A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [265]
Their foreheads met with a dull thunk, and blinding pain shot through his head. They fell apart, gasping, and Jamie rolled up onto his knees, head spinning and eyes watering, trying to see.
There was a blur of gray and a shriek of terror. Rollo gave one deep-chested, snarling bark, then settled into a rumbling, continuous growl. Jamie shut one eye, a hand to his throbbing forehead, and made out his opponent lying flat in the mud, Rollo poised over him, black lips drawn back to show all his teeth.
The splash of feet running through the shallows, and Ian was there, gasping for breath.
“Are ye all right, Uncle Jamie?”
He took his hand away and looked at his fingers. No blood, though he would have sworn his head was split open.
“No,” he said, “but better than him. Oh, Jesus.”
“Did ye kill the other one?”
“Probably not. Oh, God.”
Lowering himself to his hands and knees, he crawled a short distance away and threw up. Behind him, he could hear Ian sharply demanding to know who the men were and whether there were others with them, in Cherokee.
“They’re Tuscarora,” he said. His head still throbbed, but he felt a little better.
“Oh, aye?” Ian was surprised, but at once shifted into the tongue of the Kahnyen’kehaka. The young captive, already terrorized by Rollo, looked as though he might die of fright, seeing Ian’s tattoos and hearing him speak Mohawk. Kahnyen’kehaka was of the same family as Tuscarora, and plainly the young man could make out what Ian said, for he replied, stammering with fear. They were alone. Was his brother dead?
Jamie rinsed his mouth with water, splashed it on his face. That was better, though a lump like a duck’s egg was swelling over his left eye.
“Brother?”
Yes, the young man said, his brother. If they did not mean to kill him now, might he go and see? His brother was wounded.
Ian glanced at Jamie for agreement, then called Rollo off with a word. The bedraggled captive struggled painfully to his feet, staggering, and set off back along the shore, followed by the dog and the two naked Scots.
The other man was indeed wounded; blood was seeping through a crude bandage round his leg. He had made the bandage of his shirt, and was bare-chested, scrawny, and starved-looking. Jamie glanced from one to the other; neither could be older than twenty, he thought, and likely younger than that, with their faces pinched by hunger and ill-usage, their clothes little more than rags.
The horses had moved off a little, nervous of the fighting, but the clothes the Scots had left hanging from the bushes were still there. Ian pulled on his breeches and went to fetch food and drink from the saddlebags, while Jamie dressed more slowly, interrogating the young man as the latter anxiously examined his brother.
They were Tuscarora, the young man confirmed. His name was a long one, meaning roughly “the gleam of light on water in a spring”; this was his brother, “the goose that encourages the leader when they fly,” more simply known as Goose.
“What happened to him?” Jamie pulled his shirt over his head and nodded—wincing at the movement—at the gash in Goose’s leg, quite obviously made by something like an ax.
Light on Water took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. He had a substantial knot on his head, as well.
“Tsalagi,” he said. “We were two score in number; the rest are dead, or taken. You will not give us to them, Lord? Please?”
“Tsalagi? Which?”
Light shook his head; he could not say. His band had chosen to stay when his village moved north, but they had not prospered; there were not enough men to defend a village and hunt, and without defenders, others stole their crops, took their women.
Growing poorer, they, too, had taken to stealing and to begging to survive through the winter. More had died of