A Breath of Snow and Ashes (115 page)

He blinked, dark lashes cutting off his gaze, and kept his eyes closed, whether in acknowledgement or denial of what she’d said, she didn’t know.

“But it’s more than that,” she said, her voice growing firmer. “It isn’t only her,
or
him. Is it?”

“No,” he said. His voice sounded distant, almost uncaring, but she knew it wasn’t that.

“It’s them,” she said more softly. “All the mothers. The grandmothers. The women. The—the children.” Clan and family and tribe and nation; custom, spirit, tradition—the strands that wrapped Works with Her Hands and held her to the earth, secure. And above all, children. Those loud small voices that drowned the voices of the wood, and kept a soul from wandering through the night.

No one knew the strength of such bonds better than one who had walked the earth without them, outcast and alone. She had, and he had, and they both knew the truth.

“It’s them,” he echoed softly, and opened his eyes. They were dark with loss, the color of shadows in the deepest wood. “And them.” He turned his head, to look upward, into the trees beyond the creek, above the bones of the mammoth that lay trapped in the earth, stripped to the sky and mute to all prayer. He turned back, raised a hand, and touched her cheek.

“I’ll stay, then.”

THEY CAMPED FOR the night on the far side of the beaver pond. The litter of wood chips and debarked saplings made good kindling for their fire.

There was little to eat; no more than a hatful of bitter fox-grapes and the heel of bread, so hard by now that it had to be dunked in water to chew. It didn’t matter; neither one of them was hungry, and Rollo had disappeared to hunt for himself.

They sat silently, watching the fire die down. There was no need to keep it going; the night was not cold, and they would not linger in the morning—home was too near.

At last, Ian stirred a bit, and Brianna glanced at him.

“What was your father’s name?” he asked very formally.

“Frank—er . . . Franklin. Franklin Wolverton Randall.”

“An Englishman, then?”

“Very,” she said, smiling in spite of herself.

He nodded, murmuring “Franklin Wolverton Randall” to himself, as though to commit it to memory, then looked at her seriously.

“If ever I find myself in a church again, then, I shall light a candle to his memory.”

“I expect . . . he’d like that.”

He nodded, and leaned back, back braced against a longleaf pine. The ground nearby was littered with the cones; he picked up a handful and tossed them, one by one, into the fire.

“What about Lizzie?” she asked after a little while. “She’s always been fond of you.” To put it mildly: Lizzie had wilted and pined for weeks, when he had been lost to the Iroquois. “And now that she’s not marrying Manfred . . .”

He tilted back his head, eyes closed, and rested it against the trunk of the pine.

“I’ve thought of it,” he admitted.

“But . . . ?”

“Aye, but.” He opened his eyes and gave her a wry look. “I’d ken where I was, if I woke beside her. But where I’d be is in bed wi’ my wee sister. I think I’m maybe not so desperate as that. Yet,” he added as an obvious afterthought.

71

BLACK PUDDING

I
WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF a black pudding when Ronnie Sinclair appeared in the yard, carrying two small whisky casks. Several more were bound in a neatly corrugated cascade down his back, which made him look like some exotic form of caterpillar, balanced precariously upright in mid-pupation. It was a chilly day, but he was sweating freely from the long walk uphill—and cursing in similar vein.

“Why in the name of Bride did Himself build the frigging house up here in the godforsaken clouds?” he demanded without ceremony. “Why not where a bloody wagon could reach the yard?” He set the casks down carefully, then ducked his head through the straps of the harness to shed his wooden carapace. He sighed in relief, rubbing at his shoulders where the straps had dug.

I ignored the rhetorical questions, and kept stirring, tilting my head toward the house in invitation.

“There’s fresh coffee made,” I said. “And bannocks with honey, too.” My own stomach recoiled slightly at the thought of eating. Once spiced, stuffed, boiled, and fried, black pudding was delicious. The earlier stages, involving as they did arm-deep manipulations in a barrel of semi-coagulated pig’s blood, were substantially less appetizing.

Sinclair, though, looked happier at mention of food. He wiped a sleeve across his sweating forehead and nodded to me, turning toward the house. Then he stopped and turned back.

“Ah. I’d forgot, missus. I’ve a wee message for yourself, as well.” He patted gingerly at his chest, then lower, probing around his ribs until he at length found what he was looking for and extracted it from the layers of his sweat-soaked clothing. He pulled out a damp wad of paper and held it out to me in expectation, ignoring the fact that my right arm was coated with blood nearly to the shoulder, and the left in scarcely better case.

“Put it in the kitchen, why don’t you?” I suggested. “Himself’s inside. I’ll come as soon as I’ve got this lot sorted. Who—” I started to ask whom the letter was from, but tactfully altered this to, “Who gave it to you?” Ronnie couldn’t read—though I saw no marks on the outside of the note, in any case.

