Excerpt 1 from An Echo in the Bone
Copyright © 2006 Diana Gabaldon, An Echo in the Bone. All rights reserved.

The sea below flexed itself into peaks and hillocks that melted at once into complex swirls, troughs and valleys that left no more than a delicate tracery of white foam as a fleeting memorial to each fantasy of shape. It was only substance, he thought, watching this mesmeric dissolution; no true shape at all, and yet an endless array of illusions, amazing constructs that were in fact no more than the mindless breathing of a vast, indifferent entity.

To keep his eyes fixed on that movement was his only faint hope. Let his glance once stray to the horizon and its deadly rise and fall, or worse yet, to the tilting walls of the noisome little quarter gallery or the narrow board on which he perched, and he would register each lurch and fall in the pit of his belly, each dizzy rise echoed by a ghastly drop, and even to think about that would be fa

Jamie Fraser leaned forward and threw up. Finished, he half crouched on the narrow board, head on his knees, eyes closed, sweating but momentarily relieved.

"At least ye didna do it on the deck this time, " he muttered to himself. Trying without success to forget the look of his half digested breakfast being engulfed by the heaving water below, he sat up, eyes still closed against the sight of the treacherous horizon, and groped blindly among the folds of his wadded kilt. Locating his sporran, he prodded the thin leather for the reassuring square shape of the wee box that held his pins. He couldn't put them in here, where there was danger of dropping them into the water, but the mere knowledge of their presence was a comfort.

He didn't know whether the slender gold needles in fact held some virtue in their application, or whether it might be only that they worked because Claire believed they would, but the why of it was a matter of complete indifference to him. They did work, and that was enough.

He didn't much like stabbling the bittie sharp things into his wrists and forehead, nor did he care for the wide eyed stares his appearance occasioned when he used them, but it was a deal better than puking day and night, 'til his belly knotted and his insides bled.

Most folk who suffered from the seasickness claimed not to remember it once they'd touched land. He remembered it vividly, and in the worst throes of the affliction, would gladly have plunged a dirk through his heart to end it, let alone something that looked like a darning needle.

He edged his way cautiously off the plank, worn smooth by the buttocks of hundreds of seamen, careful not to look at the fading coast of France. It was the incessancy of it; the horrible realizaion that there was no stopping it, not for a moment; no respite, no momentary assurance of solidity. He could feel his bodily fluids roiling in concert with the sea, up and down, up and down, up and

"Oh, God, not again!" he said, and grabbed hold of a joist for support.