109
THE VOICE OF TIME
AS LIZZIE HAD NO MOTHER to see to her proper “fitting out” for marriage, the women on the Ridge had grouped together to provide things like petticoats, nightgowns, and knitted stockings, with a few of the more talented ladies piecing quilt blocks. When a quilt-top was completed, everyone would come up to the “Big House” to see to the actual quilting—the laborious stitching together of quilt-top and backing, with whatever might be available in the way of batting—worn-out blankets, stitched-together rags, or wool-combings—laid in between quilt-top and backing for warmth.
I had neither great talent nor great patience for sewing generally, but I did have the manual dexterity for small, fine stitches. More importantly, I had a large kitchen with good light and enough room for a quilting-frame, plus the services of Mrs. Bug, who kept the quilters well supplied with mugs of tea and endless plates of apple scones.
We were in the midst of quilting a block pattern Mrs. Evan Lindsay had pieced out in creams and blues, when Jamie appeared suddenly in the door to the hallway. Caught up in an absorbing conversation about the snoring of husbands in general and theirs in particular, most of the women didn’t notice him, but I was facing the door. He seemed not to want to interrupt, or to attract attention, for he didn’t come into the room—but once he’d caught my eye, he jerked his head urgently, and disappeared toward his study.
I glanced at Bree, who was sitting next to me. She’d seen him; she raised an eyebrow and shrugged. I popped the knot—jerking the knotted end of my thread up between the layers of fabric, so it wouldn’t show—stabbed my needle through the quilt-top, and got up, murmuring an excuse.
“Give him beer to his supper,” Mrs. Chisholm was advising Mrs. Aberfeldy. “A great deal of it, and well-watered. That way, he’ll have to wake to piss every half-hour, and can’t get started wi’ the sort of rumption that shakes the shingles loose.”
“Oh, aye,” Mrs. Aberfeldy objected. “I tried that. But then when he comes back to bed, he’s wantin’ to . . . mmphm.” She flushed red as the ladies all cackled. “I get less sleep than I do with the snorin’!”
Jamie was waiting in the hall. The moment I appeared, he grabbed me by the arm and hustled me out of the front door.
“What—” I began, bewildered. Then I saw the tall Indian sitting on the edge of the stoop.
“What—” I said again, and then he stood up, turned, and smiled at me.
“Ian!” I shrieked, and flung myself into his arms.
He was thin and hard as a piece of sun-dried rawhide, and his clothes smelled of wood-damp and earth, with a faint echo of the smoke and body-smells of a long-house. I stood back, wiping my eyes, to look at him, and a cold nose nudged my hand, making me utter another small shriek.
“You!” I said to Rollo. “I thought I’d never see you again!” Overcome with emotion, I rubbed his ears madly. He uttered a short bark and dropped to his forepaws, wagging equally madly.
“Dog! Dog-dog! Here, dog!” Jemmy burst from the door of his own cabin, running as fast as his short legs would carry him, wet hair standing on end and face beaming. Rollo shot toward him, hitting him amidships and bowling him over in a flurry of squeals.
I had at first feared that Rollo—who was, after all, half-wolf—saw Jemmy as prey, but it was immediately apparent that the two were merely engaged in mutually ecstatic play. Brianna’s maternal sonar had picked up the squealing, though, and she came rushing to the door.
“What—” she began, eyes going to the melee taking place on the grass. Then Ian stepped forward, took her in his arms, and kissed her. Her shriek in turn brought the quilting circle boiling out onto the porch, in an eruption of questions, exclamations, and small subsidiary shrieks in acknowledgment of the general excitement.
In the midst of the resulting pandemonium, I suddenly noticed that Roger, who had appeared from somewhere, was sporting a fresh raw graze across his forehead, a black eye, and a clean shirt. I glanced at Jamie, who was standing next to me watching the goings-on, his face wreathed in a permanent grin. His shirt, by contrast, was not only filthy but ripped down the front, and with an enormous rent in one sleeve. There were huge smears of mud and dried blood on the linen, too, though I didn’t see any fresh blood showing. Given Jemmy’s wet hair and clean shirt—not that it was, anymore—this was all highly suspicious.
“What on earth have you lot been doing?” I demanded.
He shook his head, still grinning.
“It doesna signify, Sassenach. Though I have got a fresh hog for ye to butcher—when ye’ve the time.”
I pushed back a lock of hair in exasperation.
