The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [248]
“Created by your hand as you created man,
Life given for life.
That me and mine may eat with thanks for the gift,
That me and mine may give thanks for your own sacrifice of blood and flesh, Life given for life.”
The last crumbs of green and gray disappeared into the mixture under my hands, and the ritual of the sausage was complete.
“That was good of ye, Sassenach,” Jamie said, drying my clean, wet hands and arms with the towel afterward. He nodded toward the corner of the house, where Roger had disappeared to help with the rest of the butchering, looking somewhat more peaceful. “I did think to tell him before, but I couldna see how to do it.”
He grimaced slightly, wiping away a strand of hair tugged out of its bindings by the breeze.
“Ye ken that way he has, of looking at me as if he was a naturalist, and me a wee beetle he’s caught in his net?”
I laughed at the description, but had to admit it was apt; Roger did now and then behave as though Jamie was a fascinating artifact, making him repeat stories or bits of Highland lore over and over, so that Roger could commit them to memory until such time as he could write them down. Jamie acquiesced with patience and good grace, but did now and then roll a long-suffering eye at me behind Roger’s back.
“It’s his way of making sense of it all,” I said. I reached up and tucked the wayward strand behind his ear. “His father couldn’t teach him gralloch prayers, after all.”
He smiled, a little wryly. “Aye, I know. But I couldna see standing there in the dooryard trying to explain, wi’ a two-hundred-pound pig jerking my arms out of their sockets, and wee Roger sayin’, ’Now, is it “flesh and blood,” or “blood and flesh?”’ and Fergus callin’ the both of us bad names in French.”
I laughed again and moved close to him. It was a cold, windy day, and now that I had stopped working, the chill drove me closer to seek his warmth. He wrapped his arms around me, and I felt both the reassuring heat of his embrace, and the soft crackle of paper inside his shirt.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, a bittie letter Sinclair’s brought,” he said, drawing back a bit to reach into his shirt. “I didna want to open it while the Colonel was there, and didna trust him not to be reading it when I went out.”
“It’s not your letter, anyway,” I said, taking the smudged wad of paper from him. “It’s mine.”
“Oh, is it? Sinclair didna say, just handed it to me.”
“He would!” Not unusually, Ronnie Sinclair viewed me—all women, for that matter—as simply a minor appendage to a husband. I rather pitied the woman he might eventually induce to marry him.
I unfolded the note with some difficulty; it had been worn so long next to sweaty skin that the edges had frayed and stuck together.
The message inside was brief and cryptic, but unsettling. It had been scratched into the paper with something like a sharpened stick, using an ink that looked disturbingly like dried blood, though it was more likely berry juice.
“What does it say, Sassenach?” Seeing me frowning at the paper, Jamie moved to the side to look. I held it out to him.
Far down, in one corner, scratched in faint and tiny letters, as though the sender had hoped by this means to escape notice, was the word Faydree. Above, in bolder scratchings, the message read:
YU CUM
KING, FAREWELL “SURGEON’S STEEL
t was near evening; the sun sank invisibly, staining the fog with a dull and sullen orange. The evening wind off the river was rising, lifting the fog from the ground and sending it scudding in billows and swirls.
Clouds of black-powder smoke lay heavy in the hollows, lifting more slowly than the lighter shreds of mist, and lending a suitable stink of brimstone to a scene that was—if not hellish—at least bloody eerie.
Here and there a space would suddenly be cleared, like a curtain pulled back to show the aftermath of battle. Small dark figures moved in the distance, darting and stooping, stopping suddenly, heads uplifted like baboons keeping watch for a leopard. Camp followers, the wives and whores of the soldiers, come like crows to