An Echo in the Bone (118 page)

Something ran over my foot, and I jerked in reflex, slopping liquefied possum fat over my hand.

I gritted my teeth and wiped it gingerly on my apron. Possum fat
is
extremely greasy, its major drawback as a general-purpose lubricant being that it smells like dead possum.

My heart was beating fast from the shock and gave a convulsive leap when an owl came out of the copse to my right, a piece of the night taking sudden silent flight a few feet from my face.

Then a branch cracked suddenly, and I heard the movements of several men, murmuring together as they pushed through the undergrowth nearby.

I stood quite still, teeth set in my lower lip, and felt a wave of sudden, irrational terror.

It’s all right!
I told myself, furious.
It’s only soldiers looking for a shortcut. No threat, no threat
at all!

Tell that to the Marines
, my nervous system replied, at the sound of a muffled curse, the scuffle and crunch of dry leaves and breaking branches, and the sudden kicked-melon thump of a solid object meeting someone’s head. A cry, the crash of a falling body, and hurried rustling as the thieves rifled their victim’s pockets.

I couldn’t move. I wanted desperately to run but was rooted to the spot; my legs simply wouldn’t respond. It was exactly like a nightmare, with something terrible coming my way but no ability to move.

My mouth was open, and I was exerting all my strength to keep from screaming, while at the same time terrified that I
couldn’t
scream. My own breathing was loud, echoing inside my head, and all of a sudden I felt my throat harsh with swallowed blood, my breath labored, nostrils blocked. And the weight on me, heavy, amorphous, crushing me into ground rough with stones and fallen pinecones. I felt hot breath in my ear.

There, now. I’m sorry, Martha, but you got to take it. I got to give it to you. Yeah, there… oh,
Christ, there… there…

I didn’t remember falling to the ground. I was curled into a ball, face pressed to my knees, shaking with rage and terror. Crashing in the brush nearby, several men passed within a few feet of me, laughing and joking.

And then some small fragment of my sanity spoke up in the recesses of my brain, cool as dammit, dispassionately remarking,
Oh, so
that’s
a flashback. How interesting
.

“I’ll show you interesting,” I whispered—or thought I did. I don’t believe I made a sound. I was fully dressed—swaddled against the cold—I could
feel
the cold on my face, but it made no difference. I was naked, felt cool air on my breasts, my thighs—between my thighs …

I clamped my legs together as tightly as I could and bit my lip as hard as I could. Now I really did taste blood. But the next thing didn’t happen. I remembered it vividly. But it
was
a memory.

It didn’t happen again.

Very slowly, I came back. My lip hurt, and I was drooling blood; I could feel the gouge, a loose flap of flesh in my inner lip, and taste silver and copper, as though my mouth was filled with pennies.

I was breathing as though I’d run a mile, but I
could
breathe; my nose was clear, my throat soft and open, not bruised, not abraded. I was drenched in sweat, and my muscles hurt from being clenched so hard.

I could hear moaning in the brush to my left.
They didn’t kill him, then
, I thought dimly. I supposed I should go and see, help him. I didn’t want to, didn’t want to touch a man, see a man, be anywhere near one. It didn’t matter, though; I couldn’t move.

I was no longer frozen in the grip of terror; I knew where I was, that I was safe—safe enough.

But I couldn’t move. I stayed crouched, sweating and trembling, and listened.

The man groaned a few times, then rolled slowly over, branches rustling.

“Oh, shit,” he mumbled. He lay still, breathing heavily, then sat up abruptly, exclaiming, “Oh,
shit
!”—whether at the pain of the movement or the memory of the robbery, I didn’t know. There was mumbled cursing, a sigh, silence… then a shriek of pure terror that hit my spinal cord like a jolt of electricity.

Mad scrambling sounds as the man scuffled to his feet—why, why, what was going on?

Crashing and rattling of flight. Terror was infectious; I wanted to run, too, was on my feet, my heart in my mouth, but didn’t know where to go. I couldn’t hear anything above that idiot’s crashing. What was bloody out there?

A faint rustle of dry leaves made me jerk my head round—and saved me by a split second from having a heart attack when Rollo thrust his wet nose into my hand.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I exclaimed, relieved at the sound of my own voice. The sound of rustling footsteps came toward me through the leaves.

