The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [151]
He laughed at that, eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Tennis? At an Inverness grammar school? Soft Southron sport, we’d have called it; game for poofters. But I take your point—no, you’re right, I was fine at the football, but not much at rounders. Why?”
“You don’t have any binocular vision,” I said. “Chances are that someone noticed it when you were a child, and made an effort to correct it with prismatic lenses—but it’s likely that it would have been too late by the time you were seven or eight,” I added hastily, seeing his face go blank. “If that’s going to work, it needs to be done very young—before the age of five.”
“I don’t . . . binocular vision? But doesn’t everyone? . . . I mean, both my eyes do work, don’t they?” He looked mildly bewildered. He looked down into the palm of his hand, closing one eye, then the other, as though some answer might be found among the lines there.
“Your eyes are fine,” I assured him. “It’s just that they don’t work together. It’s really a fairly common condition—and many people who have it don’t realize it. It’s just that in some people, for one reason or another, the brain never learns to merge the images coming in from both eyes in order to make a three-dimensional image.”
“I don’t see in three dimensions?” He looked at me, now, squinting hard, as though expecting me suddenly to flatten out against the wall.
“Well, I haven’t quite got a trained oculist’s kit”—I waved a hand at the burned-out candle, the wooden spoon, the drawn figures, and a couple of sticks I had been using—“nor yet an oculist’s training. But I’m reasonably sure, yes.”
He listened quietly as I explained what I could. His vision seemed fairly normal, in terms of acuity. But since his brain was not fusing the information from his eyes, he must be estimating the distance and relative location of objects simply by unconscious comparison of their sizes, rather than by forming a real 3-D image. Which meant . . .
“You can see perfectly well for almost anything you want to do,” I assured him. “And you very likely can learn to shoot all right; most of the men I see shooting close one eye when they fire, anyway. But you might have trouble hitting moving targets. You can see what you’re aiming at, all right—but without binocular vision, you may not be able to tell precisely where it is in order to hit it.”
“I see,” he said. “So, if it comes to a fight, I’d best rely on straightforward bashing, is that it?”
“In my humble experience of Scottish conflicts,” I said, “most fights amount to no more than bashing, anyway. You only use a gun or arrow if your goal is murder—and in that case, a blade is usually the weapon of preference. So much surer, Jamie tells me.”
He gave a small grunt of amusement at that, but said nothing else. He sat quietly, considering what I’d told him, while I tidied up the disorder left by the day’s surgery. I could hear thumping and clanging from the kitchen, and the pop and sizzle of fat that went with the tantalizing aroma of frying onions and bacon that floated down the corridor.
It was going to be a hasty meal; Mrs. Bug had been busy all day with the preparations for the militia expedition. Still, even Mrs. Bug’s least elaborate spreads were well worth the eating.
Muffled voices came through the wall—Jemmy’s sudden wail, a brief exclamation from Brianna, another from Lizzie, then Jamie’s deep voice, evidently comforting the baby while Bree and Lizzie dealt with dinner.
Roger heard them, too; I saw his head turn toward the sound.
“Quite a woman,” he said, with a slow smile. “She can kill it and cook it. Which looks like being a good thing, under the circumstances,” he added ruefully. “Evidently I won’t be putting much meat on the table.”
“Pah,” I said briskly, wishing to forestall any attempt on his part to feel sorry for himself. “I’ve never shot a thing in my life, and I put food on this table every day. If you really feel you must kill things, you know, there are plenty of chickens and geese and pigs. And if you can