Outlander (30 page)

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We slept fairly late the next morning, and the sun was high as we left the inn, heading south this time. Most of the horses were gone from the paddock, and none of the men from our party seemed to be about. I wondered aloud where they had gone.

Jamie grinned. "I canna say for sure, but I could guess. The Watch went
that
way yesterday"—he pointed west—"so I should say Rupert and the others have gone that way." Pointing east.

"Cattle," he explained, seeing that I still didn't understand. "The estate-holders and tacksmen pay the Watch to keep an eye out, and get back their cattle, if they're stolen in a raid. But if the Watch is riding west toward Lag Cruime, any herds to the east are helpless—for a bit, anyway. It's the Grants' lands down that way, and Rupert's one of the best cattle-lifters I've ever seen. Beasts will follow him anywhere, wi' scarcely a bleat amongst them. And since there's no more entertainment to be had here, most likely he's got restless."

Jamie himself seemed rather restless, and set a good pace. There was a deer trail through the heather, and the going was fairly easy, so I kept up with no difficulty. After a bit, we came out onto a stretch of moorland, where we could walk side by side.

"What about Horrocks?" I asked suddenly. Hearing him mention the town of Lag Cruime, I had remembered the English deserter and his possible news. "You were supposed to meet him in Lag Cruime, weren't you?"

He nodded. "Aye. But I canna go there now, wi' both Randall and the Watch headed that way. Too dangerous."

"Could someone go for you? Or do you trust anyone enough?"

He glanced down at me and smiled. "Well, there's you. Since ye didna kill me last night after all, I suppose I may trust you. But I'm afraid you couldna go to Lag Cruime alone. No, if necessary, Murtagh will go for me. But I may be able to arrange something else—we'll see."

"You trust Murtagh?" I asked curiously. I had no very friendly feelings toward the scruffy little man, since he was more or less responsible for my present predicament, having kidnapped me in the first place. Still, there was clearly a friendship of some kind between him and Jamie.

"Oh, aye." He glanced at me, surprised. "Murtagh's known me all my life—a second cousin of my father's, I think. His father was my—"

"He's a Fraser, you mean," I interrupted hastily. "I thought he was one of the MacKenzies. He was with Dougal when I met you."

Jamie nodded. "Aye. When I decided to come over from France I sent word to him, asking him to meet me at the coast." He smiled wryly. "I didna ken, ye see, whether it was Dougal had tried to kill me earlier. And I did not quite like the idea of meeting several MacKenzies alone, just in case. Didna want to end up washing about in the surf off Skye, if that's what they had in mind."

"I see. So Dougal isn't the only one who believes in witnesses."

He nodded. "Very handy things, witnesses."

On the other side of the moorland was a stretch of twisted rocks, pitted and gouged by the advance and retreat of glaciers long gone. Rainwater filled the deeper pits, and thistle and tansy and meadowsweet surrounded these tarns with thick growth, the flowers reflected in the still water.

Sterile and fishless, these pools dotted the landscape and formed traps for unwary travelers, who might easily stumble into one in darkness and be forced to spend a wet and uncomfortable night on the moor. We sat down beside one pool to eat our morning meal of bread and cheese.

This tarn at least had birds; swallows dipped low over the water to drink, and plovers and curlews poked long bills into the muddy earth at its edges, digging for insects.

I tossed crumbs of bread onto the mud for the birds. A curlew eyed one suspiciously, but while it was still making up its mind, a quick swallow zoomed in under its bill and made off with the treat. The curlew ruffled its feathers and went back to its industrious digging.

Jamie called my attention to a plover, calling and dragging a seemingly broken wing near us.

"She's a nest somewhere near," I said.

"Over there." He had to point it out several times before I finally spotted it; a shallow depression, quite out in the open, but with its four spotted eggs so close in appearance to the leaf-speckled bank that when I blinked I lost sight of the nest again.

