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tweagueAaaaaaand while you're all still reeling from that, here's some more fic!!! Fairly short and fairly pointless however, so it could be worse. I've been prodding the tumblr 12 Days of Christmas prompts fest in a vague sort of way - I'm not sure I'm going to try to take part officially or necessarily every day, and some of the prompts I'm going to be filling late as they're part of gift fics I'm writing for Christmas - but I thought I'd fill some as and when I felt in the mood for it, in a low stress sort of way.
Which is of course why I was on the discord channel two days ago yowling atysande in her DMs that I didn't have any inspiration for day one. She suggested I just Whump Gimlet More And Harder, which I am entirely down with, and also that I dunk him in an icy river for a bit. We aim to please. Written at extreme speed and largely unedited, we die like Young Elizabethans.
Day/Prompt(s): Day 1 ❄️ First snow ❄️ Getting soaked ❄️ “Your hands are so cold.” ❄️ “I suppose it all started with the snow.” —Frosty the Snowman
Title: Water Like A Stone
Characters: Bertie Lissie, Lorrington 'Gimlet' King
Rating: G
Words: c.4k
He ought to stay where he was - he knew that perfectly well. If lost in an unfamiliar place but basically safe, the best thing to do was to stay put, especially when with someone who knew the ground a lot better than you did and knew where you’d be waiting. So stay put he would.
“Lorry old scout, if you’ve got yourself into trouble again - “ Bertie called, disconsolately.
It had been nearly half an hour. The light was definitely fading now.
Bertie sighed. “Oh, bother.”
The weather had come down without any warning, or at any rate any warning that Bertie had been able to spot. One minute heather and furze rolling away in all directions, a landscape brown and green and purple spattered with snow under a cool grey sky; the next, mist, thick as a London smog, the kind where you couldn’t see the pavement at your feet, let alone the other side of the road.
The worst of it was they’d been out alone, without beaters or gamekeeper, because they hadn’t been planning to shoot that day - only to tread out the ground a bit, familiarise themselves with the lie of the land. It was only the third or fourth time Gimlet had visited the newly inherited estate, after all, and the grouse moors were still about as much in need of putting in order as the hunting lodge. Still, Bertie had thought, he rather liked the place in its dilapidated state, with its tangle of gorse where the moor hadn’t been burned for years, with its red kites hanging overhead and the occasional flash and flutter of a sparrowhawk, untroubled by keepers.
He changed his mind a bit after the fog came down. You could at least walk a moor that was regularly burned: now he couldn’t see the narrow sheep and deer tracks, couldn’t see the twist of roots and the knotted tangles of branches that clawed at his legs, grabbed at his feet, sent him tripping and stumbling; and it didn’t take him long to realise that he was utterly, hopelessly lost.
And that Gimlet wasn’t with him.
They hadn’t been far apart, he was certain of it. Gimlet had just scrambled down into one of the narrow gorges which had been worn by the rain and flowing water, certain he’d seen the flash of a poacher’s snare, leaving Bertie on the hillside above; and then five minutes later the fog had come down. And Bertie had called, and shouted, and surely they weren’t far apart, surely a hail would carry miles over this sort of open country, but perhaps it was the deadening blanket of the fog, the drift of moisture in the air, because he couldn’t hear a damned thing.
“Lorry!” he shouted, feeling like ten thousand kinds of fool. “Look here, if you know the way back to the lodge from here I’d be confoundedly glad if you’d pop up and tell me it. I’m liable to start sprouting fungus if we stay here much longer.”
His words seemed to drop into nothingness, like shouting into a sack; he shivered, and pulled his overcoat up around his throat. Coming in perishing cold, too, probably more snow on its way, and getting worryingly dim. Only a week past the shortest day, and the light faded early. If the fog hadn’t lifted by the time night fell -
Well. There was the caretaker and his wife up at the lodge. If they hadn’t made it back by nightfall there was a good chance they’d get up a search-party and come after them.
A fair chance, at any rate.
Better than fifty-fifty.
Probably.
“Lorry!” he shouted again.
He ought to stay where he was - he knew that perfectly well. If lost in an unfamiliar place but basically safe, the best thing to do was to stay put, especially when with someone who knew the ground a lot better than you did and knew where you’d be waiting. So stay put he would.
He could hear the trickle of water, down in the little gorge. In some ways it was a comfortable thing - at least it was a noise, in this world of utter, deadening silence. But in others -
“Lorry old scout, if you’ve got yourself into trouble again - “ Bertie called, disconsolately.
It had been nearly half an hour. The light was definitely fading now.
Bertie sighed. “Oh, bother.”
The scramble down into the gully wasn’t too bad, as it turned out - assuming he’d made it into the right gully, of course, for it seemed more than likely there’d be more than one in this beastly death-trap of a moor. He just walked down in the direction that seemed the steepest, and kept going until his foot went into a scree of scrub and loose pebbles, and down the slope he went with a rush and a clatter, steadying himself against tough twists of heather root anywhere he could catch at them to slow his descent. He splashed into ankle-deep water at the bottom, and blessed his tough walking boots, because even through the thick leather he could feel that the burn was like ice.