“Oh, there ye are, Auntie.” A tall presence loomed up, no more than a shadow in the dark, and Young Ian touched my arm. “Are ye all right, Auntie?” There was an anxious tone in his voice, bless him.

“Yes,” I said rather faintly, then with more conviction, “Yes. I am. I got turned about, in the dark.”

“Oh.” The tall figure relaxed. “I thought ye must have lost your way. Denny Hunter came and said ye’d gone off to find some grease but ye’d no come back, and he was worrit for ye. So Rollo and I came to find ye. Who was yon fellow that Rollo scared the bejesus out of?”

“I don’t know.” The mention of grease made me look for the cup of possum grease. It was on the ground, empty and clean. From the lapping noises, I deduced that Rollo, having finished off what was in the cup, was now tidily licking the dead leaves on which grease had spilled when I dropped it. Under the circumstances, I didn’t feel I could really complain.

Ian bent and scooped up the cup.

“Come back to the fire, Auntie. I’ll find some more grease.”

I made no demur at this and followed him down off the hillside, paying no real attention to my surroundings. I was too occupied in rearranging my mental state, settling my feelings, and trying to regain some kind of equilibrium.

I’d heard the word “flashback” only briefly, in Boston in the sixties. We didn’t call it flashback earlier, but I’d heard about it. And I’d seen it. Shell shock, they said in the First World War.

Battle fatigue, in the Second. It’s what happens when you live through things you shouldn’t have been able to live through and can’t reconcile that knowledge with the fact that you did.

Well, I did
, I said defiantly to myself.
So you can just get used to it
. I wondered for an instant who I was talking to and—quite seriously—whether I was losing my mind.

I certainly remembered what had happened to me during my abduction years before. I’d have strongly preferred not to but knew enough about psychology not to try to suppress the memories.

When they showed up, I looked carefully at them, doing deep-breathing exercises, then stuffed them back where they’d come from and went to find Jamie. After a time, I found that only certain details showed up vividly: the cup of a dead ear, purple in the dawn light, looking like an exotic fungus; the brilliant burst of light I’d seen when Harley Boble had broken my nose; the smell of corn on the breath of the teenaged idiot who’d tried to rape me. The soft, heavy weight of the man who did. The rest was a merciful blur.

I had nightmares, too, though Jamie generally woke at once when I began to make whimpering noises and grabbed me hard enough to shatter the dream, holding me against him and stroking my hair, my back, humming to me, half asleep himself, until I sank back into his peace and slept again. This was different.

IAN WENT FROM fire to fire in search of grease and at length obtained a small tin containing half an inch of goose grease mixed with comfrey. It was more than a bit rancid, but Denny Hunter had told him what it was for, and he didn’t suppose the state of it mattered so much.

The state of his aunt concerned him somewhat more. He knew fine well why she sometimes twitched like a wee cricket or moaned in her sleep. He’d seen the state of her when they’d got her back from the bastards, and he knew the sort of things they’d done to her. Blood rose in him and the vessels at his temples swelled at memory of the fight when they’d taken her back.

She hadn’t wished to take her own revenge, when they’d rescued her; he thought perhaps that had been a mistake, though he understood the part about her being a healer and sworn not to kill.

The thing was, some men needed killing. The Church didn’t admit that, save it was war. The Mohawk understood it fine. So did Uncle Jamie.

And the Quakers…

He groaned.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire
. The instant he’d got the grease, his steps had turned, not toward the hospital tent where Denny almost surely was—but toward the Hunters’ tent. He could pretend he was going to the hospital tent; the two were near enough together. But he’d never seen any point in lying to himself.

Not for the first time, he missed Brianna. He could say anything to her, and she to him—more, he thought, than she could sometimes say to Roger Mac.

Mechanically, he crossed himself, muttering,
“Gum biodh iad sabhailte, a Dhìa.” That they
might be safe, O God
.

For that matter, he wondered what Roger Mac might have counseled were he here. He was a quiet man, and a godly one, if a Presbyterian. But he’d been on that night’s ride and joined in the work, and not a word said about it after.

