I didn’t see any chest movement, but when I held my hand in front of his mouth, I thought I could detect the faint movement of air. I couldn’t do chest compressions, not with a cracked sternum and an invisible ball in or under it.
“Breathe,” I said, under my breath, as I pressed a fresh dressing onto his knee and wrapped it hastily with a length of bandage to give light pressure. “Please, please, please breathe …”
Young Ian had materialized again at some point and was squatting beside me, handing me things from my pack as I needed them. He seemed to be saying the Hail Mary, though I couldn’t tell whether he was speaking Gaelic or Mohawk. I wondered vaguely how I knew it was the Hail Mary and realized slowly that I had the vision of a vast blue space in my mind. “Blue, like the Virgin’s cloak …” I blinked away stinging sweat and saw Jamie’s face, composed and tranquil. Was he seeing Heaven, and I seeing it through his closed eyes?
“You are losing your mind, Beauchamp,” I muttered, and kept working, willing the bleeding to stop. “Feed him honey-water,” I said to Ian.
“He canna swallow it, Auntie.”
“I don’t bloody care! Give it to him!”
A hand reached over Ian’s shoulder and took the canteen. Roger, face and hands blood-smeared and his black hair come loose, hanging wet with sweat, full of red and yellow leaves.
I might have sobbed, in the minor relief of having him there. He held the canteen to Jamie’s mouth with one hand; the other reached out and touched my face gently. Then his hand rested on Jamie’s shoulder and shook it, less gently.
“Ye can’t die, mate. Presbyterians don’t do Last Rites.”
I might have laughed, if I’d had any breath to spare. My hands and arms were red to the elbows.
I WOULDN’T LET go. I couldn’t speak anymore, I hadn’t strength for it. But I wouldn’t let go and I wouldn’t move.
Ian spoke to me now and then. Other voices came and went. Alarm, concern, anger, helplessness. Ian and Roger. I didn’t listen.
BLUE.
So beautiful.
It’s not empty.
MY FACE WAS pressed against his chest, my mouth on his wounded breastbone, the silver taste of blood and salt of sweat on my tongue. I thought I could feel the slow—so slow—thump of his heart.
Lub … Dub …… Lub …… Dub …
I thought of Bree’s racing heart, of tiny David’s small, busy thump beneath my fingers, tried to feel my own heart in my fingertips, force all of that life into his.
Don’t let go.
I WAS VAGUELY aware, from time to time, that things were happening around me. People were shouting, a few shots, more shouting …
I heard Roger’s voice, but didn’t, couldn’t spare enough attention to know what he was saying. I felt it, though, when he knelt by Jamie and laid a hand on him. Something flickered through him and through me, and I breathed it in like oxygen.
JAMIE’S SMELL HAD changed, and that frightened me badly. I could smell hot dust and horses and hot metal and gun smoke and the muddy stink from puddles of horse piss and the panicked sharp smell of broken plants and the shattered tree trunks on the hillside below. I could smell Jamie’s sweat and his blood—God, the blood, it had saturated my bodice and stays and the fabric stuck to me and to him, a thin crust of hot stickiness, not the cut-metal smell of fresh blood but the thick stink of butchery. The sweat was cold on his skin, slick and nearly odorless, no vital reek of manhood in it anymore.
His skin was cold beneath the film of sweat and blood and I pressed myself as hard against him as I could, holding tight to the shapes of his back, trying to force myself into the fibers of his muscle, reach the heart inside the bony cage of his chest, make it beat.
Suddenly I was aware that there was something warm and round in my mouth, a metal taste, stronger than blood. I coughed, lifted my head enough to spit, and found that it was a musket ball, warm from his body.
He was breathing still … only a faint waft of air on my forehead, perceptible only because it cooled my own sweat.
Breathe, I thought fiercely, and pressed my forehead against his chest, against the small dark hole of the wound, seeing the bloodstained pink and the air-starved blue of his lungs beneath. I reached for his heart, but had no words, only the weight of its soft, slowing beat, the motion, like two small heavy balls that I held, one in each hand, one heavier than the other, and tossed them to and fro, to and fro, catching each one separately but close together.
Lub-dub … lub-dub … lub—dub …