Picking up a stick, Jamie gently poked the nest, pushing one egg out of place. The mother plover, excited, ran up almost in front of him. He sat on his heels, quite motionless, letting the bird dart back and forth, squalling. There was a flash of movement and he held the bird in his hand, suddenly still.

He spoke to the bird in Gaelic, a quiet, hissing sort of speech, as he stroked the soft, mottled plumage with one finger. The bird crouched in his hand, completely motionless, even the reflections frozen in its round black eyes.

He set it gently on the ground, but the bird did not move away until he said a few more words, and waved his hand slowly back and forth behind it. It gave a short jerk and darted away into the weeds. He watched it go, and, quite unconscious, crossed himself.

"Why did you do that?" I asked, curious.

"What?" He was momentarily startled; I think he had forgotten I was there.

"You crossed yourself when the bird flew off; I wondered why."

He shrugged, mildly embarrassed.

"Ah, well. It's an old tale, is all. Why plovers cry as they do, and run keening about their nests like that." He motioned to the far side of the tarn, where another plover was doing exactly that. He watched the bird for a few moments, abstracted.

"Plovers have the souls of young mothers dead in childbirth," he said. He glanced aside at me, shyly. "The story goes that they cry and run about their nests because they canna believe the young are safe hatched; they're mourning always for the lost one—or looking for a child left behind." He squatted by the nest and nudged the oblong egg with his stick, turning it bit by bit until the pointed end faced in, like the others. He stayed squatting, even after the egg had been replaced, balancing the stick across his thighs, staring out over the still waters of the tarn.

"It's only habit, I suppose," he said. "I did it first when I was much younger, when I first heard that story. I didna really believe they have souls, of course, even then, but, ye ken, just as a bit of respect…" He looked up at me and smiled suddenly. "Done it so often now, I'd not even notice. There's quite a few plovers in Scotland, ye ken." He rose and tossed the stick aside. "Let's go on, now; there's a place I want to show you, near the top of the hill yon." He took my elbow to help me out of the declivity, and we set off up the slope.

I had heard what he said to the plover he released. Though I had only a few words of Gaelic, I had heard the old salutation often enough to be familiar with it. 'God go with ye, Mother,' he had said.

A young mother, dead in childbirth. And a child left behind. I touched his arm and he looked down at me. "How old were you?" I asked.

He gave me a half-smile. "Eight," he answered. "Weaned, at least."

He spoke no more, but led me uphill. We were in sloping foothills, now, thick with heather. Just beyond, the countryside changed abruptly, with huge heaps of granite rearing up from the earth, surrounded by clusters of sycamore and larch. We came over the crest of the hill, and left the plovers crying by the tarns behind us.

The sun was growing hot, and after an hour of shoving through thick foliage—even with Jamie doing most of the shoving—I was ready for a rest.

We found a shady spot at the foot of one of the granite outcrops. The spot reminded me a bit of the place where I had first met Murtagh—and parted company with Captain Randall. Still, it was pleasant here. Jamie told me that we were alone, because of the constant birdsong all around. If anyone came near, most birds would stop singing, though the jays and the jackdaws would screech and call in alarm.

"Always hide in a forest, Sassenach," he advised me. "If ye dinna move too much yourself, the birds will tell you in plenty of time if anyone's near."

Looking back from pointing out a squawking jay in the tree overhead, his eyes caught mine. And we sat as though frozen, within hand's reach but not touching, barely breathing. After a time, the jay grew bored with us and left. It was Jamie who looked away first, with an almost imperceptible shiver, as though he were cold.

The heads of shaggy-cap mushrooms poked whitely through the mold beneath the ferns. Jamie's blunt forefinger flipped one off its stem, and traced the spokes of the basidium as he marshaled his next words. When he spoke carefully, as now, he all but lost the slight Scots accent that usually marked his speech.

"I do not wish to… that is… I do not mean to imply…" He looked up suddenly and smiled, with a helpless gesture. "I dinna want to insult you by sounding as though I think you've a vast experience of men, is all. But it would be foolish to pretend that ye don't know more than I do about such matters. What I meant to ask is, is this… usual? What it is between us, when I touch you, when you … lie with me? Is it always so between a man and a woman?"

