An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana (читать книги TXT) 📗
The earlier ones, though, were all too weathered to read, no more than the shadows of letters showing through the black stains of lichen and the soft, obliterating moss. There, next to Ellen’s grave, was the tiny square stone for Caitlin Maisri Murray, Jenny and Ian’s sixth child, who had lived only a day or so. Jenny had shown Brianna the stone, stooping to run a gentle hand across the letters and laying a yellow rose from the path beside it. There had been a small cairn there, too—pebbles left by those who visited the grave. The cairn had been scattered long since, but Brianna stooped and found a pebble now and placed it by the little stone.
There was another, she saw, beside it. Another small stone, as for a child. Not quite as weathered, but plainly almost as old. Only two words on it, she thought, and, closing her eyes, ran her fingers slowly over the stone, feeling out the shallow, broken lines. There was an “E” in the first line. A “Y,” she thought, in the second. And maybe a “K.”
What sort of Highland name begins with “Y”? she thought, puzzled. There’s McKay, but that’s in the wrong order …
“You—er—don’t know which grave might be Grandda’s, do you?” she asked Jem hesitantly. She was almost afraid to hear the answer.
“No.” He looked surprised, and glanced where she was looking, toward the assemblage of stones. Obviously he hadn’t connected their presence with his grandfather. “He just said he’d like to be buried here, and if I came here, I should leave him a stane. So I did.” His accent slid naturally into the word, and she heard her father’s voice again, distinctly, but this time smiled a little.
“Where?”
“Up there. He likes to be up high, ken? Where he can see,” Jem said casually, pointing up the hill. Just beyond the shadow of the broch, she could see the traces of something not quite a trail through a mass of gorse, heather, and broken rock. And poking out of the mass at the crest of the hill, a big, lumpy boulder, on whose shoulder sat a tiny pyramid of pebbles, barely visible.
“Did you leave all those today?”
“No, I put one whenever I come. That’s what ye’re meant to do, aye?”
There was a small lump in her throat, but she swallowed it and smiled. “Aye, it is. I’ll go up and leave one, too.”
Mandy was now sitting on one of the fallen gravestones, laying out burdock leaves as plates around the dirty teacup, which she had unearthed and set in the middle. She was chatting to the guests at her invisible tea party, politely animated. There was no need to disturb her, Brianna decided, and followed Jem up the rocky trail—the last of the journey accomplished on hands and knees, owing to the steepness.
It was windy, so near the crest of the hill, and they weren’t much bothered by the midgies. Damp with perspiration, she added her own pebble ceremoniously to the wee cairn, and sat down for a moment to enjoy the view. Most of Lallybroch was visible from here, as was the road that led to the highway. She looked that way, but no sign yet of Roger’s bright-orange Morris Mini. She sighed and looked away.
It was nice, up so high. Quiet, with just the sigh of the cool wind and the buzz of bees busy working in the yellow blossoms. No wonder her father liked—
“Jem.” He was slumped comfortably against the rock, looking out over the surrounding hills.
“Aye?”
She hesitated, but had to ask.
“You … can’t see your grandda, can you?”
He shot her a startled blue look.
“No. He’s dead.”
“Oh,” she said, at once relieved and slightly disappointed. “I know. I … just wondered.”
“I think maybe Mandy can,” Jem said, nodding toward his sister, a bright red blot on the landscape below. “But ye can’t really tell. Babies talk to lots of people ye can’t see,” he added tolerantly. “Grannie says so.”
She didn’t know whether to wish he would stop referring to his grandparents in the present tense or not. It was more than slightly unnerving, but he had said he couldn’t see Jamie. She didn’t want to ask whether he could see Claire—she supposed not—but she felt her parents close, whenever Jem or Mandy mentioned them, and she certainly wanted Jem and Mandy to feel close to them, as well.
She and Roger had explained things to the kids as well as such things could be explained. And evidently her father had had his own private talk with Jem; a good thing, she thought. Jamie’s blend of devout Catholicism and matter-of-fact Highland acceptance of life, death, and things not seen was probably a lot better suited to explaining things like how you could be dead on one side of the stones, but—
“He said he’d look after us. Grandda,” he added, turning to look at her.
She bit her tongue. No, he was not reading her mind, she told herself firmly. They’d just been talking of Jamie, after all, and Jem had chosen this particular place in which to pay his respects. So it was only natural that his grandfather would be still in his mind.
“Of course he will,” she said, and put a hand on his square shoulder, massaging the knobby bones at the base of his neck with her thumb. He giggled and ducked out from under her hand, then hopped suddenly down the trail, sliding on his bottom partway, to the detriment of his jeans.
She paused for a last look round before following him, and noticed the jumble of rock on top of a hill a quarter mile or so away. A jumble of rock was exactly what one might expect to see on any Highland hilltop—but there was something slightly different about this particular assortment of stones. She shaded her eyes with her hand, squinting. She might be wrong—but she was an engineer; she knew the look of a thing built by men.
An Iron Age fortress, maybe? she thought, intrigued. There were layered stones at the bottom of that heap, she’d swear it. A foundation, perhaps. She’d have to climb up there one of these days for a closer look—maybe tomorrow, if Roger … Again, she glanced at the road, and again found it empty.
Mandy had grown tired of her tea party and was ready to go home. Holding her daughter firmly by one hand and the teacup in the other, Brianna made her way down the hill toward the big white-harled house, its windows fresh-washed and glinting companionably.
Had Annie done that? she wondered. She hadn’t noticed, and surely window-washing on that scale would have entailed a good bit of fuss and bother. But then, she’d been distracted, what with the anticipations and apprehensions of the new job. Her heart gave a small hop at the thought that on Monday she would fit back one more piece of who she’d once been, one more stone in the foundation of who she now was.
“Maybe the piskies did it,” she said aloud, and laughed.
“Piskies diddit,” Mandy echoed happily.
Jem had nearly reached the bottom, and turned, impatient, waiting for them.
“Jem,” she said, the thought occurring as they came even with him. “Do you know what a Nuckelavee is?”
Jem’s eyes went huge, and he clapped his hands over Mandy’s ears. Something with a hundred cold tiny feet skittered up Brianna’s back.
“Aye,” he said, his voice small and breathless.
“Who told you about it?” she asked, keeping her voice calm. She’d kill Annie MacDonald, she thought.
But Jem’s eyes slid sideways, as he glanced involuntarily over her shoulder, up at the broch.
“He did,” he whispered.
“He?”she said sharply, and grabbed Mandy by the arm as the little girl wiggled free and turned furiously on her brother. “Don’t kick your brother, Mandy! Who do you mean, Jemmy?”
Jem’s lower teeth caught his lip.
“Him,” he blurted. “The Nuckelavee.”
“THE CREATURE’S HOME was in the sea, but it ventured upon land to feast upon humans. The Nuckelavee rode a horse on land, and its horse was sometimes indistinguishable from its own body. Its head was ten times larger than that of a man, and its mouth thrust out like a pig’s, with a wide, gaping maw. The creature had no skin, and its yellow veins, muscle structure, and sinews could clearly be seen, covered in a red slimy film. The creature was armed with venomous breath and great strength. It did, however, have one weakness: an aversion to freshwater. The horse on which it rode is described as having one red eye, a mouth the size of a whale’s, and flappers like fins around its forelegs.”