“Is this the local equivalent of killing the fatted calf in honor of the prodigal’s return?” I asked, nodding at Ian, who was by now completely submerged in a tide of women. Lizzie, I saw, was clinging to one of his arms, her pale face absolutely ablaze with excitement. I felt a slight qualm, seeing it, but pushed it away for the moment.
“Has Ian brought friends? Or—his family, perhaps?” He had said his wife was expecting, and that was nearly two years back. The child—if all had gone well—must be nearly old enough to walk.
Jamie’s smile dimmed a little at that.
“No,” he said. “He’s alone. Save for the dog, of course,” he added, with a nod at Rollo, who was lying on his back, paws in the air, squirming happily under Jemmy’s onslaught.
“Oh. Well.” I smoothed down my hair and re-tied the ribbon, beginning to think what ought to be done regarding the quilters, the fresh hog, and some sort of celebratory supper—though I supposed Mrs. Bug would deal with that.
“How long is he staying, did he say?”
Jamie took a deep breath, putting a hand on my back.
“For good,” he said, and his voice was full of joy—but with an odd tinge of sadness that made me look up at him in puzzlement. “He’s come home.”
IT WAS VERY LATE indeed before the butchering, the quilting, and the supper were all finished, and the visitors finally left, charged with gossip. Though not so much gossip as all that; Ian had been friendly to everyone, but reticent, saying very little about his journey from the north—and nothing at all about the reasons behind it.
“Did Ian tell you anything?” I asked Jamie, finding him temporarily alone in his study before dinner. He shook his head.
“Verra little. Only that he had come back to stay.”
“Do you suppose something dreadful happened to his wife? And the baby?” I felt a deep pang of distress, both for Ian, and for the slight, pretty Mohawk girl called Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa—Works With Her Hands. Ian had called her Emily. Death in childbirth was not uncommon, even among the Indians.
Jamie shook his head again, looking sober.
“I dinna ken, but I think it must be something of the kind. He hasna spoken of them at all—and the lad’s eyes are a great deal older than he is.”
Lizzie had appeared at the door then, with an urgent message from Mrs. Bug regarding dispositions for supper, and I had to go. Following Lizzie toward the kitchen, though, I couldn’t help wondering just what Ian’s return might mean to her—particularly if we were right in our suppositions about Ian’s Mohawk wife.
Lizzie had been half in love with Ian, before he had left, and had pined for months following his decision to stay with the Kahnyen’kehaka. But that was more than two years ago, and two years can be a very long time, especially in a young person’s life.
I knew what Jamie meant about Ian’s eyes, and knew for certain that he wasn’t the same impulsive, cheerful lad we had left with the Mohawk. Lizzie wasn’t quite the timidly adoring girl-mouse she had been, either.
What she was, though, was Manfred McGillivray’s betrothed. I could only be thankful that neither Ute McGillivray nor any of her daughters had been present at this afternoon’s quilting circle. With luck, the glamor of Ian’s return would be short-lived.
“Will you be all right down here?” I asked Ian, dubiously. I had put several quilts and a goose-down pillow on the surgery table for him, he having politely rejected Mr. Wemyss’s offer of his own bed and Mrs. Bug’s desire to make him a comfortable pallet before the kitchen hearth.
“Oh, aye, Auntie,” he said, and grinned at me. “Ye wouldna credit the places Rollo and I have been sleeping.” He stretched, yawning and blinking. “Christ—I’ve no been up past sunset anytime this month or more.”
“And up at dawn, too, I expect. That’s why I thought you might be better in here; no one will disturb you, if you’d like to sleep late in the morning.”
He laughed at that.
“Only if I leave the window open, so Rollo can come and go as he likes. Though he seems to think the huntin’ might be good enough inside.”
Rollo was seated in the middle of the floor, muzzle lifted in anticipation, his yellow wolf-eyes fixed unwaveringly on the upper cupboard door. A low rumbling noise, like water bumping in a kettle, issued from behind the door.
“I’ll gie ye odds on the cat, Ian,” Jamie observed, coming into the surgery. “He’s a verra high opinion of himself, has wee Adso. I saw him chase a fox, last week.”
“The fact that you were behind him with a gun had nothing to do with the fox’s running away, of course,” I said.
“Well, not so far as yon cheetie’s concerned,” Jamie agreed, grinning.
“Cheetie,” Ian repeated softly. “It feels . . . verra good to speak Scots again, Uncle Jamie.”
Jamie’s hand brushed Ian’s arm lightly.
