A sixth sister appeared, pushing rudely in between Mary and
Tamra. This one perhaps was only one-and-twenty, with flushed
cheeks, smooth skin, and dark eyes. Her white habit billowed like a
dream. The red rose over her breast stood out like a curse.
'Go! Leave him!'
'Oooo, my dear!' cried Sister Louise in a voice both laughing and
angry. 'Here's Jenna, the baby, and has she fallen in love with
him?'
'She has!' laughed Tamra. 'Baby's heart is his for the purchase,'
'Oh, so it is!' agreed Sister Coquina.
Mary turned to the newcomer, lips pursed into a tight line. 'Ye
have no business here, saucy girl.'
'I do if I say I do,' Sister Jenna replied. She seemed more in charge
of herself now. A curl of black hair had escaped her wimple and
lay across her forehead in a comma. 'Now go. He's not up to your
jokes and laughter.'
'Order us not,' Sister Mary said, 'for we never joke. So you know,
Sister Jenna.'
The girl's face softened a little, and Roland saw she was afraid. It
made him afraid for her. For himself, as well. 'Go,' she repeated.
`'Tis not the time. Are there not others to tend?'
Sister Mary seemed to consider. The others watched her. At last
she nodded, and smiled down at Roland. Again her face seemed to
shimmer, like something seen through a heat-haze. What he saw
(or thought he saw) beneath was horrible and watchful. 'Bide well,
pretty man,' she said to Roland. 'Bide with us a bit, and we'll heal
ye.'
What choice have I? Roland thought.
The others laughed, birdlike titters which rose into the dimness like
ribbons. Sister Michela actually blew him a kiss.
'Come, ladies!' Sister Mary cried. 'We'll leave Jenna with him a bit
in memory of her mother, who we loved well!' And with that, she
led the others away, five white birds flying off down the centre
aisle, their skirts nodding this way and that.
'Thank you,' Roland said, looking up at the owner of the cool
hand.. . for he knew it was she who had soothed him.
She took up his fingers as if to prove this, and caressed them. 'They
mean ye no harm,' she said ... yet Roland saw she believed not a
word of it, nor did he. He was in trouble here, very bad trouble.
'What is this place?'
'Our place,' she said simply. 'The home of the Little Sisters of
Eluria. Our convent, if 'ee like.'
'This is no convent,' Roland said, looking past her at the empty
beds. It's an infirmary. Isn't it?'
'A hospital,' she said, still stroking his fingers. 'We serve the
doctors ... and they serve us.' He was fascinated by the black curl
lying on the cream of her brow - would have stroked it, if he had
dared reach up. Just to tell its texture. He found it beautiful because
it was the only dark thing in all this white. The white had lost its
charm for him. 'We are hospitallers ... or were, before the world
moved on.'
'Are you for the Jesus-man?'
She looked surprised for a moment, almost shocked, and then
laughed merrily. 'No, not us!'
'If you are hospitallers ... nurses ... where are the doctors?'
She looked at him, biting at her lip, as if trying to decide
something. Roland found her doubt utterly charming, and he
realized that, sick or not, he was looking at a woman as a woman
for the first time since Susan Delgado had died, and that had been
long ago. The whole world had changed since then, and not for the
better.
'Would you really know?'
'Yes, of course,' he said, a little surprised. A little disquieted, too.
He kept waiting for her face to shimmer and change, as the faces of
the others had done. It didn't. There was none of that unpleasant
dead-earth smell about her, either.
Wait, he cautioned himself. Believe nothing here, least of all your
senses. Not yet.
'I suppose you must,' she said with a sigh. It tinkled the bells at her
forehead, which were darker in colour than those the others wore -
not black like her hair but charry, somehow, as if they had been
hung in the smoke of a campfire. Their sound, however, was
brightest silver. 'Promise me you'll not scream and wake the pube
in yonder bed.'
'Pube?'
'The boy. Do ye promise?'
'Aye,' he said, falling into the half-forgotten patois of the Outer Arc
without even being aware of it. Susan's dialect. 'It's been long since
I screamed, pretty.'
She coloured more definitely at that, roses more natural and lively
than the one on her breast mounting in her cheeks.
'Don't call pretty what ye can't properly see,' she said.
'Then push back the wimple you wear.'
Her face he could see perfectly well, but he badly wanted to see
her hair - hungered for it, almost. A full flood of black in all this
dreaming white. Of course it might be cropped, those of her order
might wear it that way, but he somehow didn't think so.
'No, 'tis not allowed.'
'By who?'
'Big Sister.'
'She who calls herself Mary?'
'Aye, her.' She started away, then paused and looked back over her
shoulder. In another girl her age, one as pretty as this, that look
back would have been flirtatious. This girl's was only grave.
'Remember your promise.'
'Aye, no screams.'
