Cross Creek November, 1771 4 страница
I took a deep breath and laid my hands lightly on his shoulders.
“Bloody man. Stepping on a snake! Couldn’t you have looked where you were going?”
“Not whilst chasing a thousand-weight of meat downhill,” he said, smiling. I felt a tiny relaxation in the muscles under my hands, and repressed the urge to smile back. I glared down at him instead.
“You scared bloody hell out of me!” That at least was sincere.
The eyebrow went up again.
“Maybe ye think I wasna frightened, too?”
“You’re not allowed,” I said firmly. “Only one of us can be scared at a time, and it’s my turn.”
That made him laugh, though the laughter was quickly succeeded by coughing and a shaking chill.
“Fetch me a hot stone for his feet,” I said to Marsali, quickly tucking in the quilts around him. “And fill the teapot with boiling water and bring that, too.”
She darted hastily toward the kitchen. I glanced toward the window, wondering whether Brianna was having any luck in finding maggots. They had no equal in cleaning pustulant wounds without damage to the healthy flesh nearby. If I was to save his leg as well as his life, I needed more help than Saint Bride’s.
Wondering vaguely if there were a patron saint of maggots, I lifted the edge of the quilt and stole a quick look at my other invertebrate assistants. Good; I let out a small sigh of relief. The leeches worked fast; they were already swelling into plumpness, sucking away the blood that was flooding the tissues of his leg from ruptured capillaries. Without that pressure, healthy circulation might be restored in time to keep skin and muscle alive.
I could see his hand clenched on the edge of the table, and could feel the shuddering of his chill through my thighs, pressed against the wood.
I took his head between my hands; the skin of his cheeks was burning hot.
“You are not going to die!” I hissed. “You’re not! I won’t let you!”
“People keep sayin’ that to me,” he muttered, eyes closed and sunken with exhaustion. “Am I not allowed my own opinion?”
“No,” I said. “You’re not. Here, drink this.”
I held the cup of penicillin broth to his lips, steadying it while he drank. He made faces, squinching his eyes shut, but swallowed it obediently enough.
Marsali had brought the teapot, brimful of boiling water. I poured most of it over the waiting herbs, and left them to steep, while I poured him a cup of cold water to wash away the taste of the penicillin.
He swallowed the water, eyes still shut, then lay back on the pillow.
“What is that?” he asked. “It tastes of iron.”
“Water,” I replied. “Everything tastes of iron; your gums are bleeding.” I handed the empty water jug to Marsali and asked her to bring more. “Put honey in it,” I said. “About one part honey to four parts water.”
“Beef tea is what he needs,” she said, pausing to look at him, brow furrowed with concern. “That’s what my Mam did swear by, and her Mam before her. When a body’s lost a deal o’ blood, there’s naught like beef tea.”
I thought Marsali must be seriously worried; she seldom mentioned her mother in my hearing, out of a natural sense of tact. For once, though, bloody Laoghaire was right; beef tea would be an excellent thing—if we happened to have any fresh beef, which we didn’t.
“Honey water,” I said briefly, shooing her out of the room. I went to fetch reinforcements from the leech department, pausing to check on Brianna’s progress through the front window.
She was out by the paddock, barefoot, skirts kilted up above the knee, shaking bits of horse dung from one foot. No luck so far, then. She saw me at the window and waved, then motioned to the ax that stood nearby, then to the edge of the wood. I nodded and waved back; a rotted log might be a possibility.
Jemmy was on the ground nearby, his leading-strings securely tied to the paddock fence. He certainly didn’t need them to help him stay upright, but they did keep him from escaping while his mother was busy. He was industriously engaged in pulling down the remains of a dried gourd-vine that had grown up over the fence, crowing with delight as bits of crumbled leaf and the dried remains of frostbitten gourds showered over his flaming hair. His round face bore a look of determined intent, as he set about the task of getting a gourd the size of his head into his mouth.
A movement caught the corner of my eye; Marsali, bringing up water from the spring, to fill the crusted cauldron. No, she wasn’t showing at all yet—Jamie was right, she was much too thin—but now that I knew, I could see the pallor in her face, and the shadows under her eyes.
Damn. Another glimpse of movement; Bree’s long pale legs, flashing under her kilted skirts in the shadow of the big blue spruce. And was she using the tansy oil? She was still nursing Jemmy, but that was no guarantee, not at his age . . .
I swung around at a sound behind me, to find Jamie climbing slowly back into his nest of quilts, looking like a great crimson sloth, my amputation saw in one hand.
“What the hell are you doing?”
He eased himself down, grimacing, and lay back on the pillow, breathing in long, deep gasps. The folded saw was clasped to his chest.
“I repeat,” I said, standing menacingly over him, hands on my hips, “what the hell . . .”
He opened his eyes and lifted the saw an inch or so.
“No,” he said positively. “I ken what ye’re thinking, Sassenach, and I willna have it.”
I took a deep breath, to keep my voice from quivering.
“You know I wouldn’t, not unless I absolutely had to.”
“No,” he said again, and gave me a familiar look of obstinacy. No surprise at all that he never wondered who Jemmy looked like, I thought with sour amusement.
