Seven Stones to Stand or Fall

by Diana Gabaldon

  He flung off his nightshirt and knelt to rummage in his trunk, with a guilty look over his shoulder. Tom, though, was safely tucked up somewhere amid the attics or outbuildings of King’s House and almost certainly sound asleep. Tom suffered badly with seasickness, and the voyage had been hard on him.

  The heat of the Indies hadn’t done the battered tin of bear grease any good, either; the rancid fat nearly overpowered the scent of the peppermint and other herbs mixed into it. Still, he reasoned, if it repelled him, how much more a mosquito, and he rubbed it into as much of his flesh as he could reach. Despite the stink, he found it not unpleasant. There was enough of the original smell left as to remind him of his usage of the stuff in Canada. Enough to remind him of Manoke, who had given it to him. Anointed him with it, in a cool blue evening on a deserted sandy isle in the St. Lawrence River.

  Finished, he put down the tin and touched his rising prick. He didn’t suppose he’d ever see Manoke again. But he did remember. Vividly.

  A little later, he lay gasping on the bed under his netting, heart thumping slowly in counterpoint to the echoes of his flesh. He opened his eyes, feeling pleasantly relaxed, his head finally clear. The room was close; the servants had shut the windows, of course, to keep out the dangerous night air, and sweat misted his body. He felt too slack to get up and open the French doors onto the terrace, though; in a moment would do.

  He closed his eyes again—then opened them abruptly and leapt out of bed, reaching for the dagger he’d laid on the table. The servant called Rodrigo stood pressed against the door, the whites of his eyes showing in his black face.

  “What do you want?” Grey put the dagger down but kept his hand on it, his heart still racing.

  “I have a message for you, sah,” the young man said. He swallowed audibly.

  “Yes? Come into the light, where I can see you.” Grey reached for his banyan and slid into it, still keeping an eye on the man.

  Rodrigo peeled himself off the door with evident reluctance, but he’d come to say something, and say it he would. He advanced into the dim circle of candlelight, hands at his sides, nervously clutching air.

  “Do you know, sah, what an Obeah man is?”

  “No.”

  That disconcerted Rodrigo visibly. He blinked and twisted his lips, obviously at a loss as how to describe this entity. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders helplessly and gave up.

  “He says to you, beware.”

  “Does he?” Grey said dryly. “Of anything specific?”

  That seemed to help; Rodrigo nodded vigorously.

  “You don’t be close to the governor. Stay right away, as far as you can. He’s going to—I mean…something bad might happen. Soon. He—” The servant broke off, apparently realising that he could be dismissed—if not worse—for talking about the governor in this loose fashion. Grey was more than curious, though, and sat down, motioning to Rodrigo to take the stool, which he did with obvious reluctance.

  Whatever an Obeah man was, Grey thought, he clearly had considerable power, to force Rodrigo to do something he so plainly didn’t want to do. The young man’s face shone with sweat, and his hands clenched mindlessly on the fabric of his coat.

  “Tell me what the Obeah man said,” Grey said, leaning forward, intent. “I promise you, I will tell no one.”

  Rodrigo gulped but nodded. He bent his head, looking at the table as though he might find the right words written in the grain of the wood.

  “Zombie,” he muttered, almost inaudibly. “The zombie come for him. For the governor.”

  Grey had no notion what a zombie might be, but the word was spoken in such a tone as to make a chill flicker over his skin, sudden as distant lightning.

  “Zombie,” he said carefully. Mindful of the governor’s reaction earlier, he asked, “Is a zombie perhaps a snake of some kind?”

  Rodrigo gasped but then seemed to relax a little.

  “No, sah,” he said seriously. “Zombie are dead people.” He stood up then, bowed abruptly, and left, his message delivered.

  NOT SURPRISINGLY, Grey did not fall asleep immediately in the wake of this visit.

  Having encountered German night-hags, Indian ghosts, and having spent a year or two in the Scottish Highlands, he had more acquaintance than most with picaresque superstition. While he wasn’t inclined to give instant credence to local custom and belief, neither was he inclined to discount such belief out of hand. Belief made people do things that they otherwise wouldn’t—and whether the belief had substance or not, the consequent actions certainly did.

