A hand reached over Ian’s shoulder and took the canteen. Roger, face and hands blood-smeared and his black hair come loose, hanging wet with sweat, full of red and yellow leaves.
I might have sobbed, in the minor relief of having him there. He held the canteen to Jamie’s mouth with one hand; the other reached out and touched my face gently. Then his hand rested on Jamie’s shoulder and shook it, less gently.
“Ye can’t die, mate. Presbyterians don’t do Last Rites.”
I might have laughed, if I’d had any breath to spare. My hands and arms were red to the elbows.
I WOULDN’T LET go. I couldn’t speak anymore, I hadn’t strength for it. But I wouldn’t let go and I wouldn’t move.
Ian spoke to me now and then. Other voices came and went. Alarm, concern, anger, helplessness. Ian and Roger. I didn’t listen.
BLUE.
So beautiful.
It’s not empty.
MY FACE WAS pressed against his chest, my mouth on his wounded breastbone, the silver taste of blood and salt of sweat on my tongue. I thought I could feel the slow—so slow—thump of his heart.
Lub … Dub ……… Lub …… Dub …
I thought of Bree’s racing heart, of tiny David’s small, busy thump beneath my fingers, tried to feel my own heart in my fingertips, force all of that life into his.
Don’t let go.
I WAS VAGUELY aware, from time to time, that things were happening around me. People were shouting, a few shots, more shouting …
I heard Roger’s voice, but didn’t, couldn’t spare enough attention to know what he was saying. I felt it, though, when he knelt by Jamie and laid a hand on him. Something flickered through him and through me, and I breathed it in like oxygen.
JAMIE’S SMELL HAD changed, and that frightened me badly. I could smell hot dust and horses and hot metal and gun smoke and the muddy stink from puddles of horse piss and the panicked sharp smell of broken plants and the shattered tree trunks on the hillside below. I could smell Jamie’s sweat and his blood—God, the blood, it had saturated my bodice and stays and the fabric stuck to me and to him, a thin crust of hot stickiness, not the cut-metal smell of fresh blood but the thick stink of butchery. The sweat was cold on his skin, slick and nearly odorless, no vital reek of manhood in it anymore.
His skin was cold beneath the film of sweat and blood and I pressed myself as hard against him as I could, holding tight to the shapes of his back, trying to force myself into the fibers of his muscle, reach the heart inside the bony cage of his chest, make it beat.
Suddenly I was aware that there was something warm and round in my mouth, a metal taste, stronger than blood. I coughed, lifted my head enough to spit, and found that it was a musket ball, warm from his body.
He was breathing still … only a faint waft of air on my forehead, perceptible only because it cooled my own sweat.
Breathe, I thought fiercely, and pressed my forehead against his chest, against the small dark hole of the wound, seeing the bloodstained pink and the air-starved blue of his lungs beneath. I reached for his heart, but had no words, only the weight of its soft, slowing beat, the motion, like two small heavy balls that I held, one in each hand, one heavier than the other, and tossed them to and fro, to and fro, catching each one separately but close together.
Lub-dub … lub-dub … lub—dub …
“Shouldn’t we … take her away?” A rough, uncertain voice somewhere far above me. “I mean … he’s …”
“Leave her.” Young Ian. He sat down beside me; I heard the scuff of dirt beneath his moccasins and the sigh of stretching buckskin on his thighs.
I drew a quick, sobbing breath, deep as I could, pulling air for both of us, and Young Ian rested a hand on my shoulder, tentative, not sure what he should do, but he was there.
There. A solid shape with no form, glowing with a fractured light; Ian was hurt, but not badly, I could feel his strength pulse and fade, pulse and fade …
I felt the pulse of it through my flesh. For an instant, I was disoriented, couldn’t find the limits of my own body. I felt Jamie’s slow surrender in my belly and veins, Ian’s strong pulse in my heart and arteries.
Where am I?
I concluded, dimly, that it didn’t matter.
Help me, I said silently, and yielded my own boundaries.
148
Not … yet …
WE STAYED THERE, THE four of us, through the rest of that day, the night beyond, and most of the next day. When I finally resumed contact with the world, I was curled beside Jamie, a sheet of canvas flapping in a gentle wind above us.
“Here, Auntie.” Young Ian’s hands slid under my arms, and he lifted me gently into a sitting position.
“What …?” I croaked, and he put a canteen to my mouth. I drank. It was cider and I had never tasted anything better. Then I remembered.
“Jamie?” I looked blearily round for him, but couldn’t make my eyes focus.
“He’s alive, Claire.” It was Roger, squatting next to me, smiling. Bloodshot and black-stubbled, but smiling. “I don’t know how you did it, but he is alive. We were afraid to move you—the two of you, I mean, because you wouldn’t let go of him.”
I looked around. We were still behind the rocky outcrop, shielded from the battlefield, but I could hear—and smell—the cleaning-up. Grunts and talk and the shoof of shovels and soft thud of dirt cast aside. Burying the dead.
But not us.
I put a hand on Jamie. He looked dead. I certainly felt dead. But apparently we weren’t.
Jamie’s chest moved under my hand. He was breathing, and slight as the movement was, I felt it as though the gentle wind moved through me.
“Do you think it’s safe to move him, Auntie?” Young Ian asked. “Roger Mac’s found a farmhouse, not too far away, where ye can stay for a bit, until ye’re both strong enough to travel.”
I wetted my cracked lips and leaned over Jamie.
“Can you hear me?” I said.
His face twitched briefly, fell into stillness, and then—after an agonizingly long moment—his eyes opened. Only a dark-blue, red-rimmed slit, but open.
“Aye,” he whispered.
“The battle’s over. You’re not dead.”
He regarded me for a long moment, his mouth slightly open.
“Not … yet,” he said, in what I thought was a rather grudging tone.
“We’re going home,” I said.
He breathed for a minute, then said, “Good,” and closed his eyes again.
149
Angry, Irascible, Difficult Sons of Bitches
Fraser’s Ridge
October 22, 1780
“I’M NO DYING IN my sleep,” Jamie said stubbornly. “I mean—should the Lord choose to take me in my bed, I’ll go, of course. But if I’m going to die by your hand, I want to be awake.”
My hands were shaking; I folded them under my apron, both to hide the trembling and to control the urge to throttle him.
“You have to be asleep,” I said, as reasonably as I could manage, which wasn’t all that reasonably. “Your leg has to be completely immobile, and I can’t manage that if you’re awake. I don’t care how strong you think you are, you can’t keep still enough, and even tying you to the table—which I fully intend to do”—I glared at him—“wouldn’t be enough to completely immobilize you.