So he would keep his gold without regrets. He wasn’t driven with lust for it like Danny. He didn’t need it as much as Fitz, who had managed to live for centuries without saving a farthing. But it would pay a few years’ rental on the warehouse in Paris. It would allow him to travel, preferably to a country where the temperature never got below freezing.
And it would make Amanda
so
happy.
Sam shivered under the blankets the covered him. His leg throbbed, a dull ache that never stopped. Though he was lashed securely to the sled, he felt uneasy.
The Scotsman knew, he thought. He was breaking the trail today. Sam could see him walking ahead. He stopped more than once to look up at the sky.
It was a strange color, a misty gray that merged with the snowy land. The wind had picked up, and there was a chill edge to it.
Sam had known since first light. But there was nothing to be done. He had hoped that they would be able to stay ahead of what was coming. But as the feeble sun moved through the sky, it became clear to Sam that was not to be.
The Englishman was driving the sled. He was not as good at it as either of the others. But the dog Vixen worked hard for him, and that made up for his lack of skill. Today, though, the dogs were skittish. They yipped nervously, dancing in their traces. The Englishman was having trouble controlling them. He cracked the whip, and called to them by name. But they did not settle down.
The Englishman shouted to the Scotsman, asking if it was the wolves that were bothering the dogs so.
It was not the wolves, Sam knew. The wolves were gone, vanished into hidden places in the hills.
Vanished—because of the storm that was coming.
White. The whole world—what Duncan could see of it—was white. His eyes were nearly frozen shut, his beard was thick with snow. Icicles hung from the edge of his fur-lined hood. As quickly as he swept them away, they re-formed.
The blizzard had come on them suddenly. One minute, they were making their way across the vast untouched wilderness. The next, they were caught in a seething swirl of ice and snow.
There was no escaping the howling fury. Sam had said to keep going as long as it was daylight. So they would.
But daylight seemed a fanciful concept. There was no such thing. There was only the white blur surrounding them, the endless turmoil of wind-driven white, the stinging white that numbed his face and left him gasping.
He had felt the sting of wind-whipped snow before, of course. In the wilds of Mongolia, he had fought his way through a storm that swept down from the north, trusting his shaggy pony to bear him to the safety of the camp. And once in Montana, he had volunteered to help a rancher bring his herd farther down and closer in before a storm hit. They had not moved quickly enough, and he had spent a night trapped on a cold hillside before the weather cleared. Only the Lakota trick of climbing inside a fresh-killed animal carcass had kept him from freezing.
Mongolia. Montana. Both had been a walk in the spring heather of the Highlands compared to this raging white monster that bit at him with teeth of ice as he struggled on.
“Bloody blizzard,” Fitzcairn muttered. Would the foul thing never end? The day was done, the blinding turmoil now invisible as the milky light faded, dimmed and vanished. They were all huddled around the sled, men and dogs, wrapped in fur blankets, pressed close together. There was no thought of a fire. Not in this fiercely erratic wind. So spoke the Indian. Well, it didn’t take years of wilderness experience to reason that one out. Besides which, in the gathering of firewood, it was best if a man could see beyond the end of his frozen nose.
Danny was to one side of him, Vixen to the other. Both whined and twitched as they slept. He burrowed farther down between them, pulling the heavy fur up over his head. But the air grew stale, rich with the odor of wet dog and long-unwashed human. He pulled the robe away, just at the right moment to catch a writhing blast of snow full in the face. His eyes stung and watered, icy tracks trailing down his cheeks. He blinked, and stared into—nothingness. He had thought the nights by the lake in the Mackenzie Mountains dark. This dark was something beyond that. He knew this dark; he had seen it before.
He shuddered. It was not from the cold.
Most often when he died, he revived quickly. That seemed to be the way of it with all Immortals.
But now and then the coming back took longer. No one knew why. The circumstances were not predictable.
Once Fitz had wakened wrapped in shroud cloth, lying on the ground next to a freshly dug grave. Two women, dear girls the both of them, were having a remarkable fight over his dead body. When he opened his eyes and struggled to sit up, the priest had pronounced it a miracle.
