Drums of Autumn

  so we caught up our plaids and came away after him, only stopping to snatch a brand from the hearth and smoor the fire. He led us a good chase, too, did ye no, laddie?” He rubbed Rollo’s ears with affectionate pride. “And here ye were!”

  The brandywine was buzzing in my ears, swaddling my wits in a warm, sweet blanket, but I had enough sense left to tell me that for Rollo to have followed a trail back to me…someone had walked all that way in my shoes.

  I had recovered some remnants of my voice by this time, and managed to talk with only a little hoarseness.

  “Did you—see anything—along the way?” I asked.

  “No, Auntie,” Ian said, suddenly sober. “Did you?”

  Jamie lifted his head, and I could see how worry and exhaustion had hollowed his face, leaving the broad cheekbones sharp beneath his skin. I wasn’t the only one who had had a long, hard night.

  “Yes,” I said, “but I’ll tell you later. Right now, I believe I’ve turned into a pumpkin. Let’s go home.”

  * * *

  Jamie had brought horses, but there was no way to get them down into the hollow; we were forced to make our way down the banks of the flooded stream, splashing through the shallows, then to clamber laboriously up a rocky slope to the ledge above, where the animals were tethered. Rubber-legged and flimsy after my ordeal, I wasn’t a great deal of help in this endeavor, but Jamie and Ian coped matter-of-factly, boosting me over obstructions and handing me back and forth like a large, unwieldy package.

  “You really aren’t supposed to give alcohol to people suffering from hypothermia,” I said feebly as Jamie put the flask to my lips again during one pause for rest.

  “I dinna care what you’re suffering from, you’ll feel it less with the drink in your belly,” he said. It was still chilly from the rain, but his face was flushed from the climb. “Besides,” he added, mopping his brow with a fold of his plaid, “if ye pass out, you’ll be less trouble to hoik about. Christ, it’s like hauling a newborn calf out of a bog.”

  “Sorry,” I said. I lay flat on the ground and closed my eyes, hoping I wouldn’t throw up. The sky was spinning in one direction, my stomach in the other.

  “Away, dog!” Ian said.

  I opened one eye to see what was going on, and saw Ian firmly shooing Rollo away from the skull, which I had insisted he bring with us.

  Seen in daylight, it was hardly a prepossessing object. Stained and discolored by the soil in which it had been buried, from a distance it resembled a smooth stone, scooped and gouged by wind and weather. Several of the teeth had been chipped or broken, though the skull showed no other damage.

  “Just what do ye mean to do wi’ Prince Charming there?” Jamie asked, eyeing my acquisition rather critically. His color had faded, and he had got his breath back. He glanced down at me, reached over and smoothed the hair out of my eyes, smiling.

  “All right, Sassenach?”

  “Better,” I assured him, sitting up. The countryside had not quite stopped moving round me, but the brandy sloshing through my veins now gave the movement a rather pleasant quality, like the soothing rush of trees past the window of a railway carriage.

  “I suppose we ought to take him home and give him Christian burial, at least?” Ian eyed the skull dubiously.

  “I shouldn’t think he’d appreciate it; I don’t believe he was a Christian.” I fought back a vivid recollection of the man I had seen in the hollow. While it was true that some Indians had been converted by missionaries, this particular naked gentleman, with his black-painted face and feathered hair, had given me the impression that he was about as pagan as they come.

  I fumbled in the pocket of my skirt, my fingers numb and stiff.

  “This was buried with him.”

  I drew out the flat stone I had unearthed. It was dirty brown in color, an irregular oval half the size of my palm. It was flattened on one side, rounded on the other, and smooth as though it had come from a streambed. I turned it over on my palm and gasped.

  The flattened face was indeed incised with a carving, as I had thought. It was a glyph in the shape of a spiral, coiling in on itself. But it wasn’t the carving that brought both Jamie and Ian to peer into my hand, heads nearly touching.

  Where the smooth surface had been chipped away, the rock within glowed with a lambent fire, little flames of green and orange and red all fighting fiercely for the light.

  “My God, what is it?” Ian asked, sounding awed.

  “It’s an opal—and a damned big one, at that,” Jamie said. He poked the stone with a large, blunt forefinger, as though checking to ensure that it was real. It was.

  He rubbed a hand through his hair, thinking, then glanced at me.

  “They do say that opals are unlucky stones, Sassenach.” I thought he was joking, but he looked uneasy. A widely traveled, well-educated man, still he had been born a Highlander, and I knew he had a deeply superstitious streak, though it didn’t often show.

  Ha, I thought to myself. You’ve spent the night with a ghost and you think he’s superstitious?

  “Nonsense,” I said, with rather more conviction than I felt. “It’s only a rock.”