  Obeah men and zombies notwithstanding, plainly there was some threat to Governor Warren—and Grey rather thought the governor knew what it was.

  How exigent was the threat, though? He pinched out the candle flame and sat in darkness for a moment, letting his eyes adjust, then rose and went soft-footed to the French doors, through which Rodrigo had vanished.

  The guest bedchambers of King’s House were merely a string of boxes, all facing the long terrace and each opening directly onto it through a pair of French doors. Grey paused for a moment, hand on the muslin drape; if anyone was watching his room, they would see the curtain being drawn aside.

  Instead, he turned and went to the inner door of the room. This opened onto a narrow service corridor, completely dark at the moment—and completely empty, if his senses could be trusted. He closed the door quietly, glancing over his shoulder at the French doors. It was interesting, he thought, that Rodrigo had come to the front door, so to speak, when he could have approached Grey unseen.

  But Rodrigo had said the Obeah man sent him. Plainly he wanted it to be seen that he had obeyed his order. Which in turn meant that someone was likely watching to see that he had.

  The logical conclusion would be that the same someone—or someones—was watching to see what Grey might do next.

  His body had reached its own conclusions already and was reaching for breeches and shirt before he had quite decided that if something were about to happen to Warren, it was clearly his duty to stop it, zombies or not. He stepped out of the French doors onto the terrace, moving quite openly.

  There was an infantryman posted at either end of the terrace, as he’d expected; Robert Cherry was nothing if not meticulous. On the other hand, the bloody sentries had plainly not seen Rodrigo entering his room, and he wasn’t at all pleased about that. Recriminations could wait, though; the nearer sentry saw him and challenged him with a sharp “Who goes there?”

  “It’s me,” Grey said briefly, and, without ceremony, dispatched the sentry with orders to alert the other soldiers posted around the house, then send two men into the house, where they should wait in the hall until summoned.

  Grey then went back into his room, through the inner door, and down the dark service corridor. He found a dozing black servant behind a door at the end of it, minding the fire under the row of huge coppers that supplied hot water to the household.

  The man blinked and stared when shaken awake but eventually nodded in response to Grey’s demand to be taken to the governor’s bedchamber. He led Grey into the main part of the house and up a darkened stair lit only by the moonlight streaming through the tall casements. Everything was quiet on the upper floor save for slow, regular snoring coming from what the slave said was the governor’s room.

  The man was swaying with weariness; Grey dismissed him, with orders to let in and send up the soldiers who should now be at the door. The man yawned hugely, and Grey watched him stumble down the stairs into the murk of the hall below, hoping he would not fall and break his neck. The house was very quiet. He was beginning to feel somewhat foolish. And yet…

  The house seemed to breathe around him, almost as though it were a sentient thing and aware of him. He found the fancy unsettling.

  Ought he to wake Warren? he wondered. Warn him? Question him? No, he decided. There was no point in disturbing the man’s rest. Questions could wait for the morning.

  The sound of feet coming up the st
air dispelled his sense of uneasiness, and he gave his orders quietly. The sentries were to keep guard on this door until relieved in the morning; at any sound of disturbance within, they were to enter at once. Otherwise…

  “Stay alert. If you see or hear anything, I wish to know about it.”

  He paused, but Warren continued to snore, so he shrugged and made his way downstairs, out into the silken night, and back to his own room.

  He smelled it first. For an instant he thought he had left the tin of bear-grease ointment uncovered—and then the reek of sweet decay took him by the throat, followed instantly by a pair of hands that came out of the dark and fastened on said throat.

  He fought back in blind panic, striking and kicking wildly, but the grip on his windpipe didn’t loosen, and bright lights began to flicker at the corners of what would have been his vision if he’d had any. With a tremendous effort of will, he made himself go limp. The sudden weight surprised his assailant and jerked Grey free of the throttling grasp as he fell. He hit the floor and rolled.

