The Outlandish Companion

by Diana Gabaldon

  I looked down into the mixture, hiding a smile.

  “I don’t think it would make a difference. That particular prayer is a lot older than the Church of Rome, if I’m not mistaken.”

  A flicker of interest lit Roger’s face, the buried scholar coming to the surface.

  “I did think the Gaelic was a very old form—even older than what you hear these days—I mean… now.” He flushed a little, realizing what he had said. I nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  I remembered what it was like; that feeling that one was living in an elaborate make-believe. The feeling that reality existed in another time, another place. I remembered, and with a small shock, realized that it was now only memory—for me, time had shifted.

  Now was my time, reality the scrape of wood and slick of grease beneath my fingers, the arc of the sun that set the rhythm of my days, the nearness of Jamie. It was the other world, of cars and ringing telephones, of alarm clocks and mortgages, that seemed unreal and remote, the stuff of dreams.

  Neither Roger nor Bree had made that transition, though. I could see it in the way they behaved, hear it in the echoes of their private conversations. Likely it was because they had each other; they could keep the other time alive, a small shared world between them. For me, the change was easier. I had lived here before, had come this time on purpose, after all—and I had Jamie. No matter what I told him of the future, he could never see it as other than a fairy tale. Our small shared world was built of different things.

  How were Bree and Roger to manage, though? It was dangerous to treat the past as they sometimes did—as picturesque or curious, a temporary condition that could be escaped. There was no escape for them—whether it was love or duty, Jemmy held them both, a small redheaded anchor to the present. Better—or safer, at least—if they could wholly accept this time as theirs.

  “The Indians have it, too,” I said to Roger. “The gralloch prayer, or something like it. That’s why I said I thought it older than the Church.”

  He nodded, interested.

  “I think that kind of thing is common to all primitive cultures—anyplace where men kill to eat.”

  Primitive cultures. I caught my lower lip between my teeth, forbearing to point out that primitive or not, if his family were to survive, he personally would very likely be obliged to kill for them. But then I caught sight of his hand, idly rubbing at the dried blood between his fingers. He knew that already. Yes, I did, he’d said, when I’d told him he need not.

  He looked up then, caught my eye, and gave me a faint, tired smile. He understood.

  “I think maybe… it’s that killing without ceremony seems like murder,” he said slowly. “If you have the ceremony—some sort of ritual that acknowledges your necessity…”

  “Necessity—and also sacrifice.” Jamie’s voice came softly from behind me, startling me. I turned my head sharply. He was standing in the shadow of the big blue spruce; I wondered how long he’d been there.

  “Didn’t hear you come out,” I said, turning up my face to be kissed as he came to me. “Has the Colonel gone?”

  “No,” he said, and kissed my brow, one of the few clean spots left. “I’ve left him wi’ Sinclair for a bit. The Committee of Safety, aye?” He grimaced, then looked at me and smiled. He pulled out a clean handkerchief, smoothed the long wisps of hair out of my face, and bound them neatly back with the folded kerchief, tied in a narrow band round my head.

  “Oh, thank you!” I said in relief. He touched the back of my neck gently in acknowledgment, then turned to Roger.

  “Aye, you’ve the right of it,” he said. “Killing’s never a pleasant business, but it’s needful. If ye must spill blood, though, it’s right to take it wi’ thanks.”

  Roger nodded, glancing at the mixture I was working, up to my elbows in spilled blood.

  “You’ll tell me the proper words for the next time, then?”

  “Not too late for this time, is it?” I said. Both men looked slightly startled. I raised an eyebrow at Jamie, then Roger. “I did say it wasn’t for the pig.”

  Jamie’s eyes met mine with a glint of humor, but he nodded gravely.

  “Well enough.”

  At my direction, he took up the heavy jar of spices: the ground mixture of mace and marjoram, sage and cayenne, parsley and thyme. Roger held out his hands, cupped, and Jamie poured them full. Then Roger rubbed the herbs slowly between his palms, showering the dusty greenish crumbs into the barrel, their pungent scent mingling with the smell of the blood, as Jamie spoke the words slowly, in an ancient tongue come down from the days of the Norsemen.