At another time, in another place, he had not opened his eyes until the grave was filled. So total was the darkness before him that he thought at first he had somehow lost his vision. He raised a hand to feel his face—and rapped his knuckles sharply on the bottom of the casket lid. He had not felt such fear since the second time he had been killed.
Had the wooden box been sturdier, had the grave been deeper, he did not care to think how long it might have taken him to work his way to the surface. As it was, the lass who had come to lay flowers by his stone must have nearly died herself from fright when he clawed one hand free.
Her name was Aisleen, and she was a resourceful girl. Instead of fleeing in terror, she stayed and dug into the soft earth, pulling him forth like a veritable Lazarus.
She’d also been too practical to believe in miracles. So he had told her the truth of it and kept her with him for a time. Until she fell victim to one of those diseases that periodically killed thousands of mortals. A cough, a fever, then a terrible swift wasting away. He laid her to rest, in a fine heavy casket, lined in pale green silk. Afterward, as he knelt to lay a sprig of lilac on her grave, he could not help but remember how it had been to wake where she was now, blinded by the darkness.
He’d not avoided death since then, but he had avoided the grave. Still, though it was centuries ago, it was not something that a man ever forgot. And as he stared into the terrible blackness, the memory swept over him, like another blast of icy wind.
He tried to sleep, but the whole of the endless night he could only doze fitfully. Again and again, he would start awake, flailing out, fighting back the shadows that seemed to press in on him from above.
So still it was. Not the quiet of a mother sitting peaceful by the fire rocking her wee babe. Not even the stillness that came over the battlefield and the men who stood ready there, just before the fighting was joined.
No, this was like the silence afterward, the next afternoon when the wounded no longer cried in pain and the field was left to the dead.
He had heard such silences before, at Gettysburg where he had first died. And at Cold Harbor just before dawn, as he lay among the thousand of corpses.
Still, in time those silences would be broken. The woodland creatures frightened away by the fury of the fighting would return. Birds would sing in the trees again. Cows would low in the bloody grass. The flies would buzz at their feedings.
And the ones that came to claim the dead would call out, when they found a brother or a friend, or stumbled across a body still clinging to life.
But this silence went on without end. Oh, they made noise themselves, as they struggled through three feet or more of heavy new snow. MacLeod and the heathen spoke in hushed, secret tones. Hugh swore as he fell into a deep drift, sunk up to his waist in white. The dogs fussed more than usual as they pulled the sled along, the crack of the whip was more frequent.
But if they stopped, for a rest or a morsel of food, the silence was complete, solid almost, like a thing you could see.
And the weight of that silence was all that there was. No bird nor beast moved across the land. No wolf howl or owl screech broke the stillness.
To Danny it became like one of his silent dreams, a day only half-remembered at night, a night forgotten in the day.
Siwash Sam was worried. After the great storm, the great cold would come. He needed no sticks of glass to tell him this.
Already it had begun. He could feel it himself, feel the bite of the frost on his nose and cheeks. And he could feel it in the tips of his fingers when he took off his gloves to cover his face with a layer of grease.
A man alone would be in grave danger in such weather. If he foundered in the deepest snow, if he broke through ice into even the shallowest of water, if he could not make his hands move to build a fire, he would be dead.
Four men together should be safe, if they took care. He had warned the Scotsman of what was to come. They must keep moving for as long as they could, even past the dying of the light. And when they stopped, they must build a fire big enough to last the night through. Watch must be kept, so that this fire never fell to smoldering coals.
He had passed the pot of grease around to them all. The Englishman sniffed at it and made a face. The Scotsman and the Irishman used it without a word.
Sam grunted in pain as the sled jerked forward. With the cold also came the ice, crusting on the surface of the snow. The dogs slipped and slid on it, their claws chittering like the small mice that hid in the walls of the hogan. Behind him the Irishman stumbled. The ice was thick enough in some places to hold the weight of the sled—and not in others.
Sam knew this would make the going harder. That was the way of the land—it did not easily give up anything, to man or animal. Not the gold beneath the earth, to be sure. But not such simple things as food or shelter—or a safe passage through the wild.
“Blecch.” Fitzcairn said.
