Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(118)

“Or penis, if ye want to be all English about it,” Ian chimed in.

Several of the men were listening now, willing to join in any sort of conversation to get away from the echo of the last scream, still hanging in the air like fog.

“Ha,” Jamie said. “Penis isna even an English word, ye wee ignoramus. It’s Latin. And even in Latin, it doesna mean a man’s closest companion—it means ‘tail.’?”

Ian gave him a long, slow look.

“Tail, is it? So ye canna even tell the difference between your cock and your arse, and ye’re preachin’ to me about Latin?”

The men roared. Jamie’s face flamed up instantly, and Ian laughed and gave him a good nudge with his shoulder. Jamie snorted but elbowed Ian back and laughed, too, reluctantly.

“Aye, all right, then.” He looked abashed; he didn’t usually throw his education in Ian’s face. Ian didn’t hold it against him; he’d floundered for a bit, too, his first days with the company, and that was the sort of thing you did, trying to get your feet under you by making a point of what you were good at. But if Jamie tried rubbing Mathieu’s or Big Georges’s face in his Latin and Greek, he’d be proving himself with his fists, and fast, too. Right this minute, he didn’t look as though he could fight a rabbit and win.

The renewed murmur of conversation, subdued as it was, dried up at once with the appearance of Mathieu through the trees. Mathieu was a big man, though broad rather than tall, with a face like a mad boar and a character to match. Nobody called him “Pig-face” to his face.

“You, cheese rind—go bury that turd,” he said to Jamie, adding with a narrowing of red-rimmed eyes, “far back in the wood. And go before I put a boot in your arse. Move!”

Jamie got up—slowly—eyes fixed on Mathieu with a look Ian didn’t care for. He came up quick beside Jamie and gripped him by the arm.

“I’ll help,” he said. “Come on.”



“WHY DO THEY want this one buried?” Jamie muttered to Ian. “Giving him a Christian burial?” He drove one of the trenching spades Armand had lent them into the soft leaf mold, with a violence that would have told Ian just how churned up his friend was if he hadn’t known already.

“Ye kent it’s no a verra civilized life, a charaid,” Ian said. He didn’t feel any better about it himself, after all, and spoke sharp. “Not like the Université.”

The blood flamed up Jamie’s neck like tinder taking fire, and Ian held out a palm, in hopes of quelling him. He didn’t want a fight, and Jamie couldn’t stand one.

“We’re burying him because D’Eglise thinks his friends might come back to look for him, and it’s better they don’t see what was done to him, aye? Ye can see by looking that the other fellow was just killed fightin’. Business is one thing; revenge is another.”

Jamie’s jaw worked for a bit, but gradually the hot flush faded and his clench on the shovel loosened.

“Aye,” he muttered, and resumed digging. The sweat was running down his neck in minutes, and he was breathing hard. Ian nudged him out of the way with an elbow and finished the digging. Silent, they took the dead man by the oxters and ankles and dragged him into the shallow pit.

“D’ye think D’Eglise found out anything?” Jamie asked, as they scattered matted chunks of old leaves over the raw earth.

“I hope so,” Ian replied, eyes on his work. “I wouldna like to think they did that for nothing.”

He straightened up and they stood awkwardly for a moment, not quite looking at each other. It seemed wrong to leave a grave, even that of a stranger and a Jew, without a word of prayer. But it seemed worse to say a Christian prayer over the man—more insult than blessing, in the circumstances.

At last Jamie grimaced and, bending, dug about under the leaves, coming out with two small stones. He gave one to Ian, and one after the other, they squatted and placed the stones together atop the grave. It wasn’t much of a cairn, but it was something.



IT WASN’T THE captain’s way to make explanations or to give more than brief, explicit orders to his men. He had come back into camp at evening, his face dark and his lips pressed tight. But three other men had heard the interrogation of the Jewish stranger, and by the usual metaphysical processes that happen around campfires, everyone in the troop knew by the next morning what he had said.

“Ephraim bar-Sefer,” Ian said to Jamie, who had come back late to the fire, after going off quietly to wash his shirt out again. “That was his name.” Ian was a bit worrit about the wean. His wounds weren’t healing as they should, and the way he’d passed out…He’d a fever now; Ian could feel the heat coming off his skin, but he shivered now and then, though the night wasn’t bitter.

“Is it better to know that?” Jamie asked bleakly.

“We can pray for him by name,” Ian pointed out. “That’s better, is it not?”

Jamie wrinkled up his brow, but after a moment he nodded.

“Aye, it is. What else did he say, then?”

Ian rolled his eyes. Ephraim bar-Sefer had confessed that the band of attackers were professional thieves, mostly Jews, who—

“Jews?” Jamie interrupted. “Jewish bandits?” For some reason, the thought struck Jamie as funny, but Ian didn’t laugh.