“Lorrington King, you are a wretched, perishing nuisance,” he shouted, loudly, as he clambered along the bottom of the gully, working more by touch than by sight, scrambling over small rocks and large ones and splashing through the shallow water. “If this is the sort of hospitality I can expect at Strathcarglas Lodge then you can bally well count me out next year. I’d rather have Christmas at home.”
He stood for a minute to catch his breath, listen for a response.
Nothing.
“Well, all right, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” he went on, stomping on again, not quite certain if he was hoping for a response or just longing for something other than the sound of his own feet, his own breath, the noise of the water growing louder. “Frankly another Christmas like the one I’ve just had might see me off entirely. But that doesn’t mean you just get to load me up with horrors here too, just to see how long it takes before I finally succumb to nervous exhaustion.”
He stopped, again. The water noise was definitely louder, now, and seemed to come from ahead, not just from the burn at his feet. And was that - ?
“Lorry!” he shouted again, louder, and broke into a stumbling run, water splashing up around his feet, soaking the bottoms of his trousers.
“Here!” came the answer, faint and far ahead it seemed; and faint not just from distance, he thought. King was never one of life’s bellowers, but he sounded - somehow unlike himself.
“All right, I’m on my way,” he shouted. “Keep calling. I’ll come to you.”
“Take care,” came the reply. “The river - “
“All right, old thing, I’ll keep my eyes peeled. Keep calling.”
He followed the voice, stumbling and tripping down the gully, as the noise of running water got louder, and managed to just pull himself up in time as the stream suddenly plunged off into nothingness, dropping over black slippery rock in a white rush off foam, and down below the sound of water dropping into water.
“Do you know how big the drop is?” he shouted.
“Not - not sure - “ came the voice from the fog, and he still couldn’t see him, not a sign, though his voice sounded as though Bertie could reach out and touch him, close enough to hear the shake and quaver of it. “C-came a bit of a cropper over it. Can’t be more than - a few feet though - don’t think it did me much harm - “
“All right, old lad, be with you in half a jiffy,” Bertie said, reassuringly as he could. Instead of going over the slick black stone, he scrambled down at the side, amongst the tangle of ancient gorse bushes that tore at his clothes, scratched at his skin, caught at his hair; but it brought him down safe, down on the bank of what seemed to be a fair sized river, broad but not too deep, boulder-strewn, swift with winter spate.
“How’s the water?” he called.
“F-fine,” Gimlet called back. “Getting in’s the worst bit. Positively cosy once you’re used to it.”
“I meant how deep, old thing.”
“N-not more than a foot or two, unless you hit a deep pool.”
“I’ll try to stick to the shallow bits then,” said Bertie, grimly taking off shoes and socks and trousers and overcoat. It would be hell while he was in, but he’d need them dry later.
It was hell: absolute unmitigated hell, and he actually yelped with the discomfort of it, unable to hold it back. It felt like the skin being taken off his feet. “My God, Lorry, how long have you been paddling in this muck?” he managed as he waded through the shallowest patches he could find.
“Not - not sure,” came the answer, and Bertie could quite understand why he sounded so faint and strange now, his teeth must be chattering so hard he could hardly get the words out. “Thought - thought I might have to paddle in it for a jolly sight longer, to be quite honest.”
And Bertie wondered whether Gimlet was doing exactly as he was - forcing the words out, even through chattering teeth, because staying quiet in the silence and the freezing wet was just unendurable. “Whatever possessed you to choose today for a dip?” he managed; and there, he could see something now, a dark hummock of something in the fog -
“Didn’t - seem to have much choice in the matter -”
And it was him - half sitting, half lying in the freezing water, soaked to the bone, hair plastered to his head, face so pinched and white with cold it seemed to gleam in the dimness, pushed half up against a tumbled mess of boulders and large rocks, the water flowing up around him to the waist.
“Came over that junior Niagara, did you?” Bertie murmured, taking hold of the gloved hand that Gimlet had stretched out to him, almost unconsciously; felt the clumsy, faint grip of it on his own, felt the shake of it.
“Didn’t spot it until I went over it,” Gimlet managed. “Brought a heap of rocks down with me too. Can’t - can’t get my foot clear. Damn fool thing to do. Four years blowing up large areas of France and get felled by a rock on my own bally estate - ”
“All right, old lad, we’ll apportion blame later,” Bertie soothed. “Let me see if I can’t work you free.”
“I couldn’t shift it,” Gimlet managed. “Bertie, you might need to go for help.”
“Let’s see what we can manage with a little brute force and ignorance first, shall we?” said Bertie, cheerfully. “That’s my speciality after all.”
He didn’t say - he didn’t need to say - that leaving Gimlet in the frigid river for as long as it would probably take to blunder his way back to what passed locally for civilisation and get help would probably kill him.
He went and looked at the dark spill of boulders against which the water foamed white in the fading daylight. There was no way Gimlet had brought them all down with him, some couldn’t have shifted in generations of winter flooding; he must have come down amongst them, bringing a few extras with him, leg caught between these two big ones here and the fresh fall holding him in place -
“They’re pretty well wedged in on this side,” he said, feeling the weight of one of the upper ones, seeing if it would tip. “That’s why you couldn’t shift it from there. I think if I can come at it from the other side I’ll be able to move it. Sit tight while I find something to use.”