In spite of his difficulties, I knew exactly what he meant. His gaze was direct, holding my eyes as he waited my answer. I wanted to look away, but couldn't.

"There's often something like it," I said, and had to stop and clear my throat. "But no. No, it isn't—usual. I have no idea why, but no. This is… different."

He relaxed a bit, as though I had confirmed something about which he had been anxious.

"I thought perhaps not. I've not lain with a woman before, but I've… ah, had my hands on a few." He smiled shyly, and shook his head. "It wasna the same. I mean, I've held women in my arms before, and kissed them, and… well." He waved a hand, dismissing the and. "It was verra pleasant indeed. Made my heart pound and my breath come short, and all that. But it wasna at all as it is when I take you in my arms and kiss you." His eyes, I thought, were the color of lakes and skies, and as fathomless as either.

He reached out and touched my lower lip, barely brushing the edge. "It starts out the same, but then, after a moment," he said, speaking softly, "suddenly it's as though I've a living flame in my arms." His touch grew firmer, outlining my lips and caressing the line of my jaw. "And I want only to throw myself into it and be consumed."

I thought of telling him that his own touch seared my skin and filled my veins with fire. But I was already alight and glowing like a brand. I closed my eyes and felt the kindling touch move to cheek and temple, ear and neck, and shuddered as his hands dropped to my waist and drew me close.

Jamie seemed to have a definite idea where we were going. At length he stopped at the foot of a huge rock, some twenty feet high, warty with lumps and jagged cracks. Tansy and eglantine had taken root in the cracks, and waved in precarious yellow flags against the stone. He took my hand and nodded at the rock face before us.

"D'ye see the steps, there, Sassenach? Think ye can manage it?" There were, in fact, faintly marked protuberances in the stone, rising at an angle across the face of the rock. Some were bona fide ledges, and others merely a foothold for lichens. I couldn't tell whether they were natural, or perhaps had known some assistance in their forming, but I thought it might just be possible to climb them, even in a full-length skirt and tight bodice.

With some slippages and scares, and with Jamie pushing helpfully from the rear on occasion, I made it to the top of the rock, and paused to look around. The view was spectacular. The dark bulk of a mountain rose to the east, while far below to the south the foothills ran out into a vast, barren moorland. The top of the rock sloped inward from all sides, forming a shallow dish. In the center of the dish was a blackened circle, with the sooty remnants of charred sticks. We were not the first visitors, then.

"You knew this place?" Jamie stood to one side a little, observing me and taking pleasure in my raptness. He shrugged, deprecating.

"Oh, aye. I know most places through this part of the Highlands. Come here, there's a spot ye can sit, and see down to where the road comes past the hill." The inn also was visible from here, reduced from doll-house to child's building-block by the distance. A few tethered horses were clustered under the trees by the road, small blobs of brown and black from here.

No trees grew on the top of the rock, and the sun was hot on my back. We sat side by side, legs dangling over the edge, and companionably shared one of the bottles of ale that Jamie had thoughtfully lifted from the well in the inn yard as we left. There were no trees atop the rock, but the smaller plants, the ones that could gain a foothold in the precarious cracks and root themselves in meager soil, sprouted here and there, raising their faces bravely to the hot spring sun. There was a small clump of daisies sheltering in the lee of an outcrop near my hand, and I reached to pluck one.

There was a faint whir, and the daisy leapt off its stem and landed on my knee. I stared stupidly, my mind unable to make sense of this bizarre behavior. Jamie, a good deal faster than I in his apprehensions, had flung himself flat on the rock.

"Get
down
!" he said. A large hand fastened on my elbow and jerked me flat beside him. As I hit the spongy moss, I saw the shaft of the arrow, still quivering above my face, where it had struck home in a cleft of the outcrop.