  “Say it in English,” I said, seeing from Roger’s face that while he repeated the words, he did not recognize them all.

  “O Lord, bless the blood and the flesh of this the creature that you gave me,” Jamie said softly. He scooped a pinch of the herbs himself, and rubbed them between thumb and forefinger, in a rain of fragrant dust.

  “Created by your hand as you created man,

  Life given for life.

  That me and mine may eat with thanks for the gift,

  That me and mine may give thanks for your own sacrifice of blood and flesh, Life given for life.”

  The last crumbs of green and gray disappeared into the mixture under my hands, and the ritual of the sausage was complete.

  “That was good of ye, Sassenach,” Jamie said, drying my clean, wet hands and arms with the towel afterward. He nodded toward the corner of the house, where Roger had disappeared to help with the rest of the butchering, looking somewhat more peaceful. “I did think to tell him before, but I couldna see how to do it.”

  He grimaced slightly, wiping away a strand of hair tugged out of its bindings by the breeze.

  “Ye ken that way he has, of looking at me as if he was a naturalist, and me a wee beetle he’s caught in his net?”

  I laughed at the description, but had to admit it was apt; Roger did now and then behave as though Jamie was a fascinating artifact, making him repeat stories or bits of Highland lore over and over, so that Roger could commit them to memory until such time as he could write them down. Jamie acquiesced with patience and good grace, but did now and then roll a long-suffering eye at me behind Roger’s back.

  “It’s his way of making sense of it all,” I said. I reached up and tucked the wayward strand behind his ear. “His father couldn’t teach him gralloch prayers, after all.”

  He smiled, a little wryly. “Aye, I know. But I couldna see standing there in the dooryard trying to explain, wi’ a two-hundred-pound pig jerking my arms out of their sockets, and wee Roger sayin’, ’Now, is it “flesh and blood,” or “blood and flesh?”’ and Fergus callin’ the both of us bad names in French.”

  I laughed again and moved close to him. It was a cold, windy day, and now that I had stopped working, the chill drove me closer to seek his warmth. He wrapped his arms around me, and I felt both the reassuring heat of his embrace, and the soft crackle of paper inside his shirt.

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, a bittie letter Sinclair’s brought,” he said, drawing back a bit to reach into his shirt. “I didna want to open it while the Colonel was there, and didna trust him not to be reading it when I went out.”

  “It’s not your letter, anyway,” I said, taking the smudged wad of paper from him. “It’s mine.”

  “Oh, is it? Sinclair didna say, just handed it to me.”

  “He would!” Not unusually, Ronnie Sinclair viewed me—all women, for that matter—as simply a minor appendage to a husband. I rather pitied the woman he might eventually induce to marry him.

  I unfolded the note with some difficulty; it had been worn so long next to sweaty skin that the edges had frayed and stuck together.

  The message inside was brief and cryptic, but unsettling. It had been scratched into the paper with something like a sharpened stick, using an ink that looked disturbingly like dried blood, though it was more likely berry juice.

  “What does it say,
Sassenach?” Seeing me frowning at the paper, Jamie moved to the side to look. I held it out to him.

  Far down, in one corner, scratched in faint and tiny letters, as though the sender had hoped by this means to escape notice, was the word Faydree. Above, in bolder scratchings, the message read:

  YU CUM

  KING, FAREWELL “SURGEON’S STEEL

  t was near evening; the sun sank invisibly, staining the fog with a dull and sullen orange. The evening wind off the river was rising, lifting the fog from the ground and sending it scudding in billows and swirls.

  Clouds of black-powder smoke lay heavy in the hollows, lifting more slowly than the lighter shreds of mist, and lending a suitable stink of brimstone to a scene that was—if not hellish—at least bloody eerie.

  Here and there a space would suddenly be cleared, like a curtain pulled back to show the aftermath of battle. Small dark figures moved in the distance, darting and stooping, stopping suddenly, heads uplifted like baboons keeping watch for a leopard. Camp followers, the wives and whores of the soldiers, come like crows to scavenge the dead.

