A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [163]
I grabbed a handful of his hair, lifted my head, and bit his ear, hard. He shrieked and rolled off me.
The other man had gone back toward the fire. At this, though, he turned and called back, “Christ, Donner, is she that good? I’ll have to give her a try!” This got a laugh from the men by the fire, but luckily it died away and they returned to their own concerns. I returned to mine, which was escape.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Donner whined in an undertone, holding his ear. “I wasn’t going to do anything! Christ, you got nice tits, but you’re like old enough to be my mother!”
“Shut up!” I said, pushing myself to a sitting position. The effort made my head spin; tiny colored lights flickered like Christmas-tree bulbs at the edge of my vision. In spite of this, some part of my mind was actively working again.
He was at least partly right. We couldn’t leave immediately. After drawing so much attention to himself, the others would be expecting him to come back within a few minutes; if he didn’t, they’d start looking for him—and we needed more than a few minutes’ start.
“We can’t go now,” he whispered, rubbing his ear reproachfully. “They’ll notice. Wait ’til they go to sleep. I’ll come get you then.”
I hesitated. I was in mortal danger every moment that I spent within reach of Hodgepile and his feral gang. If I had needed any convincing, the encounters of the last two hours had demonstrated that. This Donner needed to go back to the fire and show himself—but I could steal away. Was it worth the risk that someone would come and find me gone, before I had got beyond pursuit? It would be more certain to wait until they slept. But did I dare wait that long?
And then there was Donner himself. If he wanted to talk to me, I certainly wanted to talk to him. The chance of stumbling on another time-traveler . . .
Donner read my hesitation, but misunderstood it.
“You’re not going without me!” He grabbed my wrist in sudden alarm, and before I could jerk away, had whipped a bit of the cut line around it. I fought and pulled away, hissing to try to make him understand, but he was panicked at the thought that I might slip away without him, and wouldn’t listen. Hampered by my injuries, and unwilling to make enough noise to draw attention, I could only delay but not prevent his determined efforts to tie me up again.
“Okay.” He was sweating; a drop fell warm on my face as he leaned over me to check the bindings. At least he hadn’t put the noose round my neck again, instead tethering me to the tree with a rope around my waist.
“I shoulda known what you are,” he murmured, intent on his job. “Even before you said ‘Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.’”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” I snapped, squirming away from his hand. “Don’t bloody do that—I’ll suffocate!” He was trying to put the cloth strip back in my mouth, but seemed to pick up the note of panic in my voice, because he hesitated.
“Oh,” he said uncertainly. “Well. I guess—” Once again, he looked back over his shoulder, but then made up his mind and dropped the gag on the ground. “Okay. But you be quiet, all right? What I meant—you don’t act afraid of men. Most of the women from now do. You oughta act more afraid.”
And with that parting shot, he rose and brushed dead leaves from his clothes before heading back to the fire.
THERE COMES A POINT when the body has simply had enough. It snatches at sleep, no matter what menace the future may hold. I’d seen that happen: the Jacobite soldiers who slept in the ditches where they fell, the British pilots who slept in their planes while mechanics fueled them, only to leap to full alert again in time to take off. For that matter, women in long labor routinely sleep between contractions.
In the same manner, I slept.
That kind of sleep is neither deep nor peaceful, though. I came out of it with a hand across my mouth.
The fourth man was neither incompetent nor brutal. He was large and soft-bodied, and he had loved his dead wife. I knew