Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(95)
Everyone thought that very funny; the clearing rocked with laughter. Grey waited it out. From the corner of his eye, he saw the girl Azeel watching him with something like a fearful hope in her eyes.
“He is under my protection,” he repeated. “Yes, I want him.”
Accompong nodded and took a deep breath, sniffing appreciatively at the mingled scents of cassava porridge, fried plantain, and frying pig meat.
“Sit down, Colonel,” he said, “and eat with me.”
Grey sank slowly down beside him, weariness throbbing through his legs. Looking around, he saw Cresswell dragged roughly off but left sitting on the ground against a hut, unmolested. Tom and the two soldiers, looking dazed, were being fed at one of the cook fires. Then he saw Rodrigo, still standing like a scarecrow, and struggled to his feet.
He took the young man’s tattered sleeve and said, “Come with me.” Rather to his surprise, Rodrigo did, turning like an automaton. He led the young man through the staring crowd to the girl Azeel, and said, “Stop.” He lifted Rodrigo’s hand and offered it to the girl, who, after a moment’s hesitation, took firmly hold of it.
“Look after him, please,” Grey said to her. Only as he turned away did it register upon him that the arm he had held was wrapped with a bandage. Ah. Dead men don’t bleed.
Returning to Accompong’s fire, he found a wooden platter of steaming food awaiting him. He sank down gratefully upon the ground again and closed his eyes—then opened them, startled, as he felt something descend upon his head and found himself peering out from under the drooping felt brim of the headman’s ragged hat.
“Oh,” he said. “Thank you.” He hesitated, looking round, either for the leather hatbox or for his ragged palm-frond hat, but didn’t see either one.
“Never mind,” said Accompong, and, leaning forward, slid his hands carefully over Grey’s shoulders, palms up, as though lifting something heavy. “I will take your snake, instead. You have carried him long enough, I think.”
AUTHOR’S NOTES
MY SOURCE FOR the theoretical basis of making zombies was The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic, by Wade Davis, which I’d read many years ago. Information on the maroons of Jamaica, the temperament, beliefs, and behaviour of Africans from different regions, and on historical slave rebellions came chiefly from Black Rebellion: Five Slave Revolts, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. This manuscript (originally a series of articles published in Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s magazine, and Century) also supplied a number of valuable details regarding terrain and personalities.
Captain Accompong was a real maroon leader—I took his physical description from this source—and the custom of trading hats upon conclusion of a bargain also came from Black Rebellion. General background, atmosphere, and the importance of snakes came from Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse and a number of less important books dealing with voodoo. (By the way, I now have most of my reference collection—some 2,500 books—listed on LibraryThing and cross-indexed by topic, in case you’re interested in pursuing anything like, say, Scotland, magic, or the American Revolution.)
A LEAF ON THE WIND OF ALL HALLOWS
INTRODUCTION
ONE OF THE interesting things you can do with a “bulge” (i.e., one of the novellas or short stories in the Outlander universe) is to follow mysteries, hints, and loose ends from the main books of the series. One such trail follows the story of Roger MacKenzie’s parents.
In Outlander, we learn that Roger was orphaned during World War II, and then adopted by his great-uncle, the Reverend Reginald Wakefield, who tells his friends, Claire and Frank Randall, that Roger’s mother was killed in the Blitz, and that his father was a Spitfire pilot “shot down over the Channel.”
In Drums of Autumn, Roger tells his wife, Brianna, the moving story of his mother’s death in the collapse of a Tube station during the bombing of London.
But in An Echo in the Bone, there is a poignant conversation in the moonlight between Claire and Roger, during which we encounter this little zinger:
Her hands wrapped his, small and hard and smelling of medicine.
“I don’t know what happened to your father,” she said. “But it wasn’t what they told you […]
“Of course things happen,” she said, as though able to read his thoughts. “Accounts get garbled, too, over time and distance. Whoever told your mother might have been mistaken; she might have said something that the reverend misconstrued. All those things are possible. But during the War, I had letters from Frank—he wrote as often as he could, up until they recruited him into MI6. After that, I often wouldn’t hear anything for months. But just before that, he wrote to me, and mentioned—just as casual chat, you know—that he’d run into something strange in the reports he was handling. A Spitfire had gone down, crashed—not shot down; they thought it must have been an engine failure—in Northumbria, and while it hadn’t burned, for a wonder, there was no sign of the pilot. None. And he did mention the name of the pilot, because he thought Jeremiah rather an appropriately doomed sort of name.”
“Jerry,” Roger said, his lips feeling numb. “My mother always called him Jerry.”