Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [374]
“Here,” he said, stopping at a place where the rocks lay scattered, surrounded by thick grass. “Let’s rest for a bit.” Chilly as the early mornings were, the climb had heated him; he sat on a flat rock, legs stretched out to let the air come under his kilt, and pushed the plaid off his shoulders.
“It feels so different here,” she said, brushing back a lock of the soft red hair whose flames warmed him more than the sun. She glanced back at him, smiling. “Do you know what I mean? I rode from Inverness to Lallybroch, through the Great Glen, and that was wild enough”—she shivered slightly at the recollection—“but it wasn’t like this at all.”
“No,” he said. He knew exactly what she meant; the wildness of the glens and the moors was inhabited, in a way that this place of forests and rushing waters was not.
“I think—” he began, then stopped. Would she think him daft? But she was looking up at him, wanting him to say. “The spirits that live there,” he said, a little awkwardly. “They are auld, and they’ve seen men for thousands on thousands of years; they ken us weel, and they’re none so wary of showing themselves. What lives here”—he laid a hand on the trunk of a chestnut tree that rose a hundred feet above them, whose girth measured more than thirty feet around—“they havena seen our like before.”
She nodded, seeming not at all taken back.
“They’re curious, though, aren’t they,” she said, “some of them?” and tipped back her head to look up into the dizzy spiral of the branches overhead. “Don’t you feel them watching, now and then?”
“Now and then.”
He sat on the rock beside her and watched the light spread, spilling over the edge of the mountain, lighting the distant falls the way kindling catches from a spark, filling the mist with a glow like pearls, then burning it away altogether. Together they saw the slope of the mountain come to the light of day, and he said a quiet word to the spirit of this place, in thanks. If it had no Gaelic, still it might catch his meaning.
She stretched her long legs, breathing in the scent of the morning.
“You didn’t really mind, did you?” Her voice was soft, and she kept her eyes on the valley below, careful not to look at him. “Living in the cave near Broch Mhorda.”
“No,” he said. The sun was warm on his breast and face, and filled him with a sense of peace. “No, I didna mind it.”
“Only hearing about it—I thought it must have been terrible. Cold and dirty and lonely, I mean.” She did look at him then, and the morning sky lived in her eyes.
“It was,” he said, and smiled a little.
“Ian—Uncle Ian—took me there to show me.”
“Did he, then? It’s none so bleak, in the summertime, when the yellow’s on the broom.”
“No. But even when it was—” She hesitated.
“No, I didna mind it.” He closed his eyes and let the sun heat his eyelids.
At first he had thought the loneliness would kill him, but once he had learned it would not, he came to value the solitude of the mountainside. He could see the sun clear, though his eyes were closed; a great red ball, flaming round the edges. Was that how Jocasta saw it behind her blind eyes?
She was silent for a long time, and so was he, content to listen. There were wee birds working in the spruce nearby, hanging upside down from the branches, hunting the bugs that they ate and talking to themselves about what they found.
“Roger—” she said suddenly, and his heart was struck by a dart of jealousy, the more painful for being unexpected. Was he not to have her to himself, even for so short a time? He opened his eyes and did his best to look interested.
“I tried to tell him, once, about being alone. That I thought it maybe wasn’t a bad thing.” She sighed, the heavy brows drawn down. “I don’t think he understood.”
He made a noncommittal sound in his throat.
“I thought—” She hesitated, glanced at him, then away. “I thought maybe that was why it’s—why you and Mama …” Her skin was so clear, he could