“If you think - I’d be sitting tight for a second longer than I had to - “
“That’s right, old boy, work up a little light annoyance, it’ll help keep you warm.” His own teeth were chattering now, and his toes had already gone numb, which was probably a blessing. “Two shakes of a lamb’s tail, you wait.”
Well, perhaps not two, but not more than about twenty: he didn’t have to blunder in the fog further than the inside of the next bend of the river before he found an old fence-post, washed down from some farmer’s croft upstream. And at least there was this about paddling about in a freezing river in a pea-souper in the twilight, he thought grimly as he hefted the stout wooden stake in fingers gone stiff with cold: at least you couldn’t get lost.
“Bertie?”
“Right here, old thing. Brought the cavalry, or closest equivalent I could find in this beastly ditch. You still with me?”
“Nowhere - better to be.”
“What on earth possessed you to tramp all the way down here?” Bertie inquired, squatting down to eye the pile of stones. If he could fix up a fulcrum here, insert the sharpened tip of the post under that stone - if Lorry’s ankle wasn’t jammed right between that uncomfortable-looking outcropping and the stone he was trying to move - “Doesn’t seem to me like an ideal spot for a ramble, especially in the weather. Or did you just fancy ten minutes’ peace and quiet?”
“Chance’d - be a fine thing - ”
The noise of the thunder of water was almost louder than his voice now. “Come on, old lad, keep me entertained. Tell me why you came down this way.”
“I - found an otter trap. Up the burn. Wanted - wanted to check there weren’t any more downstream. After - after the p-pelts, I expect. Or m-maybe those blighters from the hotel, wanting - wanting to see them off the fish stocks - have the procurator fiscal on them, coming on my land, t-trapping my otters - ”
Bertie heaved on the makeshift lever, and Gimlet’s words cut off abruptly.
“All right?” Bertie gasped, pushing with all his strength, willing the stone to move -
“All - all right,” came the reply.
And with a final effort the stone toppled, and Bertie dropped the post with a clatter, and scrambled up towards his friend. “How’s that?”
“Bally f-foot’s so numb I didn’t feel a thing.”
“Thank heavens for small mercies, eh?” said Bertie, shoving the smaller stones aside, feeling for the line of his leg through the sodden tweed, feeling for bones through the skin - “Can you move it, old man? Don’t want to jolt you, but I don’t think we should spend a second more in this charming plunge pool of yours than we have to.”
A twitch; a flex of the muscle. “Might - might need a hand.”
“Rather thought you might,” said Bertie, cheerfully, though hearing Gimlet admitting to any such thing came as something of a shock. He put one arm around his friend’s back, pulled one of Gimlet’s arms over his shoulders and held on to hand and waist and firmly hauled him to his feet. Half his weight seemed to be sodden wool, not him at all. “Come on. Up with you. Awfully good luck really - the rocks coming down on your bad leg. Dashed difficult to limp on both sides at once, and I should know.”
He could feel the shaking all through him now, and he told himself that was good, that meant his body was still trying to warm itself, not shutting down in shock.
“W-why aren’t you wearing any trousers?” Gimlet managed.
“Didn’t want to get the cuffs all muddy,” said Bertie. “Thought you’d approve.”
Gimlet nodded, shortly. “Good - good show,” he said, and settled against Bertie’s side.
When they made it to the bank Bertie picked up his coat, tried to wrap it around Gimlet’s shoulders; but Gimlet pushed it away with a hand that shook. “Not - not yet. Keep it dry. Won’t - won’t come to much harm in the next five minutes or so.”
“You know, Lorry old thing, I always defend you when other people say you’re round the twist,” said Bertie, through gritted teeth. “But I’m beginning to have my doubts. We’re not getting anywhere more hospitable than this in the next five minutes. Best we can hope for is a nice gorse bush to shelter under until morning, so put the blasted coat on.”
Gimlet shook his head, stubbornly. “My - bally estate. Might not know it like Lorrington yet, b-but know it better than you do. There’s a bothy - not more than five minutes from here. North-east. Can’t m-miss it.”
“We blinking well can miss it in this fog,” Bertie exclaimed. “We could miss it by ten metres and it might as well be a mile.”
“Worth a try,” said Gimlet, and there was still that ridiculous stubborn certainty in his voice that Bertie knew better than to argue with. “‘m not sleeping in these - m-muddy things unless I have to.”
So Bertie shoved his feet wet into his boots, shoved the socks in his pocket, put the overcoat and the trousers - blessedly dry, blessedly warm, not being used because Lorrington King was a blessed idiot - over his arm, and set his teeth, and set-to to haul his friend up the slippery bank and out into the fog of the darkening moor.
And of course, because it was Lorrington King, and because the world tended to rearrange itself around King’s expectations rather than trying to argue with him about them, they found the bothy in around four and a half minutes.
“One day, old man, your luck is going to wear out,” Bertie managed, forcing the stiff door open with his shoulder.
