The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [74]
He curled up again, knees clasped as tight to his belly as he could get them. He’d heard himself whimpering and, shocked at the sound, had bitten the inside of his cheek hard to stop it.
The chorus were saying something about the draught, all of them urging him to take it. An uncorked bottle of something hot-smelling and sickly-sweet was waved under his nose. Opium. The word flared a warning in his mind. He’d had opium before, in France. He still remembered the dreams, a nasty mix of lust and nightmare. And he remembered being told that he’d raved in the midst of them, too, talking wildly of the naked demons that he saw. Again, on the crossing to France: he’d been wounded then, and had suffered all those wounds again—and worse—in opium dreams. And what had happened later, at the abbey, when he’d fought the shade of Black Jack Randall in fire and shadow, had done something terrible to him against a stone wall … that was opium, too.
The whole cabin shot into the air and then fell with shocking violence, flinging people into the bulkheads like birds smashing into windowpanes. Jamie rolled off the bench on which he’d been lying, crashed into several bodies, and ended entangled with one of them, both wedged between the bulkhead and a large sliding crate of chickens that no one had thought to secure.
“Bloody get off me!” A strangled English voice came from somewhere under him and, realizing that it was John Grey he lay on, he rose like a rocket, cracking his head on the low beam above. Clutching his head—obviously shattered—he sank to his knees and fell half upon the crate, to the great consternation of the chickens. Shrieks and squawks and an explosion of down feathers and bits of chicken shit erupted through the slats, in an ammoniac reek that stabbed right through his nose and into what was left of his brain.
He subsided slowly onto the floor, not caring what he lay in. More squawking, this human. Hands. They hauled him half sitting, though he hung like a bag of laundry, unable to help.
“Christ, he’s a heavy motherfucker!” said a rough voice in his ear.
“Open your mouth,” said another voice, breathless but determined.
Grey, he thought dimly.
Fingers seized his raw nose and squeezed and he yelped, only to choke as a cascade of vile liquid poured into his mouth. Someone cupped his chin and slammed his jaw shut.
“Swallow, for God’s sake!”
The whisky burned down his throat and into his chest and, for one brief moment, cleared his mind of the omnipresent nausea. He opened his eyes and caught sight of Quinn, staring at him with an expression of intense concern.
I mustn’t speak of him. Mustn’t risk it, being muddled. Mustn’t speak.
He worked his tongue, gasping for breath, gathering his strength. Then snatched the bottle from John Grey and drained it.
JAMIE WOKE IN A rather pleasant state of mind; he couldn’t remember who he was, let alone where, but it didn’t seem to matter. He was lying on a bed and it wasn’t moving. The light in the room flickered like sunlight on waves, but this was in fact the work of a large tree he could see, standing outside the window, fluttering its leaves in a lackadaisical manner. He thought there were not any trees in the ocean but couldn’t swear to it, what with the peculiar images still floating languidly now and then across the back of his eyes.
He closed his eyes, the better to examine one of these, which seemed to be a mermaid with three breasts, one of which she was pointing at him in an enticing sort of way.
“Will you be havin’ a pot of coffee, sir?” she said. Her breast began to stream black coffee, and her other hand held a dish beneath to catch it.
“Does one o’ the other ones squirt whisky?” he asked. There was a sudden gasp in his ear, and he managed to open one eye a crack, squeezing the other closed in order to keep the mermaid in sight, lest she swim off with his coffee.
He was looking at