“I shouted, yes,” William said stiffly. “A snake struck at me.”
“Oh.” Murray’s mouth twitched a little. “Ye scream like a lassie,” he said, eyes returning to his work. The knife pressed down.
William made a deeply visceral noise.
“Aye, better,” said Murray. He smiled briefly, as though to himself, and with a firm grip on William’s wrist sliced cleanly through the skin beside the splinter, laying it open for six inches or so. Turning back the skin with the point of the knife, he flicked out the large splinter, then picked delicately at the smaller slivers the cypress shard had left behind.
Having removed as much as he could, he then wrapped a fold of his ragged plaid round the handle of the camp kettle, picked it up, and poured the steaming water into the open wound.
William made a much more visceral sound, this one accompanied by words.
Murray shook his head, and clicked his tongue in reproof.
“Aye, well. I suppose I’ll have to keep ye from dying, because if ye do die, ye’re bound to go to hell, usin’ language like that.”
“I don’t propose to die,” William said shortly. He was breathing hard, and mopped his brow with his free arm. He lifted the other gingerly and shook blood-tinged water from his fingertips, though the resulting sensation made him light-headed. He sat down on the log, rather suddenly.
“Put your heid atween your knees, if ye’re giddy,” Murray suggested.
“I am not giddy.”
There was no response to this save the sound of chewing. While waiting for the kettle to boil, Murray had waded into the water and pulled several handsful of some strong-smelling herb that grew on the verge. He was in process now of chewing the leaves, spitting the resultant green wads into a square of cloth. Extracting a rather shriveled onion from the haversack he carried, he cut a generous slice from this and eyed it critically, but seemed to think it would pass without mastication. He added it to his packet, folding the cloth neatly over the contents.
This he placed over the wound and wrapped it in place with strips of cloth torn from William’s shirttail.
Murray glanced up at him thoughtfully.
“I suppose ye’re verra stubborn?”
William stared at the Scot, put out at this remark, though in fact he had been told repeatedly, by friends, relatives, and military superiors, that his intransigence would one day kill him. Surely it didn’t show on his face!
“What the devil do you mean by that?”
“It wasna meant as an insult,” Murray said mildly, and bent to tighten the knot of the impromptu bandage with his teeth. He turned away and spat out a few threads. “I hope ye are—because it’ll be a good distance to find ye help, and if you’re sufficiently stubborn as not to die on me, that would be good, I think.”
“I said I don’t propose to die,” William assured him. “And I don’t need help. Where—are we anywhere near Dismal Town?”
Murray pursed his lips.
“No,” he said, and raised one brow. “Were ye bound there?”
William considered for an instant, but nodded. No harm in telling him that, surely.
Murray raised an eyebrow.
“Why?”
“I—have business with some gentlemen there.” As he said this, William’s heart gave a lurch. Christ, the book! He’d been so confounded by his various trials and adventures that the true importance of his loss had not even struck him.
Beyond its general entertainment value and its usefulness as palimpsest for his own meditations, the book was vital to his mission. It contained several carefully marked passages whose code gave him the names and locations of those men he was to visit—and, more importantly, what he was to tell them. He could recall a good many of the names, he thought, but for the rest…
His dismay was so great that it overshadowed the throbbing in his arm, and he stood up abruptly, seized by the urge to rush back into the Great Dismal and begin combing it, inch by inch, until he should recover the book.
“Are ye all right, man?” Murray had risen, too, and was looking at him with a combination of curiosity and concern.
“I—yes. Just—I thought of something, that’s all.”
“Well, think about it sitting down, aye? Ye’re about to fall into the fire.”
In fact, William’s vision had gone bright, and pulsating dots of dark and light obscured most of Murray’s face, though the look of alarm was still visible.
“I—yes, I will.” He sat down even more abruptly than he’d risen, a heavy cold sweat sudden on his face. A hand on his good arm urged him to lie down, and he did, feeling dimly that it was preferable to fainting.
Murray made a Scottish noise of consternation and muttered something incomprehensible. William could feel the other man hovering over him, uncertain.
“I’m fine,” he said—without opening his eyes. “I just… need to rest a bit.”
“Mmphm.”
William couldn’t tell whether this particular noise was meant as acceptance or dismay, but Murray went away, coming back a moment later with a blanket, with which he covered William without comment. William made a feeble gesture of thanks, unable to speak, as his teeth had begun to chatter with a sudden chill.
His limbs had been aching for some time, but he had ignored it in the need to push on. Now the burden of it fell full on him, a bone-deep ache that made him want to moan aloud. To keep from it, he waited until the chill relaxed enough to let him speak, then called to Murray.
“You are familiar with Dismal Town yourself, sir? You’ve been there?”
