by Stephen King
He’d considered changing back to his spider-form, knowing that body would feel the cold less, but his entire short life had been plagued by the specter of starvation, and he supposed that part of him would always fear it, no matter how much food he had at hand. The gods knew there wasn’t much now; three severed arms, four legs (two partially eaten), and a piece of a torso from the wicker basket, that was all. If he changed, the spider would gobble that little bit up by daylight. And while there was game out here—he heard the deer moving around just as clearly as his White Daddy did—Mordred wasn’t entirely confident of his ability to trap it, or run it down.
So he sat and shivered and listened to the sound of their voices until the voices ceased. Maybe they slept. He might have dozed a little, himself. And the only thing that kept him from giving up and going back was his hatred of them. That they should have each other when he had no one. No one at all.
Mordred’s a-hungry, he thought miserably. Mordred’s a-cold. And Mordred has no one. Mordred’s alone.
He slipped his wrist into his mouth, bit deep, and sucked the warmth that flowed out. In the blood he tasted the last of Rando Thoughtful’s life…but so little! So soon gone! And once it was, there was nothing but the useless, recycled taste of himself.
In the dark, Mordred began to cry.
Three
Four hours after dawn, under a white sky that promised rain or sleet (perhaps both at the same time), Susannah Dean lay shivering behind a fallen log, looking down into one of the little valleys. You’ll hear Oy, the gunslinger had told her. And you’ll hear me, too. I’ll do what I can, but I’ll be driving them ahead of me and you’ll have the best shooting. Make every shot count.
What made things worse was her creeping intuition that Mordred was very close now, and he might try to bushwhack her while her back was turned. She kept looking around, but they had picked a relatively clear spot, and the open grass behind her was empty each time save once, when she had seen a large brown rabbit lolloping along with its ears dragging the ground.
At last she heard Oy’s high-pitched barking from the copse of trees on her left. A moment later, Roland began to yell. “H’yah! H’yah! Get on brisk! Get on brisk, I tell thee! Never tarry! Never tarry a single—” Then the sound of him coughing. She didn’t like that cough. No, not at all.
Now she could see movement in the trees, and for one of the few times since Roland had forced her to admit there was another person hiding inside of her, she called on Detta Walker.
I need you. If you want to be warm again, you settle my hands so I can shoot straight.
And the ceaseless shivering of her body stopped. As the herd of deer burst out of the trees—not a small herd, either; there had to be at least eighteen of them, led by a buck with a magnificent rack—her hands also stopped their shaking. In the right one she held Roland’s revolver with the sandalwood grips.
Here came Oy, bursting out of the woods behind the final straggler. This was a mutie doe, running (and with eerie grace) on four legs of varying sizes with a fifth waggling bonelessly from the middle of her belly like a teat. Last of all came Roland, not really running at all, not anymore, but rather staggering onward at a grim jog. She ignored him, tracking the buck with the gun as the big fellow ran across her field of fire.
“This way,” she whispered. “Break to your right, honey-child, let’s see you do it. Commala-come-come.”
And while there was no reason why he should have, the buck leading his little fleeing herd did indeed veer slightly in Susannah’s direction. Now she was filled with the sort of coldness she welcomed. Her vision seemed to sharpen until she could see the muscles rippling under the buck’s hide, the white crescent as his eye rolled, the old wound on the nearest doe’s foreleg, where the fur had never grown back. She had a moment to wish Eddie and Jake were lying on either side of her, feeling what she was feeling, seeing what she was seeing, and then that was gone, too.
I do not kill with my gun; she who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her father.
“I kill with my heart,” she murmured, and began shooting.
The first bullet took the lead buck in the head and he crashed over on his left side. The others ran past him. A doe leaped over his body and Susannah’s second bullet took her at the height of her leap, so that she crashed down dead on the other side, one leg splayed and broken, all grace gone.
She heard Roland fire three times, but didn’t look to see how he’d done; she had her own business to attend to, and she attended to it well. Each of the last four bullets in the cylinder took down a deer, and only one was still moving when he fell. It didn’t occur to her that this was an amazing piece of shooting, especially with a pistol; she was a gunslinger, after all, and shooting was her business.
Besides, the morning was windless.
Half the herd now lay dead in the grassy valley below. All the remainder save one wheeled left and pelted away downslope toward the stream. A moment later they were lost in a screen of willows. The last one, a yearling buck, ran directly toward her. Susannah didn’t bother trying to reload from the little pile of bullets lying beside her on a square of buckskin but took one of the ’Riza plates instead, her hand automatically finding the dull gripping-place.
“ ’Riza!” she screamed, and flung it. It flew across the dry grass, elevating slightly as it did, giving off that weird moaning sound. It struck the racing buck at mid-neck. Droplets of blood flew in a garland around its head, black against the white sky. A butcher’s cleaver could not have done a neater job. For a moment the buck ran on, heedless and headless, blood jetting from the stump of its neck as its racing heart gave up its last half a dozen beats. Then it crashed to its splayed forelegs less than ten yards in front of her hide, staining the dry yellow grass a bright red.
