* * *
I watched the light come nearer, drifting down the hill like a milkweed puff. One thought floated in my paralyzed mind—a random line of Shelley’s: Fiend, I defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind. Somewhere in the dimmer recesses of my consciousness, something observed that Shelley had had much better nerves than I. I clutched the skull closer. It wasn’t much of a weapon—but somehow I didn’t think that whatever was coming would be deterred by knives or pistols, either.
It wasn’t only that the wet surroundings made it seem grossly improbable that anyone was strolling through the woods with a blazing torch. The light didn’t burn like a pine torch or oil lantern. It didn’t flicker, but burned with a soft, steady glow.
It floated a few feet above the ground, just about where someone would hold a torch they carried before them. It drew slowly nearer, at the pace of a man walking. I could see it bob slightly, moving to the rhythm of a steady stride.
I cowered in my burrow, half hidden by the bank of earth and severed roots. I was freezing cold, but sweat ran down my sides and I could smell the reek of my own fear. My numb toes curled in the dirt, wanting to run.
I had seen St. Elmo’s fire before, at sea. Eerie as that was, its liquid blue crackle didn’t resemble at all the pale light approaching. This had neither spark nor color; only a spectral glow. Marsh gas, people in Cross Creek said when the mountain lights were mentioned.
Ha, I said to myself, though soundlessly. Marsh gas my left foot!
The light moved through a small thicket of alders, and out into the clearing before me. It wasn’t marsh gas.
He was tall, and he was naked. Beyond a breechclout, he wore nothing but paint; long stripes of red down arms and legs and torso, and his face was solid black, from chin to forehead. His hair was greased and dressed in a crest, from which two turkey feathers stiffly pointed.
I was invisible, completely hidden in the darkness of my refuge, while the torch he held washed him in soft light, gleaming off his hairless chest and shoulders, shadowing the orbits of his eyes. But he knew I was there.
I didn’t dare to move. My breath sounded painfully loud in my ears. He simply stood there, perhaps a dozen feet away, and looked straight into the dark where I was, as though it were the broadest day. And the light of his torch burned steady and soundless, pallid as a corpse candle, the wood of it not consumed.
I don’t know how long I had been standing there before it occurred to me that I was no longer afraid. I was still cold, but my heart had slowed to its normal pace, and my bare toes had uncurled.
“Whatever do you want?” I said, and only then realized that we had been in some sort of communication for some time. Whatever this was, it had no words. Nothing coherent passed between us—but something passed, nonetheless.
The clouds had lifted, shredding away before a light wind, and dark streaks of starlit sky showed through rents in the racing cirrus. The wood was quiet, but in the usual way of a drenched night-wood; the creaks and sighs of tall trees moving, the rustle of shrubs brushed by the wind’s restless edge, and in the background the constant rush of invisible water, echoing the turbulence of the air above.
I breathed deeply, feeling suddenly very much alive. The air was thick and sweet with the breath of green plants, the tang of herbs and musk of dead leaves, overlaid and interlaced with the scents of the storm—wet rock, damp earth, and rising mist, and a sharp hint of ozone, sudden as the lightning that had struck the tree.
Earth and air, I thought suddenly, and fire and water too. And here I stood with all the elements; in their midst and at their mercy.
“What do you want?” I said again, feeling helpless. “I can’t do anything for you. I know you’re there; I can see you. But that’s all.”
Nothing moved, no words were spoken. But quite clearly the thought formed in my mind, in a voice that was not my own.
That’s enough, it said.
Without haste, he turned and walked away. By the time he had gone two dozen paces, the light of his torch disappeared, fading into nonexistence like the final glow of twilight into night.
“Oh,” I said, a little blankly. “Goodness.” My legs were trembling, and I sat down, the skull—which I had almost forgotten—cradled in my lap.
I sat there for a long time, watching and listening, but nothing further happened. The mountains surrounded me, dark and impenetrable. Perhaps in the morning, I could find my way back to the trail, but for now, wandering about in darkness could lead to nothing but disaster.
