A Trail of Fire by Diana Gabaldon Read Free Book Online Page B

smell. Hot pastry, steaming, juicy meat. There was a row of fat little pasties ranged along the sill, covered with a clean cloth in case of birds, but showing plump and rounded through it, the odd spot of gravy soaking through the napkin.
    His mouth watered so fiercely that his salivary glands ached and he had to massage the underside of his jaw to ease the pain.
    It was the first house he’d seen in two days. Once he’d got out of the ravine, he’d circled well away from the mile-castle and eventually struck a small cluster of cottages, where the people were no more understandable, but did give him some food. That had lasted him a little while; beyond that, he’d been surviving on what he could glean from hedges and the odd vegetable patch. He’d found another hamlet, but the folk there had driven him away.
    Once he’d got enough of a grip of himself to think clearly, it became obvious that he needed to go back to the standing stones. Whatever had happened to him had happened there, and if he really was somewhere in the past – and hard as he’d tried to find some alternative explanation, none was forthcoming – then his only chance of getting back where he belonged seemed to lie there, too.
    He’d come well away from the drover’s track, though, seeking food, and as the few people he met didn’t understand him any more than he understood them, he’d had some difficulty in finding his way back to the wall. He thought he was quite close, now, though – the ragged country was beginning to seem familiar, though perhaps that was only delusion.
    Everything else had faded into unimportance, though, when he smelt food.
    He circled the house at a cautious distance, checking for dogs. No dog. Aye, fine, then. He chose an approach from the side, out of view of any of the few windows. Darted swiftly from bush to ploughshare to midden to house, and plastered himself against the grey stone wall, breathing hard – and breathing in that delicious, savoury aroma. Shite, he was drooling. He wiped his sleeve hastily across his mouth, slithered round the corner, and reached out a hand.
    As it happened, the farmstead did boast a dog, which had been attending its absent master in the barn. Both these worthies returning unexpectedly at this point, the dog at once spotted what it assumed to be jiggery-pokery taking place, and gave tongue in an altogether proper manner. Alerted in turn to felonious activity on his premises, the householder instantly joined the affray, armed with a wooden spade, with which he batted Jerry over the head.
    As he staggered back against the wall of the house, he had just wit enough left to notice that the farmwife – now sticking out of her window and shrieking like the Glasgow Express – had knocked one of the pasties to the ground, where it was being devoured by the dog, who wore an expression of piety and rewarded virtue that Jerry found really offensive.
    Then the farmer hit him again, and he stopped being offended.

    It was a well-built byre, the stones fitted carefully and mortared. He wore himself out with shouting and kicking at the door until his gammy leg gave way and he collapsed onto the earthen floor.
    ‘Now bloody what?’ he muttered. He was damp with sweat from his effort, but it was cold in the byre, with that penetrating damp cold peculiar to the British Isles, that seeps into your bones and makes the joints ache. His knee would give him fits in the morning. The air was saturated with the scent of manure and chilled urine. ‘Why would the bloody Jerries want the damn place?’ he said, and sitting up, huddled into his shirt. It was going to be a frigging long night.
    He got up onto his hands and knees and felt carefully round inside the byre, but there was nothing even faintly edible – only a scurf of mouldy hay. Not even the rats would have that; the inside of the place was empty as a drum and silent as a church.
    What had happened to the cows? he wondered. Dead of a plague, eaten,