“Now and again, aye.” He could see Murray, a dark silhouette crouched by the fire, and hear the chink of metal on stone. “It’s verra aptly named.”
“Ha,” William said weakly. “I daresay. And h-h-have you met a Mr. Washington, by chance?”
“Five or six of them. The general’s got a good many cousins, aye?”
“The g-g—”
“General Washington. Ye’ve heard of him, maybe?” There was a distinct hint of amusement in the Scottish Mohawk’s voice.
“I have, yes. But—surely that…” This made no sense. His voice trailed off, and he rallied, forcing his drifting thoughts back into coherence. “It is a Mr. Henry Washington. He is kin to the general, too?”
“So far as I ken, anyone named Washington within three hundred miles is kin to the general.” Murray stooped to his bag, coming out with a large furry mass, a long, naked tail dangling from it. “Why?”
“I—nothing.” The chill had eased, and he drew a grateful breath, the knotted muscles of his belly relaxing. But the faint threads of wariness were making themselves felt through puzzlement and the gathering fog of fever. “Someone told me that Mr. Henry Washington was a prominent Loyalist.”
Murray turned toward him in astonishment.
“Who in Bride’s name would tell ye that?”
“Plainly someone grossly mistaken.” William pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. His wounded arm hurt. “What is that thing? Possum?”
“Muskrat. Dinna fash; it’s fresh. I killed it just before I met ye.”
“Oh. Good.” He felt obscurely comforted and couldn’t think why. Not the muskrat; he’d eaten muskrat often enough and found it tasty, though the fever had stolen his appetite. He felt weak with hunger, but had no desire to eat. Oh. No, it was the “dinna fash.” Spoken with just that kindly, matter-of-fact intonation—Mac the groom had used to say that to him, often, whether the trouble was being thrown from his pony or not being allowed to ride into the town with his grandfather. “Dinna fash; it will be all right.”
The ripping sound of skin parting from the underlying muscle made him momentarily dizzy and he closed his eyes.
“Ye’ve got a red beard.”
Murray’s voice came to him, filled with surprise.
“You’ve only just now noticed that?” William said crossly, and opened his eyes. The color of his beard was an embarrassment to him; while the hair on his head, chest, and limbs was a decent sort of dark chestnut, that on his chin and privates was an unexpectedly vivid shade that mortified him. He shaved fastidiously, even on shipboard or on the road—but his razor, of course, had departed with the horse.
“Well, aye,” Murray said mildly. “I expect I was distracted earlier.” He fell silent, concentrating on his work, and William tried to relax his mind, hoping to sleep for a time. He was tired enough. Repeated images of the swamp played themselves out before his closed eyes, though, wearying him with visions that he could neither ignore nor dismiss.
Roots like the loops of snares, mud, rank brown dollops of cold pig shit, the turds uneasily humanlike… churned dead leaves…
Dead leaves floating on water like brown glass, reflections shattering around his shins… words in the water, the pages of his book, faint, mocking as they sank away…
Looking up, the sky as vertiginous as the lake, feeling that he might fall up as easily as down and drown in the water-clogged air… drowning in his sweat… a young woman licked the sweat from his cheek, tickling, her body heavy, hot, and cloying, so that he turned and twisted, but could not escape her oppressive attentions…
… sweat collecting behind his ears, thick and greasy in his hair… growing like fat slow pearls in the stubble of his vulgar beard… chilling on his skin, his clothes a dripping shroud… the woman was still there, dead now, dead weight on his chest, pinning him to the icy ground…
Fog and the creeping cold… white fingers prying into his eyes, his ears. He must keep his mouth shut or it would reach inside him … All white.
He curled into a ball, shaking.
William did at last fall deeper into a fitful sleep, from which he roused some time later, to the rich smell of roasted muskrat, and found the enormous dog lying pressed against him, snoring.
“Jesus,” he said, with disconcerting recollections of the young woman in his dreams. He pushed feebly at the dog. “Where did that come from?”
“That’s Rollo,” Murray said reprovingly. “I made him lie wi’ ye for a bit of heat; ye’ve got a shaking ague, if ye hadn’t noticed.”
“I had noticed that, yes.” William struggled upright and made himself eat but was happy to lie down again, at a safe distance from the dog, who was now lying on his back, paws drooping, looking like nothing so much as a giant hairy dead insect. William passed a hand downward over his clammy face, trying to remove that disturbing image from his mind before it made its way into his fever dreams.
Night had come well on, and the sky opened overhead, clear and empty and vast, moonless but brilliant with distant stars. He thought of his father’s father, dead long before his own birth, but a noted amateur astronomer. His father had often taken him—and sometimes his mother—to lie on the lawns at Helwater, to look up at the stars and name the constellations. It was a cold sight, that blue-black emptiness, and made his fevered blood tremble, but the stars were a comfort, nonetheless.