I was no longer afraid; my fear had left me during my encounter with—whatever it was. I was still cold, though, and very, very hungry. I put down the skull and curled myself up beside it, pulling my damp cloak around me. It took a long time to fall asleep, and I lay in my chilly burrow watching the evening stars wheel overhead through rifts in the cloud.
I tried to make sense of the last half hour, but there was really nothing to make sense of; nothing, really, had happened. And yet it had; he had been there. The sense of him remained with me, somehow vaguely comforting, and at last I fell asleep, cheek pillowed on a clump of dead leaves.
I dreamt uneasily, because of cold and hunger; a procession of disjoint images. Lightning-blasted trees, blazing like torches. Trees uprooted from the earth, walking on their roots with a dreadful lurching gait.
Lying in the rain with my throat cut, warm blood pulsing down across my chest, a queer comfort to my chilling flesh. My fingers numb, unable to move. The rain striking my skin like hail, each cold drop a hammer blow, and then the rain itself seemed warm, and soft upon my face. Buried alive, black soil showering down into open eyes.
I woke, heart pounding. Lay silent. It was deep night now; the sky stretched clear and endless overhead, and I lay in a bowl of darkness. After a time, I slept again, pursued by dreams.
Wolves howling in the distance. Fleeing panicked through a forest of white aspen that stood in snow, the trees’ red sap glowing like bloody jewels on white-paper trunks. A man standing in the bleeding trees with his head plucked bald, save a standing crest of black, greased hair. He had deep eyes and a shattered smile, and the blood on his breast was brighter than the tree sap.
Wolves, much closer. Howling and barking and the scent of blood hot in my own nose, running with the pack, running from the pack. Running. Harefooted, white-toothed, and the ghost of blood a taste in my mouth, a tingle in my nose. Hunger. Chase and catch and kill and blood. Heart hammering, blood racing, sheer panic of the hunted.
I felt my armbone crack with a noise like a dry branch snapping, and tasted marrow warm and salty, slippery on my tongue.
Something brushed my face and I opened my eyes. Great yellow eyes stared into mine, from the dark ruff of a white-toothed wolf. I screamed and struck at it and the beast started back with a startled “Woof!”
I floundered to my knees and crouched there, gibbering. It had just gone daybreak. The dawning light was new and tender, and showed me plainly the huge black outline of…Rollo.
“Oh, Jesus God, what the bloody hell are you doing here, frigging bloody horrible…filthy beast!” I might eventually have gotten a grip on myself, but Jamie got one first.
Big hands pulled me up and out of my hiding place, held me tight and patted me anxiously, checking for damage. The wool of his plaid was soft against my face; it smelt of wet and lye soap and his own male scent and I breathed it in like oxygen.
“Are ye all right? For God’s sake, Sassenach, are ye all right?”
“No,” I said. “Yes,” I said, and started to cry.
It didn’t last long; it was no more than the shock of relief. I tried to say as much, but Jamie wasn’t listening. He scooped me up in his arms, filthy as I was, and began to carry me toward the small stream.
“Hush, then,” he said, squeezing me tightly against him. “Hush, mo chridhe. It’s all right now; you’re safe.”
I was still fuddled with cold and dreams. Alone so long with no voice but my own, his sounded odd, unreal and hard to understand. The warm solidness of his grasp was real, though.
“Wait,” I said, tugging feebly at his shirt. “Wait, I forgot. I have to—”
“Jesus, Uncle Jamie, look at this!”
Jamie turned, holding me. Young Ian was standing in the mouth of my refuge, framed in dangling roots, holding up the skull.
I felt Jamie’s muscles tighten as he saw it.
“Holy God, Sassenach, what’s that?”
“Who, you mean,” I said. “I don’t know. Nice chap, though. Don’t let Rollo at him; he wouldn’t like it.” Rollo was sniffing the skull with intense concentration, wet black nostrils flaring with interest.