  Children, too. Under a bush, a boy of nine or ten straddled the body of a Redcoat soldier, smashing at the face with a heavy rock. I stopped, paralyzed at the sight, and saw the boy reach into the gaping, bloodied mouth and wrench out a tooth. He slipped the bloody prize into a bag that hung by his side, groped farther, tugging, and finding no more teeth loose, picked up his rock in a businesslike way and went back to work.

  I felt bile rise in my throat, and hurried on, swallowing. I was no stranger to war, to death and wounds. But I had never been so near a battle before; I had never before come on a battlefield where the dead and wounded still lay, before the ministrations of medics and burial details.

  There were calls for help, and occasional moans or screams, ringing disembodied out of the mist, reminding me uncomfortably of Jamie’s story of the doomed spirits of the glen. Like the hero of that story, I didn’t stop to heed their call, but pressed on, stumbling over small rises, slipping on damp grass.

  I had seen photographs of the great battlefields, from the American Civil War to the beaches of Normandy. This was nothing like that—no churned earth, no heaps of tangled limbs. It was still, save for the noises of the scattered wounded and the voices of those calling, like me, for a missing friend or husband.

  Shattered trees lay toppled by artillery; in this light, I might have thought the bodies turned into logs themselves, dark shapes lying long in the grass—save for the fact that some of them still moved. Here and there, a form stirred feebly, victim of war’s sorcery, struggling against the enchantment of death.

  I paused and shouted into the mist, calling his name. I heard answering calls, but none in his voice. Ahead of me lay a young man, arms outflung, a look of blank astonishment on his face, blood pooled round his upper body like a great halo. His lower half lay six feet away. I walked between the pieces, keeping my skirts close, nostrils pinched tight against the thick iron smell of blood.

  The light was fading now, but I saw Jamie as soon as I came over the edge of the next rise. He was lying on his face in the hollow, one arm flung out, the other curled beneath him. The shoulders of his dark blue coat were nearly black with damp, and his legs thrown wide, booted heels askew.

  The breath caught in my throat, and I ran down the slope toward him, heedless of grass clumps, mud, and brambles. As I got close, though, I saw a scuttling figure dart out from behind a nearby bush and dash toward him. It fell to its knees beside him and without hesitation, grasped his hair and yanked his head to one side. Something glinted in the figure’s hand, bright even in the dull light.

  “Stop!” I shouted. “Drop it, you bastard!”

  Startled, the figure looked up as I flung myself over the last yards of space. Narrow red-rimmed eyes glared up at me out of a round face streaked with soot and grime. “Get off!” she snarled. “I found ’im first!” It was a knife in her hand; she made little jabbing motions at me, in an effort to drive me away.

  I was too furious—and too afraid for Jamie—to be scared for myself.

  “Let go of him! Touch him and I’ll kill you!” I said. My fists were clenched, and I must have looked as though I meant it, for the woman flinched back, loosing her hold on Jamie’s hair.

  “He’s mine,” she said, thrusting her chin pugnaciously at me. “Go find yourself another.”

  Another form slipped out of the mist and materialized by her side. It was the boy I had seen earlier, filthy and scruffy as the woman herself. He had no knife, but clutched a crude metal strip, cut from a canteen. The edge of it was dark, with rust or blood.

  He glared at me. “He’s ours, Mum said! Get on wi’ yer! Scat!”

  Not waiting to see whether I would or not, he flung a leg over Jamie’s back, sat on him, and began to grope in the side pockets of his coat.

  ’“E’s still alive, Mum,” he advised. “I can feel ’is ’eart beatin’. Best slit his throat quick; I don’t think ’e’s bad hurt.”

  I grabbed the boy by the collar and jerked him off Jamie’s body, making him drop his weapon. He squealed, and flailed at me with arms and elbows, but I kneed him in the rump, hard enough to jar his backbone, then got my elbow locked about his neck in a stranglehold, his skinny wrist vised in my other hand.

  “Leave him go!” The woman’s eyes narrowed like a weasel’s, and her eyeteeth shone in a snarl.

  I didn’t dare take my eyes away from the woman’s long enough to look at Jamie. I could see him, though, at the edge of my vision, head turned to the side, his neck gleaming white, exposed and vulnerable.