Duncan turned from the fire. His friend sat a few feet away. He was wiping furiously at his mouth with the back of his mittened hand.
“Got a taste of that infernal stuff we’re covered with,” he mumbled. Then he spit to one side. A sharp crackle sounded as the spittle hit the snow. The dog Vixen was lying to one side, biting the ice balls from the pads of her feet. She cocked her head at the sound.
“Hah. Fancy that!” he exclaimed. Then he spit again. “Did you hear that MacLeod? How cold must it truly be, do you think, that such a thing would be?” Vixen got up and nosed the two stains on the snow.
“Here, let me show you—”
“I saw it the first time, Fitzcairn. And the second,” Duncan said. “Further demonstrations aren’t necessary.”
“Where’s your spirit of scientific inquiry, man?” Fitzcairn demanded. “Does it not make you wonder what other bodily fluids might be likely to freeze if they were cast upon the bosom of the snow?”
Duncan threw another branch on the fire. “Go spit for Danny, Fitz. Maybe it will impress him.”
Fitz sighed. “What you mean, Highlander, is that maybe it will bring him out of the fog he’s in.”
“He’s not said a word in days, I think.” Duncan hesitated. “I’ll admit that I’ve not had that much experience as a teacher. But even as his friend—are you not worried?”
Fitz rose and looked around. Danny was nowhere to be seen. He had gone off to gather even more fuel for the fire that had to last the night through.
“Tell me, MacLeod.” He gestured into the somber twilight. “What do you see?”
Duncan frowned. “I see snow, Fitz. A goodly lot of it.”
“And do you recall the lovely Miz Benét, when she was trying to discourage us from continuing our quest, saying that some tribe native to this place had two hundred different words to describe snow?”
Duncan nodded. “I thought then that she was—embellishing.”
“Well, for myself, I’ve no interest in learning a one of them. Although I could add a few, none of which could be shared with a lady.” He spit again, emphasizing his words.
“Now, you’ll have to concede that what we have around us is, as you put it, a goodly amount of nothing but snow. And you must further concede that language lessons are not on our agenda, even if conversation were possible, as we make our way, step after interminable step, through this godforsaken land.”
“How cold does it have to be, I wonder, before a man’s mouth freezes shut?” Duncan said.
Fitzcairn ignored him. “But we must somehow occupy our minds along the way. You and I have centuries of memories to sort through. Wine. Women. The odd song here and there.”
“More wine? More women?” Duncan suggested. But Fitz was unstoppable.
“Danny’s not even lived a mortal lifetime yet. So he’s found another way to pass the time.” He paused. “I’ve a good idea what’s occupying him. Trust me, Highlander. It’s nothing to cause concern.”
The young Immortal came into view then, his arms loaded with broken branches. Fitzcairn grinned, blue eyes bright beneath the fur of his ridiculous hat. “Danny, lad,” he called, “I’ve something to show you.” He set off to join him.
“Fifty below,” Siwash Sam said.
Duncan was startled. He’d thought the Indian was sleeping. How much of Fitzcairn’s rant had he heard? How much sense had he made of it?
“What?”
“The water from a man’s mouth freezes when it is fifty below. I have heard the redcoats say that,” Sam answered.
Fifty degrees below zero. That did not bear thinking about. Duncan thought it best not to tell the other two Immortals.
Since the blizzard, their pace had slowed. The ten days that he had estimated were going to stretch into two weeks. Still, if they went on, taking all the cautions that Sam had advised to guard against the bitter cold, they should still reach the fort before food became a serious problem.
Duncan turned back to the fire, warming his hands. He felt a creeping numbness, even through two pairs of gloves. He thought of Claire—he’d not put words on paper since they had left the valley where they had made their strike.
And if he were to do so, if he could take off both pairs of gloves and write a note before his fingers grew stiff and clumsy, what could he say?
He could ask her if one of the two hundred words for snow was “frozen hell.” Or he could write in his argonaut’s report that when it grew colder than could possibly be imagined, spittle turned to ice. No doubt the readers of Silas Witherspoon’s paper, sitting at their breakfast tables in their dressing gowns with their pots of tea and buttered toast would find that fascinating!