  “Well, it’s no so much they’re unlucky, Uncle Jamie,” Ian put in. “My Mam has a wee opal ring her mother left her—though it’s nothing like this!” Ian touched the stone reverently. “She did say as how an opal takes on something of its owner, though—so if ye had an opal that belonged to a good person before ye, then all was well, and you’d have good luck of it. But if not—” He shrugged.

  “Aye, well,” Jamie said dryly. He jerked his head toward the skull, pointing with his chin. “If it belonged to this fellow, it doesna seem as if it was ower-lucky for him.”

  “At least we know nobody killed him for it,” I pointed out.

  “Perhaps they didna want it because they kent it was bad luck,” Ian suggested. He was frowning at the stone, a worried line between his eyes. “Maybe we should put it back, Auntie.”

  I rubbed my nose and looked at Jamie.

  “It’s probably rather valuable,” I said.

  “Ah.” The two of them stood in contemplation for a moment, torn between superstition and pragmatism.

  “Aye well,” Jamie said finally, “I suppose it will do no harm to keep it for a bit.” One side of his mouth lifted in a smile. “Let me carry it, Sassenach; if I’m struck by lightning on the way home, ye can put it back.”

  I got awkwardly to my feet, holding on to Jamie’s arm to keep my balance. I blinked and swayed, but stayed upright. Jamie took the stone from my hand and slipped it back into his sporran.

  “I’ll show it to Nayawenne,” I said. “She might know what the carving means, at least.”

  “A good thought, Sassenach,” Jamie approved. “And if Prince Charming should be her kinsman, she can have him, with my blessing.” He nodded toward a small stand of maple trees a hundred yards away, their green barely tinged with yellow.

  “The horses are tied just yonder. Can ye walk, Sassenach?”

  I looked down at my feet, considering. They seemed a lot farther away than I was used to.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “I think I’m really rather drunk.”

  “Och, no, Auntie,” Ian assured me kindly. “My Da says you’re never drunk, so long as ye can hold on to the floor.”

  Jamie laughed at this, and threw the end of his plaid over his shoulder.

  “My Da used to say ye werena drunk, so long as ye could find your arse with both hands.” He eyed my backside with a lifted brow, but wisely thought better of whatever else he might have been going to say.

  Ian choked on a giggle and coughed, recovering himself.

  “Aye, well. It’s no much farther, Auntie. Are ye sure ye canna walk?”

  “Well, I’m no going to pick her up again, I’ll tell ye,” Jamie said, not waiting for my answer. “I dinna want to rupture my back.” He took the skull from Ian, holding it between the tips of his fingers, and placed it delicately in my lap.
“Wait here wi’ your wee friend, Sassenach,” he said. “Ian and I will fetch the horses.”

  * * *

  By the time we reached Fraser’s Ridge, it was early afternoon. I had been cold, wet, and without food for nearly two days, and was feeling distinctly light-headed; a feeling exaggerated both by more infusions of brandywine and by my efforts to explain the events of the night before to Ian and Jamie. Viewed in the light of day, the entire night seemed unreal.

  But then, almost everything seemed unreal, viewed through a haze of exhaustion, hunger, and mild drunkenness. Consequently, when we turned into the clearing, I thought at first that the smoke from the chimney was a hallucination—until the tang of burning hickory wood struck my nose.

  “I thought you said you smoored the fire,” I said to Jamie. “Lucky you didn’t burn down the house.” Such accidents were common; I had heard of more than one wooden cabin burned to the ground as the result of a poorly tended hearth.

  “I did smoor it,” he said briefly, swinging down from the saddle. “Someone’s here. D’ye ken the horse, Ian?”

  Ian stood in his stirrups to look down into the penfold.

  “Why, it’s Auntie’s wicked beast!” he said in surprise. “And a big dapple with him!”

  Sure enough, the newly named Judas was standing in the penfold, unsaddled, companionably switching flies head to tail with a thick-barreled gray gelding.

  “Do you know who owns him?” I asked. I hadn’t got down yet; small waves of dizziness had been washing over me every few minutes, forcing me to cling to the saddle. The ground under the horse seemed to be heaving gently up and down, like ocean billows.

  “No, but it’s a friend,” Jamie said. “He’s fed my beasts for me, and milked the goat.” He nodded from the horses’ hay-filled manger to the door, where a pail of milk stood on the bench, neatly covered with a square of cloth to prevent flies falling in.

  “Come along, Sassenach.” He reached up and took me by the waist. “We’ll tuck ye in bed and brew ye a dish of tea.”

  Our arrival had been heard; the door of the cabin opened, and Duncan Innes looked out.