The previous night’s long misery was forgotten. The numbness had departed her hands and her feet. There was no grief in her now, no sense of loss, no fear. For the moment Susannah was exactly the woman that ka had made her. The mixed smell of gunpowder and blood from the downed buck was bitter; it was also the world’s sweetest perfume.
Standing up straight on her stumps, Susannah spread her arms, Roland’s pistol clenched in her right hand, and made a Y against the sky. Then she screamed. There were no words in it, nor could there have been. Our greatest moments of triumph are always inarticulate.
Four
Roland had insisted that they eat a huge breakfast, and her protests that cold corned beef tasted like so much lumpy mush cut zero ice with him. By two that afternoon according to his fancy-schmancy pocket-watch—right around the time the steady cold rain fattened into an icy drizzle, in other words—she was glad. She had never done a harder day of physical labor, and the day wasn’t finished. Roland was by her all the while, matching her in spite of his worsening cough. She had time (during their brief but crazily delicious noon meal of seared deer-steaks) to consider how strange he was, how remarkable. After all this time and all these adventures, she had still not seen the bottom of him. Not even close. She had seen him laughing and crying, killing and dancing, she’d seen him sleeping and on the squat behind a screen of bushes with his pants down and his ass hung over what he called the Log of Ease. She’d never slept with him as a woman does with a man, but she thought she’d seen him in every other circumstance, and…no. Still no bottom.
“That cough’s sounding more and more like pneumonia to me,” Susannah remarked, not long after the rain had started. They were then in the part of the day’s activities Roland called aven-car: carrying the kill and preparing to make it into something else.
“Never let it worry you,” Roland said. “I have what I need here to cure it.”
“Say true?” she asked doubtfully.
“Yar. And these, which I never lost.” He reached into his pocket and showed her a handful of aspirin tablets. She thought the expression on his face was one of real reverence, and why not? It might be that he owed his life to what he called astin. Astin
and cheflet.
They loaded their kill into the back of Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi and dragged it down to the stream. It took three trips in all. After they’d stacked the carcasses, Roland carefully placed the head of the yearling buck atop the pile, where it looked at them from its glazed eyes.
“What you want that for?” Susannah asked, with a trace of Detta in her voice.
“We’re going to need all the brains we can get,” Roland said, and coughed dryly into his curled fist again. “It’s a dirty way to do the job, but it’s quick, and it works.”
Five
When they had their kill piled beside the icy stream (“At least we don’t have the flies to worry about,” Roland said), the gunslinger began gathering deadwood. Susannah looked forward to the fire, but her terrible need of the previous night had departed. She had been working hard, and for the time being, at least, was warm enough to suit her. She tried to remember the depth of her despair, how the cold had crept into her bones, turning them to glass, and couldn’t do it. Because the body had a way of forgetting the worst things, she supposed, and without the body’s cooperation, all the brain had were memories like faded snapshots.
Before beginning his wood-gathering chore, Roland inspected the bank of the icy stream and dug out a piece of rock. He handed it to her, and Susannah rubbed a thumb over its milky, water-smoothed surface. “Quartz?” she asked, but she didn’t think it was. Not quite.
“I don’t know that word, Susannah. We call it chert. It makes tools that are primitive but plenty useful: axe-heads, knives, skewers, scrapers. It’s scrapers we’ll want. Also at least one hand-hammer.”
“I know what we’re going to scrape, but what are we going to hammer?”
“I’ll show you, but first will you join me here for a moment?” Roland got down on his knees and took her cold hand in one of his. Together they faced the deer’s head.
“We thank you for what we are about to receive,” Roland told the head, and Susannah shivered. It was exactly how her father began when he was giving the grace before a big meal, one where all the family was gathered.
Our own family is broken, she thought, but did not say; done was done. The response she gave was the one she had been taught as a young girl: “Father, we thank thee.”
“Guide our hands and guide our hearts as we take life from death,” Roland said. Then he looked at her, eyebrows raised, asking without speaking a word if she had more to say.
Susannah found that she did. “Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallow’d be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation; deliver us from evil; Thou art the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, now and forever.”
“That’s a lovely prayer,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “I didn’t say it just right—it’s been a long time—but it’s still the best prayer. Now let’s do our business, while I can still feel my hands.”
Roland gave her an amen.
Six
Roland took the severed head of the yearling deer (the antler-nubs made lifting it easy), set it in front of him, then swung the fist-sized chunk of rock against the skull. There was a muffled cracking sound that made Susannah’s stomach cringe. Roland gripped the antlers and pulled, first left and then right. When Susannah saw the way the broken skull wiggled under the hide, her stomach did more than cringe; it did a slow loop-the-loop.
Roland hit twice more, wielding the piece of chert with near-surgical precision. Then he used his knife to cut a circle in the head-hide, which he pulled off like a cap. This revealed the cracked skull beneath. He worked the blade of his knife into the widest crack and used it as a lever. When the deer’s brain was exposed, he took it out, set it carefully aside, and looked at Susannah. “We’ll want the brains of every deer we killed, and that’s what we need a hammer for.”