Jamie peered down into my face, frowning slightly.
“Are ye sure you’re quite all right, Sassenach?”
“No,” I said, though in fact my wits were coming back as I woke up all the way. “I’m cold and I’m starving. You didn’t happen to bring any breakfast, did you?” I asked longingly. “I could murder a plateful of eggs.”
“No,” he said, setting me down while he groped in his sporran. “I hadna time to trouble for food, but I’ve got some brandywine. Here, Sassenach; it’ll do you good. And then,” he added, raising one eyebrow, “you can tell me how the devil ye came to be out in the middle of nowhere, aye?”
I collapsed on a rock and sipped the brandywine gratefully. The flask trembled in my hands, but the shivering began to ease as the dark amber stuff made its way directly through the walls of my empty stomach and into my bloodstream.
Jamie stood behind me, his hand on my shoulder.
“How long have ye been here, Sassenach?” he asked, his voice gentle.
“All night,” I said, shivering again. “Since just before noon yesterday, when the bloody horse—I think his name’s Judas—dropped me off that ledge up there.”
I nodded at the ledge. The middle of nowhere was a good description of the place, I thought. It could have been any of a thousand anonymous hollows in these hills. A thought struck me—one that should have occurred to me long before, had I not been so chilled and groggy.
“How the hell did you find me?” I asked. “Did one of the Muellers follow me, or—don’t tell me the bloody horse led you to me, like Lassie?”
“It’s a gelding, Auntie,” Ian put in reprovingly. “No a lassie. But we havena seen your horse at all. No, Rollo led us to ye.” He beamed proudly at the dog, who contrived to look blandly dignified, as though he did this sort of thing all the time.
“But if you haven’t seen the horse,” I began, bewildered, “how did you even know I’d left Muellers’? And how could Rollo—” I broke off, seeing the two men eyeing each other.
Ian shrugged slightly and nodded, yielding to Jamie. Jamie hunkered down on the ground beside me, and lifting the hem of my dress, took my bare feet into his big, warm hands.
“Your feet are frozen, Sassenach,” he said quietly. “Where did ye lose your shoes?”
“Back there,” I said, with a nod toward the uprooted tree. “They must still be there. I took them off to cross a stream, then put them down and couldn’t find them in the dark.”
“They’re not there, Auntie,” said Ian. He sounded so queer that I looked up at him in surprise. He was still holding the skull, turning it gingerly over in his hands.
“No, they’re not.” Jamie’s head was bent as he chafed my feet, and I could see the early light glint copper off his hair, which lay tumbled loose over his shoulders, disheveled as though he had just risen from his bed.
“I was in bed, asleep,” he said, echoing my thought. “When yon beast suddenly went mad.” He jerked his chin at Rollo, without looking up. “Barking and howling and flingin’ his carcass at the door as though the Devil was outside.”
“I shouted at him, and tried to get hold of his scruff and shake him quiet,” Ian put in, “but he wouldna stop, no matter what I did.”
“Aye, he carried on so that the spittle flew from his jaws and I was sure he’d gone truly mad. I thought he’d do us an injury, so I bade Ian unbolt the door and let him be gone.” Jamie sat back on his heels and frowned at my foot, then picked a dead leaf off my instep.
“Well, and was the Devil outside?” I asked flippantly.
Jamie shook his head.
“We searched the clearing, from the penfold to the spring, and didna find a thing—except these.” He reached into his sporran and drew out my shoes. He looked up into my face, his own quite expressionless.
“They were sitting on the doorstep, side by side.”
Every hair on my body rose. I lifted the flask and drained the last of the brandywine.
“Rollo tore off, bayin’ like a hound,” Ian said, eagerly taking up the story. “But then he came back a moment later, and began to sniff at your shoes and whinge and cry.”
