The Fiery Cross

by Diana Gabaldon

  Another noise mingled with the whinging below; coughing, I thought, but it didn't stop, and the rhythm sounded wron . I put my head out, cautious as a

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  snail after a thunderstorm, and made out a few words in the rasping gurgle. C'. . . excavatingfor a mine ... forty-niner ... da-auybter, Clementine.1 Roger was singing.

  I felt the tears sting my eyes, and drew my head in hastily, lest I be seen. There was no tune to it-the pitch varied no more than the hooting of wind across the mouth of an empty bottle-and yet it was music. A dogged, ragged gasp of a song, and yet Jemmy's wailing quieted to sniffling sobs, as though he was trying to make out the words, so painfully forced through his father's scarred throat.

  "Fed she duck-lings ... by the wa-ter . . . " He was having to gasp for breath after each whispered phrase, the sound of it like tearing linen. I curled my fingers into fists, as though by sheer force of will I could help him get the words out.

  "Herring box-es . . . without top-ses ... san-dals were for. Clementine." The breeze was rising again, stirring in the tops of the trees. The next line was lost in their rustle, and I heard no more for a minute or two, strain my ears as I would.

  Then I saw Jamie, standing still.

  He made no noise, but I felt him at once; a warmth, a thickening, in the cool air of the room.

  "Are ye well, Sassenach?" he asked softly from the doorway.

  "Yes, fine." I spoke in a whisper, not to wake Lizzie and her father, who slept in the back bedroom. "Just needed a breath of air; I didn't mean to wake you." He came closer, a tall naked ghost, smelling of sleep.

  "I always wake when you do, Sassenach; I sleep ill without ye by my side." He touched my forehead briefly. "I thought ye were maybe fevered; the bed was damp where ye'd lain. You're sure you're all right?"

  "I was hot; I couldn't sleep. But yes, I'm all right. And you?" I touched his face; his skin was warm with sleep.

  He came to stand beside me at the window, looking out into the late summer night. The moon was full, and the birds were restless; from near at hand, I heard the faint chirp of a late-nesting warbler, and farther off, the squeak of a hunting saw-whet owl.

  "You recall Laurence Sterne?" Jamie asked, evidently reminded of the naturalist by the sounds.

  "I doubt anyone who's met him would forget him," I said dryly. "The bag of dried spiders makes rather an impression. To say nothing of the smell." Stern carried with him a distinctive aroma, composed in equal parts of natural body odor, an expensive cologne that he favored-which was sufficiently strong to compete with-though not to conquer-the pungencies of various preservatives such as camphor and alcohol-and a faint reek of decay from the specimens he collected.

  He chuckled soffly.

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  "That's true. He stinks worse than you do."

  "I do not stink!" I said indignantly.

  "Mmphm." He took my hand and lifted it to his nose, sniffing delicately. 'A onions," he said, "and garlic. Something hot ... peppercorns. Aye, and dove. Squirrel-blood and meat-juice." His tongue flicked out like a snake's, touching my knuckles. "Starch-potatoes-and something woody. Toadstools."

  "Not fair at all," I said, trying to get my hand back. "You know perfectly well what we had for dinner. And they weren't toadstools, they were woodcars-11

  "Mm?" He turned my hand over and sniffed at my palm, then my wrist and up my forearm. "Vinegar and dill; ye've been making cucumber pickles, aye? Good, I like those. Mm, oh, and soured milk here in the fine hairs on your arm-were ye splashed churning butter, or skimming cream?"

  "You guess, since you're so good at it." "Butter."

  "Damn." I was still trying to pull away, but only because the stubble on his face tickled the sensitive skin of my upper arm. He smelled his way up my arm into the hollow of my shoulder, making me squeak as the strands of his hair drifted across my skin.

  He lifted my arm a bit, touched the damp silky hair there and ran his fingers under his nose. "'Eau defemme,' he murmured, and I heard the laughter in his voice. 'Ma petitefleur "

  "And I batbed, too," I said ruefully.

  "Aye, with the sunflower soap," he said, a slight tone of surprise in his voice as he sniffed at the hollow of my collarbone. I gave a small, high-pitched yelp, and he reached up to lay a large, warm hand across my mouth. He smelt of gunpowder, hay, and manure, but I couldn't say so, what with him muffling me.

  He straightened a little, and leaned close, so the roughness of his whiskers brushed my cheek. His hand fell away, and I felt the softness of his lips against my temple, the butterfly touch of his tongue on my skin.

  "And salt," he said, very softly, his breath warm on my face. "There is salt on your face, and your lashes are wet. D'ye weep, Sassenach?"

