An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana (книги без регистрации бесплатно полностью txt) 📗

“Well… aye, I do. Not all the time, but now and then—and the nasty thing is that even though it’s gone, it still hurts like damnation, which doesna seem really fair.”

He could have bitten his tongue at that, for here Ian was dying, and him complaining that the loss of his finger wasn’t fair. Ian wheezed with amusement, though, and leaned back, shaking his head.

“If life was fair, then what?”

They sat in companionable silence for a while, watching the wind move through the pines on the hillside opposite. Then Jamie reached into his sporran and brought out the tiny white-wrapped package. It was a bit grubby from being in his sporran but had been tidily preserved and tightly wrapped.

Ian eyed the little bundle in his palm.

“What’s this?”

“My finger,” Jamie said. “I—well… I wondered whether ye’d maybe not mind to have it buried with ye.”

Ian looked at him for a moment. Then his shoulders started to shake.

“God, don’t laugh!” Jamie said, alarmed. “I didna mean to make ye laugh! Christ, Jenny will kill me if ye cough up a lung and die out here!”

Ian was coughing, fits of it interspersed with long-drawn-out wheezes of laughter. Tears of mirth stood in his eyes, and he pressed both fists into his chest, struggling to breathe. At last, though, he left off and straightened slowly up, making a sound like a bellows. He sniffed deep and casually spat a glob of horrifying scarlet into the rocks.

“I’d rather die out here laughin’ at you than in my bed wi’ six priests say-in’ prayers,” he said. “Doubt I’ll get the chance, though.” He put out a hand, palm up. “Aye, give it here.”

Jamie laid the little white-wrapped cylinder in his hand, and Ian tucked the finger casually into his own sporran.

“I’ll keep it safe ’til ye catch me up.”

HE CAME DOWN through the trees and made his way toward the edge of the moorland that lay below the cave. It was sharply cold, with a stiff breeze blowing, and the light changed over the land like the flicker of a bird’s wings as the clouds slid overhead, long and fleeting. He’d picked up a deer trail through the heather earlier in the morning, but it had disappeared in a stony fall near a brae, and now he was coming back toward the house; he was behind the hill on which the broch stood, this side of it thick with a little wood of beech and pine. He’d not seen a deer or even a coney this morning, but wasn’t bothered.

With so many in the house, they could use a deer, to be sure—but he was happy only to be out of the house, even if he came back with nothing.

He couldn’t look at Ian without wanting to stare at his face, to commit him to memory, to impress these last bits of his brother-in-law upon his mind in the way that he recalled special vivid moments, there to be taken out and lived through again at need. But at the same time, he didn’t want to remember Ian as he was now; much better to keep what he had of him: firelight on the side of Ian’s face, laughing fit to burst as he’d forced Jamie’s arm over in a wrestling match, his own wiry strength surprising them both. Ian’s long, knob-jointed hands on the gralloch knife, the wrench and the hot metal smell of the blood that smeared his fingers, the look of his brown hair ruffling in the wind off the loch, the narrow back, bent and springy as a bow as he stooped to snatch one of his toddling bairns or grandchildren off their feet and throw them up giggling into the air.

It was good they’d come, he thought. Better than good that they’d brought the lad back in time to speak to his father as a man, to comfort Ian’s mind and take his leave properly. But to live in the same house with a beloved brother dying by inches under your nose wore sadly on the nerves.

With so many women in the house, squabbling was inevitable. With so many of the women Frasers, it was like walking through a gunpowder mill with a lit candle. Everyone tried so hard to manage, to keep in countenance, to accommodate—but that only made it worse when some spark finally set the powder keg off. He wasn’t only out hunting because they needed meat.

He spared a sympathetic thought for Claire. After Jenny’s anguished request, Claire had taken to hiding in their room or in Ian’s study—he had invited her to use it, and Jamie thought that aggravated Jenny still more—writing busily, making the book Andy Bell had put in her mind. She had great powers of concentration and could stay inside her mind for hours—but she had to come out to eat. And it was always there, the knowledge that Ian was dying, grinding like a quern, slow but relentless, wearing away the nerves.

Ian’s nerves, too.

He and Ian had been walking—slowly—by the side of the loch two days before, when Ian stopped suddenly, curling in on himself like an autumn leaf. Jamie hurried to take him by the arm before he could fall, and he lowered him to the ground, finding a boulder to brace his back, pulling the shawl high around the wasted shoulders, looking for anything, anything at all he could do.

“What is it, a charaid?” he said, anxious, crouching beside his brother-in-law, his friend.

Ian was coughing, almost silently, his body shaking with the force of it. At last the spasm eased and he could draw breath, his face bright with the consumptive flush, that terrible illusion of health.

“It hurts, Jamie.” The words were spoken simply, but Ian’s eyelids were closed, as though he didn’t want to look at Jamie while he spoke.

“I’ll carry ye back. We’ll get ye a bit of laudanum, maybe, and—”

Ian waved a hand, quelling his anxious promises. He breathed shallowly for a moment before shaking his head.

“Aye, my chest feels like there’s a knife in it,” he said finally. “But that’s no what I meant. I’m no bothered so much about dying—but Christ, the slowness of it is killing me.” He did open his eyes then, meeting Jamie’s, and laughed as silently as he’d coughed, the barest breath of sound as his body shook with it.

“This dying hurts me, Dougal. I’d have it over.” The words came into his mind as clearly as if they’d been spoken just now in front of him, rather than thirty years before in a dark church, ruined by cannon fire. Rupert had said that, dying slow. “You’re my chief, man,” he’d said to Dougal, imploring. “It’s your job.” And Dougal MacKenzie had done what love and duty called for.

He had been holding Ian’s hand, clasping hard, trying to force some notion of well-being from his own calloused palm into Ian’s thin gray skin. His thumb slid upward now, pressing on the wrist where he had seen Claire grip, searching out the truth of a patient’s health.

He felt the skin give, sliding across the bones of Ian’s wrist. He thought suddenly of the blood vow given at his marriage, the sting of the blade and Claire’s cold wrist pressed to his and the blood slick between them. Ian’s wrist was cold, too, but not from fear.

He glanced at his own wrist, but there was no trace of a scar, either from vows or fetters; those wounds were fleeting, long-healed.

“D’ye remember when we gave each other blood for blood?” Ian’s eyes were closed, but he smiled. Jamie’s hand tightened on the bony wrist, a little startled but not truly surprised that Ian had reached into his mind and caught the echo of his thoughts.

“Aye, of course.” He couldn’t help a small smile of his own, a painful one.

They’d been eight years old, the two of them. Jamie’s mother and her bairn had died the day before. The house had been full of mourners, his father dazed with shock. They had slipped out, he and Ian, scrambling up the hill behind the house, trying not to look at the fresh-dug grave by the broch. Into the wood, safe under the trees.

Had slowed then, wandering, come to a stop at last at the top of the high hill, where some old stone building that they called the fort had fallen down long ago. They’d sat on the rubble, wrapped in their plaids against the wind, not talking much.