“W-with your luck, you’ll be there to see it,” Gimlet replied; and Bertie deposited him, unceremoniously, on the floor next to the stove so he didn’t soak the bed, and lit the stub of candle from the box of matches, and silently thanked his lucky stars, because if it hadn’t been for this blessed bothy then there was a good chance one or both of them wouldn’t have seen the morning.
“Can you get out of your kit?” he asked, piling kindling into the stove with shaking hands. A fire first, then clothes as dry as they could make them, food if there was any to be had, and a horrible weight had lifted, because they were inside, a door between them and the night and the fog and the terrible cold of the river.
“Of course - “ said Gimlet, but his hands were trembling so much he couldn’t even get his gloves off, though of course that didn’t stop him from trying.
Bertie put a light to the newspaper and curls of birch bark which served for firelighters; let himself watch, for a moment, as the flames took hold, because there was nothing that put heart into you like a fire; then turned to Gimlet and patiently began to extract him from the wet leather of the gloves.
“Can - manage,” Gimlet muttered.
“Of course you can,” said Bertie, steadily. “But I got dashed good at valeting for myself during the war. Wouldn’t want to let the old skills atrophy.”
Gloves off, fingers like ice underneath, blue-white even in the orange gleam of firelight, and he absent-mindedly tucked the first hand under his arm while he worked on freeing the second, and Gimlet didn’t complain, for a wonder. Coat off, soaked through entirely, and he dropped it on the floor by the door as it’d need wringing out before it was worth hanging up to dry. Jacket next, pullover, shirt, vest, peeling him out of layer after layer like an onion from its silken skins, leaving him white and chill and shivering. The fire was going well now, crackling and spitting, and he could feel the warmth of it going through him, soothing the shudder of his muscles, making it easier to strip off his own relatively dry jacket and shirt.
“Don’t - don’t need all your things,” said Gimlet, still in that faint, unnatural voice. “Coat’ll do me.”
“Fair shares,” Bertie said, firmly. “One for you, one for me. Know you’ve been longing for a look at who makes my shirts for years, anyway.”
And Gimlet pulled the shirt on, and Bertie’s dry coat over the top, disappearing into them in that way that always startled Bertie: realising he was the taller by half a head and broader in proportion, still, just as he had been when they were boys. He’d always rather assumed King would overtake him one day.
Boots, socks, trousers next, stripping them off legs clammy and cold to the touch; and he passed him his own dry socks, his own tweed trousers, and helped him pull them on, and Gimlet didn’t say a word.
“Plenty of growth-space left in them, anyway,” Bertie said, brightly. Then, quietly, “Still with me, old man?”
“S-still with you,” said Gimlet.
“Up onto the bed then. Get the blankets up round you, and I’ll see what I can scare up by way of provender.”
And Gimlet went, meek as a lamb, and climbed under the rough woollen blankets, and didn’t pass a single remark about ticks or lice or muddy boot marks.
Bertie went and poked in the little cupboard that had been hung on the wall, and found a packet of biscuits, jam, a slab of military-ration chocolate, best not to enquire from where.
“My word, this is a surprisingly snug billet,” he remarked. “Good thing they keep it well stocked.”
“Wages of virtue,” said Gimlet. “Second time I’ve ended up in one of these blessed bothies after doing myself a mischief. After the first time I m-made sure to keep all the places on the estate up to scratch. Good thing I did.” He paused; pulled the blankets higher. “Starting to f-feel like Scotland might not be the healthiest of p-places for me.”
“Lorry old boy, if you took against every country where you’d ever come a hair’s breadth from death and dismemberment, you’d probably be left with Liechtenstein and not a lot else,” said Bertie, and passed him the chocolate. “Here. One piece at a time.”
Outside, for just long enough to wring out the wet things; back inside, door slammed shut, and hung them on pegs on the wall close to the stove. Turves of peat from a basket, piled on top of the fire, to catch and smolder and hold the heat until morning. Then he toed off his boots; clambered into the narrow bed, so he was between Gimlet and the chill of the wooden wall.
Gimlet pushed the half bar of chocolate towards him. “F-fair shares.”
“Right you are, old boy,” Bertie said, and polished off the rest, while Gimlet lay down, and pulled the covers to his chin, and looked at the fire, still shuddering with cold.
He put his arm across his friend’s waist; burrowing under the rough blanket; tucking himself against the sharp angles of Gimlet’s back, trying to surround the smaller man.
“Bertie - “
“I know, old thing, but put up with it for the moment, all right?”
“N-not that, ass. Just - rather thought I might have come a cropper for a while there. Inglorious end of a glorious career and all that.”
“Oh, well, I’m the expert at inglorious accidents, old boy. Absolute martyr to them. Best not to dwell on them afterwards, never got anyone anywhere to go about beratin’ oneself.”
He was still shivering, Bertie could feel, shivering in that bone-deep way that would take hours to ease, and probably in the morning when the fog lifted and Bertie could go for help he’d need to hunt up a doctor, a way to get him down to the nearest hospital, check nothing had gone badly awry; but he was still making sense, and he was here, and Bertie could begin to fancy that the back pressed to his chest was warming a little; and that would do for now.
