He took the pipe and returned the honor of the gesture, then passed it to the next man, refusing to speak further.
They didn’t push him to, seeming to recognize and respect the shock he felt.
Shock. Not even that. What he felt was the blankest astonishment. Cautiously, unwilling, he stole a keek at that picture of Alistair. God, it was there.
He realized that he was holding his breath, not wanting to breathe the reek of blood and spilled bowels. He breathed, soft smoke and a copper tang of seasoned bodies, and could have wept, swept with sudden longing for the cold, sharp air of the Highlands, pungent with the scents of peat and gorse.
Alexander Cameron said something to him, but he couldn’t reply. Ian, seeing the difficulty, leaned forward to answer, and they all laughed. Ian gave him a curious look, but then turned back to the conversation, beginning a story of a famous game of lacrosse he had played among the Mohawk. Leaving Jamie to sit still, wreathed in the smoke.
Fourteen men. And he did not remember a single face. And that random thumb, hovering uncertainly. Whatever did he mean by that? That he had fought yet another, but not made certain of the fellow?
He was afraid even to think of the memory. Unsure what to do with it. But at the same time, conscious of a sense of awe. And despite everything, grateful to have this small thing back.
IT WAS VERY LATE, and most of the men had gone to their own houses, or lay comfortably asleep around the fire. Ian had left the fire, but hadn’t come back. Cameron was still there, smoking his own pipe now, though he shared this with Bird, taking turn and turn about.
“There is a thing I would tell you,” Jamie said abruptly, in the midst of a drowsy silence. “Both of you.” Bird raised his brows in slow question, drugged with tobacco.
He hadn’t known he meant to say it. Had thought to wait, judge his time—if he spoke at all. Perhaps it was the closeness of the house, the dark intimacy of the fireside, or the intoxication of tobacco. Perhaps only the kinship of an exile for those who would suffer the same fate. But he’d spoken; had no choice now but to tell them what he knew.
“The women of my family are . . .” He groped, not knowing the Cherokee word. “Those who see in dreams what is to come.” He darted a look at Cameron, who appeared to take this in his stride, for he nodded, and closed his eyes to draw smoke into his lungs.
“Have they the Sight, then?” he asked, mildly interested.
Jamie nodded; it was as good an explanation as any.
“They have seen a thing concerning the Tsalagi. Both my wife and my daughter have seen this thing.”
Bird’s attention sharpened, hearing this. Dreams were important; for more than one person to share a dream was extraordinary, and therefore most important.
“It grieves me to tell you,” Jamie said, and meant it. “Sixty years from this time, the Tsalagi will be taken from their lands, removed to a new place. Many will die on this journey, so that the path they tread will be called . . .” He groped for the word for “tears,” did not find it, and ended, “the trail where they wept.”
Bird’s lips pursed, as though to draw smoke, but the pipe fumed unnoticed in his hands.
“Who will do this?” he asked. “Who can?”
Jamie drew a deep breath; here was the difficulty. And yet—so much less difficult than he had thought, now that it came to the matter.
“It will be white men,” he said. “But it will not be King George’s men.”
“The French?” Cameron spoke with a hint of incredulity, but frowned, nonetheless, trying to see how this might come to pass. “Or the Spanish, do they mean? The Spanish are a good deal closer—but none sae many.” Spain still held the country south of Georgia, and parts of the Indies, but the English held Georgia firmly; there was little apparent chance of any northward movement by the Spaniards.
“No. Not Spanish, not French.” He could wish Ian had stayed, for more than one reason. But the lad had not, and so he would have to struggle with the Tsalagi, which was an interesting tongue, but one in which he could talk fluently only of solid things—and of a very limited future.
“What they tell me—what my women say—” He struggled to find sensible words. “A thing that they see in their dreams, this thing will come to pass, if it concerns many people. But they think it may not come to pass, if it concerns a few, or one.”
Bird blinked, confused—and no wonder. Grimly, Jamie tried again to explain.
“There are large things, and there are small things. A large thing is a thing like a great battle, or the raising up of a notable chief—though he is one man, he is raised up by the voices of many. If my women dream of these large things, then they will happen. But in any large thing, there are many people. Some say do this; others, do that.” He zigzagged his hand to and fro, and Bird nodded.
“So. If many people say, ‘Do this’”—he stabbed his fingers sharply to the left—“then this happens. But what of the people who said, ‘do that’?” And he jerked a thumb back the other way. “These people may choose a different way.”
Bird made the hm-hm-hm! sound he used when startled.
“So it may be that some will not go?” Cameron asked sharply. “They might escape?”
“I hope so,” Jamie said simply.
They sat in silence for a bit, each man staring into the fire, each seeing his own visions—of the future, or the past.
“This wife you have,” Bird said at last, deeply contemplative, “did you pay a great deal for her?”
“She cost me almost everything I had,” he said, with a wry tone that made the others laugh. “But worth it.”
