A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [93]
“Poor old creature,” I said, putting a final pebble on Ephraim’s cairn. “How do you suppose he ended up in such a place?”
“God knows.” Jamie shook his head. “There are always hermits, men who mislike the society of their fellows. Perhaps he was one o’ those. Or perhaps some misfortune drove him into the wilderness, and he . . . stayed.” He shrugged a little, and gave me a half-smile.
“I sometimes wonder how any of us came to be where we are, Sassenach. Don’t you?”
“I used to,” I said. “But after a time, there didn’t seem to be any possibility of an answer, so I stopped.”
He looked down at me, diverted.
“Have ye, then?” He put out a hand and tucked back a lock of windblown hair. “Perhaps I shouldna ask it, then, but I will. Do ye mind, Sassenach? That ye are here, I mean. Do ye ever wish ye were—back?”
I shook my head.
“No, not ever.”
And that was true. But I woke sometimes in the dead of night, thinking, Is now the dream? Would I wake again to the thick warm smell of central heating and Frank’s Old Spice? And when I fell asleep again to the scent of woodsmoke and the musk of Jamie’s skin, would feel a faint, surprised regret.
If he saw the thought on my face, he gave no sign of it, but bent and kissed me gently on the forehead. He took my arm, and we walked a little way into the wood, away from the house and its clearing below.
“Sometimes I smell the pines,” he said, taking a deep, slow breath of the pungent air. “And I think for an instant I am in Scotland. But then I come to myself and see; there is no kindly bracken here, nor great barren mountains—not the wildness that I kent, but only wilderness that I do not.”
I thought I heard nostalgia in his voice, but not sorrow. He’d asked, though; so would I.
“And do you ever wish to be . . . back?”
“Oh, aye,” he said, surprising me—and then laughed at the look on my face. “But not enough not to wish more to be here, Sassenach.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the tiny graveyard, with its small collection of cairns and crosses, with here and there a larger boulder marking a particular grave.
“Did ye ken, Sassenach, that some folk believe the last person to lie in a graveyard becomes its guardian? He must stand on guard until the next person dies and comes to take his place—only then can he rest.”
“I suppose our mysterious Ephraim might be rather surprised to find himself in such a position, when here he’d lain down under a tree all alone,” I said, smiling a little. “But I do wonder: what is the guardian of a graveyard guarding—and from whom?”
He laughed at that.
“Oh . . . vandals, maybe; desecraters. Or charmers.”
“Charmers?” I was surprised at that; I’d thought the word “charmer” synonymous with “healer.”
“There are charms that call for bones, Sassenach,” he said. “Or the ashes of a burnt body. Or soil from a grave.” He spoke lightly enough, but with no sense of jesting. “Aye, even the dead may need defending.”
“And who better to do it than a resident ghost?” I said. “Quite.”
We climbed up through a stand of quivering aspen, whose light dappled us with green and silver, and I paused to scrape a blob of the crimson sap from a paper-white trunk. How odd, I thought, wondering why the sight of it gave me pause—and then remembered, and turned sharply to look again at the graveyard.
Not a memory, but a dream—or a vision. A man, battered and broken, rising to his feet amid a stand of aspen, rising for what he knew was the last time, his last fight, baring shattered teeth stained with blood that was the color of the aspens’ sap. His face was painted black for death—and I knew that there were silver fillings in his teeth.
But the granite boulder stood silent and peaceful, drifted all about with yellow pine needles, marking the rest of the man who had once called himself Otter-Tooth.
The moment passed, and vanished. We walked out of the aspens, and into another clearing, this one higher than the rise the graveyard stood on.
I was surprised to see that someone had been cutting timber here, and clearing the ground. A sizable stack