The Fiery Cross (155 page)

He was lolloping over the stubbled corn fields, ears pointed forward and obviously happy to be rejoining society. He was also saddled and riderless, and I said a very bad word under my breath when I saw it.

“He’s broken his hobbles and run.” Jamie had appeared at my shoulder, peering down at the small figure of the mule. He pointed. “See?” I hadn’t noticed, in my alarm, but there was a small rag of cloth tied round one of his forelegs, flapping as he ran.

“I suppose that’s better,” I said. My hands had gone sweaty, and I wiped my palms on the elbows of my sleeves, unable to look away. “I mean—if he was hobbled, then Roger wasn’t on him. Roger wasn’t thrown, or knocked off and hurt.”

“Ah, no.” Jamie seemed concerned, but not alarmed. “He’ll have a long walk back, is all.” Still, I saw his gaze shift out, over the narrow river valley, now nearly filled with smoke. He shook his head slightly, and said something under his breath—no doubt a cousin to my own bad word.

“I wonder if this is how the Lord feels,” he said aloud, and gave me a wry glance. “Able to see what foolishness men are up to, but canna do a bloody thing about it.”

Before I could answer him, lightning flashed, and the thunder cracked on its heels with a clap so loud and sudden that I jumped, nearly losing my grip. Jamie seized my arm to stop me falling, and pulled me back from the edge. The horses were throwing fits again, at the far end of the ledge, and he turned toward them, but stopped suddenly, his hand still on my arm.

“What?” I looked where he was looking, and saw nothing but the wall of the cliff, some ten feet away, festooned with small rock plants.

He let go my arm, and without answering, walked toward the cliff. And, I saw, toward an old fire-blasted snag that stood near it. Very delicately, he reached out and tweaked something from the dead tree’s bark. I reached his side and peered into the palm of his hand, where he cradled several long, coarse hairs. White hairs.

Rain began to fall again, settling down in a businesslike way to the job of soaking everything in sight. A piercing pair of whinnies came from the horses, who didn’t like being abandoned one bit.

I looked at the trunk of the tree; there were white hairs all over it, caught in the cracks of the ragged bark.
A bear has special scratching trees
, I could hear Josiah saying.
He’ll come back to one, again and again
. I swallowed, hard.

“Perhaps,” Jamie said very thoughtfully, “it’s no just the thunder that troubles the horses.”

Perhaps not, but it wasn’t helping. Lightning flashed into the trees far down the slope and the thunder sounded with it. Another flash-bang following on its heels, and another, as though an ack-ack gun were going off beneath our feet. The horses were having hysterics, and I felt rather like joining them.

I had put on my hooded cloak when I left the village, but both hood and hair were matted to my skull, the rain pounding down on my head like a shower of nails. Jamie’s hair was plastered to his head as well, and he grimaced through the rain.

He made a “stay here” gesture, but I shook my head and followed him. The horses were in a complete state, saturated manes dangling over rolling eyes. Judas had succeeded in half-uprooting the small tree I had tied him to, and Gideon had his ears laid flat, flexing his lip repeatedly over his big yellow teeth, looking for someone or something to bite.

Seeing this, Jamie’s lips tightened. He glanced back toward the place where we had found the scratching-tree, invisible from our present position. The lightning flashed, the thunder shuddered through the rock, and the horses both screamed and lunged. Jamie shook his head, making the decision, and grabbed Judas’s reins, holding him steady. Evidently we were getting off the mountain, slippery trail or not.

I got into the saddle in a swash of wet skirts, and took a firm grip, trying to shout soothing words into Judas’s ear as he skittered and danced, eager to be gone. We were dangerously close to the conifers at the edge, and I leaned hard inward, trying to get him toward the cliff side of the ledge.

An extraordinary prickling sensation ran over my body, as though I were being bitten from head to toe by thousands of tiny ants. I looked at my hands and saw them glowing, limned in blue light. The hairs on my forearms stood straight out, each one glowing blue. My hood had fallen back, and I felt the hair on my head rise all at once, as though a giant hand had gently lifted it.

