“Aye. Aye . . . right. Thanks, then,” he added awkwardly.
Roger couldn’t speak, could give him nothing more than the breath of a smile. Then Buck was beside him, plucking urgently at his sleeve and gesturing at the bobbing light, and they set off, awkward and lumbering after the brief cooldown.
Bree . . . He swallowed, fists clenched. He’d got a stone once, he could do it again. . . . But the greater part of his mind was still with the man they had just left by the lake. He looked over his shoulder and saw Jerry beginning to walk, limping badly but resolute, thin shoulders squared under his pale khaki shirt and the end of his scarf fluttering in the rising wind.
Then it all rose up in him. Seized by an urgency greater than any he’d ever known, he turned and ran. Ran heedless of footing, of dark, of Buck’s startled cry behind him.
Jerry heard his footsteps on the grass and whirled round, startled himself. Roger grabbed him by both hands, squeezed them hard enough to make Jerry gasp, and said fiercely, “I love you!”
That was all there was time for—and all he could possibly say. He let go and turned away fast, his boots making a shoof-shoof noise in the dry lake grass. He glanced up the hill, but the light had vanished. Likely it had been someone from the farmhouse, satisfied now that the intruders were gone.
Buck was waiting, shrouded in his cloak and holding Roger’s; he must have dropped it coming down the hill. Buck shook it out and folded it round Roger’s shoulders; Roger’s fingers shook, trying to fasten the brooch.
“Why did ye tell him a daft thing like that?” Buck asked, doing it for him. Buck’s head was bent, not looking at him.
Roger swallowed hard, and his voice came clear but painful, the words like ice shards in his throat.
“Because he isn’t going to make it back. It’s the only chance I’ll ever have. Come on.”
POSTPARTUM
THE NIGHT SHIVERED. The whole night. The ground and the lake, the sky, the dark, the stars, and every particle of his own body. He was scattered, instantly everywhere and part of everything. And part of them. There was one moment of an exaltation too great for fear and then he vanished, his last thought no more than a faint, I am . . . voiced more in hope than declaration.
Roger came back to a blurred knowledge of himself, flat on his back under a clear black sky whose brilliant stars seemed pinpoints now, desperately far away. He missed them, missed being part of the night. Missed, with a brief rending sense of desolation, the two men who’d shared his soul for that blazing moment.
The sound of Buck throwing up returned him to a sense of his body. He was lying in cold, wet grass, half soaked, smelling of mud and old manure, chilled to the bone, and bruised in a number of uncomfortable places.
Buck said something horrible in Gaelic and retched again. He was on his hands and knees a few feet away, a blot on the darkness.
“You all right?” Roger croaked, rolling onto his side. He’d remembered, suddenly, the trouble with Buck’s heart when they’d made their passage at Craigh na Dun. “If your heart’s giving you bother again—”
“If it was, damn-all ye could do about it, is there?” Buck said. He hawked a glob of something nasty into the grass and sat down heavily, wiping his sleeve across his mouth. “Christ, I hate that! Didna ken we’d feel it, this far away.”
“Mmphm.” Roger sat up slowly. He wondered whether Buck had felt the same thing he had, but it didn’t seem the moment for metaphysical discussion. “He’s gone, then.”
“Want me to go and make sure of it?” Buck said disagreeably. “God, my head!”
Roger rose to his feet, staggering a little, and went and got Buck under one arm, levering him to his feet.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go find the horses. We’ll get away a bit, make a wee camp, get some food into you.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I bloody am.” In fact, he was ravenous. Buck swayed but appeared able to stand on his own. Roger released him and turned briefly to look back at the distant lake and the standing stones. For an instant, he recaptured the sense of being part of them, and then it was gone; the gleaming water and the stones were no more than part of the craggy landscape.
There was no way of knowing what time it was, but the night was still pitch-dark by the time they’d retrieved the horses, made their way to a sheltered spot under a cliff face, found water, made fire, and toasted some bannocks to eat with their dried salt herring.
They didn’t talk, both exhausted. Roger pushed away the obvious “So now what?” and let his thoughts come randomly as they would; time enough for plans tomorrow.
After a bit, Buck got up abruptly and went off into the dark. He stayed gone for some time, during which time Roger sat gazing into the fire, replaying every moment he’d spent with Jerry MacKenzie in his mind, trying to fix it all. He wished passionately that it had been daylight, that he’d been able to see more of his father’s face than the brief glimpses he’d had in the beam of the dark lantern.
Whatever his regrets, though, and the cold knowledge that Jerry wouldn’t make it back—or not back to where he’d started from, at least (God, what if he ended up lost in yet another strange time? Was that possible?)—there was the one small, warm thing. He’d said it. And wherever his father had gone, he’d carry that with him.
He wrapped himself in his cloak, lay down by the embers of the fire, and carried it with him into sleep.
WHEN ROGER WOKE in the morning, thickheaded but feeling reasonably okay, Buck had already built up the fire and was frying bacon. The smell of it got Roger into a sitting position, rubbing the last of the sleep from his eyes.