The Fiery Cross (169 page)

There were still voices outside, muffled by distance, disjointed with drink and the lateness of the hour. All jovial, though; no sound of hostility or incipient violence. I didn’t really care, though. The inhabitants of the Ridge could hammer each other senseless and dance on the remains, for all I cared. All my attention was focused on Jamie.

His breathing was shallow but even, his shoulders relaxed. I didn’t want to disturb him; he needed rest above all things. At the same time, I ached to touch him. I wanted to reassure myself that he was here, alive beside me—but I also needed badly to know how things went with him.

Was he feverish? Had the incipient infection in his leg blossomed in spite of the penicillin, spreading poison through his blood?

I moved my head cautiously, bringing my face within an inch of his shirt-covered back, and breathed in, slow and deep. I could feel the warmth of him on my face, but couldn’t tell through the linen nightshirt just how hot he really was.

He smelt faintly of the woods, more strongly of blood. The onions in the dressing gave off a bitter tang; so did his sweat.

I inhaled again, testing the air. No scent of pus. Too early for the smell of gangrene, even if the rot was beginning, invisible under the bandages. I thought there was a strange scent about his skin, though; something I hadn’t smelled before. Necrosis of the tissue? Some breakdown product of the snake’s venom? I blew a short breath through my nose and took in a fresh one, deeper.

“Do I stink verra badly?” he inquired.

“Uk!” I said, startled into biting my tongue, and he quivered slightly, in what I took to be suppressed amusement.

“Ye sound like a wee truffle-pig, Sassenach, snortling away back there.”

“Oh, indeed,” I said, a bit crossly. I touched the tender spot on my tongue. “Well, at least you’re awake. How do you feel?”

“Like a pile of moldy tripes.”

“Very picturesque,” I said. “Can you be a trifle more specific?” I put a hand lightly on his side, and he let his breath out in a sound like a small moan.

“Like a pile of moldy tripes . . .” he said, and pausing to breathe heavily, added, “. . . .with
maggots
.”

“You’d joke on your deathbed, wouldn’t you?” Even as I said it, I felt a tremor of unease. He
would
, and I hoped this wasn’t it.

“Well, I’ll try, Sassenach,” he murmured, sounding drowsy. “But I’m no really at my best under the circumstances.”

“Do you hurt much?”

“No. I’m just . . . tired.” He sounded as though he were in fact too exhausted to search for the proper word, and had settled for that one by default.

“Little wonder if you are. I’ll go and sleep somewhere else, so you can rest.” I made to throw back the covers and rise, but he stopped me, raising one hand slightly.

“No. No, dinna leave me.” His shoulder fell back toward me, and he tried to lift his head from the pillow. I felt still more uneasy when I realized that he was too weak even to turn over by himself.

“I won’t leave you. Maybe I should sleep in the chair, though. I don’t want to—”

“I’m cold,” he said softly. “I’m verra cold.”

I pressed my fingers lightly just under his breastbone, seeking the big abdominal pulse. His heartbeat was rapid, shallower than it should have been. He wasn’t feverish. He didn’t just feel cold, he
was
cold to the touch, his skin chilled and his fingers icy. I found that very alarming.

No longer shy, I cuddled close against him, my breasts squashing softly against his back, cheek resting on his shoulder blade. I concentrated as hard as I could on generating body heat, trying to radiate warmth through my skin and into his. So often he had enfolded me in the curve of his body, sheltering me, giving me the warmth of his big body. I wished passionately that I were larger, and could do the same for him now; as it was, I could do no more than cling to him like a small, fierce mustard plaster, and hope I had the same effect.

Very gently, I found the hem of his shirt and pulled it up, then cupped my hands to fit the rounds of his buttocks. They tightened slightly in surprise, then relaxed.

It occurred to me to wonder just why I felt I must lay hands on him, but I didn’t trouble my mind with it; I had had the feeling many times before, and had long since given up worrying that it wasn’t scientific.

I could feel the faintly pebbled texture of the rash upon his skin, and the thought came unbidden of the lamia. A creature smooth and cool to the touch, a shape-shifter, passionately venomous, its nature infectious. A swift bite and the snake’s poison spreading, slowing his heart, chilling his warm blood; I could imagine tiny scales rising under his skin in the dark.