I froze, afraid even to look around, and tried to press myself still flatter against the ground. Jamie was motionless at my side, so still that he might have been a stone himself. Even the birds and insects seemed to have paused in their song, and the air hung breathless and waiting. Suddenly Jamie began to laugh.

He sat up, and grasping the arrow by the shaft, twisted it carefully out of the rock. It was fletched with the split tail-feathers of a woodpecker, I saw, and banded with blue thread, wrapped in a line half an inch wide below the quills.

Laying the arrow aside, Jamie cupped his hands around his mouth and gave a remarkably good imitation of the call of a green woodpecker. He lowered his hands and waited. In a moment, the call was answered from the grove below, and a broad smile spread across his face.

"A friend of yours?" I guessed. He nodded, eyes intent on the narrow path up the rock-face.

"Hugh Munro, unless someone else has taken to making arrows in his style."

We waited a moment longer, but no one appeared on the path below.

"Ah," said Jamie softly, and whirled around, just in time to confront a head, rising slowly above the edge of the rock behind us.

The head burst into a jack-o'-lantern grin, snaggle-toothed and jolly, beaming with pleasure at surprising us. The head itself was roughly pumpkin-shaped, the impression enhanced by the orange-brown, leathery skin that covered not only the face but the round, bald crown of the head as well. Few pumpkins, however, could boast such a luxuriant growth of beard, nor such a pair of bright blue eyes. Stubby hands with filthy nails planted themselves beneath the beard and swiftly hoisted the remainder of the jack-o'-lantern up into view.

The body rather matched the head, having a distinct look of the Halloween goblin about it. The shoulders were very broad, but hunched and slanted, one being considerably higher than the other. One leg, too, seemed somewhat shorter than its fellow, giving the man a rather hopping, hitching sort of gait.

Munro, if this was indeed Jamie's friend, was clad in what appeared to be multiple layers of rags, the faded colors of berry-dyed fabric peeking out through rents in a shapeless garment that might once have been a woman's smock.

He carried no sporran at his belt—which was in any case no more than a frayed length of rope, from which two furry carcasses swung, head-down. Instead, he had a fat leather wallet slung across his chest, of surprisingly good quality, considering the rest of his outfit. A collection of small metal oddments dangled from the strap of the wallet: religious medals, military decorations, what looked to be old uniform buttons, worn coins, pierced and sewn on, and three or four small rectangular bits of metal, dull grey and with cryptic marks incised in their surfaces.

Jamie rose as the creature hopped nimbly over the intervening protrusions of rock, and the two men embraced warmly, thumping each other hard on the back in the odd fashion of manly greeting.

"And how goes it then, with the house of Munro?" inquired Jamie, standing back at length and surveying his old companion.

Munro ducked his head and made an odd gobbling noise, grinning. Then, raising his eyebrows, he nodded in my direction and waved his stubby hands in a strangely graceful interrogatory gesture.

"My wife," said Jamie, reddening slightly with a mixture of shyness and pride at the new introduction. "Married but the two days."

Munro smiled more broadly still at this information, and executed a remarkably complex and graceful bow, involving the rapid touching of head, heart, and lips and ending up in a near-horizontal position on the ground at my feet. Having executed this striking maneuver, he sprang to his feet with the grace of an acrobat and thumped Jamie again, this time in apparent congratulation.

Munro then began an extraordinary ballet of the hands, motioning to himself, away down toward the forest, at me, and back to himself, with such an array of gestures and wavings that I could hardly follow his flying hands. I had seen deaf-mute talk before, but never executed so swiftly and gracefully.

"Is that so, then?" Jamie exclaimed. It was his turn to buffet the other man in congratulation. No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly.

"He's married as well," Jamie explained, turning to me. "Six months since, to a widow—oh, all right, to a
fat
widow," he amended, in response to an emphatic gesture from Munro, "with six children, down in the village of Dubhlairn."

"How nice," I said politely. "It looks as though they'll eat well, at least." I motioned to the rabbits hanging from his belt.

