The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [556]
“It’s me, baby,” she reassured him. She reached a hand toward him, but stopped short of touching him. He didn’t cry, but burrowed his face into Lizzie’s shoulder, rejecting the notion that this apocalyptic vision had anything at all to do with the mother he’d been fussing for a few minutes earlier.
Brianna ignored both her son’s rejection and the fact that she was leaving footprints composed in equal parts of mud and blood all over the floor.
“Look,” she said, holding out a closed fist to me. Her hands were caked with dried blood, her fingernails crescents of black. She reverently uncurled her fingers to show me her treasure; a handful of tiny, wriggling white worms that made my heart give a quick bump of excitement.
“Are they the right kind?” she asked anxiously.
“I think so; let me check.” I hastily dumped the wet leaves from the herb tea onto a small plate, to give the worms a temporary refuge. Brianna gently deposited them on the mangled foliage and carried the plate to the counter where my microscope stood, as though the plate bore specks of gold dust, rather than maggots.
I picked up one of the worms with the edge of a fingernail, and deposited it on a glass slide, where it writhed unhappily in a futile search for nourishment. I beckoned to Bree to bring me another candle.
“Nothing but a mouth and a gut,” I muttered, tilting the mirror to catch the light. It was much too dim for microscopic work, but might just be sufficient for this. “Voracious little buggers.”
I held my breath, peering through the fragile eyepiece, straining to see. Ordinary blow-fly and flesh-fly larvae had one line visible on the body; screw-worm larvae had two. The lines were faint, invisible to the naked eye, but very important. Blow-fly maggots ate carrion, and only carrion—dead, decaying flesh. Screw-worm larvae burrowed into the living flesh, and consumed the live muscle and blood of their host. Nothing I wanted to insert into a fresh wound!
I closed one eye, to let the other adapt to the moving shadows in the eyepiece. The dark cylinder of the maggot’s body writhed, twisting in all directions at once. One line was clearly visible. Was that another? I squinted until my eye began to water, but could see no more. Letting out the breath I’d been holding, I relaxed.
“Congratulations, Da,” Brianna said, moving to Jamie’s side. He opened one eye, which passed with a marked lack of enthusiasm down Brianna’s figure. Stripped to a knee-length shift for butchering, she was splotched from head to toe with gouts of dark blood, and the muslin had stuck to her in random patches.
“Oh, aye?” he said. “For what?”
“The maggots. You did it,” she explained. She opened her other hand, revealing a misshapen blob of metal—a squashed rifle-ball. “The maggots were in a wound in the hindquarters—I dug this out of the hole behind them.”
I laughed, as much from relief as from amusement.
“Jamie! You shot it in the arse?”
Jamie’s mouth twitched a little.
“I didna think I’d hit it at all,” he said. “I was only trying to turn the herd toward Fergus.” He reached up a slow hand and took the ball, rolling it gently between his fingers.
“Maybe you should keep it for good luck,” Brianna said. She spoke lightly, but I could see the furrow between her invisible brows. “Or to bite on while Mama’s working on your leg.”
“Too late,” he said, with a very faint smile.
It was then she caught sight of the small leather strip that lay on the table near his head, marked with overlapping crescents—the deep imprints of Jamie’s teeth. She glanced at me, appalled. I lifted one shoulder slightly. I had spent more than an hour cleaning the wound in his leg, and it hadn’t been easy on either of us.
I cleared my throat, and turned back to the maggots. From the corner of my eye, I saw Bree lay the back of her hand gently against