A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [309]
“No,” he said, staring across the pool.
“Why not?” There was no tone of accusation in the question; more curiosity. Why, after all, should he have chosen to talk to his father-in-law first, rather than his wife?
Because you know what it is to be a man, he thought, and she doesn’t. What he said, though, was another version of the truth.
“I don’t want her to think me a coward.”
Jamie made a small “hmph” noise, almost surprise, but didn’t reply at once, concentrating on reeling in his line. He took the sodden fly from the hook, then hesitated over the collection on his hat, finally choosing a delicate green thing with a curving wisp of black feather.
“D’ye think she would?” Not waiting for an answer, Fraser stood and whipped the line up and back, sending the fly out to drift down over the center of the pool, lighting like a leaf on the water.
Roger watched as he brought it in, playing it over the water in a jerky dance. The Reverend had been a fisherman. All at once, he saw the Ness and its sparkling riffles, running clear brown over the rocks, Dad standing in his battered waders, reeling in his line. He was choked with longing. For Scotland. For his father. For one more day—just one—of peace.
The mountains and the green wood rose up mysterious and wild around them, and the hazy sky unfurled itself over the hollow like angel’s wings, silent and sunlit. But not peaceful; never peace, not here.
“Do you believe us—Claire and Brianna and me—about the war that’s coming?”
Jamie laughed shortly, gaze fixed on the water.
“I’ve eyes, man. It doesna take either prophet or witch to see it standing on the road.”
“That,” said Roger, giving him a curious look, “is a very odd way of putting it.”
“Is it, so? Is that no what the Bible says? When ye shall see the abomination of desolation, standing where it ought not, then let them in Judaea flee to the mountains?”
Let him who readeth understand. Memory supplied the missing part of the verse, and Roger became aware, with a small sense of cold in the bone, that Jamie did indeed see it standing on the road, and recognized it. Nor was he using figures of speech; he was describing, precisely, what he saw—because he had seen it before.
The sound of small boys yelling in joy drifted across the water, and Fraser turned his head a little, listening. A faint smile touched his mouth, then he looked down into the moving water, seeming to grow still. The ropes of his hair stirred against the sunburned skin of his neck, in the same way that the leaves of the mountain ash moved above.
Roger wanted suddenly to ask Jamie whether he was afraid, but kept silence. He knew the answer, in any case.
It doesn’t matter. He breathed deep, and felt the same answer, to the same question, asked of himself. It didn’t seem to come from anywhere, but was just there inside him, as though he had been born with it, always known it.
It doesn’t matter. You will do it anyway.
They stayed for some time in silence. Jamie cast twice more with the green fly, then shook his head and muttered something, reeled it in, changed it for a Dun Fly, and cast again. The little boys charged past on the other bank, naked as eels, giggling, and disappeared through the bushes.
Really odd, Roger thought. He felt all right. Still having not the slightest idea what he meant to do, exactly, still seeing the drifting cloud coming toward them, and now knowing much more about what lay within it. But still all right.
Jamie had a fish on the line. He brought it in fast, and jerked it shining and flapping onto the bank, where he killed it with a sharp blow on a rock before tucking it into his creel.
“D’ye mean to turn Quaker?” Jamie asked seriously.
“No.” Roger was startled by the question. “Why do you ask that?”
Jamie made the odd little half-shrugging gesture that he sometimes used when uncomfortable about something, and didn’t speak again until he’d made the new cast.
“Ye said ye didna want Brianna to think ye coward. I’ve fought by the side of a priest before.” One side of his mouth turned up, wry. “Granted, he wasna much of