pack, running from the pack. Running. Harefooted, white-toothed, and the ghost of blood a taste in my mouth, a tingle in my nose. Hunger. Chase and catch and kill and blood. Heart hammering, blood racing, sheer panic of the hunted.

  I felt my armbone crack with a noise like a dry branch snapping, and tasted marrow warm and salty, slippery on my tongue.

  Something brushed my face and I opened my eyes. Great yellow eyes stared into mine, from the dark ruff of a white-toothed wolf. I screamed and struck at it and the beast started back with a startled “Woof!”

  I floundered to my knees and crouched there, gibbering. It had just gone daybreak. The dawning light was new and tender, and showed me plainly the huge black outline of…Rollo.

  “Oh, Jesus God, what the bloody hell are you doing here, frigging bloody horrible…filthy beast!” I might eventually have gotten a grip on myself, but Jamie got one first.

  Big hands pulled me up and out of my hiding place, held me tight and patted me anxiously, checking for damage. The wool of his plaid was soft against my face; it smelt of wet and lye soap and his own male scent and I breathed it in like oxygen.

  “Are ye all right? For God’s sake, Sassenach, are ye all right?”

  “No,” I said. “Yes,” I said, and started to cry.

  It didn’t last long; it was no more than the shock of relief. I tried to say as much, but Jamie wasn’t listening. He scooped me up in his arms, filthy as I was, and began to carr
y me toward the small stream.

  “Hush, then,” he said, squeezing me tightly against him. “Hush, mo chridhe. It’s all right now; you’re safe.”

  I was still fuddled with cold and dreams. Alone so long with no voice but my own, his sounded odd, unreal and hard to understand. The warm solidness of his grasp was real, though.

  “Wait,” I said, tugging feebly at his shirt. “Wait, I forgot. I have to—”

  “Jesus, Uncle Jamie, look at this!”

  Jamie turned, holding me. Young Ian was standing in the mouth of my refuge, framed in dangling roots, holding up the skull.

  I felt Jamie’s muscles tighten as he saw it.

  “Holy God, Sassenach, what’s that?”

  “Who, you mean,” I said. “I don’t know. Nice chap, though. Don’t let Rollo at him; he wouldn’t like it.” Rollo was sniffing the skull with intense concentration, wet black nostrils flaring with interest.

  Jamie peered down into my face, frowning slightly.

  “Are ye sure you’re quite all right, Sassenach?”

  “No,” I said, though in fact my wits were coming back as I woke up all the way. “I’m cold and I’m starving. You didn’t happen to bring any breakfast, did you?” I asked longingly. “I could murder a plateful of eggs.”

  “No,” he said, setting me down while he groped in his sporran. “I hadna time to trouble for food, but I’ve got some brandywine. Here, Sassenach; it’ll do you good. And then,” he added, raising one eyebrow, “you can tell me how the devil ye came to be out in the middle of nowhere, aye?”

  I collapsed on a rock and sipped the brandywine gratefully. The flask trembled in my hands, but the shivering began to ease as the dark amber stuff made its way directly through the walls of my empty stomach and into my bloodstream.

  Jamie stood behind me, his hand on my shoulder.

  “How long have ye been here, Sassenach?” he asked, his voice gentle.

  “All night,” I said, shivering again. “Since just before noon yesterday, when the bloody horse—I think his name’s Judas—dropped me off that ledge up there.”

  I nodded at the ledge. The middle of nowhere was a good description of the place, I thought. It could have been any of a thousand anonymous hollows in these hills. A thought struck me—one that should have occurred to me long before, had I not been so chilled and groggy.

  “How the hell did you find me?” I asked. “Did one of the Muellers follow me, or—don’t tell me the bloody horse led you to me, like Lassie?”

  “It’s a gelding, Auntie,” Ian put in reprovingly. “No a lassie. But we havena seen your horse at all. No, Rollo led us to ye.” He beamed proudly at the dog, who contrived to look blandly dignified, as though he did this sort of thing all the time.

  “But if you haven’t seen the horse,” I began, bewildered, “how did you even know I’d left Muellers’? And how could Rollo—” I broke off, seeing the two men eyeing each other.

  Ian shrugged slightly and nodded, yielding to Jamie. Jamie hunkered down on the ground beside me, and lifting the hem of my dress, took my bare feet into his big, warm hands.

  “Your feet are frozen, Sassenach,” he said quietly. “Where did ye lose your shoes?”

  “Back there,” I said, with a nod toward the uprooted tree. “They must still be there. I took them off to cross a stream, then put them down and couldn’t find them in the dark.”

  “They’re not there, Auntie,” said Ian. He sounded so queer that I looked up at him in surprise. He was still holding the skull, turning it gingerly over in his hands.

  “No, they’re not.” Jamie’s head was bent as he chafed my feet, and I could see the early light glint copper off his hair, which lay tumbled loose over his shoulders, disheveled as though he had just risen from his bed.

  “I was in bed, asleep,” he said, echoing my thought. “When yon beast suddenly went mad.” He jerked his chin at Rollo, without looking up. “Barking and howling and flingin’ his carcass at the door as though the Devil was outside.”

  “I shouted at him, and tried to get hold of his scruff and shake him quiet,” Ian put in, “but he wouldna stop, no matter what I did.”

  “Aye, he carried on so that the spittle flew from his jaws and I was sure he’d gone truly mad. I thought he’d do us an injury, so I bade Ian unbolt the door and let him be gone.” Jamie sat back on his heels and frowned at my foot, then picked a dead leaf off my instep.

  “Well, and was the Devil outside?” I asked flippantly.

  Jamie shook his head.

  “We searched the clearing, from the penfold to the spring, and didna find a thing—except these.” He reached into his sporran and drew out my shoes. He looked up into my face, his own quite expressionless.

  “They were sitting on the doorstep, side by side.”

  Every hair on my body rose. I lifted the flask and drained the last of the brandywine.

  “Rollo tore off, bayin’ like a hound,” Ian said, eagerly taking up the story. “But then he came back a moment later, and began to sniff at your shoes and whinge and cry.”

  “I felt rather like doing that myself, aye?” Jamie’s mouth lifted slightly at one corner, but I could see the fear still dark in his eyes.

  I swallowed, but my mouth was too dry to talk, despite the brandywine.

  Jamie slipped one shoe onto my foot, and then the other. They were damp, but faintly warm from his body.

  “I did think ye were maybe dead, Cinderella,” he said softly, head bent to hide his face.

  Ian didn’t notice, caught up in the enthusiasm of the story.

  “My clever wee dog was for dashing off, the same as when he’s smelt a rabbit,