I forcibly repressed the thought, but not the shudder that went with it.

“Claire,” he said softly. “Touch me.”

I couldn’t hear his heartbeat. I could hear mine; a thick, muffled sound in the ear pressed to the pillow.

I slid my hand over the slope of his belly, and more slowly down, fingers parting the coarse curly tangle, dipping low to cup the rounded shapes of him. What heat he had was here.

I stroked him with a thumb and felt him stir. The breath went out of him in a long sigh, and his body seemed to grow heavier, sinking into the mattress as he relaxed. His flesh was like candle wax in my hand, smooth and silky as it warmed.

I felt very odd; no longer frightened, but with all my senses at once preternaturally acute and yet . . . peaceful. I was no longer conscious of any sounds save Jamie’s breathing and the beating of his heart; the darkness was filled with them. I had no conscious thought, but seemed to act purely by instinct, reaching down and under, seeking the heart of his heat in the center of his being.

Then I was moving—or we were moving together. One hand reached down between us, up between his legs, my fingertips on the spot just behind his testicles. My other hand reached over, around, moving with the same rhythm that flexed my thighs and lifted my hips, thrusting against him from behind.

I could have done it forever, and felt that perhaps I did. I had no sense of time passing, only of a dreamy peace, and that slow, steady rhythm as we moved together in the dark. Somewhere, sometime, I felt a steady pulsing, first in the one hand, then in both. It melded with the beat of his heart.

He sighed, long and deep, and I felt the air rush from my own lungs. We lay silent and passed gently into unconsciousness, together.

I WOKE FEELING utterly peaceful. I lay still, without thought, listening to the thrum of blood through my veins, watching the drift of sunlit particles in the beam of light that fell through the half-opened shutters. Then I remembered, and flung myself over in bed, staring.

His eyes were closed, and his skin was the color of old ivory. His head was turned slightly away from me, so that the cords of his neck stood out, but I couldn’t see any pulse in his throat. He was still warm, or at least the bedclothes were still warm. I sniffed the air, urgently. The room was fetid with the scent of onions and honey and fever-sweat, but no stink of sudden death.

I clapped a hand on the center of his chest, and he jerked, startled, and opened his eyes.

“You
bastard
,” I said, so relieved to feel the rise of his chest as he drew breath that my voice trembled. “You tried to die on me, didn’t you?”

His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, under my hand, and my own heart jerked and shuddered, as though I had been pulled back at the last moment from an unexpected precipice.

He blinked at me. His eyes were heavy, still clouded with fever.

“It didna take much effort, Sassenach,” he said, his voice soft and husky from sleep. “Not dying was harder.”

He made no pretense of not understanding me. In the light of day, I saw clearly what exhaustion and the aftereffects of shock had stopped me seeing the night before. His insistence on his own bed. The open shutters, so he could hear the voices of his family below, his tenants outside. And me beside him. He had, very carefully, and without saying a word to me, decided how and where he wanted to die.

“You thought you were dying when we brought you up here, didn’t you?” I asked. My voice sounded more bewildered than accusing.

It took him a moment to answer, though he didn’t look hesitant. It was more as though he was looking for the proper words.

“Well, I didna ken for sure, no,” he said slowly. “Though I did feel verra ill.” His eyes closed, slowly, as though he were too tired to keep them open. “I still do,” he added, in a detached sort of voice. “Ye needna worry, though—I’ve made my choice.”

“What on earth do you mean by that?”

I groped beneath the covers, and found his wrist. He
was
warm; hot again, in fact, and with a pulse that was too fast, too shallow. Still, it was so different from the deathly chill I had felt in him the night before that my first reaction was relief.

He took a couple of deep breaths, then turned his head and opened his eyes to look at me.

“I mean I could have died last night.”

He could, certainly—and yet that wasn’t what he meant. He made it sound like a conscious—

“What do you mean you’ve made your choice? You’ve decided not to die, after all?” I tried to speak lightly, but it wasn’t working very well. I remembered all too well that odd sense of timeless stillness that had surrounded us.

“It was verra strange,” he said. “And yet it wasna strange at all.” He sounded faintly surprised.

“I think,” I said carefully, keeping a thumb on his pulse, “you’d better tell me just what happened.”