“Thanks all the same,” said Gimlet, into the quiet.
Bertie tightened his arm, just a fraction. “Any time, old man.”
Which is of course why I was on the discord channel two days ago yowling at
ysande in her DMs that I didn't have any inspiration for day one. She suggested I just Whump Gimlet More And Harder, which I am entirely down with, and also that I dunk him in an icy river for a bit. We aim to please. Written at extreme speed and largely unedited, we die like Young Elizabethans.Day/Prompt(s): Day 1 ❄️ First snow ❄️ Getting soaked ❄️ “Your hands are so cold.” ❄️ “I suppose it all started with the snow.” —Frosty the Snowman
Title: Water Like A Stone
Characters: Bertie Lissie, Lorrington 'Gimlet' King
Rating: G
Words: c.4k
He ought to stay where he was - he knew that perfectly well. If lost in an unfamiliar place but basically safe, the best thing to do was to stay put, especially when with someone who knew the ground a lot better than you did and knew where you’d be waiting. So stay put he would.
“Lorry old scout, if you’ve got yourself into trouble again - “ Bertie called, disconsolately.
It had been nearly half an hour. The light was definitely fading now.
Bertie sighed. “Oh, bother.”
The weather had come down without any warning, or at any rate any warning that Bertie had been able to spot. One minute heather and furze rolling away in all directions, a landscape brown and green and purple spattered with snow under a cool grey sky; the next, mist, thick as a London smog, the kind where you couldn’t see the pavement at your feet, let alone the other side of the road.
The worst of it was they’d been out alone, without beaters or gamekeeper, because they hadn’t been planning to shoot that day - only to tread out the ground a bit, familiarise themselves with the lie of the land. It was only the third or fourth time Gimlet had visited the newly inherited estate, after all, and the grouse moors were still about as much in need of putting in order as the hunting lodge. Still, Bertie had thought, he rather liked the place in its dilapidated state, with its tangle of gorse where the moor hadn’t been burned for years, with its red kites hanging overhead and the occasional flash and flutter of a sparrowhawk, untroubled by keepers.
He changed his mind a bit after the fog came down. You could at least walk a moor that was regularly burned: now he couldn’t see the narrow sheep and deer tracks, couldn’t see the twist of roots and the knotted tangles of branches that clawed at his legs, grabbed at his feet, sent him tripping and stumbling; and it didn’t take him long to realise that he was utterly, hopelessly lost.
And that Gimlet wasn’t with him.
They hadn’t been far apart, he was certain of it. Gimlet had just scrambled down into one of the narrow gorges which had been worn by the rain and flowing water, certain he’d seen the flash of a poacher’s snare, leaving Bertie on the hillside above; and then five minutes later the fog had come down. And Bertie had called, and shouted, and surely they weren’t far apart, surely a hail would carry miles over this sort of open country, but perhaps it was the deadening blanket of the fog, the drift of moisture in the air, because he couldn’t hear a damned thing.
“Lorry!” he shouted, feeling like ten thousand kinds of fool. “Look here, if you know the way back to the lodge from here I’d be confoundedly glad if you’d pop up and tell me it. I’m liable to start sprouting fungus if we stay here much longer.”
His words seemed to drop into nothingness, like shouting into a sack; he shivered, and pulled his overcoat up around his throat. Coming in perishing cold, too, probably more snow on its way, and getting worryingly dim. Only a week past the shortest day, and the light faded early. If the fog hadn’t lifted by the time night fell -
Well. There was the caretaker and his wife up at the lodge. If they hadn’t made it back by nightfall there was a good chance they’d get up a search-party and come after them.
A fair chance, at any rate.
Better than fifty-fifty.
Probably.
“Lorry!” he shouted again.
He ought to stay where he was - he knew that perfectly well. If lost in an unfamiliar place but basically safe, the best thing to do was to stay put, especially when with someone who knew the ground a lot better than you did and knew where you’d be waiting. So stay put he would.
He could hear the trickle of water, down in the little gorge. In some ways it was a comfortable thing - at least it was a noise, in this world of utter, deadening silence. But in others -
“Lorry old scout, if you’ve got yourself into trouble again - “ Bertie called, disconsolately.
It had been nearly half an hour. The light was definitely fading now.
Bertie sighed. “Oh, bother.”
The scramble down into the gully wasn’t too bad, as it turned out - assuming he’d made it into the right gully, of course, for it seemed more than likely there’d be more than one in this beastly death-trap of a moor. He just walked down in the direction that seemed the steepest, and kept going until his foot went into a scree of scrub and loose pebbles, and down the slope he went with a rush and a clatter, steadying himself against tough twists of heather root anywhere he could catch at them to slow his descent. He splashed into ankle-deep water at the bottom, and blessed his tough walking boots, because even through the thick leather he could feel that the burn was like ice.
“Lorrington King, you are a wretched, perishing nuisance,” he shouted, loudly, as he clambered along the bottom of the gully, working more by touch than by sight, scrambling over small rocks and large ones and splashing through the shallow water. “If this is the sort of hospitality I can expect at Strathcarglas Lodge then you can bally well count me out next year. I’d rather have Christmas at home.”
