Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [218]
Sheet lightning shimmered far away, across the mountains. Then more bolts, sizzling across the sky, each succeeded by a louder roll of thunder. The hailstorm passed, and the rain resumed, pelting down as hard as ever. The valley below disappeared in cloud and mist, but the lightning lit the stark mountain ridges like bones on an X ray.
“One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus, three hippopotamus, four hippopot—” BWOOOM! The horse jerked its head and stamped nervously.
“I know just how you feel,” I told it, peering down the valley. “Steady, though, steady.” There it went again, a flash that lit the dark ridge and left the silhouette of the horse’s pricked ears imprinted on my retinas.
“One hippopotamus, two hippo—” I could have sworn the ground shook. The horse let out a high-pitched scream and reared against my pull on the reins, hooves thrashing in the leaves. The air reeked of ozone.
Flash.
“One,” I said through my teeth. “Damn you, whoa! One hip—”
Flash.
“One—”
Flash.
“Whoa! WHOA!”
I wasn’t conscious of the fall at all; nor even the landing. One moment I was sawing at the reins, a thousand pounds of panicked horse going to pieces under me, shying in all directions. The next, I was lying on my back, blinking up at a spinning black sky, trying to will my diaphragm to work.
Echoes of the shock of impact wavered through my flesh, and I tried frantically to fit myself back into my body. Then I drew breath, a painful gasp, and found myself shaking, the shock turning to the first intimations of damage.
I lay still, eyes closed, concentrating on breathing, conducting an inventory. The rain was still pounding down onto my face, puddling in my eye sockets and running down into my ears. My face and hands were numb. My arms moved. I could breathe a little easier now.
My legs. The left one hurt, but not in any threatening way; only a bruised knee. I rolled heavily onto my side, impeded by my wet, bulky garments. Still, it was the heavy clothing that had saved me from serious damage.
Above me came an uncertain whinny, audible amid the booming thunder. I looked up, dizzy, and saw the horse’s head, protruding from a thicket of buckbrush some thirty feet overhead. Below the thicket, a steep, rocky slope fell away; a long scrape mark toward the bottom showed where I had struck and rolled before ending up in my present position.
We had been standing virtually on the edge of this small precipice without my seeing it, screened as it was by the heavy growth of shrubs. The horse’s panic had sent it to the edge, but evidently it had sensed the danger and caught itself before going over—not before letting me slide off into space, though.
“You bloody bugger!” I said. And wondered whether the unknown German name meant something similar. “I could have broken my neck!” I wiped the mud from my face with a hand that still shook, and looked about me for a way back up.
There wasn’t one. Behind me, the rocky cliff face continued, merging into one of the granite horns. Before me, it ended abruptly, in a plunge straight downward into a small hollow. The slope I stood on declined into this hollow as well, rolling down through clumps of yellow-wood and sumac to the banks of a small creek some sixty feet below.
I stood quite still, trying to think. No one knew where I was. I didn’t know exactly where I was, come to that. Worse, no one would be looking for me for some time. Jamie would think I was still at Muellers’ because of the rain. The Muellers would of course have no reason to think I hadn’t made it safely home; even if they had doubts, they couldn’t follow me, because of the flooded creek. And by the time anyone found the washed-out trail, any traces of my passage would long since have been obliterated by the rain.
I was uninjured, that was something. I was also afoot, alone, without food, moderately lost, and thoroughly wet. About the only certainty was that I wasn’t going to die of thirst.
The lightning was