She went to the bearded man, skirt swinging. In the dimness, she
cast only a blur of shadow on the empty beds she passed. When
she reached the man (this one was unconscious, Roland thought,
not just sleeping), she looked back at Roland once more. He
nodded.
Sister Jenna stepped close to the suspended man on the far side of
his bed, so that Roland saw her through the twists and loops of
woven white silk. She placed her hands lightly on the left side of
his chest, bent over him ... and shook her head from side to side,
like one expressing a brisk negative. The bells she wore on her
forehead rang sharply, and Roland once more felt that weird
stirring up his back, accompanied by a low ripple of pain. It was as
if he had shuddered without actually shuddering, or shuddered in a
dream.
What happened next almost did jerk a scream from him; he had to
bite his lips against it. Once more the unconscious man's legs
seemed to move without moving ... because it was what was on
them that moved. The man's hairy shins, ankles, and feet were
exposed below the hem of his bed-dress. Now a black wave of
bugs moved down them. They were singing fiercely, like an army
column that sings as it marches.
Roland remembered the black scar across the man's cheek and
nose - the scar which had disappeared. More such as these, of
course. And they were on him, as well. That was how he could
shiver without shivering. They were all over his back. Battening on
him.
No, keeping back a scream wasn't as easy as he had expected it to
be.
The bugs ran down to the tips of the suspended man's toes, then
leaped off them in waves, like creat
ures leaping off an
embankment and into a swimming hole. They organized
themselves quickly and easily on the bright white sheet below, and
began to march down to the floor in a battalion about a foot wide.
Roland couldn't get a good look at them, the distance was too far
and the light too dim, but he thought they were perhaps twice the
size of ants, and a little smaller than the fat honeybees which had
swarmed the flowerbeds back home.
They sang as they went.
The bearded man didn't sing. As the swarms of bugs which had
coated his twisted legs began to diminish, he shuddered and
groaned. The young woman put her hand on his brow and soothed
him, making Roland a little jealous even in his revulsion at what he
was seeing.
And was what he was seeing really so awful? In Gilead, leeches
had been used for certain ailments - swellings of the brain, the
armpits, and the groin, primarily. When it came to the brain, the
leeches, ugly as they were, were certainly preferable to the next
step, which was trepanning.
Yet there was something loathsome about them, perhaps only
because he couldn't see them well, and something awful about
trying to imagine them all over his back as he hung here, helpless.
Not singing, though. Why? Because they were feeding? Sleeping?
Both at once?
The bearded man's groans subsided. The bugs marched away
across the floor, towards one of the mildly rippling silken walls.
Roland lost sight of them in the shadows.
Jenna came back to him, her eyes anxious. 'Ye did well. Yet I see
how ye feel; it's on your face.'
'The doctors,' he said.
'Yes. Their power is very great, but. . .'She dropped her voice. 'I
believe that drover is beyond their help. His legs are a little better,
and the wounds on his face are all but healed, but he has injuries
where the doctors cannot reach.' She traced a hand across her
midsection, suggesting the location of these injuries, if not their
nature.
'And me?' Roland asked.
'Ye were ta'en by the green folk,' she said. 'Ye must have angered
them powerfully, for them not to kill ye outright. They roped ye
and dragged ye, instead. Tamra, Michela, and Louise were out
gathering herbs. They saw the green folk at play with ye, and bade
them stop, but -,
'Do the muties always obey you, Sister Jenna
She smiled, perhaps pleased he remembered her name. 'Not
always, but mostly. This time they did, or ye'd have now found the
clearing in the trees.'
'I suppose so.'
'The skin was stripped almost clean off your back - red ye were
from nape to waist. Ye'll always bear the scars, but the doctors
have gone far towards healing ye. And their singing is passing fair,
is it not?'
'Yes,' Roland said, but the thought of those black things all over his
back, roosting in his raw flesh, still revolted him. 'I owe you
thanks, and give it freely. Anything I can do for you -
'Tell me your name, then. Do that.'
'I'm Roland of Gilead. A gunslinger. I had revolvers, Sister Jenna.
Have you seen them?'
'I've seen no shooters,' she said, but cast her eyes aside. The roses
bloomed in her cheeks again. She might be a good nurse, and fair,
but Roland thought her a poor liar. He was glad. Good liars were
common. Honesty, on the other hand, came dear.
Let the untruth pass for now, he told himself. She speaks it out of
fear, I think.
'Jenna!' The cry came from the deeper shadows at the far end of the
infirmary - today it seemed longer than ever to the gunslinger - and
Sister Jenna jumped guiltily. 'Come away! Ye've passed words
enough to entertain twenty men! Let him sleep!'
'Aye!' she called, then turned back to Roland. 'Don't let on that I
showed you the doctors.'
'Mum is the word, Jenna.'
She paused, biting her lip again, then suddenly swept back her
wimple. It fell against the nape of her neck in a soft chiming of
bells. Freed from its confinement, her hair swept against her
cheeks like shadows.