  “Ah, you’re there, Mac Dubh,” he said. “What’s amiss, then? Your goat was carryin’ on fit to wake the dead, wi’ her bag like to burst, when I came up the trail this morning.” Then he saw me, and his long, mournful face went blank with surprise.

  “Mrs. Claire!” he said, taking in my mud-stained and battered appearance. “Ye’ll have had an accident, then? I was a bit worrit when I found the horse loose on the mountainside as I came up, and your wee box on the saddle. I looked about and called for ye, but I couldna find any sign of ye, so I brought the beast along to the house.”

  “Yes, I had an accident,” I said, trying to stand upright by myself and not succeeding very well. “I’m all right, though.” I wasn’t altogether sure about that. My head felt three times its normal size.

  “Bed,” Jamie said firmly, grabbing me by the arms before I could fall over. “Now.”

  “Bath,” I said. “First.”

  He glanced in the direction of the creek.

  “You’ll freeze or drown. Or both. For God’s sake, Sassenach, eat and go to bed; ye can wash tomorrow.”

  “Now. Hot water. Kettle.” I hadn’t the energy to waste on prolonged argument, but I was determined. I wasn’t going to bed dirty, and I wasn’t going to wash filthy sheets later.

  Jamie looked at me in exasperation, then rolled his eyes in surrender.

  “Hot water, kettle, now, then,” he said. “Ian, fetch some wood, and then take Duncan and see to the pigs. I’m going to scrub your auntie.”

  “I can scrub myself!”

  “The hell ye can.”

  He was right; my fingers were so stiff, they couldn’t undo the hooks of my bodice. He undressed me as though I were a small child, tossing the ripped skirt and mud-caked petticoats carelessly into the corner, and stripping off the chemise and stays, worn so long that the cloth folds had made deep red ridges in my flesh. I groaned with a voluptuous combination of pain and pleasure, rubbing the red marks as blood coursed back through my constricted torso.

  “Sit,” he said, pushing a stool under me as I collapsed. He wrapped a quilt around my shoulders, put a plate containing one and a half stale bannocks in front of me, and went to rootle in the cupboard after soap, washcloth, and linen towels.

  “Find the green bottle, please,” I said, nibbling at the dry oatcake. “I’ll need to wash my hair.”

  “Mmphm.” More clinking, and he emerged at last with his hands full of things, including a towel and the bottle full of the shampoo I had made—not wishing to wash my hair with lye soap—from soaproot, lupin oil, walnut leaves and calendula flowers. He set these on the table, along with my largest mixing bowl, and carefully filled it with hot water from the cauldron.

  Leaving this to cool a bit, Jamie dipped a rag into the water, and knelt down to wash my feet.

  The feeling of warmth on my sore, half-frozen feet was as close to ecstasy as I expected to get this side of heaven. Tired and half-drunk as I was, I felt as though I were dissolving from the feet up, as he gently but thoroughly washed me from toe to head.

  “Where did ye get this, Sassenach?” Recalled from a state as close to sleep as to waking, I glanced down muzzily at my left knee. It was swollen, and the inner side had gone the deep purplish-blue of a gentian.

  “Oh…that happened when I fell off the horse.”

  “That was verra careless,” he said sharply. “Have I not told ye time and again to be careful, especially with a new horse? Ye canna trust them at all until ye’ve known them a good while. And you’re not strong enough to deal with one that’s headstrong or skittish.”

  “It wasn’t a matter of trusting him,” I said. I rather dimly admired the broad spread of his bent shoulders, flexing smoothly under his linen shirt as he sponged my bruised knee. “The lightning scared him, and I fell off a thirty-foot ledge.”

  “Ye could have broken your neck!”

  “Thought I had, for a bit.” I closed my eyes, swaying slightly.

  “Ye should have taken better thought, Sassenach; ye should never have been on that side of the ridge to begin with, let alone—”

  “I couldn’t help it,” I said, opening my eyes. “The trail was washed out; I had to go around.”

  He was glaring at me, slanted eyes narrowed into dark blue slits.

  “Ye ought not to have left the Muellers’ in the first place, and it raining like that! Did ye not have sense enough to know what the ground would be like?”

  I straightened up with some effort, holding the quilt against my breasts. It occurred to me, with a faint sense of surprise, that he was more than slightly annoyed.

  “Well…no,” I said, trying to marshal what wits I had. “How could I know something like that? Besides—”

  He interrupted me by slapping the washrag into the bowl, spattering water all over the table.

  “Be quiet!” he said. “I dinna mean to argue with you!”

  I stared up at him.

