A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [110]
“Why?” I said bluntly. “How?”
He drew on his pipe, and blew another ring. It struck the remnants of the first and both disintegrated in a haze of fragrant smoke. He frowned a little, and glanced down at the hand, now resting on his knee.
“Ah, well. It was my choice. We were bowmen, see,” he explained to me. “All the men of my sept, we were brought up to it, early. I’d my first bow at three, and could strike a grouse through the heart at forty feet by the time I was six.”
He spoke with an air of simple pride, squinting a little at a small flock of doves that were foraging under the trees nearby, as though estimating how easily he could have bagged one.
“I did hear my father tell of the archers,” Jamie said. “At Glenshiels. Many of them Grants, he said—and some Campbells.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, interested in the story, but wary.
“Aye, that was us.” Arch puffed industriously, smoke wreathing up round his head. “We’d crept down through the bracken in the night,” he explained to me, “and hid among the rocks above the river at Glenshiels, under the bracken and the rowans. Ye could have stood a foot away and not seen one of us, so thick as it was.
“A bit cramped,” he added confidentially to Jamie. “Ye couldna stand up to take a piss, and we’d had our suppers—with a bit o’ beer—before we came up the other side o’ the mountain. All squatting like women, we were. Trying like the devil to keep our bowstrings dry in our shirts, too, what wi’ the rain coming down and dripping down our necks through the fern.
“But come the dawn,” he went on cheerfully, “and we stood on the signal and let fly. I will say ’twas a bonny sight, our arrows hailing down from the hills on the poor sods camped there by the river. Aye, your faither fought there, too, a Sheaumais,” he added, pointing the stem of his pipe at Jamie. “He was one o’ those by the river.” A spasm of silent laughter shook him.
“No love lost, then,” Jamie replied, very dryly. “Between you and the Frasers.”
Old Arch shook his head, not at all discomposed.
“None,” he said. He turned his attention back to me, his manner sobering a little.
“So when the Frasers would capture a Grant alone on their land, it was their habit to give him a choice. He could lose his right eye, or the twa fingers of his right hand. Either way, he wouldna draw a bow again against them.”
He rubbed the maimed hand slowly to and fro against his thigh, stretching it out, as though his phantom fingers reached and yearned for the touch of singing sinew. Then he shook his head, as though dismissing the vision, and curled his hand into a fist. He turned to me.
“Ye werena intending to take Christie’s fingers straight off, were ye, Mrs. Fraser?”
“No,” I said, startled. “Of course not. He doesn’t think . . . ?”
Arch shrugged, bushy white brows raised toward his receding hairline.
“I couldna say for sure, but he seemed verra much disturbed at the thought of being cut.”
“Hmm,” I said. I’d have to speak to Tom Christie.
Jamie had stood up to take his leave, and I followed suit automatically, shaking out my skirts and trying to shake out of my head the mental image of a young man’s hand, pinned to the ground, and an ax chunking down.
“No Frasers at Glenhelm, ye said?” Jamie asked thoughtfully, looking down at Mr. Bug. “Leslie, the nephew—he would have been Bobby Fraser’s heir, would he?”
“Aye, he would.” Mr. Bug’s pipe had gone out. He turned it over and knocked the dottle neatly out against the edge of the porch.
“Both killed together, were they? I mind my father telling of it, once. Found in a stream, their heads caved in, he said.”
Arch Bug blinked up at him, eyelids lowered, lizardlike, against the sun’s glare.
“Weel, ye see, a Sheaumais,” he said, “a bow’s like a good-wife, aye? Knows her master, and answers his touch. An ax, though—” He shook his head. “An ax is a whore. Any man can use one—and it works as well in either hand.”
He blew through the stem of the pipe to clear it of ash, wiped the bowl with his handkerchief, and tucked it