Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [143]
“Do you know any useful taki-taki to say to her?” I asked. “Of course, she might not know that, either, if she wasn’t brought through the Indies.”
He turned his head and looked up at my passenger, considering.
“Ah,” he said. “Well, there’s the one thing they’ll all know, no matter where they’ve come.” He reached out and squeezed the woman’s foot firmly.
“Freedom,” he said, and paused. “Saorsa. D’ye ken what I say?”
She didn’t loosen her grip, but her breath went out in a shuddering sigh, and I thought I felt her nod.
The horses followed each other in single file, Myers in the lead. The rough track was not even a wagon trail, only a sort of flattening of undergrowth, but it did at least provide clear passage through the trees.
I doubted that Sergeant Murchison’s vengeance would pursue us so far—if he pursued us at all—but the sense of escape was too strong to ignore. We shared an unspoken but pervasive sense of urgency, and with no particular discussion, agreed to ride on as far as possible.
My passenger was either losing her fear or simply becoming too tired to care anymore; after a midnight stop for refreshment she allowed Ian and Myers to boost her back on the horse without protest, and while she never released her hold on my waist, she did seem to doze now and then, her forehead pressed against my shoulder.
The fatigue of long riding crept over me, too, aided by the hypnotic soft thudding of the horses’ feet, and the unending susurrus of the pines overhead. We were still in the longleaf forest, and the tall, straight trunks surrounded us like the masts of long-sunk ships.
Lines of an ancient Scottish song drifted through my mind—“How many strawberries grow in the salt sea; how many ships sail in the forest?”—and I wondered muzzily whether the composer had walked through a place like this, unearthly in half-moon and starlight, so dreamlike that the borders between the elements were lost; we might as well be afloat as earthbound, the heave and fall beneath me the rise of planking, and the sound of the pines the wind in our sails.
We stopped at dawn, unsaddled the horses, hobbled them, and left them to feed in the long grass of a small meadow. I found Jamie, and curled up at once into a nest of grass beside him, the horses’ peaceful champing the last thing I heard.
We slept heavily through the heat of the day, and awoke near sunset, stiff, thirsty, and covered with ticks. I was profoundly thankful that the ticks seemed to share the mosquitoes’ general distaste for my flesh, but I had learned on our trip north to check Jamie and the others every time we slept; there were always outriders.
“Ick,” I said, examining a particularly juicy specimen, the size of a grape, nestling amid the soft cinnamon hair of Jamie’s underarm. “Damn, I’m afraid to pull that one; it’s so full it’ll likely burst.”
He shrugged, busy exploring his scalp with the other hand, in search of further intruders.
“Leave it while ye deal with the rest,” he suggested. “Perhaps it will fall off of its own accord.”
“I suppose I’d better,” I agreed reluctantly. I hadn’t any objection to the tick’s bursting, but not while its jaws were still embedded in Jamie’s flesh. I’d seen infections caused by forcibly interrupted ticks, and they weren’t anything I wanted to deal with in the middle of a forest. I had only a rudimentary medical kit with me—though this luckily included a very fine pair of small tweezer-pointed forceps from Dr. Rawlings’s box.
Myers and Ian seemed to be managing all right; both stripped to the waist, Myers was crouched over the boy like a huge black baboon, fingers busy in Ian’s hair.
“Here’s a wee one,” Jamie said, bending over and pushing his own hair aside so I could reach the small dark bleb behind his ear. I was engaged in gently maneuvering the creature out, when I became aware of a presence