“I felt rather like doing that myself, aye?” Jamie’s mouth lifted slightly at one corner, but I could see the fear still dark in his eyes.
I swallowed, but my mouth was too dry to talk, despite the brandywine.
Jamie slipped one shoe onto my foot, and then the other. They were damp, but faintly warm from his body.
“I did think ye were maybe dead, Cinderella,” he said softly, head bent to hide his face.
Ian didn’t notice, caught up in the enthusiasm of the story.
“My clever wee dog was for dashing off, the same as when he’s smelt a rabbit, so we caught up our plaids and came away after him, only stopping to snatch a brand from the hearth and smoor the fire. He led us a good chase, too, did ye no, laddie?” He rubbed Rollo’s ears with affectionate pride. “And here ye were!”
The brandywine was buzzing in my ears, swaddling my wits in a warm, sweet blanket, but I had enough sense left to tell me that for Rollo to have followed a trail back to me…someone had walked all that way in my shoes.
I had recovered some remnants of my voice by this time, and managed to talk with only a little hoarseness.
“Did you—see anything—along the way?” I asked.
“No, Auntie,” Ian said, suddenly sober. “Did you?”
Jamie lifted his head, and I could see how worry and exhaustion had hollowed his face, leaving the broad cheekbones sharp beneath his skin. I wasn’t the only one who had had a long, hard night.
“Yes,” I said, “but I’ll tell you later. Right now, I believe I’ve turned into a pumpkin. Let’s go home.”
* * *
Jamie had brought horses, but there was no way to get them down into the hollow; we were forced to make our way down the banks of the flooded stream, splashing through the shallows, then to clamber laboriously up a rocky slope to the ledge above, where the animals were tethered. Rubber-legged and flimsy after my ordeal, I wasn’t a great deal of help in this endeavor, but Jamie and Ian coped matter-of-factly, boosting me over obstructions and handing me back and forth like a large, unwieldy package.
“You really aren’t supposed to give alcohol to people suffering from hypothermia,” I said feebly as Jamie put the flask to my lips again during one pause for rest.
“I dinna care what you’re suffering from, you’ll feel it less with the drink in your belly,” he said. It was still chilly from the rain, but his face was flushed from the climb. “Besides,” he added, mopping his brow with a fold of his plaid, “if ye pass out, you’ll be less trouble to hoik about. Christ, it’s like hauling a newborn calf out of a bog.”
“Sorry,” I said. I lay flat on the ground and closed my eyes, hoping I wouldn’t throw up. The sky was spinning in one direction, my stomach in the other.
“Away, dog!” Ian said.
I opened one eye to see what was going on, and saw Ian firmly shooing Rollo away from the skull, which I had insisted he bring with us.
Seen in daylight, it was hardly a prepossessing object. Stained and discolored by the soil in which it had been buried, from a distance it resembled a smooth stone, scooped and gouged by wind and weather. Several of the teeth had been chipped or broken, though the skull showed no other damage.
“Just what do ye mean to do wi’ Prince Charming there?” Jamie asked, eyeing my acquisition rather critically. His color had faded, and he had got his breath back. He glanced down at me, reached over and smoothed the hair out of my eyes, smiling.
“All right, Sassenach?”
“Better,” I assured him, sitting up. The countryside had not quite stopped moving round me, but the brandy sloshing through my veins now gave the movement a rather pleasant quality, like the soothing rush of trees past the window of a railway carriage.
“I suppose we ought to take him home and give him Christian burial, at least?” Ian eyed the skull dubiously.
“I shouldn’t think he’d appreciate it; I don’t believe he was a Christian.” I fought back a vivid recollection of the man I had seen in the hollow. While it was true that some Indians had been converted by missionaries, this particular naked gentleman, with his black-painted face and feathered hair, had given me the impression that he was about as pagan as they come.
I fumbled in the pocket of my skirt, my fingers numb and stiff.
“This was buried with him.”