“Oh,” she said in a choked voice. “Brains.”
“To make a tanning slurry. But there’s more use for chert than that. Look.” He showed her how to bang two chunks together until one or both shattered, leaving large, nearly even pieces instead of jagged lumps. She knew that metamorphic rocks broke that way, but schists and such were generally too weak to make good tools. This stuff was strong.
“When you get chunks that break thick enough to hold on one side but thin to an edge on the other,” Roland said, “lay them by. Those will be our scrapers. If we had more time we could make handles, but we don’t. Our hands will be plenty sore by bedtime.”
“How long do you think it will take to get enough scrapers?”
“Not so long,” Roland said. “Chert breaks lucky, or so I used to hear.”
While Roland dragged deadwood for a fire into a copse of mixed willows and alders by the edge of the frozen stream, Susannah inspected her way along the embankments, looking for chert. By the time she’d found a dozen large chunks, she had also located a granite boulder rising from the ground in a smooth, weather-worn curve. She thought it would make a fine anvil.
The chert did indeed break lucky, and she had thirty potential scrapers by the time Roland was bringing back his third large load of firewood. He made a little pile of kindling which Susannah shielded with her hands. By then it was sleeting, and although they were working beneath a fairly dense clump of trees, she thought it wouldn’t be long before both of them were soaked.
When the fire was lit, Roland went a few steps away, once more fell on his knees, and folded his hands.
“Praying again?” she asked, amused.
“What we learn in our childhood has a way of sticking,” he said. He closed his eyes for a few moments, then brought his clasped hands to his mouth and kissed them. The only word she heard him say was Gan. Then he opened his eyes and lifted his hands, spreading them and making a pretty gesture that looked to her like birds flying away. When he spoke again, his voice was dry and matter-of-fact: Mr. Taking-Care-of-Business. “That’s very well, then,” he said. “Let’s go to work.”
Seven
They made twine from grass, just as Mordred had done, and hung the first deer—the one already headless—by its back legs from the low branch of a willow. Roland used his knife to cut its belly open, then reached into the guts, rummaged, and removed two dripping red organs that she thought were kidneys.
“These for fever and cough,” he said, and bit into the first one as if it were an apple. Susannah made a gurking noise and turned away to consider the stream until he was finished. When he was, she turned back and watched him cut circles around the hanging legs close to where they joined the body.
“Are you any better?” she asked him uneasily.
“I will be,” he said. “Now help me take the hide off this fellow. We’ll want the first one with the hair still on it—we need to make a bowl for our slurry. Now watch.”
He worked his fingers into the place where the deer’s hide still clung to the body by the thin layer of fat and muscle beneath, then pulled. The hide tore easily to a point halfway down the deer’s midsection. “Now do your side, Susannah.”
Getting her fingers underneath was the only hard part. This time they pulled together, and when they had the hide all the way down to the dangling forelegs, it vaguely resembled a shirt. Roland used his knife to cut it off, then began to dig in the ground a little way from the roaring fire but still beneath the shelter of the trees. She helped him, relishing the way the sweat rolled down her face and body. When they had a shallow bowl-shaped depression two feet across and eighteen inches deep, Roland lined it with the hide.
All that afternoon they took turns skinning the eight other deer they had killed. It was important to do it as quickly as possible, for when the underlying layer of fat and muscle dried up, the work would become slower and harder. The gunslinger kept the fire burning high and hot, every now and then leaving her to rake ashes out onto the ground. When they had cooled enough so they would not burn holes in their bowl-liner,
he pushed them into the hole they’d made. Susannah’s back and arms were aching fiercely by five o’clock, but she kept at it. Roland’s face, neck, and hands were comically smeared with ash.
“You look like a fella in a minstrel show,” she said at one point. “Rastus Coon.”
“Who’s that?”
“Nobody but the white folks’ fool,” she said. “Do you suppose Mordred’s out there, watching us work?” All day she’d kept an eye peeled for him.
“No,” he said, pausing to rest. He brushed his hair back from his forehead, leaving a fresh smear and now making her think of penitents on Ash Wednesday. “I think he’s gone off to make his own kill.”
“Mordred’s a-hungry,” she said. And then: “You can touch him a little, can’t you? At least enough to know if he’s here or if he’s gone.”
Roland considered this, then said simply: “I’m his father.”
Eight
By dark, they had a large heap of deerskins and a pile of skinned, headless carcasses that surely would have been black with flies in warmer weather. They ate another huge meal of sizzling venison steaks, utterly delicious, and Susannah spared another thought for Mordred, somewhere out in the dark, probably eating his own supper raw. He might have matches, but he wasn’t stupid; if they saw another fire in all this darkness, they would rush down upon it. And him. Then, bang-bang-bang, goodbye Spider-Boy. She felt a surprising amount of sympathy for him and told herself to beware of it. Certainly he would have felt none for either her or Roland, had the shoe been on the other foot.
When they were done eating, Roland wiped his greasy fingers on his shirt and said, “That tasted fine.”
“You got that right.”
“Now let’s get the brains out. Then we’ll sleep.”
“One at a time?” Susannah asked.