He stood for a minute to catch his breath, listen for a response.
Nothing.
“Well, all right, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” he went on, stomping on again, not quite certain if he was hoping for a response or just longing for something other than the sound of his own feet, his own breath, the noise of the water growing louder. “Frankly another Christmas like the one I’ve just had might see me off entirely. But that doesn’t mean you just get to load me up with horrors here too, just to see how long it takes before I finally succumb to nervous exhaustion.”
He stopped, again. The water noise was definitely louder, now, and seemed to come from ahead, not just from the burn at his feet. And was that - ?
“Lorry!” he shouted again, louder, and broke into a stumbling run, water splashing up around his feet, soaking the bottoms of his trousers.
“Here!” came the answer, faint and far ahead it seemed; and faint not just from distance, he thought. King was never one of life’s bellowers, but he sounded - somehow unlike himself.
“All right, I’m on my way,” he shouted. “Keep calling. I’ll come to you.”
“Take care,” came the reply. “The river - “
“All right, old thing, I’ll keep my eyes peeled. Keep calling.”
He followed the voice, stumbling and tripping down the gully, as the noise of running water got louder, and managed to just pull himself up in time as the stream suddenly plunged off into nothingness, dropping over black slippery rock in a white rush off foam, and down below the sound of water dropping into water.
“Do you know how big the drop is?” he shouted.
“Not - not sure - “ came the voice from the fog, and he still couldn’t see him, not a sign, though his voice sounded as though Bertie could reach out and touch him, close enough to hear the shake and quaver of it. “C-came a bit of a cropper over it. Can’t be more than - a few feet though - don’t think it did me much harm - “
“All right, old lad, be with you in half a jiffy,” Bertie said, reassuringly as he could. Instead of going over the slick black stone, he scrambled down at the side, amongst the tangle of ancient gorse bushes that tore at his clothes, scratched at his skin, caught at his hair; but it brought him down safe, down on the bank of what seemed to be a fair sized river, broad but not too deep, boulder-strewn, swift with winter spate.
“How’s the water?” he called.
“F-fine,” Gimlet called back. “Getting in’s the worst bit. Positively cosy once you’re used to it.”
“I meant how deep, old thing.”
“N-not more than a foot or two, unless you hit a deep pool.”
“I’ll try to stick to the shallow bits then,” said Bertie, grimly taking off shoes and socks and trousers and overcoat. It would be hell while he was in, but he’d need them dry later.
It was hell: absolute unmitigated hell, and he actually yelped with the discomfort of it, unable to hold it back. It felt like the skin being taken off his feet. “My God, Lorry, how long have you been paddling in this muck?” he managed as he waded through the shallowest patches he could find.
“Not - not sure,” came the answer, and Bertie could quite understand why he sounded so faint and strange now, his teeth must be chattering so hard he could hardly get the words out. “Thought - thought I might have to paddle in it for a jolly sight longer, to be quite honest.”
And Bertie wondered whether Gimlet was doing exactly as he was - forcing the words out, even through chattering teeth, because staying quiet in the silence and the freezing wet was just unendurable. “Whatever possessed you to choose today for a dip?” he managed; and there, he could see something now, a dark hummock of something in the fog -
“Didn’t - seem to have much choice in the matter -”
And it was him - half sitting, half lying in the freezing water, soaked to the bone, hair plastered to his head, face so pinched and white with cold it seemed to gleam in the dimness, pushed half up against a tumbled mess of boulders and large rocks, the water flowing up around him to the waist.
“Came over that junior Niagara, did you?” Bertie murmured, taking hold of the gloved hand that Gimlet had stretched out to him, almost unconsciously; felt the clumsy, faint grip of it on his own, felt the shake of it.
“Didn’t spot it until I went over it,” Gimlet managed. “Brought a heap of rocks down with me too. Can’t - can’t get my foot clear. Damn fool thing to do. Four years blowing up large areas of France and get felled by a rock on my own bally estate - ”
“All right, old lad, we’ll apportion blame later,” Bertie soothed. “Let me see if I can’t work you free.”
“I couldn’t shift it,” Gimlet managed. “Bertie, you might need to go for help.”
“Let’s see what we can manage with a little brute force and ignorance first, shall we?” said Bertie, cheerfully. “That’s my speciality after all.”
He didn’t say - he didn’t need to say - that leaving Gimlet in the frigid river for as long as it would probably take to blunder his way back to what passed locally for civilisation and get help would probably kill him.
He went and looked at the dark spill of boulders against which the water foamed white in the fading daylight. There was no way Gimlet had brought them all down with him, some couldn’t have shifted in generations of winter flooding; he must have come down amongst them, bringing a few extras with him, leg caught between these two big ones here and the fresh fall holding him in place -
“They’re pretty well wedged in on this side,” he said, feeling the weight of one of the upper ones, seeing if it would tip. “That’s why you couldn’t shift it from there. I think if I can come at it from the other side I’ll be able to move it. Sit tight while I find something to use.”