He actually smiled at that, though the smile was more in his eyes than his lips. Those were dry, and painfully cracked in the corners. I touched his lips with a finger, wanting to go and fetch some soothing ointment for him, some water, some tea—but I put aside the impulse, steeling myself to stay and hear.

“I dinna really know, Sassenach—or rather, I do, but I canna think quite how to say it.” He still looked tired, but his eyes stayed open. They lingered on my face, a vivid blue in the morning light, with an expression almost of curiosity, as though he hadn’t seen me before.

“You are so beautiful,” he said, softly. “So verra beautiful,
mo chridhe
.”

My hands were covered with fading blue blotches and overlooked smears of buffalo blood, I could feel my hair clinging in unwashed tangles to my neck, and I could smell everything from the stale-urine odor of dye to the reek of fear-sweat on my body. And yet whatever he saw lit his face as though he were looking at the full moon on a summer night, pure and lovely.

His eyes stayed fixed on my face as he talked, absorbed, moving slightly as they seemed to trace my features.

“I felt verra badly indeed when Arch and Roger Mac brought me up,” he said. “Terribly sick, and my leg and my head both throbbing with each heartbeat, so much that I began to dread the next. And so I would listen to the spaces between. Ye wouldna think it,” he said, sounded vaguely surprised, “but there is a great deal of time between the beats of a heart.”

He had, he said, begun to hope, in those spaces, that the next beat would not come. And slowly, he realized that his heart was indeed slowing—and that the pain was growing remote, something separate from himself.

His skin had grown colder, the fever fading from both body and mind, leaving the latter oddly clear.

“And this is where I canna really say, Sassenach.” He pulled his wrist from my grip in the intensity of his story, and curled his fingers over mine. “But I . . . saw.”

“Saw what?” And yet I already knew that he couldn’t tell me. Like any doctor, I had seen sick people make up their minds to die—and I knew that look they sometimes had; eyes wide-fixed on
something
in the distance.

He hesitated, struggling to find words. I thought of something, and jumped in to try to help.

“There was an elderly woman,” I said. “She died in the hospital where I was on staff—all her grown children with her, it was very peaceful.” I looked down, my own eyes fixed on his fingers, still red and slightly swollen, interlaced with my own stained and bloody digits.

“She died—she was
dead
, I could see her pulse had stopped, she wasn’t breathing. All her children were by her bedside, weeping. And then, quite suddenly, her eyes opened. She wasn’t looking at any of them, but she was seeing
something
. And she said, quite clearly, ‘Oooh!’ Just like that—thrilled, like a little girl who’s just seen something wonderful. And then she closed her eyes again.” I looked up at him, blinking back tears. “Was it—like that?”

He nodded, speechless, and his hand tightened on mine.

“Something like,” he said, very softly.

He had felt oddly suspended, in a place he could by no means describe, feeling completely at peace—and seeing very clearly.

“It was as if there was a—it wasna a door, exactly, but a passageway of some kind—before me. And I could go through it, if I wanted. And I did want to,” he said, giving me a sideways glance and a shy smile.

He had known what lay behind him, too, and realized that for that moment, he could choose. Go forward—or turn back.

“And that’s when you asked me to touch you?”

“I knew ye were the only thing that could bring me back,” he said simply. “I didna have the strength, myself.”

There was a huge lump in my throat; I couldn’t speak, but squeezed his hand very tight.

“Why?” I asked at last. “Why did you . . . choose to stay?” My throat was still tight, and my voice was hoarse. He heard it, and his hand tightened on mine; a ghost of his usual firm grip, and yet with the memory of strength within it.

“Because ye need me,” he said, very softly.

“Not because you love me?”

He looked up then, with a shadow of a smile.

“Sassenach . . . I love ye now, and I will love ye always. Whether I am dead—or you—whether we are together or apart. You know it is true,” he said quietly, and touched my face. “I know it of you, and ye know it of me as well.”

He bent his head then, the bright hair swinging down across his cheek.

“I didna mean only you, Sassenach. I have work still to do. I thought—for a bit—that perhaps it wasna so; that ye all might manage, with Roger Mac and auld Arch, Joseph and the Beardsleys. But there is war coming, and—for my sins—” he grimaced slightly, “I am a chief.”