“A tinker on his way to Belem’s Creek handed it to me,” he said. “He didna say who gave it him—only that it was for the healer.”

He frowned at the wadded paper, but I saw his eyes slide sideways toward my legs. In spite of the chill, I was barefoot and stripped to my chemise and stays, no more than a smeared apron wrapped around my waist. Ronnie had been looking for a wife for some little time, and in consequence had formed the unconscious habit of appraising the physical attributes of every woman he encountered, without regard to age or availability. He noticed my noticing, and hastily jerked his gaze away.

“That was all?” I asked. “The healer? He didn’t give my name?”

Sinclair rubbed a hand through thinning ginger hair, so two spikes stood up over his reddened ears, increasing his naturally sly, foxy look.

“Didna have to, did he?” Without further attempts at conversation, he disappeared into the house, in search of food and Jamie, leaving me to my sanguinary labors.

The worst part was cleaning the blood: swishing an arm through the dark, reeking depths of the barrel to collect the threads of fibrin that formed as the blood began to clot. These clung to my arm and could then be pulled out and rinsed away—repeatedly. At that, it was slightly less nasty than the job of washing out the intestines to be used for the sausage casings; Brianna and Lizzie were doing that, down at the creek.

I peered at the latest results; no fibers visible in the clear red liquid that dripped from my fingers. I dunked my arm again in the water cask that stood beside the blood barrel, balanced on boards laid across a pair of trestles under the big chestnut tree. Jamie and Roger and Arch Bug had dragged the pig—not the white sow, but one of her many offspring from a prior year—into the yard, clubbed it between the eyes with a maul, then swung it up into the branches, slit the throat, and let the blood drain into the barrel.

Roger and Arch had then taken the disemboweled carcass away to be scalded and the bristles scraped off; Jamie’s presence was required to deal with Major MacDonald, who had appeared suddenly, puffing and wheezing from the climb up to the Ridge. Between the two, I thought Jamie would much have preferred to deal with the pig.

I finished washing my hands and arms—wasted labor, but necessary to my peace of mind—and dried off with a linen towel. I shoveled double handsful into the barrel from the waiting bowls of barley, oatmeal, and boiled rice, smiling slightly at memory of the Major’s plum-red face, and Ronnie Sinclair’s complaints. Himself had picked his building site on the Ridge with a great deal of forethought—precisely
because
of the difficulties involved in reaching it.

I ran my fingers through my hair, then took a deep breath and plunged my clean arm back into the barrel. The blood was cooling rapidly. Doused by the cereal, the smell was less immediate now than the metallic reek of fresh, hot blood. The mixture was still warm to the touch, though, and the grains made graceful swirls of white and brown, pale whirlpools drawn down into the blood as I stirred.

Ronnie was right; it hadn’t been necessary to identify me further than “the healer.” There wasn’t another closer than Cross Creek, unless one counted the shamans among the Indians—which most Europeans wouldn’t.

I wondered who had sent the note, and whether the matter was urgent. Probably not—at least it was not likely to be a matter of imminent childbirth or serious accident. Word of such events was likely to arrive in person, carried urgently by a friend or relative. A written message entrusted to a tinker couldn’t be counted on to be delivered with any sort of promptitude; tinkers wandered or stayed, depending on what work they found.

For that matter, tinkers and tramps seldom came so far as the Ridge, though we had seen three within the last month. I didn’t know whether that was the result of our growing population—Fraser’s Ridge boasted nearly sixty families now, though the cabins were scattered over ten miles of forested mountain slopes—or something more sinister.

“It’s one of the signs, Sassenach,” Jamie had told me, frowning after the departing form of the last such temporary guest. “When there is war in the air, men take to the roads.”

I thought he was right; I remembered wanderers on the Highland roads, carrying rumors of the Stuart Rising. It was as though the tremors of unrest jarred loose those who were not firmly attached to a place by love of land or family, and the swirling currents of dissension bore them onward, the first premonitory fragments of a slow-motion explosion that would shatter everything. I shivered, the light breeze touching cold through my shift.

The mass of gruel had reached the necessary consistency, something like a very thick, dark-red cream. I shook clumps of clotted grain from my fingers and reached with my clean left hand for the wooden bowl of minced and sauteed onions, standing ready. The strong smell of the onions overlaid the scent of butchery, pleasantly domestic.

The salt was ground, so was the pepper. All I needed now . . . as if on cue, Roger appeared around the corner of the house, a large basin in his hands, filled with fine-chopped pork fat.

“Just in time!” I said, and nodded toward the barrel. “No, don’t dump it in, it has to be measured—roughly.” I’d used ten double handsful of oatmeal, ten of rice, ten of barley. Half that total, then—fifteen. I shook back the hair from my eyes again, and carefully scooped up a double handful of the basin’s content, dropping it into the barrel with a splat.