“You don’t know what may happen—”
“I ken what’s happening to my leg better than you do, Sassenach,” he interrupted, then paused to breathe some more. “I dinna care.”
“Maybe you don’t, but I do!”
“I’m no going to die,” he said firmly, “and I dinna wish to live with half a leg. I’ve a horror of it.”
“Well, I’m not very keen on it myself. But if it’s a choice between your leg and your life?”
“It’s not.”
“It damn well may be!”
“It won’t.” Age made not the slightest difference, I thought. Two years or fifty, a Fraser was a Fraser, and no rock was more stubborn. I rubbed a hand through my hair.
“All. Right,” I said, between clenched teeth. “Give me the bloody thing and I’ll put it away.”
“Your word.”
“My what?” I stared at him.
“Your word,” he repeated, giving me back the stare, with interest. “I may be fevered and lose my wits. I dinna want ye to take my leg if I’m in no state to stop it.”
“If you’re in that sort of state, I’ll have no choice!”
“Perhaps ye don’t,” he said evenly, “but I do. I’ve made it. Your word, Sassenach.”
“You bloody, unspeakable, infuriating—”
His smile was startling, a white grin in the ruddy face. “If ye call me a Scot, Sassenach, then I know I’m going to live.”
A shriek from outside kept me from answering. I swung round to the window, in time to see Marsali drop two pails of water on the ground. The water geysered over her skirt and shoes, but she paid no attention. I glanced hastily in the direction she was looking, and gasped.
It had walked casually through the paddock fence, snapping the rails as though they were matchsticks, and stood now in the midst of the pumpkin patch by the house, vines jerking in its mouth as it chewed. It stood huge and dark and wooly, ten feet away from Jemmy, who stared up at it with round, round eyes and open mouth, his gourd forgotten in his hands.
Marsali let out another screech, and Jemmy, catching her terror, began to scream for his mother. I turned, and—feeling as though I were moving in slow motion, though I was surely not—snatched the saw neatly from Jamie’s hand, went out the door, and headed for the yard, thinking as I did so that buffalo looked so much smaller in zoos.
As I cleared the stoop—I must have leaped; I had no memory of the steps—Brianna came out of the woods. She was running silently, ax in her hand, and her face was set, inward and intent. I had no time to call out before she reached it.
She had drawn back the ax, still running, swung it in an arc as she took the last step, and brought it down with all her strength, just behind the huge beast’s ears. A thin spray of blood flew up and spattered on the pumpkins. It bellowed and lowered its head, as though to charge forward.
Bree dodged to one side, dived for Jemmy, was on her knees, tugging at the strings that bound him to the fence. From the corner of my eye, I could see Marsali, yelling Gaelic prayers and imprecations as she seized a newly dyed petticoat from the blackberry bushes.
I had somehow unfolded the saw as I ran; I cut Jemmy’s strings with two swipes, then was on my feet and running back across the dooryard. Marsali had thrown the petticoat over the buffalo’s head; it stood bewildered, shaking its head and swaying to and fro, blood showing black on the yellow-green of the fresh-dyed indigo.
It stood as tall as I at the shoulder, and it smelt strange; dusty and warm, gamey but oddly familiar, with a barn-smell, like a cow. It took a step, another, and I dug my fingers into its wool, holding on. I could feel the tremors running through it; they shook me like an earthquake.
I had never done it, but felt as though I had, a thousand times. Dreamlike and sure, I ran a hand under slobbering lips, felt warm breath blow down my sleeve. The great pulse throbbed in the angle of the jaw; I could see it in my mind, the big meaty heart and its pumping blood, warm in my hand, cold against my cheek where it pressed the sodden petticoat.
I drew the saw across the throat, cut hard, and felt in hands and forearms the tensile severing of skin and muscle, the grate of bone, the snap of tendon, and the slippery, rubbery, blood-squirting vessels, sliding away.
The world shook. It shifted and slid, and landed with a thud. When I came to myself, I was sitting in the middle of my dooryard, one hand still twisted in its hair, one leg gone numb beneath the weight of the buffalo’s head, my skirts plastered to my thighs, hot and stinking, sodden with its blood.
Someone said something and I looked up. Jamie was on his hands and knees on the stoop—mouth open, stark naked. Marsali sat on the ground, legs splayed out in front of her, soundlessly opening and closing her mouth.
Brianna stood over me, Jemmy held against her shoulder. Terror forgotten, he leaned far over, looking down in curiosity at the buffalo.
“Ooo!” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Very well put.”
“You’re all right, Mama?” Bree asked, and I realized she had asked several times before. She put down a hand and rested it gently on my head.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think so.”
I took her hand and laboriously worked my leg free, leaning on her as I stood up. The same tremors that had gone through the buffalo were going through her—and me—but they were fading. She took a deep breath, looking down at the massive body. Lying on its side, it rose nearly as high as her waist. Marsali came to stand beside us, shaking her head in awe at its size.
“Mother of God, how on earth are we going to butcher that?” she said.
“Oh,” I said, and dragged a trembling hand through my hair. “I suppose we’ll manage.”