IT WAS VERY LATE when he went to the guesthouse; the moon had set, and the sky had that look of deep serenity, the stars singing to themselves in endless night. His body ached in every muscle, and he was so tired that he stumbled on the threshold. His instincts were still working, though, and he felt, rather than saw, someone move in the shadows of the sleeping-couch.
God, Bird was still at it. Well, tonight it wouldn’t matter; he could lie naked with a covey of young women, and sleep sound. Too exhausted to be annoyed by her presence, he struggled for some polite acknowledgment of the woman. Then she stood up.
The firelight showed him an elderly woman, her hair in grizzled plaits, her dress of white buckskin decorated with paint and porcupine quills. He recognized Calls-in-the-Forest, dressed in her best. Bird’s sense of humor had finally got completely out of hand; he had sent Jamie his mother.
All grasp of Tsalagi deserted him. He opened his mouth, but merely gaped at her. She smiled, very slightly, and held out her hand.
“Come and lie down, Bear-Killer,” she said. Her voice was kind and gruff. “I’ve come to comb the snakes from your hair.”
She drew him unresisting to the couch, and made him lie down with his head in her lap. Sure enough; she unplaited his hair and spread it out across her knees, her touch soothing to his throbbing head and the painful knot on his brow.
He had no idea how old she might be, but her fingers were muscular and tireless, making small, rhythmic circles in his scalp, on his temples, behind his ears, near to the bone at the base of his skull. She had thrown sweet grass and some other herb on the fire; the chimney hole was drawing well and he could see white smoke rising upward in a wavering pillar, very calm, but a sense of constant movement in it.
She was humming to herself, or rather whispering some song, the words too indistinct to make out. He watched the silent shapes stream upward in the smoke, and felt his body growing heavy, limbs filled with wet sand, his body a sandbag placed in the path of a flood.
“Talk, Bear-Killer,” she said very softly, breaking off her chant. She had a wooden comb in her hand; he felt the teeth of it caress his scalp, rounded with wear.
“I cannot call your words to me,” he said, searching for each word in Tsalagi, and thus speaking very slowly. She made a small snorting noise in reply.
“The words don’t matter, nor the tongue in which you speak,” she said. “Only talk. I will understand.”
And so he began haltingly to speak—in Gaelic, as it was the only tongue that didn’t seem to require any effort. He understood that he was to speak of what filled his heart, and so began with Scotland—and Culloden. Of grief. Of loss. Of fear.
And in the speaking turned from past to future, where he saw these three specters loom again, cold creatures coming toward him out of the fog, looking through their empty eyes.
Another stood among them—Jack Randall—confusingly on both sides of him. Those eyes were not empty, but alive, intent in a misty face. Had he killed the man, or not? If he had, did the ghost follow at his heels? Or if he had not, was it the thought of vengeance unsatisfied that haunted him, taunted him with its imperfect memory?
But in the speaking, he seemed somehow to rise a little way above his body, and see himself at rest, eyes open, fixed upward, his hair darkly flaming in a halo round his head, streaked with the silver of his age. And here he saw that he merely was, in a place between, apart. And quite alone. At peace.
“I hold to no evil in my heart,” he said, hearing his voice come slow, from a long way off. “This evil does not touch me. More may come, but not this. Not here. Not now.”
“I understand,” whispered the old woman, and went on combing his hair as the white smoke rose silent toward the hole to the sky.
45
A TAINT IN THE BLOOD
June 1774
I SAT BACK ON MY HEELS and stretched, tired but pleased. My back ached, my knees creaked like hinges, my fingernails were caked with dirt, and strands of hair stuck to my neck and cheeks—but the new crops of pole beans, onions, turnips, and radishes were planted, the cabbages weeded and culled, and a dozen large peanut bushes had been pulled up and hung to dry on the garden palisades, safe from marauding squirrels.
I glanced up at the sun; still above the chestnut trees. Time enough then before supper for a last chore or two. I stood up and surveyed my small kingdom, debating where best to spend my remaining time. Rooting up the catmint and lemon balm that threatened to engulf the far corner of the garden? Carting baskets of nicely rotted manure up from the heap behind the barn? No, that was man’s work.
Herbs? My three French lavender bushes stood knee-high, thick with deep blue swabs on slender stalks, and the yarrow was well in bloom, with lacy umbels of white and pink and yellow. I rubbed a finger under my itching nose, trying to recall whether this was the proper phase of the moon in which to cut yarrow. Lavender and rosemary should be cut in the morning, though, when the volatile oils had risen with the sun; it wasn’t as potent if taken later in the day.
Down with the mint, then. I reached for the hoe I had left leaning against the fence, saw a face leering through the palisades, and started back, my heart leaping into my throat.
“Oh!” My visitor had jumped back, too, equally startled. “Bitte, ma’am! Didn’t mean to fright ye.”
It was Manfred McGillivray, peeping shyly through the drooping vines of morning glory and wild yam. He’d come earlier in the day, bringing a canvas-wrapped bundle containing several muskets for Jamie.