“I suppose it does, a mhic a pheathar,” he said, just as softly. “Will ye have forgot all your Gaelic, then?”
“’S beag ’tha fhios aig fear a bhaile mar ’tha fear na mara bèo,” Ian replied, without hesitation. It was a well-known saying: “Little does the landsman know how the seaman lives.”
Jamie laughed in gratified surprise, and Ian grinned broadly back. His face was weathered to a deep brown, and the dotted lines of his Mohawk tattoos ran in fierce crescents from nose to cheekbones—but for a moment, I saw his hazel eyes dance with mischief, and saw again the lad we had known.
“I used to say things over in my mind,” he said, the grin fading a little. “I’d look at things, and say the words in my mind—‘Avbhar,’ ‘Coire,’ ‘Skirlie’—so as not to forget.” He glanced shyly at Jamie. “Ye did tell me to remember, Uncle.”
Jamie blinked, and cleared his throat.
“So I did, Ian,” he murmured. “I’m glad of it.” He squeezed Ian’s shoulder hard—and then they were embracing fiercely, thumping each other’s backs with wordless emotion.
By the time I had wiped my own eyes and blown my nose, they had separated and resumed an air of elaborate casualness, affecting to ignore my descent into female sentiment.
“I kept hold of the Scots and the Gaelic, Uncle,” Ian said, clearing his own throat. “The Latin was a bit beyond me, though.”
“I canna think ye’d have much occasion to practice your Latin,” Jamie said. He wiped his shirtsleeve under his nose, smiling. “Unless a wandering Jesuit happened by.”
Ian looked a little queer at that. He glanced from Jamie to me, then at the door to the surgery, to be sure no one was coming.
“Well, it wasna exactly that, Uncle,” he said.
He walked quietly to the door, peeked out into the hallway, then closed the door softly, and came back to the table. He had worn a small leather bag tied at his waist, which—aside from knife, bow, and quiver—appeared to contain the whole of his worldly possessions. He had put this aside earlier, but now picked it up and rummaged briefly in it, withdrawing a small book, bound in black leather. He handed this to Jamie, who took it, looking puzzled.
“When I—that is, just before I left Snaketown—the old lady, Tewaktenyonh, gave me that wee book. I’d seen it before; Emily”—he stopped, clearing his throat hard, then went on steadily—“Emily begged a page of it for me, to send ye a note to say all was well. Did ye get that?”
“Yes, we did,” I assured him. “Jamie sent it to your mother, later.”
“Oh, aye?” Ian’s expression lightened at thought of his mother. “That’s good. She’ll be pleased to hear I’ve come back, I hope.”
“I’ll lay ye any odds ye like on that one,” Jamie assured him. “But what’s this?” He lifted the book, raising a brow in question. “It looks like a priest’s breviary.”
“So it does.” Ian nodded, scratching at a mosquito bite on his neck. “That’s not what it is, though. Look at it, aye?”
I moved close to Jamie, looking over his elbow as he opened the book. There was a ragged edge of paper, where the flyleaf had been torn out. There was no title page, though, nor printing. The book appeared to be a journal of some sort; the pages were filled with writing in black ink.
Two words stood alone at the top of the first page, scrawled in large, shaky letters.
Ego sum, they said. I am.
“Are you, then?” said Jamie, half under his breath. “Aye, and who will ye be?” Half down the page, the writing continued. Here the writing was smaller, more controlled, though something seemed odd-looking about it.
“Prima cogitatio est . . .”
“This is the first thing that comes into my head,” Jamie read softly, translating aloud.
“I am; I still exist. Did I, in that place between? I must have, for I remember it. I will try later to describe it. Now I have no words. I feel very ill.”
The letters were small and rounded, each printed singly. The work of a neat and careful writer, but they staggered drunkenly, words slanting up the page. He did feel ill, if the writing were any indication.
When the tidy printing resumed on the next page, it had steadied, along with the writer’s nerve.
“Ibi denum locus . . .
It is the place. Of course it would be. But it is the proper time as well, I know it. The trees, the bushes are different. There was a clearing to the west and now it is completely filled with laurels. I was looking at a big magnolia tree when I stepped into the circle, and now it is gone; there is an oak sapling there. The sound is different. There is no noise of highway and vehicles in the distance. Only birds, singing very loudly. Wind.
I am still dizzy. My legs are weak. I cannot stand yet. I woke under the wall where the snake eats its tail, but some distance from the cavity where we laid the circle. I must have crawled, there are dirt and scratches on my hands and clothes. I lay for some time after waking, too ill to rise. I am better now. Still weak and sick, but I am exultant nonetheless. It worked. We have succeeded.”