  “Stand up and step back,” I said, “or I’ll choke him to death, I swear I will!”

  She crouched over Jamie’s body, knife in hand, as she measured me, trying to make up her mind whether I meant it. I did.

  The boy struggled and twisted in my grasp, his feet hammering against my shins. He was small for his age, and thin as a stick, but strong nonetheless; it was like wrestling an eel. I tightened my hold on his neck; he gurgled and quit struggling. His hair was thick with rancid grease and dirt, the smell of it rank in my nostrils.

  Slowly, the woman stood up. She was much smaller than I, and scrawny with it—bony wrists stuck out of the ragged sleeves. I couldn’t guess her age—under the filth and the puffiness of malnutrition, she might have been anything from twenty to fifty.

  “My man lies yonder, dead on the ground,” she said, jerking her head at the fog behind her. “’E hadn’t nothing but his musket, and the sergeant’ll take that back.”

  Her eyes slid toward the distant wood, where the British troops had retreated. “I’ll find a man soon, but I’ve children to feed in the meantime—two besides the boy.” She licked her lips, and a coaxing note entered her voice. “You’re alone; you can manage better than we can. Let me have this one—there’s more over there.” She pointed with her chin, toward the slope behind me, where the rebel dead and wounded lay.

  My grasp must have loosened slightly as I listened, for the boy, who had hung quiescent in my grasp, made a sudden lunge and burst free, diving over Jamie’s body to roll at his mother’s feet.

  He got up beside her, watching me with rat’s eyes, beady-bright and watchful. He bent and groped about in the grass, coming up with the makeshift dagger.

  “Hold ’er off, Mum,” he said, his voice raspy from the choking. “I’ll take ’im.”

  From the corner of my eye, I had caught the gleam of metal, half-buried in the grass.

  “Wait!” I said, and took a step back. “Don’t kill him. Don’t.” A step to the side, another back. “I’ll go, I’ll let you have him, but…” I lunged to the side, and got my hand on the cold metal hilt.

  I had picked up Jamie’s sword before. It had been made for him, larger and heavier than the usual. It must have weighed ten pounds, at least, but I didn’t notice.

  I snatched it up and swung it in a two-handed arc that ripped the air and left the metal ringing in my
hands.

  Mother and son jumped back, identical looks of ludicrous surprise on their round, grimy faces.

  “Get away!” I said.

  Her mouth opened, but she didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry for your man,” I said. “But my man lies here. Get away, I said!” I raised the sword, and the woman stepped back hastily, dragging the boy by the arm.

  She turned and went, muttering curses at me over her shoulder, but I paid no attention to what she said. The boy’s eyes stayed fixed on me as he went, dark coals in the dim light. He would know me again—and I him.

  They vanished in the mist, and I lowered the sword, which suddenly weighed too much to hold. I dropped it on the grass, and fell to my knees beside Jamie.

  My own heart was pounding in my ears and my hands shaking with reaction, as I groped for the pulse in his neck. I turned his head, and could see it, throbbing steadily just below his jaw.

  “Thank God!” I whispered to myself. “Oh, thank God!”

  I ran my hands over him quickly, searching for injury before I moved him. I didn’t think the scavengers would come back; I could hear the voices of a group of men, distant on the ridge behind me—a rebel detail coming to fetch the wounded.

  There was a large knot on his brow, already turning purple. Nothing else that I could see. The boy had been right, I thought, with gratitude; he wasn’t badly hurt. Then I rolled him onto his back, and saw his hand.

  Highlanders were accustomed to fight with sword in one hand, targe in the other, the small leather shield used to deflect an opponent’s blow. He hadn’t had a targe.

  The blade had struck him between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand, and sliced through the hand itself, a deep, ugly wound that split his palm and the body of his hand, halfway to the wrist.

  Despite the horrid look of the wound, there wasn’t much blood; the hand had been curled under him, his weight acting as a pressure bandage. The front of his shirt was smeared with red, deeply stained over his heart. I ripped open his shirt and felt inside, to be sure that the blood was from his hand, but it was. His chest was cool and damp from the grass, but unscathed, his nipples shrunken and stiff with chill.