  "No," I said, though I had a sudden, irrational urge to do just that. "No, I sweat. I was ... hot."

  I wasn't any longer; my skin was cool; cold where the night-draft from the window chilled my backside.

  "Ah, but here ... mm." He was on his knees now, one arm about my waist to hold me still, his nose buried in the hollow between my breasts. "Oh," he said, and his voice had changed again.

  I didn't normally wear perfume, but I had a special oil, sent from the Indies, made with orange flowers, jasmine, vanilla beans, and cinnamon. I had only a tiny vial, and wore a small dab infrequentlyfor occasions that I thought might perhaps be special -

  "Ye wanted me," he said ruefully. "And I fell asleep without even touching you. I'm sorry, Sassenach. Ye should have said."

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  "You were tired." His hand had left my mouth; I stroked his hair, smoothing the long dark strands behind his ear. He laughed, and I felt the warmth of his breath on my bare stomach.

  "Ye could raise me from the dead for that, Sassenach, and I wouldna mind it." He stood up then, facing me, and even in the dim light I could see that no such desperate measures on my part would be required.

  "It's hot," I said. "I'm sweating." "Ye think I'm not?"

  His hands closed on my waist and he fifted me suddenly, setting me down on the broad windowsill. I gasped at contact with the cool wood, reflexively grasping the window frame on either side.

  "What on earth are you doing?"

  He didn't bother answering; it was an entirely rhetorical question, in any case.

  "Eau defemme," he murmured, his soft hair brushing across my thighs as he knelt. The floorboards creaked under his weight. "Parfum d'amor, mm?"

  The cool breeze lifted my hair, drew it tickling across my back like the lightest of lover's touches. Jamie's hands were firm on the curve of my hips; I was in no danger of failing, and yet I felt the dizzy drop behind me, the clear and endless night, with its star-strewn empty sky into which I might fall and go on falling, a tiny speck, blazing hotter and hotter with the friction of my passage, bursting finally into the incandescence of a shooting ... star.

  "Ssh," Jamie murmured, far off. He was standing now, his hands on my waist, and the moaning noise might have been the wind, or me. His fingers brushed my lips. They might have been matches, striking flames against my skin. Heat danced over me, belly and breast, neck and face, burning in front, cool behind, like St. Lawrence on his gridiron.

  I wrapped my legs around him, one heel settled in the cleft of his buttocks, the solid strength of his hips between my legs my only anchor.

  "Let go," he said in my ear. "I'll hold you." I did let go, and leaned back on the air, safe in his hands.

  "YOU DID START OUT to tell me something about Lawrence Stern," I murmured drowsily, much later.

  "So I did." Jamie stretched and settled himself, a hand curved proprietorially over my buttock. My knuckles brushed the hairs on his thigh. It was too hot to lie pressed together, but we didn't want to separate entirely.

  "We were talking of birds; he bein' uncommon fond of them. I asked him why it was that in the late summer, the birds sing at night-the nights are shorter then, ye'd think they'd want their rest, but no. There's rustling a
nd twittering and all manner o' carryings-on, all the night long in the hedges and the trees."

  "Are there? I hadn't noticed."

  "Ye're no in the habit of sleeping in the forest, Sassenach," he said tolerantly. "I have been, and so had Stern. He'd noticed the same thing, he said, and wondered why."

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  "And did he have an answer?"

  "Not an answer-but a theory, at least."

  "Oh, even better," I said, in sleepy amusement.

  He gave a soft grunt of agreement and rolled slightly to one side, admitting a little welcome air between our salty skins. I could see the gleam of moisture over the slope of his shoulder, and the prickle of sweat among the dark curly hairs of his chest. He scratched gently at it, with a softly agreeable rasping sound.

  "What he did was to capture a number of the birds, and shut them up in cages lined with blotting paper."

  "What?" That waked me up a bit, if only to laugh. "Whatever for?"

  "Well, not lined entirely, only on the floor," he explained. "He put out a wee plate on the floor filled with ink and a cup of seed in the middle, so that they couldna feed without getting the ink on their feet. Then as they hopped to and fro, their footprints would show on the blotting paper."

  "Umm. And what, precisely, did that show-other than black footprints?" The insects were beginning to find us, drawn by the musk of our heated flesh. A tiny zeeeeee by my car prompted me to slap at the invisible mosquito, then reach for the gauze-cloth that Jamie had pushed back when he rose to find me. This was fastened to an ingenious mechanism-Brianna's invention-fixed to the beam above the bed, so that when unrolled, the cloth fell down on all sides, shielding us from the bloodthirsty hordes of the summer nights.

