The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [517]
I clung with all my might to him, and to the dying pulse of my own flesh. But joy grasped is joy vanished, and within moments I was no more than myself. The dark starburst on my ankle showed clearly, even in firelight.
I slackened my grip on his shoulders and touched the rough whorls of his hair with tenderness. He turned his head and kissed my breast, then stirred and sighed and slid sideways.
“And they say hen’s teeth are rare,” he said, gingerly touching a deep bite-mark on one shoulder.
I laughed, in spite of myself.
“As rare as a rooster’s cock, I suppose.” I raised myself on one elbow and peered toward the hearth.
“What is it, wee hen?”
“Just making sure my clothes won’t catch fire.” What with one thing and another, I hadn’t much noticed where he’d thrown my garments, but they seemed to be a safe distance from the flames; the skirt was in a small heap by the bed, the bodice and shift somehow had ended up in separate corners of the room. My brassiere-strip was nowhere to be seen.
Light flickered on the whitewashed walls, and the bed was full of shadows.
“You are beautiful,” he whispered to me.
“If you say so.”
“Do ye not believe me? Have I ever lied to you?”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean—if you say it, then it’s true. You make it true.”
He sighed and shifted, easing us into comfort. A log cracked suddenly in the hearth, sending up a spray of gold sparks, and subsided, hissing as the heat struck a hidden seam of damp. I watched the new wood turn black, then red, blazing into white-hot light.
“Do ye say it of me, Sassenach?” he asked suddenly. He sounded shy, and I turned my head to look up at him in surprise.
“Do I say what? That you’re beautiful?” My mouth curved involuntarily, and he smiled in return.
“Well . . . not that. But that ye can bear my looks, at least.”
I traced the faint white line of the scar across his ribs, left by a sword, long ago. The longer, thicker scar of the bayonet that had ripped the length of one thigh. The arm that held me, browned and roughened, the hairs of it bleached white-gold with long days of sun and work. Near my hand, his cock curled between his thighs, gone soft and small and tender now, in its nest of auburn hair.
“You’re beautiful to me, Jamie,” I said softly, at last. “So beautiful, you break my heart.”
His hand traced the knobs of my backbone, one at a time.
“But I am an auld man,” he said, smiling. “Or should be. I’ve white hairs in my head; my beard’s gone gray.”
“Silver,” I said, brushing the soft stubble on his chin, parti-colored as a quilt. “In bits.”
“Gray,” he said firmly. “And scabbit-looking with it. And yet . . .” His eyes softened as he looked at me. “Yet I burn when I come to ye, Sassenach—and will, I think, ’til we two be burned to ashes.”
“Is that poetry?” I asked cautiously. “Or do you mean it literally?”
“Oh,” he said. “No. I hadna meant . . . no.” He tightened his arm around me and bent his head to mine.
“I dinna ken about that. If it should be—”
“It won’t.”
A breath of laughter stirred my hair.
“Ye sound verra sure of it, Sassenach.”
“The future can be changed; I do it all the time.”
“Oh, aye?”
I rolled away a bit, to look at him.
“I do. Look at Mairi MacNeill. If I hadn’t been there last week, she would have died, and her twins with her. But I was there, and they didn’t.”
I put a hand behind my head, watching the reflection of the flames ripple like water across the ceiling beams.
“I do wonder—there are lots I can’t save, but some I do. If someone lives because of me, and later has children, and they have children, and so on . . . well, by the time you reach my time, say, there are probably thirty or forty people in the world who wouldn’t otherwise have been there, hm? And they’ve all been doing things meanwhile, living their lives—don’t you think that’s changing the future?” For the first time, it occurred to me to wonder just how much I was single-handedly contributing to the population explosion of the twentieth century.
“Aye,” he said slowly. He picked up my free hand and traced the lines of