The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [251]
There was a large knot on his brow, already turning purple. Nothing else that I could see. The boy had been right, I thought, with gratitude; he wasn’t badly hurt. Then I rolled him onto his back, and saw his hand.
Highlanders were accustomed to fight with sword in one hand, targe in the other, the small leather shield used to deflect an opponent’s blow. He hadn’t had a targe.
The blade had struck him between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand, and sliced through the hand itself, a deep, ugly wound that split his palm and the body of his hand, halfway to the wrist.
Despite the horrid look of the wound, there wasn’t much blood; the hand had been curled under him, his weight acting as a pressure bandage. The front of his shirt was smeared with red, deeply stained over his heart. I ripped open his shirt and felt inside, to be sure that the blood was from his hand, but it was. His chest was cool and damp from the grass, but unscathed, his nipples shrunken and stiff with chill.
“That… tickles,” he said, in a drowsy voice. He pawed awkwardly at his chest with his left hand, trying to brush my hand away.
“Sorry,” I said, repressing the urge to laugh with the joy of seeing him alive and conscious. I got an arm behind his shoulders and helped him to sit up. He looked drunk, with one eye swollen half-shut, and grass in his hair. He acted drunk, too, swaying alarmingly from side to side.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Sick,” he said succinctly. He leaned to the side and threw up.
I eased him back on the grass and wiped his mouth, then set about bandaging his hand.
“Someone will be here soon,” I assured him. “We’ll get you back to the wagon, and I can take care of this.”
“Mmphm.” He grunted slightly as I pulled the bandage tight. “What happened?”
“What happened?” I stopped what I was doing and stared at him. “You’re asking me?”
“What happened in the battle, I mean,” he said patiently, regarding me with his one good eye. “I know what happened to me—roughly,” he added, wincing as he touched his forehead.
“Yes, roughly,” I said rudely, “You got yourself chopped like a butchered hog, and your head half caved in. Being a sodding bloody hero again, that’s what happened to you!”
“I wasna—” he began, but I interrupted, my relief over seeing him alive being rapidly succeeded by rage.
“You didn’t have to go! You shouldn’t have gone! Stick to the writing and the printing, you said. You weren’t going to fight unless you had to, you said. Well, you didn’t have to, but you did it anyway, you vainglorious, pigheaded, grandstanding Scot!”
“Grandstanding?” he inquired.
“You know just what I mean, because it’s just what you did! You might have been killed!”
“Aye,” he agreed ruefully. “I thought I was, when the dragoon came down on me. I screeched and scairt his horse, though,” he added more cheerfully. “It reared up and got me in the face with its knee.”
“Don’t change the subject!” I snapped.
“Is the subject not that I’m not killed?” he asked, trying to raise one brow and failing, with another wince.
“No! The subject is your stupidity, your bloody selfish stubbornness!”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that! You—you—oaf! How dare you do that to me? You think I haven’t got anything better to do with my life than trot round after you, sticking pieces back on?” I was frankly shrieking at him by this time.
To my increased fury, he grinned at me, his expression made the more rakish by the half-closed eye.
“Ye’d have been a good fishwife, Sassenach,” he observed. “Ye’ve the tongue for it.”
“You shut up, you fucking bloody—”
“They’ll hear you,” he said mildly, with a wave toward the party of Continental soldiers making their way down the slope toward us.
“I don’t care who hears me! If you weren’t already hurt, I’d—I’d—”
“Be careful, Sassenach,” he said, still grinning. “Ye dinna want to knock off any more pieces; ye’ll only have to stick them back on, aye?”
“Don’t bloody tempt me,” I said through my teeth, with a glance at the sword I had dropped.
He saw it and reached for it, but couldn’t quite manage. With an explosive snort,