  I pulled it into place with some regret, for while it excluded mosquitoes, gnats, and the unnervingly large mosquito-hawk moths, it also unavoidably shut out some of the air and all sight of the luminous night sky beyond the window. I lay down again at a little distance on the bed; while Jamie's natural fiirnace was a great boon on winter nights, it had its drawbacks in the summer. I didn't mind melting in an inferno of blazing desire, if it came to that, but I had no more clean shifts.

  "There were a great many footprints, Sassenach-but most of them were on one side of the cage. In all the cages."

  "Oh, really? And what did Sterne think that signified?"

  "Well, he had the bright thought of putting down a compass by the cages. And it seems that all the night through, the birds were hopping and striving toward the southeast-which is the direction in which they migrate, come the fall."

  "That's very interesting." I pulled my hair back into a tail, liffing it off my neck for coolness. "But it's not quite the time to migrate, is it, in late summer? And they don't fly at night, do they, even when they migrate?"

  "No. It was as though they felt the imminence of flight, and the pull of itand that disturbed their rest. The stranger it was, because most of the birds that he had were young ones, who had never yet made the journey; they hadna seen the place where they were bound, and yet they felt it there-calling to them, perhaps, rousing them from sleep."

  I moved slightly, and Jamie lifted his hand from my leg.

  "Zugunruhe," he said softly, tracing with a fingertip the damp mark he had left on my skin.

  "What's that?"

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  "It's what Sterne called it-the wakefulness of the wee birds, getting ready to leave on their long flight."

  "Does it mean something in particular?"

  "Aye. 'Ruhe' is stillness, rest. And 'zug' is a journey of some sort. So 'zugunruhe' is a restlessness-the uneasiness before a long journey."

  I rolled toward him, butting my forehead affectionately against his shoulder. I inhaled, in the style of one savoring the delicate aroma of a fine cigar.

  "Eau de bomme?"

  He raised his head and sniffed dubiously, wrinkling up his nose.

  "Eau de cbevre, I think," he said. "Though it might be something worse. Is there a French word for skunk, I wonder?"

  "Le Pew." I suggested, giggling. The birds sang all night.

  October, 1772

  AMIE NODDED at something behind him, smiling.

  "I see we've help today."

  Roger looked back to see Jemmy stumping along behind them, his small fair brow furrowed in fierce concentration, a fist-sized rock clutched to his chest with both hands. Roger wanted to laugh at the sight, but instead turned and squatted down, waiting for the boy to catch them up.

  "Is that for the new hogpen, qbille ruadh?" he said.

  Jemmy nodded solemnly. The morning was still cool, but the little boy's cheeks glowed with effort.

  "Thank you," Roger said gravely. He held out his hand. "Shall I take it, then?"

  Jemmy shook his head violently, heavy fringe flying. "Me do!"

  "It's a long walk, yhille ruadb," Jamie said. "And your mother Aill miss ye, no?"

  "No! "Grand-da's right, a bbalaicb, Mummy needs you," Roger said, reaching for the rock. "Here, let me take . . ."

  "No!" Jemmy clutched the rock protectively against his smock, mouth set in a stubborn line.

  "But ye can't . . ." Jamie began. "Come!"

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  "No, I said ye must Roger began.

  "COME!" "Now, look, lad-" both men began together, then stopped, looked at each other and laughed.

  "Where's Mummy, then?" Roger said, trying another tack. "Mummy will be worried about you, aye?"

  The small red head shook in vehement negation.

  "Claire said the women meant to be quilting today," Jamie said to Roger. "Marsali's brought a pattern; they'll maybe have started the stitching of it." He squatted down beside Roger, eye to eye with his grandson.

  "Have ye got away from your mother, then?"

  The soft pink mouth, hitherto clamped tight, twitched, allowing a small giggle to escape.

  "Thought so," Roger said in resignation. "Come on, then. Back to the house." He stood up and swung the little boy up into his arms, rock and all. "No, no! NO!" Jemmy stiffened in resistance, his feet digging painfully into

  Roger's belly as his body arched backward like a bow. "Me help! Me HELP!" Trying to make his own arguments heard through Jemmy's roars without shouting, while at the same time keeping the boy from falling backward onto his head, Roger didn't at first hear the cries from the direction of the house. When he finally resorted to clapping a hand over his offspring's wide-open mouth, though, feminine calls of "Jeeeeemmmeeeeeeee!" were clearly audible through the trees.

  "See, Mrs. Lizzie's looking for ye," Jamie said to his grandson, jerking a thumb toward the sound.

  "Not only Lizzie," Roger said. More women's voices were echoing the chorus, with increasing notes of annoyance. "Mum and Granny Claire and Granny Bug and Auntie Marsali, too, from the sounds of it. They don't sound very pleased with you, lad."