  Bloody hell, where was the man? If it was a man. For even as his mind reasserted its claim to reason, his more-visceral faculties were recalling Rodrigo’s parting statement: ‘Zombie are dead people.’ And whatever was here in the dark with him seemed to have been dead for several days, judging from its smell.

  He could hear the rustling of something moving quietly toward him. Was it breathing? He couldn’t tell for the rasp of his own breath, harsh in his throat, and the blood-thick hammering of his heart in his ears.

  He was lying at the foot of a wall, his legs half under the dressing table’s bench. There was light in the room, now that his eyes were accustomed; the French doors were pale rectangles in the dark, and he could make out the shape of the thing that was hunting him. It was man-shaped but oddly hunched and swung its head and shoulders from side to side, almost as though it meant to smell him out. Which wouldn’t take it more than two more seconds, at most.

  He sat up abruptly, seized the small padded bench, and threw it as hard as he could at the thing’s legs. It made a startled oof! noise that was undeniably human, then it staggered, waving its arms for balance. The noise reassured Grey, and he rolled up onto one knee and launched himself at the creature, bellowing incoherent abuse.

  He butted it around chest height, felt it fall backwards, then lunged for the pool of shadow where he thought the table was. It was there and, feeling frantically over the surface, he found his dagger, still where he’d left it. He snatched it up and turned just in time to face the thing, which closed on him at once, reeking and making a disagreeable gobbling noise. He slashed at it and felt his knife skitter down the creature’s forearm, bouncing off bone. It screamed, releasing a blast of foul breath directly into his face, then turned and rushed for the French doors, bursting through them in a shower of glass and flying muslin.

  Grey charged after it, onto the terrace, shouting for the sentries. But the sentries, as he recalled belatedly, were in the main house, keeping watch over the governor, lest that worthy’s rest be disturbed by…whatever sort of thing this was. Zombie?

  Whatever it was, it was gone.

  He sat down abruptly on the stones of the terrace, shaking with reaction. No one had come out in response to the noise. Surely no one could have slept through that; perhaps no one else was housed on this side of the mansion.

  He felt ill and breathless and rested his head for a moment on his knees, before jerking it up to look round, lest something else be stealing up on him. But the night was still and balmy. The only noise was an agitated rustling of leaves in a nearby tree, which for a shocked second he thought might be the creature, climbing from branch to branch in search of refuge. Then he heard soft chitterings and hissing squeaks. Bats, said the calmly rational part of his mind—what was left of it.

  He gulped and breathed, trying to get clean air into his lungs to replace the disgusting stench of the creature. He’d been a soldier most of his life; he’d seen the dead on battlefields, and smelled them, too. Had buried fallen comrades in trenches and burned the bodies of his enemies. He knew what graves and rotting flesh smelled like. And the thing that had had its hands round his throat had almost certainly come from a recent grave.

  He was shivering violently, despite the warmth of the night. He rubbed a hand over his left arm, which ached from the struggle; he had been badly wounded three years before, at Crefeld, and had nearly lost the arm. It worked but was still a good deal weaker than he’d like. Glancing at it, though, he was startled. Dark smears befouled the pale sleeve of his banyan, and, turning over his right hand, he found it wet and sticky.

  “Jesus,” he murmured, and brought it gingerly to his nose. No mistaking that smell, even overlaid as it was by grave reek and the incongruous scent of night-blooming jasmine from the vines that grew in tubs by the terrace. Rain was beginning to fall, pungent and sweet—but even that could not obliterate the smell.

  Blood. Fresh blood. Not his, either.

  He rubbed the rest of the blood from his hand with the hem of his banyan, and the cold horror of the last few minutes faded into a glowing coal of anger, hot in the pit of his stomach.

  He’d been a soldier most of his life; he’d killed. He’d seen the dead on battlefields. And one thing he knew for a fact. Dead men don’t bleed.

  FETTES AND CHERRY had to know, of course. So did Tom, as the wreckage of his room couldn’t be explained as the result of a nightmare. The four of them gathered in Grey’s room, conferring by candlelight as Tom went about tidying the damage, white to the lips.