I drew out the flat stone I had unearthed. It was dirty brown in color, an irregular oval half the size of my palm. It was flattened on one side, rounded on the other, and smooth as though it had come from a streambed. I turned it over on my palm and gasped.
The flattened face was indeed incised with a carving, as I had thought. It was a glyph in the shape of a spiral, coiling in on itself. But it wasn’t the carving that brought both Jamie and Ian to peer into my hand, heads nearly touching.
Where the smooth surface had been chipped away, the rock within glowed with a lambent fire, little flames of green and orange and red all fighting fiercely for the light.
“My God, what is it?” Ian asked, sounding awed.
“It’s an opal—and a damned big one, at that,” Jamie said. He poked the stone with a large, blunt forefinger, as though checking to ensure that it was real. It was.
He rubbed a hand through his hair, thinking, then glanced at me.
“They do say that opals are unlucky stones, Sassenach.” I thought he was joking, but he looked uneasy. A widely traveled, well-educated man, still he had been born a Highlander, and I knew he had a deeply superstitious streak, though it didn’t often show.
Ha, I thought to myself. You’ve spent the night with a ghost and you think he’s superstitious?
“Nonsense,” I said, with rather more conviction than I felt. “It’s only a rock.”
“Well, it’s no so much they’re unlucky, Uncle Jamie,” Ian put in. “My Mam has a wee opal ring her mother left her—though it’s nothing like this!” Ian touched the stone reverently. “She did say as how an opal takes on something of its owner, though—so if ye had an opal that belonged to a good person before ye, then all was well, and you’d have good luck of it. But if not—” He shrugged.
“Aye, well,” Jamie said dryly. He jerked his head toward the skull, pointing with his chin. “If it belonged to this fellow, it doesna seem as if it was ower-lucky for him.”
“At least we know nobody killed him for it,” I pointed out.
“Perhaps they didna want it because they kent it was bad luck,” Ian suggested. He was frowning at the stone, a worried line between his eyes. “Maybe we should put it back, Auntie.”
I rubbed my nose and looked at Jamie.
“It’s probably rather valuable,” I said.
“Ah.” The two of them stood in contemplation for a moment, torn between superstition and pragmatism.
“Aye well,” Jamie said finally, “I suppose it will do no harm to keep it for a bit.” One side of his mouth lifted in a smile. “Let me carry it, Sassenach; if I’m struck by lightning on the way home, ye can put it back.”
I got awkwardly to my feet, holding on to Jamie’s arm to keep my balance. I blinked and swayed, but stayed upright. Jamie took the stone from my hand and slipped it back into his sporran.
“I’ll show it to Nayawenne,” I said. “She might know what the carving means, at least.”
“A good thought, Sassenach,” Jamie approved. “And if Prince Charming should be her kinsman, she can have him, with my blessing.” He nodded toward a small stand of maple trees a hundred yards away, their green barely tinged with yellow.
“The horses are tied just yonder. Can ye walk, Sassenach?”
I looked down at my feet, considering. They seemed a lot farther away than I was used to.
“I’m not sure,” I said, “I think I’m really rather drunk.”
“Och, no, Auntie,” Ian assured me kindly. “My Da says you’re never drunk, so long as ye can hold on to the floor.”
Jamie laughed at this, and threw the end of his plaid over his shoulder.
“My Da used to say ye werena drunk, so long as ye could find your arse with both hands.” He eyed my backside with a lifted brow, but wisely thought better of whatever else he might have been going to say.
Ian choked on a giggle and coughed, recovering himself.
“Aye, well. It’s no much farther, Auntie. Are ye sure ye canna walk?”
“Well, I’m no going to pick her up again, I’ll tell ye,” Jamie said, not waiting for my answer. “I dinna want to rupture my back.” He took the skull from Ian, holding it between the tips of his fingers, and placed it delicately in my lap. “Wait here wi’ your wee friend, Sassenach,” he said. “Ian and I will fetch the horses.”