  “What the hell do you mean to do? And where do you get off shouting at me? I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  He inhaled strongly through his nose. Then he stood up, picked the rag from the bowl, and carefully wrung it out. He let out his breath, knelt down in front of me, and deftly swabbed my face clean.

  “No. Ye haven’t,” he agreed. One corner of his long mouth quirked wryly. “But ye scairt hell out of me, Sassenach, and it makes me want to give ye a terrible scolding, whether ye deserve it or no.”

  “Oh,” I said. I wanted at first to laugh, but felt a stab of remorse as I saw how drawn his face was. His shirt sleeve was daubed with mud, and there were burrs and foxtails in his stockings, left from a night of searching for me through the dark mountains, not knowing where I was; if I were alive or dead. I had scared hell out of him, whether I meant to or not.

  I groped for some means of apology, finding my tongue nearly as thick as my
wits. Finally I reached out and picked a fuzzy yellow catkin from his hair.

  “Why don’t you scold me in Gaelic?” I said. “It will ease your feelings just as much, and I’ll only understand half of what you say.”

  He made a Scottish noise of derision, and shoved my head into the bowl with a firm hand on my neck. When I reemerged, dripping, though, he dropped a towel on my head and started in, rubbing my hair with large, firm hands and speaking in the formally menacing tones of a minister denouncing sin from the pulpit.

  “Silly woman,” he said in Gaelic. “You have not the brain of a fly!” I caught the words for “foolish,” and “clumsy,” in the subsequent remarks, but quickly stopped listening. I closed my eyes and lost myself instead in the dreamy pleasure of having my hair rubbed dry and then combed out.

  He had a sure and gentle touch, probably gained from handling horses’ tails. I had seen him talk to horses while he groomed them, much as he was talking to me now, the Gaelic a soothing descant to the whisk of curry comb or brush. I imagined he was more complimentary to the horses, though.

  His hands touched my neck, my bare back, and shoulders as he worked; fleeting touches that brought my newly thawed flesh to life. I shivered, but let the quilt fall to my lap. The fire was still burning high, flames dancing on the side of the kettle, and the room had grown quite warm.

  He was now describing, in a pleasantly conversational tone, various things he would have liked to do to me, beginning with beating me black and blue with a stick, and going on from there. Gaelic is a rich language, and Jamie was far from unimaginative in matters of either violence or sex. Whether he meant it or not, I thought it was probably a good thing that I didn’t understand everything he said.

  I could feel the heat of the fire on my breasts; Jamie’s warmth against my back. The loose fabric of his shirt brushed my skin as he leaned across to reach a bottle on the shelf, and I shivered again. He noticed this, and interrupted his tirade for a moment.

  “Cold?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” The sharp smell of camphor stung my nose, and before I could move, one large hand had seized my shoulder, holding me in place, while the other rubbed slippery oil firmly into my chest.

  “Stop! That tickles! Stop, I say!”

  He didn’t stop. I squirmed madly, trying to escape, but he was a lot bigger than I was.

  “Be still,” he said, inexorable fingers rubbing deep between my ticklish ribs, under my collarbone, around and under my tender breasts, greasing me as thoroughly as a suckling pig bound for the spit.

  “You bastard!” I said when he let me go, breathless from struggling and giggling. I reeked of peppermint and camphor, and my skin glowed with heat from chin to belly.

  He grinned at me, revenged and thoroughly unrepentant.

  “You do it to me when I’ve got an ague,” he pointed out, wiping his hands on the towel. “Grease for the gander is grease for the goose, aye?”

  “I have not got an ague! Not even a sniffle!”

  “I expect ye will have, out all night and sleepin’ in wet clothes.” He clicked his tongue disapprovingly, like a Scottish housewife.

  “And you’ve never done that, have you? How many times have you caught cold from sleeping rough?” I demanded. “Good heavens, you lived in a cave for seven years!”

  “And spent three of them sneezing. Besides, I’m a man,” he added, with total illogic. “Had ye not better put on your night rail, Sassenach? Ye havena got a stitch on.”

  “I noticed. Wet clothes and being cold do not cause sickness,” I informed him, hunting about under the table for the fallen quilt.

  He raised both eyebrows.

  “Oh, they don’t?”

  “No, they don’t.” I backed out from under the table, clutching the quilt. “I’ve told you before, it’s germs that cause sickness. If I haven’t been exposed to any germs, I won’t get sick.”

  “Ah, gerrrrms,” he said, rolling it like a marble in his mouth. “God, ye’ve got a fine, fat arse! Why do folk have more illness in the winter than the springtime, then? The germs breed in the cold, I expect?”

  “Not exactly.” Feeling absurdly self-conscious, I spread the quilt, meaning to fold it around my shoulders again. Before I could wrap myself in it, though,