  “You’ve never heard of zombie—or zombies? I have no idea whether the term is plural or not.” Heads were shaken all round. A large square bottle of excellent Scotch whisky had survived the rigours of the voyage in the bottom of his trunk, and he poured generous tots of this, including Tom in the distribution.

  “Tom—will you ask among the servants tomorrow? Carefully, of course. Drink that; it will do you good.”

  “Oh, I’ll be careful, me lord,” Tom assured him fervently. He took an obedient gulp of the whisky before Grey could warn him. His eyes bulged and he made a noise like a bull that has sat on a bumblebee, but managed somehow to swallow the mouthful, after which he stood still, opening and closing his mouth in a stunned sort of way.

  Bob Cherry’s mouth twitched, but Fettes maintained his usual stolid imperturbability.

  “Why the attack upon you, sir, do you suppose?”

  “If the servant who warned me about the Obeah man was correct, I can only suppose that it was a consequence of my posting sentries to keep guard upon the governor. But you’re right.” He nodded at Fettes’s implication. “That means that whoever was responsible for this”—he waved a hand to indicate the disorder of his chamber, which still smelled of its recent intruder, despite the rain-scented wind that came through the shattered doors and the burnt-honey smell of the whisky—“either was watching the house closely, or—”

  “Or lives here,” Fettes said, and took a meditative sip. “Dawes, perhaps?”

  Grey’s eyebrows rose. That small, tubby, genial man? And yet he’d known a number of small, wicked men.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “it was not he who attacked me; I can tell you that much. Whoever it was was taller than I am and of a very lean build—not corpulent at all.”

  Tom made a hesitant noise, indicating that he had had a thought, and Grey nodded at him, giving permission to speak.

  “You’re quite sure, me lord, as the man who went for you…er…wasn’t dead? Because by the smell of him, he’s been buried for a week, at least.”

  A reflexive shudder went through all of them, but Grey shook his head.

  “I am positive,” he said, as firmly as he could. “It was a live man—though certainly a peculiar one,” he added, frowning.

  “Ought we to search the house, sir?” Cherry suggested.

  Grey shook his head reluctantly.

  “He—or it—went away into the garden. He l
eft discernible footmarks.” He did not add that there had been sufficient time for the servants—if they were involved—to hide any traces of the creature by now. If there was involvement, he thought, the servant Rodrigo was his best avenue of inquiry—and it would not serve his purposes to alarm the house and focus attention on the young man ahead of time.

  “Tom,” he said, turning to his valet. “Does Rodrigo appear to be approachable?”

  “Oh, yes, me lord. He was friendly to me over supper,” Tom assured him, brush in hand. “D’ye want me to talk to him?”

  “Yes, if you will. Beyond that…” He rubbed a hand over his face, feeling the sprouting beard-stubble on his jaw. “I think we will proceed with the plans for tomorrow. But, Captain Cherry, will you also find time to question Mr. Dawes? You may tell him what transpired here tonight; I should find his response to that most interesting.”

  “Yes, sir.” Cherry finished his whisky, coughed, and sat blinking for a moment, then cleared his throat. “The, um, the governor, sir…?”

  “I’ll speak to him myself,” Grey said. “And then I propose to ride up into the hills, to pay a visit to a couple of plantations, with an eye to defensive postings. For we must be seen to be taking prompt and decisive action. If there’s offensive action to be taken against the maroons, it will wait until we see what we’re up against.” Fettes and Cherry nodded; lifelong soldiers, they had no urgent desire to rush into combat.

  The meeting dismissed, Grey sat down with a fresh glass of whisky, sipping it as Tom finished his work in silence.

  “You’re sure as you want to sleep in this room tonight, me lord?” he said, putting the dressing-table bench neatly back in its spot. “I could find you another place, I’m sure.”

  Grey smiled at him with affection.

  “I’m sure you could, Tom. But so could our recent friend, I expect. No, Captain Cherry will post a double guard on the terrace, as well as inside the house. It will be perfectly safe.” And even if it wasn’t, the thought of hiding, skulking away from whatever the thing was that had visited him…No. He wouldn’t allow them—whoever they were—to think they had shaken his nerve.