“If you think - I’d be sitting tight for a second longer than I had to - “
“That’s right, old boy, work up a little light annoyance, it’ll help keep you warm.” His own teeth were chattering now, and his toes had already gone numb, which was probably a blessing. “Two shakes of a lamb’s tail, you wait.”
Well, perhaps not two, but not more than about twenty: he didn’t have to blunder in the fog further than the inside of the next bend of the river before he found an old fence-post, washed down from some farmer’s croft upstream. And at least there was this about paddling about in a freezing river in a pea-souper in the twilight, he thought grimly as he hefted the stout wooden stake in fingers gone stiff with cold: at least you couldn’t get lost.
“Bertie?”
“Right here, old thing. Brought the cavalry, or closest equivalent I could find in this beastly ditch. You still with me?”
“Nowhere - better to be.”
“What on earth possessed you to tramp all the way down here?” Bertie inquired, squatting down to eye the pile of stones. If he could fix up a fulcrum here, insert the sharpened tip of the post under that stone - if Lorry’s ankle wasn’t jammed right between that uncomfortable-looking outcropping and the stone he was trying to move - “Doesn’t seem to me like an ideal spot for a ramble, especially in the weather. Or did you just fancy ten minutes’ peace and quiet?”
“Chance’d - be a fine thing - ”
The noise of the thunder of water was almost louder than his voice now. “Come on, old lad, keep me entertained. Tell me why you came down this way.”
“I - found an otter trap. Up the burn. Wanted - wanted to check there weren’t any more downstream. After - after the p-pelts, I expect. Or m-maybe those blighters from the hotel, wanting - wanting to see them off the fish stocks - have the procurator fiscal on them, coming on my land, t-trapping my otters - ”
Bertie heaved on the makeshift lever, and Gimlet’s words cut off abruptly.
“All right?” Bertie gasped, pushing with all his strength, willing the stone to move -
“All - all right,” came the reply.
And with a final effort the stone toppled, and Bertie dropped the post with a clatter, and scrambled up towards his friend. “How’s that?”
“Bally f-foot’s so numb I didn’t feel a thing.”
“Thank heavens for small mercies, eh?” said Bertie, shoving the smaller stones aside, feeling for the line of his leg through the sodden tweed, feeling for bones through the skin - “Can you move it, old man? Don’t want to jolt you, but I don’t think we should spend a second more in this charming plunge pool of yours than we have to.”
A twitch; a flex of the muscle. “Might - might need a hand.”
“Rather thought you might,” said Bertie, cheerfully, though hearing Gimlet admitting to any such thing came as something of a shock. He put one arm around his friend’s back, pulled one of Gimlet’s arms over his shoulders and held on to hand and waist and firmly hauled him to his feet. Half his weight seemed to be sodden wool, not him at all. “Come on. Up with you. Awfully good luck really - the rocks coming down on your bad leg. Dashed difficult to limp on both sides at once, and I should know.”
He could feel the shaking all through him now, and he told himself that was good, that meant his body was still trying to warm itself, not shutting down in shock.
“W-why aren’t you wearing any trousers?” Gimlet managed.
“Didn’t want to get the cuffs all muddy,” said Bertie. “Thought you’d approve.”
Gimlet nodded, shortly. “Good - good show,” he said, and settled against Bertie’s side.
When they made it to the bank Bertie picked up his coat, tried to wrap it around Gimlet’s shoulders; but Gimlet pushed it away with a hand that shook. “Not - not yet. Keep it dry. Won’t - won’t come to much harm in the next five minutes or so.”
“You know, Lorry old thing, I always defend you when other people say you’re round the twist,” said Bertie, through gritted teeth. “But I’m beginning to have my doubts. We’re not getting anywhere more hospitable than this in the next five minutes. Best we can hope for is a nice gorse bush to shelter under until morning, so put the blasted coat on.”
Gimlet shook his head, stubbornly. “My - bally estate. Might not know it like Lorrington yet, b-but know it better than you do. There’s a bothy - not more than five minutes from here. North-east. Can’t m-miss it.”
“We blinking well can miss it in this fog,” Bertie exclaimed. “We could miss it by ten metres and it might as well be a mile.”
“Worth a try,” said Gimlet, and there was still that ridiculous stubborn certainty in his voice that Bertie knew better than to argue with. “‘m not sleeping in these - m-muddy things unless I have to.”
So Bertie shoved his feet wet into his boots, shoved the socks in his pocket, put the overcoat and the trousers - blessedly dry, blessedly warm, not being used because Lorrington King was a blessed idiot - over his arm, and set his teeth, and set-to to haul his friend up the slippery bank and out into the fog of the darkening moor.
And of course, because it was Lorrington King, and because the world tended to rearrange itself around King’s expectations rather than trying to argue with him about them, they found the bothy in around four and a half minutes.
“One day, old man, your luck is going to wear out,” Bertie managed, forcing the stiff door open with his shoulder.
“W-with your luck, you’ll be there to see it,” Gimlet replied; and Bertie deposited him, unceremoniously, on the floor next to the stove so he didn’t soak the bed, and lit the stub of candle from the box of matches, and silently thanked his lucky stars, because if it hadn’t been for this blessed bothy then there was a good chance one or both of them wouldn’t have seen the morning.
