The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [134]
What he had heard was the sound of hooves and voices, half-swallowed by the moaning wind.
“Was it some years before, I should ha’ thought it was the Watch,” he said. “But there wasna any such thing after Culloden. My next thought was that it was English soldiers—but I couldna hear any words in English, and usually I’d hear them easily at a distance. English sounds different, ken, than the Gàidhlig, even when ye dinna make out the words.”
“I would suppose it does,” Grey murmured.
“The other thing,” Fraser went on, as though Grey hadn’t spoken, “was that I couldna tell which direction the sound came from. And I should have. The wind was strong but steady, from the northwest. And yet the sounds came sometimes out o’ the wind but just as often from the south or the east. And then they would disappear, and then come back.”
By this time he had been standing, hovering near the body of the slain deer, wondering whether to run and, if so, which way?
“And then I heard a woman scream. She … ah.” Fraser’s voice sounded a little odd, suddenly careful. Why? Grey wondered. “It … wasna a scream of fear, or even anger. It … ehm … well, it was the way a woman will scream, sometimes, if she’s … pleased.”
“In bed, you mean.” It wasn’t a question. “So do men. Sometimes.”
You idiot! Of all the things you might have said …
He would have berated himself further for having brought back the echo of his unfortunate remark in the stable at Helwater, that injudicious—that criminally stupid remark—
But Fraser merely made a deep “mmphm” sound in his throat, seeming to acknowledge Grey’s present remark at face value.
“I thought for an instant, perhaps, rape … but there were nay English soldiers in the district—”
“Scots do not commit rapine?” Annoyance with himself sharpened Grey’s tone.
“Not often,” Fraser said briefly. “Not Highlanders. But as I say, it didna sound like that. And then I heard other noises—screeching and skellochs, and the screaming of horses, aye, but not the noise of battle. More like folk who are roaring drunk—and the horses, too. And it was coming closer to me.”
It was the notion of drunken horses that at this point had put the vision of the Wild Hunt into Jamie’s mind. It was not a common tale of the Highlands, but he had heard such stories. And heard more, from other mercenaries, when he’d fought in France as a young man.
“The queen, they said, rides a great white horse, white as moonlight,” he said quietly. “Shining in the dark.”
Jamie had spent enough time on the moors and in the high crags to know how much lay hidden in the land, how many ghosts and spirits lingered there, how much unknown to man—and the thought of supernatural creatures was not foreign to him at all. Once the thought of the Wild Hunt had come to him, he spared not a moment in leaving the deer’s carcass, as fast as he could go.
“I thought they smelled the blood, ken,” he explained. “I’d not said the rightful prayer to bless it. They’d think it was their lawful prey.”
The matter-of-fact tone of this statement made the small hairs prickle on John’s nape.
“I see,” he said, rather faintly. He saw all too well, in his mind’s eye: a helter-skelter rush of the unearthly, horses’ coats and faerie faces glowing with a spectral light, spilling down out of the dark, screaming like the wind, howling for blood. The shrieking of the lust-crazed frogs now struck him differently; he heard the blind hunger in it.
“Sidhe,” Fraser said softly. Sheee, the word sounded like, to Grey; much like the sigh of the wind.
“It’s the same word, in the Gàidhlig and the Gaeilge. It means the creatures of the other world. But sometimes when they come forth out o’ the stony duns where they live—they dinna go back alone.”
He had run for a nearby burn, out of some half-heard, half-recollected notion that the sidhe could not cross running water, thrown himself over a high bank, and crouched among the boulders at its foot, staggering against the force of water that surged to mid-thigh, half-drowned in the spray, blind in the