I REMAINED ALONE, a small mercy. Boble’s violent attack seemed to have frightened away the boys.
I rolled onto my side and lay still, breathing. I felt very tired, and utterly forlorn.
Jamie, I thought, where are you?
I wasn’t afraid of what might happen next; I couldn’t see any further than the moment I was in, a single breath, a single heartbeat. I didn’t think, and wouldn’t feel. Not yet. I just lay still, and breathed.
Very slowly I began to notice small things. A fragment of bark caught in my hair, scratchy on my cheek. The give of the thick dead leaves beneath me, cradling my body. The sense of effort as my chest lifted. Increasing effort.
A tiny nerve began to twitch near one eye.
I realized quite suddenly that with the gag in my mouth and my nasal tissues being rapidly congested by blood and swelling, I was in some actual danger of suffocation. I twisted as far onto my side as I could get without strangling, and rubbed my face first against the ground, then—with increasing desperation—dug my heels into the ground and wriggled upward, scraping my face hard against the bark of the tree, trying without success to loosen or dislodge the gag.
The bark rasped lip and cheek, but the kerchief tied round my head was so tight that it cut hard into the corners of my mouth, forcing it open so that saliva leaked constantly into the wad of fabric in my mouth. I gagged at the tickle of sodden cloth in my throat, and felt vomit burn the back of my nose.
You aren’t, you aren’t, you aren’tyouaren’tyou aren’t going to vomit! I dragged air bubbling through my bloody nose, tasted thick copper as it slimed down my throat, gagged harder, doubled up—and saw white light at the edge of vision, as the noose went tight around my throat.
I fell back, my head hitting hard against the tree. I hardly noticed; the noose loosened again, thank God, and I managed one, two, three precious breaths of blood-clogged air.
My nose was puffed from cheekbone to cheekbone, and swelling fast. I clenched my teeth on the gag and blew outward through my nose, trying to clear it, if only for a moment. Blood tinged with bile sprayed warm across my chin and splattered on my chest—and I sucked air fast, getting a bit.
Blow, inhale. Blow, inhale. Blow . . . but my nasal passages were almost swollen shut by now, and I nearly sobbed in panic and frustration, as no air came.
Christ, don’t cry! You’re dead if you cry, for God’s sake don’t cry!
Blow . . . blow . . . I snorted with the last reserve of stale air in my lungs, and got a hair of clearance, enough to fill them once more.
I held my breath, trying to stay conscious long enough to discover a way to breathe—there had to be a way to breathe.
I would not let a wretch like Harley Boble kill me by simple inadvertence. That wasn’t right; it couldn’t be.
I pressed myself, half-sitting, up against the tree to ease the strain on the noose around my neck as much as possible, and let my head fall forward, so that the blood from my nose ran down, dripping. That helped, a little. Not for long, though.
My eyelids began to feel tight; my nose was definitely broken, and the flesh all round the upper part of my face was puffing now, swelling with the blood and lymph of capillary trauma, squeezing my eyes shut, further constricting my thread of air.
I bit the gag in an agony of frustration, then, seized by desperation, began to chew at it, grinding the fabric between my teeth, trying to smash it down, compress it, shift it somehow inside my mouth. . . . I bit the inside of my cheek and felt the pain but didn’t mind, it wasn’t important, nothing mattered but breath, oh, God, I couldn’t breathe, please help me breathe, please. . . .
I bit my tongue, gasped in pain—and realized that I had succeeded in thrusting my tongue past the gag, reaching the tip of it to the corner of my mouth. By poking as hard as I could with my tongue tip, I had made a tiny channel of air. No more than a wisp of oxygen could ooze through it—but it was air, and that was all that mattered.
I had my head canted painfully to one side, forehead pressed against the tree, but was afraid to move at all, for fear of losing my slender lifeline of air, if the gag should shift when I moved my head. I sat still, hands clenched, drawing long, gurgling, horribly shallow breaths, and wondering how long I could stay this way; the muscles of my neck were already quivering from strain.
My hands were throbbing again—they hadn’t ever stopped, I supposed, but I hadn’t had attention to spare for them. Now I did, and momentarily welcomed the shooting pains that outlined each nail with liquid fire, for distraction from the deadly stiffness spreading down my neck and through my shoulder.
The muscles of my neck jumped and spasmed; I gasped, lost my air, and arched my body bowlike, fingers dug into the binding ropes as I fought to get it back.
A hand came down on my arm. I hadn’t heard him approach. I turned blindly, butting at him with my head. I didn’t care who he was or what he wanted, provided he would remove the gag. Rape seemed a perfectly reasonable exchange for survival, at least at the moment.