'Am I pretty? Am I? Tell me the truth, Roland of Gilead - no
flattery. For flattery's kind only a candle's length.'
'Pretty as a summer night.'
What she saw in his face seemed to please her more than his
words, because she smiled radiantly. She pulled the wimple up
again, tucking her hair back in with quick little finger-pokes. 'Am I
decent?'
'Decent as fair,' he said, then cautiously lifted an arm and pointed
at her brow. 'One curl's out ... just there.'
'Aye, always that one to devil me.' With a comical little grimace,
she tucked it back. Roland thought how much he would like to kiss
her rosy cheeks ... and perhaps her rosy mouth, for good measure.
'All's well,' he said.
'Jenna!' The cry was more impatient than ever. 'Meditations!'
`I'm coming just now!' she called, and gathered her voluminous
skirts to go. Yet she turned back once more, her face now very
grave and very serious. 'One more thing,' she said in a voice only a
step above a whisper. She snatched a quick look around. 'The gold
medallion ye wear - ye wear it because it's yours. Do'ee understand
... James?'
'Yes.' He turned his head a bit to look at the sleeping boy. 'This is
my brother.'
`If they ask, yes. To say different would be to get Jenna in serious
trouble.'
How serious he did not ask, and she was gone in any case, seeming
to flow along the aisle between all the empty beds, her skirt caught
up in one hand. The roses had fled from her face, leaving her
cheeks and brow ashy. He remembered the greedy look on the
faces of the others, how they had gathered around him in a
tightening knot ... and the way their faces had shimmered.
Six women, five old and one young.
Doctors that sang and then crawled away across the floor when
dismissed by jingling bells.
And an improbable hospital ward of perhaps a hundred beds, a
ward with a silk roof and silk walls ...
... and all the beds empty save three.
Roland didn't understand why Jenna had taken the dead boy's
medallion from his pants pocket and put it around his neck, but he
had an idea that if they found out she had done so, the Little Sisters
of Eluria might kill her.
Roland closed his eyes, and the soft singing of the doctor-insects
once again floated him off into sleep.
IV. A Bowl of Soup. The Boy
in the Next Bed. The Night-Nurses.
Roland dreamed that a very large bug (a doctor-bug, mayhap) was
flying around his head and banging repeatedly into his nose -
collisions which were annoying rather than painful. He swiped at
the bug repeatedly, and although his hands were eerily fast under
ordinary circumstances, he kept missing it. And each time he
missed, the bug giggled.
I'm slow because I've been sick, he thought.
No, ambushed. Dragged across the ground by slow mutants, saved
by the Little
Sisters of Eluria.
Roland had a sudden, vivid image of a man's shadow growing
from the shadow of an overturned freight-wagon; heard a rough,
gleeful voice cry, 'Booh!'
He jerked awake hard enough to set his body rocking in its
complication of slings, and the woman who had been standing
beside his head, giggling as she tapped his nose lightly with a
wooden spoon, stepped back so quickly that the bowl in her other
hand slipped from her fingers.
Roland's hands shot out, and they were as quick as ever - his
frustrated failure to catch the bug had been only part of his dream.
He caught the bowl before more than a few drops could spill. The
woman - Sister Coquina - looked at him with round eyes.
There was pain all up and down his back from the sudden
movement but it was nowhere near as sharp as it had been before,
and there was no sensation of movement on his skin. Perhaps the
'doctors' were only sleeping, but he had an idea they were gone.
He held out his hand for the spoon Coquina had been teasing him
with (he found he wasn't surprised at all that one of these would
tease a sick and sleeping man in such a way; it only would have
surprised him if it had been Jenna), and she handed it to him, her
eyes still big.
'How speedy ye are!' she said. `'Twas like a magic trick, and you
still rising from sleep!'
'Remember it, sai,' he said, and tried the soup. There were tiny bits
of chicken floating in it. He probably would have considered it
bland under other circumstances, but under these, it seemed
ambrosial. He began to eat greedily.
'What do 'ee mean by that?' she asked. The light was very dim
now, the wall-panels across the way a pinkish-orange that
suggested sunset. In this light, Coquina looked quite young and
pretty ... but it was a glamour, Roland was sure; a sorcerous kind
of make-up.
'I mean nothing in particular.' Roland dismissed the spoon as too
slow, preferring to tilt the bowl itself to his lips. In this way he
disposed of the soup in four large gulps. 'You have been kind to
me'
'Aye, so we have!' she said, rather indignantly.
'- and I hope your kindness has no hidden motive. If it does, Sister,
remember that I'm quick. And, as for myself, I have not always
been kind.'
She made no reply, only took the bowl when Roland handed it
back. She did this delicately, perhaps not wanting to touch his
fingers. Her eyes dropped to where the medallion lay, once more
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