Jenny and Rachel both laughed, one with honest amusement and the other ruefully.
“I’m afraid we haven’t managed to find the proper name for him as yet,” Rachel said, touching him gently on the shoulder. Oggy turned toward his mother’s voice and kept on turning, leaning slowly out of Jenny’s arms like a sloth drawn ineluctably toward sweet fruit.
Rachel gathered him up, gently touching his cheek. He turned his head—again slowly—and started sucking on her knuckle.
“Ian says that Mohawk children find their proper names when they’re older, and have just cradle-names until then.”
Jenny’s shapely black eyebrows rose at this.
“Ye mean to tell me that the bairn’s going to be Oggy until … when?”
“Oh, no,” Rachel assured her. “I’m sure I’ll think of something before ‘when.’” She smiled at her mother-in-law, who rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to Brianna.
“I’m glad ye didna have such trouble wi’ your own bairns, a nighean. Jamie said in his letters that they’re called Jeremiah and Amanda, is that right?”
Brianna coughed, avoiding Rachel’s eye.
“Um … Jeremiah Alexander Ian Fraser MacKenzie,” she said. “And Amanda Claire Hope MacKenzie.”
Jenny nodded approvingly, whether at the quality or the quantity of the names.
“Jenny!” Bree’s father appeared on the porch, sweaty and disheveled, bloodstained shirt much in evidence. “Ian canna find the beer.”
“We drank it,” Jenny called back, not turning a hair.
“Oh.” He disappeared back into the house, presumably in search of something else potable, leaving damp, slightly bloody footprints on the porch.
“What’s happened to him?” Jenny demanded, shooting a sharp glance from the footprints to Brianna, who shrugged.
“A bear.”
“Oh.” She seemed to digest this for a moment, then shook her head. “I suppose I’ll have to let him have beer, then.” She disappeared after the menfolk, leaving Brianna and Rachel outside.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met a Quaker before,” Brianna said after a slightly awkward pause. “Is ‘Quaker’ the right word, by the way? I don’t mean to—”
“We say Friend,” Rachel said, smiling again. “Quaker is not offensive, though. But I think thee must have met at least one. Thee might not know, if the Friend chose not to use Plain Speech in talking with thee. Most of us don’t have stripes, spots, or any other physical mark by which thee might discern us.”
“Most of you?”
“Well, naturally I cannot see my own back, but I’m sure Ian would have told me, was there anything remarkable …”
Brianna laughed, feeling slightly giddy from hunger, relief, and the simple, recurrent joy at being with her family again. A charmingly expanded family, too, it seemed.
“I’m really glad to meet you,” she said to Rachel. “I couldn’t imagine what sort of girl would marry Ian—I’m sorry, that sounds wrong …”
“No, thee is quite right,” Rachel assured her. “I couldn’t have imagined marrying a man like him, either, but there he is in my bed each morning, nonetheless. They do say the Lord moves in mysterious ways. Come into the house,” she added, shifting Oggy into a new position. “I know where the wine is.”
5
Meditations on a Hyoid
“IT ALL BEGINS IN medias res, and if you’re lucky, it ends that way as well.” Roger swallowed, and I felt his larynx bob under my fingers. The skin of his throat was cool, and smooth where I held it, though I could feel a tiny prickle of beard stubble brush my knuckle just under his jaw.
“That’s what Dr. McEwan said?” I asked curiously. “What did he mean by it, I wonder?”
Roger’s eyes were closed—people normally closed their eyes when I examined them, as though needing to preserve what privacy they could—but at this, he opened them, an arresting deep green lit by the morning sun.
“I asked him. He said that nothing ever truly starts or stops, so far as he could see. That people think a child’s life begins at birth, but plainly that’s not so—ye can see them move in the womb, and a child that comes too soon will often live for a short time, and ye see that it’s alive in all its senses, even though it can’t sustain life.”
Now I’d closed my own eyes, not because I found Roger’s gaze unsettling, but in order to concentrate on the vibrations of his words. I moved my grip on his throat a little lower.
“Well, he’s quite right about that,” I said, envisioning the inner anatomy of the throat as I talked. “Babies are born already running, as it were. All their processes—except breathing—are working long before birth. But that’s still a rather cryptic remark.”
“Yes, it was.” He swallowed again and I felt his breath, warm on my bare forearm. “I prodded him a bit, because he’d obviously meant it by way of explanation—or at least the best he could do by way of explanation. I don’t suppose you could describe what it is you actually do when you heal someone, could you?”
I smiled at that without opening my eyes. “Oh, I might have a go at it. But there’s an implied error there; I don’t actually heal people. They heal by themselves. I just … support them.”
A sound that wasn’t quite a laugh made his larynx execute a complicated double bob. I thought I could feel a slight concavity under my thumb, where the cartilage had been partially crushed by the rope … I put my other hand round my own throat, for comparison.
“That’s actually what he said, too—Hector McEwan, I mean. But he did heal people; I saw him do it.”
My hands released both our throats, and I opened my eyes.
He gave me a quick précis of his relations with William Buccleigh, from Buck’s role in his hanging at Alamance, through the reappearance of his ancestor in Inverness in 1980, and Buck’s joining him in the search for Jem, after Brianna’s erstwhile co-worker, Rob Cameron, had kidnapped the boy.
“That was when he became … a bit more than a friend,” Roger said. He looked down and cleared his throat. “He came with me to search for Jem. Jem wasn’t there, of course, but we did find another Jeremiah. My father,” he said abruptly, his voice cracking on the word. I reached by reflex for his hand, but he waved me off, clearing his throat again.
“It’s okay. I’ll—I’ll tell you about that … later.” He swallowed and straightened a little, meeting my eyes again. “But Buck—that’s what we called him, Buck—when we came through the stones in search of Jem, we were both … damaged by the passage. You said, I think, that it got worse, if you did it more than once?”
“I wouldn’t say once isn’t damaging,” I said, with a small internal shudder at the memory of that void, a chaos where nothing seems to exist but noise. That, and the faint flicker of thought, all that holds you together between one breath and the next. “But yes, it does get worse. What happened to you?”
“To me, not that much. Unconscious for a bit, woke up strangling, fighting for air. Muck sweat, disorientation; couldn’t keep my balance for a bit, staggered all over. But Buck—” He frowned, and I saw his eyes change as he looked inward again, seeing the green hilltop of Craigh na Dun as he woke with the rain on his face. As I had waked three times. The hair on my neck rose slowly.