“We?” I said, looking at Jamie with both eyebrows raised. He shrugged and turned the page.
“The stone is gone. Only a smear of soot in my pocket. Raymond was right, then. It was a small unpolished sapphire. I must remember to put down everything, for the sake of others who may come after me.”
A small, cold shudder of premonition flowed up my back and over me, making my scalp tingle as the hair on my head began to stand. Others who may come after me. Not meaning to, I reached out and touched the book; an irresistible impulse. I needed to touch him somehow, make some contact with the vanished writer of these words.
Jamie glanced curiously at me. With some effort, I took my hand away, curling my fingers into a fist. He hesitated for a moment, but then looked back at the book, as though the neat black writing compelled his gaze as it did my own.
I knew now what had struck me about that writing. It had not been written with a quill. Quill-writing, even the best, was uneven in color, dark where the quill was freshly dipped, fading slowly through a line of writing. Every word of this was the same—written in a thin, hard line of black ink that slightly dented the fibers of the page. Quills never did that.
“Ball point,” I said. “He wrote it with a ball-point pen. My God.”
Jamie glanced back at me. I must have looked pale, for he moved as though to close the book, but I shook my head, motioning to him to go on reading. He frowned dubiously, but with one eye still on me, looked back. Then his attention shifted wholly to the book, and his brows rose as he looked at the writing on the next page.
“Look,” he said softly, turning the book toward me and pointing to one line. Written in Latin like the others, but there were unfamiliar words mixed into the text—long, strange-looking words.
“Mohawk?” Jamie said. He looked up, into Ian’s face. “That is a word in an Indian tongue, surely. One of the Algonquian tongues, no?”
“Rains Hard,” said Ian, quietly. “It is the Kahnyen’kehaka—the Mohawk tongue, Uncle. Rains Hard is someone’s name. And the others written there, too—Strong Walker, Six Turtles, and Talks With Spirits.”
“I thought the Mohawk have no written language,” Jamie said, one ruddy eyebrow lifted. Ian shook his head.
“Nor they do, Uncle Jamie. But someone wrote that”—he nodded at the page,—“and if ye work out the sound of the words . . .” He shrugged. “They are Mohawk names. I’m sure of it.”
Jamie looked at him for a long moment, then without comment bent his head and resumed his translation.
“I had one of the sapphires, Rains Hard the other. Talks With Spirits had a ruby, Strong Walker took the diamond, and Six Turtles had the emerald. We were not sure of the diagram—whether it should be four points, for the directions of the compass, or five, in a pentacle. But there were the five of us, sworn by blood to this deed, so we laid the circle with five points.”
There was a small gap between this sentence and the next, and the writing changed, becoming now firm and even, as though the writer had paused, then taken up his story at a later point.
“I have gone back to look. There is no sign of the circle—but I see no reason why there should be, after all. I think I must have been unconscious for some time; we laid the circle just inside the mouth of the crevice, but there are no marks in the earth there to show how I crawled or rolled to the spot where I woke, and yet there are marks in the dust, made by rain. My clothes are damp, but I cannot tell if this is from rain, from morning dew, or sweat from lying in the sun; it was near midday when I woke, for the sun was overhead, and it was hot. I am thirsty. Did I crawl away from the crevice, and then collapse? Or was I thrown some distance by the force of the transition?”
I had the most curious sense, hearing this, that the words were echoing, somewhere inside my head. It wasn’t that I had heard it before, and yet the words had a dreadful familiarity. I shook my head, to clear it, and looked up to find Ian’s eyes on me, soft brown and full of speculation.
“Yes,” I said baldly, in answer to his look. “I am. Brianna and Roger, too.” Jamie, who had paused to disentangle a phrase, looked up. He saw Ian’s face, and mine, and reached to put his hand on mine.
“How much could ye read, lad?” he asked quietly.
“Quite a lot, Uncle,” Ian answered, but his eyes didn’t leave my face. “Not everything”—a brief smile touched his lips—“and I’m sure I havena got the grammar right—but I think I understand it. Do you?”
It wasn’t clear whether he addressed the question to me or Jamie; both of us hesitated, exchanged a glance—then I turned back to Ian and nodded, and so did Jamie. Jamie’s hand tightened on mine.
“Mmphm,” Ian said, and his face lighted with an expression of profound satisfaction. “I knew ye weren’t a fairy, Auntie Claire!”