I made desperate noises, whimpering, snorting, and spewing gouts of blood and snot as I shook my head violently, trying to indicate that I was choking—given the level of sexual incompetence so far demonstrated, he might not even realize that I couldn’t breathe, and simply proceed about his business, unaware that simple rape was becoming necrophilia.
He was fumbling round my head. Thank God, thank God! I held myself still with superhuman effort, head swimming as little bursts of fire went off inside my eyeballs. Then the strip of fabric came away and I thrust the wad of cloth out of my mouth by reflex, instantly gagged, and threw up, whooping air and retching simultaneously.
I hadn’t eaten; no more than a thread of bile seared my throat and ran down my chin. I choked and swallowed and breathed, sucking air in huge, greedy, lung-bursting gulps.
He was saying something, whispering urgently. I didn’t care, couldn’t listen. All I heard was the grateful wheeze of my own breathing, and the thump of my heart. Finally slowing from its frantic race to keep oxygen moving round my starved tissues, it pounded hard enough to shake my body.
Then a word or two got through to me, and I lifted my head, staring at him.
“Whad?” I said thickly. I coughed, shaking my head to try to clear it. It hurt very much. “What did you say?”
He was visible only as a ragged, lion-haired silhouette, bony-shouldered in the faint glow from the fire.
“I said,” he whispered, leaning close, “does the name ‘Ringo Starr’ mean anything to you?”
I WAS BY THIS TIME well beyond shock. I merely wiped my split lip gingerly on my shoulder, and said, very calmly, “Yes.”
He had been holding his breath; I realized it only when I heard the sigh as he released it, and saw his shoulders slump.
“Oh, God,” he said, half under his breath. “Oh, God.”
He lunged forward suddenly and caught me against him in a hard embrace. I recoiled, choking as the noose round my neck tightened once again, but he didn’t notice, absorbed in his own emotion.
“Oh, God,” he said, and buried his face in my shoulder, nearly sobbing. “Oh, God. I knew, I knew you hadda be, I knew it, but I couldn’t believe it, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God! I didn’t think I’d ever find another one, not ever—”
“Kk,” I said. I arched my back, urgently.
“Wha—oh, shit!” He let go and grabbed for the rope around my neck. He scrabbled hold of it and yanked the noose over my head, nearly tearing my ear off in the process, but I didn’t mind. “Shit, you okay?”
“Yes,” I croaked. “Un . . . tie me.”
He sniffed, wiping his nose on his sleeve, and glanced back over his shoulder.
“I can’t,” he whispered. “The next guy who comes along’ll see.”
“The next guy?” I screamed, as well as I could scream in a strangled whisper. “What do you mean, the next—”
“Well, you know. . . .” It seemed suddenly to dawn on him that I might have objections to waiting tamely like a trussed turkey for the next would-be rapist in the lineup. “Er . . . I mean . . . well, never mind. Who are you?”
“You know damn well who I am,” I croaked furiously, shoving him with my bound hands. “I’m Claire Fraser. Who in bloody hell are you, what are you doing here, and if you want one more word out of me, you’ll bloody well untie me this minute!”
He turned again to glance apprehensively over his shoulder, and it occurred to me vaguely that he was afraid of his so-called comrades. So was I. I could see his profile in silhouette; it was indeed the bushy-haired young Indian, the one I had thought might be a Tuscaroran. Indian . . . some connection clicked into place, deep in the tangled synapses.
“Bloody hell,” I said, and dabbed at a trickle of blood that ran from the raw corner of my mouth. “Otter-Toof. Tooth. You’re one of his.”
“What?!” His head swung back to face me, eyes so wide the whites showed briefly. “Who?”
“Oh, what in hell was his real name? Robert . . . Robert th-something . . .” I was trembling with fury, terror, shock, and exhaustion, groping through the muddled remnants of what used to be my mind. Wreck though I might be, I remembered Otter-Tooth, all right. I had a sudden vivid memory of being alone in the dark, on a night like this, wet with rain and all alone, a long-buried skull cupped in my hands.
“Springer,” he said, and gripped my arm eagerly. “Springer—was that it? Robert Springer?”
I had just enough presence of mind to clamp my jaw, thrust out my chin, and hold up my bound hands in front of him. Not another word until he cut me loose.
“Shit,” he muttered again, and with another hasty glance behind him, fumbled for his knife. He wasn’t skillful with it. If I had needed any evidence that he wasn’t a real Indian of the time . . . but he got my hands free without cutting me, and I doubled up with a groan, hands tucked under my armpits as the blood surged into them. They felt like balloons filled and stretched to the point of bursting.
“When?” he demanded, paying no attention to my distress. “When did you come? Where did you find Bob? Where is he?”
