A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [662]
“What d’ye think, lass? What should I do there? How would it be?”
“Well, it—” she began, and stopped, trying to envision him in that world—behind the wheel of a car? Going to an office, in a three-piece suit? That idea was so ludicrous, she laughed. Or sitting in a darkened theater, watching Godzilla films with Jem and Roger?
“What’s Jamie spelled backward?” she asked.
“Eimaj, I suppose,” he replied, bewildered. “Why?”
“I think you’d do fine,” she said, smiling. “Never mind. You’d—well, I suppose you could . . . publish newspapers. The printing presses are bigger and faster, and it takes a lot more people to gather the news, but otherwise—I don’t think it’s so different then from what it is now. You know how to do that.”
He nodded, a crease of concentration forming between the thick brows that were so like hers.
“I suppose so,” he said a little dubiously. “Could I be a farmer, d’ye think? Surely folk still eat; someone must feed them.”
“You could.” She looked round, taking fresh note of all the homely details of the place: the chickens scratching peaceably in the dirt; the soft, weathered boards of the stable; the thrown-up dirt near the foundation of the house where the white pig had burrowed in. “There are people then who still farm just this way; small places, way up in the mountains. It’s a hard life—” She saw him smile, and laughed in return. “All right, it’s not any harder than it is now—but it’s a lot easier in the cities.”
She paused, thinking.
“You wouldn’t have to fight,” she said finally.
He seemed surprised at that.
“No? But ye did say there are wars.”
“There certainly are,” she said, needles of ice piercing her belly, as the images pierced her mind: fields of poppies, fields of white crosses—a man on fire, a naked child running with burned skin, the contorted face of a man in the instant before the bullet entered his brain. “But—but then it’s only the young men who fight. And not all of them; only some.”
“Mmphm.” He thought for a bit, his brow furrowed, then looked up searching her face.
“This world of yours, this America,” he said finally, matter-of-factly. “The freedom that ye go to. There will be a fearful price to be paid. Will it be worth it, do ye think?”
It was her turn then to be silent and think. At last she put her hand on his arm—solid, warm, steady as iron.
“Almost nothing would be worth losing you,” she whispered. “But maybe that comes close.”
AS THE WORLD turns toward winter and the nights grow long, people begin to wake in the dark. Lying in bed too long cramps the limbs, and dreams dreamt too long turn inward on themselves, grotesque as a Mandarin’s fingernails. By and large, the human body isn’t adapted for more than seven or eight hours’ sleep—but what happens when the nights are longer than that?
What happens is the second sleep. You fall asleep from tiredness, soon after dark—but then wake again, rising toward the surface of your dreams like a trout coming up to feed. And should your sleeping partner also wake then—and people who have slept together for a good many years know at once when each other wakes—you have a small, private place to share, deep in the night. A place in which to rise, to stretch, to bring a juicy apple back to bed, to share slice by slice, fingers brushing lips. To have the luxury of conversation, uninterrupted by the business of the day. To make love slowly in the light of an autumn moon.
And then, to lie close, and let a lover’s dreams caress your skin as you begin to sink once more beneath the waves of consciousness, blissful in the knowledge that dawn is far off—that’s second sleep.
I came very slowly to the surface of my first sleep, to find that the highly erotic dream I had been having had some basis in reality.
“I’d never thought myself the sort who’d molest a corpse, Sassenach.” Jamie’s voice tickled the tender flesh below my ear, murmuring. “But I will say the notion has more appeal than I’d thought.”
I wasn’t sufficiently coherent as to respond to this, but thrust my hips