* * *
“Have ye got a bit of water, Sassenach?” asked Jamie. “I’m gettin’ a bit dry with the talking.”
“Bastard!” I said. “You can’t stop there! What happened?”
“Water,” he said, grinning, “and I’ll tell ye.”
“All right,” I said, handing him a water bottle and watching as he tilted it into his mouth. “What happened then?”
“Nothing,” he said, lowering the bottle and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “What did ye think, I was going to answer him?” He grinned impudently at me and ducked as I aimed a slap at his ear.
“Now, now,” he reproved. “No way to treat a man wounded in the service of his King, now is it?”
“Wounded, are you?” I said. “Believe me, Jamie Fraser, a mere saber slash is as nothing compared to what I will do to you if…”
“Oh, threats, too, is it? What was that poem ye told me about, ‘When pain and anguish wring the brow, a ministering angel’…ow!”
“Next time, I twist it right off at the roots,” I said, releasing the ear. “Get on with it, I have to go back in a minute.”
He rubbed the ear gingerly, but leaned back against the wall and resumed his story.
“Well, we just sat there on our haunches, the padre and I, staring at each other and listening to the sentries six feet away. “What’s that?” says the one, and me thinking can I get up in time to take him with my dirk before he shoots me in the back, and what about his friend? For I canna expect help from the priest, unless maybe it’s a last prayer over my body.”
There was a long, nerve-racking silence, as the two Jacobites squatted in the grass, hands still clasped, afraid to move enough even to let go.
“Ahhh, yer seein’ things,” came from the other sentry at last, and Jamie felt the shudder of relief run through the priest, as his damp fingers slid free. “Nothin’ up there but furze bushes. Never mind, lad,” the sentry said reassuringly, and Jamie heard the clap of a hand on a shoulder and the stamp of booted feet, trying to keep warm. “There’s the damn lot of ’em, sure, and in this dark, they could be the whole bloody Highland army, for all you can see.” Jamie thought he heard the breath of a smothered laugh from one of the “furze bushes,” on the hillside within hearing.
He glanced at the crest of the hill, where the stars were beginning to dim. Less than ten minutes to first light, he judged. At which point, Johnnie Cope’s troops would swiftly realize that the Highland army was not, as they thought, an hour’s march away in the opposite direction, but already face-to-face with their front lines.
There was a noise to the left, in the direction of the sea. It was faint, and indistinct, but the note of alarm was clear to battle-trained ears. Someone, he supposed, had tripped over a furze bush.
“Hey?” The note of alarm was taken up by one of the sentries nearby. “What’s happening?”
The priest would have to take care of himself, he thought. Jamie drew the broadsword as he rose, and with one long step, was within reach. The man was no more than a shape in the darkness, but distinct enough. The merciless blade smashed down with all his strength, and split the man’s skull where he stood.
“Highlanders!” The shriek broke from the man’s companion, and the second sentry sprang out like a rabbit flushed from a copse, bounding away into the fading dark before Jamie could free his weapon from its gory cleft. He put a foot on the fallen man’s back and jerked, gritting his teeth against the unpleasant sensation of slack flesh and grating bone.
Alarm was spreading up and down the English lines; he could feel as much as hear it—an agitation of men rudely wakened, groping blindly for weapons, searching in all directions for the unseen threat.
Clanranald’s pipers were behind to the right, but no signal as yet came for the charge. Continue the advance, then, heart pounding and left arm tingling from the death blow, belly muscles clenched and eyes straining through the waning dark, the spray of warm blood across his face going cold and sticky in the chill.
“I could hear them first,” he said, staring off into the night as though still searching for the English soldiers. He bent forward, hugging his knees. “Then I could see, too. The English, wriggling over the ground like maggots in meat, and the men behind me. George McClure came up with me, and Wallace and Ross on the other side, and we were walkin’ still, one pace at a time, but faster and faster, seein’ the sassenaches breaking before us.”
There was a dull boom off to the right; the firing of a single cannon. A moment later, another, and then, as though this were the signal, a wavering cry rose from the oncoming Highlanders.
“The pipes started then,” he said, eyes closed. “I didna remember my musket ’til I heard one fire close behind me; I’d left it in the grass next to the priest. When it’s like that, ye dinna see anything but the small bit that’s happening round you.
“Ye hear a shout, and of a sudden, you’re running. Slow, for a step or two, while ye free your belt, and then your plaid falls free and you’re bounding, wi’ your feet splashing mud up your legs and the chill of the wet grass on your feet, and your shirttails flying off your bare arse. The wind blows into your shirt and up your belly and out along your arms.…Then the noise takes ye and you’re screaming, like runnin’ down a hill yelling into the wind when you’re a bairn, to see can ye lift yourself on the sound.”
They rode the waves of their own shrieking onto the plain, and the force of the Highland charge crashed onto the shoals of the English army, smothering them in a boiling surge of blood and terror.
“They ran,” he said softly. “One man stood to face me—all during the fight, only one. The others I took from behind.” He rubbed a grimy hand over his face, and I could feel a fine tremor start somewhere deep inside him.
“I remember…everything,” he said, almost whispering. “Every blow. Every face. The man lying on the ground in front of me who wet himself wi’ fear. The horses screaming. All the stinks—black powder and blood and the smell of my own sweat. Everything. But it’s like I was standin’ outside, watching myself. I wasna really there.” He opened his eyes and looked sidelong at me. He was bent almost double, head on his knees, the shivering visible now.
“D’ye know?” he asked.
“I know.”
While I hadn’t fought with sword or knife, I had fought often enough with hands and will; getting through the chaos of death only because there is no other choice. And it did leave behind that odd feeling of detachment; the brain seemed to rise above the body, coldly judging and directing, the viscera obediently subdued until the crisis passed. It was always sometime later that the shaking started.
I hadn’t reached that point yet. I slid the cloak from my shoulders and covered him before going back into the cottage.