The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [249]
Children, too. Under a bush, a boy of nine or ten straddled the body of a Redcoat soldier, smashing at the face with a heavy rock. I stopped, paralyzed at the sight, and saw the boy reach into the gaping, bloodied mouth and wrench out a tooth. He slipped the bloody prize into a bag that hung by his side, groped farther, tugging, and finding no more teeth loose, picked up his rock in a businesslike way and went back to work.
I felt bile rise in my throat, and hurried on, swallowing. I was no stranger to war, to death and wounds. But I had never been so near a battle before; I had never before come on a battlefield where the dead and wounded still lay, before the ministrations of medics and burial details.
There were calls for help, and occasional moans or screams, ringing disembodied out of the mist, reminding me uncomfortably of Jamie’s story of the doomed spirits of the glen. Like the hero of that story, I didn’t stop to heed their call, but pressed on, stumbling over small rises, slipping on damp grass.
I had seen photographs of the great battlefields, from the American Civil War to the beaches of Normandy. This was nothing like that—no churned earth, no heaps of tangled limbs. It was still, save for the noises of the scattered wounded and the voices of those calling, like me, for a missing friend or husband.
Shattered trees lay toppled by artillery; in this light, I might have thought the bodies turned into logs themselves, dark shapes lying long in the grass—save for the fact that some of them still moved. Here and there, a form stirred feebly, victim of war’s sorcery, struggling against the enchantment of death.
I paused and shouted into the mist, calling his name. I heard answering calls, but none in his voice. Ahead of me lay a young man, arms outflung, a look of blank astonishment on his face, blood pooled round his upper body like a great halo. His lower half lay six feet away. I walked between the pieces, keeping my skirts close, nostrils pinched tight against the thick iron smell of blood.
The light was fading now, but I saw Jamie as soon as I came over the edge of the next rise. He was lying on his face in the hollow, one arm flung out, the other curled beneath him. The shoulders of his dark blue coat were nearly black with damp, and his legs thrown wide, booted heels askew.
The breath caught in my throat, and I ran down the slope toward him, heedless of grass clumps, mud, and brambles. As I got close, though, I saw a scuttling figure dart out from behind a nearby bush and dash toward him. It fell to its knees beside him and without hesitation, grasped his hair and yanked his head to one side. Something glinted in the figure’s hand, bright even in the dull light.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Drop it, you bastard!”
Startled, the figure looked up as I flung myself over the last yards of space. Narrow red-rimmed eyes glared up at me out of a round face streaked with soot and grime. “Get off!” she snarled. “I found ’im first!” It was a knife in her hand; she made little jabbing motions at me, in an effort to drive me away.
I was too furious—and too afraid for Jamie—to be scared for myself.
“Let go of him! Touch him and I’ll kill you!” I said. My fists were clenched, and I must have looked as though I meant it, for the woman flinched back, loosing her hold on Jamie’s hair.
“He’s mine,” she said, thrusting her chin pugnaciously at me. “Go find yourself another.”
Another form slipped out of the mist and materialized by her side. It was the boy I had seen earlier, filthy and scruffy as the woman herself. He had no knife, but clutched a crude metal strip, cut from a canteen. The edge of it was dark, with rust or blood.
He glared at me. “He’s ours, Mum said! Get on wi’ yer! Scat!”
Not waiting to see whether I would or not, he flung a leg over Jamie’s back, sat on him, and began to grope in the side pockets of his coat.
’“E’s still alive, Mum,” he advised. “I can feel ’is ’eart beatin’. Best slit his throat quick; I don’t think ’e’s bad hurt.”
I grabbed the boy by the collar and jerked him