The air smelled suddenly of brimstone, and I looked about in alarm. Trees, rocks, the ground itself was bathed in blue light. Tiny snakes of brilliant white electricity hissed across the surface of the cliff, a few yards away.

I turned, calling for Jamie, and saw him on Gideon, turning toward me, his mouth open as he shouted, all words lost in the reverberation of the air around us.

Gideon’s mane began to rise, as though by magic. Jamie’s hair floated up from his shoulders, shot with wires of crackling blue. Horse and rider glowed with hell-light, each muscle of face and limb outlined. I felt a rush of air over my skin, and then Jamie flung himself from his saddle and into me, hurling us both into emptiness.

The lightning struck before we hit the ground.

I came to, smelling burned flesh and the throat-searing sting of ozone. I felt as though I had been turned inside out; all of my organs seemed to be exposed.

It was still raining. I lay still for a while, letting the rain run over my face and soak my hair, while the neurons of my nervous system slowly began to work again. My finger twitched, by itself. I tried to do it on purpose, and succeeded. I flexed my fingers—not so good. A few more minutes, though, and enough circuits were working to allow me to sit up.

Jamie was lying near me, sprawled on his back like a rag doll among a patch of sumac. I crawled over to him, and found that his eyes were open. He blinked at me, and a muscle twitched at the side of his mouth in an attempt at a smile.

I couldn’t see any blood, and while his limbs were thrown awry, they were all straight. The rain pooled in his eye sockets, running into his eyes. He blinked violently, then turned his head to let the water drain off his face. I put a hand on his stomach, and felt the big abdominal pulse beneath my fingers, very slow, but steady.

I didn’t know how long we had been unconscious, but this storm too had moved away. Sheet lightning flashed beyond the distant mountains, throwing the peaks into sharp relief.

“Thunder is good,” I quoted, watching it in a sort of dreamy stupor, “thunder is impressive; but it is the lightning that does the work.”

“It’s done a job of work on me. Are ye all right, Sassenach?”

“Splendid,” I said, still feeling pleasantly remote. “And you?”

He glanced at me curiously, but seemed to conclude that it was all right. He grasped a sumac bush and dragged himself laboriously to his feet.

“I canna feel my toes just yet,” he told me, “but the rest is all right. The horses, though—” He glanced upward, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed.

The horses were silent.

We were some twenty feet below the ledge, among the firs and balsams. I
could
move, but didn’t seem able to summon the will to do so. I sat still, taking stock, while Jamie shook himself, then began the climb back up to the mankiller’s ledge.

It seemed very quiet; I wondered whether I had been deafened by the blast. My foot was cold. I looked down and discovered that my left shoe was gone—whether knocked off by the lightning or lost in the fall, I had no idea, but I didn’t see it anywhere nearby. The stocking was gone, too; there was a small dark starburst of veins, just below the anklebone—a legacy of my second pregnancy. I sat staring at it as though it were the key to the secrets of the universe.

The horses must be dead; I knew that. Why weren’t we? I breathed in the stink of burning flesh, and a tiny shudder arose, somewhere deep inside me. Were we alive now, only because we were doomed to die in four years? When it came our turn, would we lie in the burnt ruins of our house, shells of charred and reeking flesh?

Burnt to bones
, whispered the voice of my memory. Tears ran down my face with the rain, but they were distant tears—for the horses, for my mother—not for myself. Not yet.

There were blue veins beneath the surface of my skin, more prominent than before. On the backs of my hands, they traced a roadmap . . . in the tender flesh behind my knee, they showed in webs and traceries; along my shin, one large vein swelled snakelike, distended. I pressed a finger on it; it was soft and disappeared, but came back the instant I removed the finger.