“All right, are you?” I asked. I gestured toward a stool with my chin, beginning to work the fat into the mixture with my fingers. Roger was still a trifle pale and tight around the mouth, but he gave me a wry smile as he sat.

“Fine.”

“You didn’t have to do it, you know.”

“Yes, I did.” The note of wryness in his voice deepened. “I only wish I’d done it better.”

I shrugged, one-shouldered, and reached into the basin he held out for me.

“It takes practice.”

Roger had volunteered to kill the pig. Jamie had simply handed him the maul and stood back. I had seen Jamie kill pigs before; he said a brief prayer, blessed the pig, then crushed the skull with one tremendous blow. It had taken Roger five tries, and the memory of the squealing raised gooseflesh on my shoulders even now. Afterward, he had set down the maul, gone behind a tree, and been violently sick.

I scooped another handful. The mix was thickening, developing a greasy feel.

“He should have shown you how.”

“I shouldn’t think there’s anything technically difficult about it,” Roger said dryly. “Straightforward enough, after all, to bash an animal on the head.”

“Physically, perhaps,” I agreed. I scooped more fat, working with both hands now. “There’s a prayer for it, you know. For slaughtering an animal, I mean. Jamie should have told you.”

He looked faintly startled.

“No, I didn’t know.” He smiled, a little better now. “Last rites for the pig, aye?”

“I don’t think it’s for the pig’s benefit,” I said tartly. We lapsed into silence for a few moments, as I creamed the rest of the fat into the grain mixture, pausing to flick away occasional bits of gristle. I could feel Roger’s eyes on the barrel, watching the curious alchemy of cookery, that process of making the transfer of life from one being to another palatable.

“Highland drovers sometimes drain a cup or two of blood from one of their beasts, and mix it with oatmeal to eat on the road,” I said. “Nutritious, I suppose, but less tasty.”

Roger nodded, abstracted. He had set down the nearly empty basin and was cleaning dried blood from under his nails with the point of his dirk.

“Is it the same as the one for deer?” he asked. “The prayer. I’ve seen Jamie say that one, though I didn’t catch all of the words.”

“The gralloch prayer? I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

Roger worked industriously on a thumbnail, eyes fixed on his hand.

“I wasn’t sure if he thought it right for me to know it. Me not being a Catholic, I mean.”

I looked down into the mixture, hiding a smile.

“I don’t think it would make a difference. That particular prayer is a lot older than the Church of Rome, if I’m not mistaken.”

A flicker of interest lit Roger’s face, the buried scholar coming to the surface.

“I did think the Gaelic was a very old form—even older than what you hear these days—I mean . . . now.” He flushed a little, realizing what he had said. I nodded, but didn’t say anything.

I remembered what it was like, that feeling that one was living in an elaborate make-believe. The feeling that reality existed in another time, another place. I remembered, and with a small shock, realized that it
was
now only memory—for me, time had shifted, as though my illness had pushed me through some final barrier.

Now
was my time, reality the scrape of wood and slick of grease beneath my fingers, the arc of the sun that set the rhythm of my days, the nearness of Jamie. It was the other world, of cars and ringing telephones, of alarm clocks and mortgages, that seemed unreal and remote, the stuff of dreams.

Neither Roger nor Bree had made that transition, though. I could see it in the way they behaved, hear it in the echoes of their private conversations. Likely it was because they had each other; they could keep the other time alive, a small shared world between them. For me, the change was easier. I had lived here before, had come this time on purpose, after all—and I had Jamie. No matter what I told him of the future, he could never see it as other than a fairy tale. Our small shared world was built of different things.

I worried now and then about Bree and Roger, though. It was dangerous to treat the past as they sometimes did—as picturesque or curious, a temporary condition that could be escaped. There was no escape for them—whether it was love or duty, Jemmy held them both, a small redheaded anchor to the present. Better—or safer, at least—if they could wholly accept this time as theirs.

“The Indians have it, too,” I said to Roger. “The gralloch prayer, or something like it. That’s why I said I thought it older than the Church.”

He nodded, interested.

“I think that kind of thing is common to all primitive cultures—anyplace where men kill to eat.”

Primitive cultures. I caught my lower lip between my teeth, forbearing to point out that primitive or not, if his family were to survive, he personally would very likely be obliged to kill for them. But then I caught sight of his hand, idly rubbing at the dried blood between his fingers. He knew that already.
“Yes, I did,”
he’d said, when I’d told him he need not.

He looked up then, caught my eye, and gave me a faint, tired smile. He understood.

“I think maybe . . . it’s that killing without ceremony seems like murder,” he said slowly. “If you have the ceremony—some sort of ritual that acknowledges your necessity . . .”

“Necessity—and also sacrifice.” Jamie’s voice came softly from behind me, startling me. I turned my head sharply. He was standing in the shadow of the big red spruce; I wondered how long he’d been there.