Munro at once unfastened one of the corpses and handed it to me, with such an expression of beaming goodwill that I felt obliged to accept it, smiling back and hoping privately that it didn't harbor fleas.

"A wedding gift," said Jamie. "And most welcome, Munro. Ye must allow us to return the favor." With which, he extracted one of the bottles of ale from its mossy bed and handed it across.

The courtesies attended to in this manner, we all sat down again to a companionable sharing of the third bottle. Jamie and Munro carried on an exchange of news, gossip, and conversation which seemed no less free for the fact that only one of them spoke.

I took little part in the conversation, being unable to read Munro's hand-signs, though Jamie did his best to include me by translation and reference.

At one point, Jamie jabbed a thumb at the rectangular bits of lead that adorned Munro's strap.

"Gone official, have ye?" he asked. "Or is that just for when the game is scarce?" Munro bobbed his head and nodded like a jack-in-the-box.

"What are they?" I asked curiously.

"Gaberlunzies."

"Oh, to be sure," I said. "Pardon my asking."

"A gaberlunzie is a license to beg, Sassenach," Jamie explained. "It's good within the borders of the parish, and only on the one day a week when begging's allowed. Each parish has its own, so the beggars from one parish canna take overmuch advantage of the charity of the next."

"A system with a certain amount of elasticity, I see," I said, eyeing Munro's stock of four lead seals.

"Ah, well, Munro's a special case, d'ye see. He was captured by the Turks at sea. Spent a good many years rowing up and down in a galley, and a few more as a slave in Algiers. That's where he lost his tongue."

"They… cut it out?" I felt a bit faint.

Jamie seemed undisturbed by the thought, but then he had apparently known Munro for some time.

"Oh, aye. And broke his leg for him, as well. The back, too, Munro? No," he amended, at a series of signs from Munro, "the back was an accident, something that happened jumping off a wall in Alexandria. The feet, though; that was the Turks' doing."

I didn't really want to know, but both Munro and Jamie seemed dying to tell me. "All right," I said, resigned. "What happened to his feet?"

With something approaching pride, Munro stripped off his battered clogs and hose, exposing broad, splayed feet on which the skin was thickened and roughened, white shiny patches alternating with angry red areas.

"Boiling oil," said Jamie. "It's how they force captive Christians to convert to the Mussulman religion."

"It looks a very effective means of persuasion," I said. "So that's why several parishes will give him leave to beg? To make up for his trials on behalf of Christendom?"

"Aye, exactly." Jamie was evidently pleased with my swift appreciation of the situation. Munro also expressed his admiration with another deep salaam, followed by a very expressive if indelicate sequence of hand movements which I gathered were meant to be praising my physical appearance as well.

"Thank ye, man. Aye, she'll do me proud, I reckon." Jamie, seeing my uplifted brows, tactfully turned Munro so that his back was to me and the flying fingers hidden. "Now, tell me what's doing in the villages?"

The two men drew closer together, continuing their lopsided conversation with an increased intensity. Since Jamie's part seemed to be limited mainly to grunts and exclamations of interest, I could glean little of the content, and busied myself instead with a survey of the strange little rock plants sprouting from the surfaces of our perch.

I had collected a pocketful of eyebright and dittany by the time they finished talking and Hugh Munro rose to go. With a final bow to me and a thump on the back for Jamie, he shuffled to the edge of the rock and disappeared as quickly as one of the rabbits he poached might vanish into its hole.

"What fascinating friends you have," I said.

"Oh, aye. Nice fellow, Hugh. I hunted wi' him and some others, last year. He's on his own, now that he's an official beggar, but his work keeps him moving about the parishes; he'll know everything that goes on within the borders of Ardagh and Chesthill."

"Including the whereabouts of Horrocks?" I guessed.

Jamie nodded. "Aye. And he'll carry a message for me, to change the meeting place."

"Which foxes Dougal rather neatly," I observed. "If he had any ideas about holding you to ransom over Horrocks."

He nodded, and a smile creased one corner of his mouth.

"Aye, there's that about it."