Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [150]
His eyes were half closed, watching the fireflies. The shadows faded upward as night rose from the earth to the sky. A moment before, light through the oak leaves had mottled him like a fawn; now the brightness had faded, so he lay in a sort of dim green glow, the lines of his body at once solid and insubstantial.
“All the wee bugs come out just now—the moths and the midges; all the bittie things that hang about in clouds over the water. Ye see the swallows come for them, and then the bats, swooping down. And the salmon, rising to the evening hatch and making rings on the water.”
His eyes were open now, fixed on the waving sea of grass on the hillside, but I knew he saw instead the surface of the tiny loch near Lallybroch, alive with fleeting ripples.
“It’s only a moment, but ye feel as though it will last forever. Strange, is it no?” he said thoughtfully. “Ye can almost see the light go as ye watch—and yet there’s no time ye can look and say ‘Now! Now it’s night.’ ” He gestured at the opening between the oak trees, and the valley below, its hollows filling with dark.
“No.” I lay back in the grass beside him, feeling the warm damp of the grass mold the buckskin to my body. The air was thick and cool under the trees, like the air in a church, dim and fragrant with remembered incense.
“Do you remember Father Anselm at the abbey?” I looked up; the color was going from the oak leaves overhead, leaving the soft silver undersides gray as mouse fur. “He said there was always an hour in the day when time seems to stop—but that it was different for everyone. He thought it might be the hour when one was born.”
I turned my head to look at him.
“Do you know when you were born?” I asked. “The time of day, I mean?”
He glanced at me and smiled, rolling over to face me.
“Aye, I do. Perhaps he was right, then, for I was born at suppertime—just at twilight on the first of May.” He brushed away a floating firefly and grinned at me.
“Have I never told ye that story? How my mother had put on a pot of brose to cook, and then her pains came on so fast she’d no time to think of it, and no one else remembered either until they smelled the burning, and it ruined the supper and the pot as well? There was nothing else in the house to eat save a great gooseberry pie. So they all ate that, but there was a new kitchenmaid and the gooseberries were green, and all of them—except my mother and me, of course—spent the night writhing wi’ the indigestion.”
He shook his head, still smiling. “My father said it was months before he could look at me without feeling his bowels cramp.”
I laughed, and he reached to pick a last-year’s leaf from my hair.
“And what hour were you born, Sassenach?”
“I don’t know,” I said, with the usual pang of faint regret for my vanished family. “It wasn’t on my birth certificate, and if Uncle Lamb knew, he never told me. I know when Brianna was born, though,” I added, more cheerfully. “She was born at three minutes past three in the morning. There was a huge clock on the wall of the delivery room, and I saw it.”
Dim as the light was, I could see his look of surprise clearly.
“You were awake? I thought ye told me women are drugged then, so as not to feel the pain.”
“They mostly were, then. I wouldn’t let them give me anything, though.” I stared upward. The shadows were thick around us now, but the sky was still clear and light above, a soft, brilliant blue.
“Why the hell not?” he demanded, incredulous. “I’ve never seen a woman give birth, but I’ve heard it more than once, I’ll tell ye. And damned if I can see why a woman in her right mind would do it, and there was any choice about it.”
“Well …” I paused, not wanting to seem melodramatic. It was the truth, though. “Well,” I said, rather defiantly, “I thought I was going to die, and I didn’t want to die in my sleep.”
He wasn’t shocked. He only raised one brow, and snorted faintly with amusement.
“Would