A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [683]
The residents of the Ridge had been generous—as generous as people who had virtually nothing themselves could be at the tail end of winter. We had food for the journey, and many of the women had brought me bits of their household simples; I had small jars of lavender, rosemary, comfrey, and mustard seed, two precious steel needles, a small skein of silk thread to use for sutures and dental floss (though I didn’t mention that last use to the ladies, who would have been deeply affronted by the notion), and a very small stock of bandages and gauze for dressings.
One thing I had in abundance, though, was alcohol. The corncrib had been spared from the flames, and so had the still. Since there was more than enough grain for both animals and household, Jamie had thriftily transformed the rest into a very raw—but potent—liquor, which we would take along to trade for necessary goods along the way. One small cask had been kept for my especial use, though; I’d carefully painted the legend Sauerkraut on the side, to discourage theft on the road.
“And what if we should be set upon by illiterate banditti?” Jamie had asked, amused by this.
“Thought of that,” I informed him, displaying a small corked bottle full of cloudy liquid. “Eau de sauerkraut. I’ll pour it on the cask at first sight of anyone suspicious.”
“I suppose we’d best hope they’re not German bandits, then.”
“Have you ever met a German bandit?” I asked. With the exception of the occasional drunkard or wife-beater, almost all the Germans we knew were honest, hardworking, and virtuous to a fault. Not all that surprising, given that so many of them had come to the colony as part of a religious movement.
“Not as such,” he admitted. “But ye mind the Muellers, aye? And what they did to your friends. They wouldna have called themselves bandits, but the Tuscarora likely didna make the same distinction.”
That was no more than the truth, and a cold thumb pressed the base of my skull. The Muellers, German neighbors, had had a beloved daughter and her newborn child die of measles, and had blamed the nearby Indians for the infection. Deranged by grief, old Herr Mueller had led a party of his sons and sons-in-law to take revenge—and scalps. My viscera still remembered the shock of seeing my friend Nayawenne’s white-streaked hair spill out of a bundle into my lap.
“Is my hair turning white, do you think?” I said abruptly. He raised his eyebrows, but bent forward and peered at the top of my head, fingering gently through my hair.
“There’s maybe one hair in fifty that’s gone white. One in five-and-twenty is silver. Why?”
“I suppose I have a little time, then. Nayawenne …” I hadn’t spoken her name aloud in several years, and found an odd comfort in the speaking, as though it had conjured her. “She told me that I’d come into my full power when my hair turned white.”
“Now there’s a fearsome thought,” he said, grinning.
“No doubt. Since it hasn’t happened yet, though, I suppose if we stumble into a nest of sauerkraut thieves on the road, I’ll have to defend my cask with my scalpel,” I said.
He gave me a slightly queer look at this, but then laughed and shook his head.
His own packing was a little more involved. He and Young Ian had removed the gold from the house’s foundation the night after Mrs. Bug’s funeral—a delicate process preceded by my putting out a large slop basin of stale bread soaked in corn liquor, then calling “Sooo-eeee!” at the top of my lungs from the head of the garden path.
A moment of silence, and then the white sow emerged from her den, a pale blotch against the smoke-stained rocks of the foundation. I knew exactly what she was, but the sight of that white, rapidly moving form still made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. It had come on to snow—one of the reasons for Jamie’s decision to act at once—and she came through the whirl of big, soft flakes with a velocity that made her seem like the spirit of the storm