A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [336]
Ian glanced at the canvas, but his attention returned to the miniatures of her parents. He stood looking at them, a slight smile on his long, half-homely face. Then, feeling her eyes on him, he glanced up, alarmed.
“Oh, no, ye don’t!”
“Oh, come on, Ian, let me just sketch you,” she coaxed. “It won’t hurt, you know.”
“Och, that’s what you think,” he countered, backing away as though the pencil she had taken up might be a weapon. “The Kahnyen’kehaka think to have a likeness of someone gives ye power over them. That’s why the medicine society wear false faces—so the demons causing the illness willna have their true likeness and willna ken who to hurt, aye?”
This was said in such a serious tone that she squinted at him, to see whether he was joking. He didn’t seem to be.
“Mmm. Ian—Mama explained to you about germs, didn’t she?”
“Aye, she did, o’ course,” he said, in a tone exhibiting no conviction at all. “She showed me things swimmin’ about, and said they were livin’ in my teeth!” His face showed momentary repugnance at the notion, but he left the matter to return to the subject at hand.
“There was a traveling Frenchman came to the village once, a natural philosopher—he’d drawings he’d made of birds and animals, and that astonished them—but then he made the mistake of offering to make a likeness of the war chief’s wife. I barely got him out in one piece.”
“But you aren’t a Mohawk,” she said patiently, “and if you were—you’re not afraid of me having power over you, are you?”
He turned his head and gave her a sudden queer look that went through her like a knife through butter.
“No,” he said. “No, of course not.” But his voice had little more conviction than when discussing germs.
Still, he moved to the stool she kept for sitters, set in good light from the open doors that led to the terrace, and sat down, chin lifted and jaw set like one about to be heroically executed.
Suppressing a smile, she took up the sketching block and drew as quickly as she could, lest he change his mind. He was a difficult subject; his features lacked the solid, clear-cut bone structure that both her parents and Roger had. And yet it was in no way a soft face, even discounting the stippled tattoos that curved from the bridge of his nose across his cheeks.
Young and fresh, and yet the firmness of his mouth—it was slightly crooked, she saw with interest; how had she never noticed that before?—belonged to someone much older, bracketed by lines that would cut much deeper with age, but were already firmly entrenched.
The eyes . . . she despaired of getting those right. Large and hazel, they were his one claim to beauty, and yet, beautiful was the last thing you would call them. Like most eyes, they weren’t one color at all, but many—the colors of autumn, dark wet earth and crackling oak leaves, and the touch of setting sun on dry grass.
The color was a challenge, but one she could meet. The expression, though—it changed in an instant from something so guilelessly amiable as to seem almost half-witted to something you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.
The expression at present was somewhere between these two extremes, but shifted suddenly toward the latter as his attention focused on the open doors behind her, and the terrace beyond.
She glanced over her shoulder, startled. Someone was there; she saw the edge of his—or her—shadow, but the person who threw it was keeping out of sight. Whoever it was began to whistle, a tentative, breathy sound.
For an instant, everything was normal. Then the world shifted. The intruder was whistling “Yellow Submarine.”
All the blood rushed from her head, and she swayed, grabbing the edge of an occasional table to keep from falling. Dimly, she sensed Ian rising like a cat from his stool, seizing one of her palette knives, and sliding noiselessly out of the room into the hallway.
Her hands had gone cold and numb; so had her lips. She tried to whistle a phrase in reply, but nothing but a little air emerged. Straightening up, she took hold of herself, and sang the last few words instead. She