The inner workings of my body were becoming slowly more visible, the taut skin thinning, leaving me vulnerable, with everything outside, exposed to the elements, that once was safely sheltered in the snug casing of the body. Bone and blood push through . . . there was an oozing graze on the top of my foot.

Jamie was back, drenched to the skin and breathless from the climb. Both his shoes were gone, I saw.

“Judas is dead,” he said, sitting down beside me. He took my cold hand in his own cold hand and pressed it hard.

“Poor thing,” I said, and the tears ran faster, warm streams mingling with cold rain. “He knew, didn’t he? He always hated thunder and lightning, always.”

Jamie put an arm round my shoulders and pressed my head against his chest, making little soothing noises.

“And Gideon?” I asked at last, raising my head and making an effort to wipe my nose on a fold of sodden cloak. Jamie shook his head, with a small, incredulous smile.

“He’s alive,” he said. “He’s burnt down the side of his right shoulder and foreleg and his mane’s singed off entirely.” He picked up a fold of his own tattered cloak and tried to wipe my face, with no better results than I had had myself. “I expect it will do wonders for his temper,” he said, trying to make a joke of it.

“I suppose so.” I was too worn out and shaken to laugh, but I managed a small smile, and it felt good. “Can you lead him down, do you think? I—I have some ointment. It’s good for burns.”

“Aye, I think so.” He gave me a hand and helped me stand up. I turned to brush down my crumpled skirts, and as I did so, caught sight of something.

“Look,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper. “Jamie—look.”

Ten feet away, up the slope from us, stood a big balsam fir, its top sheared cleanly away and half its remaining branches charred and smoking. Wedged between one branch and the stump of the trunk was a huge, rounded mass. It was half black, the tissues turned to carbon—but the hair on the other half lay in sodden white spikes, the cream-white color of trilliums.

Jamie stood looking up at the corpse of the bear, his mouth half open. Slowly he closed it, and shook his head. He turned to me, then, and looked past me, toward the distant mountains, where the retreating lightning flashed silently.

“They do say,” he said softly, “that a great storm portends the death of a king.”

He touched my face, very gently.

“Wait here, Sassenach, while I fetch the horse. We’ll go home.”

Fraser’s Ridge
October, 1771

T
HE SEASON CHANGED, from one hour to the next. She had gone to sleep in the cool balm of an Indian summer evening, and wakened in the middle of the night to the sharp bite of autumn, her feet freezing under the single quilt. Still drowsy, she couldn’t fall sleep again, not without more covers.

She dragged slit-eyed out of bed, padded over the icy floor to check Jemmy. He was warm enough, sunk deep into his tiny featherbed, the quilt drawn up around his small pink ears. She laid a gentle hand on his back, waiting for the reassurance of the rise and fall of his breath. Once, twice, once more.

She rummaged for an extra quilt and spread it on the bed, reached for a cup of water to ease her dry throat, and realized with a grunt of annoyance that it was empty. She thought with longing of crawling back into bed, sinking into deep, warm slumber—but not dying of thirst.

There was a bucket of well water by the stoop. Yawning and grimacing, she slid the bolt from its brackets and set it gently down—though Jem slept so soundly at night, there wasn’t much danger of waking him.

Still, she opened the door with care and stepped out, shivering slightly as the cold air twitched the shift about her legs. She bent and groped in the darkness. No bucket. Where—

She saw a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye and whirled. For an instant, she thought it was Obadiah Henderson, sitting on the bench beside her door, and her heart clenched like a fist as he stood up. Then she realized, and was in Roger’s arms before her mind could consciously sort out the details of him.

Pressed against him, speechless, she had time to notice things: the arch of his collarbone against her face, the smell of clothes gone so long worn, so long unwashed that they didn’t smell even of sweat any longer, but of the wood he walked through and the earth he slept upon, and mostly of the bitter smoke he breathed. The strength of his arm about her and the rasp of his beard on her skin. The cracked cold leather of his shoes beneath her bare toes, and the shape of the bones of his feet within them.