The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle (900 page)

Conversation became general then, accomplished for the most part in Mohawk. The Indians showed no particular interest in William, though the man beside him handed him a chunk of cold meat in a companionable fashion. He nodded thanks and made himself eat it, though he would as soon have forced down one of his shoe soles. He felt unwell and clammy, and when he had finished the meat, nodded politely to the Indian next him and went to lie down again, hoping he wouldn’t vomit.

Seeing this, Murray lifted his chin in William’s direction and said something to his friends in Mohawk, ending with a question of some kind.

The English-speaker, a short, thickset fellow in a checked wool shirt and buckskin trousers, shrugged in reply, then got up and came to bend over him again.

“Show me this arm,” he said, and without waiting for William to comply, picked up his wrist and pulled up the sleeve of his shirt. William nearly passed out.

When the black spots stopped whirling in front of his eyes, he saw that Murray and two more Indians had come to join the first. All of them were looking at his exposed arm in open consternation. He didn’t want to look, but risked a glance. His forearm was grotesquely swollen, nearly twice its normal size, and dark reddish streaks ran from under the tightly bandaged poultice, down his arm toward the wrist.

The English-speaker—what had Murray called him?
Glutton
, he thought, but why?—drew his knife and cut the bandage. Only with the removal of its constriction did William realize how uncomfortable the binding had been. He repressed the urge to rub his arm, feeling the pins and needles of returning circulation. Pins and needles, bloody hell. It felt as though his arm were engulfed by a mass of fire ants, all stinging.

“Shit,” he said, through his teeth. All the Indians knew that word, evidently, for they all laughed, save Glutton and Murray, who were squinting at his arm.

Glutton—he didn’t look fat, why was he called that?—poked gingerly at the arm, shook his head, and said something to Murray, then pointed off toward the west.

Murray rubbed a hand over his face, then shook his head violently, in the manner of a man shaking off fatigue or worry. Then he shrugged and asked something of the group at large. Nods and shrugs, and several of the men got up and went into the wood.

A number of questions revolved slowly through William’s brain, round and bright like the metal globes of his grandfather’s orrery in the library of the London house at Jermyn Street.

What are they doing?

What’s happening?

Am I dying?

Am I dying like a British soldier?

Why did he … British soldier …
His mind caught the tail of that one as it passed, pulling it down to look at more carefully.
“British soldier
”—who had said that? The answer spun slowly into view. Murray. When they’d talked in the night … what had Murray said?

“Is it different for a British soldier, then? Ye dinna want to die as a coward, do ye?”

“Not going to die at all,” he muttered, but his mind ignored him, intent on tracking this small mystery. What had Murray meant by that? Had he been speaking theoretically? Or had he in fact recognized William
as
a British soldier?

Not possible, surely.

And what the devil had he said in reply? The sun was coming up, the dawning light bright enough to hurt his eyes, soft as it was. He squinted, concentrating.

“It’s not so different—the hoping to die well if you have to,”
he’d said. So he’d answered as though he
was
a British soldier, damn him.

At the moment, he didn’t really care whether he died well or like a dog.… Where was the—oh, there. Rollo sniffed at his arm, making a small whining noise in the back of his throat, then nosed at the wound and began to lick it. It felt most peculiar: painful, but weirdly soothing, and he made no move to drive the dog away.

What … oh, yes. He had simply replied, not noticing what Murray had said. But what if Murray
did
know who—or what—he was? A small stab of alarm pierced the muddle of his slowing thoughts. Had Murray been following him, before he came into the swamp? Seen him speaking to the man at the wilderness farm near the edge of the swamp, perhaps, and followed, ready to intercept him when the opportunity should offer? But if that were true …

What Murray had said about Henry Washington, about Dismal Town—was it a lie?

The stocky Indian knelt down beside him, nudging the dog away. William couldn’t ask any of the questions clogging his brain.

“Why do they call you Glutton?” he asked instead, through the haze of hot pain.

The man grinned and pulled open the neck of his shirt, to display a mass of welted scars that covered neck and chest.

“Killed one,” he said. “With my hands. My spirit animal now. You have one?”

“No.”

The Indian looked reproving at this.

“You need one, you going to live through this. Pick one. Pick a strong one.”

Muzzily obedient, William groped through random images of animals: pig … snake … deer … catamount … no, too rank, foul-smelling.

“Bear,” he said, settling on that with a sense of certainty. Didn’t get any stronger than a bear, did it?

“Bear,” the Indian repeated, nodding. “Yes, that’s good.” He slit William’s sleeve with his knife; the fabric would no longer fit easily over the
swollen arm. Sunlight washed suddenly over him, glanced silver from the blade of his knife. He looked at William then and laughed.

“You got one red beard, Bear Cub, you know that?”

“I know that,” William said, and shut his eyes against the spears of morning’s light.

Glutton wanted the catamount’s skin, but Murray, alarmed by William’s condition, refused to wait for him to skin it. The upshot of the resulting argument was that William found himself occupying a hastily constructed travois, cheek by jowl with the dead cat, being dragged over rough terrain behind Murray’s horse. Their destination, he was given to understand, was a small settlement some ten miles distant, which boasted a doctor.

Glutton and two of the other Mohawk came with them in order to show the way, leaving their other companions to continue hunting.

The catamount had been gutted, which William supposed might be better than not—the day was warm, and getting hot—but the scent of blood drew masses of flies, which feasted at their leisure, as the horse, burdened with the travois, could not go fast enough to outpace them. The flies hummed and buzzed and shrilled about his ears, setting his nerves on edge, and while most were interested in the cat, enough of them cared to try William for taste as sufficed to keep his mind off his arm.