“1946,” I said, squeezing my arms down tight on my throbbing hands. “The first time. 1968, the second. As for Mr. Springer—”
“The second—did you say the second time?” His voice rose in astonishment. He choked it off, looking guiltily back, but the sounds of the men dicing and arguing round the fire were more than loud enough to drown out a simple exclamation.
“Second time,” he repeated more softly. “So you did it? You went back?”
I nodded, pressing my lips together and rocking back and forth a little. I thought my fingernails would pop off with each heartbeat.
“What about you?” I asked, though I was fairly sure that I already knew.
“1968,” he said, confirming it.
“What year did you turn up in?” I asked. “I mean—how long have you been here? Er . . . now, I mean.”
“Oh, God.” He sat back on his heels, running a hand back through his long, tangled hair. “I been here six years, as near as I can tell. But you said—second time. If you made it home, why in hell’d you come back? Oh—wait. You didn’t make it home, you went to another time, but not the one you came from? Where’d you start from?”
“Scotland, 1946. And no, I made it home,” I said, not wanting to go into details. “My husband was here, though. I came back on purpose, to be with him.” A decision whose wisdom seemed presently in severe doubt.
“And speaking of my husband,” I added, beginning to feel as though I might possess a few shreds of sanity after all, “I was not joking. He’s coming. You don’t want him to find you keeping me captive, I assure you. But if you—”
He disregarded this, leaning eagerly toward me.
“But that means you know how it works! You can steer!”
“Something like that,” I said, impatient. “I take it that you and your companions didn’t know how to steer, as you put it?” I massaged one hand with the other, gritting my teeth against the throb of blood. I could feel the furrows the rope had left in my flesh.
“We thought we did.” Bitterness tinged his voice. “Singing stones. Gemstones. That’s what we used. Raymond said . . . It didn’t work, though. Or maybe . . . maybe it did.” He was making deductions; I could hear the excitement rising again in his tone.
“You met Bob Springer—Otter-Tooth, I mean. So he did make it! And if he made it, maybe the others did, too. See, I thought they were all dead. I thought—thought I was alone.” There was a catch in his voice, and despite the urgency of the situation and my annoyance at him, I felt a pang of sympathy. I knew very well what it felt like to be alone in that way, marooned in time.
In a way, I hated to disillusion him, but there was no point in keeping the truth from him.
“Otter-Tooth is dead, I’m afraid.”
He suddenly stopped moving and sat very still. The faint glow of firelight through the trees outlined him; I could see his face. A few long hairs lifted in the breeze. They were the only thing that moved.
“How?” he said at last, in a small, choked voice.
“Killed by the Iroquois,” I said. “The Mohawk.” My mind was beginning, very slowly, to work again. Six years ago, this man—whoever he was—had come. 1767, that would be. And yet Otter-Tooth, the man who had once been Robert Springer, had died more than a generation earlier. They’d started out together, but ended in different times.
“Shit,” he said, though the obvious distress in his voice was mingled with something like awe. “That would have been a real bummer, especially for Bob. He, like, idolized those guys.”
“Yes, I expect he was most put out about it,” I replied, rather dryly. My eyelids felt thick and heavy. It was an effort to force them open, but I could still see. I glanced at the fire glow, but couldn’t see anything beyond the faint movement of shadows in the distance. If there actually was a lineup of men waiting for my services, at least they were tactfully keeping out of sight. I doubted it, and gave silent thanks that I wasn’t twenty years younger—there might have been.
“I met some Iroquois—Christ, I went looking for ’em, if you can believe that! That was the whole point, see, to find the Iroquois tribes and get them to—”
“Yes, I know what you had in mind,” I interrupted. “Look, this is not really the time or place for a long discussion. I think that—”
“Those Iroquois are some nasty tumblers, I tell you, man,” he said, jabbing me in the chest with a finger for emphasis. “You wouldn’t believe what they do to—”
“I know. So is my husband.” I gave him a glare, which—judging from the way he flinched—was probably rendered highly effective by the state of my face. I hoped so; it hurt a lot to do it.
“Now, what you want to do,” I said, mustering as much authority into my voice as I could, “is to go back to the fire, wait for a bit, then leave casually, sneak round, and get two horses. I hear a stream down there—” I waved briefly to the right. “I’ll meet you there. Once we’re safely away, I’ll tell you everything I know.”
In fact, I probably couldn’t tell him anything very helpful, but he didn’t know that. I heard him swallow.
“I don’t know . . .” he said uncertainly, glancing round again. “Hodge, he’s kind of gnarly. He shot one guy, a few days ago. Didn’t even say anything, just walked up to him, pulled his gun, and boom!”