Ian spared a moment’s contemplation of Roger Mac’s future congregation and what they’d think of that picture of their minister, but shook his head and went on. All these wonderings were only means to keep him from thinking what he’d say when he saw her, and that was pointless. He wanted only to say one thing to her, and that was the one thing he couldn’t say, ever.

The tent flap was closed, but there was a candle burning within. He coughed politely outside, and Rollo, seeing where they were, wagged his tail and uttered a cordial
woof !

The flap was thrust back at once, and Rachel stood there, mending in one hand, squinting into the dark but already smiling; she’d heard the dog. She’d taken off her cap, and her hair was messed, coming down from its pins.

“Rollo!” she said, bending down to scratch his ears. “And I see thee’ve brought thy friend along, too.”

Ian smiled, lifting the little tin.

“I brought some grease. My aunt said your brother needed it for his arsehole.” An instant too late, he re-collected himself. “I mean—for
an
arsehole.” Mortification flamed up his chest, but he was speaking to perhaps the only woman in camp who might take arseholes as a common topic of conversation. Well, the only one save his auntie, he amended. Or the whores, maybe.

“Oh, he’ll be pleased; I thank thee.”

She reached to take the tin from him, and her fingers brushed his. The tin box was smeared with the grease and slippery; it fell and both of them bent to retrieve it. She straightened first; her hair brushed his cheek, warm and smelling of her.

Without even thinking, he put both hands on her face and bent to her. Saw the flash and darkening of her eyes, and had one heartbeat, two, of perfect warm happiness, as his lips rested on hers, as his heart rested in her hands.

Then one of those hands cracked against his cheek, and he staggered back like a drunkard startled out of sleep.

“What does thee do?” she whispered. Her eyes wide as saucers, she had backed away, was pressed against the wall of the tent as though to fall through it. “Thee must not!”

He couldn’t find the words to say. His languages boiled in his mind like stew, and he was mute.

The first word to surface through the moil in his mind was the
Gàidhlig
, though.

“Mo chridhe,”
he said, and breathed for the first time since he’d touched her. Mohawk came next, deep and visceral.
I need you
. And tagging belatedly, English, the one best suited to apology. “I—I’m sorry.”

She nodded, jerky as a puppet.

“Yes. I—yes.”

He should leave; she was afraid. He knew that. But he knew something else, too. It wasn’t him she was afraid of. Slowly, slowly, he put out a hand to her, the fingers moving without his will, slowly, as though to guddle a trout.

And by an expected miracle, but miracle nonetheless, her hand stole out toward his, trembling.

He touched the tips of her fingers, found them cold. His own were warm, he would warm her….

In his mind, he felt the chill of her flesh against his own, noted the nipples hard against the cloth of her dress and felt the small round weight of her breasts, cold in his hands, the press of her thighs, chill and hard against his heat.

He was gripping her hand, drawing her back. And she was coming, boneless, helpless, drawn to his heat.

“Thee must not,” she whispered, barely audible. “We must not.”

It came to him dimly that of course he could not simply draw her to him, sink to the earth, push her garments out of the way, and have her, though every fiber of his being demanded that he do just that. Some faint memory of civilization asserted itself, though, and he grabbed for it. At the same time, with a terrible reluctance, he released her hand.

“No, of course,” he said, in perfect English. “Of course we mustn’t.”

“I—thee—” She swallowed and ran the back of her hand across her lips. Not as though to wipe away his kiss, but in astonishment, he thought. “Does thee know—” She stopped dead, helpless, and stared at him.

“I’m not worried about whether ye love me,” he said, and knew he spoke the truth. “Not now.

I’m worried about whether ye might die because ye do.”

“Thee has a cheek! I didn’t say I loved thee.”

He looked at her then, and something moved in his chest. It might have been laughter. It might not.

“A great deal better ye don’t,” he said softly. “I’m no a fool, and neither are you.”

She made an impulsive gesture toward him, and he drew back, just a hair.

“I think ye’d best not touch me, lass,” he said, still staring intently into her eyes, the color of cress under rushing water. “Because if ye do, I’ll take ye, here and now. And then it’s too late for us both, isn’t it?”