The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [175]
The hell you aren’t, Roger thought. Or well on your way to it, anyroad. He took a last deep swallow of cold beer and put down cup and plate. The food could wait a bit longer. Bree had taken back the baby and had his bodhran tucked under her arm; he reached for it, and she gave him a glancing smile, but most of her attention was fixed on her father.
Jamie bent and pulled a torch from the fire, stood with it in his hand, lighting the broad planes and sharp angles of his face.
“Let God witness here our willingness, and may God strengthen our arms—” He paused, to let the Germans catch up. “But let this fiery cross stand as testament to our honor, to invoke God’s protection for our families—until we come safe home again.”
He turned and touched the torch to the upright of the cross, holding it until the dry bark caught and a small flame grew and glimmered from the dark wood.
Everyone stood silent, watching. There was no sound but the shift and sigh of the crowd, echoing the sough of the wind in the wilderness around them. It was no more than a tiny tongue of fire, flickering in the breeze, on the verge of going out altogether. No petrol-soaked roar, no devouring conflagration. Roger felt Brianna sigh beside him, some of the tension leaving her.
The flame steadied and caught. The edges of the jigsaw-pieces of pine bark glowed crimson, then white, and vanished into ash as the flame began to spread upward. It was big and solid, and would burn slowly, this cross, halfway through the night, lighting the dooryard as the men gathered beneath it, talking, eating, drinking, beginning the process of becoming what Jamie Fraser meant them to be: friends, neighbors, companions in arms. Under his command.
Fraser stood for a moment, watching, to be sure the flame had caught. Then he turned back to the crowd of men and dropped his torch back into the fire.
“We cannot say what may befall us. God grant us courage,” he said, very simply. “God grant us wisdom. If it be His will, may He grant us peace. We ride in the morning.”
He turned then and left the fire, glancing to find Roger as he did so. Roger nodded back, swallowed to clear his throat, and began to sing softly from the darkness, the opening to the song Jamie had wanted to finish the proceedings—“The Flower of Scotland.”
“Oh, flower of Scotland,
When will we see your like again?
That fought and died for
Your wee bit hill and glen . . .”
Not one of the songs Bree called the warmongering ones. It was a solemn song, that one, and melancholy. But not a song of grief, for all that; one of remembrance, of pride and determination. It wasn’t even a legitimately ancient song—Roger knew the man who’d written it, in his own time—but Jamie had heard it, and knowing the history of Stirling and Bannockburn, strongly approved the sentiment.
“And stood against him,
Proud Edward’s army,
And sent him homeward
Tae think again.”
The Scottish members of the crowd let him sing alone through the verse, but voices lifted softly, then louder, in the refrain.
“And sent him ho-omeward . . .
Tae think again!”
He remembered something Bree had told him, lying in bed the night before, during the few moments when both of them were still conscious. They had been talking of the people of the times, speculating as to whether they might one day meet people like Jefferson or Washington face to face; it was an exciting—and not at all impossible—prospect. She had mentioned John Adams, quoting something she had read that he had said—or would say, rather—during the Revolution:
“I am a warrior, that my son may be a merchant—and his son may be a
poet.”
“The hills are bare now,
And autumn leaves lie thick and still,
O’er land that is lost now,
Which those so dearly held.
And stood against him,
Proud Edward’s army,
And sent him homeward
Tae think again.”
No longer Edward’s army, but George’s. And yet the same proud army. He caught a glimpse of Claire,