“What for?”
He shrugged, shaking his head.
“I don’t even know, man. Just . . . boom, you know?”
“I know,” I assured him, holding on to temper and sanity by a thread. “Look, let’s not trouble with the horses, then. Let’s just go.” I lurched awkwardly onto one knee, hoping that I would be able to rise in a few moments, let alone walk. The big muscles in my thighs were knotted hard in the spots where Boble had kicked me; trying to stand made the muscles jump and quiver in spasms that effectively hamstrung me.
“Shit, not now!” In his agitation, the young man seized my arm and jerked me down beside him. I hit the ground hard on one hip and let out a cry of pain.
“You all right there, Donner?” The voice came out of the darkness somewhere behind me. It was casual—obviously one of the men had merely stepped out of camp to relieve himself—but the effect on the young Indian was galvanizing. He flung himself full-length upon me, banging my head on the ground and knocking all the breath out of me.
“Fine . . . really . . . great,” he called to his companion, gasping in an exaggerated manner, evidently trying to sound like a man in the throes of half-completed lust. He sounded like someone dying of asthma, but I wasn’t complaining. I couldn’t.
I’d been knocked on the head a few times, and generally saw nothing but blackness as a result. This time I honestly did see colored stars, and lay limp and bemused, feeling as though I sat tranquilly some distance above my battered body. Then Donner laid a hand on my breast and I came instantly back to earth.
“Let go of me this instant!” I hissed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Hey, hey, nothing, nothing, sorry,” he assured me hastily. He removed the hand, but didn’t get off me. He squirmed a bit, and I realized that he was aroused by the contact, whether intended or not.
“Get off!” I said, in a furious whisper.
“Hey, I don’t mean anything, I mean I wouldn’t hurt you or nothing. It’s just I haven’t had a woman in—”
I grabbed a handful of his hair, lifted my head, and bit his ear, hard. He shrieked and rolled off me.
The other man had gone back toward the fire. At this, though, he turned and called back, “Christ, Donner, is she that good? I’ll have to give her a try!” This got a laugh from the men by the fire, but luckily it died away and they returned to their own concerns. I returned to mine, which was escape.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Donner whined in an undertone, holding his ear. “I wasn’t going to do anything! Christ, you got nice tits, but you’re like old enough to be my mother!”
“Shut up!” I said, pushing myself to a sitting position. The effort made my head spin; tiny colored lights flickered like Christmas-tree bulbs at the edge of my vision. In spite of this, some part of my mind was actively working again.
He was at least partly right. We couldn’t leave immediately. After drawing so much attention to himself, the others would be expecting him to come back within a few minutes; if he didn’t, they’d start looking for him—and we needed more than a few minutes’ start.
“We can’t go now,” he whispered, rubbing his ear reproachfully. “They’ll notice. Wait ’til they go to sleep. I’ll come get you then.”
I hesitated. I was in mortal danger every moment that I spent within reach of Hodgepile and his feral gang. If I had needed any convincing, the encounters of the last two hours had demonstrated that. This Donner needed to go back to the fire and show himself—but I could steal away. Was it worth the risk that someone would come and find me gone, before I had got beyond pursuit? It would be more certain to wait until they slept. But did I dare wait that long?
And then there was Donner himself. If he wanted to talk to me, I certainly wanted to talk to him. The chance of stumbling on another time-traveler . . .
Donner read my hesitation, but misunderstood it.
“You’re not going without me!” He grabbed my wrist in sudden alarm, and before I could jerk away, had whipped a bit of the cut line around it. I fought and pulled away, hissing to try to make him understand, but he was panicked at the thought that I might slip away without him, and wouldn’t listen. Hampered by my injuries, and unwilling to make enough noise to draw attention, I could only delay but not prevent his determined efforts to tie me up again.
“Okay.” He was sweating; a drop fell warm on my face as he leaned over me to check the bindings. At least he hadn’t put the noose round my neck again, instead tethering me to the tree with a rope around my waist.
“I shoulda known what you are,” he murmured, intent on his job. “Even before you said ‘Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.’”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” I snapped, squirming away from his hand. “Don’t bloody do that—I’ll suffocate!” He was trying to put the cloth strip back in my mouth, but seemed to pick up the note of panic in my voice, because he hesitated.
“Oh,” he said uncertainly. “Well. I guess—” Once again, he looked back over his shoulder, but then made up his mind and dropped the gag on the ground. “Okay. But you be quiet, all right? What I meant—you don’t act afraid of men. Most of the women from now do. You oughta act more afraid.”
And with that parting shot, he rose and brushed dead leaves from his clothes before heading back to the fire.