Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [257]
“Look,” he said softly.
I looked where he pointed, up across the smooth expanse of the cave wall, and gasped at the sight.
Painted beasts galloped across the rock face above me, hooves spurning the air as they leaped toward the light above. There were bison, and deer, grouped together in tail-raised flight, and at the end of the rock shelf, a tracing of delicate birds, wings spread as they hovered above the charge of the earthbound beasts.
Done in red and black and ochre with a delicate grace that used the lines of the rock itself for emphasis, they thundered soundlessly, haunches rounded with effort, wings taking flight through the crevices of stone. They had lived once in the dark of a cave, lit only by the flames of those who made them. Exposed to the sun by the fall of their sheltering roof, they seemed alive as anything that walked upon the earth.
Lost in contemplation of the massive shoulders that thrust their way from the rock, I didn’t miss Jamie until he called me.
“Sassenach! Come here, will ye?” There was something odd about his voice, and I hurried toward him. He stood at the entrance of a small side-cave, looking down.
They lay behind an outcrop of the rock, as though they had sought shelter from the wind that chased the bison.
There were two of them, lying together on the packed earth of the cave floor. Sealed in the dry air of the cave, the bones had endured, though flesh had long since dried to dust. A tiny remnant of brown-parchment skin clung to the round curve of one skull, a strand of hair gone red with age stirring softly in the draft of our presence.
“My God,” I said, softly, as though I might disturb them. I moved closer to Jamie, and his hand slid around my waist.
“Do you think…were they…killed here? A sacrifice, perhaps?”
Jamie shook his head, staring pensively down at the small heap of delicate, friable bones.
“No,” he said. He, too, spoke softly, as though in the sanctuary of a church. He turned and lifted a hand to the wall behind us, where the deer leaped and the cranes soared into space beyond the stone.
“No,” he said again. “The folk that made such beasts…they couldna do such things.” He turned again then to the two skeletons, entwined at our feet. He crouched over them, tracing the line of the bones with a gentle finger, careful not to touch the ivory surface.
“See how they lie,” he said. “They didna fall here, and no one laid out their bodies. They lay down themselves.” His hand glided above the long armbones of the larger skeleton, a dark shadow fluttering like a large moth as it crossed the jackstraw pile of ribs.
“He had his arms around her,” he said. “He cupped his thighs behind her own, and held her tight to him, and his head is resting on her shoulder.”
His hand made passes over the bones, illuminating, indicating, clothing them once more with the flesh of imagination, so I could see them as they had been, embraced for the last time, for always. The small bones of the fingers had fallen apart, but a vestige of gristle still joined the metacarpals of the hands. The tiny phalanges overlay each other; they had linked hands in their last waiting.
Jamie had risen and was surveying the interior of the cavern, the late afternoon sun painting the walls with splashes of crimson and ochre.
“There.” He pointed to a spot near the cavern entrance. The rocks there were brown with dust and age, but not rusty with water and erosion, like those deeper in the cave.
“That was the entrance, once,” he said. “The rocks fell once before, and sealed this place.” He turned back and rested a hand on the rocky outcrop that shielded the lovers from the light.
“They must have felt their way around the cave, hand in hand,” I said. “Looking for a way out, in the dust and the dark.”
“Aye.” He rested his forehead against the stone, eyes closed. “And the light was gone, and the air failed them. And so they lay down in the dark to die.” The tears made wet tracks through the dust on his cheeks. I brushed a hand beneath my own eyes, and took his free hand, carefully weaving