Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [318]
Turning to report this to His Highness, I halted, stopped by the odd look on his face. For a split second, I thought it was “rookie’s tremors,” the shock of a person unaccustomed to the sight of wounds and blood. Many a trainee nurse at the combat station had removed a field dressing, taken one look and bolted, to vomit quietly outside before returning to tend the patient. Battle wounds have a peculiarly nasty look to them.
But it couldn’t be that. By no means a natural warrior, still Charles had been blooded, like Jamie, at the age of fourteen, in his first battle at Gaeta. No, I decided, even as the momentary expression of shock faded from the soft brown eyes. He would not be startled by blood or wounds.
This wasn’t a cottar or a herder that stood before him. Not a nameless subject, whose duty was to fight for the Stuart cause. This was a friend. And I thought that perhaps Jamie’s wound had suddenly brought it home to him; that blood was shed on his order, men wounded for his cause—little wonder if the realization struck him, deep as a sword-cut.
He looked at Jamie’s side for a long moment, then looked up to meet his eyes. He grasped Jamie by the hand, and bowed his own head.
“Thank you,” he said softly.
And just for that one moment, I thought perhaps he might have made a king, after all.
* * *
On a small slope behind the church, a tent had been erected at His Highness’s order, for the last shelter of those dead in battle. Given preference in treatment, the English soldiers received none here; the men lay in rows, cloths covering their faces, Highlanders distinguished only by their dress, all awaiting burial on the morrow. MacDonald of Keppoch had brought a French priest with him; the man, shoulders sagging with weariness, purple stole worn incongruously over a stained Highland plaid, moved slowly through the tent, pausing to pray at the foot of each recumbent figure.
“Perpetual rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.” He crossed himself mechanically, and moved on to another corpse.
I had seen the tent earlier, and—heart in mouth—counted the bodies of the Highland dead. Twenty-two. Now, as I entered the tent, I found the toll had risen to twenty-six.
A twenty-seventh lay in the nearby church, on the last mile of his journey. Alexander Kincaid Fraser, dying slowly of the wounds that riddled his belly and chest, of a slow internal seepage that couldn’t be halted. I had seen him when they brought him in, bleached white from an afternoon of bleeding slowly to death, alone in the field among the bodies of his foes.
He had tried to smile at me, and I had wetted his cracked lips with water and coated them with tallow. To give him a drink was to kill him at once, as the liquid would rush through his perforated intestines and cause fatal shock. I hesitated, seeing the seriousness of his wounds, and thinking that a quick death might be better…but then I had stopped. I realized that he would want to see a priest and make his confession, at least. And so I had dispatched him to the church, where Father Benin tended the dying as I tended the living.
Jamie had made short visits to the church every half-hour or so, but Kincaid held his own for an amazingly long time, clinging to life despite the constant ebbing of its substance. But Jamie had not come back from his latest visit. I knew that the fight was ending now at last, and went to see if I could help.
The space under the windows where Kincaid had lain was empty, save for a large, dark stain. He wasn’t in the tent of the dead, either, and neither was Jamie anywhere in sight.
I found them at length some distance up the hill behind the church. Jamie was sitting on a rock, the form of Alexander Kincaid cradled in his arms, curly head resting on his shoulder, the long, hairy legs trailing limp to one side. Both were still as the rock on which they sat. Still as death, though only one was dead.
I touched the white, slack hand, to be sure, and rested my hand on the thick brown hair, feeling still so incongruously