“Can you get out of your kit?” he asked, piling kindling into the stove with shaking hands. A fire first, then clothes as dry as they could make them, food if there was any to be had, and a horrible weight had lifted, because they were inside, a door between them and the night and the fog and the terrible cold of the river.
“Of course - “ said Gimlet, but his hands were trembling so much he couldn’t even get his gloves off, though of course that didn’t stop him from trying.
Bertie put a light to the newspaper and curls of birch bark which served for firelighters; let himself watch, for a moment, as the flames took hold, because there was nothing that put heart into you like a fire; then turned to Gimlet and patiently began to extract him from the wet leather of the gloves.
“Can - manage,” Gimlet muttered.
“Of course you can,” said Bertie, steadily. “But I got dashed good at valeting for myself during the war. Wouldn’t want to let the old skills atrophy.”
Gloves off, fingers like ice underneath, blue-white even in the orange gleam of firelight, and he absent-mindedly tucked the first hand under his arm while he worked on freeing the second, and Gimlet didn’t complain, for a wonder. Coat off, soaked through entirely, and he dropped it on the floor by the door as it’d need wringing out before it was worth hanging up to dry. Jacket next, pullover, shirt, vest, peeling him out of layer after layer like an onion from its silken skins, leaving him white and chill and shivering. The fire was going well now, crackling and spitting, and he could feel the warmth of it going through him, soothing the shudder of his muscles, making it easier to strip off his own relatively dry jacket and shirt.
“Don’t - don’t need all your things,” said Gimlet, still in that faint, unnatural voice. “Coat’ll do me.”
“Fair shares,” Bertie said, firmly. “One for you, one for me. Know you’ve been longing for a look at who makes my shirts for years, anyway.”
And Gimlet pulled the shirt on, and Bertie’s dry coat over the top, disappearing into them in that way that always startled Bertie: realising he was the taller by half a head and broader in proportion, still, just as he had been when they were boys. He’d always rather assumed King would overtake him one day.
Boots, socks, trousers next, stripping them off legs clammy and cold to the touch; and he passed him his own dry socks, his own tweed trousers, and helped him pull them on, and Gimlet didn’t say a word.
“Plenty of growth-space left in them, anyway,” Bertie said, brightly. Then, quietly, “Still with me, old man?”
“S-still with you,” said Gimlet.
“Up onto the bed then. Get the blankets up round you, and I’ll see what I can scare up by way of provender.”
And Gimlet went, meek as a lamb, and climbed under the rough woollen blankets, and didn’t pass a single remark about ticks or lice or muddy boot marks.
Bertie went and poked in the little cupboard that had been hung on the wall, and found a packet of biscuits, jam, a slab of military-ration chocolate, best not to enquire from where.
“My word, this is a surprisingly snug billet,” he remarked. “Good thing they keep it well stocked.”
“Wages of virtue,” said Gimlet. “Second time I’ve ended up in one of these blessed bothies after doing myself a mischief. After the first time I m-made sure to keep all the places on the estate up to scratch. Good thing I did.” He paused; pulled the blankets higher. “Starting to f-feel like Scotland might not be the healthiest of p-places for me.”
“Lorry old boy, if you took against every country where you’d ever come a hair’s breadth from death and dismemberment, you’d probably be left with Liechtenstein and not a lot else,” said Bertie, and passed him the chocolate. “Here. One piece at a time.”
Outside, for just long enough to wring out the wet things; back inside, door slammed shut, and hung them on pegs on the wall close to the stove. Turves of peat from a basket, piled on top of the fire, to catch and smolder and hold the heat until morning. Then he toed off his boots; clambered into the narrow bed, so he was between Gimlet and the chill of the wooden wall.
Gimlet pushed the half bar of chocolate towards him. “F-fair shares.”
“Right you are, old boy,” Bertie said, and polished off the rest, while Gimlet lay down, and pulled the covers to his chin, and looked at the fire, still shuddering with cold.
He put his arm across his friend’s waist; burrowing under the rough blanket; tucking himself against the sharp angles of Gimlet’s back, trying to surround the smaller man.
“Bertie - “
“I know, old thing, but put up with it for the moment, all right?”
“N-not that, ass. Just - rather thought I might have come a cropper for a while there. Inglorious end of a glorious career and all that.”
“Oh, well, I’m the expert at inglorious accidents, old boy. Absolute martyr to them. Best not to dwell on them afterwards, never got anyone anywhere to go about beratin’ oneself.”
He was still shivering, Bertie could feel, shivering in that bone-deep way that would take hours to ease, and probably in the morning when the fog lifted and Bertie could go for help he’d need to hunt up a doctor, a way to get him down to the nearest hospital, check nothing had gone badly awry; but he was still making sense, and he was here, and Bertie could begin to fancy that the back pressed to his chest was warming a little; and that would do for now.
“Thanks all the same,” said Gimlet, into the quiet.
Bertie tightened his arm, just a fraction. “Any time, old man.”
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Date: 2024-12-13 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-13 10:17 pm (UTC)