  "We'd best take him, back, then," Jamie said. He looked at his grandson, not without sympathy. "Mind, you're like to get your bum smacked, laddie. Women dinna like it when ye run off on them."

  This threatening prospect caused Jemmy to drop his rock and wrap his arms and legs tightly round Roger.

  "Go with YOU, Daddy," he said coaxingly. "But Mummy-"

  "NO MUMMY! Want Daddy!"

  Roger patted Jemmy's back, small but solid under his grubby smock. He was torn; this was the first time Jern had so definitely wanted him in preference to Bree, and he had to admit to a sneaking feeling of flattery. Even if his son's present partiality sprang as much from an urge to avoid punishment as from a desire for his company, Jem had wanted to come with him.

  "I suppose we could take him," he said to Jamie, over Jem's head, now nestled trustingly against his collarbone. "Just for the morning; I could fetch him back at noon."

  "Oh, aye," Jamie said. He smiled at his grandson, picked up the fallen stone and handed it back to him. "Building hogpens is proper man's work, aye? None of this prinking and yaffling th
e ladies are so fond of."

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  "Speaking of yaffling . . . " Roger lifted his chin in the direction of the house, where the cries of "JEEMEEEEE!" were now taking on a distinctly irritated tone, tinged with panic. "We'd best tell them we have him."

  "I'll go." Jamie dropped the rucksack off his shoulderwrith a sigh, and raised one eyebrow at his grandson. "Mind lad, ye owe me. When women are in a fret, they'll take it out on the first man they see, whether he's to blame or not, Like enough I'll get my bum smacked." He rolled his eyes, but grinned at Jemmy, then turned and set off for the house at a trot.

  Jemmy giggled.

  "Smack, Grand-da!" he called.

  "Hush, wee rascal." Roger gave him a soft slap on the bottom, and realized that Jern was wearing short breeks under his smock, but no clout under them. He swung the boy down onto his feet.

  "D'ye need to go potty?" he asked automatically, falling into Brianna's peculiar idiom.

  "No," Jem said, just as automatically, but with a reflexive kneading of his crotch that made his father take him by the arm, firmly steering him off the path and behind a convenient bush.

  "Come on. Let's have a try, while we wait for Grand-da, 15

  IT SEEMED RATHER a long time before Jamie reappeared, though the indignant cries of the searchers had been quickly stilled. If Jamie had got his bum smacked, Roger thought cynically, he appeared to have enjoyed it. A slight flush showed on the high cheekbones, and he wore a faint but definite air of satisfaction.

  This was explained at once, though, when Jamie produced a small bundle from inside his shirt and unwrapped a linen towel, revealing half a dozen fresh biscuits, still warm, and dripping with melted butter and honey.

  "I think perhaps Mrs. Bug meant them for the quilting circle," he said, distributing the booty. "But there was plenty of batter left in the bowl; I doubt they'll be missed."

  "If they are, I'll blame it on you," Roger assured him, catching a dribble of warm honey that ran down his wrist. He wiped it off and sucked his finger, eyes closing momentarily in ecstasy.

  "What now, ye'd give me up to the Inquisition?" Jamie's eyes creased into blue triangles of amusement as he wiped crumbs from his mouth. "And after I shared my plunder with ye, too-there's gratitude! 11

  "Your reputation will stand it," Roger said wryly. "Jem and I are persona non grata after what happened to her spice cake last week, but Himself can do no wrong, as far as Granny Bug is concerned. She wouldn't mind if you ate the entire contents of the pantry single-handed."

  Jamie licked a smear of honey from the comer of his mouth, with the smug complacency of a man permanently in Mrs. Bug's good books.

  "Well, that's as may be," he admitted. "Still, if ye expect to blame it on me, we'd bestwipe a bit of the evidence off the laddie before we go home."

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  Jemmy had been addressing himself to his treat with single-minded concentration, with the result that his entire face gleamed with butter, daubs of honey ran in amber trails down his smock, and what appeared to be several small globs of half-chewed biscuit were stuck in his hair.

  "How in hell did you do that so fast?" Roger demanded in amazement. "Look what ye've done to your shirt! Your mother will kill us both." He took the towel and made an abortive attempt to wipe some of the mess off, but succeeded only in spreading it farther.

  "Dinna fash," Jamie said tolerantly. "He'll be so covered wi' filth by the end of the day, his mother will never notice a few crumbs extra. Watch out, lad!" A quick grab saved half a biscuit that had broken off as the boy made an attempt to cram the last pastry into his mouth in a single gulp.