“I remember you standin’ up to piss and Enoch Grant behind ye pokin’ ye in the arse with the end of his bow and hissin’ like a snake through his teeth to make ye set down again. Not that ye did set yourself down,” Da added, fairly.
Murtagh had made a disgruntled hmph! and Jamie had ventured to ask what he’d done instead then?
The result was another, louder hmph! and his da laughed again, out loud this time.
“He turned round and pissed on Enoch Grant and then jumped down his throat and gave him laldy wi’ the hilt of his dirk.”
“Mm,” said Murtagh, clearly relishing the memory.
The hapless Grant had escaped worse injury, though, because just then the officers started shouting and the enemy—visible on the field at Sheriffmuir these last two hours—began to move.
“And a few minutes later, we popped out o’ the bracken like a swarm o’ brobhadan and the archers fired their arrows and those of us wi’ swords and targes ran down upon the Sassunaich,” Da said to Jamie.
“Aye, much good havin’ the high ground did us,” Murtagh said, glowering slightly. “I near as breakfast got an arrow in the back from our own men. It went through the sleeve o’ my shirt!”
“Well, ye did piss on Enoch Grant,” Da said reasonably. “What would ye expect him to do?”
Jamie smiled to himself, hearing the two of them talking, clear as day, and feeling in his bones the memory of the comfort of sleep coming for him, wrapped in the warmth of the firelit room at Lallybroch.
He was warm now, sweating from the climb, and he wasn’t sleepy. It was a small mountain, not even half the height of a Scottish beinn, but the sides were steep and thickly forested. He was following a cattle track across the face of the mountain—the local people grazed their stock sometimes on the top of the mountain, because there was a good meadow—but oak and maple saplings and a scurf of low bushes were creeping over it, and the track had vanished altogether by the time he made it to the summit through a screen of pines.
He stood at the edge of a long meadow, growing in a sort of saddle-shaped depression. It was late in the afternoon by now, and several deer were grazing at the far end, close to the shelter of the trees. One or two lifted their heads and looked at him, but he was still, and they went back to their business among the growing shadows.
There were rocky outcroppings near the edges of the plateau. Not large ones, but for a single rifleman, a decent vantage point—if you could make it that far and not be picked off struggling up the mountainside.
Aye, he could see well enough what Patrick Ferguson would think. With plenty of ammunition and a well-armed band of militia, it would be a simple matter to hunker down near the edges and fire downhill at the attackers.
Except, as Frank Randall had recounted it, this strategy would work only so long as the attackers were kept at a distance. Let them get too high, too close to the wee meadow, and Ferguson would switch to bayonet tactics at that point. But the problem was that the attackers who’d survived to get high enough and had eluded the bayonets would come over the edge with their weapons loaded and mow down the Loyalists who were fighting with unloaded guns equipped with butcher knives for bayonets. According to the damned book, Ferguson had little experience in battle—he’d been shot in the elbow in the only battle he’d fought, and the wound had crippled him—and he’d not understood either the terrain or the character of the men who would be climbing that mountain.
Randall hadn’t mentioned it, but Jamie was sure that Ferguson would have been using his own patented breech-loading rifle—he’d always use it, being unable to load a regular gun with his crippled elbow.
Strange to think of this man, this Ferguson, minding his own business somewhere just this minute, having no notion what was coming for him.
But you know the same is coming for you. A strange quivering ran down the backs of his legs, and he tensed his back and curled his fists to make it stop.
“Nay, I don’t,” he said defiantly to the shade of Frank Randall. “Ye’ve not been here; ye won’t be here. I’m no going to believe you just because ye wrote it down, aye?”
He’d spoken aloud and the deer had vanished like smoke, leaving him alone in the gathering twilight.
The evening was peaceful, but not the meadow. He’d brought his own disturbance with him, and the wind made long, rippling furrows through the grass, as though small creatures were being chased, running for their lives.
There ought to be some ritual for facing one’s death—and in fact, there were many, but none seemed quite appropriate for this situation. Lacking any other notion, though, he turned sunwise and walked the edge of the grass, making a circle completely round the mountaintop and the shades of the battle to come. The first sun charm to come to his mind was the deasil charm, said to bless a new child and protect him from harm.