An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana (книги без регистрации бесплатно полностью txt) 📗
“Oh, no,” Hugh assured us. “The earth took him, long since. There’s no but a wee stain of his bones there now. And ye needna be worrit about there being a curse upon the place, either.”
“Oh, good,” I murmured, but he paid no attention.
“Some lang nebbit opened the tomb a hundred years ago or more, so if there was to be a curse on it, it surely went off attached to him.”
This was comforting, and in fact none of the people now standing about the cairn seemed at all put off or bothered by its proximity. Though it might just be that they had lived near it for so long that it had become no more than a feature of the landscape.
There was a certain amount of practical discussion, the men looking at the cairn and shaking their heads dubiously, gesturing in turn toward the open passage that led to the burial chamber, then toward the top of the cairn, where the stones had either been removed or had simply fallen in and been cleared away below. The women gravitated closer together, waiting. We had arrived in a fog of fatigue the day before, and while I had been introduced to all of them, I had trouble keeping the proper name attached to the proper face. In truth, their faces all looked similar—thin, worn, and pale, with a sense of chronic exhaustion about them, a tiredness much deeper than waking the dead would account for.
I had a sudden recollection of Mrs. Bug’s funeral. Makeshift and hasty—and yet carried out with dignity and genuine sorrow on the part of the mourners. I thought these people had barely known Simon Fraser.
How much better to have regarded his own last wish as stated and left him on the battlefield with his fallen comrades, I thought. But whoever said funerals were for the benefit of the living had had the right of it.
The sense of failure and futility that had followed the defeat at Saratoga had made his own officers determined to accomplish something, to make a proper gesture toward a man they had loved and a warrior they honored. Perhaps they had wanted to send him home, too, because of their desire for their own homes.
The same sense of failure—plus a deadly streak of romanticism—had doubtless made General Burgoyne insist upon the gesture; I thought he likely felt his own honor required it. And then Hugh Fraser, reduced to a hand-to-mouth existence in the wake of Culloden and faced with the unexpected homecoming of his younger brother, unable to produce much in the way of a funeral, but deeply romantic himself… and the end of it this strange procession, bringing Simon Fraser to a home no longer his and a wife who was a stranger to him.
And his place will know him no more. The line came to mind as the men made their decision and began to dismount the coffin from its wheels. I had drawn closer, along with the other women, and found I was now standing within a foot or two of one of the standing stones that ringed the cairn. These were smaller than the stones on Craigh na Dun—no more than two or three feet high. Moved by sudden impulse, I reached out and touched it.
I hadn’t expected anything to happen, and it very luckily didn’t. Though had I suddenly vanished in the midst of the burial, it would have substantially enlivened the event.
No buzzing, no screaming, no sensation at all. It was just a rock. After all, I thought, there was no reason why all standing stones should be assumed to mark time portals. Presumably the ancient builders had used stones to mark any place of significance—and surely a cairn like this one must have been significant. I wondered what sort of man—or woman, perhaps?—had lain here, leaving no more than an echo of their bones, so much more fragile than the enduring rocks that sheltered them.
The coffin was lowered to the ground and—with much grunting and puffing—shoved through the passage into the burial chamber in the center of the tomb. There was a large flat slab of stone that lay against the cairn, this incised with strange cup-shaped marks, presumably made by the original builders. Four of the stronger men took hold of this and maneuvered it slowly over the top of the cairn, sealing the hole above the chamber.
It fell with a muffled thud that sent a few small rocks rolling down the sides of the cairn. The men came down then, and we all stood rather awkwardly round it, wondering what to do next.
There was no priest here. The funeral Mass for Simon had been said earlier, in a small, bare stone church, before the procession to this thoroughly pagan burial. Evidently, Hugh’s researches hadn’t discovered anything regarding rites for such things.
Just when it seemed that we would be obliged simply to turn round and slog our way back to the farmhouse, Ian coughed explosively and stepped forward.
The funeral procession was drab in the extreme, none of the bright tartans that had graced Highland ceremonies in the past. Even Jamie’s appearance was subdued, cloaked, and his hair covered with a black slouch hat. The sole exception to the general somberness was Ian.
He had provoked stares when he’d come downstairs this morning, and the staring hadn’t stopped. With good reason. He’d shaved most of his head and greased the remaining strip of hair into a stiff ridge down the middle of his scalp, to which he had attached a dangling ornament of turkey feathers with a pierced silver sixpence. He was wearing a cloak, but under it had put on his worn buckskins, with the blue-and-white wampum armlet his wife, Emily, had made for him.
Jamie had looked him slowly up and down when he appeared and nodded, one corner of his mouth turning up.
“It willna make a difference, aye?” he’d said quietly to Ian as we headed for the door. “They’ll still ken ye for who ye are.”
“Will they?” Ian had said, but then ducked out into the downpour without waiting for an answer.
Jamie had undoubtedly been right; the Indian finery was a dress rehearsal in preparation for his arrival at Lallybroch, for we were bound there directly, once Simon’s body was decently disposed of and the farewell whisky had been drunk.
It had its uses now, though. Ian slowly removed his cloak and handed it to Jamie, then walked to the entrance of the passage and turned to face the mourners—who watched this apparition, bug-eyed. He spread his hands, palms upward, closed his eyes, put back his head so the rain ran down his face, and began to chant something in Mohawk. He was no singer, and his voice was so hoarse from his cold that many words broke or disappeared, but I caught Simon’s name in the beginning. The general’s death song. It didn’t go on for long, but when he dropped his hands, the congregation uttered a deep, collective sigh.
Ian walked away, not looking back, and without a word the mourners followed. It was finished.
BY THE WIND GRIEVED
THE WEATHER CONTINUED to be terrible, with fitful gusts of snow now added to the rain, and Hugh pressed us to stay, at least for another few days, until the sky should clear.
“It might well be Michaelmas before that happens,” Jamie said to him, smiling. “Nay, cousin, we’ll be off.”
And so we were, bundled in all the clothes we possessed. It took more than two days to reach Lallybroch, and we were obliged to shelter overnight in an abandoned croft, putting the horses in the cow byre next to us. There was no furniture nor peat for the hearth, and half the roof had gone, but the stone walls broke the wind.
“I miss my dog,” Ian grumbled, huddling under his cloak and pulling a blanket over his goose-pimpled head.
“Would he sit on your heid?” Jamie inquired, taking a firmer hold on me as the wind roared past our shelter and threatened to rip away the rest of the threadbare thatch overhead. “Ye should have thought about it being January, before ye shaved your scalp.”
“Well enough for you,” Ian replied, peering balefully out from under his blanket. “Ye’ve got Auntie Claire to keep warm with.”