UNABLE TO STAY AWAKE much longer, Ian had finally retired, yawning, though pausing in his flight toward bed to seize Rollo by the scruff of the neck and immobilize him while I removed Adso from the cupboard, fluffed to twice his normal size and hissing like a snake. Holding the cat by his own scruff to avoid being disemboweled, I had carried him out of harm’s way, up to our bedroom, where I dumped him unceremoniously on the bed, turning at once to Jamie.
“What happened next?” I demanded.
He was already lighting a fresh candle. Unfastening his shirt with one hand and thumbing the book open with the other, he sank down onto the bed, still absorbed in the reading.
“He couldna find any of his friends. He searched the countryside nearby for two days, calling, but there was no trace. He was verra much distraught, but at last he thought he must go on; he was in need of food, and had nothing but a knife and a bit of salt with him. He must hunt, or find people.”
Ian said that Tewaktenyonh had given him the book, enjoining him to bring it to me. It had belonged to a man named Otter-Tooth, she said—a member of my family.
An icy finger had touched my spine at that—and hadn’t gone away. Little ripples of unease kept tickling over my skin like the touch of ghostly fingers. My family, indeed.
I had told her that Otter-Tooth was perhaps one of “my family,” unable to describe the peculiar kinship of time-travelers in any other way. I had never met Otter-Tooth—at least not in the flesh—but if he was the man I thought he was, then his was the head buried in our small burying-ground—complete with silver fillings.
Perhaps I was at last going to learn who he had really been—and how on earth he had come to meet such a startling end.
“He wasna much of a hunter,” Jamie said critically, frowning at the page. “Couldna catch so much as a ground-squirrel with a snare, and in the middle of summer, forbye!”
Fortunately for Otter-Tooth—if it was indeed he—he had been familiar with a number of edible plants, and seemed extremely pleased with himself for recognizing pawpaw and persimmon.
“Recognizing a persimmon is no great feat, for God’s sake,” I said. “They look like orange baseballs!”
“And they taste like the bottom of a chamber pot,” Jamie added, he not caring at all for persimmons. “Still, he was hungry by that time, and if ye’re hungry enough . . .” He trailed off, lips moving silently as he continued his translation.
The man had wandered through the wilderness for some time—though “wandering” seemed not quite right; he had chosen a specific direction, guided by the sun and stars. That seemed odd—what had he been looking for?
Whatever it was, he had eventually found a village. He didn’t speak the language of the inhabitants—“Why ought he to think he should?” Jamie wondered aloud—but had become extraordinarily distraught, according to his writing, at the discovery that the women were using iron kettles to cook with.
“Tewaktenyonh said that!” I interrupted. “When she was telling me about him—if it’s the same man,” I added, pro forma, “she said he carried on all the time about the cooking pots, and the knives and guns. He said the Indians were . . . How did she put it?—they needed to ‘return to the ways of their ancestors,’ or the white man would eat them alive.”
“A verra excitable fellow,” Jamie muttered, still riveted to the book. “And with a taste for rhetoric, too.”
Within a page or two, though, the source of Otter-Tooth’s strange preoccupation with cooking pots became somewhat clearer.
“I have failed,” Jamie read. “I am too late.” He straightened his back, and glanced at me, then went on.
“I do not know exactly when I am, nor can I find out—these people will not reckon years by any scale I know, even had I enough of their tongue to ask. But I know I am too late.
Had I arrived when I meant to, before 1650, there would be no iron in a village so far inland. To find it here in such casual use means that I am at least fifty years too late—perhaps more!”
Otter-Tooth was cast into great gloom by this discovery, and spent several days in utmost despair. But then he pulled himself together, determining that there was nothing to be done but to go on. And so he had set out alone, though, with the gift of some food from the villagers—heading north.
“I’ve no idea what the man thought he was doing,” Jamie observed. “But I will say he shows courage. His friends are dead or gone, and he’s nothing with him, no notion where he is—and yet he goes on.”
“Yes—though in all honesty, I don’t suppose he could think of anything else to do,” I said. I touched the book again, gently, remembering the first few days after my own passage through the stones.
The difference, of course, was that this man had chosen to come through the stones on purpose. Exactly why he had done it—and how—was not revealed just yet.
Traveling alone through the wilderness, with nothing but this small book for company, Otter-Tooth had—he said—decided that he would occupy his mind with setting down an account of his journey, with its motives and intents.