The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [96]
The last words came hoarsely, and the abbot regarded him closely for a moment, before nodding.
“You must pray for the strength to do the right thing—God will give it to you.”
He nodded mutely. He’d prayed for strength like that twice before, and it had been granted. He hadn’t thought he’d survive, either time, but he had. He hoped if it came to a third time, he wouldn’t.
“I thought ye said this was the easy bits,” Jamie said, forcing a smile.
The abbot grimaced, not without sympathy.
“Easy to see what’s to do, I meant. Not necessarily easy to do it.” He stood up and brushed a fuzzy catkin from the shoulder of his robe. “Come, let’s be walking a bit. A man could turn to stone sitting too long.”
They paced slowly through the orchard and out into a stretch of fields, some left in meadow for a few sheep and the odd cow, some sowed and already sprouting, a green haze covering the furrows. They kept to the edges, not to trample the young neeps and tattie-vines, and eventually emerged on the edge of a bog.
This was a proper bog, not merely the soggy clay or spongy footing common everywhere in Ireland. A treeless gray-green bumpy landscape, it stretched a good half mile before them to a tiny hillock of rock in the far distance, from which a stunted pine tree sprouted, flaglike in the wind. For once out of the shelter of the trees, the wind had come up and sang about their ears, flapping the ends of Father Michael’s stola and tugging at the skirts of their clothing.
Father Michael beckoned to him, and, following, he found a wooden trackway, half sunk between the hummocks of moss-choked grass that rose up among a thousand tiny channels and pools.
“I don’t know who made these tracks to begin with,” the abbot remarked, setting a sandaled foot on the thin planks. “They’ve been here longer than any man remembers. We keep them up, though; it’s the only safe way across the moss.”
Jamie nodded; the planks gave slightly when stepped upon, water oozing through the cracks between. But they bore his weight, though the vibration of his step made the bog beside the trackway tremble, the antennae of moss quivering in curiosity as he passed.
“The Old Ones thought the number three holy, just as we do.” Father Michael’s words, half-shouted above the wind, drifted back to him. “They had the three gods—the god of thunder, him they called Taranis. Then Esus, the god of the underworld—mind, they didn’t see the underworld quite the same way we think of hell, but it wasn’t a pleasant place, nonetheless.”
“And the third?” Jamie was still clutching the abbot’s handkerchief. He wiped his nose with it; the chill wind made it stream.
“Ah, now, that would be …” The abbot didn’t stop walking but tapped his fingers briskly on his skull, to assist thought. “Now, who in creation … Oh, of course. The third is the god of the particular tribe, so they’d all have different names.”
“Oh, aye.” Was the abbot telling him this only to pass the time? He wondered. Obviously they weren’t out walking for their health, and he knew of only one reason they might be traversing a bog.
He was right.
“Now, a proper god requires sacrifice, does he not? And the old gods wanted blood.”
He’d drawn close to the abbot now and could hear him clearly, despite the whine of the wind. There were birds in the moss, too; he heard the call of a snipe, thin and high.
“They would take prisoners of war and burn them in great wicker cages, for Taranis.” The abbot turned his head to look back at Jamie, showing a smile. “A good thing for you the English are more civilized now?” The ironic question at the end of this remark was evidently meant to convey the abbot’s doubt regarding the level of English civilization, and Jamie gave him back a wry smile, acknowledging it. Being burned alive … well, they’d done that, too, the English. Fired crofts and fields, without regard to the women and children they condemned—either by the fire itself, or by cold and slow starvation.
“I’m fortunate,