The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [672]
Jamie glanced curiously at me. With some effort, I took my hand away, curling my fingers into a fist. He hesitated for a moment, but then looked back at the book, as though the neat black writing compelled his gaze as it did my own.
I knew now what had struck me about that writing. It had not been written with a quill. Quill-writing, even the best, was uneven in color, dark where the quill was freshly dipped, fading slowly through a line of writing. Every word of this was the same—written in a thin, hard line of black ink that slightly dented the fibers of the page. Quills never did that.
“Ball point,” I said. “He wrote it with a ball-point pen. My God.”
Jamie glanced back at me. I must have looked pale, for he moved as though to close the book, but I shook my head, motioning to him to go on reading. He frowned dubiously, but with one eye still on me, looked back. Then his attention shifted wholly to the book, and his brows rose as he looked at the writing on the next page.
“Look,” he said softly, turning the book toward me and pointing to one line. Written in Latin like the others, but there were unfamiliar words mixed into the text—long, strange-looking words.
“Mohawk?” Jamie said. He looked up, into Ian’s face. “That is a word in an Indian tongue, surely. One of the Algonquian tongues, no?”
“Rains Hard,” said Ian, quietly. “It is the Kahnyen’kehaka—the Mohawk tongue, Uncle. Rains Hard is someone’s name. And the others written there, too—Strong Walker, Six Turtles, and Talks With Spirits.”
“I thought the Mohawk have no written language,” Jamie said, one ruddy eyebrow lifted. Ian shook his head.
“Nor they do, Uncle Jamie. But someone wrote that”—he nodded at the page,—“and if ye work out the sound of the words . . .” He shrugged. “They are Mohawk names. I’m sure of it.”
Jamie looked at him for a long moment, then without comment bent his head and resumed his translation.
“I had one of the sapphires, Rains Hard the other. Talks With Spirits had a ruby, Strong Walker took the diamond, and Six Turtles had the emerald. We were not sure of the diagram—whether it should be four points, for the directions of the compass, or five, in a pentacle. But there were the five of us, sworn by blood to this deed, so we laid the circle with five points.”
There was a small gap between this sentence and the next, and the writing changed, becoming now firm and even, as though the writer had paused, then taken up his story at a later point.
“I have gone back to look. There is no sign of the circle—but I see no reason why there should be, after all. I think I must have been unconscious for some time; we laid the circle just inside the mouth of the crevice, but there are no marks in the earth there to show how I crawled or rolled to the spot where I woke, and yet there are marks in the dust, made by rain. My clothes are damp, but I cannot tell if this is from rain, from morning dew, or sweat from lying in the sun; it was near midday when I woke, for the sun was overhead, and it was hot. I am thirsty. Did I crawl away from the crevice, and then collapse? Or was I thrown some distance by the force of the transition?”
I had the most curious sense, hearing this, that the words were echoing, somewhere inside my head. It wasn’t that I had heard it before, and yet the words had a dreadful familiarity. I shook my head, to clear it, and looked up to find Ian’s eyes on me, soft brown and full of speculation.
“Yes,” I said baldly, in answer to his look. “I am. Brianna and Roger, too.” Jamie, who had paused to disentangle a phrase, looked up. He saw Ian’s face, and mine, and reached to put his hand on mine.
“How much could ye read, lad?” he asked quietly.
“Quite a lot, Uncle,” Ian answered, but his eyes didn’t leave my face. “Not everything”—a brief smile touched his lips—“and I’m sure I havena got the grammar right—but I think I understand it. Do you?”
It wasn’t clear whether he addressed the question to me or Jamie;