When the Indians paused for urination and water, they hauled William to his feet—a relief, even wobbly as he was. Murray glanced at his fly-bitten, sunburned features, and reaching into a skin bag slung at his waist, pulled out a battered tin, which turned out to contain a highly malodorous ointment, with which he anointed William liberally.

“It’s no but another five or six miles,” he assured William, who hadn’t asked.

“Oh, good,” William said, with what vigor he could muster. “It’s not hell after all, then—only purgatory. What’s another thousand years?”

That made Murray laugh, though Glutton regarded him in puzzlement.

“Ye’ll do,” Murray said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Want to walk for a bit?”

“God, yes.”

His head swam, his feet refused to point forward, and his knees seemed to bend in unwonted directions, but anything was better than another hour of communing with the flies that blanketed the catamount’s glazed eyes and drying tongue. Provided with a stout stick cut from an oak sapling, he plodded doggedly behind the horse, alternately drenched with sweat and shaking with clammy chills, but determined to stay upright until and unless he actually fell down.

The ointment did keep the flies at bay—all the Indians were likewise smeared with it—and when not fighting the shaking, he lapsed into a sort of trance, concerned only with putting one foot before the other.

The Indians and Murray kept an eye on him for a time, but then, satisfied
that he could remain upright, returned to their own conversations. He could not understand the two Mohawk-speakers, but Glutton appeared to be catechizing Murray closely concerning the nature of purgatory.

Murray was having some difficulty in explaining the concept, apparently owing to the Mohawk having no notion of sin, or of a God concerned with the wickedness of man.

“You’re lucky you became Kahnyen’kehaka,” Glutton said at last, shaking his head. “A spirit not satisfied with an evil man being dead but that wants to torture him after death? And Christians think we’re cruel!”

“Aye, well,” Murray replied, “but think. Say a man is a coward and hasna died well. Purgatory gives him a chance to prove his courage after all, no? And once he is proved a proper man, then the bridge is open to him, and he can pass through the clouds of terrible things unhindered to paradise.”

“Hmm!” Glutton said, though he seemed still dubious. “I suppose if a man can stand to be tortured for hundreds of years … but how does he do this, if no body?”

“D’ye think a man needs a body to be tortured?” Murray asked this with a certain dryness, and Glutton grunted in what might be either agreement or amusement and dropped the subject.

They all walked in silence for some time, surrounded by birdcalls and the loud buzzing of flies. Preoccupied with the effort of remaining upright, William had fixed his attention on the back of Murray’s head as a means of not veering off the trail and thus noticed when the Scot, who was leading the horse, slowed his pace a little.

He thought at first that this was on his account and was about to protest that he could keep up—for a little while, at least—but then saw Murray glance swiftly at the other Mohawk, who had drawn ahead, then turn to Glutton and ask something, in a voice too low for William to make out the words.

Glutton hunched his shoulders in reluctance, then let them fall, resigned. “Oh, I see,” he said. “She’s your purgatory, eh?”

Murray made a sound of reluctant amusement. “Does it matter? I asked if she’s well.”

Glutton sighed, shrugging one shoulder.

“Yes, well. She has a son. A daughter, too, I think. Her husband …”

“Aye?” Murray’s voice had hardened in some fashion.

“You know Thayendanegea?”

“I do.” Now Murray sounded curious. William was curious himself, in a vague, unfocused sort of way, and waited to hear who Thayendanegea might be and what he had to do with the woman who was—who had been—Murray’s paramour? Oh, no.

“I am no longer wed.”
Hi
s
wife, then. William felt a faint pang of sympathy, thinking of Margery. He had thought of her only casually, if at all, in the past four years, but suddenly her betrayal seemed tragedy. Images of her swam about him, fractured by a sense of grief. He felt moisture running down his face, didn’t know if it was sweat or tears. The thought came to him, slowly, as from a great distance, that he must be off his head, but he had no notion what to do about it.

The flies weren’t biting but were still buzzing in his ears. He listened to the
hum with great concentration, convinced that the flies were trying to tell him something important. He listened with great attention, but could make out only nonsense syllables. “Shosha.” “Nik.” “Osonni.” No, that was a word, he knew that one! White man, it meant white man—were they talking about him?

He pawed clumsily at his ear, brushing at the flies, and caught that word again: “purgatory.”

For a time, he could not place the meaning of the word; it hung in front of him, covered with flies. Dimly, he perceived the horse’s hindquarters, gleaming in the sun, the twin lines made in the dust by the—what was it? A thing made of—bed—no, canvas; he shook his head. It was his bedsack, wrapped about two trailing saplings, trailing … “travois,” that was the word—yes. And the cat, there was a cat there, looking at him with eyes like rough amber, its head turned over its shoulder, openmouthed, its fangs showing.

Now the cat was talking to him, too.

“You mad, you know that?”

“I know that,” he murmured. He didn’t catch the cat’s reply, growled in a Scottish accent.

He leaned closer, to hear. Felt as though he floated down, through air thick as water, toward that open mouth. Suddenly all sense of effort ceased; he was no longer moving but was supported somehow. Couldn’t see the cat … oh. He was lying facedown on the ground, grass and dirt beneath his cheek.

The cat’s voice floated back to him, angry but resigned.

“This purgatory of yours? You think you can get out walking backward?”

Well, no, William thought, feeling peaceful. That made no sense at all.

PLAIN SPEECH