Outlander aka Cross Stitch - Gabaldon Diana (библиотека электронных книг txt) 📗

“Hugh Munro, unless someone else has taken to making arrows in his style.”

We waited a moment longer, but no one appeared on the path below.

“Ah,” said Jamie softly, and whirled around, just in time to confront a head, rising slowly above the edge of the rock behind us.

The head burst into a jack-o’-lantern grin, snaggle-toothed and jolly, beaming with pleasure at surprising us. The head itself was roughly pumpkin-shaped, the impression enhanced by the orange-brown, leathery skin that covered not only the face but the round, bald crown of the head as well. Few pumpkins, however, could boast such a luxuriant growth of beard, nor such a pair of bright blue eyes. Stubby hands with filthy nails planted themselves beneath the beard and swiftly hoisted the remainder of the jack-o’-lantern up into view.

The body rather matched the head, having a distinct look of the Halloween goblin about it. The shoulders were very broad, but hunched and slanted, one being considerably higher than the other. One leg, too, seemed somewhat shorter than its fellow, giving the man a rather hopping, hitching sort of gait.

Munro, if this was indeed Jamie’s friend, was clad in what appeared to be multiple layers of rags, the faded colors of berry-dyed fabric peeking out through rents in a shapeless garment that might once have been a woman’s smock.

He carried no sporran at his belt – which was in any case no more than a frayed length of rope, from which two furry carcasses swung, head-down. Instead, he had a fat leather wallet slung across his chest, of surprisingly good quality, considering the rest of his outfit. A collection of small metal oddments dangled from the strap of the wallet: religious medals, military decorations, what looked to be old uniform buttons, worn coins, pierced and sewn on, and three or four small rectangular bits of metal, dull grey and with cryptic marks incised in their surfaces.

Jamie rose as the creature hopped nimbly over the intervening protrusions of rock, and the two men embraced warmly, thumping each other hard on the back in the odd fashion of manly greeting.

“And how goes it then, with the house of Munro?” inquired Jamie, standing back at length and surveying his old companion.

Munro ducked his head and made an odd gobbling noise, grinning. Then, raising his eyebrows, he nodded in my direction and waved his stubby hands in a strangely graceful interrogatory gesture.

“My wife,” said Jamie, reddening slightly with a mixture of shyness and pride at the new introduction. “Married but the two days.”

Munro smiled more broadly still at this information, and executed a remarkably complex and graceful bow, involving the rapid touching of head, heart, and lips and ending up in a near-horizontal position on the ground at my feet. Having executed this striking maneuver, he sprang to his feet with the grace of an acrobat and thumped Jamie again, this time in apparent congratulation.

Munro then began an extraordinary ballet of the hands, motioning to himself, away down toward the forest, at me, and back to himself, with such an array of gestures and wavings that I could hardly follow his flying hands. I had seen deaf-mute talk before, but never executed so swiftly and gracefully.

“Is that so, then?” Jamie exclaimed. It was his turn to buffet the other man in congratulation. No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly.

“He’s married as well,” Jamie explained, turning to me. “Six months since, to a widow – oh, all right, to a fat widow,” he amended, in response to an emphatic gesture from Munro, “with six children, down in the village of Dubhlairn.”

“How nice,” I said politely. “It looks as though they’ll eat well, at least.” I motioned to the rabbits hanging from his belt.

Munro at once unfastened one of the corpses and handed it to me, with such an expression of beaming goodwill that I felt obliged to accept it, smiling back and hoping privately that it didn’t harbor fleas.

“A wedding gift,” said Jamie. “And most welcome, Munro. Ye must allow us to return the favor.” With which, he extracted one of the bottles of ale from its mossy bed and handed it across.

The courtesies attended to in this manner, we all sat down again to a companionable sharing of the third bottle. Jamie and Munro carried on an exchange of news, gossip, and conversation which seemed no less free for the fact that only one of them spoke.

I took little part in the conversation, being unable to read Munro’s hand-signs, though Jamie did his best to include me by translation and reference.

At one point, Jamie jabbed a thumb at the rectangular bits of lead that adorned Munro’s strap.

“Gone official, have ye?” he asked. “Or is that just for when the game is scarce?” Munro bobbed his head and nodded like a jack-in-the-box.

“What are they?” I asked curiously.

“Gaberlunzies.”

“Oh, to be sure,” I said. “Pardon my asking.”

“A gaberlunzie is a license to beg, Sassenach,” Jamie explained. “It’s good within the borders of the parish, and only on the one day a week when begging’s allowed. Each parish has its own, so the beggars from one parish canna take overmuch advantage of the charity of the next.”

“A system with a certain amount of elasticity, I see,” I said, eyeing Munro’s stock of four lead seals.

“Ah, well, Munro’s a special case, d’ye see. He was captured by the Turks at sea. Spent a good many years rowing up and down in a galley, and a few more as a slave in Algiers. That’s where he lost his tongue.”

“They… cut it out?” I felt a bit faint.

Jamie seemed undisturbed by the thought, but then he had apparently known Munro for some time.

“Oh, aye. And broke his leg for him, as well. The back, too, Munro? No,” he amended, at a series of signs from Munro, “the back was an accident, something that happened jumping off a wall in Alexandria. The feet, though; that was the Turks’ doing.”

I didn’t really want to know, but both Munro and Jamie seemed dying to tell me. “All right,” I said, resigned. “What happened to his feet?”

With something approaching pride, Munro stripped off his battered clogs and hose, exposing broad, splayed feet on which the skin was thickened and roughened, white shiny patches alternating with angry red areas.

“Boiling oil,” said Jamie. “It’s how they force captive Christians to convert to the Mussulman religion.”

“It looks a very effective means of persuasion,” I said. “So that’s why several parishes will give him leave to beg? To make up for his trials on behalf of Christendom?”

“Aye, exactly.” Jamie was evidently pleased with my swift appreciation of the situation. Munro also expressed his admiration with another deep salaam, followed by a very expressive if indelicate sequence of hand movements which I gathered were meant to be praising my physical appearance as well.

“Thank ye, man. Aye, she’ll do me proud, I reckon.” Jamie, seeing my uplifted brows, tactfully turned Munro so that his back was to me and the flying fingers hidden. “Now, tell me what’s doing in the villages?”

The two men drew closer together, continuing their lopsided conversation with an increased intensity. Since Jamie’s part seemed to be limited mainly to grunts and exclamations of interest, I could glean little of the content, and busied myself instead with a survey of the strange little rock plants sprouting from the surfaces of our perch.

I had collected a pocketful of eyebright and dittany by the time they finished talking and Hugh Munro rose to go. With a final bow to me and a thump on the back for Jamie, he shuffled to the edge of the rock and disappeared as quickly as one of the rabbits he poached might vanish into its hole.

“What fascinating friends you have,” I said.

“Oh, aye. Nice fellow, Hugh. I hunted wi’ him and some others, last year. He’s on his own, now that he’s an official beggar, but his work keeps him moving about the parishes; he’ll know everything that goes on within the borders of Ardagh and Chesthill.”