Outlander - Diana Gabaldon [395]
A little hesitantly, I let the novice’s robe drop from my arms.
“How hot is it?” I asked.
“Hot enough,” he answered. “Dinna worry, it won’t burn ye. But stay over an hour or so, and it might cook the flesh off your bones like soupmeat.”
“What an appealing idea,” I said, discarding the robe.
Following his straight, slender figure, I stepped cautiously into the water. There were steps cut in the stone, leading down underwater, with a knotted rope fastened along the wall to provide handholds.
The water flowed up over my hips, and the flesh of my belly shivered in delight as the heat swirled through me. At the bottom of the steps, I stood on clean black sand, the water just below the level of my shoulders, my breasts floating like glass fisher-floats. My skin was flushed with the heat, and small prickles of perspiration were starting on the back of my neck, under the heavy hair. It was pure bliss.
The surface of the spring was smooth and waveless, but the water wasn’t still; I could feel small stirrings, currents running through the body of the pool like nerve impulses. It was that, I suppose, added to the incredible soothing heat, that gave me the momentary illusion that the spring was alive—a warm, welcoming entity that reached out to soothe and embrace. Anselm had said that the springs had healing powers, and I wasn’t disposed to doubt it.
Jamie came up behind me, tiny wavelets marking his passage through the water. He reached around me to cup my breasts, softly smoothing the hot water over the upper slopes.
“Do ye like it, mo duinne?” He bent forward and planted a kiss on my shoulder.
I let my feet float out from under me, resting against him.
“It’s wonderful! It’s the first time I’ve been warm all the way through since August.” He began to tow me, backing slowly through the water; my legs streamed out in the wake of our passage, the amazing warmth passing down my limbs like caressing hands.
He stopped, swung me around, and lowered me gently onto hard wood. Half-visible in the shadowy underwater light, I could see planks set into a rocky niche. He sat down on the bench beside me, stretching his arms out on the rocky ledge behind us.
“Brother Ambrose brought me down here the other day to soak,” he said. “To soften the scars a bit. It does feel good, doesn’t it?”
“More than good.” The water was so buoyant that I felt I might float away if I loosed my hold on the bench. I looked upward into the black shadows of the roof.
“Does anything live in this cave? Bats, I mean? Or fish?”
He shook his head. “Nothing but the spirit of the spring, Sassenach. The water bubbles up from the earth through a narrow crack back there”—he nodded toward the Stygian blackness at the back of the cave—“and trickles out through a dozen tiny openings in the rock. But there’s no real opening to the outside, save the door into the monastery.”
“Spirit of the spring?” I said, amused. “Sounds rather pagan, to be hiding under a monastery.”
He stretched luxuriously, long legs wavering under the glassy surface like the stems of water plants.
“Well, whatever ye wish to call it, it’s been here a good deal longer than the monastery.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
The walls of the cave were of smooth, dark volcanic rock, almost like black glass, slick with the moisture of the spring. The whole chamber looked like a gigantic bubble, half-filled with that curiously alive but sterile water. I felt as though we were cradled in the womblike center of the earth, and that if I pressed my ear to the rock, I would hear the infinitely slow beat of a great heart nearby.
We were very quiet for a long time then, half-floating, half-dreaming, brushing now and then against each other as we drifted in the unseen currents of the cave.
When I spoke at last, my voice seemed slow and drugged.
“I’ve decided.”
“Ah. Will it be Rome, then?” Jamie’s voice seemed to come from a long way away.
“Yes. I don’t know, once there—”
“It doesna matter. We shall do what we can.” His hand reached for me, moving so slowly I thought it would